Son of the Enemy (23 page)

Nothing.

“Can you look at me, please?”

After a moment she rolled onto her back and stretched like a cat. Then she folded her arms under her head, looked up at him and gave him a slow smile that belied the anger in her eyes.

“So,” she said. “How did it feel to be used?”

Philip watched in horrified fascination as John Emerson
rubbed his face in Belle’s cunt. And she was bound to the bedpost!

No!

He pulled out his knife and was prepared to go inside until he lifted her head and—
Oh, God.
She was enjoying it!

Through a haze of disbelief and pain, Philip fumbled with his zipper, needing to release his diddling pole. It was so hard it hurt. She was arching up from the bed, her head thrown back, her nipples cherry red.

He pumped his pole as the anger washed through him. She liked it! The bitch actually liked having another man’s face in her cunt. And now she was saying his name, he could read her lips.
He pumped harder. How could she betray him like this?

Emerson. He’s brainwashed her.

Emerson was kneeling now, his big, hard pole jutting out, and pushing it into her mouth.

Philip forced himself not to cry out as he released a long spurt of hot semen onto the siding beneath the window. When he calmed down a bit, he cleaned himself off with a handkerchief, folded it neatly and put it in his back pocket. Then he put his eye to the peephole again. Emerson had flipped her over and was fucking her from behind, like a dog.

The pain was agonizing.

Philip’s pole was limp, so he couldn’t push any more anger out of it. Not yet. He watched until Emerson had finished and climbed off the bed, then put his lips to the peephole.

“You’ll both be punished for this, my love,” he whispered.

Ty slipped around the side of the pool house and inserted the spare key into the lock. If Philip didn’t have anything to hide, he wouldn’t lock the door at night, right? Hopefully Philip wouldn’t come home until after he’d had a good look at his room, but Ty knew he had to be quick, just in case. The old Mercedes he drove wasn’t in its usual spot, and the tire tracks looked pretty fresh, but for all he knew the freak had just run up to the 7-Eleven or something.

He’d spent a lot of time thinking about Philip while he was at his grandmother’s house, since there wasn’t a hell of a lot else to do. If he could prove that Philip was up to something really bad, if he had physical evidence of it, then he could tell his father. And his father would tell the cops. And Philip would have no credibility at all when he tried to tell them what Ty had really been doing in the woods that day. And then maybe he wouldn’t go to juvie after all, even if Philip could produce the baggie with the dope and Ty’s fingerprints all over it. Of course, if he could find the baggie in Philip’s room and get rid of it, he’d feel a whole lot less worried about the bastard causing trouble for him.

He didn’t dare turn on the lights inside the pool house, but he’d brought a small flashlight with him, and he shined it around the sauna area, then into the little kitchenette, which looked about as neat and clean as he would have expected. According to his mother, it was pretty much unnatural for a man to be neat. Not that his mother was a great judge of human nature, considering the company she kept.

Why he was thinking about his mother right now he didn’t know. Maybe it was seeing the kitchen. Isn’t that where mothers were supposed to hang out? As opposed to in the bedroom with some buff guy ten years younger than she was?

He shined the flashlight on the doorknob of the little bedroom Philip had taken over. He didn’t want to touch it, just in case the guy dusted for fingerprints or something. He felt for the key on the ring in his pocket. Was there some kind of weird smell coming out of the room or was it his imagination? He held his breath and inserted the key in the lock. It turned easily, but just to make sure he hadn’t been set up, he shined the light up and down the doorframe. Freako could have left a hair or something sticking out at a certain point so he’d know if someone came in while he was out. Ty didn’t spot anything. He listened for sounds outside, then wrapped the bottom of his tee shirt around his hand and turned the knob.

It was smoky inside the room, like someone had been burning candles. He ran the beam across the nearest wall first, being careful not to shine it near the window. The blinds were closed, he knew that from trying to look inside, but… What the hell? Black plastic garbage bags had been tacked over the windows. Ty’s gut tightened a little more.

Shit.

Yeah, he wanted to know if Philip was up to anything, but he really wasn’t in the mood to get totally grossed out.

