Angel Face (26 page)

She looked as if she were about to rip apart. This was the woman he’d surprised on the porch of his house. Her features were as stark and as bloodless as that creature’s. She’d scrubbed herself raw and exchanged the sundress for a pair of Levi’s and a man’s T-shirt. The backpack she’d dragged through the jungle was slung over one arm. He didn’t know why she’d gone to such lengths, but he could guess. She didn’t want to be Angela Lowe.

She hated who she was. Or what she’d done. She hated something.

Jordan’s heart was twisting at the sight of her, but he knew what emotion could do to him. Any kind of sympathy right now would be suicidal. He had to wall it off. The only thing that mattered was the truth, whatever it
took to get there, but he lived in holy fear that it would be brutal.

“Stay where you are,” he said as she started toward him.

She hesitated, confused. Even to talk seemed difficult for her.

“Jordan? There’s s-something I have to tell you.”

“Stay there!”

She halted, but the shock of it seemed to uncork her. Suddenly she was babbling, and he wouldn’t have been able to make sense of it, except that he’d heard it before. She was going on about the experiment, telling him it was flawed and that he shouldn’t drink something.

“Angela, we’ve been through this already—”

“No, you don’t understand. Something’s gone wrong.”

“I’m not part of any experiment. I never have been.”

“Jordan, listen to me! Your
brain
is being tapped right this moment. I just saw the scans, and they’re abnormal.”

“Abnormal scans? Of my brain?” What was she talking about? This was as crazy as he’d ever heard her, even when she was delirious in the jungle.

“It is! I swear, Jordan, right now as I’m standing here.” Her hand flew up and she whipped at hair that wasn’t there.

“I just came from SmartTech,” she rushed to explain. “They have supercomputers and multiple imaging technology that scans brain activity. It’s all done remotely. I told you about it, remember, the brain-tapping experiment? Subjects can be studied without their even knowing, but that’s not the point. There’s something wrong.”

He would play along for now, he told himself, humor her. “And what is wrong?”

“Your brain scan has all the signs of a firestorm: high cingulate excitation, abnormal temporal lobe activity, and a depressed prefrontal cortex. That triad of symptoms are precursors to violence, Jordan. Deadly violence.”

He wanted to tell her that one of them was nuts, and it wasn’t him. He almost wished it
was
shock this time. He wasn’t a psychiatrist, but he’d already diagnosed her as delusional and dangerously agitated. It would do him no good to remind her that he hadn’t been drinking
any
kind of cocktail, that he’d been in the jungle with her for three days. He had the feeling she would ramble on about experiments until dawn if he let her.

“It’s not clear what the problem is—toxicity from the chemicals, overstimulation of the sites.” She peered at him from haunted eyes. “Jordan? What’s wrong?”

Jordan had been gripped with an electrifying thought. It had just occurred to him that she might not be crazy at all. This could be another way to distract him, and he’d had plenty of experience with how she worked and how lethally distracting she could be.

“You believe me, don’t you? Don’t you?” She implored him with her voice and her clutched hands. “Come with me to SmartTech. I’ll show you what’s happening. The experiment has to be stopped!”

She
had to be stopped. She had started toward him, but Jordan didn’t want her within arm’s length. His memories of bondage in the jungle, of knives and snarling beasts, were too vivid.

“Angela, a patient died in my office tonight. He was a doctor.”

She hesitated, stunned, and he had a vision of her stumbling into the bird perch again. Where
was
Birdy? Maybe Penny had taken her home. Jordan’s temples had begun to throb, and his mind was fuzzing at the edges, but he wanted to know where the damn bird was. He couldn’t lose everything all at once. He was losing his mind. Wasn’t that enough?

Angela couldn’t seem to find words, so Jordan kept talking. He had to do this. He had to rip her apart so he could see who she was. What eight-year-old kid didn’t
know that? If you didn’t take things apart, there was no way to know how they were put together. How many hearts had he taken apart and put back together? How many lives had he saved? How many had he lost?

