The First Prophet (15 page)

“Son of a bitch.” Sergeant Lewis stood at the foot of the stairs and watched his breath
mist with the curse. He was vaguely aware of one of the men coolly disabling the shop’s
security system and going inside, but he didn’t bother to follow.

They wouldn’t be there. They were long gone.

And he was anxious to get out of here. If one of the neighbors happened to wake up
and look out a window, he’d have to answer some very uncomfortable questions in the
morning.

His cell phone rang just then, and he swiftly drew it out of an inner pocket and answered
before it could ring again. “Yeah?” Of course, he knew who it would be. Who else would
it be at four o’clock in the fucking morning?

“Well?”

“We missed them.”

“I know that.”

Lewis looked around at darkness and shadows and felt his heart thud a bit faster.
You bastard—where are you?

“What I want to know,” the cool voice continued, “is how you intend to find them now
that you’ve lost them.”

Lewis gritted his teeth and spoke between them. “I’m sure you have a suggestion.”

“I have several. You won’t like any of them.”

So what else is new.

“Meet me in one hour. The usual place.”

Lewis opened his mouth to object, but the line went dead. Slowly, he closed the phone
and returned it to his pocket. He had a hollow feeling about the coming meeting.

A very hollow feeling.

“Very clever, our Mr. Mackenzie.” Brodie lowered the infrared binoculars and glanced
aside to meet Cait’s gaze. “He kept Gallagher out of harm’s way and still managed
to take a look at the presumed enemy.”

Cait sniffed and then rubbed her nose. It was cold on the roof of the building across
from the antiques shop, and they had been up here for hours. Her nose was beginning
to run. “He was too close, if you ask me. If he knew they were coming, why not just
take her and run?”

“Maybe he didn’t know they were coming, just thought they might. Or maybe she knew
and he wasn’t sure.”

“Even so, they could have been seen sneaking back to the car. We saw them.”

“Umm. But the others didn’t, did they.” Brodie
frowned. “Odd, that. They’re usually Johnny-on-the-spot whenever something like this
goes down. Wonder who fell asleep at the switch.”

“Maybe that cop. Jeez, how many does that make?”

“Too many. At the local
and
state levels so far. And impossible to guess who’ll show their face next. Be a lot
easier on us if they’d just wear a sign. But at least we have one more name to add
to the list.”

Cait rested her chin on her hand as she peered across the street and watched silent
men getting silently into weirdly silent cars. “Think he’s a major player?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I’ve never seen him before, but this was our first case in Richmond,
so that doesn’t mean much. I’d give a lot to know who called him just now. He didn’t
look very happy about it.”

“You think he removed the evidence I couldn’t find from the shop yesterday, don’t
you?”

“I’d bet money on it. Nobody’d expect a cop—probably the first at the scene—to pocket
a piece of evidence. At least, nobody but a suspicious bastard like me.”

“Think he did the same thing at Sarah Gallagher’s house? The fire marshal suspected
arson, but so far he can’t find any proof.”

Brodie nodded, lifting the binoculars to gaze once more across the street. “Makes
sense. They do tend to clean up after themselves whenever possible—and suspicious
fires make for uncomfortably public headlines.”

“Okay, so what do we do now? Stick with the cop or go after Mackenzie and Gallagher?”

He hesitated only an instant before lowering the binoculars and easing back away from
the edge. “I’d love to go after the cop, but we’ll leave that to someone else. We
have to get our hands on Sarah Gallagher. And it’ll be a lot harder now. You can bet
they saw Lewis just as clearly as we did, and you can bet it scared the hell out of
both of them. We’re taught to trust cops, to depend on them for safety. Hell of a
thing when we find out that’s a luxury we can no longer afford.”

“Amen,” Cait agreed soberly.

Neither made a sound as they crossed the roof and took an exterior stairway down to
the ground. Their car was parked nearby, and neither spoke again until they were in
it and moving.

“We don’t know where they’re going. Do we?” Cait asked as Brodie drove toward the
highway.

“No. Get on the cell. Call it in.”

Immediately, Cait drew a specially modified cell phone from a bag on the floorboard
and punched in a familiar number.

Sarah watched the sun come up from the front seat of Tucker’s Mercedes and wondered
idly why it looked no different from the last sunrise she had seen, only a few weeks
before. It should look different, she thought. The whole world had changed since then.
It had gotten darker. And grimmer. And as terrifying as any nightmare.

She could still feel them. Out there somewhere.
Somewhere near. Looming over her like the shadow of something vast and far-reaching.
It was like feeling breath on the back of her neck, the cold, fetid breath of an ancient
predator.

Where are you? Who are you?

But she was afraid to look too hard, to reach into that place inside herself where
the voices—at least one of the voices—might have the answers. She was afraid to willingly
open that door.

Afraid of the answers she might get. Afraid they would see her before she could see
them.

“We’re about two hours away from the cabin,” Tucker said finally. “We’ll stop for
groceries when we get closer; there’s never anything in Pat’s refrigerator but beer,
and we might be there a few days.” His voice was matter-of-fact but didn’t quite hide
the fact that Lewis’s presence in that hit squad had shaken him almost as much as
it had her.

“Does this friend of yours know you’re—we’re—coming?”

“He doesn’t live in the cabin, just spends summers there. I called him from my bank,
and he said I was welcome to spend a few days there. Polishing the latest novel. Most
people assume that requires peace and quiet.”

