Blind Pursuit (27 page)

50

Gund, driving fast on Interstate 10, heading southeast.

He would keep going until he crossed the state border into New Mexico. In Las Cruces he could ditch the van and steal a car. Afterward, he would get off the main highway and take the back roads. In Dallas or Houston, he would buy new ID.

Did he have money? None. He’d packed nothing, taken nothing. Panic must have chased all practicalities from his brain.

It didn’t matter. Along the way he would steal whatever he needed.

His grip on the steering wheel tightened. He pushed the speedometer needle to eighty as the concrete miles blurred past.

The engine throbbed, and his head throbbed with it. But at least the tingling of his fingers had faded, as had the unnatural heat at the back of his neck and the distant, unreal chiming in his ears. Those symptoms had vanished sometime during his search of his apartment. He had no idea why.

He wondered how much time he’d wasted in that search, exploring every possible place of concealment, the pistol shaking in his hand. Hatred and humiliation had made him sloppy, the search feverish and inefficient. Frequently he found himself checking the same closet or cubbyhole for the third or fourth time.

Finally he understood that she was gone, had been gone for many minutes, and worse—that she must have driven directly to the police.

She would talk to the detective who’d looked into Erin’s disappearance. The man would believe her this time. He would want to ask Gund some questions. Might already be on his way over.

Fear seized him. He ran from his apartment, not looking back, then got on the interstate and floored the gas pedal, barreling past semi trucks and sticker-festooned campers traveling at sixty-five.

Now he was beyond city limits, coming up on the Valencia Road exit, passing it, with Wilmot Road two miles ahead.

Soon he would leave the Tucson area behind. Christ, he never should have come here in the first place. Never.

“Never,” he murmured under his breath. Distantly he noted how peculiar the word sounded, slurred and indistinct, as if he had been drinking, or as if he were mumbling in his sleep.

The thought skipped lightly along the margin of his awareness, leaving him before he could quite grasp it. Unimportant anyway. What was important was to keep driving, get the hell out of here, never come back.

Shouldn’t have left Wisconsin. Things had been all right there. He had been safe there. Safe and empty inside.

For twenty years he’d worked as a janitor at the university, the lonely monotony of his life interrupted only by the periodic need to kill and the anguish afterward.

Perhaps he could have continued that way for another twenty years ... if he hadn’t seen the article.

It was a scholarly monograph on fire setters, appearing in the
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
. Some professor had left the slim, glossy publication on a coffee table in the psychology department’s faculty lounge. Gund found it while cleaning up on a winter night in 1992, a few months after the third woman, Deborah Collins, had burned.

The title, printed on the cover, hooked his attention at once. “Fire as Rage: Pyromania and the Antisocial Personality.”

Below it, the byline: Erin Reilly, Ph.D.

Erin Reilly.

A biographical note appended to Erin’s article said she’d recently established a private practice in Tucson.

After that, he checked each new issue of every psychology publication as it had come in. Over the past four years he found several other articles by Erin. All concerned the same issue—fire as a weapon, fire as an instrument of rage.

He wasn’t sure exactly when it occurred to him that she could treat his problem. At first he dismissed the idea; in order to undergo therapy, he first would have to confess, and there had never been any chance he would do that.

Then, last year, the possibility of kidnapping her entered his mind for the first time. The plan exercised a peculiar hold on his imagination. He couldn’t shake free of it. He found himself rehearsing it mentally, examining his strategy for imperfections, revising it again and again.

Last October he quit his job at the university. He sold his ancient station wagon and replaced it with a used Chevy Astro. Packed his few belongings into a U-Haul trailer, hitched it to the van, and drove to Arizona.

Money was not a problem for him. In his twenty years of custodial work, he had saved nearly all of what he’d earned, spending next to nothing for the studio apartment he rented. The surplus accumulated week after week, month after month, in a simple savings account. The total was $126,295.32 at the time of his departure.

He had not been putting away a nest egg for his retirement; he merely had never found any use for money. His plan gave him a conscious purpose for the first time in his life.

Erin advertised her practice in the Tucson Yellow Pages. The day after his arrival, Gund watched the office complex where she worked until she emerged at noon.

He recognized her immediately—her red hair was still the same—but the sight of her slender, long-legged figure startled him. At some level he hadn’t quite accepted the fact that she was an adult now.

She got into her Ford Taurus and drove to a restaurant downtown. At the restaurant she met Annie.

The two of them, together. Dining on a sunny veranda. Through binoculars he studied them.

Beautiful. Both so very beautiful.

