Angel of Darkness (30 page)

Parker's attitude irritated Mullins further. ‘Look,' Mullins said as he picked up a hacksaw to begin working at the marks he'd made on the heavy pipe. ‘I'm the one who's taking the risk here. I'm the one who could end up behind bars a hell of a lot more secure than these if I get caught. I told you it was overkill to try and frame the kid. I told you some jackass would step forward to help him.'

Parker reached a beefy arm through the bars and grabbed Mullins by his collar. He jerked him forward so hard his head bumped against the iron bars. ‘Don't think I don't see the scratches on your face. You let that woman make a little bitch out of you, didn't you? I told you to leave the girl's mother alone.' Parker's tone was so deadly calm that I felt a tremor of fear pass through me. It was Parker's control I found most frightening. Mullins had trouble keeping his anger in check; Parker never did. It was as if the evil that lived in Parker was so evolved that nothing could make it veer from its chosen path.

‘Yeah?' Mullins said. ‘You're also the one who told me to kill the shrink.' He tried to sound as tough as Parker, but he failed and his voice faltered. ‘Let go of me or I will walk away.'

‘I told you to make it look like suicide,' Parker said calmly. He released his grip as if he found the touch of Mullins distasteful. ‘I didn't tell you to beat the guy into hamburger. That's amateur hour, my friend.'

‘I'm not your friend.' Mullins picked up the peculiar cutting tool and began to work on the pipe again. He had to crouch over to reach the bottom of the pipe in front of Parker. The posture made him look like a supplicant kneeling before his master. And perhaps he was.

The rain showed no signs of slowing and, if possible, was growing in intensity. Parker looked up at the sky, his brow furrowed with worry.

‘Give me that thing,' Parker ordered him. ‘I'm stronger than you and it won't take so much time.'

Mullins would not give up control. ‘Ever used a snap cutter before?' he asked Parker, relishing at least one area where he knew more than Parker.

‘So what?' Parker said. ‘It's not rocket science.'

Mullins was enjoying his position of superiority. ‘It's not brute force, either,' he said, holding the tool out of Parker's reach. ‘The wrong angle can damage the tool. You have to know how to use it, when to slant it, or you're just wasting your time. I know how to use it.'

‘Fine,' Parker said reluctantly. He looked behind him into the darkness of the tunnel. ‘How long is this going to take? They've got a couple of real slackers on night duty, but I can't push it much longer. Someone's going to notice I'm gone.'

Mullins shrugged. ‘Another hour, maybe. If you weren't such a fat ass, you could squeeze out sooner but I've got at least two more bars to go.'

I wondered at their inability to get along for more than a few seconds at a time. This was not a partnership that was going to end well.

‘You're going to give me my money right away, right?' Mullins asked Parker. ‘Enough to afford a place to lay low in style? And if you're taking my truck, I want cash for that, too, plus a ride at least five hundred miles from this hellhole.'

Parker looked bored and kept looking behind him into the darkness of the pipe. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Women have been sending in cash like you wouldn't believe and they're willing to do anything I tell them to do. You'll get what I promised. I got one sketell in Atlanta who will put us up for a night. But she's mine before we leave, so don't get any ideas. After I take care of her, we go our separate ways.' Parker wanted to regain the upper hand and he could not resist adding, ‘You're too sloppy. You butcher the moment. I can't work that way.'

Mullins froze. He stared at the bar he was cutting through for a few seconds before he answered Parker. His voice was hard. ‘Do you really think you're any better than me?' he said. ‘You think because you kill them more slowly, or mark them with some half-ass prison brand, or have some sick need to spread them out, that you're any better than me?' Mullins bent back over his work. ‘You're no better than me. We both just kill them. There's not much more to it than that.'

Mullins knew what he had done to Darcy Swan and the psychiatrist was wrong. And judging from his tone of voice, I'm not sure he had enjoyed it, not in the way Parker enjoyed killing. Mullins sounded almost as if he was ashamed of himself and I wondered again about the hold Parker had over him. How had Mullins got himself into this mess?

