A Darker Place (11 page)

McCarthy, when the action came to his attention, had not been so reassured. Neither, apparently, was Anne Waverly.

Her file missed some of the material his contained, mostly letters and missives sent out over the growing international computer network. It did, however, contain half a dozen items his lacked, two of which, had they come to his attention earlier (despite being illegally obtained and therefore legally inadmissible) would have upgraded the level of concern over Martin Cranmer’s enterprise a number of notches.

Three of the pages were photocopies of letters to the editor of the county’s local newspaper, complaints about suspicious activities on the Cranmer farm. They had not been published, an oddity that took on distinctly sinister overtones when coupled with photocopies of six months of a man’s bank statements clipped to an unsigned letter that read:

“Who’s William Denwilling?” Glen asked, reading the name from the checking account statements.

“The owner and editor of the local paper.”

Denwilling had received a postal order for five hundred dollars in the middle of each of the months for which there were photocopies. Glen read on.

The second alarming factor Glen missed at first, because the name on the photocopied obituary, a forty-six-year-old farmer killed in an automobile accident, meant nothing to him. However, the next page Anne had included was an assessor’s map with the boundaries of two adjacent properties highlighted: Martin Cranmer’s name was in one, the dead farmer’s in the other. With that, a small bell rang, and Glen leafed back through the file to find that the man had been one of the three residents who had written irate yet unpublished letters to William Denwilling’s newspaper, complaining about problems with their weird neighbors.

The rest of the file contained no revelations. However, the familiar material, from the harangues across the Web to the stockpiling of foodstuffs, took on a darker meaning with the knowledge of editorial bribery and the death of an outspoken critic.

He reached the end of the file, folded the earlier pages back, and sat for a moment studying the grainy photo of Cranmer, the smiling, bearded farmer/prophet.

“There’s very little of this I can use, you know,” he said.

“You won’t have to if I go in.”

Even with the evidence of her carefully compiled file in his hand, the blunt offer startled him. He had never expected to use her in anything but an advisory capacity again, and then only as a last resort.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Anne,” he said carefully.

“Is there anyone else?”

“We have a couple of—”

She interrupted. “Anyone as good?”

He was silent. She turned back from the window then to look at him, and she was smiling.

“If I don’t do it one more time, I’m going to live the rest of my life with the taste of failure in my mouth. My clumsiness in Utah killed seven people.”

“Anne, your skill and your willingness to sacrifice yourself saved all the rest of them.”

“From a situation I put them in.”

“For Christ sake. Anne, not even you can stop an avalanche. Not even you could second-guess a man like Jeremiah Cotton.”

“In my head, I know that, Glen. In my gut, I need to try one more time.”

“And if it happens that this one goes bad?”

“Well, I guess I’ll just shoot myself,” she said, still smiling.

“Anne…”

“I’m joking, Glen. Surely you must know that if I were going to commit suicide, I’d have done it a long time ago. And anyway, this one won’t go bad. We’re early enough with Cranmer, we can certainly defuse him and may even get enough evidence to put him away for a while. Very different from the last time. And a nice, tidy investigation might take your boss’s mind off Waco.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with Waco,” he said quickly.

“I didn’t think you had.” It was a simple statement, but Glen heard Anne’s faith in his abilities behind it. He looked down at the envelope.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll push a little harder.”

He had pushed, and Anne had gone in, and in fact, they had been early enough: Cranmer was in prison now for a variety of offenses. However, the night before Anne had gone to Cranmer had not been an easy one. It had taken Glen two hours of concentrated effort to gain Anne’s full and undistracted attention, and he had felt distinctly triumphant when she had fallen asleep afterward. When she came back from Kansas, however, she looked immensely tired and had lost an alarming amount of weight. Besides, she was beginning to make him feel… uneasy. He went through the motions of preparing a new identity for her, but privately he vowed that he would not again pull her into one of his investigations.

Over the course of his nearly forty years, Glen had been forced to break any number of vows, some of them serious, but never had he gone back on his private word with greater reluctance than with the case that had taken him into Anne Waverly’s lecture hall two weeks before that morning, and into her bed last night. In fact, it was something of a surprise that his reluctance had not manifested itself physically. Perhaps if Anne had not been so… uncontrolled, he might have had time to consider what he was doing and created difficulty for himself, but she had been. God, had she been.