After lunch, the women separated with a hug. Gund tailed Annie to her flower shop, where he caught sight of a sign in the window: HELP WANTED.

It had been crazy to apply for the job. If she’d recognized him as Oliver ... or if she simply had checked out his phony story about a mix-up at the University of Arizona that had cost him a promised custodial position ...

But he risked it. To improve his chances he invented a mawkish story about his late wife. The wallet photo he showed Annie was actually one he’d found among Deborah Collins’s belongings. Deborah’s mother, probably.

Annie fell for it. He got the job. Later he tailed her to her home; on a weekend afternoon he spied on her and Erin as they played tennis, then shadowed Erin to her apartment complex.

Once he knew where Erin lived, he began to finalize the preparations for her abduction and captivity. His last step was to purchase the old Connor ranch, the ranch of his boyhood, depleting nearly all of his twenty years of savings to make a single payment of $119,000 in cash. The ranch, isolated yet convenient to town, was ideal for his purposes.

An impeccable strategy, faultlessly implemented. He was sure of that. He had planned and executed every stage of the operation without a single misstep.

And yet here he was, speeding out of town, abandoning his possessions and his very identity to pursue a life on the run.

A freeway sign alerted him to the next exit. Houghton Road.

His foot eased up on the gas pedal, and the van’s speed began to drop.

Odd.

Why was he slowing down? He’d been making good time, and there was nobody ahead of him.

The steering wheel turned under his hands. The beam of his one headlight crossed over the white line as the van pulled into the right-hand lane.

The exit lane.

The off-ramp for Houghton Road lay a hundred yards ahead.

A flick of his hand, and the right turn signal flashed.

He dropped his gaze. Nerveless, paralyzed, he stared at the small, flashing arrow on the dashboard for what seemed like a very long time.

He got it now. Of course he did.

There would be no trip across the state line, no change of identity, no fugitive existence.

None of that ever had been his purpose. He’d merely imagined that it was. The idea had been only a twitch, a last, feeble spasm of rational thought; it had not moved him.

Because he had clicked off. Become unplugged.

Sometime during that episode of rage and frenzy in his apartment, when he’d been hunting Annie, he had slipped into this altered state of mind without even realizing it.

Since then he had been operating on automatic pilot, thoughts running on one track, actions proceeding along another.

At forty miles an hour he left the interstate, then swung north on Houghton Road. He passed the gas station where Erin tried making a 911 call last night.

There were reasons, sound reasons, for returning to the interstate and continuing his drive east. But those arguments held no force. They had long since folded under the pressure of the beating needs in control of him.

Only one impulse motivated him now.

He would kill her. Kill Erin. Take her out to the arroyo and stake her to the ground and burn her.

Next, Annie. Sooner or later she would return to her townhouse. When she did, he would be there. He would tie her to a chair or truss her on the floor, and then ...

The van thumped and rattled, and he realized with mild surprise that he had turned onto the side road that led to the ranch. He hadn’t even been aware of slowing down or steering to his right.

Ahead, the gate of the ranch was open, the padlock and chain removed this afternoon to serve as Erin’s shackles.

He guided the van through the gate, to the barn. The barn doors, too, had been left open in his hasty departure. Careless—the wreck of Erin’s Taurus was dimly visible within.

He parked alongside the car. From the van’s glove compartment he took his flashlight and the stun gun.

The flash would be helpful in the arroyo. And the stun gun might be necessary to get Erin there without unduly harming her.

He wanted her conscious when he struck the fatal match.

Funny how calm he felt. Calm outwardly, of course; he always was, once his plug was pulled. But the strange thing was that he felt the same tranquility within. There was none of the turmoil that had accompanied his other killings. No inner witness who looked on aghast.

He was at peace with himself. The words of that smug TV expert came back to him:
This is not a tormented person. This is a man who’s quite comfortable with what he does—and what he is
.

That never had been true of him before. Had been the furthest thing from reality. But not tonight.

Tonight the burning felt good to him. Felt
right
.

Flashlight and keys in hand, the side pockets of his jacket stuffed with the pistol and stun gun, he strode out of the barn. He shut the main doors behind him, then crossed yards of brittle grass to the house, his legs cutting space with mechanical efficiency, his gaze focused straight ahead.

Felt right, he thought again. Well, of course it did. Why wouldn’t it?

It
was
right.

The burnings in the woods up north had been wrong.

He saw that now. The three women he’d killed meant nothing to him. They were mere random strangers, surrogates for the two he’d really wanted. Symbolic sacrifices, that was all. Their deaths, satisfying him only briefly, served no lasting purpose.

