He knew the lay of the land and the customs here, but old Earl was no more related to him than was the President of the United States. But his grandfather had lived in this old house built of stone to last the ages, and the Redbirds had bought the place, Grandfather first deeding it over to Matisak's parents in the final, feeble moments of his life, as a favor to his son and daughter-in-law, whose idea it was to sell the worthless place. Matisak recalled how his mother, gaining access to the property at last, had talked of better days for them at last. Now, for the Redbirds, their transaction with the Matisak family had come full circle.
Soon he'd come full circle with Jessica Coran too, soon after she received his latest poem to her, after news of how the old Earl and Hillary had ended their days together on this hardscrabble plot of land. She'd come to have a firsthand look at his handiwork; she'd have to. She wouldn't be able to keep away, not even if she wanted to. He was as much in her blood as she was in his, he reasoned.
And when she came… he'd be waiting…
He was angry with Jessica for having left Oklahoma in the first place, for having given up hope of their reunion. Where was she now? Why hadn't she stayed in Oklahoma to hunt him down as she'd promised in the press? Where was the bitch whose blood he most savored now? He'd once again been wronged by the one person whose blood he most wished to devour, and she called him evil, her with her torturing innocence. Always filled with that sickening sense of righteous indignation; the self-righteousness of the pampered and pedigreed, as if she were completely innocent, as if she had nothing whatever to do with his obsessions and his blood lust.
Still, he must admit that she didn't know evil quite so intimately as he'd like her to know it.
But by the god of all that was perverse, she had excited and inspired him. She'd been the catalyst to stimulate him to new heights, since his first contact with her, his first all-too-brief taste of her blood, when she'd first hunted him across the Midwest and throughout all of Chicago. She was the reason Dr. Arnold had to die; she was the reason he himself had to escape, so that he might see her again, touch her again, listen to that melodic voice once more, but this time without cameras or recorders or bars or six-inch-thick glass partitions between them.
He now dipped his index finger into the last jar of crimson fluid extracted from Hillary, and in her blood he wrote across a smooth #2 pinewood board he'd nailed to the joists beside Earl and Hillary his latest sentiment toward Dr. Jessica Coran. He started by drawing a scarlet T, the first line reading:
Time to renew, Jess
Soon he was entranced by his own poetic vision, the words and blood flowing in tandem, as if inspired, his finished product reading:
Time to renew, Jess
All devotion to you, Jess…
Come to renew
Our love which grows here
With each drop that flows here…
Then he was sated for the moment, sipping on more of Earl's blood from one of the mason jars, when he heard a dull rumble-against-stone noise coming from outside, either a faraway plane or a car coming along the hardscrabble surface of the dirt road. A peek out into the bright day hurt his eyes, but he made out the black and white trappings of the Res Police car fast approaching.
Matisak grinned in the darkness.
He had the res cops in his sights now the entire way. They pulled to within six yards of Hillary's kitchen window, one of them shouting from the car while the other hammered the horn. When they got no response, each man got out, both looking trim and muscular in their green serge uniforms.
One went for the house, the other coming directly toward the barn and other outhouses.
Matisak's grin widened. He felt like the ghoul beneath the bridge, prepared to pounce, his eyes wandering back toward the carnage over his left shoulder where the two remaining tenterhooks and halters begged for weight. He raised the blood-caked spade he'd used on Earl.
His single worry was where to find more mason jars and an additional cooler.
10
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.
Quantico, Virginia
She was damned if she did, damned if she didn't, and she bloody well knew it. Even getting on the Lear jet provided her by Paul Zanek and the Air Force at Quantico, she knew there was no hope for it.
If Kim had said no to Paul and the New Orleans assignment, she would have handed Chief Zanek the first official stake to drive into her heart-or the heart of her fledgling division. Insubordination still weighed heavily at the unofficial “court-martials” carried out all the time at Quantico. It would take more than a disagreement about assignments to do her completely in, but it would be a start, a first blot on the record to inevitably lead to another and another until the “evidence” indicted her.
And if not New Orleans, he'd find another “bazaar” for her to be banished to. Still, in accepting the dual challenge brought her by Commissioner Richard Stephens and the presence of Jessica Coran, Kim knew that she could do far worse damage in the Big Easy than she might have in refusing an assignment offered her by a superior of Zanek's rank.
Suppose the psychic trail was now too cold to follow. Suppose the killer had moved from the area. Had been arrested on other charges and was serving time far from the city sprawled crescentlike along the winding Mississippi. Suppose she could get nowhere on the case. Suppose this hardly heartless monster went into some den to hibernate. Say, an asylum in Louisiana's up-country area. She could come up pitifully wanting, unable to detect useful clues or any information whatsoever, and such a poor showing, leaving everyone dissatisfied, would only bring unwanted attention and notoriety to her department, and from this all would crumble. The FBI funding would dry up and they could all pack their bags; the powers-that-be were already paranoid over knowledge of the FBI's research into the use of psychic detection falling into the wrong hands. Either way, Paul Zanek might actually have manipulated her into a corner that she didn't deserve to be in. God forbid the newshounds got wind of the story; if so, her work and her place within the safe confines of Quantico would be history, especially if she wound up on 20/20, 48 Hours or, God certainly forbid, Hard Copy.
She tried to get comfortable in her seat, the roar of the engine like a banshee wail, a warning, an unclear yet persistent premonition of tumult yet to be sensed, seen, heard, swallowed and felt internally as well as externally-to be fully realized both physically and psychically.
She settled back as the plane began its desperate race to meet the wind; lifting, it took on the weightlessness that always made her a bit disoriented yet exhilarated, not unlike the first pangs of fear on a descending roller coaster. She rested her eyes and felt foolish to be the only passenger aboard the six-seater, momentarily wondering about the cost in jet fuel and manpower to the taxpaying public she secretly served.
Soon cruising at thirty thousand feet toward home, she wondered what she would find in New Orleans. She'd been away from the Mardi Gras capital of the world for almost eight years now, and nothing changed faster during one's absence than a major American city. “You can't go home again” was a very real and poignant experience for most people, but for her it meant little, for going home was the last thing she wanted to do. She'd been remarkably successful at closing out that part of her life, hiding her Cajijn blood and even her childhood from herself; you only remember what you want to remember. In fact, her childhood was little more than a big, dark screen with an occasional gray image wafting across from a broken-down projector. She supposed that a shrink-someone other than herself-might help her to deal with that inner wasteland of the soul that she'd battled to ignore her entire adult life, but she really didn't want to go home. Her conscious mind had successfully and thoroughly blocked out her subconscious mind on this score, the two in a quiet, even contest, holding one another at bay, grappling in that inner cosmos, each with a headlock on the other and no way to continue the combat. But going back could change all that, and she had reason to fear the outcome, knowing that some awful creature from the dark past lurked there, waiting for her return.