With trembling effort she forced down panic, struggling for calm, directing the splintered chaos of her thoughts into straight-line patterns.
First question: Where was she?
She lay still, listening hard. Over the violent rhythm of her heart she heard the throb of an engine.
A vehicle. Was she in the trunk of a car?
No, she sensed somehow that the space around her was bigger than that. And the cold metal surface beneath her, vibrating with the engine, felt like the uncarpeted floor of the cargo compartment in a truck or van.
Moving pretty fast, she’d guess. Maybe forty or forty-five miles an hour. No stops for traffic signals. On a highway, but not an interstate. The road was too rough. One of the older highways that led out of town.
Out of town…
Into the desert? There could be reasons for taking her to an isolated spot, far from buildings and people.
Fear rose in her again, squeezing her heart in its cold grip. She thought she might pass out.
No. She had to remain conscious. It was her only chance.
There was a possibility he would unseal her lips at some point, if only to hear her scream or plead. Should he do that, she would reason with him, try to establish contact. Dealing with irrationality was her daily business. There ought to be some way for her to get through.
Then she remembered his eyes, so blue, so cold.
Well, she could try, anyway. If he let her talk at all.
And if for some reason he untied her? What then?
She would have to fight.
The idea was not entirely desperate. Three years ago she’d taken a class in tae kwon do, the Korean form of karate, as part of a training program designed to help therapists defend themselves against violent patients.
She was by no means a martial-arts expert-she’d earned only a yellow belt, qualifying her as barely more than a beginner-but if she could deliver a snap kick to her abductor’s kneecap or a palm-heel strike to his throat, she might be able to drop him to the ground long enough to flee.
In practice sessions, at least, she’d done well enough. Annie, a suitably impressed spectator, had dubbed her Erin-san, the Irish Ninja. But then, what could you expect from a woman who’d named her cat Stink?
Annie…
The voice over the intercom. Annie’s voice.
Oh, God, did he have her, too?
Erin wished she hadn’t been gagged. Wished she could call out Annie’s name, learn if her sister was somewhere nearby. Perhaps trussed and silenced as she herself was, sharing the nightmare.
Would he have wanted them both? Why? They had no enemies. It didn’t make sense.
Who was he, anyway? She’d seen his face only briefly; it had seemed utterly unfamiliar. That thick red beard and shock of carrot-top hair…
But perhaps the beard was a disguise. If so, he could be nearly anybody. One of her patients, even.
Any therapist could become a target. That was why she’d been careful to keep an unlisted address, and why she’d chosen to live in a security building.
Three of her current patients had shown occasional violent tendencies. Nothing like this, though. And none of the three had those chilly blue eyes.
Well, maybe he was someone she’d treated years ago, during her internship at a psychology clinic downtown. Or one of the numberless transients she’d met while doing pro bono work at the local shelters-sad, lost men whose faces she never would remember, because they were all alike.
Her speculations led nowhere. His identity was unguessable, and without knowing who he was, she couldn’t know his intention in abducting her. But on that point she had to assume the worst.
Had to assume he meant to kill her.
Twisting her wrists, she tried to loosen the cord that secured them. The bristly scrape of the binding against her skin told her that he had tied her hands with rope. Thick, stiff rope lashed around her wrists in multiple coils, python-snug.
She had seen a calf trussed once at a rodeo, its hooves bound with a cowboy’s lasso. Though she had pitied the bleating animal, she had never imagined one day sharing its fate.
Even its ultimate fate? To be led to slaughter, to sag under a butcher’s saw?
The sticky stuff sealing her lips was tape. If she could lift her hands to her face, she could untape her mouth, then chew at the rope on her wrists until possibly the knot came undone.
But her arms wouldn’t move. They were pinned to her right thigh by another loop of rope, knotted so tightly it threatened to cut off the circulation in her leg. She was unable to work it loose.
Bending at the waist, she tried to bring her head closer to her hands, close enough that she could at least raise the blindfold.
No use. She would have to be a contortionist to do it.
Never had she been so vulnerable, so completely powerless. Even in her parents’ house on that August night twenty-three years ago, she’d been able to take action, fight for survival.
The noise in her throat was a choked moan.
Erin prayed that her sister wasn’t with her. Prayed that the voice over the intercom had been only a trick, and Annie was safe at home.
She wanted one of them, at least, to survive this night.
6
The van’s high beams splashed white light across a blur of macadam and roadside mesquite shrubs as Harold Gund sped south on Houghton Road.
He wondered if Erin was alert yet. The others had recovered quickly from the incapacitating shock. All three had been fully conscious when he’d carried them into the wilderness and hammered the stakes into the ground.
The memory of those women, of what he had done to them in the woods, made him feel…
But he didn’t know how he felt.
His hands gripped the steering wheel, the knuckles squeezed bloodless. From this clue he surmised that what he felt was fury.
Fury at himself? Or at the women, for having been so damnably easy to abduct? Or at a world that could make possible a thing like him? And what kind of thing was that?
He had no answers to these questions. Introspection was unknown to him. When he looked inside himself, he saw only darkness, as deep and still as the desert gloom.
His turnoff was coming up shortly. He cut his speed a bit and leaned forward, eyes narrowed. The unmarked side road would be easy to miss, especially in this dark landscape devoid of variation, this infinite sweep of sameness.
He wondered how many little lives were fated to be snuffed out tonight in the expanse of brush and weeds around him. How many cactus wrens would be plucked from their nests, how many rabbits would perish in their burrows? Even now, among the gnarled trees and glistening cacti, warm blood was being spilled, moist flesh tasted.
He was not so different from the rest of creation. Perhaps it was the safely civilized members of the human species who were unnatural, not he.
Or perhaps not.
He shook his head, defeated, as always, by the enigma of himself.
Sometimes he listened to the TV specials that promised to explain men like him, hoping for insight. So far he had been disappointed.
The experts consulted by the police and the media were fools. Possibly they knew something about others of his kind, but of him they understood nothing.
