Blood Of Angels (24 page)

'Trust,' I said. 'Yes, I think I remember the word.'

I shook his hand and left. As I crossed the road I glanced back at the bar to see him still sitting there in the booth. I'd deliberately parked the car some distance away and round a series of blocks that you'd have to have been tied to me with a rope to follow, and I left town via a road that could be taken as leading in just about any direction except the one I was actually going. As I drove back to Thornton I tried hard to work out what I felt about Unger. Part of me did want to trust him, to feel there was someone inside a recognizable agency who might be able to help us. Another part wasn't sure. Had he really guessed that the person I spoke of was a woman, just from the way I spoke? Was his question as to whether there were any more of us a general enquiry, or was it loaded? If he was allied to the Straw Men then it would make sense for him to try to gather us together. Wouldn't it?

The problem with paranoia is it's hard to know where to stop. As soon as you question something as fundamental as the human contract, all bets are off. The reason the Iraq torture pictures were shocking was not the events they portrayed. Excesses in Vietnam are well-documented. We know about POW camps in WWII. We've heard of heads on spikes in medieval times, knights burned alive at Agincourt, the inventive horror with which the Romans and Carthaginians terrorized each other in the Punic Wars. There has been no war without atrocity. War
is
atrocity, pure and simple: only greed, nationalism and faith help us pretend otherwise. The only shocking thing about the pictures was the act of photography itself, the realization that people wanted to record these events, that they believed there were other people who would want to see them too. Is that really such a long way from the killer who keeps a picture of his victims? Or a lock of their hair? The serial killer is sufficiently unhooked from his culture that he is able to commit this kind of deed on home soil — whereas most of us need the anonymity and distance of a foreign land, of being vaguely mandated through a declaration of war.

But other than that — how much difference is there?

US intelligence didn't fail to prevent 9/11 purely because of incompetence. The assumption is always that we're so much more capable than the rest of the world. They don't win matches, we sometimes drop the ball. Wrong. Sometimes the bad guys win because they're as good as we are. Strength of will and purity of hate will make up a
huge
technology gap. To believe otherwise is to be a country still stuck on Spring Break, goggle-eyed with the contents of our culture's wet T-shirts, the first heart-stopping whupping of our life just visible on the horizon.

After a while it started to rain.

It was a depressing drive.

===OO=OOO=OO===

I pulled back into Thornton a little after midnight. The town lay quiet under faint moonlight, flat and inexplicable as someone else's dream. I drove slowly past the sheriff's building, considered calling Nina. Realized that she'd either be too busy or no longer there. The car that had what looked like reporters in it was still present, but empty. Presumably they were inside, and the Julia Gulicks story would break tomorrow. The white van I'd seen was gone.

When I got to the hotel I saw Reidel's car parked out front and Monroe's a couple of slots away. I went inside, hoping that whatever late-night conference they were involved in was happening somewhere other than Nina's room. The bar and the restaurant were empty, however, closed in that hotel-specific way which seems to declare they're shut now, they were never fucking open in the first place, and they sure as hell never will be again. There was no one around in the lobby, nor at reception.

I shambled down the corridor, wondering whether I could reasonably tell the other cops to fuck off to bed. Or if I might do it anyway, reasonably or otherwise. That afternoon Nina had looked more tired than I'd ever seen before. She needed sleep. So did I.

I knocked on the door to give them due warning, and then opened it with my swipe key. Silence inside. I shut it behind me.

'Nina?'

No reply. The conference was evidently being held elsewhere. Did I even know what room Monroe was in? I walked down the little passageway past the bathroom, thinking maybe I'd just lie on the bed and let Nina join me in her own time.

When I got to the main room I stopped as if walking into sheet glass.

At first all I could see was blood.

I knew I was making sounds. I knew because they were hurting my throat. I just didn't know how loud they must have been.

