Novels 11 Adam Read online

  She floated home at ten thirty, trying to convince herself that it was way too soon to think she was in love. She failed miserably.

  When Jessica got home, she found Alex seated on the couch with his head in his hands, crying. He knew? She felt a surge of anger that he would stick his nose in her relationship, but when she asked him what was wrong he offered an unexpected explanation.

  He’d been fired.

  Alex told all. He’d overslept and shown up for work late eight or nine times in the last two months, ever since he’d started staying up during the night. He’d begged, but the manager had refused, suggesting that he was a freak.

  Jessica had encouraged him to get a better job many times—he certainly had the mind for a higher pay scale. Each time, Alex refused, citing his fear of people and new environments. His personal space was critical to him, and the slightest change bothered him—a pillow out of place or a dirty glass in the living room, none of it escaped his attention. The prospect of finding a new job in a new place working with new people was more than he could handle.

  Once again, Jessica held her brother as he wept. “It wasn’t just losing a job,” she said. “Everything that made him normal was being stripped from him. And he was terrified.”

  She loved the broken boy in her arms with a compassion that would defy most human beings’ understanding. But most human beings had not suffered the abuse she and Alex had.

  Most human beings did not have a brother who had repeatedly stepped in to spare them from even more abuse.

  Most human beings did not have a brother who had helped them escape captivity, learn to face the world, and grab hold of a new life.

  Alex had his problems, but somehow they would get through this and find a way to fully recover.

  For the next several days, Alex settled into a frightful self-loathing that triggered Jessica’s guilt and made it difficult for her to pursue her budding relationship with Bruce. How could she go around with a light step and a sailing heart when Alex was at home, barely able to get up off the couch?

  She mentioned Alex’s depression to Bruce, and her new boyfriend suggested a therapist. Amazingly, Alex agreed to see the man.

  No records of Alex Trane’s twenty-seven appointments with Dr. Chuck Alexander survived the fire that swept through his office four years later. Dr. Alexander himself died in a boating accident while on vacation in Florida last year. The wealth of information that might have been gleaned from this source is lost to the field of behavioral science. Only Jessica’s very limited memory of what Alex told her during a few conversations remains.

  “For the most part he refused to talk about his sessions with the therapist,” she said. “But as long as it was working—and I really thought he might have killed himself without them—I was okay.”

  Two things stand out in her memory besides the belief that the sessions were helping Alex. The first was that Alex came home from one of his first appointments mumbling about maybe joining the FBI and becoming a behavioral psychologist. He could run circles around them all.

  The second, which came several months later, just before his breakdown, was that he’d been wrong about there not being a god. There was a god, and his name was Psychology.

  It soon became clear to Alex that his therapy sessions weren’t the solution to his deepening depression. If anything, they only convinced him that there was no hope. He’d tried religion, going so far as to embrace priesthood. He’d thrown himself into academia and excelled as a student. He’d exposed himself, at least in part, to a therapist. If none of these could give him release, what could?

  Beginning in the fall of 1991, Jessica saw a subtle but unnerving change in her brother. For the first time since they’d escaped their captivity eleven years earlier, he started to withdraw from her.

  Even through his depression he’d always shared his struggles with Jessica. He depended on her for comfort. Since childhood they relied on their strong bond of friendship to deal with the hurdles they faced. And above all, they always protected each other, with Alex taking the lead. Perhaps his withdrawal from Jessica was an attempt on his part to protect her from the greatest obstacle they would yet face.

  Himself.

  Apart from his biweekly therapy sessions and an occasional trip out to the library or for food, Alex remained mostly cooped up in the apartment, sinking deeper and deeper into himself. His skin paled and he lost weight.

  Jessica, meanwhile, was finding greater and greater freedom in the company of her boyfriend, Bruce Halstron, whom Alex still knew nothing about.

  The siblings’ lives were drifting apart, and Jessica didn’t know what she could do to stop it. “I thought it was a good thing. Not his depression, but the fact that we didn’t have to talk about it. My happiness only made him frustrated. The less we saw each other, the better for both of us.”

  One day in early November, Alex came out of his room as Jessica was preparing for work. He walked into her bedroom, something he never did, and stared at her as she pinned her hair up. After a moment she asked him what was wrong.

  “I think I know how to fix this,” he said.

  Mentally dismissing the claim as yet one more in a long string of failed attempts to find light in his dark world, she just nodded and told him that was good, because she didn’t know how much more of it she could stand.

  He stared at her a long time, then slowly turned around and headed back toward his room. She heard the door close and the dead bolt he’d installed snap shut. Feeling guilty that she’d sent him away so flippantly, Jessica considered knocking on the door to apologize, but out of respect for their privacy rules, she decided against it.

  She left the apartment and walked to Denny’s, putting the matter out of her mind.

  When Jessica returned that night after a quick dinner with Bruce, she found a very different Alex waiting up for her. The one who had haunted their apartment like a walking dead man over the past few months was nowhere to be found. Alex was sitting at the kitchen table, eating calmly and reading a book on the FBI. Looking up, he asked her how work was. “Fine,” she told him. He smiled gently and replied without effort, “That’s good. That’s good.” Then he bit into the sandwich he was eating, flipped the page, and continued reading.