Sarah was suddenly uneasy, her instincts jangling. “Will he tell anyone you’re there?”
After seeing a police officer coming stealthily by night to get her, paranoia was
stronger in her than it had ever been before. Except that it wasn’t paranoia, of course.

“No, he won’t breathe a word. Don’t worry, Sarah.”

“Right.”

He glanced over at her. “I’m sorry. That sounds facile, doesn’t it?”

“A bit.”

“It wasn’t meant to. I’m not kidding myself, and I won’t kid you. What we saw last
night makes this a whole new ball game. It means we can’t trust the cops.”

“Any of them? They can’t all be…be in on this? Can they?”

Tucker shook his head. “I can’t imagine some mysterious conspiracy that large. But
how can we possibly know who to trust? Unless you find some special insight along
the way, I think we’d better not take chances. You trusted Lewis, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Until…”

“Right. Until he showed up outside your apartment in the dead of night, intending
to kill you. That
is
what you believe?”

Sarah hesitated, then nodded. “I know they came for me. I don’t know if they were
going to kill me, but I know they wanted to…hurt me.”

Tucker sent her another glance. “But you still don’t know why Lewis—why anyone—would
want to hurt you?”

“No. But…it isn’t just him. He wasn’t the man who was watching me. And…” She hesitated,
then said slowly, “When I had the vision about them coming for me, I heard a voice—a
man’s voice, but not Lewis’s—saying, ‘Even if you run, we will find you. We will always
find you.’”

Tucker looked at her sharply. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“Those men coming to the apartment were the immediate threat. That’s all I thought
about until we got away.”

“But you heard a voice saying they’d find you?”

“Yes. And a low hum of…murmuring and whispering. Tucker…I think there are a lot of
them. Like an army. I didn’t see them, but I heard them. Soft murmuring voices all
around me. And they weren’t friendly voices.”

Tucker was silent for a moment, then said quietly, “My name is Legion: for we are
many.”

“That’s from the Bible.”

He nodded. “As I recall, it refers to the devil and his minions.”

“Evil.” Sarah shivered. “I…feel that about them, in a way. Darkness, shadows. Threatening,
always threatening. And all around me. Reaching out for me. They want me, and I don’t
know why.”

“But you do know that your life was perfectly normal until you were mugged—and woke
up psychic.”

She tried to think, to force her fears to the back of her consciousness. “Yes. So
it has to have something to do with that.”

“Somehow,” he mused, “being psychic, having visions, makes you valuable to someone.
Or a threat to someone. Why? Did you—have you made a prediction that hasn’t yet come
true? I mean, one involving someone else?”

“No. The only threat I saw was aimed at me.”

“That serial killer out in California; you predicted something about him, didn’t you?”

“Just that he’d strike again. Which he has. But he’s still out there killing. And
he’s just one man.”

“You don’t feel a threat from him?”

“To myself? No. He doesn’t even know I exist.”

Tucker glanced at her. “Okay, tell me this. Are we heading in the right direction?”

“We aren’t heading in the wrong one,” she said slowly.

He let out a faint sound of humor. “Well, that’s something.”

“I’m sorry.” She felt a bit stiff, very conscious of the things she had not been able
to bring herself to tell him. Like those other voices. But he didn’t need to know
about them. Not really.

“You’re doing fine. Tell me this. Do you know
why
we need to head in the right direction? Are we looking for something? Someone? Or
is the point simply to get away from Richmond and the threat back there?”

“I…don’t know.” Then, suddenly, she did know, and blurted, “Someone. I think there’s
someone we have to find. Someone we have to look for.”

“Who?”

The moment of clarity was gone as abruptly as it had come, and Sarah slumped in the
seat. “I don’t know. I don’t
know
.”

“All right, Sarah. Don’t force it. You’re exhausted anyway; it’s a miracle you were
able to come up with anything
at all. Look, I think we could both use some coffee and a couple of breakfast biscuits.
I’ll get off at the next exit and find a place.”

She looked down at her hands and rubbed them together because they felt so cold.

“Sarah?”

“I’m okay. But I could use some coffee.” She didn’t want him to know how fragile she
felt right now. How unutterably tired. How frightened.

This is my fate. My destiny. All this has to happen.

“You’ll be safe at the cabin, Sarah. You’ll be able to rest.”

“At least for a while?”

He hesitated, then nodded. “At least for a while.”

Staring through the windshield now, she said idly, “They will find us, you know. They’re
very, very good at that. They’ve been good at that for a long time. A long time.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just do.” It was like catching a glimpse of something from the corner of her eye,
Sarah realized. There was knowledge there, off to the side, just out of sight. Waiting
for her to pay attention. She could see it if she looked.

She didn’t want to look.

After a moment, Tucker said, “A long time. Then maybe you’re not the first psychic
they’ve gone after.”

She turned the possibility over in her mind. “Maybe. Maybe there are others. Or were.”

Almost to himself, Tucker muttered, “That might explain a few things in my life.”

“What do you mean?”

“There have been a few psychics I heard about and went looking for, but was unable
to find. They just seemed to have…dropped off the face of the earth. I always assumed
they changed their names and ducked out of sight because one scam too many had brought
the cops sniffing after them. Or disgruntled customers.”