Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (20 page)

Ten minutes later I was behind the wheel of the Charger, cruising through the Hollywood Hills with the windows down, enjoying the crisp, cool air blowing in my face.

I drove through the Hills, cruised down to Universal City and out to Toluca Lake, then back around Griffith Park by way of the I-5 freeway. I cut back west via Los Feliz Boulevard, headed for the 101.

That’s when I felt it.

The faint stirring of something
other
in the back of my mind.

At first I ignored it, thinking it was just fatigue playing tricks on me or maybe the beginnings of a headache. But the feeling began to grow stronger and I started having a hard time focusing on what I was doing. My thoughts were scattered, and entwined within them were fleeting images of things that I was certain I’d never seen before. People and places and things that just shouldn’t be, things that made me shudder and shake in my boots.

I shook my head, trying to clear it, and nearly ran off the road as my hands jerked the wheel to the right.

That’s when I knew I was in serious trouble.

I hadn’t turned the wheel.

I was dead certain of it.

An ice pick began poking about in my brain, sending spikes of blinding pain jabbing through my system and making me jerk about like a puppet on a string.

I’m not alone in here
, I thought.

That’s when the attack intensified. Whatever it was inside my head with me began to force its will upon me, trying to take control. I watched as one of my hands let go of the wheel, seemingly of its own accord, and jabbed the button on the radio. Loud, blaring music filled the car as my hand turned up the volume even as I struggled to force it back to the steering wheel. The spikes of pain in my head grew more frequent, the music blared in my ears, and my hands began jerking about as my control of the situation slipped away.

Darkness began to pool at the edges of my vision as I felt my personality forced into the back of my mind and glimpsed another, stronger entity settle into its place.

I remember thinking,
Damn, he’s pissed!
as my consciousness seemed to fray like an old sheet flapping in hurricane-force winds, and I slipped down into darkness, screaming in vain against the power that had taken control of my body.

27

… I surged up from a prone position with the remains of a scream fading from my lips. It was like turning on a light: one minute I was lost and drifting, the next fully aware and in control of my body again.

I had no idea how much time had passed.

Or where I even was.

All I knew was that something
other
had taken control of me, had made me dance and sing and prance about like a puppet on a string, all while I was trapped unaware in the back of my mind.

It was absolutely terrifying.

Adrenaline flooded my system, a belated response to the threat my mind was just now beginning to understand. My instincts were telling me that I had two choices—fight or flight—but neither was really possible. I couldn’t fight something I couldn’t see. And I couldn’t run away from something that I was carrying around in my own head. The paradox threatened to overload my synapses and panic loomed, a dark wave rising high above my head, ready to drown me in its depths.

As I fought to keep control, I glanced down at myself, only to discover that my hands, arms, and chest were covered in drying blood!

I scrambled to my feet, frantically patting myself down, convinced the blood would turn out to be mine despite the fact that I wasn’t feeling any pain.

Thankfully, it wasn’t.

Just whose it was remained to be seen, but I’d deal with that when the time came.

My frantic self-examination had left my fingers and palms covered in warm, sticky blood that had the feel of drying glue, so I glanced about, looking for a place to wash it off.

I was standing in a kitchen, one I didn’t recognize. Dark wood cabinets. Stainless steel appliances. Marble countertops. An island, with a sink, stood in the center of the room, and I went directly to it, nudging the faucet on with my elbow and rinsing my hands beneath the stream with a near compulsive fervor until they were free of blood.

As I turned away from the sink, hands cold and dripping, I realized that the thing in my head, whatever it might be, was allowing me to see through its eyes again. Everything had that crisp, hyper-real tinge to it, which was fine when you were looking at countertops but decidedly unsettling when looking at what seemed like gallons of blood drying on your clothing.

Afraid of what I would find, I went in search of the owner of that blood.

