Spiral (33 page)

It lay off a dirt and marl road that reminded me of the one going by Billy’s, the roadhouse where Donna Moran worked. Only I hadn’t seen a building or a light since leaving the paved state route about half a mile back.

Tranh’d told me over the phone to watch for a neon-orange surveyor’s tape on the left, because a driveway into the Colonel’s tract had been punched through a little beyond it. Another quarter-mile, and I spotted the tape knotted around a stout trunk, fresh tire tracks curving into the hammock.

Which is when I turned off my headlights and engine.

I waited until my eyes adjusted to the dark and my ears to the silence. After a minute, I could make out both the shapes of trees against the cloud-streaked night sky and the sounds of frogs singing in them. After another minute, the shades of gray became relatively distinct, and I was hearing sounds of creatures I couldn’t recognize. High-pitched barking, low-pitched chuffing, even a roar that belonged in
Jurassic Park.

I opened the driver’s side door and stepped out onto mushy grass, my shoes squelching in the quiet around me. I didn’t know how far sound would travel, but I’d guessed that anybody for a mile around could have heard the car engine, so I didn’t sweat closing my door.

Ten steps up the driveway—really just a cleared and packed trail—the mosquitoes found me. I waved at them, but didn’t slap any, figuring that noise could be identified as obviously human by somebody close by. And though Tranh had said the driveway went on for nearly half a mile into the hammock, he wasn’t sure how many side-paths might have been blazed, so I wasn’t sure how close that somebody might be.

I moved down the center of the driveway, since I hadn’t known him to use any distance weapons, and I wanted the open space of the cleared brush around me to buy reaction time.

Thanks to moonlight trickling through the canopy of tree crowns above, I could make out a narrower path cut to the right. The surrounding trees, ferns, and vines—some thick enough for Kyle Cascadden to swing from—were so dense, I didn’t think anyone would use anything else to move along, so I followed the path to a dead-end about fifty feet farther down. On the way back out, I listened carefully. I’d learned in Vietnam that a human being could remain silent in the bush by standing stock still, but almost every motion in dense foliage gives off some sound. I was fairly certain no one was moving on either side of me.

I still trod very slowly, though, swinging my head left to right in a slow arc and then back again, letting what images there were come in at an angle to my retinas, my ears like radar dishes for any noise, any movement. The Skipper had commented a couple of times about the old days, and that sense of walking on a razor’s edge came close to what I was feeling now.

Back on the driveway, I moved farther along, the peek-a-boo moon giving me glimpses of continuing tire tracks. I passed three more side-paths, one on the left and two on the right, but even though leaving them unexplored and to my rear bothered me, I thought following the tracks might bring me somewhere faster.

Especially since I seemed to be getting closer to the creature making the low, chuffing noises.

Another hundred meters by my stride count, and three more side-paths, all on the left this time. Passing them was even more troubling, but the chuffing was getting louder.

Fifty meters farther, and I could see the driveway curving for the first time, to the right. I stopped and listened as carefully as I ever had in my life. Nothing I could call human, but the chuffing sound was now less than a baseball toss away.

Just around the curve, in fact.

I stayed on the inside of the driveway arc, moving two steps, then stopping, then one and stopping, then three and the same. Enough times to pick up sound, but hopefully without any kind of predictable pattern for someone to spring an ambush or—

I saw her first.

I’d already stopped for a listen. If I hadn’t, I’m not sure the change in the shape of this particular tree would have been apparent until I was a lot closer.

Not that it made any difference to Malinda Dujong.

This time, the cloying smell of decaying flesh hit me ten feet later, the process no doubt accelerated by the heat of a Florida day. And by some creatures in the hammock as well, from the strips of flesh ripped from her body.

Up close, the eyes and earlobes were gone, peck-marks on her cheeks. The lips had been saved by black electrician’s tape over them. Her dress was torn in places, less like random slashing and more like careful cutting, as though the intention were to expose certain parts. Her forehead was lashed to the trunk of the tree, her wrists around the back of the trunk, and her ankles to its base, all by wire cable like a trendy outdoor cafe might use to secure its tables and chairs after closing time. I didn’t quite understand the reason for the wire as opposed to rope until I could see her neck and shoulders.

