Blood Of Angels (25 page)

'Nina was unconscious. Must have been.'

Monroe looked away. 'Or…'

'No,' I said. 'Not that. Unconscious.' I stood up. Jittery, needing to be on the move. 'I'm out of here.'

'Where are you going?'

'To do what I should have done an hour ago,' I said. 'Go looking. She's not here. So she's got to be somewhere else.'

I got a piece of paper out of my pocket and scribbled my cell number on it. 'Call me. The second. Anything at all.'

'I will.' He looked at me hard. 'You too. Don't think about dealing with this by yourself.'

'You think I'll promise you that?'

'No. But if you find him, I want to be there.'

'You won't stop me killing him.'

'I didn't say anything about stopping you.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

I drove around the town randomly and fast, windows open wide, listening for the sound of sirens. It occurred to me to go check the sites where the two bodies had been found, but the lot at the walk-down to Raynor's Wood was empty and I hadn't paid enough attention to find the second murder scene again. I called Monroe with the idea and he said he'd send someone.

So I kept moving faster and faster, searching the town on a grid. I saw cop vehicles flashing in different directions but nobody paid any attention to me or stopped my car despite the fact I was driving like a maniac and — had they looked — liberally smeared with blood.

A second sweep brought me past the cop station and I pulled to an impulse halt. I was out of the car and walking up to the front doors before I knew what I had in mind. The interior was deserted, just one cop behind the desk looking tense. Luckily he was someone who'd seen me go in and out that afternoon.

'Sir, are you okay? Are you hurt?'

'No,' I said. 'I've just come from where Reidel got killed. Where's Gulicks?'

'In the cells. You can't go in there.'

'Yeah, I can,' I said. 'Call Special Agent Monroe. Tell him it's Ward Hopkins.'

I walked past him through into the back half of the building and headed down the corridor past the interview room from that afternoon. At the end was a sign indicating the overnight holding area, three grim-looking doors in a row. Another twitchy-looking cop with a gun was standing outside the middle one.

'Open the door,' I said.

'I'm not doing that, sir.'

I stood where I could see through the slot window in the cell door. The area beyond was small, nine feet by nine, dark except for light leaking in from the corridor. A narrow bed took up one side, a sink and a functional metal latrine on the other. A chair was positioned against the back wall in between.

Julia Gulicks was sitting bolt upright on it, head lowered. As I stared in through the slot, she raised her head. Her face was pale and her eyes were wide.

She looked straight at me. And something happened in her face.

I don't think it was a smile. But she did something with her mouth that wasn't right.

'Sir—' The cop from the front desk came walking fast down the corridor behind me. 'You've got to go. Right now.'

'I want to talk to her,' I said. She was still looking at me.

'That's not going to happen, Mr Hopkins. I just talked to Agent Monroe and he said not to arrest you but to escort you the hell back out of here, right away.' He put his hand on my arm. 'I don't want to have to…'

I shrugged him off. The guard cop was watching me closely. 'I'm going,' I said.

The cop shepherded me hurriedly back out of the station onto the pavement. He was extremely pissed and I knew I wouldn't be able to pull something like that again. Not that it had done me any good.

Except -

The look that woman had given me had meaning. No one smiles that way without something strange on their mind. Gulicks must know something serious had happened in town — the station would have been chaotic when news of Reidel's murder broke. She could have heard specifics through the door. Was she just reacting to that? To the news that the cop who'd harried her that afternoon had been killed?

I stood on the sidewalk, knowing the cop was still watching me from behind the desk. I had been exhausted even before I got back to the hotel after meeting Unger. Now I could barely think.

I sat down heavily on the steps.

Assumption, or hope: Nina wasn't dead. If the idea had been to kill them both, the attacker could have done it a lot more easily in the hotel room.

So: why would someone kill Reidel but take Nina alive?

Either the killer originally went there to murder them both and for some reason changed his mind, electing to kill the cop and abduct Nina instead. Or, the killer arrived with the intention of pulling Nina out. In which case either Reidel's presence was unexpected — and he got killed just because he was there — or the killer went in already expecting one fatality, one kidnapping. Either way, he succeeded in doing what he wanted.

