Final Sins (34 page)

Faust kept driving even as he methodically smashed Tess McCallum’s cell phone to pieces against the dashboard.

He had discovered the phone in her pocket after striking her unconscious with the haft of his knife. Then he had parked at a strip mall and placed a quick local call from a pay phone, using coins pilfered from the sedan’s glove compartment. The mall shops were closed, and no one was around—a good thing, since his robe, silk pajamas, and bedroom slippers would draw stares even in Los Angeles.

The call was the first and most critical step in preserving his freedom. The use of a public telephone ensured that it could never be traced to him.

When he returned to the car, Tess McCallum was beginning to stir. He pulled off the belt of his robe and cut it in two. The longer piece was wound around her wrists in her lap, while the shorter piece, knotted at the back of her head, made a serviceable gag.

The phone started ringing only moments after he had resumed driving. He answered it, expecting to hear from someone from the FBI. Instead it was Abby Sinclair’s voice on the line. He almost wished he could have arranged a meeting with her. What she had done to Elise was unforgivable. But he had more urgent priorities.

Beside him, Tess was now squirming in her seat. She had regained consciousness during the phone call and had been restless ever since.

“Quiet yourself,” he said. “I would not want to render you unconscious a second time. A repeat blow might pose a serious risk of cerebral hemorrhage.”

She did not appear to appreciate his advice, but she did settle down a bit.

“Much better.” He smiled. “It is good to know that you can be reasonable.”

He guided the car through empty streets. The city was asleep, and only nocturnal creatures like himself were on the prowl.

“You cheated me of Raven,” he said in a gentle conversational tone. “I had completed all my preparations. I had broken her spirit. That is what I do, you see. Anyone can kill the body. I kill the will to live. Or perhaps it is truer to say that I allow it to die of attrition over many days. The young typically have more of a will to live and thus pose more of a challenge. You are not so very young anymore, are you? Yet you do wish to live. You wish, no doubt, to add me to your own roster of victims, to place my name beside those of Mobius and the Rain Man and the long-forgotten drug dealer in Miami. You will not have the opportunity to do so.”

He found the familiar street and pulled into a rear alley. The FBI car would be safely out of sight here. It might be spotted by a cruising patrol car, but this was a risk he had to accept. He would need the car soon. In less than an hour he would be on the move again.

But then he would be alone. Tess McCallum’s ride—and her life—ended here.

He escorted her out of the car and down the alley to a rear door. He knew the combination to disarm the security system. And in the cabinet in his secret room he had kept a spare key set, which he had taken along with the knife. One of the keys on the ring opened the door.

“Inside,” he said, switching on the pocket flashlight he had removed from her coat.

She entered, and he followed, closing the door behind him. It clicked shut, locking automatically. He could not rearm the alarm system, or their own movements would set off the motion detectors. But it was all right.

The Unblinking I would be perfectly safe while he was here. He was not going to steal anything. He was a partial owner of the art gallery, after all.

“You do not know this place,” he said as he walked Tess McCallum to the front of the building, the flashlight’s narrow funnel of light bobbing ahead of them. “I know it well. It is appropriate that I will kill you here.”

He looked for a reaction from her. In the dim glow of the flashlight he could see no flicker of expression. Her eyes were wide and dull. Perhaps he had struck her harder than he had thought.

“Although I could not kill Raven,” he said, “I did leave my mark on her.” He arrived at the front desk in the foyer, where the master control switches were located. “And I will do the same to you.” One set of switches for the track lighting, another for the
minispots
focused on the holograms. “In your case, as I lack a branding iron, I will carve the
wolfsangel
into your flesh.”

Leaving the room lights off, he flipped the second set of switches. In the darkness a bevy of small, faint spotlights blinked on, and the holograms came to life, smudges of color glowing in the adjacent exhibit room and in more distant rooms beyond.

“Images of death,” he said. “Your body will be found among them, Tess. Another work of art.”

* * *

The blow to her head had left Tess spacey and uncoordinated for a while, but slowly her strength had returned. Getting out of the car and moving about had helped. She could focus her eyes again, and her fingers responded when she willed them to flex.

She tried not to let him see any change in her. He had to think she was helpless.

But she was never helpless. Never,

Faust was not experienced in physical confrontations. He was an intellectual, whose victims had been chosen for their inability to fight back. Yes, her hands were tied in front of her, but she could still use them. All she needed was a weapon.

The telephone on the desk. A large, rectangular office model with multiple lines and a built-in answering machine and speaker.

She took a slow, sliding step closer to the desk. Faust, preoccupied by the switches, didn’t notice. She lifted her hands, taking care to avert her body from the spill of the flashlight’s beam.

Elsewhere in the building ceiling lights came on, and bright colors leaped out of the dark. She ignored them, staying focused on the phone.

He looked up, looked past her, said something about art and death.

She wasn’t listening. It didn’t matter what he said.

All that mattered was that he was within arm’s reach, and distracted. Vulnerable.

Now.

She seized the phone and swung it up in a powerful arc, tearing out the cord. He turned, not fast enough, and the corner of the metal box caught him under the chin and whipped his head back. She heard the clack of his jaws and knew she’d hurt him. She stepped forward and delivered a smashing downswing, aiming for a knockout blow, but he jerked to one side, the sharp edge of the speaker raking his cheek.

Then the phone was in his hands. He wrested it away and threw it aside. Her flashlight was rolling on the desk where he’d dropped it. She grabbed for it, thinking that it, too, could be a weapon, but already he had her hands in his, and he was staring at her as blood trickled down his face.

