Novels 11 Adam Read online

  None of this was helping her. And time was ticking. They were right. It was all hopeless.

  She turned her attention back to the near-death cases. The fact that Daniel had died and been resuscitated twice now was unique enough on its own. The fact that he’d evidently gone after Eve after having a near-death experience in Laramie was mind-boggling.

  The fact that Eve had cited a near-death experience—Daisy Ringwald’s—as his trigger for believing in the supernatural was downright scary. Needless to say, Heather had dug into the cases with a newfound respect.

  She was familiar with all the reasons why NDEs were nothing more than electrochemical reactions in the brain at the time of death—Daniel had explained the phenomenon to her a dozen times over the years.

  But the evidence that supported a conclusion other than chemically induced hallucinations was surprisingly persuasive.

  Admittedly, most of the cases were nonsense. She had little doubt that the vast majority of near-death experiences were indeed chemically induced. Eight million Americans alive today had experienced an NDE, and too many of those had turned their stories for profit, undoubtedly embellishing to the point of quackery at times.

  But not all. Heather focused on the cases of those born blind, as Eve himself had.

  Daisy Ringwald, born in 1934 in Milwaukee. She saw several references to her case, but they added nothing to what Eve had told her.

  But a thirty-patient study of NDE effects over a two-year period by Dr. Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper added more than Heather could have imagined. It seemed that Eve’s Daisy was not alone. Among the numerous documented cases in which blind people had NDEs, a full 8 percent could describe events and objects during their deaths.

  How does a person born blind describe something she’s never seen? In many of the cases, the subjects had “seen” for the first time in their lives and were able to describe what they saw.

  If they hadn’t ever seen these objects with their physical eyes, what had they seen them with? Clearly, there was more to the human being than electrochemical reactions.

  Eve’s question whispered through her mind. Do you believe, Heather?

  Believe what, Eve? That you’re a psychopath caught in your own sick, twisted version of reality? Yes, I believe.

  I’m going to help you see, Heather. All of you.

  And how are you going to help Daniel see, Eve? Because he’s as stubborn as a mule.

  I was going to be a priest, Heather.

  The doorbell rang, startling her from her reverie. She set the file down and hurried upstairs. Lori stood in the doorway, arms crossed. They’d found something?

  “Hello, Heather.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Can I come in?”

  Heather stepped away from the door. “So what’s happened?”

  “Nothing new.” But the lines on her face betrayed something more. “I just . . .”

  The woman was distraught. She was acting more like a mourning spouse than a forensic pathologist who’d seen this a hundred times.

  “I love him, Lori.”

  “I know you do. Please, don’t worry. This has nothing to do with Daniel and me, not in that way. I haven’t been with him and never will.”

  Well, that was out.

  “Okay. So what is it? Forgive me for being a bit distracted, but unlike you, I’ve given myself to Daniel from the day I met him. He means everything to me, I don’t care how that sounds.”

  Lori nodded. “I’m afraid. For him, I mean.”

  “We all are.”

  “I killed him, Heather.”

  The statement sat between them, like a dumb rock. Meaningless.

  “What, so now you’re Eve?”

  “No, I mean Daniel convinced me to force his heart into fibrillation in an attempt to have a near-death experience. I did it twice.”

  Heather didn’t know what to do with such an absurd admission. Then again, this was Daniel they were talking about.

  “Tell me everything.”

  Heather led Lori to the basement, sat in a chair opposite her, and heard it all. The trial with DMT, the morgue experience, the way they killed him in Laramie, the fear that drove him to it, the visions of the boy in the black room. It took half an hour, but five minutes in, Heather already knew that Daniel had been onto something.

  Something beyond them all. Locked in Eve’s mind.

  “I’m surprised none of this disturbs you more,” Lori said.

  “I wouldn’t put anything past Daniel. What disturbs me is the fact that he’s in a root cellar with the same boy in his dreams.” She swallowed a lump in her throat. “Trust me, I would believe or do anything to get him back.”