I’d left a faint trail of blood drops behind me when I’d entered the kitchen who knew how many hours earlier. It was dried now, but still clearly discernible for what it was, and I followed it out of the kitchen and down the hall to what had once been a bedroom but which was now nothing more than an abattoir.

The blood splashed on the front of my shirt was nothing compared to the amount that had been spilled from the body of the man on the bed in front of me. The entire bed seemed to be bathed in crimson, and its thick coppery scent filled the air, forcing me to bury my nose in the crook of my arm to keep from vomiting.

The trail of blood on the floor was thicker here than in the kitchen, and I followed it right up to the side of the bed.

The victim was spread-eagle across the bed, his arms and legs tied in such a way that they stretched him in opposite directions. His position reminded me of the position of the figure in Leonardo da Vinci’s
Vitruvian Man
.

Unlike Leonardo’s creation, however, the man on the bed had been mercilessly tortured.

Due to his nakedness, it was easy for me to see the dozens of cuts that had been carved into his flesh: on his chest, shoulders, stomach, arms, legs, even the bottoms of his feet. The blood that had spilled from his wounds had splashed the wall behind him and had pooled beneath his frame before running down the sides of the bed.

In addition to the knife wounds, he’d also been beaten, his face so swollen and misshapen that at first I didn’t recognize him. But after staring at his face for several long moments the pieces of the puzzle finally came together and I knew.

The man on the bed was Sean Grady.

I recoiled.

Good God! Had I done this?

The blood on my clothes and hands would suggest that I had, but I didn’t understand why. What had I been looking for? What had I wanted from him?

Or rather, what had the thing inside my head wanted?

Grady hadn’t been the most sterling of characters, but he certainly hadn’t deserved this. No one deserved this.

The killer had left a calling card as well; he’d used Grady’s blood to write “I’m coming for you…” in large letters on the wall above the headboard.

I turned away, my thoughts awhirl as I tried to figure out what to do next, and that’s when it hit me. Something Bergman said when we’d been talking the other night.

He’d been tied down, tortured with a knife …

The words were still ringing in my ears when I turned to look at Grady again.

Tied down, tortured with a knife …

I was starting to suspect I knew just who it was that was riding around with me inside my head.

But I would have to deal with him later. Right now I was standing in an active murder scene with enough blood on my clothes to land me in prison for the rest of my life. I had to do what I could to make it seem as if I’d never been here. Then, once I’d taken care of that, I had to get out of this apartment and back to Fuentes’s property without anyone getting a look at me.

No small task, I assure you.

Back in Boston I’d worked as a freelance consultant to the Boston Police Department, more specifically homicide detective Miles Stanton. He’d call me in when things got a little unusual, so I’d been to my fair share of crime scenes. One thing I learned was that there was no way to eliminate all of the evidence of my presence there. There were just too many variables in play: trace evidence like hair and fiber samples, fingerprints, and DNA identification. You couldn’t hide the fact that someone had been there; hell, the body alone would accomplish that all on its own. But you could hide that it had been you, specifically, that had been present, provided you had a little bit of luck on your side.

I was horrified about what had happened to Grady, but I knew I hadn’t done it, not consciously or willingly anyway, and I wasn’t going to take the rap for it if I could help it. I was already being hunted for murders I hadn’t committed; it seemed somehow fair, given the circumstances, that I keep them from hunting me for the one I had.

The vast majority of law enforcement officials were good, honest people trying to do a difficult job in less than ideal conditions. Just like anyone else, they sometimes made mistakes. I needed to confuse the evidentiary picture enough that it would appear that mistakes had been made, even when the reality was quite different.

And who knew, maybe one of the investigators would make a mistake when processing the scene, increasing my chances of staying out of the suspect limelight.

I still had no idea whose property this was—Grady’s or someone else’s. If it was the latter, they could come home at any moment, so I worked as quickly and efficiently as possible, my heart pounding like a gong inside my chest the entire time.

