The Darkness Gathers (16 page)

“Whatever happened to Sarah?”

“I don’t know. I never knew her personally. I called over to the
Times
, and someone told me that there had been layoffs and that her job had been eliminated. I tried to find her phone number but was never able to locate her. I’ve never seen her byline anywhere.”

“So what’s your point?”

“Just that there are people behind the scenes who call the shots, you know. They can make inconvenient scenarios—and people—disappear.”

“You’re afraid that we’re becoming one of those inconveniences.”

“I’d say it’s a fair bet. Who knows what Stephen Parker stumbled upon—he’s dead. Or what Valentina knew—she’s dead. Or what Manny was close to finding—someone warned him off. Usually when these things start happening, it indicates that someone is invested in having secrets kept. If we keep nosing around …”

“They might be finding pieces of us in alligators all over Florida?”

Jeffrey shrugged. “
Something
spooked Detective Ignacio. He doesn’t seem like the skittish type. It would have to be something or someone pretty powerful to call that dog off.”

Lydia nodded. “He
did
seem afraid, like he thought he had to make a choice between his family and going after Nathan Quinn … and possibly Tatiana’s safe return.”

Jeffrey couldn’t blame him. There was nothing more important to him than Lydia. He would choose her life over his own or anyone else’s, if it came to that.

“Can you walk away from this? When a girl’s life hangs in the balance and two people are already dead?”

“If I thought staying our course meant risking our lives, then yes. What about you, Lydia? Can you walk away?”

Lydia folded her arms and leaned over the table a bit. She searched his face and saw tiny lines she hadn’t noticed before around his hazel eyes, realized he hadn’t shaved that morning. She slipped her foot from her shoe, slid it under the table, and traced his calf with the tip of her toe. Her nausea had subsided, replaced with the familiar feeling of electricity in her blood. The thought of powerful forces conspiring to keep secrets was irresistible to her.

“Just twenty-four more hours.”

“For what?”

“To dig around a bit and see what we find. If nothing pops by this time tomorrow night, then we are fated to go home to our new, happy, quiet life. And I’ll seriously consider a career as a novelist,” she said, smiling. When the buzz was at its hottest, she felt like she was ten feet tall and bulletproof.

“And if something ‘pops’? What then?” he asked, meeting her storm-cloud eyes and reaching for her fingers with one hand, rubbing her small forearm with the other.

But they weren’t invincible. The boundary of their skin was weak, their beating hearts delicate and fallible. And she could feel that they stood at the bottom of a dark mountain.

His hands were hot on her, pulling her into the safety and comfort of his aura. But she could not shake the images in her mind: the girl in the phone booth, Shawna Fox’s green eyes, Jed McIntyre in the parking lot, rocking back and forth as if the chaos of his thoughts kept him in constant motion.

She searched for a witty one-liner to make him laugh, to pull him into her buzz. But she couldn’t think of anything. So she just hung her head a bit and looked down at his hand on her arm, touched his strong fingers.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “I just don’t know.”

chapter sixteen

L
ydia Strong had written in her book
With a Vengeance
that Jed McIntyre had been trying to create a “brethren of misery” when he murdered thirteen single working mothers in upstate New York. Jed McIntyre had been impressed that someone finally understood him so well. He hadn’t really even known it at the time, but he eventually acknowledged that he had wanted other people to suffer the way he had suffered when his father murdered his mother, slit her throat with a dull cleaver in her own kitchen. He wanted someone else in the world to understand his loneliness, grief, and isolation. But of course it ran so much deeper—or, rather, so much higher—than that. It’s not as though one makes a conscious decision to become a serial murderer. It’s more like you feel so bad, so ugly, so broken inside all day, doing the things that other people do. Then somehow, maybe accidentally, or maybe because you read something or see something on the television, you discover something that makes you feel less bad all the time. For some people, it’s drugs and alcohol; for some people, it’s food; and for him, it was murder. But still he was touched, really moved that Lydia had taken the time to get to know him. It made him want to be a better man for her. But of course that wasn’t possible.