The skin looked as though acid had been dripped on it, the flesh scoured down to the bone in some spots. Through the gaps in her dress, more burned areas. And on her arms and legs...

Anywhere that had been in contact with the tree.

Which is when I heard the chuffing noise grow louder, a little farther along the curve. Fighting the reflex to run, I stayed to the inside of the arc, but not stopping as frequently as I could have. Or should have.

Though I’m not sure that would have made a difference, either.

At each stop, I turned to look back at Dujong. She was still in sight as I rounded a protruding tree limb and saw Justo Vega, thirty feet in front of me.

He was lashed to another tree, his eyes bugging but still in their sockets. His left arm seemed to be tied around the back of the tree, as Dujong’s had been, but his right arm was bound at his waist in front, what I thought was the little Cuban flag I’d seen on the dashboard of his car now dangling limply from that hand.

And given the way his chest heaved and neck strained in time to the chuffing sounds, Justo was the ”creature” making them.

I watched and listened for as long as I could bear just standing there. Then I ran in a zigzag pattern toward Justo, finally coming into the range of his eyes beneath the band of wire that restricted his head movement. He began waving the little flag frantically, his eyes rolling up as though he were trying to gaze at the moon.

Reaching for the tape over his mouth, I managed to get out, ”Justo, I’ll get these off—” before a whooshing sound above and behind me made contact with the back of my head, and I felt the tree take a shot at me, too.

Nancy remained just beyond my reach, but this time she wasn’t drowning. Somehow we’d moved from the Bay area to Hawaii, and she stood in the path of molten lava, flowing down the hill toward her. Nancy was tied to a tree, her hand extending out to me. But the faster I ran toward her, the farther she and the tree receded toward the lava flow. I lunged as the hair on her head caught fire, nearly exploding into flame. And then the flesh on Nancy’s hand began to melt away, down to skeleton. I could feel the heat, her pain on my own hands.

”John?”

And when Nancy called out to me, it wasn’t even her own voice, but that of a man, a voice I thought sounded familiar, though—

”John!”

I opened my eyes to deep-set, hooded ones staring back from less than a foot away, my hands and shoulders and neck all burning so intensely I nearly cried out.

David Helides said, ”For a moment there, I was afraid you weren’t going to wake up.”

I tried to talk, realized my mouth had been taped shut.

Just like Justo’s.

Helides stepped back by executing a little dance step, a runway model at triple speed. He wore a dark shirt and pants, but not his usual sweats. These were fashionable, like something in a Banana Republic display window, and his hair was brushed and gelled stylishly back over his ears.

”The real me, John.”

A searing flash on my left shoulder. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to swallow the scream, creating that same chuffing noise I’d heard Justo making.

Could still hear him making over the sound of my own.

”You’re tied to a manchineel tree,” said Helides. ”I mentioned them to you the first time you came to visit, remember?”

The torture tree the Native-American tribe used on their prisoners.

”You might recall that I described the sap as being ‘caustic.’ Well, I’ve come to think of it more as arboreal ‘lava,’ really. Perhaps you’d now agree?”

I probably would have nodded reflexively, except my forehead was lashed, and I realized that the part of my scalp against the tree felt wet.

Helides pointed toward his left and my right, but out of the field of vision I had. ”Your friend Mr. Vega agreed with me on that, after he promised not to scream if I took the tape off his mouth. Though frankly, I doubt anyone could have heard him anyway.” Helides cupped his hand behind his left ear, bending his knees and widening his eyes in a parody of a Swiss yodeler. ”Listen.”

I could hear the doppler sound of an approaching and then receding vehicle engine.