  Jessica asked him if he was okay, and he responded with assurance.

  “Yes, Jessica. I’m fine. And you know I’ll never let them hurt you.”

  Encouraged by his confidence, Jessica boldly put her hand on his shoulder and told him that she appreciated his concern, but she really wasn’t sure she wanted him to protect her from anyone. She even considered telling Alex about Bruce, but she couldn’t. Not yet.

  That night they talked about sensible things for the first time in weeks. “He was tired, and he looked like he’d crawled out of a casket, but he was acting like a perfect gentleman, soft-spoken and confident. When I asked him why he was in such a good mood, he just shrugged and said it was about time.”

  He told her that his book was coming along nicely. With any luck he could get Man of Sorrow published and make up for her shouldering all the bills these last few months.

  But the most surprising change in Alex came at midnight, when he said he was going to try to sleep. Jessica watched him tape his mouth, wished him a good night’s sleep, and retired to her bedroom.

  She found him sleeping on the couch the next morning.

  That night Alex went a step further. He not only slept the night through, but he did it in his bedroom.

  Jessica’s hopes soared over the next week. The nightmares were still visiting her brother each night, but not with enough intensity to wake him, he said. He still spent most of his time in his room, writing and brooding, but he emerged each evening and talked to her, almost like a father figure, calmly, with purpose and understanding.

  Alex was a new person, and Jessica told Bruce the good news at the end of that first week. Her brother’s depression was gone. She hadn’t told Bruce about the Browns or any d
etails about Alex’s dysfunctional life, but he knew that her brother’s depression weighed heavily on her, and Bruce shared her excitement.

  She headed home early that day, determined to finally tell Alex all about her relationship with Bruce.

  They were thinking of getting mar ried—it was high time her brother knew the truth.

  Nothing could have prepared Jessica for the sight that greeted her when she opened the door to apartment 161 at the Holly Street Apartments on November 23, 1991.

  TWENTY-TWO

  2008

  HEATHER SAT ON THE chair, trembling as much from the cold as from fear. The smell of earth leaked through the bag he’d placed over her head. Sweat dripped past her temple, mingled with mucus from her nostrils, and wet the corners of her mouth, a milky, salty mix that oddly enough helped her feel alive.

  Her hands were bound behind her, and she could feel the chair’s cool metal along her arms. Her feet were tied together, then somehow looped to the chair legs, she thought. Her mouth, taped.

  Eve hadn’t spoken to her. She’d felt his breath and smelled his musky skin, neither of which was offensive. But she hadn’t seen him and she hadn’t heard his voice. She wasn’t even sure he was in the room with her.

  It had all happened so quickly, her taking. So uneventful, really. No real struggle, no violence, no threatening words.

  She’d come home after having drinks with Raquel, checked the answering machine for a message from Daniel, then busied herself with a few odd tasks around the house before taking a glass of wine to the basement as she often did.

  To the Eve room.

  She’d stepped in, flipped the switch on, and was standing under the blinking lights when Eve reached around from behind her and smothered her nose and mouth with the sock. A strong medicinal odor flooded her nasal cavity, and she dropped the wineglass.

  She had grabbed at his hand, but before true fear could grip her mind, she passed out.

  The true fear came sometime later, when she woke up bound and gagged with tape in the back of his vehicle. She knew she’d been taken by Eve, and for the first few hours she’d lain still, telling herself to stay calm. She could beat him. She would beat him. Nothing she could do or say now would help, but at some point an opportunity would present itself—it always did. Always. And when it did, she would be ready.

  But the thin veneer of courage wore ever thinner as the hours stretched on in silence. What might be an always with any other killer was more than likely a never with Eve. The man driving the van had already calculated the eventuality of every potential opportunity that might come her way and made the necessary arrangements to remove them completely.

  She knew this because she knew Eve.

  They’d driven for a long time, maybe a day. She couldn’t tell because he’d placed a bag over her head. She’d been forced to urinate on the floor, through her jeans. He’d fed her from behind once, a bottle of water and a Heath bar.

  She’d asked one question with the tape off her mouth. “Who are you?” But she knew he wouldn’t answer, and so she resisted the urge to ask him more. The time would come.

  Or it wouldn’t.

  It was dark again when he taped her mouth and carried her from the van into the cave in which she now sat, trembling with renewed fear.

  Something shifted to her right, and she stilled her breathing. A pebble rolled. He was there, to her right.

  The bag came off her head. Heather stared into blackness. Not shadows or darkness, but the kind of pitch-blackness found in caskets, six feet under.

  Fingers dug at the tape stuck to her lips. Slowly pulled it off. She whimpered once but swallowed a cry of pain from the ripping adhesive.

  A lighter sparked to life a foot ahead and to the right of her face. She started. The orange flame licked at the dark, and for a brief moment she saw dirt walls, old beams embedded.

  But her attention shifted immediately to the hand that held a red Bic lighter. Clean nails. Little or no hair on his arm. He stood behind her, reaching forward so she couldn’t see his face.

