Comes a Horseman (29 page)

“I'm sorry?”

“Someone . . . some
thing
has”—he swiveled his head back and forth, looking for a word—
“haunted
this place since that night. A shadow, always watching me from dark corners. It vandalizes the rooms. Smell that lovely odor, just under the jasmine?”

Her nose had grown used to the smell she had sensed when she first entered the room. She sniffed, caught an unpleasant hint of it. She nodded.

“Rotten eggs, thrown on the floor and in my desk drawers. I think it's urinating on the carpets, or at least oozing a stench.” He paused, thinking, looking as weary as a beaten dog. “This thing, it howls and laughs. At night, it screams in my bedroom, but when I turn on the light, nothing is there. Maria, my housekeeper, couldn't take it anymore; she left a week ago.”

“What about the police?” Alicia asked, thinking she knew the answer.

“They suggested setting up a video camera. They wanted proof I'm not mad.”

“Did you?”

“The
thing
keeps stealing the tapes. Whether it's demonic or human, Father Randall brought it here.”

“Demonic?”

He turned disheartened eyes to her, unwilling to go there with an obvious unbeliever.

She looked down at her notes, made a few more.

“Father, in your books do you identify endears by name?”

“They'd have my head if I did, most of them. They want their privacy, and I promise to honor that.”

“No way at all to identify them?”

“I change their doctors' names, the names of hospitals, employers, street names—anything that can give them away. The average endear, especially one who's gone to hell, is more cautious than a homosexual these days. There's no one standing up for them, telling the public that having a supernatural experience does not make you a freak. And going to hell? Well, that does tend to cast aspersions on one's reputation.”

“But they talk to you.”

“It helps that I wear a collar. And as I said, I get to them quickly, before they've fortified their defenses.”

“How do you become aware of a possible NDE?”

“I give lectures at hospitals, speak frequently on radio programs and at conventions for people who appreciate this kind of thing.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Supernatural, paranormal. I fit right in with the UFO and poltergeist crowds. Point is, I get the word out. A lot of people know what I do and how to contact me. Even skeptical physicians . . . when they come face-to-face with a resuscitated patient screaming about fire burning their flesh and creatures snapping at them, they suddenly believe or have enough questions that they pick up the phone and call me.”

“You drop everything and go?”

“Until recently, NDEs were fairly rare. Now that we have more ways of reviving people whose hearts have stopped, I'm getting more calls. Now I ‘drop everything and go' only when the experience seems particularly vivid.”

“So you have the names, addresses, details of, what, hundreds of hellish endears?”

“Thousands . . . or, I used to.”

“They were in your files, all the information about these endears?” This was it, the heart of the matter.

“I kept the door locked.” He pointed over his shoulder at a heavy dead bolt on the file room door. “They must have picked it.”

She scribbled a note about that. Then she flipped back a few pages, found the sheet she wanted, and ripped it out. She held it out to him.

“Do you recognize any of these names?”

He squinted at the list, mouthing each name, shaking his head. Then his eyebrows shot up.

“William Bell,” he said. “I interviewed him. Initially, he interested me because he was young, twenty if I remember. This was three, four years ago. He was living in Utah.”

“Moab,” Alicia confirmed. Bell's bio placed him in Moab his entire life.

“He had been jet-skiing, hotdogging it, cut a turn too sharply and flew off. Hit his head on the handlebar and went under. Friends of his pulled him out, gave him CPR. Resuscitated him after twelve minutes, give or take. Woke up screaming for help, clawing at the air. Said, ‘They got me! Oh God, make them let me go! Please!' Something like that. One of the EMTs who responded to the call knew of my work and contacted me.”

“You said you were
initially
interested in him because of his age. Was there something else later?”

“In about 10 percent of the cases I investigate, instead of the NDE making the endear resolve to get to heaven, it just depresses them,” he said. “They go into what we used to call a blue funk. Nothing can get them out of it, and they go through life in dead-end jobs and dead-end relationships, as if they're determined to start their sentence in hell early. He was like that.”

