The Darkness Gathers (34 page)

Jacob looked uneasily at Lydia and Jeffrey, then back at Sasa. Lydia could hear the blood rushing in her ears as her eyes locked with Tatiana’s.

“We can discuss it,” he said quietly.

“We
are
discussing it,” Sasa said with a laugh.

Tatiana had managed to withdraw the weapon from the holster and was raising it to Sasa’s head. The heavy Glock shook in her grasp as she wrapped both her hands around the grip. Lydia was struck by what a bizarre image it was: Tatiana’s tiny arms and her pretty face seemed so incongruous with the murderous intent in her eyes and the gun in her hand. If she’d been in any position to do so, Lydia would have wrested the gun from Tatiana’s hand and shot Sasa herself. With everything she’d been through, Tatiana definitely didn’t need to be the one to kill her mother’s boyfriend. But she seemed more than prepared to do it. And she looked to be their only hope. Lydia watched as Tatiana switched off the safety on the side of the gun like a pro.

Tatiana never moved her eyes from Lydia’s, as if seeking strength and approval there. Lydia nodded slightly; as she did, Sasa dropped his eyes to her. Time crystallized into milliseconds as Sasa followed the path of Lydia’s gaze. A look of surprise crossed his face, and he spun quickly around, forgetting Jenna and allowing her to fall to the floor. She hit the ground hard, gasping, her hands to her throat, and pushed herself away with her legs. Sasa swung his weapon toward Tatiana but seemed to hesitate when he saw her there.

It was in that moment of hesitation that Tatiana emptied the gun into Sasa’s chest and head. The room exploded in gunfire as the mirror that hung over the fireplace shattered and fell to the floor, a lamp exploded into a million pieces, and stuffing burst from the couch and chairs. Jeffrey crawled toward Lydia in an effort to shield her. Jacob lay on the floor, hands over his head. Jeffrey watched as Sasa fell to the floor, his chest open and dark with blood, his face a mass of torn flesh. Jeffrey dove for the semiautomatic weapon that went sailing from Sasa’s hand, catching it before it hit the floor. There was a moment of silence, everyone too afraid to move.

Then Tatiana dropped her hands, which still held the gun, her mouth slack and her eyes glassy. She burst into tears, releasing heartbreaking sobs. “Mom,” she called, her voice sounding so young and desperate.

Three FBI agents from outside burst in through the front door, cradling machine guns as Tatiana sank to the floor. Jenna rushed to her daughter, removed the gun from her hands, and slid it across the floor. Then she took Tatiana into her arms. Lydia could see them both shaking from across the room.

“Nice work, guys,” Jacob said sarcastically to the men as they entered the room too late. Jacob stood and brushed himself off. The agents took off their ski masks and stared at Sasa’s dead body. “Make yourselves useful and get rid of that,” he said, trying to sound cool and in control, but the quaver in his voice told the tale.

“Jesus,” Jeffrey said as he and Jacob knelt next to Bentley and Negron, pointlessly checking for a pulse on both of them.

“They were the good guys,” said Jacob, as if it needed clarifying. And maybe it did.

The other FBI agents lifted Sasa’s body and carried it out of the room. He wore an expression of stunned surprise, the smug grin permanently removed from his face, his expensive suit soaked in blood. Tatiana’s sobs filled the room as Jenna rocked her like an infant. Lydia looked around at the mess, amazed at how the moment she had opened the envelope in her office, she had set a sequence of events into play that had led them all to this. Like a magnet, the darkness had gathered them all together, for different reasons and to different ends, but together nonetheless.

One down, two to go, thought Lydia, walking over to the girl to tell her she had done the right thing. She wanted to tell Tatiana that they were all okay and that everything was going to be all right. Even though she wasn’t sure that was the truth.

chapter thirty-four

I
t had grown dark in the quiet suburban neighborhood. He’d sat there for hours and hadn’t seen one person on the street, not one car go by. He’d dozed for a few minutes here and there when the sugar rush had passed, but mostly he’d just watched as one by one the lights in the home of David and Eleanor Strong had gone off. He hadn’t seen any movement in the house, no shadows in the windows. But he hadn’t wanted to risk walking onto their property and trying to peer inside. He knew enough about these neighborhoods to know that even when you thought people were all snug and sound asleep in their beds, there was always some insomniac watching out the window, waiting for a reason to wake everybody else in the neighborhood. Misery loves company.