  “Do you like the light, Heather?”

  It was the first time Eve had spoken, and his voice surprised her. She didn’t know what she’d expected—perhaps something gravelly, not the smooth, low voice that spoke in her right ear.

  His breath smelled like toothpaste.

  Then the flame went out, plunging her back into the blackness.

  “Eve?” Her voice trembled. She tried to stop shaking.

  “No. Would you like to meet her?”

  “What’s your name?”

  No answer.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “No. I don’t kill people.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  He moved to her left, several feet off now. “Because he broke his promise to leave me alone. He made a promise to Eve. That’s why she let him live again. But he lied.”

  This was all pointless, she knew. He was going to kill her. The disease was going to kill her. “Are you going to hurt me?”

  “I saw the room in your basement,” Eve said, speaking slowly. “You don’t know very much, do you? I was going to be a priest, did you know that?” A deep breath. “But I didn’t believe. Heather, do you believe?”

  “Believe what?”

  “That the serpent is real. That it eats away at the mind.”

  It was his first reference to the meningitis, the disease that broke past the protective layer of meninges and poisoned the brain. Heather shivered. This was it. He was leading up to something.

  “Please . . . please don’t hurt me.”

  For ten or fifteen seconds nothing happened. Eve breathed evenly behind her. She shivered in the chair. Then his fingers touched her cheek. A tender caress.

  “Have you ever heard of Daisy, Heather? Daisy Ringwald, born in 1934 in Milwaukee.”

  “No.”

  “She was born blind. Without an optic nerve. Died blind.”

  A tear slipped down Heather’s cheek.

  “But she saw. Blind as a bat until she died on the operating table on January 23, 2002. When they brought her back she told them what she’d seen. The heart surgeon’s emerald class ring on the table next to instruments that she described with perfect detail. She saw it all, Heather. What the nurses were wearing, their jewelry, the layout of the bed and the lights. Even the cover of a copy of Huckleberry Finn that had gone unnoticed for five years on the top of a cabinet in the corner.”

  He breathed deep and his thumb brushed her cheekbone.

  “How did she see it, Heather? If she was blind.”

  She was shaking too badly to respond.

  “Are you blind, Heather?”

  She almost said no, but in the context of his story, she changed her mind. “Yes.”

  “Conventional wisdom would say that what I’m planning to do with you is a mistake. They will accuse me of breaking my own rules. Of making the stupid move that gets the criminal caught. I’m telling you this in case you’re later tempted to wonder if I’ve made a mistake. Don’t be.”

  “I believe you,” she whimpered.

  “Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “I’m going to help you see. All of you.”

  But Heather was afraid. Very afraid.

  THE FLIGHT INTO LARAMIE, Wyoming, aboard the Citation, took two hours and seven minutes from wheels up to wheels down, and with a little help from Lori, Daniel managed to sleep an hour and a half of it.

  The raid was a long shot, Brit had told Montova, but they all knew long shots broke cases. The Wyoming HP had set up roadblocks on every road in and out of the abandoned Consolidation Coal Company operation east of Laramie. Daniel and Brit would go in with Lori and a local for backup this time. State police would remain back at a five-mile perimeter.

  Before the mine, the two-hundred-acre plot had housed the Medicine Bow Honey Farm, the largest known bee farm on record, owned and operated by a family of settlers until a surveyor had found a seam of
coal on the land in 1959. Strapped with debt, the family sold the mining rights to a subsidiary of the Consolidation Coal Company, which began mining operations in 1961.

  They’d moved the bees in swarms and flattened more than a hundred thousand hives—something to do with the competition and low quality of honey.

  Unlike most mines that tunneled deep or dug large open pits, short wall tunnels rarely exceeded 150 feet, relying instead on thick veins that could be cut from the side of the mine. According to the operations manager they’d awakened in Maryland, the Medicine Bow mine consisted of one colliery with four entry points, three of which had collapsed in 1977, after which the mine had been shut down. The striations of the coal appeared to match the FBI sample, at least in type.

  Daniel let Brit drive the rental Suburban, a dark-green, late model that suited the task. Mark Tremble from the Laramie PD rode shotgun, Lori and Daniel behind.

  He felt Lori’s hand on his knee. “You good?” she whispered.

  Five hours since he’d been brought back and still no recurrence of the fear, unlike the trial with DMT. Whatever his brain had done during those fifty-six seconds seemed to have worked wonders. So far. He nodded.

  She squeezed his knee, then removed her hand.

  For the second time in a week they drove quietly through the night, bearing down on Eve’s suspected location. Beyond that similarity, the raid was hardly familiar.

  This time Daniel had died to be here.

  This time Heather would die.

  They came to a gate with a rusted chain and padlock. “Before we busted them, this used to be a hangout for potheads,” Tremble said. “The lock doesn’t actually work.”

  He jumped out, peered ahead, then unlatched the gate and swung it open. A squeal disturbed the quiet.

  “What’s he doing?” Daniel snapped. “He’ll hear that. Go, go!”

  Brit moved the truck forward, slowed for Tremble to climb in, then pushed ahead.