So: assume Nina was the target. What did that mean? And who did it point towards?

Everybody's assumption had been that it was the killer at large in Thornton. From some hidden vantage he had observed Nina on the investigation, decided she was a danger to his safety or that he'd like to work on her next. I didn't like this last idea at all, but thankfully there was a problem with it — a complete switch of MO and victim profile: from the stealth killing of two middle-aged men to forcibly abducting an armed and female federal agent.

So: consider instead the idea it was somebody else.

Monroe's suggestion that it might be Paul had shaken me but it didn't stand up. It was true that my brother was capable of the attack on every physical and moral level. I just didn't make him for it. Partly because I believed he would have been there waiting when I returned to the hotel room. Also I didn't want to believe it because I knew if it was Paul then I would never see Nina again, no matter what I did next.

So who else? Other agents of the Straw Men? They'd doubtless have other people who would kill police officers without qualm: I had seen one of them empty his gun into Charles Monroe in a public place six months ago, and I had been to a location where the dead bodies of their victims had been buried in the gardens of high-value real estate. These were not people who understood boundaries on behaviour.

Then something clicked in my head.

I had no problem getting out of Thornton: I don't know which three exits were supposed to have been covered, but I evidently found some other way without any trouble. I put my boot down and got to Owensville fast. I dropped speed once I got to the main drag because there were more cop cars around here — Monroe's alert had evidently had an effect. I found the Days Inn and forced myself to enter the building slowly enough to look casual.

Three o'clock in the morning and the Inn still had someone behind reception. He looked dozy, to be sure, but he was there. Maybe if the place in Thornton had the same policy Nina would still be in her room, and I'd be there with her.

'I'm in 211,' I said, coming on tired and a little drunk. 'I lost my key someplace. Can you run me off another?'

'I'm sorry sir, I didn't see you check in. I'd need to see ID.'

I kept moving, pretended to fumble in my pocket. 'Oh — that's okay, I found it.'

'Goodnight, sir.'

I hurried up the stairs and down a corridor until I found room 211. I knocked on the door and put my hand in my jacket.

No response. I knocked again, harder. Put my head up close. No sound from the interior. I suddenly started feeling cold inside.

'Carl? It's Ward.'

Nothing. I stood back and gave the door a solid kick. The door barely registered it. I gave it another kick with no more effect. I don't know how to hack that kind of lock and wasn't fool enough to try shooting it out.

I ran back down to reception. 'Some problem with the key,' I said. 'It's not working. I need another one.'

'Then I'd still need to see ID.'

I pulled out the gun. 'Will this do?'

I saw him reaching to his left.

'Don't touch the phone. I'm investigating a homicide in Thornton.'

'You're a cop?'

'No. FBI.'

'You should have said.' With visions of making local news as Owensville's most helpful citizen, he was a different proposition. His fingers rattled over the keyboard in front of him. '211?'

'Yes. Carl Unger.'

He frowned. 'Um, no.'

'I really have to get inside that room.'

He grabbed a card blank from the pile and swiped it but didn't hand it to me. Instead he came out from behind the desk. Evidently he was coming too. I had neither the time nor the inclination for punching him out, so I followed. He was quick up the stairs and went straight to the door. He swiped the card through the lock and opened it.

I walked in. The room was empty. The bed untouched. The bathroom was spotless and the toilet still sanitized for someone's comfort and convenience.

I swore and rounded on the desk jockey. 'Tell me,' I said.

'Mr Unger made a reservation by phone late this afternoon. He called a little before ten o'clock this evening and cancelled it. It was too late and he had to pay but basically he checked out without ever entering the hotel.'

I sat bonelessly down on the end of the bed. I felt too angry and foolish to speak. Unger had separated the two of us effortlessly. He booked a room in the hotel so it looked like he was
in situ,
and to give him a place to draw me and Nina to the following morning if tonight's business hadn't gone as planned.