“No hope?”

“People like William believe either they're fated to hell and they just happen to find out before their time, or getting from hell to heaven seems too overwhelming, because it's too much work or they aren't privy to some secret pass phrase that grants entrée into God's kingdom. A shame, really.”

He stared at the list.

“Cynthia Loeb . . . maybe . . .” He pushed the paper toward her. “Ah, my memory's not what it used to be. And a lot of names go onto my Incident Report and right into the files without much thought, especially if nothing about the event stands out. I'm sorry.”

She surveyed the list. Everyone on it had been brutally murdered, decapitated. Why? Father McAfee's information was enough to convince her that all the victims were endears, probably believing they had visited hell. She thought it was all a load of bull, but the important thing was that someone believed it. McAfee did and recorded their names. She felt sure the killer did as well, and had used McAfee's records to identify targets.

Conducting a major investigation was like organizing a room: it got messier before it got cleaner. Now that she understood what linked the victims, even more puzzling questions assailed her: Why would someone want to murder people who claimed to have seen hell during a near-death experience? How did the Vatican—or at least this Fr. Adalberto Randall—fit into the plot? Why would they have wanted Father McAfee's files enough to have stolen them, if they did? To assist a killer? Why, why, why? All she could do was continue to fish.

“Father, do you have any idea why someone would want an endear dead, specifically
because
he is an endear?”

“Dead? No, I . . . All of these people—” He pointed at the sheet in her hand. “Murdered? But my heavens . . .
why
?” His eyes roamed as thoughts swirled behind them. “My files. But there are so many!”

He had said there were thousands, but for the first time (it was something about the way he said “so many”), the implications of that struck her. Thousands. Could the five victims they knew about be the first of thousands? It was incomprehensible. But the sudden frequency of the killings hinted at ambition. Brady had said so.

Father McAfee said dourly, “Ms. Wagner, I must ask: were any of the victims children?”

“No, but . . . have children had near-death experiences?”

“Oh, yes, many.”

“Where they've gone to
hell
?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Whether children can go to hell is an eternal debate among Christians. My studies have convinced me that they can and do. Which opens up new debates. Calvinists will say it proves the doctrine of election, that God chose before time whom He will save. Catholics believe christening—that is, baptism—saves children from hell until they are old enough to choose for themselves to embrace or reject Christ's love. However, I have interviewed baptized children who had vivid and corroborative visions of hell while clinically dead. It is hard to understand how a loving God could relegate little ones to eternal torment.”

She nodded solemnly. “What do you believe?”

He smiled. “That God is indeed loving, and His ways are higher than our ways.”

She hesitated, then said quietly, “There were children in your files.”

“Yes. A few dozen, at least.”

She had an instant vision of the CSD's lasers flittering over the decapitated head of a child. Abruptly, she stood up, shaking her head to dislodge the thought. “Father, I . . .”

She felt the need to do something, but she didn't know what. She wanted to get her thoughts into her computer where she could organize them, shuffle them around, attempt to make connections that were too tenuous to make mentally, with a million facts and possibilities and images colliding into one another. She wanted to talk to Brady. A rekindled sense of urgency was pushing at her. She needed answers, needed them now.

Why was someone killing endears? Were a thousand names on his list?

Father McAfee stood, put a hand on her arm. “Agent Wagner, would you like some tea? You look as startled as I feel.”

“No, thank you. I need to gather my thoughts. You've been extremely helpful.”

She started for the door and saw that it was cracked open again. In a flash, she had her pistol out of its holster. She dropped the notepad and pen into a blazer pocket.

“I don't think—,” Father McAfee began.

She silenced him with a raised palm. She used her foot to pull open the door. The hallway beyond was dark. She pressed herself against the jamb and squinted into the hall in one direction. Too dark to see anything. An ancient photograph of smiling priests in an ornate frame hung on the wall opposite the door. If other frames marched down the hall, she could not see them. She rolled around the doorjamb and stepped into the hall, her gun held out in both hands. She could almost feel the depth of the blackness where the hall opened up into the library, the way spelunkers know they've reached a cavern, even in utter lightlessness.

