“Here it is, sonny,” the man whispered.
“I want to know where Lynn Kreiss and her friends went camping.”
Barry blinked in the semidarkness. Lynn Kreiss? Who was this fucker?
He’d been all over this with the cops. He had blown them off, of course.
Barry dark didn’t give cops of any variety the time of fuckin’ day, not after all the hassle they gave him with traffic stops and parking
tickets. He had also feigned total ignorance because Rip had made him swear not to tell anyone, but then that knife did move and there was a sudden cold draft on his skin as the man sliced open the back of Barry’s shirt from waist to collar. As Barry was trying to assimilate this development, the man took him by the hair again, hoisting him all the way up on his toes.
This time, Barry yelled with the pain. And then that huge knife pressed for an instant against the small of his back, its cold steel tugging once at his belt line, and then his jeans and underwear were sliding down his thighs. He looked down and saw the tip of that brilliant blade projecting from between his naked legs. He struggled, then stopped when he felt a stinging sensation on the bottom of his scrotum. He made a squeaking noise and went even higher on his toes, teetering almost out of balance, managing to stay upright only because of the man’s grip on his hair.
“Talk to me, wipe,” the man whispered again.
“Where did they go?” Barry was shaking all over now. This giant bastard was going to cut him in half!
“Okay! Okay} Jesus Christ, man! Don’t! Rip said they were going to break into someplace called Site R. I don’t know what that is.
Please, man!”
Barry felt the knife turning between his legs, the edge of the blade scraping against his inner thigh, and then it was withdrawn, its dull edge pressing pointedly into his genitals. The grip on his hair relaxed. As Barry sagged back down onto his feet, something tapped him behind his right ear and he sagged to the floor. He felt almost grateful as he slipped into unconsciousness, glad to be out of it. His last sensation was that of his bladder emptying.
The Virginia Tech campus police desk sergeant went through the report with Janet Carter. It was 11:30 P.M. and some patrol cop was making a big deal on the radio-circuit speaker about a fender bender.
“Okay,” the sergeant said.
“So the complainant is one Barry dark, third-year civil engineering student. Subject called nine one one at eighteen-fifty-five, semi hysterical Since he lived in the student housing area, we owned it. Responding officers said they found the subject naked on the floor, his clothes sliced up around him, a lump behind his ear and a puddle of piss on the carpet. Subject reported that a very large individual with no head assaulted him, cut his clothes off, threatened to kill him, and then coldcocked him. That’s about it.”
“Headless?” Carter asked, looking up from her notebook.
The sergeant shrugged, looking at his report.
“That’s what he said.
Subject showed evidence of being hit twice, and then the sleeping pill behind the ear. Can’t move his arms. Point contusions. I got Montgomery County hospital to fax their ER report over. States direct blunt-force trauma to the—let’s see—brachial nerve tie-in on both sides, causing complete but hopefully temporary paralysis to both arms. No sign of alcohol or drugs in his blood work. Hematoma behind the right ear but no skull fracture. Released after four hours of observation.”
He put the report down on the counter.
“We called you people because when the incident report went into our computer, there was a flag tying the subject’s name to an interview list on the disappearance of those three Tech kids.”
“Right. That was ours. This kid have red hair?”
The cop scanned the report.
“Yep.”
“I think I remember him. Snot mouth. Lots of attitude. Anything taken?”
“Apparently not. Right now, he’s on some legal drugs and can’t tell us anything—like why this might have happened, or what the headless horseman was after.”
Janet shook her head. She had just gone to bed when the call came from the Roanoke duty officer to get over to Tech campus security. She had asked if it could wait until morning, but the duty officer said Special Agent Talbot, the first agent they’d called, seemed to think Carter would want to get on it right away. Thank you, Larry Talbot, she thought.
“Headless,” she said again.
“Okay, that’s a new one.”
The sergeant shrugged again.
“College kids, what can I tell you.
They’ve got seriously active imaginations. This isn’t the weirdest one we’ve ever seen, believe me. You want a copy of this report?”
“Yes, please,” she said.
“Did the responding officers see any evidence of a burglary?”
“This all went down in the student ghetto. They checked the door lock, said it was easy pickings. It’s not in the report, but the guys said the apartment was a double-glove situation. If there was evidence in there, none of them wanted to touch it or catch it.”
She nodded again.
“Got it. I think I’ll go see Mr. dark. How do I get there?”
Fifteen minutes later, she was knocking on the door of dark’s apartment.
No one answered. She examined the door lock. The cops had been right: She could have taken it with a Q-Tip. She knocked again, then took off a shoe and used that to make enough racket to bring Barry dark to the
door finally. He was wearing an oversized Tech sweatshirt and flip flops
His eyes were bleary, and she noticed that his arms were not in the armholes of the sweatshirt. She identified herself. She had heard a door open on the other side of the noisome stairwell, but it closed quickly when the name FBI rang out. He stared at her for a long moment, blinking slowly, and then nudged the door open with his foot, letting her in. She left the door cracked and wrinkled her nose at the mess in the apartment.
dark sat down carefully on the only chair in the room and blinked up at her with dilated eyes. There was a single light on in the living room.
His arms hung down uselessly inside the sweatshirt. She did remember him. He had been truculent, almost hostile, during the initial round of interviews on the Kreiss case, which was how she thought of it now, after the meeting with Edwin Kreiss earlier that day. She looked at her watch;
yesterday, actually. She was pretty sure that either she or Talbot had reinterviewed this one. She definitely remembered the orange-red hair and the pug-nosed, freckled-face smirk that begged every passing life-form for a slap. She remained standing and got out her notebook.
“So,” she began.
“I’ve read the campus police’s incident report. What’d you leave out?”
“Leave out?” he asked blankly.
“Nothing. I told them what happened.
This huge bastard—” “Look, Mr. dark,” she interrupted.
“Let’s cut to the chase. Why was he here? What did he want? You grope somebody’s wife at Kroger’s, or what?”
He stared at her, trying for a hard look, but then his eyes drifted out of focus. Hell, she thought, closing the book. He’s zoning out. She wasn’t going to get anything useful here. She looked around. There was a pile of cut-up clothes next to the far wall. There was a dark brown smear on the wall, and some paper towels stuffed under the rug beneath it. The room was such a mess of clothes, papers, athletic gear, bicycles, and tattered books that Sherlock Holmes would not have been able to tell if anything was missing. She could see a desktop PC through the bedroom door, but the bedroom looked even scarier than this room. Her toes curled at the thought of even going into the kitchen, which she could smell from where she stood. She looked back at dark, who was staring dully at the floor.