The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (7 page)

He had managed to avenge himself on those who had wronged him. Yet he remained unhappy and unfocused. He desperately missed the action of the field and the purpose it gave him. Despite its falseness, it had at least provided a center for his life, and without that center he felt out of balance, useless. He needed to feel worthy again; he needed to matter.

The initial solution came to him quite by accident. A former Caretaker he had worked with had become a sheriff in Southern California. His Orange County district was being plagued by a series of stranglings, and he asked for the Ferryman’s help. Kimberlain overcame his initial reluctance and found that taking up the chase allowed him to employ the skills so long a part of him and so sorely missed. Yet now
he
was in control. His work resulted in the strangler’s capture, and his reward was a deeper understanding of himself. He was a hunter, and a hunter needed to hunt. More than that, he was a monster, and only by tracking down other monsters could he atone for his past. He began working on his own, uninvited, to track down the most loathsome of criminals.

And yet this, too, left him unfulfilled before very long. To track down these monsters he had to enter their thoughts, and even before his encounter with Winston Peet the hate was telling on him. He had thought that pursuing the deviants who own the underbelly of America would somehow vindicate him for his actions as a Caretaker. Yet their victims were still dead, just as his were. He lay in the hospital those long weeks after his encounter with Peet and considered the track his life was on, no longer satisfied with it. Everything was death, his entire existence still defined by it. Nothing had changed, and nothing would until he found a way to breathe life back into himself.

But how? The Ferryman gazed out at the world and saw pain. Everywhere he looked were people who had been wronged and were helpless to avenge themselves. Their lives had been taken from them. Often the system was to blame, a system he had once been part of. A system he had killed for. He realized that the best means for him to live again was to help others do the same. Offer them a lifeline in the hope of grabbing hold of it himself.

And so the paybacks began. Slowly at first, irregularly spaced until word leaked out and he was flooded with more requests than he could fill. There was no set procedure to reach him. But word continued to spread. People with a need for his services always seemed able to find him somehow, and he helped them because the process allowed him to help himself. How many lives had he taken or destroyed as a Caretaker? Kimberlain hadn’t counted back then, just as he didn’t now count the specific number of people helped by his paybacks. He knew there was a balance to be achieved, and he would feel it when he got there. Until then, the paybacks would continue.

He was spared further thinking when the private road leading to his cabin appeared two hours before dawn. He snailed down the unpaved road in his four-wheel-drive Pathfinder, careful to check his portable perimeter monitoring system at various junctures along the way. None of the alarms had been triggered, none of the traps sprung. The cabin would be as it had been when he left.

He was halfway between the Pathfinder and the porch when he saw the crinkled piece of paper stuck to the cabin’s front door. It flapped in the breeze like a shirt tossed over a clothesline, and the bold print grew clear in the moonlight just before the Ferryman was close enough to touch it:

Came here as soon as I could. Sorry I missed you. Will call again
.

The words made little sense until the next breeze lifted the top flap to reveal the note’s signature:

Andrew Harrison Leeds

The Second Dominion
Trails

Saturday, August 15; 6:00
A.M
.

Chapter 7

“WE’LL BE OUT
of here as soon as we can,” Talley promised.

“There’s no rush; so will I.”

“For good?”

“Until this is settled. My security’s been broken. If I stay here, Leeds or one of the others is bound to come back.”

Talley had made it up to Vermont in record time, three hours from the time Kimberlain’s call reached her. She had traveled in the same Learjet as the day before, once again, she claimed, to the bureau’s chagrin.

“You’re getting good at bending the rules, Ms. Talley.”

“Only slightly, Ferryman.”

Kimberlain’s eyes narrowed. “I see you’ve been checking files.”

“Just one. I was especially interested in the more complete details of your paybacks.”

“Really?”

“For personal reasons. We have a deal, remember? I give you free access to The Locks. You help me with Tiny Tim.”

“Meaning …”

“A visit to the town he hit three nights ago to tell us what we’re missing.”

“Later.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It’ll have to be for now. I want to hear what you’ve learned.”

