The Darkness Gathers (37 page)

“Bad idea,” whispered Jeffrey.

She put it back in her pocket without a word.

“Why didn’t you tell me what you were thinking?” he asked her quietly.

“Honestly, I didn’t even put it together until I started talking.”

He frowned at her, which she felt more than saw in the darkness. “Bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit. I never hide anything from you,” she said, grabbing his arm as they kept walking.

They took the rough path to Old Croton Aqueduct Trail and walked into the woods, which were wedged between the Henry Hudson and Mosholu parkways and bisected by the Major Deegan Expressway. They could hear the whisper of cars passing on the highways beneath them.

“I’m supposed to meet him there,” she said, pointing to a large structure.

The segment of the trail they were on was part of the forty-one-mile aqueduct built in the 1830s as New York City’s first extensive water supply. It brought water from Croton Dam into the city. The large stone building they approached was a weir that once existed to maintain the flow of water and control air pressure. It was isolated and abandoned. Not even homeless people or squatters came this far inside the park at night.

“How did you get him to meet you here?”

“He would have met me anywhere I said. He’s desperate,” she said.

“How’s it supposed to go down?”

“He’s supposed to have the means for taking Jed McIntyre into custody. And once he does, then I supposedly tell him where to find Tatiana.”

Jeffrey reached into his pocket and pulled out his cellular phone, which Lydia had not heard ring. He didn’t say anything as he put the phone to his ear.

“Jeff,” said Dax, breathless on the other end. “He’s gone. I’ve lost Jed McIntyre.”

“What? How?”

“It looks like someone blew him out of here. You two are in fucking trouble. Where are you?”

“We’re at the Croton Aqueduct Trail, by the weir,” he answered, looking around him. But the line was breaking up, and he wasn’t sure whether Dax heard.

“Let’s get out of here. We’ve been set up,” Jeffrey said to her, taking the Dessert Eagle out of his waistband. “What are you carrying?”

“The Sig. What’s happening?”

“Jed McIntyre’s loose. Let’s go.”

“What?” she said, her brain not willing to accept the information.

“Where are you going, Ms. Strong? I thought you and I had a deal,” said Nathan Quinn, emerging out of the darkness like a shadow.

“This park is like a house of horrors tonight, some ghoul always creeping out of the darkness,” said Lydia, her flip comment belying that her throat was dry as sand and her legs felt weak underneath her.

“There’s no deal, Quinn,” said Jeffrey.

“There never was any deal, though, was there, Lydia?” asked Quinn. “You weren’t going to tell me where to find Tatiana. You were going to lie, then bank on the FBI getting me before I was able to have him released again.”

Lydia shrugged. “You’ll never know.” She couldn’t help but glance around her into the darkness between the trees, wondering if Jed McIntyre was lying in wait for her there. She felt more numb than terrified, the events of the evening taking on a kind of unreality.

“Let’s not rush to judgment,” said Quinn, walking toward them. He stopped when Jeffrey leveled the Desert Eagle at his head. “I wasn’t comfortable playing this game by your rules. I didn’t see how I could win. Jed McIntyre was in your custody. If I didn’t do what you wanted, all you had to do was kill him. Now, he’s in my custody. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, then I’ll unleash your nightmare, Lydia. The outcome remains the same: You get what you want—your mother’s killer behind bars—and I get my Tatiana back. Only now the means are slightly altered.”

“What’s to stop me from killing you?” asked Jeffrey.

“If you kill me, Jed McIntyre is released into the world. Maybe you’ll catch him. Or maybe he’ll catch Lydia. Is that a gamble you’re willing to take?”

“Why do you want her so badly, Nathan?” Lydia asked suddenly. “You have a million girls at your disposal. Girls you can do anything to—rape, mutilate, murder. We’ve seen the footage. We know what you are, what you do.… But why Tatiana?”

Nathan Quinn sat down on the stone steps leading to the entrance of the weir. He wore a long black wool coat cinched at the waist; the top three buttons were undone, revealing the collar of a white shirt. He was utterly relaxed, not even remotely concerned that Jeffrey had a gun pointed at his head, as if he believed himself to be immortal. He leaned back on his elbows, looking like an older male model in recline, perfectly groomed for a crisp evening stroll in the park. With his immaculately styled hair and square jaw, he could have been in a Ralph Lauren advertisement. The greatest trick that Satan ever played was getting the world to believe he doesn’t exist, Lydia thought, remembering the adage as she looked at him, though she couldn’t say why.