But it had. And so now he was gone. And Nina was gone.

Leaving just me.

===OO=OOO=OO===

When I got back to Thornton the parking lot of the Holiday Inn was jammed with police vehicles and two television trucks. A ring of pre-dawn rubberneckers stood on the pavement outside. I drove straight past. There was nothing for me there.

I drove to a place I'd already visited once that evening. The lot above Raynor's Wood. I sat in the car with the windows down, listening to the sounds of the forest. Nina's name kept swimming into my mind and my heart clenched tighter and tighter with panic.

'What do I do, Bobby? How do I find her?'

I asked before I'd realized I was going to, and silence was all that came back. Asking was foolish, but I knew that now was not the time to suddenly comprehend that people dear to me could become actually and permanently dead.

On impulse I got out my phone and hit the speed dial number for Nina's phone. It went straight to voicemail. I knew it would: Monroe had already tried to locate the phone via beacon signals and got nothing. The phone was switched off. There are conspiracy nuts who think you can trace them anyway. Sadly they are wrong.

So then I did the only thing left, and tried another number. I tried it again, and again, at five-minute intervals until finally at 7:03 it was picked up and I heard a voice for the first time in five months.

'What the hell do you want, Ward? I got your SMS and I don't know the guy's name.'

'John, I've got to talk to you.'

'We have nothing to say to each other.'

'They got Nina.'

There was a long pause. 'Who did?'

'I don't know. But they got her.'

'Where are you?'

'Thornton, Virginia. John, get here fast.'

'It's business as usual. We just do what we do.'

'Man, you're dreaming. Nobody has called me in the last twenty-four. Two parties I know of have been cancelled just this week. People's parents are freaked, big time, and with the cops hassling people left and right… It's just not a party atmosphere, Lee. People are staying home and watching TV.'

It was twenty before nine in the morning and they were sitting in Lee's car outside the Starbucks from the night Pete died, working their way through vanilla lattes again. This morning they seemed sickly and over-sweet. Being there at all was Lee's idea. He had some theory that they should go places that connected with that night, to overlay any memories people might have from then: so the last impression the staff or any patrons might have — assuming they noticed or gave a shit — was of two guys being casual, at one with their world, not two whacked-out people who'd just buried their best friend. Brad didn't know whether this made sense or not. He thought trying to second-guess the cops was a game for people with a lot more experience. Lee's confidence was beginning to worry him a little. Since his one-to-one with this Paul guy, he seemed to be disconnecting from reality just a bit.

'Didn't they realize it was going to be tough?'

'Of course,' Lee said. 'But it's about turnover. Money in, money out. They got a shitload of pills and they don't last forever.'

This sounded like bullshit to Brad. 'I guess I could go check Stacy and Josh,' he said, without any enthusiasm. 'They didn't know Pete so well. They could still be partying.'

Hudek shook his head. 'Not the Reynoldses, no.'

'How come?'

'Just no.'

'Well, Lee, you got me. Take the drugs back to your friends and explain that what with some upstate shithead having blown Sleepy's
head
off, the market isn't so fucking buoyant right now.'

Lee turned to look at him. 'You okay, bro?'

'No I'm not okay, Lee. And I miss Pete. I really fucking miss him.'

'I know. Me too.'

Brad wasn't sure he believed this. It seemed to him that in Lee's universe Pete had become merely a problem to which a solution was being bought. 'His mom was on the phone to mine yesterday evening, asking if she knew anything.'

'She's calling everyone.'

'I don't care about the general fucking situation, Lee, okay? Right now I don't care about you or Steve or about the man on the street in Baghdad. I'm talking about
me.
Last night it was
my
mom she called. And so then Mom comes and sits in my room and — shit, man: you know the score. This is bad.'

'It's going to be fine.'

'No, Lee. I'm really not sure it will.' He hesitated. 'I had Karen on the phone last night too.'

'You guys are fucking. Talking comes with the territory. Deal with it, dude.'