The forensics team that had accompanied her was still inspecting the grounds when they stepped from the porch into Kimberlain’s cabin.

“Whoever it was came alone,” Lauren Talley reported.

“It was Leeds.”

“We don’t know that for sure yet.”

“I do.”

“The handwriting doesn’t match what we have on file.”

“You really don’t know much about Andrew Harrison Leeds, do you? I can show you five different examples of his handwriting, all different.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Not for Leeds. Any traces of a vehicle?”

Talley shook her head. “None we’ve been able to find. He could have parked it off on the road and walked.”

She let her eyes wander about the cabin’s interior. It was ordinary in all regards except for two things. The first was an entire wall devoted exclusively to weapons. Pistols, muskets, ancient swords, sabers and knives hung in no discernible pattern, some as good as the day they were made. The second was an odd contraption that looked like a movie projector with dozens of lenses extending out in all directions.

“Multidimensional television,” Kimberlain said by way of explanation. “Friend of mine designed it for me, the same friend who’s up at The Locks now trying to figure out how Leeds and the others got out.”

Talley’s eyes gestured toward the far wall. “And the weapons?”

“I restore them. It’s very soothing. You should try it. Civilized weapons for more civilized times.”

Talley gazed over the impressive array. “Some would take issue with that.” She hesitated. “Do you really think Leeds might come back here? I could have a team sent up … Set a trap.”

“That would be the surest way to insure he never reappears.”

“These men are good.”

“So is Leeds. He’d sense them from a mile away.”

Talley’s dark eyes flashed beneath her flowing auburn hair.

“How much do you really know about Andrew Harrison Leeds, Ms. Talley?”

“I read the file, the trial transcript.”

“They were based only on what could be proven. They tell only a fraction of the story, one-fifth at most and very probably less.”

“The identity business you mean.”

“Leeds had five of them we know of. Before the killings that earned him the nickname Candy Man, he was a professor of forensic pathology at the Brown University medical school. Like to hear about that one?”

When Talley made no reply, Kimberlain continued.

“Class was dissecting cadavers one day, Leeds demonstrating every step of the way on a raised platform. Trouble was his cadaver wasn’t dead, just anesthesized. He performed an autopsy on a living coed.”

Talley’s eyes wavered.

“His third identity was as a physician, family doctor as a matter of fact. Killed twenty-two of his elderly patients twenty-two totally different ways.”

“My God …”

“Number four was a psychiatrist. His patients swore by him. Then seven failed to return home the same day. They were all found in his office, seated as for a group therapy session. They were all dead. Leeds strangled them, then cut out their eyes, ears, and tongues.”

Talley wavered. “Can I sit down?”

“Be my guest.”

She sank into the couch. “Why wasn’t any of this in his file?”

“I followed it up on my own. You don’t publicize what you can’t prove.”

“You tracked all of this down yourself?”

“I followed the trails, the patterns.”

“He wanted to be caught, is that it?”

“Not at all. He wanted to be
noticed
. The act is meaningless without recognition. People like Leeds live off raw emotion. What they bring about feeds their ego, and in turn their ego needs to be fed more. They’re almost like infants in that respect.”

“People like Leeds,” Talley echoed. “What does that mean?”

“Monsters. Behavioral science can call them any psychiatric term you want, but that’s what they are.”

“What about his fifth identity?”

“Private school teacher. Seventh grade somewhere in Florida. Took his class on a field trip one day… .”

“Oh no …”

“Not a single body was ever found.”

Talley was looking very pale. “He was the worst, wasn’t he?”

“Or best. Depends on your perspective.”

“Jesus … How do you do it, go after them I mean?”

“Because I have to … just like they do.”

“And in this case you’ve got to get him before he gets you, is that it?”

Kimberlain moved closer so that he was at the center of the glare reflecting off the many lenses of the multidimensional television apparatus. For just an instant Talley imagined he was actually a projection, a ghostly specter projected in six hundred horizontal lines of resolution, instead of a man.

“Not at all,” he told her. “If Leeds came here, it’s because he’s secure in the notion he’s got the perfect place to hide.”

