Mutant (13 page)

“Oh, my God, he’s coming,” she squeaked into the phone.

“Do you have a weapon?” demanded the officer.

“No!”

“Where are you hiding?”

“In a part of the barn. The door’s hooked, but he’ll easily break in and see me, and there’s no other exit.” She pressed herself against the wall at enough of an angle to keep him in view as he got closer.

“Does he already know you’re there?”

“He suspects it. I can’t talk anymore, or he’ll hear.”

“One more question. Does the door open out or in?”

“Out.”

“Then listen to me, honey! Look for something heavy—a tool, a bar, even a length of wood. When you have it, get against the wall on the hinge side of the door, and be ready for a swing at him with whatever you’ve got, but not until you can see his head the instant he pokes it in for a look around—”

Sullivan snapped the phone closed, deposited it with her purse on the ground, and grabbed a pickax. She’d no sooner moved into position than the door rattled heavily as he tested the lock. There followed a flurry of thuds from his kicking at it with his boot, and the wall behind her shook so forcefully she had to brace against it with her feet not to be thrown forward.

He’ll see me and shoot before I can clobber him, she kept thinking, her panic mounting with every blow. Or if I do manage to get him, the other one will surely kill me.

With a splintering sound one of the boards near the hook buckled inward. After a few more hits it gave way entirely, and a hand protruded through the opening. As it groped about, the slowly exploring fingers moved ever nearer to the hook in its attaching eyelet. Tightening her grip on the pickax while holding it horizontal, she took a batter’s stance and swung as hard as she could. She struck a bit off center, but the point of the curved steel easily penetrated the flesh, plied through the bones, and buried itself in the wood underneath. The fingers instantly splayed open, and a screech of agony exploded from the other side of the barrier. While she watched, the impaled appendage curled and writhed around the metal shaft like a dying spider.

Knowing he could still use the gun with his free hand, she wasted no time flipping up the restraining hook and shoving hard on the door. His screaming trebled as the wind caught the broad surface and pushed it away from her, dragging him with it. In the foot of clearance between its lower edge and the ground she could see his feet slipping in the dirt as he strained to keep it from swinging out farther. He ultimately lost the struggle, unable to overpower the force of such a giant sail for long. It began to move faster on its hinges, and he backpedaled furiously in order to keep upright, but didn’t go quickly enough. He ended up dangling on his pinioned limb and being pulled until he slammed against the barn wall. Roaring with pain, he dropped the gun at his feet, reached around, and flapped with his free hand trying to grasp the pickax.

She stepped forward. Ignoring his howls and sobs, she scooped up the weapon and scanned the field for his partner. She saw him racing toward her, but he was still a hundred yards away. Pivoting to her right she sprinted for the far corner of the barn. She heard what sounded like a wasp zing by her ear while rounding the turn.

“Shit!” she yelled, accelerating in the direction of the house and the highway beyond, the wind buffeting her as she ran. Her breathing reduced to jagged gasps and her chest burning from lack of air, she knew she’d never outlast her pursuer over a long distance.

Desperate plans raced through her head. The house she estimated to be sixty yards away. She could take cover on its far side and keep him at bay with the gun until the police came, she told herself. But eyeing the unfamiliar object in her hand, she wasn’t even sure she could fire it. There were various small buttons on the handle, one of them probably a safety lock, and she’d no time to figure out which of them did what.

Perhaps she could make it to the road and flag a passing car. It hadn’t seemed that far on her previous visit. She threw a quick look over her shoulder and saw no sign of him yet. Maybe he’d stopped to help his friend instead of coming after her. She felt a tiny swell of hope.

Then she remembered Hacket and his shotgun. Would he be waiting for her up ahead at the house? In a flash she slowed her pace, warily peering at the curtained windows again. She saw no sign of him behind the silvery webs of lace, but figured that’s where he’d be lurking. Get to the base of the walls, where he won’t have a clear shot! her instincts screamed, and she poured on the speed, expecting a bullet to tear through her at any second. But as she drove hard with her legs, the distance between her and the front of the place seemed to elongate, as if she were sprinting in a dream. She threw a quick glance behind, to see if death would come from there. Still no one. She nevertheless started to zigzag, hoping to spoil both their aims and every stride of the way she kept straining to hear the first hint of a siren. Nothing sounded above the wind but her own breathing.

