Only one impulse motivated him now.
He would kill her. Kill Erin. Take her out to the arroyo and stake her to the ground and burn her.
Next, Annie. Sooner or later she would return to her townhouse. When she did, he would be there. He would tie her to a chair or truss her on the floor, and then…
The van thumped and rattled, and he realized with mild surprise that he had turned onto the side road that led to the ranch. He hadn’t even been aware of slowing down or steering to his right.
Ahead, the gate of the ranch was open, the padlock and chain removed this afternoon to serve as Erin’s shackles.
He guided the van through the gate, to the barn. The barn doors, too, had been left open in his hasty departure. Careless-the wreck of Erin’s Taurus was dimly visible within.
He parked alongside the car. From the van’s glove compartment he took his flashlight and the stun gun.
The flash would be helpful in the arroyo. And the stun gun might be necessary to get Erin there without unduly harming her.
He wanted her conscious when he struck the fatal match.
Funny how calm he felt. Calm outwardly, of course; he always was, once his plug was pulled. But the strange thing was that he felt the same tranquility within. There was none of the turmoil that had accompanied his other killings. No inner witness who looked on aghast.
He was at peace with himself. The words of that smug TV expert came back to him: This is not a tormented person. This is a man who’s quite comfortable with what he does-and what he is.
That never had been true of him before. Had been the furthest thing from reality. But not tonight.
Tonight the burning felt good to him. Felt right.
Flashlight and keys in hand, the side pockets of his jacket stuffed with the pistol and stun gun, he strode out of the barn. He shut the main doors behind him, then crossed yards of brittle grass to the house, his legs cutting space with mechanical efficiency, his gaze focused straight ahead.
Felt right, he thought again. Well, of course it did. Why wouldn’t it?
It was right.
The burnings in the woods up north had been wrong.
He saw that now. The three women he’d killed meant nothing to him. They were mere random strangers, surrogates for the two he’d really wanted. Symbolic sacrifices, that was all. Their deaths, satisfying him only briefly, served no lasting purpose.
But these two were different. These were no strangers, no stand-ins. These were the two who had ruined his life. Who had haunted him, obsessed him, poisoned his mind with unclean thoughts.
Everything he’d done-it was their fault, entirely theirs. They had been the source of all his troubles and afflictions right from the start. They were the unhealed sore in his soul.
He reached the front door, turned the key in the lock. As he entered the house, he nodded in silent assent to his own thoughts, then went on nodding, nodding, the slight incline of his head repeated like a programmed routine.
It was right, so right, that he do this. There could be no hesitation, no doubt. Not this time.
Never could he be liberated from the torment that plagued him-never-until Erin and Annie Reilly were dead.
51
With a final twist of her wrists, Erin wrenched the coupling nut free.
As she separated the two halves of the sillcock, she heard the familiar rumble of the van’s engine.
Oliver had returned, as she’d known he would.
He wouldn’t expect her to be unchained. There was a chance she could take him by surprise.
Quickly she shrugged on her blouse and buttoned it. She tossed the bra and its unhooked strap into the cardboard box containing her provisions, then slid the box in front of the sillcock.
Footsteps overhead. The stairs drummed as he descended.
The sillcock’s detached spout would make a serviceable weapon. She tucked it into the waistband of her shorts behind her back.
Then she seated herself in the chair facing the door, one end of the chain still padlocked to her ankle, the loose end snaking behind the cardboard box, out of sight.
A key rattled in the lock. The door opened, and Oliver was there.
Yet not there, not really. She could see that.
His face was expressionless, a mask of slack flesh.
He stepped forward into the glow of the bare light bulb on the chain. The shadows lifted from his eyes, and she saw his dull, glazed stare.
Fugue state, she thought with a ripple of dread.
The pockets of his jacket were bulging-she glimpsed the checkered grip of the pistol, and the stun gun’s metallic gleam-but his hands held only a set of keys and a flashlight, switched off.
“ ’Evening, Doc.” His affectless monotone matched the emptiness of his eyes.
“Hello, Oliver.”
“I’ve come for you.” He moved nearer, then stopped behind the other chair. “She’s on to me. Your sister. She knows.”
He said it so simply that Erin needed a moment to grasp the significance of the words.
Annie knew.
She kept her own voice safely casual. “Does she?”
Oliver nodded. “Don’t know how she guessed. I must have slipped up somehow. But it doesn’t matter. It’s over.”
He was standing more than six feet away. Too far. He had to be within reach.
“We still have work to do,” she said, hoping to draw him closer.
“No more work. That’s done now.”
“We were making progress-”
“Uh-uh. I’m discontinuing therapy, Doc.” He stepped around the chair, advancing on her. “We’re going outside now. Out to the arroyo.”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“Oh, yes.” A yard away. Half a yard. “I do.”
He reached for his pocket. For the stun gun.
Now.
She twisted sideways, seized the chain, then shot upright, swinging it in a wide, looping arc.
Instinctively Oliver stepped back.
The loose end of the chain flashed past his face and found its target.
The light bulb shattered in a tinkling rain.
Darkness. Intense and absolute in the windowless room.
Even as the bulb exploded, Erin sidestepped away from the chair. A heartbeat later the wooden legs scraped noisily on concrete. Oliver had lunged blindly at the spot where she’d stood.
Her right hand fumbled behind her, prying the spout free of her waistband.
To her left, the flashlight snapped on, its pale beam dissecting the dark. The circle of light whipped toward her, sudden glare dazzling her vision.
She raised the spout and brought it down, knife-quick, aiming just behind the flash.
The pipe chopped Oliver’s wrist. Gasp of pain, and the flashlight fell free.
It struck the floor and rolled, its beam painting yellow spirals on the cellar walls. In the blurred half-light Erin saw Oliver again reaching for the stun gun.
She lashed out with the spout a second time.
Oliver sensed the attack, dodged to one side, then seized her right forearm, his grip painfully tight, squeezing