Parker's mind was elsewhere. He looked up at the sky and then behind him. ‘Another hour? You sure?'

‘We'll still have plenty of time to get the hell out of here,' Mullins pointed out. ‘We've got at least four more hours of darkness and the truck's parked down the hill in some brush where no one will ever see it, at least not till daylight. We could be in and out of here and two states over by daybreak.'

Parker wasn't interested. He had already figured all that out. He had something else on his mind. ‘I'm not sure I put the manhole lid back on completely,' he said to Mullins. I knew he was lying. ‘I want it to look like I just disappeared, and I don't want any of them to figure out the connection between you and me.'

‘A little late for that, don't you think?' Mullins asked.

‘There's a difference between suspecting and knowing,' Parker said, but he was almost automatic in his arrogance. I felt the darkness rise in him. The hunger that had frightened me earlier on the front lawn grew and filled his being. ‘I'm just going to go back and check it one more time,' Parker said. ‘I'll only be a moment.'

Mullins glanced up at him briefly and risked sarcasm. ‘Don't rush back on my account.'

Parker crouched down to fit inside the pipe and began loping back toward Holloway, his gait as smooth as a wolf's.

Why was Parker really heading back to Holloway?

And in one terrible moment, I realized what it was: the hunger had risen in him and that hunger was the one thing he could not control. He was going back to take Olivia. It would be his final act before he disappeared. He had seen her and wanted her and felt a right to take her. But he had been thwarted – and Otis Parker was not used to failure.

I hurried back up the slope. It would take Parker no time to reach Olivia. He was smart and he was willing to take the risk. He knew there were plenty of precautions taken to keep patients inside the long-term unit, but not many ways to keep people on the outside from getting in. He'd be in her building and up the stairs and in Olivia's room within minutes. It would take him no time to finish what he had set out to do.

I could not let that happen to her.

I did not know what I would do. I reached the grounds of Holloway and headed toward the long-term unit but stopped short as I noticed a shape ahead of me in the darkness. It moved and I saw it again. An animal, perhaps? Maybe a dog. No, it was too big – and it was walking upright.

It was Lily, the mutilated teddy bear tucked under her arm, tiptoeing toward the shed in the rain, intent on finding the monster she had seen from the window above. I could feel her heart beating from where I stood. She was afraid, and yet she kept moving through the darkness, compelled by something greater than her fear. I willed myself to feel what she was thinking. The grinning cat was fully awake in her mind and he was calling the shots, telling her to stop the monster forever.

Could she? I did not dare to hope.

I followed her as she slipped into the shed and spotted the manhole cover. Parker had swung it back into place from below as he descended into the pipe system, but he had not been able to lock it behind him. The locking bar protruded to one side and, as she stared at it, I could see the images flickering through Lily's mind. Yes, she understood how it worked. Somehow, she had learned it. Had it been from me?

Lily took a step toward the manhole cover and stopped. I knew Parker was moving up the pipe toward her. I wanted to scream at her to hurry, to gather her courage and move. She took another step toward the manhole cover and stopped again.

‘Go,' I willed her. ‘Just go now.'

I heard a clanging below. Parker had reached the bottom of the metal stairs that led to the manhole opening and was starting to climb up.

Lilly heard the clanging, too. She froze. My heart sank. But then I saw it, even as she saw it: the grinning cat, content in the shadows of her imagination, widening its hideous grin as it peered at her through her thoughts. ‘Close it,' the cat ordered Lily calmly. ‘Close it now.' It smiled again, looking pleased with itself.

Parker's heavy footsteps made the whole shed shake as he thundered up the metal ladder.

Lily reached the manhole cover. With all the weight of her little body, she pushed the metal bar. It did not budge. She did not have the strength to slide it shut. Beneath her, the clanging intensified. Parker was nearing the top. There was no one to stop him now.