He made a gasping noise, almost like a lover’s sigh, and thrust her backward, slamming her into the wall, and then the knife was in his hand and its blade was arrowed at her face.

“Now
there
is the Tess McCallum I expected. I did not think you would remain passive. Nor did I want you to.”

He pressed the knife closer, the needle-sharp tip almost touching her left eye. With one flick of his wrist he could insert the knifepoint in her eyeball.

“I could do it, Tess,” he whispered. “Pop your eye like a grape.”

But he didn’t. The knife withdrew.

“I do not wish to have you blinded. I wish for you to
see
what I will do to you. To see the spectacle I will make of your bare body.”

He seized her by the hair with one hand, the knife now teasing her neck, and hustled her through the partitioned rooms, past the glowing paintings—no, not paintings, but something else, some kind of luminous art, like sculptures in neon. He brought her to a corner, and together they slipped around the bend into a still darker room, where skulls floated in the dark.

Halfway inside the room, he threw her down on the floor. She stared up at him, at the knife, at the jack-o’-lantern faces around her.

She’d been right—he
was
a demon, and this was hell.

“You fear me, Tess McCallum. I sensed it in our meeting.”

He was smiling. She wanted fiercely to remove that smile from his mouth.

“And you fear this, as well.” He rotated the knife in his grip. The long blade flashed, catching the light of one of the
minispots
in the ceiling. “As you should. It is an authentic knife once used by an officer of the SS. See the finely detailed oak leaf on the handle. See the engraving in the stainless steel blade. ‘
Alles
fur Deutschland
’, it reads.”

She thought of Hitler with his
lashless
blue eyes and hypnotizing gaze. Hitler in his bunker with Eva Braun, the two of them playing out the death dance of a suicide pact.

“This blade will do terrible things to you, Tess. The Chinese had a method of execution called the death of a thousand cuts. I may not have time for one thousand, but I believe I can manage one hundred cuts before the last of your lifeblood drains away. I wish to see you grow weak before me, weak from pain and loss of blood.”

Like his victims, she thought. He was accelerating the process that normally dragged on for days of limited food and water.

“You will try to scream, but the gag has been knotted tight. Your voice will die in your throat. You will try to beg, but no words will reach me. And when I am done, I will peel the flesh from your face and leave you grinning, like these happy ones.”

His circling arm took in the skulls, their teeth bared in ageless smiles.

“Now,” he said, “let us begin.”

He knelt by her. He pushed her back, prone on the floor, and took hold of her bound hands. She twisted her wrists, but the belt of the robe had been tied too expertly to work free. And suddenly she thought of Abby with her wrists restrained by flex-cuffs, facing a man who intended to make her suffer before she died. This was just like that, no different—except Abby hadn’t been in a room full of floating skulls.

“I often said I was an artist. Now I will prove it. Of course, it was necessary for me to downplay the point, to make light of it, even to deny it. But that was merely for my own protection. I had secrets to keep. But you and I, Tess—we will have no secrets between us, will we?”

She didn’t know what he was talking about. She thought perhaps he had lost what remained of his sanity.

“You are thinking I am crazy,” he said, as if reading her mind. “Wrong. I am fulfilling my destiny.”

The knife flashed. A hot wire of pain shot through the back of her left hand.

“I was born to hate. In my heaven there is no God, only power and the will to power.”

Another sizzling arc of pain. He was slicing her hand. Cutting a zigzag pattern. The
wolfsangel
.

“Joy is the conquest of weakness. I am building a more joyful world, culling the herd, disposing of the feeble. You see, I do believe in something larger than myself.”

A third cut. Her fingers going numb. Wetness on her skin. Blood.

“I believe in a world of men like me. And with every book I sell, every autograph I sign, I bring us that much closer to that world. It is nearly upon us, Tess. Sadly, you will not live to see it.”

He leaned closer. The expression on his face was one she had never seen before on any human being: a look of feral enjoyment, the grin of a hyena on a carcass.

“And neither will Joshua Green.”

The words pulled all the breath out of her. She felt herself deflate, go limp. She was dizzy ...

Another kiss of the blade on her hand. Pain brought her back from the edge of unconsciousness. She blinked, rallied.

“Oh, yes.” There was humor in his voice. “I know about your secret paramour.”

But he couldn’t. It wasn’t possible. Unless he really was the devil, really did possess occult powers ...

She could almost believe it. She could almost believe that this man with his jackal smile in a gallery of skulls was something fiendish, inhuman.

Blood soaked the belt of his robe now, the belt that tied her wrists. But not enough blood, not for him. He cut again, digging deeper, drawing a groan from her as she shut her eyes against the pain.

“Hauser knew,” he said calmly. “I was always interested in you, always pressing him for details and gossip in our phone conversations. He no doubt saw it as a harmless way to lead me on and gain my trust. Or perhaps he relished giving away your secrets for reasons of his own. I had the impression he disliked you most heartily.”

Hauser. So that was all it was. Nothing supernatural or magical. Just a man with a grudge, who had dug up dirt on her and passed it around.

And Faust ... he was no devil, only a sick man, a psychopath, a crazy son of a bitch who had issues with women, with power ...

And who had a knife. It worked its way down the back of her hand, slicing lightly this time, its touch almost a caress.

“He learned somehow of your illicit relationship with Mr. Green. He found it most unprofessional. Now you and Joshua will pay for your transgressions. You are paying now. Joshua will pay later.”