The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (10 page)

The nearly four-hour drive to Providence was made with Leeds as Kimberlain’s traveling companion. He remembered the monster as he had been in court three months before. Leeds was of average height and build. His dark eyes drooped and looked prematurely old. He was fifty and looked every year of it. The only notable feature Kimberlain could recall was the awful dye job he had done on his hair. Colored it jet black with what looked like shoe polish that glistened under the hot court lights.

Watching him, the Ferryman thought of Peet and so many others whose physical attributes mirrored the scope of their twisted aims. But Leeds looked weak and sallow. What powered him came from deep within, something dark, twisted, and ugly; a slithering, eyeless slug residing where most people kept their souls.

Road maps directed him to Brown University, where he found a parking space in the fenced-in shadow of a rising dormitory. The cool chilled him, and he realized he had brought the wrong jacket for the weather. He followed the rest of the directions as best he could to the office of Dr. Ryan Fields. Fields, now an assistant professor, had years before been one of Leeds’s advisees in his guise as Alfred Andrews. Fields’s office was located on the third floor of the bio-med center. He was grading lab reports for students enrolled in summer session when Kimberlain knocked on his open door.

“Dr. Fields?”

Fields stood up and removed his glasses. He must have been in his early thirties now but looked ten years older. A bald spot spread outward from his crown. His eyes looked tired and lifeless.

“Call me Ryan, please. You’re Kimberlain, I assume.”

The Ferryman reached the desk and thrust his hand across it. “Thank you for seeing me on such notice and on a Saturday.”

Fields started to sit back down again. “You’re the one who finally caught Alfred Andrews.”

“Andrew Harrison Leeds,” Kimberlain corrected.

“Changing a first name to a last name. Is that common practice for them?”

“For who?”

“Serial killers. Madmen.”

“Is that what you think Leeds is?”

“Don’t you?”

“I came here to listen.”

“I think he was a terrific professor. It’s painful to say this, but I learned more from him than anyone else I ever studied under.” Fields paused. “I read where his IQ is in excess of two hundred. How many different identities did he have? Four was it?”

“Five that we know of anyway. There are probably others, one or two at least.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I found all the people he pretended to be, but I never found Leeds himself.”

Ryan Fields gazed up at the wall clock. “I’m due at the hospital in a half hour. Please, sit down.” The Ferryman did, and he went on. “Exactly what is this about, Mr. Kimberlain? You were very vague on the phone.”

“Leeds escaped from the sanitarium three nights ago.”

Ryan Fields’s eyes bulged in surprise. “I hadn’t heard, hadn’t read anything… .”

“It was kept secret from the press. No sense starting a panic. If we get lucky, he’ll be back in custody before anyone has a chance to notice,” Kimberlain added, trying to sound convincing.

“And if you don’t?”

“I’m here to make sure we do. I’m looking for hints to the identity we’re missing. If I find what links his others together, I’ll have a starting point.”

Fields cleared his throat. “What is it exactly that you want from me?”

“Your impressions mostly. Of all the people I’ll be talking to, you probably spent more time with Leeds alone than anyone else.”

Fields suppressed a shudder and leaned back in his chair. “We had many talks. His office was right across the hall from where we are now. Actually he did most of the talking.”

“About?”

“Any number of things. He was a remarkable man, knowledge-wise. Many of our discussions were strictly technical; a few, well …”

“Go on.”

“He had ideas, visions, on the way society was going to end up if it didn’t correct itself.”

“Coming from a forensic pathology professor that didn’t seem strange to you?”

“No, because he clearly enjoyed his ramblings. Lots of times I didn’t pay close attention. Other times I’d listen and feel uneasy.”

“Such as?”

Fields seemed to be searching for the words to describe it. “Well, one recurrent theme of his was that maybe America had it backward. Maybe the crazy people and convicts should be kept free and the rest of us imprisoned. After all, if we’re trying to keep them out of our world, what could be safer? They’d be breaking in instead of out.”

“Go on.”

