Blood Dahlia - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries) (23 page)

49

As Wolfgram walked onto the university campus early in the morning, he was struck by just how antiquated Penn State
really was. Some of the buildings were so run-down they looked like they could fall over any second. But there was grandeur to it, too—something about linking with the past that Wolfgram found pleasant.

His Introduction to Differential Equations class began at 7:30
a.m., and it was a timeslot he preferred. That early in the morning, mathematics was the last thing the students wanted to think about, but every once in a while, there would be a student who would be genuinely interested in the subject matter, even that early. Someone like himself, who found comfort and wonderment in numbers. Those were the students that Wolfgram taught for, and those were the students that he ended up wanting to be close to.

As he rounded a corner into the quad
on his way to grab a cup of coffee from a cart set up in the student building, he saw something that made him stop in his tracks. He wasn’t one to be startled, and so, other than stopping, he had no physical reaction to what he saw.

Sarah King and several men in black suits were speaking with someone
whom Wolfgram recognized as the dean of undergraduate studies.

He jumped back and hid around the corner. Without a weapon, he was vulnerable. He leaned back
around the corner and watched the dean speaking to them before leading them through the quad to the administration building.

Wolfgram had been fascinated with psychic phenomena as a curiosity. But now that he saw it, saw what it had brought on him, he thought Sarah King was a
n even bigger monster than he was. He looked around, unsure what to do for the first time that he could remember. Something akin to panic had taken hold.

He glanced back once more
at Sarah and watched her walk into the building and disappear with the other men. Then he dropped his satchel with his notes and ran—he wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

50

The morning had been spent at the Penn State campus. Sarah had
led them to Professor Daniel Davies. He was an associate professor of mathematics, someone the dean of the college of science had informed her was well on his way to becoming one of the top mathematicians in the country.

“You sure this is him?” Rosen had asked.

When Sarah had seen his photo on the campus website, she knew it was him. She saw him again, nude and in a dark basement, a terrified girl chained to his wall. The image caused her pain, but she’d found that she could ignore it. “Yes, that’s him.”

“Well,” the dean said, “he should be in class right now.”

When they had gone to the classroom in the mathematics building, they found a group of students sitting and chatting or playing on their phones.

“He r
an,” Sarah said. “He saw us and ran.”

Rosen glanced around the room. “Damn it.”

He began shouting orders to the other agents. Sarah looked at the podium where this…
thing
taught every day, pretending to be human, to be relatable. She knew he shook hands with people and they felt his grip and they thought, in some way, they could relate to him, maybe even find their lives similar. But that was impossible. She knew that there was nothing behind his eyes.

She followed Giovanni off the campus grounds and back to the car. Once they were inside, he said, “I think it’s best to take you back to the safe
house.”

She shook her head. “We have to find him. He’s too smart not to have some backup plan. Maybe a house in South America or something. If he gets away, he won’t stop. He’ll just keep doing it
somewhere else.”

“What do yo
u want to do?”

“I want to see his house.”

The warrant was denied. Rosen hadn’t wanted to apply for one, but Giovanni thought it was the best course rather than just knocking on his door and asking to come inside. But invading someone’s home required probable cause, a standard that, they told Sarah, required a reasonable person to think that the subject of the warrant had committed the crime. And even then they were only allowed to search for evidence they listed in the warrant, unless evidence of criminal behavior was in plain sight. They would have to knock and ask his permission to enter.

When they arrived at the home address listed
for Professor Davies, Sarah knew it was the place. She recognized it, but the house also emanated something—a darkness, a feeling that made her guts tighten up. She wasn’t even sure that whatever she had, her sensitivity, was the cause. She had always believed that evil, true evil, was felt by everyone.

They stepped out of the car
, and Sarah stood on the road a moment, just staring at the home. The neighborhood was as normal as one could expect, but the home had something to it. Maybe it was just because she knew the things that had occurred inside, but the home itself seemed sinister now.

As they walked to the front porch, Rosen stood next to the door as Giovanni stood i
n front. He stood far enough to the side that Sarah knew if someone shot through the door, they would miss him. Sarah stood off to the side, too. Giovanni looked at Rosen and then knocked.

A long silence followed.
Giovanni pressed his ear to the door and then rang the doorbell. Another silence. He stepped away and looked into one of the windows.

“Don’t think anybody’s home,” he said.

Sarah walked to the door. Rosen was scanning the street, and Giovanni was still peering through the front room window. She took out the scalpel, closed her eyes, and slid the blade across her left palm. The blade was so sharp that it hardly caused any pain, just a dull burning. Holding her hand above the doorknob and making a fist, several drops of blood fell over the knob and on the porch.