It looked like someone or something had been destroyed with a chainsaw. There were splatters of blood over the walls, the television set, the chairs, the bedspread, the big mirror on the wall. The room reeked of copper and death and there was so much dull red everywhere it was like a noise. For a second I was stunned into immobility. I couldn't get the scene to resolve itself into anything that made sense.

There was so much mess, in fact, that it was a long minute before I realized I could so far only see one body.

It was Reidel.

He lay underneath the window onto the parking lot, twisted as if he'd been thrown there hard enough to dent the wall. He'd lost half his scalp and his face was red-brown and wet. His eyes were open but there was nothing left to see out through them. It looked like someone had tried to cut his clothes off with a hatchet and then just lost it and started swinging wildly instead. There was a blood-lined slash across the wallpaper beside his head. There were far deeper cuts across his throat, arms and into the left side of his chest, and a pool of darkness on the carpet spreading two feet to either side.

One body.

Only one body.

I spun into the passageway and kicked open the door to the bathroom, gun held out and my finger a breath away from emptying it. It was surreally clean in there compared to the rest of the suite, and empty of people either living or dead.

I turned back into the main room and yanked the bed aside. Maybe I thought Nina might be hiding under there and hadn't realized it was me bellowing her name, or that something that had once been her had been shoved under there, part by part. I had it halfway across the floor when there was a sound from behind me and I whirled to see a woman in a hotel uniform standing in the passageway.

She started to scream like a big plane taking off.

'Go find Agent Monroe!' I shouted. 'Find him now.'

She stumbled backward, trying to get away. She was shrieking in earnest now and the noise and all the blood was making my brain white out and it took me a second to work out it was me she was trying to escape from. I had a gun and I was smeared with blood and there was something horrible slumped on the other side of the room. I'd have run from me too.

I stuffed the gun in my pocket and managed to grab her arm. Got the other hand on her opposite shoulder and held her still.

'It wasn't me,' I said, trying to keep my voice level, trying not to break her bones. Her eyes flickered around in their sockets, seeing everything but me. I put my face up close and said it again, louder. 'It wasn't me. Now go call the cops and
find Special Agent Monroe.'

I pushed her away towards the door. She ran.

I tried to be methodical. I knew I shouldn't mess up the scene but I'd done enough damage already and I had to see. If Nina had to be found then it had to be me who found her.

I dropped to the floor and looked under the bed just to lay that idea to rest. I got back up and threw open the small wardrobe. Nothing but Nina's few clothes. I left the doors open so her body couldn't suddenly materialize in there, falling apart and leaking blood. I looked behind the big television, swept aside the curtains either side of the window. I had to step over Reidel several times in the process and I knew there was something particularly wrong about him but didn't immediately understand what it was and it wasn't my main problem right then.

I went pointlessly back out into the bathroom and looked in there once more, moving the door and shower curtain with my elbows, trying not to contaminate the room with blood from the other nightmare.

She wasn't there. She was nowhere in the suite. I couldn't make a value judgement on that fact. I just had to find where she was.

I ran out into the hallway and towards the lobby. I passed Monroe after ten yards, turning into the corridor in his shirt sleeves, looking old and confused.

'What's happened?'

'Reidel's dead.'

His mouth dropped but then I was past him and out through the front doors and into the cold parking lot.

I sprinted into the middle of it and back and forth searching in car windows but there was no one in any of them and no one was driving away and finally I slowed and stopped. Everything was still except for clouds scudding overhead.

There was no one to chase and nothing I could do. Whatever had happened had already happened and I was too late. In the distance I heard the sound of approaching sirens.

They were too late too.

===OO=OOO=OO===

An hour later I was perched on a kerb and smoking a cigarette. The hand which held it was smeared with blood. My jeans were too. I was staring down at the pocked asphalt to give my mind something to hold on to. I'd spent much of the intervening time in Nina's room and couldn't be in there any more. The barely-contained fury and panic amongst the local cops had melded with my own and turned my head into an icy ache of helplessness. The hour seemed to have passed in jump-cuts. Nothing useful had happened. The time had merely fled, taking the initiative with it. I could see a couple of cops walking the lot, bent over, looking for signs of blood. I'd already tried.