He was cold, and he was getting stiff and numb, in spite of his gloves and heavy boots. He couldn’t have the engine on all this time; people notice that kind of thing these days, someone sitting in a running car for hours. So he just sat low in the backseat, behind the tinted windows, and waited.

He remembered when he’d sat in front of Marion Strong’s house, not far from here. It had been different then. He almost hadn’t known what he was doing. He was only aware of a desperate psychic hunger churning within him, a kind of edgy desire. And the knowledge that the act he was about to perpetrate would soothe the ache within him for a time. There had been so much speculation, so many books written on the how and why of killers like him. People were endlessly fascinated by what drove the madman, what made him, what made him
different
from other people. But Jed believed that it wasn’t the differences that made him fascinating, but the similarities.

He remembered with clarity the day he’d discovered his passion. He was twelve, living with his uncle Bill and aunt Mary. The year before, almost to the day, he’d watched his father murder his mother in their kitchen. Watched him slit her throat with a cleaver. She died slowly, bleeding out, the wound on her neck bubbling and hissing as she tried to draw breath. Jed had sat beside her in a kind of shock, trying to stop the bleeding by putting his hands on her wounds, one and then another, until she was silent. His father lay on the floor weeping, and Jed cried, too. For the last time.

His father was taken to prison and Jed was sent to live with his uncle Bill and aunt Mary. They were fine; it wasn’t one of those sob stories where he’d been molested, on top of everything else. They were just sort of dull blue-collar people without much imagination or emotion. They fed him, clothed him, made sure he did his homework. They treated him like he was made of blown glass, so aware of what he had experienced that they were afraid to look at him cross-eyed. He was pretty sure he had been normal before his mother died. He had been a Boy Scout, played on a Little League team. But maybe not; maybe murder was in his blood, a dominant gene inherited from his father.

He had just stepped off the school bus and was walking up his drive when his next-door neighbor invited him into her garage. “Come look at this, Jed,” she’d called. She was a pretty young mother who had a new baby. Her name was Cheryl, and she had blond hair like silk and skin like velvet. The baby slept peacefully against her chest. “Look,” she said as he followed her. And he saw in the corner of her garage, nestled under a workbench, a mottled Maine coon cat in a sheepskin bed, surrounded by suckling kittens. “Isn’t that wonderful?” she asked him with a smile. “Cool,” he’d answered with typical adolescent reticence. “Maybe Bill and Mary will let you have one.”

“Yeah. I’ll ask.”

The sight had awakened an evil within him. All the rest of the afternoon, he couldn’t put the image out of his mind. A burning agitation grew inside him; a deep ache of loneliness, anger, and fear felt like a cancer eating away at him. He went to his room and did not come out when called for dinner. After he did his homework, he tried to sleep, but he couldn’t. After tossing for hours, he left his bed in the night, taking a knife from the wood block on the kitchen counter.

He was too young then to put words to the way he felt when he walked in the open side door to his neighbor’s garage. He heard the soft mewing of the kittens and watched them, warm and soft, next to their mother. Their eyes were still mostly closed and their little bodies wriggled slowly with oblivious innocence and peace. He hated them, wanted to smash each of them on the floor like tennis balls. The mother issued a low growl. She must have sensed him there. She was a big cat. So Jed reached in quickly with one hand and grabbed her by the scruff of her neck, picked her up, and, with the other hand, slit her throat. He held the body away from him until it stopped moving. Then he put it back in its bed next to the kittens, who continued their soft mewing.

The release could only be compared to orgasm, though it wasn’t a sexual pleasure he derived. He just felt … better, like a normal boy. He felt like he had when he still lived with his parents, not angry and afraid. Not alone. And for months, he was interested again in baseball and music. Intellectually, he knew what he had done was wrong, but he couldn’t help the way he felt.

He had heard her screams before anyone the next morning, had sort of been waiting for them.

“Oh God, Rick!” she yelled, her cries carrying in the quiet, sunny suburban morning. “Who could do such a thing? What kind of monster?”

