Her feet hit the ground, but her legs were weak, and buckled beneath her. She landed on her battered knees, pain spiking through her. Awkwardly she got her feet under her and tried to push forward, to run before she was fully upright.
The world around her tilted one way, then another. She stumbled forward, fell, tried again, stumbled, fell. The ground rushed up at her, hard-packed dirt and clumps of dead weeds that had faded to beige. She put her arms out to break her fall, and tiny stones dug into the heels of her hands.
It was a nightmare, and the worst part of it was that she knew she was wide-awake.
As she tried to rise again, hands caught her from behind, pulled her up, and held her. Carey tried to kick, tried to struggle. She didn’t have the strength to fight him or pull free of him. Even if she had, she couldn’t outrun him. And even if she could have outrun him, there was nowhere to run. All around was nothing but countryside and clumps of bare trees and fields of dry cornstalks.
Fear shook her like a rag doll. She tried not to cry out loud, knowing her abductor would likely find her fear exciting, arousing. But tears filled her eyes and coursed down her face, and she couldn’t help it.
“You don’t have to run,” the soft voice said. “I would never hurt you, Carey. You’re my angel.”
He turned her toward him and held her at arm’s length.
“Oh, my God,” Carey whispered, terror rising in her throat to choke her.
The first thing that struck her was the gaping wound in the hollow of his cheek where she had stabbed him with the shard of plastic. Blood poured from it, ran down over his jaw, down his throat, onto the brown sweater he wore.
The second thing that struck her was the makeup-the painted lips, the overdone eye shadow, the smudged mascara, the blush on his cheekbones. The stubble of his beard was dark beneath the caked foundation makeup.
He reached up with one hand and pulled the blond wig from his head.
“It’s me,” he said as if he were an old, dear friend. “Karl. Karl Dahl.”
54
CAREY STARED AT Karl Dahl-the bald head, bruised and scabbed over on one side where he appeared to have been struck with something; the garish makeup; the jagged edge of the bleeding wound in his cheek, moving in and out as he breathed through his mouth. The whites of his eyes were bloodred. He was dressed as a woman, in a calf-length brown skirt and low-heeled boots.
Behind him, maybe twenty yards behind him and off to his right, was a huge old burned-out brick building. Two stories high, charred black, it looked to have been abandoned for a very long time. All the windows were dark, gaping holes. She could see sunlight inside where sections of the roof had either burned through or fallen in.
Karl Dahl meant to drag her inside that building. Carey pulled back, but he held fast to her arm, his grip tight and hard.
“You don’t need to be afraid of me, Carey,” he said calmly.
The way he said her name was like the stroke of a lover’s hand. She didn’t like it.
“You should call me Judge Moore, Karl,” she said, her voice almost unrecognizable to her. A dry, hoarse rasping from her aching throat. Her larynx felt the size of a fist. She had wanted to sound strong and calm as she tried to establish herself in his mind as a person to be respected.
He smiled and shook his head. “No. We’re past that. You’re the only one’s been kind to me. You understand them things I did before wasn’t bad, really.”
Karl Dahl’s criminal record showed arrests and time served for a variety of crimes-criminal trespass, window peeping, indecent exposure, breaking and entering. Nothing violent. No kidnap, no assault, no rape, no-
But he was on trial for the brutal murders of a woman and two children from a family who had been nothing but kind to him.
Chris Logan’s words from Friday afternoon came back to her.
“It’s an escalating pattern of behavior. That’s what these pervs do. They start small and work their way up.”
He was right. Carey knew as much about the Karl Dahls of the world as Logan did. The Boston Strangler had started out as a Peeping Tom.
As a prosecutor she had been able to knit a defendant’s criminal life together that way when preparing for trial, bridging one step up to the next on the criminal evolutionary scale. And she would try like hell to get it all past the presiding judge.
Now she was the judge. And as a judge, she had to adhere to a different standard.
“I don’t know very much about you, Karl,” she said, her breath hitching in her throat.
She looked past his left shoulder and saw the car. Anka’s car. Panic stabbed through her. She had spoken to Anka as the girl had gone out Saturday night to get a movie. Lost in thought, she hadn’t paid any attention when Anka came home. She vaguely remembered hearing the kitchen door open. In her peripheral vision she had been aware of a blonde walking through the hall and going up the stairs.
That the blonde might have been Karl Dahl made her skin crawl. How long had he been in her home? What had he done there while she had been in the den, discovering the depravity to which her husband had lowered himself? Had he been upstairs when she had come up and fallen onto her bed without bothering to undress? Had he been in her room? Had he been in Lucy’s room?
For the briefest of seconds, the crime scene photo of the Haas foster children flashed through her head.
“Oh, me,” Karl said shyly, “there ain’t that much to know.”
“Sure there is,” Carey said, her voice shaking. “Everybody has a story.”
“I’d sure like to hear yours,” he said. “Let’s go inside. I have everything ready for you.”
“What does that mean, Karl?”
He smiled a secretive smile made sinister by the clownish makeup and the still-bleeding gash in his face, which he seemed not to notice. “You’ll see soon enough.”
He started toward the building, pulling Carey in tow. Everything in her told her not to go into the building with him. At least if they were outside, someone might drive by, and she would have a chance to escape. The odds of that happening diminished with every step he dragged her.
“C-can’t we just s-stay out here for a while, Karl?” she asked. “I’m not f-feeling very well. Could I just have some fresh air for a while?”
It wasn’t a lie. Even as she said it, she felt her stomach twist, and she dropped down on her knees again and vomited in the weeds. Karl held on to her hand like a lover would to comfort her.
“You need to lie down is what you need,” he said gently, squatting down beside her. “You’ve just got yourself all stirred up.”
“N-no. Could we please j-just sit here for a minute? I’m very dizzy.”
“That’s from that person beating on you in that parking garage, isn’t it?” he asked. “On account of me. I seen all about it on television this morning. And I read about it in the Star Tribune. I like a good newspaper. You get more of the story.
“I’m sorry for what that man done to you,” he said. “I seen that story, and I knew right then you was my angel.”
Carey shivered as she sat back on her heels. “I’m not an angel, Karl. I’m a person. I have a family. I h-have a l-little girl. I’m a judge. I was just doing my job.”
“You’re cold,” Karl declared. “Let’s go inside. I’ve made a fire.”
He hooked an arm under hers and lifted her with him when he stood.
“What is this place?” she asked. “Where are we?”
“My secret place. I’ve stayed here many times, and no one ever bothers me.”
“I mean the building,” Carey said, trying not to dwell on what he had just told her. “Where are we? What did it used to be?”
“It used to be a munitions dump back in the war times. WW Two. There’s still some parts of shells and stuff in there, but don’t nobody seem to care about it. You think they would take it away what with the terrorists and all. You know one of them Nine-Eleven boys was learning to fly a jet airplane right here in Minneapolis.”