Authors: Michael Prescott
Tags: #Kidnapping, #True Crime, #General, #Murder, #Suspense, #Fiction, #Serial Murderers
Abby felt a little better after her phone call to Tess. It had been a way for her to blow off steam. And no matter how roundly Tess denied it, there was no doubt she had been Faust’s contact. Why Faust would call her, Abby had no idea. But he had, and Tess had given him Abby’s name. Doing her a favor, conceivably.
Well, that was a mistake she wouldn’t make again.
There was a time when Abby had genuinely liked Tess. Even though the two of them were opposites in most respects, she thought she had felt a connection. That was ancient history now. Funny how a relationship could change completely over the littlest things. Like, in this instance, Tess having arrested her and held her in FBI custody for the better part of a day, facing the prospect of life in prison for a crime she hadn’t committed.
On second thought, it wasn’t
such
a little thing.
The last time they had seen each other was in Abby’s condo last August. Tess had come to apologize or make amends or something. Abby wasn’t buying.
She’d told Tess they weren’t friends.
What are we, then?
Tess asked.
Enemies?
Not yet. But if you ever come back to my town and get mixed up in my business again—we will be.
Recommending her to Faust was not exactly the same thing as getting mixed up in Abby’s business, but it was close enough to get her hackles up. Whatever hackles were. She didn’t know, but they were up, for sure.
She was all frazzled and needed to calm down. Anger was a distraction, and she could not afford to be distracted when she was on the job. She willed herself to stop the chatter of her thoughts. There was a meditative technique she used, which involved the repetition of a simple mantra: Mind like water.
That was what she needed. Her mind as clear and calm as still water. A reflecting pool, a liquid mirror. No worries, no anger, no ego. Only stillness and depth.
Mind like water ...
She allowed herself to relax into the cushioned softness of her armchair. After a few more repetitions of the mantra, she was calm. The left hemisphere of her brain, with its linear logic and obsessive verbalizing, had been silenced. The other half of her brain, the side that functioned wordlessly and holistically, had been activated. She could observe without judging, could act without doubt.
She called Faust, using her landline and reaching him on his. This seemed to be the safest means of communication between them. There was no evidence his landline had been tapped.
“It’s me,” she said when he answered.
“My hired predator.”
“Not really how I like to think of myself. Look, I think I’ve tracked down your mystery man—”
“So soon? Miss Sinclair, you exceed even your considerable reputation.”
Just what she wanted, compliments from a homicidal maniac. “I aim to please. Now I need to initiate contact.”
“Where is he located?”
“Huh?”
“You said you had tracked him to his lair.”
“I didn’t say
lair
.” And she was
not
giving Faust his address.
“I would be most curious to know where it is he operates from.”
“That’s not the way it works.”
“I am paying your fee, am I not?”
“Yeah—and I’m calling the shots. I don’t give out that kind of info to clients. I wouldn’t want any of them to take matters into their own hands.”
“You believe I would do this?”
“In a word, yes.”
“You distrust me.”
“Thought I’d made that clear. Try to keep up, okay?”
“Well”—he sounded nettled—“if you will not oblige me in my small request, then what is it I can do for you?”
“You can text-message Elise from your cell. Tell her to meet you someplace at eight o’clock.” That would be after dark. According to the
Los Angeles Times
, delivered to her door daily, sunset was at seven thirty p.m. “Where’s a spot you might go at night?”
“There are many. We frequent alternative bookstores, underground clubs, experimental theater, poetry recitals—”
“I get it. The classic bohemian lifestyle. Pick one. Not the poetry thing. Something less ... boring.”
“Do art galleries bore you?”
“Yeah, but I can handle it. What gallery?”
“The Unblinking I, on Melrose. Tonight they’re showing the works of Piers Hoagland. Do you know him?”
“Didn’t he play Screech on
Saved by the Bell
?”
Faust seemed to take the inquiry seriously. “I do not believe so.”
“Then no.”
“He is a native of my country. A holographic artist who specializes in images of death.”
“Sounds peachy.”
“Tonight is the opening of the exhibit. Elise and I had considered going.”
“Don’t. I don’t want you there. I need to get to know this guy, and that won’t work if he’s tailing you. Just send the text message, stay put, and hope he takes the bait.”
“You are the boss. Is there anything else you require of me?”
Abby hesitated. “Where’d you get the branding iron?”
“Why should this concern you?”
“I’ve been reading your book. There’s a picture of the branding iron. I just wondered how a person acquires an item like that.”
“Perhaps you are interested in making such an acquisition for yourself?”
“No, I’m not really into pain, self-inflicted or otherwise. So where’d you get it?”
“An antiquities shop in Berlin. I do not think the proprietor even recognized the symbol. It has been prohibited in Germany, you know, along with the swastika and other insignias of the National Socialists.”
“You just found it lying around?”
“Indeed. It was most—what is the term?—serendipitous. I took it as an omen. A harbinger of my destiny.”
“You’re a superstitious guy.”
“I am a believer in fate. In what the Greeks called
Moira
, necessity. We are all players in a game, the outcome of which is predetermined. We can do no more than act out our parts.”
“And Emily Wallace’s part was to be branded by you?”
“Yes.”
“And to die at your hands?”
“Yes. Are there further questions?”
“Did you brand her before or after she was dead?”