‘There you are, little one,' a deep voice called out from the doorway. The huge orderly with the braided beard was across the dirt floor in two huge strides. The tiny gold bells on the ends of his braids tinkled as he stared down at the manhole cover, listening to the sounds of metal on metal below it as Otis Parker climbed upward. He spotted the metal locking bar and pushed it into place. It slid across the manhole cover and lodged under the bracket on the other side, locking the cover so securely in place that not even a dozen Otis Parkers could have pushed it open from below.

Parker recognized the sound of the bar sliding into place and knew he was trapped. A roar echoed in the darkness beneath the shed and the manhole cover rattled with his rage.

Lily did not flinch. She stared down at the cover with satisfaction and looked up at the orderly. ‘Tambours told me to stop the monster,' she explained to him. ‘And I always do what Tambours says to do. So I followed the monster here.'

The orderly crouched down so that his face was even with Lily's. His voice was kinder than I had ever heard it before. ‘So you did, little one,' he said. ‘And I followed you. There I was, about to go home to some boring TV show when I saw you creeping around outside and I thought to myself, “Now what would a little one be doing that for on this sort of night? There must be a monster that needs stopping.”'

Lily's face broke out into a huge grin. ‘We got him,' she said. ‘Tambours will be glad.'

‘We got him,' the orderly agreed. ‘He'll never bother anyone again.' He picked Lily up and cradled her in his arms, placing a palm flat against her forehead.

Parker roared in the pipe below them, spewing vile threats at them, not caring that he was giving away his presence. Neither took notice of him. Lily stared at the orderly and then ran a finger across the tiny braids of his beard, triggering a tinkling of bells. She smiled.

‘Tambours likes those,' she told the orderly.

‘Is that right?' the orderly asked. He smiled at Lily sadly, and took his palm from her forehead. ‘Tell me more about this Tambours.'

As he folded his parka over her so that she would be protected from the storm, the orderly listened carefully as Lily began to tell him about the grinning cat in her head.

As they left the shed, the sounds of Parker's rage echoed below them, his bellowings drowned out by the pounding rain. No one in the world above him could hear Otis Parker.

There was only one person who could possibly hear him now
.
And that was the devil himself.

THIRTY-SEVEN

T
he monster raged. Parker's thwarted lust sought expression in a temper tantrum of epic proportions. The names he screamed as he railed against his unknown captors were so vile that even I, who had wallowed in the gutter while alive, had never heard them before. He uttered archaic, almost quaint, blasphemies that hinted at the centuries of evil stored inside him. But none of that evil could transcend Parker's body – and that body was trapped underground.

Outside the shed, away from his lunatic ravings, the rain gathered even more strength and hammered the earth in curtains of liquid fury.

I glimpsed flashing lights along the service road that wound through Holloway's acres. Men in yellow slickers were hopping from a truck at intervals, opening metal covers embedded in the earth and using crowbars to turn the gears concealed inside. They had been called out because of the storm and were adjusting the drainage water coursing through the network of pipes beneath Holloway's grounds, diverting the flow away from the overtaxed smaller pipes and toward the huge drainage pipe where Parker was trapped.

He had nowhere to go, nowhere at all, except one hope of escape.

Mullins was still crouched on the concrete overhang, frantically wrapping the chain of his wrench-like tool around the metal bars then pumping the handle, trying to bite through the iron even as the water from the pipe began to gather in strength, rising in volume until he had to wrap an arm through the bars to steady himself as the overflow tore at his legs. The water in the pipe was already a foot deep and the rain showed no signs of abating. Mullins looked up, alarmed, as sounds of Parker's fury reached him from inside the tunnel.

Parker had regained control by the time he reached the mouth of the pipe where Mullins worked frantically at his task. ‘Move faster,' Parker ordered him. ‘How much longer?'

Mullins looked up briefly and sensed a weakness in Parker's surface calm. A flicker of satisfaction crossed his face. ‘You really think that was smart, making all that noise when we're trying to make a clean getaway?' he asked. The cutting tool had finally bitten through the bottom of one of the bars and Parker reached impatiently for it, bending it toward him as he tried to widen the opening.

‘You're only making it harder,' Mullins said. ‘You screw with the angle and it's going to take me longer to make the top cut.'