“FBI!” she yelled. “Step into the light! Now!”

She had not seen or heard anything, but the ruse was worth a try.

She snapped a glance over her shoulder. The corridor behind her was like black cotton.

She sidestepped back into the office and shut the door. She pressed her ear to the crack, held her breath. After twenty seconds, she turned to Father McAfee.

He whispered, “Did you see . . . ?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. Father, would you like me to stay? I could search the rectory and the church, sleep in your housekeeper's room . . . tonight, at least.”

“Thank you, but your visit has reminded me that there are worse things than scary shadows and sounds. There are things out there that bite and kill.”

“Whatever is tormenting you may have those things in mind.”

“God will protect me.”

Yeah, He will,
she wanted to say,
like He protected Cynthia Loeb and Daniel Fears and William Bell . . .

Instead, she said, “I'll find my way out.”

She opened the door and jumped when he said, “Wait!”

He pulled a book off a shelf and handed it to her.
Hell to Pay
by Duncan McAfee.

She nodded her thanks. “Take care, Father,” she said and slipped into the darkness.

40

B
rady inserted
Scooby-Doo's Alien Invasion
into the DVD player. He heard the microwave ding in the kitchen. A minute later, Zach came in, dressed in pajamas and holding a big bowl of popcorn.

“Double butter,” he announced, displaying the bowl like a trophy.

“Bring it on,” Brady said. He dropped onto the sofa and patted the cushion beside him.

Zach ran over and hurled his rump at the spot. Popcorn flew everywhere.

Brady caught a sharp correction before it left his mouth. He was determined to give Zach the fun time he had promised. He wondered if his son was testing him, seeing if he'd resort to his typical grumpiness at the slightest provocation. As much as the boy wanted back the fun-loving dad he'd had before Karen died, Brady understood it had to be genuine to count. He laughed and picked popcorn off his lap. “Remind me not to ask for a drink,” he said.

“Oh, I forgot,” Zach said, plopping the bowl in Brady's lap and hopping up. “Don't start it without me.” He darted toward the kitchen.

Brady's laughter felt good. He was here with his son, making his son happy. That was something. He held a mental hatch cover closed over the dark thing that could too easily unfurl and suffocate any joy he was feeling. He had loosed it many times, turning potentially joyous moments into pity parties. Any time it was easy to envision Karen's presence, when it was clear her being there would make it better, more lively, the specter of her absence wanted to invade Brady's consciousness. For Zach's sake, he'd learned to hold it back. It was a skill he hated having to learn, but it was that or lose Zach one way or another.

Zach yelled something from the kitchen.

“What?” called Brady.

“Pepsi, Sprite, or root beer?”

“Mountain Dew.”

“No Mountain Dew. Pepsi, Sprite, or root beer.”

“Dr Pepper.”

Zach returned with two cans. “Here's your Dr Pepper,” he said, handing Brady a Pepsi.

“Oh, thank you; my favorite.”

Zach opened a Sprite for himself, set it on the coffee table, and took the bowl of popcorn from Brady. “On with the show!” he commanded.

Brady raised the remote, and the menu screen changed to an FBI piracy warning.

Zach leaned against his arm, nodded at the screen. “Do you do that?” he asked. A handful of popcorn disappeared into his mouth.

“No, someone else goes after those evil movie copiers. They're way too scary for me.” He grabbed his own handful of popcorn.

“I bet they get all kinds of free movies, those guys who go after them.”

“Probably, but then they have to arrest themselves.”

Coco trotted in, his tags jangling merrily. Standing on the area rug in front of the TV, he turned his buggy-eyed, lolling-tongued face to Brady and Zach, hoping for a kernel or two. Zach tossed a few over the table to him. The dog's bushy tail vibrated as he licked them up. When he realized nothing more was forthcoming, he turned in a circle and lay down.