  Lori stood and walked up to the corkboard covered in newspaper clippings. “A week ago you received a call at the courthouse.”

  Only a week, and yet those two calls seemed a lifetime ago. “That’s right.”

  “Something about being taken from his—”

  “His priest!” Heather bolted up. The caller’s words rasped through her mind like a saw. “‘They took me away from my daddy, my sister, my priest!’ He was going to be a priest. That means he wasn’t a priest. He was taken away from the priesthood, not kicked out of a church—they would never kick out a wayward soul. But a seminary would. He was expelled from a seminary.”

  Heather crossed to the phone and punched in Brit’s speed dial. She quickly told him, listened to his response, made a few quick suggestions, and snapped her phone shut.

  “That’s a lot of seminaries. East Coast ones are closed, but they’ll canvass the West Coast immediately. How many students are kicked out of seminaries for heresy? Or losing their faith? It can’t be that many.”

  She slid onto her chair and swiveled around to the computer. “How many seminaries can there be?”

  “The field office is on it, Heather. They’ll have at least a partial list of students dismissed from West Coast seminaries within the hour.” She walked to the door and turned back.

  “About what I told you—”

  “It’s immaterial. Daniel killing himself is no one’s business but ours.”

  “Thank you.” Lori smiled. “I had to get that off my chest.”

  “But I would like a favor from you,” Heather said.

  “Anything.”

  “Seeing as I basically have your career in my hands, I suppose I can trust you.”

  Lori hesitated. “Go on . . .”

  “I didn’t quite tell them everything.”

  Lori raised a brow.

  “Eve told me that if the FBI approaches the cellar, he’ll kill Daniel early. And I believe him.”

  She could see Lori’s mind absorbing this new detail.

  “If you get any information, anything at all, get it to me first?”

  “I can’t withhold information from Brit.”

  “I’m not asking you to. Just give me a shot. Do you doubt Eve’s promise?”

  “I see your point,” Lori said. “I think Brit will let me run point on this—it was my lead. You’ll be my first call.”

  LORI’S CALL CAME fifty-three minutes later, ten minutes after she’d pulled into the office.

  “We have a hit, Heather. Two students were kicked out during that time. One of them lives in Seattle and works as a fireman. Dead end.”

  “And the other?”

  “Disappeared after he was expelled for heresy from St. Peter’s Seminary College in 1990.”

  “Where?”

  “Pasadena.”

  “Here?”

  “Here.”

  “What was his name?”

  There was a tremor in Lori’s voice. “Trane. Alex Trane.”

  Heather mouthed the first name. Alex. Tried to imagine Eve named Alex Trane, but nothing connected.

  “Try the priest,” Lori said.

  “Priest?”

  “The one who kicked him out,” Lori said.

  Three calls later, Heather had the phone number and ad
dress of the priest who’d sponsored Alex Trane to attend St. Peter’s Seminary College in the spring semester of 1987, and later gotten him expelled. Father Robert Seymour, retired, now living in Burbank.

  She dialed the number and prayed to the priest’s God that Seymour would pick up.

  An old, gruff voice crackled over her phone. “Hello?”

  “Father Seymour?”

  “Yes, darling. What is it?”

  “This is Heather Clark. I’m calling about a seminary student you once sponsored. Does the name Alex Trane ring any bells?”

  Silence.

  “Father?”

  “You’ve found him?” The gusto had left his voice.

  “No. I’m looking for him. I think he may have kidnapped my husband.”

  Another long beat.

  “Father, you remember him?”

  “How soon can you be here?”

  THIRTY

  EVE’S HOLY COVEN.

  Daniel lay on the cool dirt floor, drifting in and out of sleep. Consciousness. Sanity. Dreams. Nightmares. Fear.

  He’d attempted to free himself from the chain but learned within minutes that Eve hadn’t stumbled in his preparation of the restraints. Eve didn’t know how to stumble.