“Meaning …”

“Meaning a sixth identity I never uncovered, a sixth identity he can safely disappear into. And once he does, we’ll never find him.”

“Where will you start?”

“With an expert,” the Ferryman told her.

The day was more than half gone by the time Kimberlain pulled his Nissan Pathfinder off the road and drove it as far as the Maine woods would allow. The walk that would follow was all of two miles. There had once been a road a four-wheel drive could negotiate easily. But that had long been camouflaged to cover the cabin’s existence and current resident from unwelcome scrutiny.

Kimberlain reached the cabin, careful not to conceal his presence but also not to announce it too boldly. It looked considerably different from when he had occasionally used it himself. The trees and undergrowth had been unopposed in their attack. Vines slid across its roof and wrapped about the front porch beams. The cabin looked more as though it had grown out of the forest now, rather than having been built within it. Kimberlain wasn’t surprised.

Whack!

He instantly pinned the sound’s origin to the rear of the house. Circling round, he heard it three more times before his eyes locked on the massive bare shoulders and bulging arms that wielded the ax effortlessly.

Whack!

Another log splintered in two and dropped from the cutting board. The neatly stacked pile that formed most of the open area between the cabin and the woods was enough to last two winters, even three. Still, Kimberlain knew it grew bigger every day.

“Hello, Ferryman,” Winston Peet said without turning, as he brought the ax slamming downward again. “I knew you’d be coming.”

Strange to call this man a friend now, since the first time they had met six years ago each had tried quite determinedly to kill the other.

Fifteen murders had been committed before behavioral science called in the Ferryman. All the bodies had been found with their heads missing, ripped from the torsos
by hand
, explained pathologists, following death by strangulation. Impossible strength was clearly involved. Don’t look for a man, the advice went, look for a monster.

In the end, Kimberlain found the answer to the question of how to catch him had been right in front of everyone’s eyes all the time: each killing had taken place in the previous victim’s birthplace. The first had been killed in Boston. That victim’s birthplace was Gilford, New Hampshire; the victim there was born in White Plains, New York. And so it went in state after state.

The sixteenth victim had been born in the town of Medicine Lodge, Kansas. It was there, in the kitchen of the town’s bar and grill, that Kimberlain first met Winston Peet. He stood over the corpse of the bar’s lone remaining waitress. Kimberlain had met plenty of giants in his time, either abnormally tall or abnormally well muscled, but had never laid eyes on a creature who was so much of both.

The monster grinned from beneath his bald dome and slid the pretty waitress’s head across the floor toward the Ferryman’s feet. The fight that followed made history of a sort, lasting exactly the fifty-seven seconds it took for the bureau men to be attracted to the sounds of a struggle. They found Kimberlain standing over the giant with pistol in hand. The arm holding it hung crooked from a dislocated shoulder. His other wrist was broken. He was already coughing blood from numerous internal injuries, including a severely lacerated kidney. The monster, for his part, was bleeding badly from around the collarbone, courtesy of the meat cleaver Kimberlain had driven deep, the wound that had ultimately toppled him.

Kimberlain had steadied the gun as he heard the FBI charge through the entrance of the bar.

Fire
, he told himself.

Shoot me
, the monster’s sagging eyes seemed to beg.

The Ferryman held the gun rigid, and then the FBI men took over, their pistols and rifles ready as if this were a wild beast finally cornered in the jungle.

Not far from that, was the judgment of the court. They found Winston Peet to be totally incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong and sentenced him to The Locks. Kimberlain figured he was done with Peet at that point, but then the letters started and kept coming.

Two of the letters concerned an especially brutal series of murders and it was this that had drawn Kimberlain to The Locks three years before. Peet seemed to have insight into the latest monster the Ferryman was pursuing. Less than a week after the meeting, Peet escaped from The Locks and appeared in a hospital room Kimberlain was temporarily confined to. He claimed to have been renewed, reborn, his former self slain by the Ferryman’s spiritual bullet. He wanted to help and insisted he was the only man who could.