After placing the scalpel back in her pocket, s
he quickly took a step back and tucked her left hand under her arm, as though crossing them over her body because she was cold. Then she waited.

Giovanni had his hand
s on his hips, exposing his sidearm, something she’d seen him do a lot. He was comfortable around guns in a way most people weren’t. He paced around a bit and then saw the blood on the doorknob. He walked over, bent down, and looked at it up close. Then he looked at the drops on the porch. His face turned to Sarah, and they held each other’s gaze.

“Arnold,” he said, not breaking eye contact with Sarah, “we’ve got blood.”

“What?” Rosen came over and took his glasses out. He examined it more closely. “That’s blood if I’ve ever seen it. Call it in.”

Giovanni made a quick phone call as Rosen kept examining the blood. Once the call had been placed, Rosen took out his sidearm and held it low. “There might be a victim in there. We have to go in.”

Giovanni removed his weapon and said, “They’re on their way.”

“
You stay with Sarah.”

“I’m not letting you
go in there by yourself.”

Rosen
sighed, as though a child had frustrated him. “Fine. Sarah, wait in the car.”

She nodded.

Giovanni took a position in front of the door, and Rosen swung around to the other side. Giovanni shouted, “FBI, open up!”

Simultaneously
, he lifted his leg and kicked the door at the knob. It cracked opened about an inch. He kicked again, and it flew wide as Rosen rushed inside. Giovanni followed him, gun first, sweeping right and then left.

Sarah took a few steps down the porch and then turned around and stepped
back to the front door. The interior of the home was immaculately clean. Not a speck of dust anywhere. She walked inside and heard Rosen and Giovanni searching the other rooms. But they wouldn’t find anything up here. This was the surface appearance, the part of the home meant for other people to see. The real man lived downstairs.

Sarah found the stairs leading down and took them slowly. She listened for any sound, her mind open. Flashes came to her
: the two children with masks and the screaming; she could see where the screaming was coming from. A nude woman had been before the two children, begging for her life. A grown man stood over her with a large knife and was cutting her, blood spraying over the children.

Sarah stopped at the bottom of the stairs. That scenario kept playing over and over in he
r head. Two children, masks, a dying woman. And a monster doing it to her.

The basement
looked normal except for one thing: a door in a wall that didn’t look like it should have been there. She walked to it and didn’t do anything right away. But then, reaching up with her hand, she felt the smoothness of the doorknob, and everything rushed in.

All the blood, all the screams, all the pain. It came to her in one flash, all at once.
The terrible wet noises and the women who pleaded for life. It hit her like a truck, and she instantly felt the tickle of blood flowing out of her nose as her eyes rolled up into her head, and she blacked out.

51

Wolfgram sat at a café with a hat and coat on. He was in the corner with his back facing the wall, his eyes glued to the door. How much did they know? Were any of his alias
es safe? Did they know he had several passports under five different names? Were they at the airports?

Questions raced through his mind
, and he couldn’t slow them down. Panic gripped him and made his chest tighten. It was an unfamiliar feeling. Usually, he was calm under any circumstances. But he had made a mistake. He had been fascinated by Sarah King and allowed her to get close to him. He should have killed her the moment he’d found out about her.

“Did you need anything else, sir?”

The waitress was young, perhaps eighteen. Wolfgram had the strong urge to reach out and break her neck. But instead, he just shook his head.

“Okay, well, lemme know if you need anything.”

She put the bill down on the table for the coffee and the slice of pie that he hadn’t touched. Wolfgram stared at the check and then crumpled it up and tossed it on the ground.

A decision had to be made. Would he risk the airport or just go to the apartment he had rented in New Ham
pshire in case of something like this? The apartment was under an alias, a female alias no less, but he couldn’t be sure what they knew and didn’t know. If Sarah really was what everyone seemed to be believe she was… nowhere was safe.

The one chance he had was to be in a country that didn’t extradite to the
United States. Croatia was possibly the best option. He would have to risk the airports. Eventually, they would find him in New Hampshire. Maybe not soon, but someday. In the meantime, he would have to be looking over his shoulder, wondering if the footsteps he heard behind him were some federal agent who had come to drag him to an appointment with a needle.

He rose just as his phone rang. It was Dara. He was about to ignore the call when something hit him:
they would be searching for a lone male. They weren’t on the lookout for a family.

“Hello, Dara,” he answered.

“Hey, hope I’m not bugging you.”