Back in the kitchen, I found the paper towel roll and tore off a couple of sheets. Using those as makeshift gloves, I opened up the cabinet under the sink and hunted around until I found what I wanted, a bottle of household bleach. Taking the bleach back into the bedroom, I went hunting for the other item I needed, a vacuum cleaner. I was starting to think that Grady—or whoever actually owned the place—used a cleaning service that brought in their own equipment, but then I found a decade-old upright hidden away at the back of a hall closet.

I crossed my fingers and checked the bag …

It was full!

Armed with everything I needed, I headed back to the bedroom.

Being careful not to step in the rapidly cooling blood, I picked up the bleach in my paper-towel-covered hand, twisted off the cap, and then poured the entire bottle over Grady’s corpse, moving my arm up and down his form in order to spread the liquid out as much as possible. My biggest concern was DNA evidence. I knew the bleach wouldn’t destroy it, but, if given long enough, it would degrade any DNA samples enough that they couldn’t be used to make a definitive match. The sharp, pungent smell of the bleach mixed with the metallic scent of spilled blood had me fighting to keep from vomiting.

Three more minutes
, I told myself,
that’s all I need, three more minutes
.

I tossed the plastic jug of bleach aside and picked up the vacuum bag. Snatching a pen off the nightstand, I poked a hole in the bag and then did the same thing with its contents that I had done with the bleach, namely dump it on Grady. Dirt, dust, lint, thread, fingernail clippings, you name it—it all ended up on the corpse, adding to the trace evidence the investigators would have to deal with. I was hoping there had been a lot of visitors to the apartment in the days prior to the last time it had been vacuumed, each new person adding exponentially to the workload of the forensics team.

As I tossed the bag away, I was struck with the unmistakable feeling of being watched from behind.

I spun around, bringing my arms up just in case I needed to defend myself.

As I did so I could see a figure behind me doing the same and I knew in that moment that there was no way of escaping this confrontation. Whoever it was had no doubt seen me and could now tie me to the murder; I was going to have to be certain that newcomer couldn’t tell anyone what he or she had seen.

My body kicked itself into fight mode right about the same moment I completed my turn and came face to face with my attacker …

… who looked just like me!

For a second I thought the doppelganger nightmare had returned, that the fetch that Denise, Dmitri, and I had slain months before in Boston had somehow survived and had returned to make my life hell, but the true explanation was much simpler than that.

I was looking at a mirror.

I’d been so focused on the body on the bed that I hadn’t noticed the wide, rectangular mirror on the wall behind the dresser. The threatening figure was nothing more than my own reflection.

Relief swept over me, but it was fleeting. The scare reinforced my awareness that time was at a premium and the longer I was here the more chance there was of someone discovering me standing over the corpse.

It was time to go.

Too bad it wasn’t that easy. I couldn’t just walk out of the building with Grady’s blood all over me. The first person who got a good look would run off screaming and before long I’d be right back where I’d been before, running from the police and hoping they didn’t start shooting.

I used the paper towels to protect myself from leaving fingerprints as I started going through the dresser drawers, looking for something to cover myself up. Grady was a bit bulkier than I was, so a sweatshirt or even an oversized t-shirt would do the trick nicely, provided it was a dark color; black would be ideal, but blue, green, or brown would work nicely as well.

The first shirt I came to was a black Grateful Dead concert tee. Even I didn’t think the irony was funny, and my humor is blacker than most. Still, it was the right size and I pulled it on, being careful to keep the front of the shirt away from my body as I pulled it down. The shirt was even large enough to cover most of the bloodstain on the front of my jeans.

With any luck, this might actually work.

I had one last thing to do before I left.

I went into the kitchen and looked around until I found a dishrag. Towel in hand, I went back through the rooms I’d been in, seeking out the places I was certain I had touched after regaining consciousness and making some educated guesses on others as I went. Each location was wiped down with the towel in an effort to eliminate any fingerprints I might have left behind. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do.