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  “I can follow you—”

  “No. I need to do this alone. I’ll call you.” He hung up.

  There were a dozen possible explanations for Heather’s disappearance, if she had indeed disappeared, and he reviewed each one.

  Fallen and knocked herself out in the basement.

  Headed to the mountains, furious at his decision not to accept her proposal. It had taken a lot of courage for her to suggest the compromise. Maybe he’d been a fool.

  A weekend to Catalina Island with a friend.

  But she would have called someone. And she wouldn’t have missed a court appearance. Not Heather. Not ever.

  He took the next corner with a squeal of tires. Punched the menu button and scrolled through calls received until he found Lori’s call to him last night. Hit send.

  She answered on the third ring. “Hello, Dr. Clark. Nice of you to—”

  “Heather’s missing, Lori.”

  “Heather’s what?”

  “Missing. It’s Eve, it has to be. I hope this is a mistake.”

  “Calm down. Where are you now?”

  “I’m on my way to her house.”

  “You’re driving?”

  “She’s missing !”

  “Okay. I’ll meet you there.”

  “No. I need you there.”

  “I was headed out. It’s almost six.”

  “Stay there, Lori. Don’t move. I’ll call you in fifteen minutes.”

  He hung up and tried to push an image of Heather alone in the kitchen from his mind. The image was replaced with another, a dark form and Heather. In a root cellar. He dropped his open palm onto the steering wheel and cut through traffic, horn blaring.

  It took Daniel twelve minutes to reach the house. He bounded up the sidewalk, found the door locked, and retrieved a key from under the ficus plant to the door’s right.

  The lights in the house were off. All of them.

  “Heather?”

  His voice sounded hollow.

  “Heather! Answer me!”

  Daniel ran through a vacant living room, up the stairs to the master bedroom. He yelled her name into each room, checking under and behind furniture. In the bathroom, back down to the main floor, in the garage.

  Her white BMW was parked in one of two bays.

  Muttering a curse, he ran for the kitchen and checked the answering machine. Nine new messages. The first from Raquel at seven thirty this morning.

  He scrolled through the caller ID numbers, found Raquel’s cell, and called it.

  She answered in a chipper voice. “Hey, girl. Where you been hiding out?”

  “It’s Daniel, Raquel.”

  “Daniel? Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “I called you. Listen to me: I need to know when you talked to Heather last.”

  “What do you mean? Yesterday, we had a drink after work.”

  “What time?”

  “What’s wrong, Daniel? You’re saying she’s not there?”

  “No, she’s not. What time did you leave her?”

  “At about six. I called and talked to her at ten.”

  So Heather had made it home.

  Raquel’s voice now betrayed concern. “What’s happening?”

  He clicked the phone off and set it on the counter. For a few moments he couldn’t move. Heather had been taken.

  Or was she doing this to get his attention? Could it be? It wasn’t like her. But there were other possibilities. This wasn’t Eve, couldn’t be. For starters, he always took his victims as the moon was waning, never approaching a full moon.

  Eve had been in Colorado a week ago and would have had to ditch his car, find another, work his way unseen into California—all things that took time.

  Then there was Heather, who’d never been associated with any religion. Eve had only taken women with some religious affiliation thus far.

  For that matter, Eve was far too careful to waltz into a house and abduct Heather simply to send a message to Daniel.

  The basement.

  Daniel hit the light switch in the stairwell and took the steps two at a time. Storage boxes were stacked up along one wall of the unfinished game room. The door to the back room was closed.

  He hurried across the concrete floor, twisted the brass handle, and pushed the door open.

  The room was dark. He felt the wall for a switch. Found one. Flipped it up. Fluorescent bulbs stuttered to life.

  At first the illuminated scene confused him. The walls were covered with information tied to Eve. And him. It was almost as if the killer himself had set up the room. He stared in stunned silence.

  But the writing was Heather’s. The computer, hers. Everything about the room, hers. Heather had been stalking the case.

  Stalking Eve.

  Daniel walked forward, legs numb. All this time she’d been hounding not only Daniel but the killer. Eve. Which said more about Heather than he could possibly have guessed.

  The ND effect hit him with a fresh wash of dread as he stood in the middle of the floor. And this time the form at the end of his bed loomed over him.

  I see you, Daniel . . .

  He shook but refused to fall.

  When the fear passed moments later, leaving only chills, he was trembling but still upright, still staring back at the newspaper clippings, still defying the fear. In so many ways Heather had defied them all. For all he knew, she’d gone after Eve on her own. Maybe she hadn’t been taken by him; she was taking him.

  Daniel turned around, scanning the walls. A purple stain on the floor pulled his eyes downward. A broken wine glass on its side. A small lump of white next to it.

  It was a sock.

  He’d seen a sock identical to this one seven times in his life. Each time in a clear plastic bag. Each time the sock had been used to knock out a victim.

  Eve had taken his seventeenth Eve.

  The fear came again, triggered by the sock . . . by the knowledge that Heather was gone, had been gone for almost twenty-four hours.