On the adjoining wall, a single bed sat lengthwise beneath a window that had also been covered with plastic bags.

“What the fuck?” Ty whispered.

The bed was made military perfect, not a lump or wrinkle in sight. Well, at least there were no dead bodies lying on it. The flashlight beam showed nothing out of place in the whole room, other than the black garbage bags over the room’s two windows. The door to the tiny closet was closed. So was the bathroom door.

Once again he wrapped his hand in his tee shirt and opened the closet door. Philip’s camouflage suit was hung up in there, along with a couple of ugly-ass plaid shirts and some khaki pants that still had the tags on them. A pair of shiny black army boots sat on the floor. There was nothing else in there. Ty sighed, half in relief, half in disappointment. There was something seriously wrong with Philip—he’d never been so sure of anything in his life. But his intuition wasn’t going to cut it without something tangible to back it up, so he had to poke around some more.

There was a low dresser beside the closet, and he opened the top drawer first. Socks, perfectly rolled, and some plain white Fruit of the Looms folded in half. He shut the drawer quickly and opened the next. Empty. The bottom drawer was also empty.

“Fuck.”

He straightened, and the flashlight beam picked up a shiny object on the corner of the dresser. Ty held the light steady and gazed down at a small black-and-white photo in a silver frame, of a girl in some kind of costume, a long dress with a high neck, long sleeves and a big wide skirt. She was holding her hands out to someone. He squinted his eyes and bent closer.

The girl was a younger version of Hannah, except…not quite Hannah. He couldn’t have said what was different; the likeness was so close that it actually could be her. There was just something…

A car door slammed outside.

“Shit!” he whispered. It might not be Philip, but what if it was? He could look out the window and see—but the plastic bags were in the way.

“Goddamn it!” There was no way he could get out of the pool house without being seen from the driveway. So he had to hide. Where? The bathroom window faced the pool, away from the driveway. Even if there was black plastic covering it, he could rip it off and get the fuck out of there. Philip wouldn’t have to know who’d snuck in.

He pulled open the bathroom door, stepped inside and closed it behind him. The smell of smoke and candle wax was nearly overpowering. And there was something else mingled in, a pungent, animal scent of some kind, sort of musky…

“Aw, shit,” he whispered. The freak had been jerking off in here—recently. And what, burning candles at the same time?

Okay, that was it. He was definitely getting the fuck out of Dodge. The window behind the shower curtain was big enough to climb out of. It was a stupid place for a full-sized window but it made it real easy to spy on naked women on summer nights. His father threw some wild pool parties in the summer with clients and lots of young chicks, and Ty figured the women knew damn well they were being watched, so they soaped up longer than necessary so everyone got a good long look.

He pulled back the shower curtain. What he saw was so deranged he just stood there, paralyzed, staring when he should have been running.

“You sick fuck,” he whispered.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Hannah hadn’t said a word to him since they got in the car to go to the airport. They’d sat together in the boarding area at Dulles Airport from one thirty to four thirty in the morning, saying nothing. Now she was sitting beside him on a crowded flight to Boston, and she wouldn’t even lay her arm on the armrest between them. Her eyes were closed, but John knew she wasn’t sleeping because she sighed from time to time and tightened her arms around her torso. Talk about body language. One arm was wrapped around her middle and the other was crossed over her chest to the opposite shoulder. Translation: don’t touch me, emotionally or physically. He wasn’t sure which one bothered him more.

By the time they’d landed at Logan Airport and gone through the hoops to get a rental car, she looked ragged. She was pale and there were dark circles under her eyes. He offered to carry her bag but she turned down his help. He would gladly have carried her on his back if he’d thought she’d let him.

She leaned her head back against the plush seat of the new Ford Taurus and closed her eyes for a few minutes while he fiddled with the lights and windshield wipers. A light rain was falling, which was sure to snarl Sunday-morning traffic out of the airport even more than usual. Great. Just what he needed to start the day.

“It would be good if you could get some sleep in the car,” he said as he backed out of the parking spot. “When we get to Marblehead we can get some breakfast, if you can wait that long.”

