“ Seventy-five,” she countered.
“ A hundred, Pete. Make it one hundred.”
“ Wanta make up your mind?” Pete, a wizened, leathery-faced man, lightweight and short enough to pass as a jockey, stared first at Rychman and then at Jessica, his eyes twinkling with mischief. “Havin' a little contest, huh?”
“ Just put 'em up, Pete.” Rychman whipped out his Police Special, a standard. 38, and she pulled out hers, a near identical Smith amp; Wesson, but hers was a. 44-caliber.
“ Nice-looking weapon,” he complimented her.
“ Put up or shut up,” she replied, turned and without hesitation drilled the target at a hundred yards with successive rounds until she had emptied the chamber.
He was impressed and she knew it. “Your turn,” she said.
He took a casual stance and clicked off bullet after bullet as quickly as she had.
Pete had been about to drift out, but was held back by their display of shooting. “I want to see this,” he said, punching the buttons that returned the targets to their owners. As they approached, the two targets looked almost identical in every detail, every bullet hole. It was impossible to tell which of them was the better shot; both had several shots going through the same hole.
Pete was bug-eyed, stammering.
“ I knew you were good, Captain, but… wow… Young lady, you're quite a shot.”
“ Thanks, Pete.”
“ Come on, I'll drive you home,” Alan said.
“ That'd be some drive. Home's in Virginia.”
“ Your hotel, then. Pete,” he said, turning at the elevator door, “log these for us, will you? I need the points.”
When they got into the elevator and were going up, he said, “So, you relaxed a little now? Got some of that stress out?”
“ It feels great, getting a few rounds off. Relieves a lot of tension.”
He came across the elevator toward her and took her in his arms, kissing her passionately. She pushed him away.
“ Stop it, Captain, stop,” she said, and he backed off.
“ Sorry, I shouldn't have done that. Too much wine lingering in the brain, I suppose, but… well, dammit, you are-”
“ Captain Rychman, we… we are going to be working together, and I don't think it's wise to get involved in… in any other fashion until our work together is… is complete.”
She was feeling the effects of the wine, too, and finding it hard to put into words what her exact feelings and thoughts were. It seemed odd to her that a little alcohol gave her a sharp edge as a shooter, but that it dulled her emotional senses. She wasn't sure how she felt at having him kiss her. She wasn't sure if she had invited or allowed it, whether she enjoyed or disliked it. It had been a long time since she'd been touched-either physically or emotionally-by a “sane” man.
And the big, strong Alan Rychman, although very different in appearance, so reminded her of Otto. In his mannerisms, in the fact he was trying so hard to hide the little boy curled up deep within him.
“ I'd still like to take you to your hotel.”
“ Hotel, yes, hotel room, no.”
It had been nice having Alan Rychman escort her to the hotel, and he had no idea how much she had honestly wanted him to stay. She dreaded nights alone, especially away from her Virginia home in Quantico, the only place she felt completely and wholly safe. But even home had been invaded by her night visions and the shadows.
Jessica got into bed and sat up reading a recent report put together by one of the best psychological profiling teams at the FBI. The report served a double purpose: to induce a sound sleep, along with the pills given her by her shrink, and to bring her up-to-date on the most recent advice in dealing with killer couples. She knew that reading had lately become a way to avoid thinking about her continuing insomnia and what amounted to fear.
She concentrated on the cold, explicit, factual report in her lap, desperately trying to stay on her train of thought. It was well known in violent crime cases that there was often a dominant-subservient partnership involved, in which two killers formed a symbiotic bond of need and lust that led to mutual gratification through torture and murder. Killer couples weren't always a man/man team; quite often it was two women, and much more often, a man and a woman. Often one was so infatuated with the other that he felt a “spell” had been cast over him.
It wasn't a new notion; in fact, there were many such case histories available at the FBI Academy. She had read many of them while researching killer couples for a paper that had won her high marks. There were instances throughout history in which one person was so dominated by another that he or she would act out any unlawful or immoral act put to him or her.
The brutal Jack the Ripper murders in London in the fall of 1888 might have been the work of more than one man. In the early part of the twentieth century there were Leopold and Loeb, and since then there had been multiple examples of killer couples, making them almost commonplace. There were Bywaters and Thompson, Snyder and Gray, Brady and Hindley, Bonnie and Clyde, Fernandez and Beck. Killer couples, as in the Aileen Wournos lesbian killer case, were not as common as the lone-wolf serial-killer type, however they were on the rise along with cult murders.
If her time in the FBI had taught her anything, it was that a man and a woman, teamed for the murder of a third person, were one of the deadliest combinations known. Between them they had a powerful arsenal to bring to bear against their intended prey: cunning, deceit, sex appeal, physical strength, boldness, resolve and amorality. Few victims of such teams survived such an unholy assault.
Usually, such teams were only caught as the result of a sure erosion of trust between the two murderers, the erosion beginning after the first murder, because each partner was by then the sole witness to the other's crime. The relationship steadily crumbled under the weight of such responsibility. They would begin to suspect each other, begin to doubt and question every move, and would soon be unable to live from moment to moment without fearing one another.
“ You're afraid of your own shadow by now, aren't you? Aren't you?” she asked the empty room, trying to imagine the state of mind of the killer or killers at this time. Even if the Claw was an individual, she reasoned, he would eventually begin to fear himself as he might an accomplice, the way that Gerald Ray Sims feared his shadow self, Stainlype.
She had come to believe, since the death of Otto Boutine, with whom she'd shared so many intimacies, that everyone, herself included, had dark second selves within, doubles or dopplegangers, as the Germans called them. The trauma she had gone through had revealed to her the dangerous double held in check at all times by her more dominant personality. The dark double was a frightful being, a creature that truly disturbed its owner to her core, one that rattled sabers that turned into snakes that fed on the good and wishing-to-be-good self.
Jessica believed meeting the shadow within-not just glimpsing it from a distance-could cause a person either to become whole by facing down the murderous impulses that raged below the still volcano, or to become fragmented, as in the case of Gerald Ray Sims, and quite possibly Matthew Matisak. She had long been accustomed to the power of the dark side in killers, but had always denied it in herself, until she had been maimed by Matisak, until she had wanted vengeance against the maniac. She knew about her undesirable other self now, her less than pretty side, the shadow within. At times she now experienced something that felt like her two selves crossing, and it frightened her. The dark brute was, in its way, so much more powerful, as if negative energy drained off positive impulses at every turn.
It was what the shrinks called an intrapsychic “problem” that could evolve into a “conflict” if she didn't get control of it. It was one of the scars left her by Matisak, part of a legacy of fear and self-doubt created in her by the vampiristic madman. It was worse than any nightmare or replay of the events that brought her near death at his hands, because this creature was like Matisak, and yet it was her.