The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted: A Psychological Thriller (4 page)

I was getting sicker, and it showed.

The joy was gone, too. No surprise there. I’d made my full tour of duty through hell by then and had the battle scars to prove it.

I stuffed the photos away in a sock drawer, then brought my attention back to the other items, most of which I vaguely recognized: a red plastic squirt gun, a few comic books, an old pack of gum with only two sticks remaining. Why she had saved any of these was beyond me. She’d tossed plenty of things far more valuable after I’d left for college without once bothering to ask if I wanted them.

But there was something I definitely did
not
recognize.

A gold chain and pendant. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was a Saint Christopher medal, and while the length was short enough to belong to a woman, I knew I’d never seen my mother wearing it. Turning it over confirmed it: the initials were NAK. I tried to think whether we knew anyone with a name that matched but came up with nothing.

I placed it on the bed, stared at it, then looked back at the pile and discovered something else: an old, yellowed envelope addressed to my mother, postmarked July 3, 1976, from Stover, Illinois. The letter inside was written on stationary from the Greensmith Hotel:

C-

I won’t have access to a telephone for the next few days. Most of the lines are down due to the damage here. About your call during my stay in Chicago. Stop worrying. Trust me, that’s one body they’ll never find. Everything is taken care of.

-W

I swallowed hard. No name from the sender, but there didn’t need to be. I recognized the handwriting: Warren’s.

Chapter Five

The hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up.

It was as if I’d accidentally stumbled across a conversation between two strangers. Evil ones.

What the hell do I have here?

And where was this body hidden that no one would ever find?

The necklace. I laid it across my palm and studied it. Where did it come from? Was I misunderstanding? Overreacting?

But they were talking about a damned body, for Christ’s sake
.

Whose body? I had initials on a necklace, a date, and a location. I also had Sully. It might not have been connected…or it might be. He could help me find out.

I found the phone and dialed his number.

Jack Sullenfeld was my best friend in college and probably the smartest guy I know. He works as an Intel analyst for the F.B.I., and he’s my go-to guy when I’m on the hunt for sensitive data, information normally unavailable to the public.

Sully answered on the second ring. “Well, if it isn’t—”

“I need your help,” I interrupted, mindlessly rolling the necklace between my fingers.

“You sound funny.”

“I’m under a little stress.”

He paused, then spoke his words slowly, “Okay. What do you have?”

“Need you to look at missing persons or murder cases around 1976. Possible victim’s initials: NAK. The location might be in or near Stover, Illinois.”

“Male or female?”

“Don’t know. Maybe female. Just whatever you can find, okay?”

He paused a beat. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying my best for a more casual tone. “Just working some leads on a story and feeling the pressure.”

I hung up the phone and decided to do some searching myself. Fired up my Mac and logged onto Infoquest, the magazine’s subscription newspaper archiving service. Warren was a congressman back then. If he was in Stover, chances were the press might have been there, too. A search for
Stover, Illinois, Warren Strademeyer, 1976
netted me a direct hit with a story from
The Black Lake Courier,
dated July 5, 1976. Apparently, Warren was in Stover studying emergency response systems after a tornado leveled the town. The story showed a photo of him walking through the rubble and talking to authorities. That would explain why the phone lines were down. Did another search, this time for
murder, Stover, Illinois, missing, body, St. Christopher Medal, 1976.
Came up with a string of stories from the
Stover Journal,
but one in particular caught my interest: a nineteen-year-old woman named Jackie Newberry, reported missing two weeks before the tornado hit. Last seen walking to the community college but never arrived there. A search of the neighborhood and outlying area proved futile. Authorities suspected foul play.

But her initials didn’t match those on the St. Christopher medal and no mention of a necklace.

I toyed with the idea that maybe the necklace had nothing to do with this, but if that were true, where did it come from? Again, nobody I knew with those initials. A dead end, and I was dead tired. It was after midnight. I’d been up for hours, was suffering from jetlag, and quickly losing steam. Exhausted, frustrated, and troubled, I decided to call it a night, hoping some rest might help bring new answers.

I fell asleep with a pad and pen on my chest after writing
defiance
fifty-seven times.

Chapter Six

I sometimes felt like a ghost walking through that house, my needs so often going ignored that it was as if they barely existed. As if
I
barely existed. And the saddest part, the most tragic, was that I bought into the neglect. I thought it was normal, that all mothers put their own needs before those of their children. I had no way of knowing otherwise. Ours was a world ruled by contradictions and inconsistencies, painted only in shades of gray. I wouldn’t have known black or white if I’d seen them.