It must be only a few minutes since I made the call, she kept trying to reassure herself, but it felt like an eternity. She cursed herself now for not remembering the exact address. What if the name Hacket’s farm wasn’t enough to let the police find her? They couldn’t trace her cellular. They might not be on their way at all.

Hot bile surged to the roof of her mouth as the possibility slammed home and dashed whatever feeble hopes she’d had of escaping. Passing below the first of several ground-floor windows, she started to choke on the sour liquid, until the force of coughing made her stumble, and she nearly lost her footing. Once more she glanced behind her, and this time saw her pursuer fly into view from behind the corner of the barn. Flashes of light spit out chest high in the darkness between them, and the air about her head buzzed like an entire swarm of angry hornets.

Terror shredded whatever logic she still possessed. She saw her nearest cover—the open door of the main entrance a few yards to her left. Operating on raw instinct, she veered toward it and threw herself into the ominous dark hallway. She barely noticed the pain of abrading her knees and arms as she landed, having no thought other than to escape the man shooting her. Struggling to her feet, she ran blindly through the darkness, only to trip on a staircase and sprawl forward again, her breath exploding out of her lungs in a loud cry. In an instant she once more regained her feet and tore up the steps. At the top of the landing she ran through the nearest door she could find, closed it after her, and listened.

She heard his footfalls as he entered the house.

She frantically cast her eyes around the moonlit room, looking for a place to hide, and saw Hacket sitting in a large sofa chair staring at her.

She stifled a scream, and was about to bolt back out in the corridor before he could grab her, when she saw how still he was.

Catching her breath, she tiptoed forward, not taking her eyes off him. His arms dangled by his sides, and in the closed air the sour odor of urine tinged with the slightly sweet stench of excrement cloyed in the back of her throat until it was all she could do not to gag. She brought herself to reach into the folds of skin under his collar and feel for a pulse, but at her touch his head lolled forward onto her hand like a rag doll’s, a sickening crepitus like a bag of shaken bones coming from his neck.

The thudding of her pursuer racing up the staircase catapulted her out of shock and sent her diving down behind the oversize chair in which Hacket’s body lay. As she crouched in its shadow listening to the gunman approach the room, she thought she also heard, faint like a wheeze on the wind, a distant siren. A second later the door flew open and he entered.

She couldn’t see him from where she hid, but the absence of creaking floorboards told her he stood completely still. Clutching the gun, she listened to his heavy breathing and attempted to silence her own. Surely he’ll hear the approaching police, she thought, and just leave.

But he didn’t budge.

Please go, she prayed silently.

Still no reaction.

Christ, he must know the cops are coming. Why doesn’t he run?

Abruptly he strode past the chair and over to the window. He stood looking through it with his back to her, his pistol in his right hand.

Oh, God, she thought, her eyes frozen on his silhouette against the dimness outside. She’d no idea if she lay in a dark enough shadow that he wouldn’t see her when he turned around. At the very least she’d have to hide her face without him hearing her movements. With him standing not ten feet in front of her, the slightest rustle of her clothing would be enough to catch his attention. She decided instead to try and wound him.

Holding her breath, she slowly raised the gun, pointed the muzzle at the middle of his upper back, then moved it a half foot to the right, aiming at his shoulder. Exhaling softly, she squeezed the trigger.

It didn’t move.

She nearly cried out in despair, but kept her nerve enough to slide her thumb around feeling for some of the buttons she’d seen on the side of the handle. Locating one that felt promising, she pressed it.

Nothing.

She squeezed the trigger again.

It remained locked in place.

Another attempt to find the release proved just as fruitless. Terrified that he was about to turn and see her, she noiselessly put the gun down beside her, then stealthily lowered her head until she could cradle it in her arms against the floor.