One. Tonight.

“I said a patient
died
in my office, and when I called nine one one, there was a message from you on my machine.”

She was wary now, shaking her head. “I didn’t leave you a message.”

His voice went cold. There was nothing he could do to re-create her sickly soft tone as he repeated what she’d said. “ ‘It’s not so hard to kill, is it? Pretty soon you’ll be as good as me.’”

“I didn’t say that! I didn’t call! Someone must have patched that together. They have my voice on tape. Jordan, I’m being framed. They want me dead! You know that.”

“You and I both know that makes no sense. Think about it, Angela.
Think
. Why would the CIA bother to frame you for serial murders if their goal was to kill you? Not very efficient, even for them.”

“It’s not the CIA! It’s SmartTech. Oh, my God,” she whispered. “You don’t believe it, do you?”

She was caught by sudden racking emotion. Her expression contorted, fighting whatever was happening inside her, but a tear slid over the sharp bones of her cheek. Jordan watched her rub it away, and even though he could feel his own heart clench like a fist, the pain barely touched him. His mind was somewhere else, strangely removed from everything that was happening. Instead of going crazy, he’d gone sane. More than sane, he was unmoved, immovable. Maybe the gods had decided to grant him one last second or two of his famous detachment, and along with that, a flash of clarity.

She might not have a weapon, he told himself, but she
was armed. Her tears were deadlier than any gun.

She looked up at him, achingly desperate. Her fingers flew up, searching for invisible strands of hair.

Impulsively she approached him.

“I said
stay where you are
!”

“Jordan, please—”

“Stay there!” He pulled the gun from inside his jacket. His only plan was to keep her where she was. Otherwise, he would have to physically restrain her until he could get the police here. And he didn’t want that. He knew better than to allow himself anywhere near her.

“Jordan, no!” She flinched as he turned the gun on her.

He clicked on the laser sight and held the SIGPro steady. The red beam moved up her body, and she gave out a strangled cry. She might as well have turned the gun on him the way that sound cut through him. What was this doing to her? It was not a question he could afford to ask himself, but it slugged its way into his thoughts. To be held at gunpoint by the man who had vowed to save her? What kind of damage was that doing?

But Angela could feel nothing at that moment. Something had sealed off inside her when he turned the gun on her, a wall as impenetrable as the one that had protected her memory. She’d had a premonition that he was going for a gun even before he reached into his jacket, and she had pulled her backpack around as a shield. But now as she clamped the pack to her chest, her hand touched metal.

There was something in the front zipper pocket. She could tell by the handle that it was a weapon, a revolver.

She had no idea how it got there unless—

Unless someone had thought she might need to defend herself. The ramifications of that were unbelievable. Who could have done it besides Sammy? He’d said several things that had struck her as bizarre, especially his
warning about Jordan.
Did he want her to find the gun and force Jordan’s hand?

“Jordan, don’t,” she implored. “They do want me dead, and they want
you
to kill me. Please believe me. They even planted a gun in my purse.”

She unzipped the pocket to show him. Here! This was her proof! They were trying to set her up. “See?”

Her voice hissed softly, but all Jordan saw as her hand came out of the pouch was the black silhouette of deadly metal. He saw the pistol grip of a .380 caliber semiautomatic, the Cyclops eye of the barrel and a diabolically beautiful killer, reaching for her weapon.

His first thought was to shoot the gun out of her hand.

He yelled at her to stop, begged her to stop, but by that time, a powerful involuntary impulse had sparked motor nerves.
He couldn’t stop himself
. There was never a conscious command from his brain to shoot. He wasn’t even aware that he’d squeezed the trigger, but the gun went off. With her huge, startled eyes frozen in the halo of a tiny red dot, the gun went off.