But these two were different. These were no strangers, no stand-ins. These were the two who had ruined his life. Who had haunted him, obsessed him, poisoned his mind with unclean thoughts.

Everything he’d done—it was their fault, entirely theirs. They had been the source of all his troubles and afflictions right from the start. They were the unhealed sore in his soul.

He reached the front door, turned the key in the lock. As he entered the house, he nodded in silent assent to his own thoughts, then went on nodding, nodding, the slight incline of his head repeated like a programmed routine.

It was right, so right, that he do this. There could be no hesitation, no doubt. Not this time.

Never could he be liberated from the torment that plagued him—never—until Erin and Annie Reilly were dead.

51

With a final twist of her wrists, Erin wrenched the coupling nut free.

As she separated the two halves of the sillcock, she heard the familiar rumble of the van’s engine.

Oliver had returned, as she’d known he would.

He wouldn’t expect her to be unchained. There was a chance she could take him by surprise.

Quickly she shrugged on her blouse and buttoned it. She tossed the bra and its unhooked strap into the cardboard box containing her provisions, then slid the box in front of the sillcock.

Footsteps overhead. The stairs drummed as he descended.

The sillcock’s detached spout would make a serviceable weapon. She tucked it into the waistband of her shorts behind her back.

Then she seated herself in the chair facing the door, one end of the chain still padlocked to her ankle, the loose end snaking behind the cardboard box, out of sight.

A key rattled in the lock. The door opened, and Oliver was there.

Yet not there, not really. She could see that.

His face was expressionless, a mask of slack flesh.

He stepped forward into the glow of the bare light bulb on the chain. The shadows lifted from his eyes, and she saw his dull, glazed stare.

Fugue state, she thought with a ripple of dread.

The pockets of his jacket were bulging—she glimpsed the checkered grip of the pistol, and the stun gun’s metallic gleam—but his hands held only a set of keys and a flashlight, switched off.

“ ’Evening, Doc.” His affectless monotone matched the emptiness of his eyes.

“Hello, Oliver.”

“I’ve come for you.” He moved nearer, then stopped behind the other chair. “She’s on to me. Your sister. She knows.”

He said it so simply that Erin needed a moment to grasp the significance of the words.

Annie
knew
.

She kept her own voice safely casual. “Does she?”

Oliver nodded. “Don’t know how she guessed. I must have slipped up somehow. But it doesn’t matter. It’s over.”

He was standing more than six feet away. Too far. He had to be within reach.

“We still have work to do,” she said, hoping to draw him closer.

“No more work. That’s done now.”

“We were making progress—”

“Uh-uh. I’m discontinuing therapy, Doc.” He stepped around the chair, advancing on her. “We’re going outside now. Out to the arroyo.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“Oh, yes.” A yard away. Half a yard. “I do.”

He reached for his pocket. For the stun gun.

Now
.

She twisted sideways, seized the chain, then shot upright, swinging it in a wide, looping arc.

Instinctively Oliver stepped back.

The loose end of the chain flashed past his face and found its target.

The light bulb shattered in a tinkling rain.

Darkness. Intense and absolute in the windowless room.

Even as the bulb exploded, Erin sidestepped away from the chair. A heartbeat later the wooden legs scraped noisily on concrete. Oliver had lunged blindly at the spot where she’d stood.

Her right hand fumbled behind her, prying the spout free of her waistband.

To her left, the flashlight snapped on, its pale beam dissecting the dark. The circle of light whipped toward her, sudden glare dazzling her vision.

She raised the spout and brought it down, knife-quick, aiming just behind the flash.

The pipe chopped Oliver’s wrist. Gasp of pain, and the flashlight fell free.

It struck the floor and rolled, its beam painting yellow spirals on the cellar walls. In the blurred half-light Erin saw Oliver again reaching for the stun gun.

She lashed out with the spout a second time.

Oliver sensed the attack, dodged to one side, then seized her right forearm, his grip painfully tight, squeezing a gasp out of her.

Involuntarily her fingers splayed. She had time to think that the pressure of his clutch had paralyzed her radial nerve, and then the spout dropped from her hand like a discarded toy. She heard it clatter on the floor.

No weapon. But she could still fight. Months of self-defense classes must have been good for something.

Don’t think
. The voice in her mind belonged to Mr. Sanders, her tae kwon do instructor.
Thinking is too slow. Let your reflexes take over.

Oliver, still holding her right arm, jerked her toward him. His face rushed at her, his eyes sparkling in the dimness.

Reaching across her body with her left hand, she grabbed the wrist of her captured arm, then snapped her upper body back and tore free of his grasp.