  Which meant that he would be gone for a long time, Daniel realized. He was going to release Heather, and doing so anywhere near Oklahoma would help the FBI narrow their search grid. He would be alone twenty hours or more.

  Without food or water. Without a bathroom.

  As the hopelessness of his situation settled in, Daniel felt his desperation begin to yield to resolve. Not to live, but to let the end come as it may.

  There was something wrong in Eve’s Holy Coven—he knew that because of the sounds and the smells and the rising and falling temperature. Perhaps Eve’s Holy Coven was his mind, and he was losing it.

  The first indication that his mind was falling apart came with the pungent smell of urine. He blanched, tested the air again, and confirmed that it did indeed smell like a very potent urine. From where or how he didn’t know. It wasn’t his.

  The odor had come and gone. As had the sounds. Creaking at first, which would have been plausible in the house but not in this root cellar. Then the boy’s voice, whispering.

  I see you, Daniel.

  He’d jerked his head and stared into the shadows at the far corner the first few times he heard the voice.

  I see you, Daniel.

  Wind moaned. But he didn’t think there was any wind outside.

  I’m going to take you, Daniel. We’ll be good friends.

  He knew then that his mind was indeed going. If not for the recurring bouts of fear, which brought enough terror to dwarf any other consideration, the irregularities might have kept him in a constant state of anxiety. When exhaustion forced him into unconsciousness, the fear woke him, screaming into the tape.

  He told himself that profuse sweating would only speed his dehydration, but he was powerless to control his glands. And eventually his bladder.

  Heather’s release provided him with a measure of absolution that helped him endure the mind-numbing fear, the cramps that locked his muscles after the first seven or eight hours. And the knowledge that he was going to die in this cellar deep in the woods of Oklahoma.

  But his dying act had been to save Heather. The old cliché, What goes around comes around, came to mind. The pain he’d caused her over the years was now visiting him, condensed and purified so that instead of paining his heart through many sleepless nights, it was ravaging him through one week of horror.

  The fear in her eyes when he’d pulled the bag from her head refused to move from his memory. Misted eyes, peeled back because she knew that Eve was behind her, biding his time.

  But Daniel had seen something else in her eyes. He’d seen anguish. Why, Daniel? Why did you tie me in this chair? Why did you leave me? Why did you let my heart break?

  He considered the possibility that Eve had made a mistake in breaking from his routine—taking then releasing Heather, the first victim he’d done so with. He’d hoped it was a mistake, tried to nurture that hope.

  But in the end, the hope collapsed on itself. Eve had taken and released Heather only to lure his first Adam. If Heather did manage to shed new light on the case and bring agents back with her in an attempt to rescue him, he had no doubt that it would end badly.

  Eve was working in ways that reduced FBI prowess to an amateur effort.

  Daniel shifted again, tried to ease a cramp in his lower back. The cellar was cold. It was summer outside, but the earth underground felt like winter, another trick played by his decaying mind.

  He’d long ago given up the spiral attempts to figure out what was happening. Why so much fear? How had he been directed by his mind to head southhhhhhh? Why was Eve now calling him Adam?

  Actually, he had the answer to that last one. Eve was going to kill Daniel, his first Adam, the same way he killed his Eves. By infecting him with a disease that attacked the protective layer around the brain, and in so doing re-create the fall of Adam and Eve. The loss of innocence.

  Eve was taking the life of others as an atonement for his own sin. Daniel didn’t know that as a matter of fact, but he knew enough to be sure it was at least close.

  Either way, Daniel would die. Either way, Heather would live. And good for her. She did indeed deserve to live after what he’d put her through.

  The breath from his nostrils fogged. Cold.

  He heard the breathing behind him then—not the boy’s whisper but a man’s lungs at work, like bellows.