T
HE
evening air was heavy with the scent of lilacs and warm breezes gently wafted the rich perfume into every nook and cranny of the old covered porch. Lacy white petals fluttered and lifted, stirring up more sweetness and memories of better days. Days not blurred with pain and regret.

Jordan stood in the darkness, recalling nights he’d slept out here in a hammock when he was a kid and summer afternoons when his parents sat in the yard in aluminum lawn chairs, sipping lemonade and fanning themselves with the newspaper. How he missed those times. And what he would have given to revisit them, if only in his mind. But the comforting images were lost in the creak of wooden steps.

The front porch stairs announced a solitary figure, and Jordan felt his stomach turn when a beam of moonlight illuminated the man’s face. The burn scars seemed even more grotesque than he remembered, but the agent still led with them, as if he’d vowed to make sure that was what the world saw.

Jordan came out of the shadows. It was a calculated move. He wanted Firestarter out, too. He wanted to see the man’s face, but the agent didn’t accommodate him.

“You said it was urgent,” Firestarter said. “It had better be.”

“She’s dead.” Jordan’s voice was low and hot. He didn’t know how to put the agony in it that should have been there. He barely knew how to speak to this man. “Angela Lowe is dead.”

“Did you do it?”

Yes, I did it, you murdering scum. Happy now?
“She was here when I got home tonight. She had a gun in her backpack, and when she pulled it out, I shot her.”

The agent nodded. “Self-defense, then. You’re fine. Everything is fine.”

Everything was not fine. Jordan could barely conceive of things being less fine. “I have some questions.”

“There isn’t time. Where’s the body?”

Jordan wondered if his stare was as drill-bit hard as it felt. He could have cut the man’s heart out without instruments. “I’ll tell you when you answer my questions and not before. Is that clear, you cold-blooded
bastard
?”

There was a flicker of surprise on the agent’s part. Jordan sensed more than saw the hitch in his neck, the faint scowl.

Score one, Carpenter.
He wanted to get the man turned around so he could see him. The burns were like a mask, concealing his identity.

“Angela Lowe swore that I was part of an experiment,” Jordan said, “something she called ‘brain-tapping.’ She
swore it right up until the moment she died. What was she talking about?”

The agent snorted impatiently. “How would I know? The woman was certifiably crazy. She lived in a fantasy world, and she wove one around you. That was how she wormed her way into your life. You didn’t believe any of that, did you?”

A smart son of a bitch like me?
Jordan thought.
Hell, no, I didn’t believe her. Any more than I believe you.
“She talked about remote sensing and wireless technology, about the subjects drinking a brain cocktail every morning.”

“And how fantastical does that sound? She was a classic paranoid. I’m surprised she didn’t claim you were abducted by aliens.”

“Not so fantastical at all.” There was a wicker tea table on the porch where Jordan had left a set of drawings. He retrieved them to show the other man a device that could have passed for a portable TV set, except for the innovative antenna loop. In simple terms, it created its own magnetic field and could measure magnetic and electrical flux at ultralow levels with extreme accuracy.

“I developed this device myself while I was in medical school,” he told the agent. “It’s basically a remote sensor for monitoring the electrical impulses of the heart. I also wrote a paper that suggested adaptations. One of them was for the brain.”

Firestarter waved the papers away. “Maybe she read about your work. She was a medical groupie, and you were one of her heroes. She collected every article she could find about you.”

“The paper was never published. I was concerned about the potential for misuse if the idea fell into the wrong hands.”

“What the hell is this?” Firestarter demanded angrily. “You’re defending a serial killer? I’m not answering any
more questions. Tell me where the goddamn body is, Carpenter, or I’ll call in reinforcements.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

The agent came at Jordan, snarling from the scarred side of his face. “Here’s another one, in case you have any doubt. You just killed a woman in cold blood, and you’re going to need the agency’s help. With my testimony, you won’t go to jail. In fact, you’ll be a hero. Without my testimony . . . well, shit happens.”