He had known already, from the first moment he saw her, that Lydia was special. Her delicate, ephemeral beauty, her intelligent gray eyes, these would have changed the game for him had he been allowed to continue playing. He remembered how their eyes had met in the parking lot of the A&P that twilight more than sixteen years ago. She had felt him, felt his intentions, seen into his dark, twisted soul; he had watched the knowledge drain the color from her face, watched her small hand dart out to lock the car doors, then roll up the windows. But then she turned to look at him with some combination of curiosity, defiance, and fear. He’d had to smile; she melted something within him. He should have known she’d be the one to lead to his arrest. He’d been so careless that night, he almost deserved to get caught. She’d distracted him and made him forget himself.

He barely dared to think of her, except for once a month, when he wrote her a letter. When he thought of her, not even the medication could quell the desires that rose in him. Not that the pills really worked anyway; they really only dulled the twisting, aching, burning inside him. It was like he existed behind an opaque Plexiglas screen, barely recognizable, his voice unintelligible, even to himself. But it was good to have the meds as long as he was in this place; otherwise, he’d surely go insane.

He caught sight of himself in the two-way mirror. His Day-Glo orange jumper was most unflattering, a terrible color for a fair-skinned redhead, making him look even paler and more washed-out than he normally did. And it certainly did nothing to show off the body he’d been so carefully cultivating over his years here. It took discipline, real mental discipline, to work out when you were so heavily medicated. But it was a kind of release. He took great satisfaction in his hard, lean, muscular body, with cuts that would make Arnold blush like a little girl. If he’d been soft and paunchy when they’d brought him in here, he was a machine now. He looked down at his sinewy wrists and at the cuffs there, which matched the shackles on his ankles. He hated them; they made him look so common, like a thug or a gangster. But he had a feeling he wouldn’t be wearing them for long.

He looked across the long Formica table at the man who sat as far away from him as possible. He reminded Jed of one of those dream-team lawyers, the self-righteous swagger, the intimidating frown of disdain. He knew enough about the trappings of wealth to identify the gentleman’s three-thousand-dollar suit, his weekend-in-the-Caribbean tan, his manicured fingernails, his thick, glittering Tag Heuer watch. His silver-white hair seemed to glow against his tanned face; his blue eyes glittered like gems, bright and hard and cold. R. Alexander Harriman, Esq., used the kind of state-appointed attorneys who had represented Jed at his previous release review hearings to clean out his colon.

After his last hearing, two years ago, Jed had resigned himself to a lifetime behind bars. As he walked into the review, he had been sure that he had sufficiently duped the shrinks into believing that he had found Jesus and that his “mental illness” was under control with medication. He was sure that he would be sent to some halfway house, where escape would be possible. But when he’d walked in the door to appear before the committee, he’d seen former Special Agent Jeffrey Mark sitting at the table, in front of him the stack of letters Jed had monthly sent to Lydia Strong. He couldn’t believe that thirteen years later, Agent Mark still had a hard-on for him. But then as Jeffrey Mark spoke passionately to the board against Jed’s release, Jed realized that Agent Mark had a hard-on for Lydia Strong. Well, well, even the good guys were not above lusting after fifteen-year-old girls. When the parole board denied him, Jeffrey Mark had smiled. Mark, that smug, self-righteous bastard, leaned forward in his chair and said, before he could be stopped, “I’ll be here every single time you come up for review, you sick fuck.”

But that was before R. Alexander Harriman, Esq., had appeared in the visitors’ room like an avenging angel—well, really more like Satan in some clever guise, bargaining for Jed’s soul. Little did R. Alexander Harriman, Esq., and his mysterious client realize that they were getting the short end of that stick.

They’d been sitting in the cold, harshly lighted room for nearly an hour, and Harriman hadn’t said one word to him, but Jed occasionally caught him sneaking a glance, a look of disgust and apprehension on his face. They both startled when the door opened quickly and the guard entered.

“The Review Board is assembled, Mr. Harriman, and will see you and your client now,” said a bulky, fuzzy-headed young Samoan man, leaning down to unshackle Jed’s chains from the table. Another guard stood at the door.