  Now he did drop, hard, onto one knee. He pushed himself up, fighting the waves of horror with a clenched jaw. She was in Eve’s possession because of him.

  Daniel managed to get his phone out and hit send again. Lori picked up on the first ring.

  “Did you find her?”

  His voice trembled. “Eve took her.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Stay there, Lori,” he said.

  “You’re scaring me, Daniel.”

  “Stay there, I’m coming to you.”

  “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “I know what to do, Lori. I know how to find her.”

  MAN OF SORROW:

  JOURNEY INTO DARKNESS

  by Anne Rudolph

  Crime Today magazine is pleased to present the fifth installment of Anne Rudolph’s narrative account of the killer now known as Alex Price, presented in nine monthly installments.

  1990

  NINETEEN NINETY marked the beginning of the end of Alex Price’s entry into any kind of normal social existence.

  Having accepted and then dismissed their true identities, both Alex and Jessica pursued their new lives with purpose and enthusiasm through the winter of 1989 and early 1990. Jessica’s varied schedule at the restaurant allowed her to keep unpredictable hours, some of which she began to spend with friends she made at work. She started to talk more openly with men, not about her past but about her life and dreams, both of which were evolving with increased freedom.

  She rarely spoke about her brother outside of his life as a seminary student at St. Peter’s. Although none of them had met Alex, all of her new friends knew that Jessica Trane’s brother was becoming a priest and doing it better than most.

  The environment at home began to wear on Jessica, but not enough to make her push for any change. Alex still slept on the couch and she still slept on the mattress, not for her sake, but for his. At h
er request he’d tried to fall asleep in his own room on a couple of occasions, but he said he just couldn’t sleep in there.

  She suggested that they set up two beds in her bedroom, just to get the mattress out of the living room, but he recoiled at the idea of invading her personal space. They simply could not sleep together in the same bedroom now that they were adults. It wasn’t right.

  The only solution was the living room, and all things considered, Jessica didn’t mind too much, except when Alex’s nightmares woke her. If anything, they had become worse. He woke every night, screaming into the duct tape that covered his mouth, then retreated into his private room.

  Inside his room, he hung a black blanket from the ceiling so that even when he opened the door, the room could not be seen. When asked if she ever wondered what he was doing in his room all that time, she only shrugged. “He was weird that way, but I understood it. Private space was very important to him. He’d grown up in a house without any, and now he wanted to have his own place of safety.”

  It wasn’t that Alex didn’t feel safe with her, she said. It was that most of his struggles had nothing to do with her and, as he said, they all had to fight their demons on their own.

  Alex continued to excel as a student, now in his third year, and grew bolder with his verbal arguments and even bolder in his papers. Studying to become a priest had become his purpose for living, the one thing that gave him meaning.

  He would attend class in the morning, return to sleep for an hour or so in the afternoon, and walk to the restaurant where he still worked a three-hour shift as a dishwasher. Returning home by four, he would then labor over his controversial theology and philosophy papers till Jessica came home, often late at night. After telling her about his day and hearing about hers, he would prepare himself for a fitful sleep, which would usually end in a nightmare around two or three in the morning. For weeks on end, Alex lived through the same cycle.

  In April of 1990 that cycle came to an abrupt end. He presented a paper he wrote titled “God,” in which he argued that God, as defined by most of the major world religions, including Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, might be understood as nonexistent. Catholicism, he argued, might fare better as a religion that held the belief that God was an extension of man.

  “His argument would have been dismissed as philosophical banter if he hadn’t argued the case with so much conviction,” his former theology professor Herman Stiller said. “He had a reputation as someone who thought outside of the box, but reading the paper I wasn’t certain Trane didn’t believe what he’d written.”

  When confronted, Alex at first defended his position but then backed down. The matter was dismissed and he continued with his studies.

  Up to this point, Alex had been seen by other students as a strong critical thinker with a healthy dose of cynicism. But he’d never proposed doctrine that would be seen as heresy by the Catholic church until he wrote the paper on God’s nonexistence. When word of the paper leaked to a few of the students, their attitude toward Alex began to shift.

  “I have seen the face of evil, and if not for the grace of God himself, I would have cut my own throat so as not to face it ever again.”

  —Father Robert Seymour Dance of the Dead

  Meanwhile, Alex was having trouble hiding his own true feelings about religion and faith. In truth, he didn’t believe in God, not the way the rest of the students did. His was a far more subjective faith—a strange brew of secularism that used the term God as if it were a label for anything unexplainable.

  “I did notice that some of the things he said sounded a bit too familiar,” Jessica confessed. Alex used terms like demon-greased souls and babies for Lucy, both terms that Alice had used to describe sinners. But none of this concerned Jessica because, as she put it, “He wasn’t adopting Alice’s ways. I thought he was rejecting them and anything to do with false religion.”

  Indeed, Alex appeared to be taking the same path many children take once they find their freedom. Having been indoctrinated with certain beliefs as children (such as the belief in God’s existence), they enter the world and find those beliefs challenged, often turning against them.