She retreated a step, and then his two hands closed over her throat.

Brief panic shook her—she couldn’t
breathe
—before habits more deeply ingrained than she’d suspected, habits that mimicked instinct, dictated the correct response.

She raised her arms fast, over Oliver’s forearms, then swung sharply to the right, bending at the waist. Her left elbow came up, and she whipped back to an upright posture, using the momentum of her upper body to drive the elbow savagely into Oliver’s jaw.

Stunned, he released her throat.

Her right hand wasn’t paralyzed anymore. She curled it in a tight fist, the first two knuckles projecting slightly, and directed a reverse punch at Oliver’s ribs, pivoting as she delivered the blow.

He gasped but didn’t go down. With her left hand she executed a crippling palm-heel strike to his groin.

Grunt of pain, and he staggered backward, then dropped to his knees.

She’d done it. She’d beaten him.

Erin spun away from him, her next moves fully formed in her mind. Simply get out of the room, bolt and chain the door, then lock the door at the top of the stairs also. He might be able to shoot his way out, but not before she’d fled the ranch.

These thoughts crowded her brain, borne on a cresting wave of triumph, as she lunged blindly for the door frame, found it, began to step through—

The chain fastened to her right leg was jerked taut.

She lost her balance, slammed down on hands and knees.

Oliver, still sprawled on the floor, gave the chain another tug. Erin slid on the smooth concrete, dragged closer to her adversary.

She rolled onto her side, bent her left leg at the knee, and aimed a punishing snap kick at Oliver’s head.

Crack of impact. She ripped the chain free of his grasp, then scrambled to her feet.

She hoped the kick would immobilize him, but no; he was rising, too, his recovery so rapid as to be almost instantaneous. He seemed impervious to pain. The thought flashed in her mind that the same neurological wiring that suppressed awareness of his deepest feelings might cut him off from unwanted bodily sensations as well.

For the moment she’d forfeited her chance to escape through the doorway. She had to put him on the floor again.

Turning to face him, she lashed out with another kick.

Her intention was to disable him with a fractured kneecap, but he stepped into the kick, catching the blow on the side of his calf, then locked her in a crushing bear hug.

Pain shot through her ribs. She smelled his breath, sour and close.

Proper defensive move—knee strike.

Her left leg shot up. Simultaneously Oliver pistoned out both arms, shoving her away.

Caught off balance, she tried to find her footing, failed, and thudded down on her side with a gasp.

Impact shocked all the breath out of her. She tried to rise, couldn’t. Her legs and arms wouldn’t work. For a long, helpless moment she just lay there, wheezing, until her lungs sucked air again.

Then slowly she looked up, and there he was—Oliver, looming over her, a yard away, the stun gun in his hand, the flashlight on the floor throwing his huge, distended shadow across the ceiling like a great black stain.

Sparring session’s over, Erin
. Mr. Sanders sounded faintly disappointed.
Better luck next time
.

Dazed, she crawled blindly backward, away from the weapon, the chain rattle-clanking in her wake.

Brick walls bumped up against her shoulders. She had retreated into a corner. Nowhere to go.

Oliver took a step forward, closing the short distance between them. His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, and then he remembered speech.

“You filth,” he muttered. “Stinking
filth
.”

He switched on the stun gun. Electricity crackled between the prongs in a blue arc.

“Oliver.” She coughed, then found the strength to speak. “You don’t hate me enough to kill me. You know you don’t.”

“Wrong, Doc.” Still no emotion in his voice, no expression on his face. “I do hate you. You and your damn sister. I wish the two of you had never been born. I wish—”

He stopped himself.

“You wish Maureen had had us aborted,” Erin finished for him.

His eyes narrowed, the lids sliding shut as if with sleep. Slowly he nodded.

“But she didn’t,” Erin said, “because she was a Catholic, and it would have been a sin.”

“There are worse sins.”

“Like your sin.” Tick of silence in the room. “Incest.”

Oliver said nothing.

“Lincoln molested you for years. And when Maureen visited the ranch, you did the same to her. You raped her, because she was your mother’s sister, and incest was the only form of intimacy you’d ever known.”

From between frozen lips, a faint sleepwalker’s murmur: “Shut up.”

“And she got pregnant. With Annie and me.” Erin gazed up at his face, searching for a response. “You’re our father.”

Something flickered in his eyes. A hint of personality, of human consciousness.

He switched off the stun gun. The hiss of current was replaced by the labored rasp of his breathing.

“Yes,” he whispered. “God damn you, yes.”