“Most people learn limits,” he said, thoughtful. “The things they cannot have, what they cannot do within society’s boundaries. For me, a child of extreme privilege, there were, of course, fewer of those limits. My parents, to be honest, weren’t exactly religious or particularly moral people. They, too, were the children of wealthy parents and had grown up valuing material goods, pleasure, and leisure more than, say, ethics. I was handsome and rich, and people wanted to be in my company and in my favor no matter how I acted. There were few, if any, consequences for poor behavior as a child, or illegal behavior as an adolescent and young adult. I came to the conclusion fairly early that conscience is learned, not innate, because it wasn’t taught to me, as far as I can remember, and I certainly wasn’t born with one.

“I’ve always loved women. Or I should say, I’ve always had an appetite for them, a ravenous appetite. And women have always wanted me. When you are handsome and rich and charming, you can get most women to do almost anything for you, sexually and otherwise. At least the women I’ve encountered. I became bored early with the acceptable boundaries of sexual gratification. I knew there had to be more—places inside myself where normal men were not allowed to go but where I might. Wondering what levels of pleasure existed behind the iron wall of law and morality.

“So I started pushing boundaries. Once you begin, it’s never far enough; every climax is an anticlimax. So I kept pushing, until I learned there were no real boundaries, only those imagined by ordinary men with mediocre minds. It wasn’t long in my circle before I found men who understood my appetites. I learned that there was a culture of great men before me who fed the hunger, reaching for enlightenment, searching for nirvana. They only found it when they’d walked over the edge of society. It’s the interpretation of the average man that Kurtz in
Heart of Darkness
was mad. In fact, the farther into the Congo he went, the more sane he became. It was the rest of the world that had gone mad, slaving for their meager dreams and goals. When all along, true pleasure, the only thing we really seek as humans—whether we call it love or peace or whatever—is within our grasp if we dare to step across the line society draws.

“Tatiana was the first person whose love I had to earn. She didn’t care how handsome I was, or how rich. She distrusted me and shunned me, right from the night I married her mother. All the things that had drawn people to me were useless with her. Her love was the last thing on earth that I couldn’t buy or steal. I couldn’t manipulate her with charm, or Backstreet Boys tickets. Of course, she lived in my house. I could have raped her. I could have stolen her body; I could have eaten her heart. But I could only have her love, her smile, her trust if she gave them to me. Tatiana was the final boundary.”

That was his reason. The full impact of his insanity and evil hit Lydia like a battering ram. It was not the fact that he was so bad that really bothered her; it was that he was so okay with it. Here was a monster whose mask was so artfully constructed that he operated in society, successful, admired. It was sick.

“Wow … you are extremely fucked-up,” said Lydia, her voice shaking a little because she really meant it. Nathan Quinn struck fear in her soul.

“That’s the longest, most complicated bad-guy speech I ever heard,” said Jeffrey. He’d never once dropped his weapon from its aim at Nathan’s head.

A cool Cheshire cat smile split Nathan’s face. “So what do you say, Lydia? Do we have a deal?”

“Not on your life.”

He stood and smiled at her, removing a cellular phone from his pocket. “How about on yours?”

There was an eternal moment where the three of them stood like stone; each second was a universe in which a thousand different decisions could be made, the future altered by each irrevocably. Then Jeffrey spoke.

“Tatiana was kidnapped by the FBI, in cooperation with your wife and Sasa Fitore, Nathan. When we saw her, she was in Albania, being protected at a kind of fortress in Vlorë.”

The look on Lydia’s face felt like a bullet in the gut. The disbelief and betrayal were palpable in the air.

“No,” she said pointlessly, as if she couldn’t find any other words. Her brows knitted together, and her eyes opened wide in sadness.

“I’m sorry, Lydia,” Jeffrey said, lowering his gun. “I can’t let Jed McIntyre go free. I could never live with myself if anything happened to you.”

Nathan Quinn stood and laughed, a deep, guttural laugh.

The laughter seemed to change something inside Lydia. Her face went from broken to hard in under a second. Jeffrey watched her move her hand to her waistband and remove the Sig, and the two feet between them seemed like a canyon as he moved to stop her. Nathan Quinn’s face went from smug satisfaction to uncertainty as he stumbled back two steps, toward the trees. Lydia took aim, but before Jeffrey reached her, she dropped her arm to her side. In those seconds, Lydia chose life, her life, her life with Jeffrey, the life of their child. She chose them all over Tatiana.