“I acknowledged the argument had some validity, but Andrews—Leeds—took the issue further. He kept asking what if the poor, the mad, and the depraved were all that was left? He had all kinds of theories of what kind of world that would be and why it would be better. He suggested I make that the topic of my thesis. Even had a title: ‘The Ninth Dominion.’”

“Meaning?”

“Apparently, he had a theory that eight previous times in history great personalities had tried to rule the world, but each had failed.” Fields’s eyes turned to gaze out his door at the office across the hall that had remained unoccupied since the truth about Professor Alfred Andrews became known. “I remember him sitting in there telling me where they had all gone wrong.”

The Ferryman’s mind drifted, the scent of Leeds strong enough here to make him wonder if he might be hiding in his former office, listening. “What does that have to do with madmen and criminals?”

“According to him, purity. Madmen and criminals were the only pure humans because they weren’t afraid to express themselves. Nothing holds them back. They envision something and they make it happen. In the ninth dominion, the world would be made theirs.”

Something cold slid down Kimberlain’s spine. “Did he say how?”

“I don’t think he knew. Yet.”

“Yet?”

All the color had drained from Dr. Fields’s face. “I was close to him, Mr. Kimberlain, closer than anyone else at the university. A week before he killed that girl, he asked me to speculate on how long an anesthetized subject once gutted would live compared to an unanesthetized one.”

“A proposition …”

“In a continuing series. Only it wasn’t until that last day that I realized he’d made good on every one of them.”

In a daze Kimberlain walked back to the spot where he’d parked his Pathfinder. His mind was swimming with the words of Dr. Ryan Fields, measuring them beside what Winston Peet had said.

By finding his purpose, the truth behind what brought him into The Locks … and what brought him out
.

The ninth dominion … a world left to the criminals and the mad, with the maddest of all at the helm. The Ferryman could see Leeds planning for that, living for it. And if so he was seeing only part of the picture here, and a very small part at that.

He reached the Pathfinder and opened the driver’s door. Shadows from the dorm construction site danced in the street, cast there by the street lamps that gave the shadows the illusion of motion. The heavy equipment parked on the street about him looked like great yellow dinosaurs waiting to be awakened. Kimberlain climbed in behind the wheel, closed the door, and jammed his key into the starter.

A huge shadow crossing over his rearview mirror alerted the Ferryman to the fast-descending shovel an instant before impact. Enough time to throw himself low beneath the dashboard before the bone-jarring crash came. The entire top of the Pathfinder caved in and crumpled under the shovel’s massive weight. The vehicle shook on its wheels, and Kimberlain felt his teeth gnash together.

He was going for his gun when the Pathfinder was hammered by a barrage of bullets. Glass shattered and metal gave, the raging bullets piercing steel in the coffinlike confines. Kimberlain’s right hand swept beneath the floor mat, and at last he found the latch hidden there. He shifted the latch all the way to the right and then pushed hard, as bullets continued to pierce the Pathfinder. The angle at which he was bent threatened to make the effort impossible, but finally the hidden door slid free, and an escape hole opened into the night beyond.

Captain Seven had helped him install the floor panel in the Pathfinder and reinforce the lower part of the vehicle’s frame with an extra inch of galvanized steel. He never expected really to need either and hadn’t up until this moment. They were simply two more precautions among so many others.

But these two had paid off handsomely.

As the automatic fire continued to blister the upper part of the frame, Kimberlain pushed off with his legs in order to angle his body through the hole in the floor. The night and the gunmen’s attention on their firing would shield him well enough. There were three of them, one on the driver’s side of the Pathfinder, one at the front, and one at the rear. This left the passenger side for him, the side flanking the sidewalk and the chain link fence enclosing the construction site. He would have little room to maneuver, but he wouldn’t need much; his mind had already pinned the location of the gunmen within inches.

Kimberlain emerged through the open floor panel headfirst. His arms trailed quickly behind and positioned themselves to support his weight as he lowered the rest of himself out. From there he pulled himself toward the sidewalk and slid out onto it.