  In Alex’s case, he had been both indoctrinated and abused by Alice’s religion. Although he seemed to think at first that Christianity was the superior religion, he couldn’t dismiss his resentment of religion in general. In fact, the more he studied doctrine, the more he turned against all religion and faith. Like the proverbial frog in a pot of hot religious stew, his faith began to die. And it was only a matter of time before his beliefs, or lack thereof, became evident to others.

  What started as a few isolated comments to students quickly spun out of control. When presented with clear questions of faith in open discussion, he demurred with a clever and often confusing answer.

  Amazingly, Alex didn’t appear to see the case building against him. In March he turned in another paper, this time systematically dismantling the supernatural in all its forms without actually claiming that there was no supernatural reality. “The arguments were all there,” Herman Stiller recalls, “so the fact that Trane drew no definitive conclusion was immaterial. The conclusions were implied.”

  For a week, Alex heard nothing, and then he was called into the dean’s office. Present were his professor, Herman Stiller; the academic dean, Bradley Ossburger; and his priest, Father Robert Seymour. For an hour Father Seymour carefully quizzed the bright student about his personal faith, and try as he did, Alex could not cover up his profound doubts about the validity of any faith.

  “It was the way he looked at me as much as what he said that bothered me,” Father Seymour said. “His glare chilled me to the bone. He frequently substituted words. All-seeing One instead of Almighty God. Kingdom of light for Kingdom of God.”

  A simple question near the end brought the interview into clear focus. “As a priest, would you swear your allegiance to Jesus Christ, Son of the Most High God?” Father Seymour asked.

  Alex shifted uncomfortably in his seat and gave his answer: “That depends.”

  “We need a yes or a no,” the dean pressed.

  “You do, do you?” came the response. “And why do you suppose you, who by your own admission are mere mortal men, can know more than I?”

  Ossburger wouldn’t let the question go. “A yes or a no.”

  Alex leaned forward and stared the man down, eyes angry. “Then no.” He leaned back, clearly agitated. “How can you sit here and demand that I offer conclusions when I haven’t even finished my studies? I’ll give you an answer when I’ve studied all the evidence.”

  The dean had heard enough. After excusing Alex for a few minutes, they called him in and gave him the news: they were excusing him from studies at St. Peter’s, effective immediately.

  Alex stood in shock. He demanded they reconsider, but the decision was final. In a diatribe that went on for ten minutes, Alex Trane finally came clean, telling the panel exactly what he thought about their so-called religion. The Catholic church was a farce, because the nuns and the priests served a god who did not exist, in a fanciful battle against a Satan they’d made up as an excuse for their own pitiful, whore mongering souls. Which, by the way, didn’t exist either. The only reason none of them would rot in hell was because all of them would simply rot in a grave.

  Trane’s true beliefs, delivered in the colorful argumentative style he’d become known for, had finally betrayed him. Any hope of serving humanity as a man of the cloth was decidedly vanquished in those ten minutes.

  Father Robert Seymour walked Alex to his car and expressed concern for his spiritual health. They talked frankly, leaving the father with little doubt that the board had made the correct decision. Alex Trane’s issues were disturbing, to say the least.

  Alex tried to talk his way back into St. Peter’s three days later by placing a deeply remorseful call to the academic dean, but Ossburger politely declined and suggested Trane try his mind at science or psychology, both subjects
in which he’d demonstrated repeated brilliance.

  But Alex didn’t want to be a “rocket scientist or a head shrink,” as Jessica put it. He wanted to be a priest, and they had taken that away from him. “He was really crushed. Not just upset or angry. I mean completely crushed. The one thing he thought he could do to make everything better was gone.”

  After the initial anger at being kicked out of St. Peter’s passed, Alex redirected his frustration from the staff and students at the school to himself. Without the distraction of classes to fill his days, Alex took to moping around the apartment, wondering where he’d gone wrong. “Pitiful,” Jessica said. “I felt so sorry for him.”

  But they were right to dismiss him, she said, although she never admitted this to him. Alex and she talked about seminary many times late into the night, and it became clear to her that Alex would not have made a good priest. He really didn’t believe in God or Satan or anything remotely similar to God or Satan. How could anyone serve a God he didn’t believe in?

  Alex’s answer was simple: “You don’t serve God. You serve people who think they believe in God, but when push comes to shove, really don’t. People just like me. I am the perfect priest because I am everybody.”

  His anger gone and his self-confidence crushed, Alex slowly sank into a deep depression. He was searching for meaning. For substance. Even for love. And he shared his thoughts with his sister in a monotone that broke her heart.

  There was now only one thing in his life that had any meaning, he often told Jessica. “You. I love only you.”

  “You don’t mean that,” she would say. “What about yourself?”

  “I hate myself.”

  And Alex Price was speaking the truth.

  NINETEEN

  DANIEL WAS TWO BLOCKS from the FBI field office on Wilshire when the next bout of near-death effects swallowed his mind.

  He sucked at the car’s stale air as darkness clouded his vision. But he couldn’t black out. The office was only a minute away. Hunting down Eve was now beyond his own need for accomplishment or to rid society of an evil it had spawned. Heather’s life was now in his hands.