Helides lowered his hand. ”And that’s from the state route, nearly a mile from where we are, as the proverbial crow flies. The reason I could hear you coming up the dirt road in your car. I must say, though, that you gave me a bit of a scare with your silence afoot.” Helides executed another dance step, this time a pirouette ending in a karatelike stance. ”Yes. John Cuddy, skulking along my path like some sort of ninja warrior.” Helides spun around, but didn’t kick or strike out at the air. Instead, he seemed to relax. ”God, it’s so good to act out.” He turned back to me, smiling. ”Faking chronic, clinical depression is terribly enervating.”

I watch Helides cavort around the clearing, like a hyperactive child after a long drive. He skipped and hop-scotched, jumping front and back, then side to side.

Suddenly Helides stopped, turning to me again. ”You figured it out, didn’t you?”

I just stared at him.

He said, ”Same deal as with Mr. Vega. No tape, no screams. Not for help, not even from the pain. Agreed?”

I blinked.

Helides came forward, bouncing, almost prancing, on the balls of his feet. He pulled the tape off my mouth slowly, clearly enjoying the sound of it, the feel of it.

”There now, John. Tell me, how did you deduce that I was no longer depressed?”

”I worked backward from the crime. The pool scene chosen very thoughtfully, so that forensics wouldn’t come up with much. Or with too much, given the number of people attending the party.”

”A quite wonderful Website for mystery writers helped me immensely there.”

”And Veronica had told you about Kalil Biggs wanting to do a video.”

”Yes,” said Helides. ”The perfect excuse for my father ordering Duy to turn off the internal security cameras.”

”Then the — ” I clamped my jaw shut, gritting my teeth against a surge of pain from my right buttock.

”Ah, exquisite, isn’t it? I would love to have had this kind of conversation with Malinda, too, but unfortunately my specialty is flora, not fauna.”

Tightly, I said, ”And something got to her first.”

‘Turkey vultures. If it were daylight, you’d see them above, circling. After I took her on Wednesday night, and brought her here, I really had to get back to my father’s house, so there was no time to speak with her then. And besides, John, even I didn’t know how quickly the lava/sap would work, though I am glad to have had the foresight to use cable wire instead of rope. I think the sap could weaken even braided hemp to the breaking point.” Helides shook his head. ”But, I digress. Learning from Malinda—whose heart, I believe, must have simply given out from terror—I went back on the Internet, found that vultures are discouraged by movement of any sort in what they perceive to be carrion. So, I gave Mr. Vega a scarecrow of sorts, the flag of his country of origin.” He looked toward Justo’s tree. ”Waving it in a patriotic fashion will keep the vultures away.” Helides came back to me. ”For how long, though, should prove fascinating.”

I tried to focus. ”I can understand how you killed Veronica, even why violating her would deflect suspicion away from you given the depression and the drugs you take. What I still don’t understand is why—”

”—I had to kill the little bitch in the first place?” Another surge, from my left forearm this time. ”Yes.”

”Quite simple, really. She found out.”

”About what?”

Helides regarded me the way a teacher might when disappointed by an otherwise promising student. ”That I wasn’t really depressed, of course.”

”And you took her life for it?”

”Not immediately. I was actually quite naive. When I realized about fourteen months ago that I was seemingly, miraculously coming out of the years—decades, John—of genuine depression, I didn’t tell anyone. Not Dr. Forbes, certainly not my father. You see, I wasn’t sure if my ‘improvement’ was just another cruel joke the illness was playing on me. So, I conducted my own experiments, with my mind and body the laboratory. I slowly weaned myself off the drugs—still getting prescriptions filled, of course, even palming a few pills when someone else might be in the kitchen to see me ‘take’ them. I applied for—and received—a driver’s license. Then, as the weeks went by, I could feel genuine well-being for the first time in my life. Hiding it from Dr. Forbes was child’s play, as he’d already made up his mind about the hopelessness of my prognosis and basically just played drug dealer on every visit until it was time for him to go fishing. Within a month, I discovered I had a rather strong sex drive after all, even disguised myself to visit bars and occasionally indulge that drive thereafter, though one-night stands are not as easy to manage as I’ve heard they were in my brother’s—and your—time.”