She didn’t bother to look at him. “Coffee would be nice.”

His stomach was empty, but the thought of eating McDonald’s breakfast food made him nauseous. He’d bought a cinnamon roll from an airport vending machine before they boarded and had a coffee and some peanuts on the plane, but Hannah hadn’t eaten or drunk anything all night. She had to be starving.

“Tell you what. We can stop at a Mickey D’s drive-through on the way and grab a couple of coffees. Unless you’d prefer a diner.”

“Whatever.”

They drove up Route 1A through Boston to the north shore, passing through the familiar towns of Revere and Lynn, places that held early memories for John. He’d been to Boston a few times over the years, on FBI business, but he had never been tempted to make the trip down memory lane. He was losing the battle with fatigue, so he rolled his window halfway down, hoping the cool air would clear his head.

They stopped at a traffic light by a corner bakery, and the smell of oven-fresh bread transported him back in time to the day he and his mother had driven down this road for the last time. A surge of desperate sadness made it hard to take in a full breath.

The car behind him blared its horn, and he realized he hadn’t moved when the light turned green. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Hannah watching him.

“Are you okay?” she asked softly.

He glanced at her, saw the concern and puzzlement in her eyes, and wanted to weep. Even now, despising him as she did, she was still able to feel compassion for him. He wanted to pull the car over and beg her to cradle him in her arms.

“Yeah.” It came out as a whisper. “How about you?” Christ, she was the one whose mother had been murdered, and she was worrying about him?

“I don’t remember it,” she said simply, and continued to watch him, but he was afraid to say more or to reach across and touch her. He rolled up the window and focused on breathing normally, but the weight on his heart was so oppressive that it was a struggle to fill his lungs. The air simply felt too heavy.

“John?” Her tone left no doubt she knew he was in pain and she was reaching out because she couldn’t do anything else—even for someone as contemptible as he. If he spoke now she would hear the aching in his chest, and he was ashamed to expose himself that way. Besides, the lump in his throat was too large for words to pass through.

He shook his head.

She squeezed his shoulder and began to rub it gently. Up ahead a small white sign read
Welcome to Historic Marblehead.

Five minutes later he pulled the car into the parking lot of a diner and cut the engine. The place was mercifully uncrowded at nine in the morning. They ordered coffee and eggs with toast and home fries and a couple of large juices, and then took turns using the restrooms. John splashed cold water on his face and stared at his reflection in the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot, his jaw dark with whiskers, his thick hair lank and dirty. He tried to remember the last time he looked and felt so damn bad, but he couldn’t.

They didn’t talk during breakfast or in the car on the way to the B&B he’d booked, which was actually a lovely Victorian home on Front Street. Mrs. Farnum, the innkeeper, a small woman in her early seventies, looked John over unabashedly when he walked into the foyer, taking in the scruffy face and hair. He hoped he didn’t smell. Then she looked past him to where Hannah still sat in the car.

“You folks been on the road awhile?” she asked, her eyes on Hannah.

“Had a very long night last night. I hope we can check in right away. We both need a shower and a long nap.”

“The room’s ready for you. There’s a foldout couch in the sitting room, like I told you, but I suppose if it’s just you and your wife…”

He didn’t have the energy to correct her misapprehension. “I’m a terrible snorer and it keeps her awake. Is the other bed made up?”

She nodded, squinting at Hannah, who had stepped out of the car and stood there, dazed, looking around the yard. John walked outside and grabbed both bags out of the trunk, and they entered the house together. Mrs. Farnum didn’t take her eyes off Hannah. Hannah offered her hand, and the woman took it and held it.

“We’ve met,” the woman said. “But I can’t remember your name.”

Hannah seemed startled for a moment. “I don’t think so, Mrs…”

“Farnum. Gloria Farnum. Oh, yes, I know we’ve met. I never forget a face.”

“I haven’t been here since I was a child.”

“Can we go to our room now, Mrs. Farnum?” John interjected.

Hannah glared at him. “Room?”