She waited, not risking even a peek at him, hearing nothing but the wind outside and the ever louder sirens. If you must kill me, she began to pray, make it a clean shot to my head.

Chapter 9

Steele woke to the sounds of many sirens racing through the night and cutting out somewhere not too far away. When the last of them died, he lay listening to the roar of surf rolling onto rocks thirty feet below the balcony to the bedroom and the sibilant rustle of wind rustling through the palms. Occasionally the gusts would start the stiff long leaves waving up and down, sending them rattling across the open slats of the windows the way fingers play a washboard. With all the racket, it took him a few seconds to hear Sandra Arness crying softly at his side.

He turned toward her and saw in the moonlight the elegant shape of her naked back, hips, and legs that had so inflamed him the night before. Except now she trembled before his gaze, arousing only his sadness for her instead of desire.

Their lovemaking had been a disaster. They started fiercely enough, hungrily clinging to each other as he explored her body with his hands and mouth the way a man long marooned might attack the first food offered him. She responded in kind, urging him to caress her everywhere and helping him to find her special spots, rushing him from one to the other. But despite her willingness, she made no moans of pleasure, and her cries that he touch her here and there soon took on a desperate quality, as if nothing he tried worked. When he did enter her, he found her dry. He offered to withdraw for fear of hurting her, but she became even more frenzied to have him continue, straining frantically against him while uttering pleas that he pump her harder, until Steele’s own desire flagged along with his stamina. Out of shape, upset by his inability to bring her to climax, and embarrassed by his own libido slipping away, he simply petered out on her.

“Do you want me to leave?” he’d asked, miserable to the core about his pathetic performance.

“No! Don’t go,” she’d insisted, pulling him to her.

“Perhaps we can try later?”

She hadn’t replied—just lay there in his arms staring into the darkness.

He’d stroked her hair and her back until she fell asleep and rolled away from him. At the time he noticed in the bursts of moonlight between passing clouds that her bedroom looked as unlived in as the rest of her house— everything neat, nothing lying around, no books, records, or magazines to suggest a nest where she relaxed and let herself go. A lack of personal photographs added to the sterility of the place, though a series of unfaded rectangles on the walls made him wonder if she’d once hung something there that she no longer wanted to look at. The clinician in him suspected that the meticulously ordered setting probably reflected how she organized the rest of her life, overly structured, rigidly controlled, and stripped of any reminders from her past—in effect the same strategy he’d used—to keep the terrible desperation he’d witnessed tonight at bay. But the woman’s as brittle as china, and sex had breached those carefully constructed defenses, unleashing God knows what misery, he diagnosed just before he fell asleep, regretting that he ever got involved.

The sight of her crying now only reinforced his previous clinical assessment of her. He attempted to keep the cold stare of his medical eye from continuing to rove through her pain, classifying and slotting her while they lay naked together, but he might as well have tried to stop breathing. A trained physician’s mind can never truly let a possible pathology drop without giving it a thorough going-over first, even when an intimate is concerned. So the mental process went on despite his finding it obscene, until he began to look on her as a woman with an agitated state of mind who needed professional help, not the potential lover he’d gone to bed with. Feeling an irrevocable chasm open between them, he asked as gently as he could, “Sandra, what can I do?”

“Nothing,” she whispered, keeping her back to him. “Nobody can do anything for me.”

“Why? Tell me what’s the matter. Surely you don’t think my bungled attempt at sex tonight is any reflection on you—?”

“Richard, I’m not that superficial,” she rebuked. “I’m talking about grief. When I met you, and heard you describe your struggle with it, and then saw that you wanted me, I thought maybe I could escape my own hell, just for a while, a night even. Obviously I can’t. I don’t think I ever will.”

“Grief? I thought you said you were divorced. Your husband’s dead?” His questioning began feeling to him like taking a patient’s history.

She didn’t answer immediately. “No. I lost a child,” she finally said, her voice barely above a whisper. “My beautiful little Tommy, over a year and a half ago. He’s the boy killed by that bird flu you’ve been discussing all day.”