Then one day, a glimmer of hope.

She came running into the living room, shrieking with excitement. “You won’t believe it! You just won’t!” she said, clutching a handful of pamphlets against her chest, her face lighting up with delight. “The raffle! The one at church for the vacation! In the Cayman Islands! I won!”

“No way!” I bolted from my chair, leaving my book behind. “Really?”

“Really!” She tossed the pamphlets onto the coffee table, threw her arms around me, lifting me straight up in the air. “We’re going to the Cayman Islands! Can you believe it?”

I couldn’t believe she was hugging me so hard.

She grabbed one of the pamphlets and held it out in front of her, admiring the photos, practically out of breath from all her excitement. “I just never imagined I could... and with so many people entering and all…I just…this is the dream of a lifetime! We’re going to the Cayman Islands! Seven nights, all expenses paid! It’s so exciting!”

It was beyond exciting. It was wonderful.

“We’ll be staying at a resort,” she said, and spread a brochure open to show me the photos. “Four swimming pools!
Four
! And the food, oh, the food! Buffets every night! She let out a deep sigh of satisfaction. “It’ll be the perfect family vacation. Just the two of us!”

The two of us. Family.

“Now, we have several choices when we can go,” she said, her voice now taking on a practical tone. “What do you think? Next month? It’ll be December. We’ll be there during Christmas and come back with
gorgeous
suntans. How great would it be to have a suntan over the holidays! They’ll be so jealous! They’ll just be seething! I love it!”

“That would be great! Let’s do it, Mom!”

Suddenly she froze, staring at me oddly, lowering her brows. A peculiar smile slid across her face, and then she began laughing.

I laughed a little, too. “What?”

She was still laughing, catching her breath. “Oh, that’s
so funny.”

“What is?”

“You are, silly! What gave you the idea
you
were going?”

“But you said…that it was the perfect family vacation, just the two of us…and…”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Giggling now, “I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about your uncle Warren and me. Why in the world would I take you?”

Chapter Seven

I woke the next morning clawing at my covers, sweat dripping down my face, heart pounding like a hammer inside my chest.

The dream again. The boy in the woods.

The nightstand clock said 9:02 a.m. Next to it was my notebook. I found comfort seeing it there, knowing I might need it.

I have a problem that I keep secret from the world. I make lists, the same word repeated over and over. I’ve been doing it for as long as I could write. On average, they take up about a page, but they can be longer than that. Much longer. I once wrote
havoc
more than sixteen hundred times. Filled about thirty pages. I was having a bad day.

I don’t know why I do it, but I usually feel better after…at least for a while. It’s kind of like having an itch—when the urge hits, I’ve got to scratch or it’ll drive me crazy until I do. Well, actually, it’s like a mosquito bite: the more I scratch, the more I have to
keep
scratching. That’s why I need to be careful; otherwise, it can become, well…obsessive.

Of course, I haven’t missed the irony: a writer trapped by his own words. Sounds like a cruel joke. It’s like I’m straddling two parallel worlds, one I love and another I hate. I work like hell to hide it, but it keeps popping up at the most inopportune times. And I detest that I do it; I’m embarrassed as hell that I can’t stop. But I’ve
got
to do it, have trouble functioning if I don’t.

So I do.

That’s not to say I always hide it well. There have been close calls. I’ve accidentally left my lists out for someone to find—Samantha being one of them—but I’ve developed strategies, have learned to shift into damage control when that happens. I tell people it’s something I do to deal with writer’s block, and that seems to end all speculation. After all, a neurotic writer isn’t too far a stretch.

9:03 a.m. Time to stop obsessing about the dream and my lists and get moving. I jumped in the shower, shaved, then dragged a comb through my hair. I was halfway down the steps, when I heard the phone ringing.

“Not feeling the love, Sully,” I said.

“And a good morning to you, too, Mr. Sunshine.”

“Sorry. Rough night.”

“I’ve got two NAKs for you. Both around 1976, but nothing from Stover, and no females.”

I grabbed a pen and an envelope to write on. “Give it to me.”

“A forty-six-year-old male from Lester, Missouri by the name of Neil Adam Kershaw. Found strangled in his car outside a hog farm in the wee hours. You can do a search and get all the info.”