Only he really knew the answer to that question. Only he really knew what kind of monster he was. But it wasn’t that romantic. It wasn’t like he had some sick agenda like on
Profiler
or something. He’d just stumbled on something that took the pain away. He was more like an alcoholic or a drug addict than anything else.

Of course, it had escalated from there. Like any addict, he needed more and more, trying to recapture that first high. He didn’t have all this intellectual perspective when he’d killed Marion Strong. But he’d matured. He didn’t need to kill any longer to feel whole, to feel right. He had forgiven and accepted himself. He could control his impulses now … most of them. But that wasn’t going to help David and Eleanor Strong.

The neighborhood was dark now, and all the lights were out at the Strong house. He grabbed his backpack and slid out of the car. He didn’t shut the door all the way, just enough to make sure the interior lights were out. Then he moved carefully into the trees surrounding the yard.

As he rounded the corner into the backyard, a rather dim amber light over the deck came on, activated by a motion sensor. Jed stood very still, his back pressed against the white aluminum siding, but the sudden light didn’t seem to bring any reaction from inside the house. After a moment of holding his breath, he continued toward the back door. The yard was surrounded on all sides by thick, dark trees that he couldn’t identify in the night, but they provided excellent cover. The backyard could not be seen from any of the surrounding properties. He walked up three low steps onto the leaf-covered deck and easily picked the lock on the simple doorknob. People who were stupid enough to have such poor security deserved what they got.

The door led him into a small laundry room that smelled strongly of Bounce fabric softener, a scent he recognized and associated with freedom. They hadn’t used any fabric softener on the prison hospital uniforms. They had used the cheapest brand of detergent, so the uniforms never seemed clean, were always scratchy, and irritated his sensitive skin. It annoyed him just thinking about it.

The laundry room was connected to the kitchen, which was illuminated by a pink seashell night-light nestled beside a toaster oven. He slid over the green-and-white linoleum floor and sneered at the imitation Tiffany lamp that hung over the dark wood and wrought-iron table in the breakfast nook. The counter was cluttered with ribboned baskets, a hideous wooden duck napkin holder, and a bunch of other country-kitsch crap. Bad taste was another thing he found unspeakably annoying. What inspired such poor decorating decisions? he wondered as he pulled a roll of duct tape and a large sheathed hunting knife from his backpack. Jed McIntyre did not like guns. They were loud and unpredictable, not to mention lazy and sloppy. Anyone could shoot another person. It took skill, speed, and stealth to kill someone with a knife. He took off his parka and laid it next to the backpack on the floor.

The stairs were heavily carpeted, so moving silently to the second level was easier than it might have been on bare wood. He placed the duct tape around his wrist like a bracelet and the knife in the waistband of his pants. There were no more night-lights, a detail of which he was glad, because they created shadows. So he imagined himself a wraith in the darkness, one with the night, and slowly ascended to the master bedroom, which he was guessing was the first room at the top of the stairs. He could hear the softly labored breathing of sleep as he reached the top landing.

When he turned the corner into the bedroom, the digital clock glowed green at 1:33
A.M.
, casting a strange light over the two sleeping forms, one large and round, one smaller and flatter. He’d need to dispense with David Strong first, so that he could take his time with Eleanor. He unsheathed the hooked, serrated blade of the knife and moved in slowly. Keeping his breathing shallow and footsteps light, he moved toward the bed.

It was too late when he noticed what he should have noticed at the door—that only one of the forms was breathing. As his hand reached out to pull back the bedclothes, a large black form sprang like a panther, and in an instant Jed McIntyre was on his back on the floor, the wind knocked out of him, a knee on his chest, the nose of a gun to his forehead.

A cheerful Australian greeting sounded in the darkness. “Hullo, mate. Can’t be having you lurking about in the night. Can we?”

chapter thirty-five

S
he slept finally, uncomfortably, seeming to want to turn on her side and curl up the way she normally slept at home. In spite of the adrenaline coursing through his veins, the restless, helpless unease he always felt on airplanes, he felt more relaxed now that she was asleep. She looked small and tired; he reached out and touched her forehead, which was cool and dry.