Steele felt the back of his mouth go dry.

“He’d barely turned three,” she continued. “Every minute since has been an agony, everything I do meaningless. My only peace of mind lies in those few seconds when I first awake and haven’t yet remembered that he’s dead. I suspect I’m one of those people for whom all that will never change—who will never ‘get over it.’ I know what they’re like. I’ve seen them in my practice. We’re the living dead.”

He floundered around for something to say, but she continued to talk.

“I went to this conference for the same reason a murder victim’s loved ones attend the killer’s execution. I thought it would help me find closure, my seeing the experts tell me why my son died, watching them demonstrate how they’d at least conquered his killer, exerted the dominion of my profession over that filthy disease!” Her tone suddenly became bitter and her shoulders shook with a new wave of crying. “It didn’t help any,” she sobbed. “Nothing can change how dreadfully I miss him. Nothing at all.”

Steele couldn’t utter a sound. A lifetime of consoling the living about the dead had taught him there were no words to comfort a parent over the loss of a child, though he’d always struggled to find them. “I’m so sorry, Sandra,” he started to whisper, moving closer and reaching around to hold her to him. At once she stopped being a psychological entity to him and became a fellow parent, one who’d suffered an agony he prayed he would never have to face. “So very, very sorry,” he repeated. Even with the heat, she felt cold as ice.

When he next awoke, she’d left the bed. “Sandra?” he called out.

No answer.

He glanced at the luminous dial on his watch. It read 2:10. He’d been asleep for barely an hour. “Sandra?” he said again, louder this time, as he got out of bed. Then he saw her, standing naked on the low stone wall running around the edge of her balcony. “Sandra!” he screamed, and raced for the sliding glass door that separated them. She remained with her back to him, her legs slightly spread, just as she’d stood when he’d first seen her, but now her long black hair, no longer braided, streamed out behind her.

Throwing open the panel, he felt the full fury of the wind and heard an avalanche of water thud onto the coral beach below. “Sandra, for God’s sake!” he pleaded as he started across the thirty feet separating them.

Her skin bathed in moonlight, she seemed white as marble and just as impenetrable. Whether she heard his approach above the noise of the waves, he never knew. Before he could grab her, she flexed her knees, arched into the air, and disappeared over the edge in a perfect dive.

“You were damn lucky he didn’t spot you hiding behind that big easy chair,” said the detective in charge.

“I know,” replied Kathleen Sullivan, her voice barely audible.

The cop continued to scowl down at her, holding open the rear door of the patrol car in which she sat and looking not at all happy with the explanation she’d just given about why she’d been there in the first place.

Unable to think of anything useful to add, she pressed herself into the interior of the vehicle and tried to stop shaking. The difference between the gunman seeing her and what ultimately happened had been a passing cloud obscuring the moonlight during the seconds he had turned to run from the room. Finally she asked, “What were they doing here, and why did they kill Mr. Hacket?”

He sighed heavily. “It looks like you walked in on a particularly vicious home invasion. They were probably trying to rob him—people get killed for less than a hundred bucks these days—and old folks living alone are a prime target. Everybody around here knew him, including us. Rumor had it he’d come into some money lately, after he gave up farming well over a year ago and bought a snazzy new truck. Some of the local gossip went as far as to suggest he kept a small fortune hidden in this old place. I don’t buy
that
story—it pretty much looks like he lived from hand to mouth, from what we can see inside. But I guess tales of a secret stash were enough to attract his killers. They certainly took him by surprise. He never even got to that shotgun of his—it stood cocked and ready in the front hallway. They were probably trying to frighten a nonexistent bundle out of him when you showed up at the party. So they broke his neck and came after you, to leave no witnesses.”

She shuddered, remembering the ghostly head she saw snapped to one side in the window. “But they had silencers,” she said, still trying to rein in her trembling. “If they had silencers, why didn’t they shoot him?” In her state of shock she initially had no idea why that particular incongruity should matter to her. Except as a scientist, if something didn’t make sense, however trivial, she reflexively saw it as a void that needed filling.

