As they reached the edge of the village, the man spoke. “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you, Heather?”
Heather, too numbed even to think, nodded mutely.
“You know I’m not your father, don’t you?”
Again Heather could only nod.
“Do you know who I am?”
Now she shook her head, but something in his voice made her turn and look at him.
He was smiling, but it was a smile with no warmth in it.
He was staring at her, his cold eyes boring into her.
“My name is Richard Kraven,” he said.
Heather felt a terrible numbness spread through her. What did he mean? Richard Kraven was dead! He’d been executed the day her father had his heart attack! Yet even as her mind tried to deny it, she somehow knew that the words the man had spoken were true. Though this man’s flesh and bones were those of her father, his voice and his eyes told her he was not. “What do you want?” she breathed, her voice barely audible.
Richard Kraven’s cold smile widened. “I want to touch you, Heather,” he said. “I want to touch your heart.”
CHAPTER 68
“This is crazy,” Anne Jeffers said. She had no idea where they were — they hadn’t seen a sign for miles, and except for them, the narrow highway winding along the river was utterly deserted. Beyond the confines of Mark Blakemoor’s car a dense blackness seemed to absorb the glow of the headlights, the slashing rain cutting visibility to no more than a few yards. Mark had been forced by the intensity of the storm to slow to little more than a crawl, and Anne’s feeling that it was a mistake to have come up here was growing by the second. A flash of lightning burst above them, instantly followed by a crack of thunder so sharp it made Anne jump in her seat. “We’ve got to go back, Mark! This is insane! We don’t even know where we are!”
“We’re almost to the campground where they found Edna Kraven this morning,” Mark replied. “Kevin said the place they were fishing wasn’t very much farther up the road. We’ll check those, then—”
The police radio crackled to life, and Mark snatched up the microphone.
“Go ahead.”
“Turns out your R.V. has a cell phone, and we got a trace on it,” a barely audible voice, almost lost in the static caused by the storm, said.
Anne seemed about to speak, but Mark shook his head, leaning toward the radio’s speaker as he strained to catch the crackling words. But only some garbled static came through the speaker.
“Say again!” Mark shouted into the microphone. “We’ve got a lot of static!”
The radio’s speaker crackled again, and from somewhere in the cacophony of background noise a single word emerged.
Snoqualmie.
There was more, but again it was drowned out by static, and when the next transmission came through, nothing was audible at all. “Doesn’t matter,” Mark muttered. “They’re up here.” His eyes barely left the road as he quickly told Anne what had happened: “Cellular phones are almost like a homing device — they always stay in contact with the system. You can’t pin them down exactly, but you can get the general area they’re operating out of.” Without thinking, he reached out and took Anne’s hand, squeezing it gently. “We’ll find them. Just hang on. We’ll find them.”
The car continued creeping up the grade, and finally they came to the campground, but when Mark saw that not only was the police tape still hanging across the road leading into it, but that the gate was closed and locked as well, he didn’t even try to turn in. A mile and a half farther up the road, just as he was starting to wonder if Kevin had remembered where he’d been as well as he thought he had, the small sign for the turnoff to the right appeared out of the blackness. When he came to the entrance to the narrow lane a few moments later, he brought the car to a stop. The dirt track, already deeply rutted by a stream of water, was impassable by anything but a four-wheel drive. Mark might get the sedan down, but he would never get it up again, at least not tonight.
But how long had it been like this? What if the motor home was already down there?
He reached into the glove compartment, took out his gun, then got out of the car.
Anne, immediately understanding what he was about to do, scrambled out the passenger door.
“Get back in the car!” Mark shouted over the wind that was screaming through the trees, driving the rain almost horizontally. “You can’t—”
“If you can go down there, so can I,” Anne shouted back. “It’s my daughter, remember?” Before Mark could protest further, she started picking her way down the muddy road, steadying herself against the trunks of trees, grabbing at the shrubbery when she felt her feet skid on the slippery mud.
It wasn’t until she was halfway down the twisting lane that she realized she hadn’t even thought about the possibility that she might be wrong; that Glen — the real, loving Glen — might be with Heather, rather than merely the body of her husband, now fully controlled by a monstrous, vengeful Richard Kraven.
An image of the monogram Kraven had carved into the flesh of each of his victims leapt into her mind, and she visualized Heather, her chest cut open, her lungs and heart—
No!
Not Heather! It couldn’t happen to Heather — she wouldn’t let it happen to Heather!
A strangled sound of fear, fury, and frustration rose in her throat, and she bolted ahead, terrified that even now the motor home might be parked at the foot of the lane.
Terrified that Richard Kraven might already have begun his work.
CHAPTER 69
“It won’t hurt, you know.”
Heather tried not to look at the man who no longer bore any resemblance at all to her father.
He’d pulled the motor home off the road into a picnic area, a spot so secluded that even if a car passed on the road a few yards away, she knew the van probably wouldn’t even be noticed. And if someone did see it, why would they come to see if something was wrong? People parked motor homes everywhere, and nobody ever thought about what might be happening inside them.
The man had pulled all the curtains closed and turned on the generator.
Heather hadn’t dared even to move out of the passenger seat.
Part of it was the look in the man’s eye. The warmth she’d always seen in her father’s eyes, the gentle love she’d always felt when her father looked at her, was gone. The eyes that now stared cruelly from her father’s face had a dead look to them, glazed over as if hiding the fact that there was no soul behind them, no human spirit that might show her any kindness. Was it that look of death that had made her slowly come to believe he hadn’t lied to her, that he truly was Richard Kraven?
She knew what Kraven had done, knew how many bodies had been found in the area to which this man who was not her father had brought her tonight. She’d read the descriptions of the corpses they’d found, their breasts torn open, their hearts ripped out. It was what he’d meant when he said he wanted to touch her heart, and as the meaning of the words sank in, her terror had inexorably paralyzed her.
She couldn’t run, couldn’t bring herself even to try to bolt from the motor home. He would catch her before she even reached the door. And even if she made it out into the raging storm, what would she do? Where would she go?
He was getting something out of one of the cupboards now. A plastic bottle, filled with a liquid. He’d taken a rag out of a drawer, and was soaking it now with the liquid from the bottle.