The silver hunting knife seemed to come disembodied from the branches of trees behind Nathan Quinn. His brow rose in surprise and his head tilted as if jerked back hard. He looked nothing so much as confused. Then the steel blade opened a thick red line on Nathan’s neck before he even had a chance to scream. And when his body fell to the ground in a gurgling heap, he writhed there, clutching his throat as Lydia and Jeffrey watched in shock. Jed McIntyre stepped from the darkness and grinned.

“It’s good to see you, Lydia,” he said, the embodiment of all her darkest, worst fears.

From behind, Dax fired the first round at Jed, a high-pitched piercing of the silence around them, the bullet contacting with the tree just to the right of his head, sending wood chips splaying like shrapnel. But Jed McIntyre had already disappeared into the woods as quickly, as horribly, as he’d come.

chapter thirty-nine

“S
ervices were held earlier this evening for New York City private investigator Jacob Hanley, one of two men discovered dead last week in Riverdale’s Van Cortlandt Park,” said the perfectly coiffed newscaster in his deep, mournful voice, “the result of an apparent sting operation gone wrong. The police and the FBI identified the second man as Miami multimillionaire entrepreneur Nathan Quinn. Wanted for questioning in their murders is this man, Jed McIntyre, the convicted Sleepy Hollow Killer, recently released from a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane because of a computer glitch. The murderer of thirteen women, including the mother of bestselling true-crime writer Lydia Strong, McIntyre was serving consecutive life sentences for each of his victims. Strong could not be reached for comment.

“The investigating officers have refused to comment on the situation but warn viewers to be on the lookout for McIntyre, considered to be armed, extremely dangerous, and still at large.

“A former FBI agent and West Point graduate, Hanley’s funeral took place in Queens. A memorial service will take place tomorrow evening in Miami for Nathan Quinn.

“In a related story, Jenna Quinn, wife of the late Nathan Quinn and mother of the late Tatiana Quinn, who ran away from her home and was found dead earlier this month, has disappeared. She is alleged to have stolen nearly one hundred million dollars from her husband’s company and has allegedly been discovered to have ties to the Albanian mob, particularly reputed mob boss Sasa Fitore, who is also missing. Ms. Quinn is also wanted for questioning in connection with the murders of Nathan Quinn and Jacob Hanley.”

Jeffrey got up from the chair where he sat and walked over to the window, still wearing the charcoal gray Armani suit he had worn to Jacob’s funeral. Lydia lay on the couch in a simple black sheath dress and smoky gray Nero jacket. They were both spent from comforting Jacob’s wife, whom they’d found pale and shaking from grief, on top of the battle she had been waging against lung cancer—a piece of information that Jacob had chosen not to share with Jeffrey, though she’d been diagnosed nearly a year ago.

“Maybe that’s why he needed the money,” Lydia had suggested in the limo on the way back from the service, trying to salvage some memory of the friend Jeffrey had lost.

“Maybe.” Jeffrey had shrugged. “Let’s not talk about it right now.”

She’d placed a hand on his knee, which he’d covered with his. She let him look out the window at the sea of grave markers that was Woodlawn Cemetery, not trying to comfort him except just by being beside him.

He walked over to her now from the window, and she lifted her head so he could sit; then she lay back on his lap. He absently stroked her hair with one hand as the newscast droned on. He placed the other hand on her belly, looked her in the eyes, and smiled. It was weak and sad, but it was a smile. She smiled back, not trying to hide or wipe away the tear that trailed down her cheek.

“I’m scared,” she said.

“Me, too,” he answered softly, his voice catching.

“He’s out there.”

“We’ll get him,” he said with total confidence. And she believed him.

A thorough examination of the accounting over the last five years—not from the printout that Jacob had provided, which had been altered, but from the computer files that Jeffrey had never been able to check—revealed that nearly a million dollars had come into the firm from unknown sources. An investigation of Jacob’s personal finances, done in secret by Craig, had revealed several large deposits over the last five years, corresponding with the deposits made at the firm, totaling a million more. Lydia, Jeffrey, and Craig agreed to keep that among themselves, not wanting to cause Jacob’s wife any more pain.