The attorney leaned toward Jed and said in a fierce whisper, “There will be no fucking with me or my client, Mr. McIntyre. I want you to understand that. You will be back in here so fast, it will make your teeth rattle. And there will be no second chances. You’ll rot in here until you die, and then you’ll rot in hell. Are we clear?” His words were like hammers and about as hard to swallow, but Jed held his tongue and turned on as much obsequious charm as he could muster without gagging. Frankly, he’d suck the old man’s dick if it would get him out of the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane.

“Of course, Mr. Harriman. Thank you.”

Jed was rewarded for his good behavior when he walked into the institutional room where the board had assembled. Of the ten people seated, Jeffrey Mark was not among them, nor was there a single attending psychiatrist who had treated him over the last sixteen years. In fact, he’d never seen any of them before in his life.

chapter seventeen

T
he day started gray and dismal, large black clouds looming over the beach. The sun was just making its debut as she left Jeffrey warm and wrapped up in the comforter like a burrito, heading out to run for the first time in weeks. Running was like a religion for Lydia, a kind of prayer. Today, her body was forced to do contrition, make penance for weeks of inactivity. But she took an animalistic pleasure in being reduced to her muscles and her lungs, in the endorphins coursing through her blood. After the first mile along the damp shoreline with the smell of the ocean and the cries of seagulls filling her senses, she settled into her pace. Her mind was clear, and she could think about what their next move should be.

The pieces of this puzzle didn’t quite seem to fit together; everything about it was just a little off, including how Lydia and Jeffrey had become involved. Since their conversation the night before, she’d started to wonder if they
had
stumbled onto something that they weren’t equipped to handle … and if maybe it would be better for them just to walk away before that became impossible. But the only way she would be able to live with that would be if she knew for a fact that she was risking their lives to find Tatiana Quinn; if she knew beyond a doubt that all the veiled threats, the stalking black Mercedes, and the menacing Nathan Quinn were not just smoke and mirrors, some magician’s trick to scare them away.

She picked up her pace and slowed her breathing, heading for a jetty, where she planned to turn around. The beach was nearly empty, and thunder rumbled somewhere off in the distance, the waves large and white-capped. An old woman in a romantic floppy straw hat and red-and-white polka-dotted bathing suit smiled as Lydia blew past her. A skinny kid in white bathing trunks threw a Frisbee to a black Labrador, who ran off with it, forcing the boy to chase him and tackle him in order to get it back; it was a game they both seemed to enjoy, running and splashing up water. The dog’s barking and the boy’s laughter carried toward her on the wind.

She watched their game as she drew closer to them. She watched them so intently, struck by the innocent happiness of their play, that she failed to notice at first the two figures who walked into her path. When she registered that they had stopped directly in front of her, weren’t gazing at the ocean but at her approach, she stopped. Her fanny pack, strapped tightly at her waist, held her Glock, and she unzipped it.

Two men, one black, one white, started walking toward her. The white guy wore pressed jeans and heavy Timberland boots, a light navy blue Windbreaker over a white T-shirt. His head looked like almost a perfect square. It was huge, even atop his massive shoulders. He was missing a neck but made up for it with a giant chin. The black guy was longer, leaner, wearing a charcoal Henley, a cotton barn jacket, a pair of impeccably pressed chinos, and black Bruno Magli shoes. He had small, tight dreadlocks pulled back loosely. She could see their heavy weapons. The white guy wore his on a shoulder holster; the black guy had his at his waist. As they got closer, she looked around her. The beach was suddenly deserted; a few drops of rain fell from the sky.

She had two options. The first and most attractive option was to turn and run. But she could see that they were both much taller than she and in good shape, which meant that no matter how fast she was, they’d be faster in a straight sprint, simply because they had longer legs. The other option was to shoot the black guy first, because he wore his gun at his waist, and then clip the white guy while he was still struggling with that pesky shoulder holster.

But as they drew close enough for her to see their eyes, she zipped the Glock back into its pouch. Their smug bearing, the way Big Head had his hands in his pockets, the way Dreads never took his eyes off the pouch at her waist made her realize they were feds. She felt a little shaky as the adrenaline drained from her system, leaving a slight residue of anger.