Its top crushed, the vehicle would provide him no cover once he rose. He would have to shoot and keep shooting, relying on surprise to buy him the seconds he needed.

At last the machine-gun fire ceased. Kimberlain rose into a crouch. He was pressed too close against the Pathfinder’s shell to see any of the gunmen, but he had glimpsed all three sets of their legs from underneath the truck. He held his ground as one of the gunmen approached slowly from the driver’s side. The Ferryman waited until the approaching gunman had reached the remains of the door, waited until all his attention was focused on peering in to check for the victim’s body. Then Kimberlain sprang, rising up over the crushed form of the vehicle. He shot the man at the Pathfinder’s rear first and was rotating the barrel fast around even as the man’s head snapped backward. His next three shells slammed into the gunman at the front. By this point the closest of the assailants had lurched back from his inspection of the demolished cab, finger on the trigger. The instinctive maneuver actually placed him square in the Ferryman’s sights. Kimberlain fired twice, both head shots, and the man crumpled with his face reduced to pulp.

Kimberlain’s breathing steadied. He hesitated briefly and then emerged from behind the Pathfinder’s remains to inspect his handiwork. The muted sound of a shoe heel grazing the asphalt reached him. He was airborne in the next instant, his body vacating the area where a hail of automatic bullets rained down.

There had been a fourth gunman!

Machine-gun bullets traced him and coughed shards of asphalt into the air. He tried to right himself to get off at least a token shot, but another flurry of bullets from the gunman ricocheted off the Pathfinder’s carcass. One of them clamored against his Sig Sauer and sent it flying. He flailed for it briefly before another barrage forced him into a second dive.

He found himself against the chain link fence now with only one place left to go. The pause in gunfire told him the yet unseen gunman was changing clips. Kimberlain hurled himself over the fence and onto the brief bit of hard ground that rimmed the shell-like dormitory building. He took cover behind the site’s construction trailer. Before him was an unfinished doorway that lacked even a threshold of steps. His mind calculated his options and found only one.

Bullets chewing the air around him, the Ferryman lurched into the unfinished building.

Inside, he pressed himself against a wall and waited, in case the last gunman elected to follow him through. The wail of sirens was in his ears now. Perhaps the prospect of arriving authorities had led his final assailant to flee, but Kimberlain didn’t think so. More likely he had entered the cavernous, dimly lit building through another doorway and was stalking the Ferryman now.

With that in mind, Kimberlain began to move. His pursuer had no reason to rush. He knew the Ferryman was weaponless, that the only thing working against him—both of them, in many respects—was the promised arrival of the police. But Kimberlain had something else he could turn in his favor:

The unfinished dorm building itself.

The first floor, and all those above, he imagined, were comprised of large room suites; a series of bedrooms around a larger living area. Many had walls or parts of walls missing, in effect creating a labyrinth. The ceiling was present in parts, missing in others. There looked to be five or six floors in all. Kimberlain was able to see up through all of them at some openings in the corridor.

Sawdust and what might have been the remnants of fiberglass insulation stuck to his eyes and then threatened his nose. The Ferryman covered his mouth and kept moving. An unfinished staircase rose before him, and Kimberlain took it, careful with his steps. The stairs angled to the left and then lifted straight again. He glided toward the second floor.

The sounds of screeching tires and slamming doors reached him from below. He heard garbled reports over radio sets and walkie-talkies coming toward the site, footsteps crunching over rock and gravel.

Don’t come in here!
he wanted to yell out to the approaching policemen.
Don’t come in!

Kimberlain leaned over, very close to verbalizing his warning.

A hail of silenced bullets coughed splinters from the wood around him, fired from the
basement
of all places. His pursuer had found a route down into it and had been trailing him, shadowing him, this whole time, from below. The Ferryman spun onto the next set of stairs and climbed faster, legs churning as if to kick the bullets from their path.

"Help me! Please help me!"

The shout echoed up from below; the gunman wanted to draw the police inside.

“I’m on the first floor… .
Please hurry!
”

“We’re coming in!” one of the policemen shouted as more continued to arrive.