I heard the hotel's automatic doors open and looked up to see Monroe coming out alone. The lobby behind him was full of milling staff and guests, with cops trying to get them to go back to their rooms or offices or anywhere so long it was out of the way. Half the guests looked scared. The rest looked like they'd lucked into a walk-on in some particularly juicy reality show. I wanted to go in and hurt them. Hurt them badly.

'Anything?'

Monroe shook his head. 'The hotel is being pulled apart. Basement, roof, every storage area we can find. But she's not here.'

I went back to staring at the ground.

'Every cop in town is in here or out there on the streets,' he added. 'All off-duty officers have been called in. Owensville, Andley and Smithfield sheriffs are on alert. I've notified the two nearest bureaus. People are on their way.'

'It's too late.'

'No it isn't. A federal agent has been kidnapped. We have a history of responding decisively to that kind of event. We look after our own. Whatever it takes, we'll get her back.'

'Where are you going to start looking, exactly?'

'There are road blocks already up at the three main routes out of Thornton. When other agents get here we'll get the whole town locked down. We'll do a house-to-house if necessary. We'll find her if we have to pull this place apart brick by brick.'

I assumed Monroe couldn't hear the note of heroic desperation in his own voice.

'What time did you people return to the hotel this evening? How long before I found what's in there?'

'About an hour,' he admitted. 'Maybe a little longer.'

'Makes it over two by now. He could be in a different state.'

'He? Who do you think this is?'

'Who do you think? Someone's just attacked two of the key people investigating the murders. Reidel's been hacked apart with the same kind of weapon used on the victims, a heavy cleaver — didn't you see the slash in the wall?' I had since realized one of the things that had been wrong with Reidel's body. 'His hand was lying three feet away. This is down to your killer. Who else?'

'Julia Gulicks is still in a cell. There is a guard outside it.'

'Of course she is, Monroe — because
she didn't do it.
Nina was right. Your case is hot air built on Gulicks finding Widmar's body, muddied by an alleged sighting from a jealous woman in a bar. Even if Gulicks was guilty and astral-projected herself out of the station I don't believe she's capable of what happened in that hotel room. Reidel was built to fight and Nina could look after herself. You really see Gulicks taking them both down? Really? I mean, can you
see
it?'

'No,' he admitted.

'So it's a man, and it's someone who's done serious killing before. Gulicks is innocent and the real murderer has brought the fight to us and we have no idea who he is or what he's capable of.'

Monroe ran a hand through his cropped hair. I knew he cared about Nina a great deal but also that some loud and buzzy part of his head would be thinking how it looked to have an agent kidnapped on your watch, not to mention a butchered cop. He was forced to make a reluctant suggestion.

'It doesn't have to be the killer. Couldn't it be him?'

'Who?'

'Your brother.'

I stared at him. 'Why would he be killing locals here? And he was still in Pelican Bay when the John Doe got killed.'

'I know. But there's a version where Gulicks is still Thornton's killer, but your brother tracked you two here tonight. Nina shot him in the woods earlier in the year. Maybe he's come and got her back.'

This hadn't even occurred to me. 'And the hand-cutting is just a coincidence? I don't think so. And you'd better pray it's not. If it's Paul all bets are off.'

'I'm sure you're right,' he said. 'I just don't know where else to go on this.'

'Nobody in the hotel saw
anything?
No one on reception, no one on room service, no late guest getting back? Somebody got in that room and turned it into an abattoir and pulled Nina out of the hotel — and yet nobody saw or heard a thing?'

'We're still interviewing the guests but it's dead air. Room service stopped at ten thirty. The receptionist for the last three hours was the girl you scared to death. She spent the evening in the back office — standard practice: do prep for next day's business and only come out when someone rings the bell. Getting past her on the way in wouldn't be hard. Coming back out…'