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We’d reached the landing, and he pushed open the door to a large empty office. He gestured toward the corner.

“Mr. King’s body was there in a pool of blood. His wife’s corpse was laid perpendicular to him. Both headless. The heads are still missing.”

“Like all the rest of them,” I said. “They’re his trophies.”

“Skulls by now,” Peaks said.

“You said we could look at the Kings’ old house.”

“I said I’d ask.”

The Ranger pulled out his cell phone, looked at it. “No bars. Let me try outside.”

“Where the tornado’s coming,” I said, following him out.

“True enough,” he said, and he dropped down the stairs.

I paused to take it all in, tried to imagine what Oates could have experienced there that caused him to saw off the heads of the only people who’d ever been good and kind to him. I failed.

By the time I reached the bottom of the staircase, Peaks was stepping outside. I half expected to see the door torn away by the gusts, but then, as before, the wind died down.

And I heard that humming noise again. I realized it was coming from the other side of the wall where I was standing. I flashed the light around and saw another door, right below the one upstairs.

I went over to it as the gusting rose again and tried the knob. It turned.

I pushed it open, went inside, and saw the source of the hum: a Honda generator pushed up against a hole that had been cut in the back of the building to vent the machine’s exhaust. A heavy-duty extension cord ran from the generator and into a jumble of old boxes, trash, and debris left behind by the salvagers. I followed the cord to a large, dark windowless room also crammed with junk.

I flashed my light around into the shadows and then back along the electric line that ran to a large, filthy white box. I crossed to it, kicking aside cans and other trash, and realized I was looking at an old lift-top freezer.

I raised the lid and a powerful strobe light went on, blinding me. But not before I’d seen at least a dozen frozen human heads stacked inside the cold locker.

I staggered backward, dropping the lid, and threw up my arms to block the light, which seemed to be coming from the wall right behind the freezer.

Over the wind, I thought I heard something a split second before someone very powerful grabbed me around the neck from behind.

Chapter 47

The man had his massive forearm pressed so hard against my windpipe, I thought he would crush it. His head was jammed tight next to mine, so even over the wind, I could hear his high-pitched wheezing and grunting.

I am not a small man by any means, but Oates dragged me backward as if I were no bigger than a child as I choked and clawed for my weapon. He slashed my right wrist with a blade of some kind, and it went through flesh and tendon right down to the bone.

I moaned in pain. He grunted with pleasure and dragged me back another few feet.

“I don’t care who you are,” the Meat Man said in a weird nasal voice. “You don’t come into my house without an invitation.”

I felt him square his feet as if he meant to use that blade again. A deep, instinctive will to survive took over. So did all my years of training.

I dropped my chin hard against his forearm, dug in my heels, and drove myself back. It threw him off balance, and that gave me just enough leverage to twist left and drive my elbow hard into his solar plexus. It knocked the wind out of him, and his grip on me eased enough that I was able to break free of his hold.

The strobe was still going, and there was still a bright blob in my vision as I jumped away from him. I attempted to draw my pistol left-handed, but I tripped and landed on a paint can, breaking one of my ribs.

I heard Oates shouting at me over the roar of the wind outside, and I knew he was coming. I started scrambling away on all fours, thinking, Get some space. Get the gun. Shoot him.

Then I felt something slam into my calf and cut right through the meat of it.

The gaping wound was agony. I grabbed at it as I rolled over. I could see him standing above me in the pulsing light of the strobe, which revealed the bloody meat cleaver he held.

Oates was grunting and wheezing so hard it sounded like a pig with asthma. He seemed ecstatic as he raised the cleaver high over his head and started to swing it down at the center of mine.

A shot went off.

Oates jerked, screamed, and let go of the cleaver in midswing.

I heard it slam into something six inches behind my skull.

Another shot rang out.

The Meat Man jerked, stumbled, crashed against the freezer that held the severed heads of his victims, and then sprawled lifeless in the trash.

Peaks ran to me, grabbed my hand, and pressed it hard against my gaping calf wound, which was spurting blood. Then he tore off his starched white shirt, ripped it in two, and wrapped one piece tight around my calf and the other around my wrist. When he was done, he said, “Let’s get you help.”

“What about him?”

The wind outside had gone beyond the roar of crashing surf. It sounded like a freight train blazing at us down a tunnel.

“Jesus,” Peaks said.

“What the hell is that?”

“Twister! It’s coming right at us!”

Chapter 48

Three days after the run-in with Dwight Rivers, as I entered George Washington University Hospital, I thought about the Meat Man and the tornado. Even all these years later, I was still awestruck at the way it had passed within two hundred yards of me and Randall Peaks, tearing apart outbuildings but leaving the slaughterhouse untouched.

I spotted John Sampson coming down the hall toward me and waited for him.

“Mahoney tell you anything?” I said.

“Just to be here. Sixth floor.”

Since the night we found the head in Rivers’s bunker, we’d been kept completely in the dark about the case. All we knew was what we heard from the media reports, which were sketchy because Mahoney’s team was keeping a tight lid on the details.

The night before, I’d been watching a piece on the local news that featured the Shenandoah County sheriff and a Virginia State Police captain, both of whom were angry about being excluded from the Rivers investigation, when I got a text from Ned telling me to be at the hospital at nine the next morning.

Mahoney was waiting outside a hospital room for us. “His attorney’s in there.”

“Seeing things clearer?”

“Clear enough that you’re here, but do me a favor?”

“Anything.”

“Next time you get a self-destructing message from M, simultaneously squeeze the sleep button and the home button on your phone. It will take a screenshot and put it in your photos folder.”

“Really?”

“That’s what Rawlins says to do.”

Before I could tell Mahoney that I was grateful for his show of confidence, Sheila Cowles, Dwight Rivers’s attorney, came out of his room. A tall, skinny woman in her forties, Cowles adjusted her blazer and said, “I advised him not to speak to you until he’s feeling better. But he wants to talk to you so he can give you his version of events sooner rather than later.”

“What we wanted to hear,” Mahoney said, and the three of us followed her inside.

Rivers was in a hospital bed with the back raised slightly. Monitors chirped around him. An IV ran into his left arm. His right ankle and lower leg had been broken badly in the crash and that leg was in a cast. His face was swollen, but not enough to obscure the deep blue, intelligent eyes that scanned us as we entered.

Mahoney and Sampson held up their badges. Ned identified me as an FBI consultant.

Rivers studied me, then said, “You the one who saved my life?”