“Before. It was the penultimate act. I seared my totem onto the back of her hand, and then I brought out the strap and with it I encircled her slender neck. Your neck, also, is most slender and well shaped.”
“That’s not what I’d call a compliment. More like grounds for a restraining order.”
“You, of all people, must know how useless a restraining order can be.”
“Are you trying to scare me, Mr. Faust? Because you need to know, I don’t scare that easily.”
“I am merely indulging in some harmless conversational byplay. Why should I threaten you? We are on the same side.”
Abby didn’t like that thought. “Yeah. I guess we are. So do your part and make the call. Remember, eight p.m.”
“There is never a need to tell me anything twice.”
She believed him. She heard the click as the call ended.
On the same side. She really wished he hadn’t put it that way. Still, it was true. She was working for a man who had branded a young woman before killing her, a man called the Werewolf.
And tonight—also according to the
LA. Times
—was the first night of a full moon.
Raven wasn’t scared.
She was past all that. Fear had been a constant presence in the room with her for so many days. Yet now it was gone, just gone, and she felt nothing.
She had seen an old-fashioned device in her parents’ attic once. Her grandmother had used it. You put wet clothes between two wooden dowels and turned a crank, and the dowels squeezed the water out of the clothing as it rolled through. A wringer, it was called. That’s where the expression came from—
put through the wringer
.
And now she knew how it felt to be
put through the wringer
. Because she had been wrung out, wrung dry, every living feeling squeezed from her body until she was limp and numb.
Not all of her was numb, though. Her teeth ached from biting down on the linen gag knotted around her head, the gag that had made her want to retch when it was first tied on. God, he had tied it tight, with the knot at the back of her head, digging into the base of her skull.
And her wrists—they weren’t numb, either. They stung like crazy. The steel manacles had chafed her skin raw and left bleeding sores that were starting to ulcerate. The sores stood out against her pale skin, as did the large purple bruise on her thigh where he had punched her after she tried to kick him. The bruise was high up on her leg and normally would have been concealed by her shorts, but she wasn’t wearing anything. She had no idea what he had done with her clothes.
The bruise had hurt at first, but she no longer felt it. Her wrists were the focal point of her pain now. Of course, she wouldn’t have abraded them so badly if she hadn’t spent hour after hour tugging on the manacles, trying pointlessly to free herself. Even as she’d done it, she had known it was no use. She lacked the strength to pull free, and even if she did somehow get loose, she would still be trapped in the room.
The room was windowless and uncarpeted. It contained only two items of furniture. One was the bed on which she lay, a bare mattress with a steel frame and a brass headboard. Her wrists were cuffed to the headboard, impossible to work free. She was unable to get off the bed, and though she kicked and thrashed on the mattress, she had not succeeded in moving it or in making any significant amount of noise.
The other item in the room was a tall cabinet that stood against the far wall. The cabinet had never been opened in her presence, and she had no idea what secrets it held. She didn’t think she wanted to know.
On one wall there was a strange buzzer thing—she didn’t know what it was—some kind of intercom, maybe, though she had never heard any voices on it, just an occasional buzz, prolonged and insistent, like an angry bee. She thought it might be a signal to indicate that the doorbell had been rung, but she wasn’t sure. It was hard to imagine visitors ever coming to this place.
There was nothing else in the room, only four walls and a ceiling with a single bare
lightbulb
. And the door. The locked door. She knew it was locked, even though she couldn’t reach it, because she heard the jingle of keys whenever her captor came to visit.
Each time he entered, she tried to see beyond the doorway and the figure of the man silhouetted in it. Tried to see something, anything, even if it was only a sliver of daylight or a corridor that led nowhere—some proof that there was a world outside, that she was not alone in a universe that had shrunk to the dimensions of this room.
But she had seen nothing. Only darkness.
So perhaps there was no world beyond this one. Perhaps all the rest of her life had been only a dream, or a series of vivid hallucinations, and there was no sky or green grass or lilacs blooming in the spring, and she had no mother who looked the other way while her father crept into her bedroom at night, no home she had abandoned for life on the street, no friends who congregated beneath an underpass to exchange smokes and lies, no cubbyhole in a deserted building where she slept at night, shivering under a thin blanket.
All of that might have been only imagination. For all she knew, she had been born in this room and she would die here, if she ever died, if her captivity did not continue for all eternity.
Or maybe she was already dead, and this was purgatory or hell, where she had been condemned to suffer for her small sins, endlessly. If that was true, then the man who came through the doorway must be the devil himself.
She had never believed in such things in her former life. But if that life had been purely imaginary, then perhaps everything she had dismissed as illusion was real.
She didn’t know. She didn’t care, much. She was past caring, too. She was past pretty much everything—hunger and thirst and exhaustion and hope. She only wanted it to be over. She wanted it to stop.
Life and death—those were just words. Here in this room there was no life, and there was no death. There was only the waiting and the visits, and it was hard to say which was worse.
No, not hard to say. The visits were worse. His hand in her hair. His hand that stroked and caressed, so gently, as if he were petting a tremulous animal. His hand and his closeness and the hatred she felt for him, the hot, helpless hatred that made her want to leap up and lash out, all the while knowing she couldn’t, because her wrists were chained.
Blinking, she raised her head. She realized she’d been wrong. She was not past everything, not yet. She still felt one thing.
She still felt rage.
Maybe it was her rage that was keeping her alive. If so, she ought to find a way to lose it, cast it off and be done with it, so she could finally die.