  Daniel twisted to look at the doorway. Eve stood looking at him, hands loose at his sides, eyes unblinking. He was handsome, squared jaw, large with strength, not fat. Green dungarees. The plaid shirt was gone, replaced by a black pullover.

  Eve walked over and unwound the tape around his head, freeing his mouth. “You can drink.”

  He pushed the bowl close, and Daniel lowered his head into the cool water. He drank deep, grateful despite the circumstances.

  When he finished, Eve unlatched the chain, hauled Daniel to his feet, and walked him to the metal chair, which he’d placed by the bloodstained table.

  All without a word.

  Daniel sat still, but Eve made no move to fasten him to the chair. His arms were bound tight behind his back—he wasn’t going anywhere, not in his current condition.

  Eve stepped behind him, then touched his hair with his fingers. “You call me Eve?”

  Daniel said yes, but it came out hoarse and indiscernible. He cleared his throat. “Yes.”

  “My name isn’t Eve. My name is Alex Price.”

  The name wasn’t familiar. But Daniel hardly cared. He cared far more about the fact that Alex Price had given up his name because the information would die with him.

  “But I know where Eve is,” Alex Price said.

  Daniel cleared more phlegm from his throat. “Who is she?”

  Alex moved in front of him, studying him. “You came to save Heather. I knew you would. You’re a good man, Daniel Clark.”

  “You’re going to kill me?”

  “No. No, I hope I don’t have to. I haven’t killed any of them.”

  “But Eve has,” Daniel said.

  Alex walked to one side, eyes fixed on Daniel’s face. “I studied psychology once. On my own. Enough to earn a master’s if I’d gone through all the dreary paperwork. I read your books. Mostly inaccurate. And I should know.”

  “Maybe. Unless your point of view is bent.” Daniel looked up at the dark timber directly in front of him. “You grew up here, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Eve’s Holy Coven. That’s my mother’s religion. Not my real mother. Alice. She tied me and my sister to that table and punished us every dark moon.”

  He said it so nonchalantly, not what Daniel had expected.

  “Now you’ve become her. Or are you hating her? It’s always one or the other.”

  “I’ve become her,” Alex said, just as
naturally. “Do you believe in the devil, Dr. Clark?”

  It occurred to Daniel that they were already in the killer’s rite. This was probably how Eve approached all of his kills. He should at least go through the motions. Keep the man talking, buy some time.

  “It depends what you mean by the devil.”

  The corner of Alex’s lips curved gently upward. “No, of course you don’t. Not too many do these days. They talk, but they don’t believe, not really.”

  “I do believe in the devil, Alex. Just not the one you believe in. Does that make me wrong?”

  “I didn’t always believe, you know. I was wrong.”

  “Then maybe I am wrong.”

  “You don’t mind finding out?” Alex asked.

  “Finding out what?”

  “If you’re right or if you’re wrong.”

  The fear hadn’t returned since Alex’s entry. Neither had the sounds or the odor of urine. The whole scene somehow seemed perfectly natural to Daniel, which was in and of itself a bit discomforting.

  Daniel stared at Alex, unclear if he was expected to respond.

  “Do you think I’m a man of my word?” Alex asked.

  Considering the man’s profile, Daniel had little doubt. “Yes,” he said.

  “Then if I swore not to kill you, you would believe me.”

  “I suppose I would.”

  “Eve wants to make you a friend,” Alex said.

  “I know. I spoke to Eve.”

  “Will you allow it?”

  “I think I already have, Alex. I think we all make friends with our Eves.”

  “Not the inner child. I know we all have memories and influences that shaped us during our formative years. I’m not talking about that Eve, as you call it.”

  “Then what, the devil?”

  “No. The spirit you met in the box. In hell. The one who speaks to me, who led you down here.”

  A chill washed down Daniel’s back, then was gone. It sounded so innocent, this talk of devils and spirits.

  “I was in hell? I don’t remember seeing any flames or pitchforks.”

  “Then you won’t have a problem asking Eve to become your friend.”