“Who knows?” replied the detective with an impatient wave of his hand. “Maybe the creeps liked wringing necks.” He turned to watch a large black van marked HPD pull into the yard.

His callous remark made her shiver. “Officer, let me explain something to you,” she said, getting his attention again. “I’m a woman in a profession where my whole life is predicated on a simple notion that if I find the
reason
things happen, I can control what happens. A person like me gets particularly rattled when the random luck of a passing cloud determines whether I live or die. So my way of coping with an event like this is to understand the how and why of it. Maybe then I can kid myself into thinking I could spot it coming, if there ever is a next time. Otherwise I’m liable to end up scared that I’ll get jumped for no reason and with no warning every time I go out. So for my sake, please, humor me.”

By the vehicle’s interior light she saw his face squinch into a puzzled frown as he studied her. “I don’t really know why they didn’t shoot him,” he said after a few seconds, his voice all at once hesitant. “It looks like they intended to torch the place afterwards—we found some cans of gasoline in one of the front rooms. Maybe they didn’t want a bullet in his body, to try and make it look accidental. But it would never have worked. A coroner might attribute a broken neck to the guy falling a couple of stories as a burning house collapsed on him—charred remains wouldn’t tell him much else— but no way could the arson squad miss a fire set with something as crude as gasoline.” He straightened up and arched his back, stretching it with a grimace. “Hell, doped-up hotheads who kill these days—they often don’t make sense. One thing you can be sure of,” he added, giving her a dour smile while the troubled expression in his eyes deepened, “we’ll be going after these two in a big way, whoever they are or wherever they’re from. In paradise we don’t take kindly to anyone importing this league of viciousness.”

Parked haphazardly around them sat a half dozen police cars, their overhead lights making the night pulse red, white, and blue. He looked up as a second wave of vehicles, station wagons and RVs with media logos on their doors, began pulling into the yard. “You understand, you’re not to talk about this case, even though the media are going to have a field day about you being here,” he ordered, glowering at these latest arrivals.

She nodded.

A young officer ran up to them from the direction of the barn. “Here’s her phone and purse, sir,” he said. “We found it just where she said it would be, full of weeds. And the door there is exactly the way she described as well, broken boards and all. There’s not a sign of the two killers though, but we traced bloodstains to the field in back. We’ve got lots to sample for DNA of the one she got in the hand, and the pickax should have the prints of the other guy who likely helped pull it out.”

The chief detective’s frown grew as he received the articles. “Have you put out an APB?”

“Already done, sir!” said the younger man. He stooped down to peer in the door and said, “Ma’am, my family and I, we always watch your program. I’m so glad you’re all right.”

She looked up at his youthful face and thought he didn’t look much older than the boyfriends Lisa brought around these days. Wondering how long it would take to mold that eager expression into the hardened mask caked with fatigue and cynicism of his superior, she replied, “Thank you, Officer.” When he left, she all at once wanted nothing more than to hear the sound of her daughter’s voice.

“Could I have my things, please?” she asked the older detective. “Then I’d like to go. I’ve got to get my samples to the genetics lab at the university, and I’m due to fly home to New York at noon. If you want, I’ll make myself available for any additional dispositions you’ll need through the NYPD.”

He hesitated, then handed her purse to her. “You know, I watch your program, too, Dr. Sullivan.” His voice was all at once gentle and, to her astonishment, his weathered face shedded its weariness as he broke into a smile. “My oldest daughter’s a real fan, and is in the biology undergraduate program here in Honolulu. She’d be thrilled if I could give her your autograph.”

Sullivan scrawled her name on the back of an evidence envelope, marveling at how misleading the cop’s gruff exterior had been. She’d barely finished when the radio in the front seat crackled, “All cars in the Kailua vicinity. We have a 911 call by a man reporting a suicide at 205 Kaliki Road. Please respond.”

“Jesus Christ, that’s just a few minutes from here,” muttered the detective, reaching to grab the microphone from under the dashboard. “Must be the full moon,” he said, clicking the TALK button to take the call.