“On the contrary. I was just going to call you. What are you doing this weekend?”

“Nothing much. Why?”

“I’d like to take you somewhere. And Jake if you’re comfortable with him coming. I was thinking Mexico or the Bahamas.”

Silence a moment. “Seriously?”

“I’m sorry, that was too fast. We’ve only been on a couple of dates. I just… I usually go on these trips alone
, and I thought it’d be fun to have someone else along. I have the skymiles so it’d be my treat. But I’ll just—”

“No, I’ll come. That sounds like a lotta fun.”

Wolfgram smiled. “It will be.”

52

The lights glared so brightly that she thought she was staring at the sun. When Sarah woke, she brought her hand up to block the painful light when she heard a voice. Her ears seemed to be plugged up, and the only thing coming through was a muffled barking. Turning her head away from the illumination above her, she saw equipment and an oxygen tank. A paramedic was sitting on a metal bench to the side.

“Where am I?” she whispered.

The sounds still weren’t coming through. The paramedic gave an answer, but she didn’t know what it was.

Giovanni was sitting on the other side
, and she grasped that she was in an ambulance. She had just enough strength to lift her head and see the blood on her shirt. Streams of the stuff coated her arms, dried and flaking off. She laid her head back and stared at the roof of the ambulance.

The lights shifted to darkness and then the fluorescence of the emergency room. Someone hovered around her
—a nurse, she thought. The woman was asking questions, but Sarah couldn’t hear any of them. And then she wasn’t in the emergency room anymore.

She was back in the room with the screaming woman. Two children trembling before her. The man was cutting up the woman’s face. But the woman was covered in so much blood
, Sarah couldn’t see her wounds.

Then
the woman stopped screaming, stopped moving or breathing. The man still didn’t stop stabbing her, not for a long while. But when he was done, he stood over the body, breathless, with sweat dripping down his face.

“Take off yer masks,” he drawled.

The children did as they were told—two small boys with a sharp terror in their eyes.

Sarah snapped awake again. The white of the hospital room flooded her consciousness. She was in
a room alone, a soft beeping coming from the machine that was hooked up to her arm and fingers.

Blinking a few times, she cleared her vision and tried to sit up but was too weak
, no strength left in her.

Uncertain how long she lay there, it wasn’t until Giovanni came in that she knew some time had passed. He pulled up a chair and sat next to her.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like I fell off a building. How long have I been at the hospital?”

Giovanni hesitated. “Two days.”

“Two days? I was just brought
in the ER.”

“You were brought to the ER on a Tuesday. Today’s Thursday.”

She shook her head. “That’s… not possible.”

“Do you remember what happened?”

“I was down in the basement, and I touched the doorknob… and then I blacked out.”

He nodded. “That’s where we found you. You were on the floor, convulsing. We thought you’d been attacked.” He glanced out to the hallway and then back. “You were in and out of consciousness, but you’re fine. The doctors couldn’t actually find anything wrong with you. They think maybe you had a seizure
, but they’re not sure.”

“It wasn’t a seizure,” she whispered.

Giovanni leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his fingers interlacing. “You won’t believe what we found in the basement.”

“A wall of masks. But they’re not masks. They’re faces that he’s turned into masks.”

“How did… Yeah. Yeah, forensics confirmed that saliva was found inside the faces of the victims. He was wearing them.”

“I saw him, Giovanni. I saw him as a child. He wasn’t born this way
, he was made this way.”

“How?”

She swallowed. “His father. Or who I think was his father. He would teach him and another boy. He would put masks on them and make them watch while he tortured women to death. But the other boy, he looked familiar, too. I think it was… Nathan Archer. Giovanni, I think they were brothers.”

He shook his head. “No way. We ran his DNA from the saliva through FDDU. His name’s Daniel Wolfgram. He grew up in
Los Angeles and Cleveland. Nathan Archer grew up here.”

“They were separated at some point. But they were together when they were young. I know it. I’m right about this, Giovanni. They were brothers.”

He was silent a moment and then took out his phone and dialed a number. “Arnold, we need units over at Nathan Archer’s house. I think he’s related to Wolfgram. The mother might be hiding him… I know… I know, it’s a hunch, but it’s a good one. Okay… okay.” He hung up and said, “If you’re wrong about this—”

“I’m not.”

“I know you believe that. But if you are, we’re wasting time. Time that might let him slip out of the state or even the country.”

She shook her head, fatigue overtaking her in a way that made her nearly fall asleep. “I’m not wrong.” And then the fatigue washed over her, and she was asleep before Giovanni could respond.