He only hoped he hadn’t hurt her. Whatever had taken possession of her last night had wanted to be hurt, and although Glen knew full well that wife-beaters and sadists the world around always used that rationalization, in this case he thought it might be true. He even had to wonder if somehow he had known it was going to
be that way. A month ago, when he was wrestling with the need to call Anne back into service, he had dreamed: He and Anne were lying together on the rug in front of the downstairs fire, just at that urgent stage between caresses and actual intercourse, when the smooth pink scars scattered across her body, remnants of glass shards and shotgun pellets, had awakened under his touch and begun to move, twitching independently of each other until they opened and became numerous tiny mouths, gaping against the palm of his hand and speaking to him in tiny, insistent voices. He instantly shot awake, revolted by the sick eroticism of the image but so turned on, he had stirred Lisa awake and crawled into her for relief.

No, Anne had set the tone last night, as she always did in these encounters; he had only responded in kind. And it seemed to do the trick—she was always different after sex, softer and more womanly, and he knew that sex with him had become a part of the process by which she transformed herself into the character he had created for her. Sure, he had felt like he was knifing her last night when he stabbed into her, but she had responded, and that final gasp of pain had even set off her orgasm. And his.

It was light outside now, and by experience he knew that Anne would soon stir, making a small questioning chirp of a noise in the back of her throat as she half woke to his presence and pressed her back against him. When his rough face had nuzzled its way through her thick hair to the nape of her neck and his fingers located the intriguing mole on her left breast, she would begin to push back with a greater urgency, until after a minute she would-twist around and fling her arms around his neck, and they would drown in each other until it was time to start the day.

All in all, Glen thought, smiling into the pillow and
stiff now against the sheets, a hell of a way to begin an FBI investigation.

He turned then to reach for her, and sat up abruptly, his smile fading along with his arousal. The other side of the bed was empty.

Excerpt from a memorandum sent by Dr. Anne Waverly to the FBI Cult Response Team, undated

The sudden panic that seized Glen and swept him to the top of the stairway went still with the awareness that someone was moving around down below and that the stairwell was warm from the woodstove. He stood, straining to hear, and abruptly relaxed into a relief that left him feeling queasy: Anne was in the kitchen, making breakfast.

He stepped back into the bedroom to retrieve the dressing gown she kept in the closet (a man’s, size extra-extra large; he had never asked who had left it there, or who besides himself used it, although he knew that the man—or men—would have a lot of dark hair, a lot of upper-body muscle, and a real attitude). He started to pull it on, then changed his mind and went to take a shower first: If they did have a morning session, Anne might find a clean partner more appealing.

He showered and washed his hair with her coconut-smelling shampoo, and as the smell of it hit his nostrils, a cold thought shoved itself into his simple contentment. He looked sharply down at his feet, but the drain was clean of hair. He rinsed off and got out of the shower, took a towel from the rack (dry, he noted) and scrubbed at his head and face, shoulders and chest, and then wrapped it around his waist, tucking in the ends even as he was bending to peer into the wastebasket. It held two tissues and a loop of hair pulled out of a hairbrush—not what he was looking for. The tile around the sink was clean, but hanging off the edge he found one hair, perhaps eight inches long. He dropped to his knees, and on the floor he found it: a swatch of perhaps a dozen brown and gray hairs, cut flat on one end. In the drawer were the scissors she had used, with another long hair caught
in the hinges. He stood up, curled the hair around his finger, and absently dropped the tuft into the pocket of his borrowed robe. What had he expected? “No changes,” she had told him, and though he didn’t altogether understand it, he knew it always happened.

Her toothbrush was not in its usual place in the cupboard, but he found the spares in her drawer and added a cellophane wrapper to the contents of the wastebasket so he could greet her with clean breath. He hung up the towel and put on the dressing gown, stuck another condom in the pocket, and pattered downstairs in his bare feet, happily registering the warmth of the woodstove and the smell of coffee emanating from the kitchen.

So vivid was Glen’s anticipation that he took two steps into the room before his eyes informed him that the person sitting at the table with a steaming cup of coffee was not Anne. The man looked up, and Glen recognized Eliot Featherstone.

“There’s coffee,” he told Glen, and went back to the disemboweled toaster in front of him.

Anne’s toothbrush was missing, thought Glen starkly. He flung himself out the door and into the yard, where he was confronted by the sight of the barn door standing open with no vehicle inside it. Her old Land Rover was parked in its usual place with Eliot’s pickup truck beside it; the Volkswagen bus she called Rocinante was gone.

Aware suddenly of his lack of shoes, Glen picked his tender-footed way back to the porch, past Stan, who was lying on the edge of the steps with his head between his front paws and his eyes on the empty barn.

“When did she leave?” he asked Eliot in the kitchen. The younger man stared at him blankly for a minute, processing the question and his answer.

“Four?” he said finally. “Thereabouts.” He went back to his screws and wires.

Well, thought Glen, of course she’s gone, that’s what
she was going to do. Am I going to get all disappointed that she didn’t wave good-bye?