nose.

“ Goddammit, Gamble, get it done!” cried out the man who struggled to keep hold of her. She recognized the voice as that of the man who had telephoned from a booth earlier, claiming to be Teach. She fought as best she could, at one point grabbing the phone and sending it colliding into the skull over her shoulder, bruising herself as well in the bargain. But the little one scrambled to his feet, scurried ratlike to the syringe which had cascaded into a corner and now rushed around to her and her assailant's side. The other man shouted, “You stick me with that damned thing and I'll kill you, Gamble!”

She felt the needle plunge into her thigh and she screamed, but her scream was stifled by a thick hand with a surgical glove over it. Her eyes went to the cracked door with what little light was streaming through before she was forced into the adjoining room, where only darkness reigned.

“ She wanted a little light, Gamble, so give her a little light-

She somehow sensed that there was something or someone other than her two assailants in the room with them, as if the presence of evil were palpable and breathing. The drug was taking rapid effect and she wasn't sure what was real and what was imaginary any longer, but she smelled death in the darkness; she smelled an odor like that in the cabin in Wekosha and wherever else she had found the drained bodies of this madman's appetite.

Gamble was laughing, taunting her in the darkness from some distance measured in either feet or the miles created by the drug that'd made her malleable and easy to conduct. Her brain tried to fight the conductors, knowing where she was being transported to. “A little light… a little light…” Gamble was chanting without a stutter, as if he now were calmed and relaxed, now that he had his prize within his grasp.

A pair of candles or a kerosene lamp, she could not be sure, cast shadows like demons all around her. Her own shadow melded with Gamble's stubby form against one wall, and towering behind her was that of a thing that seemed for all the world to be a giant vampire bat, the man who still held her in his grasp. But there was another black shadow also, a strange, upset shadow, the shadow of a dangling body, upside down, at the center of the room.

Her face was forced suddenly into the dead face of Lyle Kaseem's, a strange, tubular object jutting from his throat.

Gamble had not lied. It was him. It was the man she had searched for since Wekosha. It was Candy Copeland's vicious, sadistic killer; Janel McDonell's torturer; the bloodsucker who had taken the lives of so many others.

As if reading her mind, Teach said in a raspy voice, his rubber-gloved hands feeling like the touch of an alien, “And you're next, Doctor…”

She felt a numbness grip her body and her mind, the powerful grip of the sedative doing its work; likely the way that Kaseem had been rendered helpless. She only half heard Gamble stutter the name of the other. “M-m- mad… Mad M-m-mat… M-m-meet Mad Matt Matisak.” His keening, sickening giggle followed.

“ Just a little of her blood, Hillary, and you can have the body, just like I promised you.”

More digusting laughter erupted from Hillary Gamble moments before she lost all sensory perception. She found herself in a dark place, somewhat shattering in its complete blackness, and yet somewhat comforting. She didn't feel anything… and yet the darkness into which she was thrust was surrounded by fear all about the periphery, like demons waiting to come get her…

Boutine and Brewer remained at Matisak's house and each moment they stayed revealed something further about the madman. Brewer, after Boutine had gone to the car to radio for assistance and news of Jessica, had inched closer and closer to the bathroom, smelling a heady, pungent odor as he did so; it was the metallic smell of blood. He had drawn his own weapon more for something to hold onto than anything else. As he neared the bathroom, he extended a hand to a hallway light, but it didn't extend into the little room at the end of the hall to do much good. Brewer felt as if he were in the haunted house at Disneyland. A chill feeling of creepiness extended along his spine to the hairs on his neck.

At the door. Brewer wheeled, but there was no one there.

He saw that the bathtub was filled with a dark, soupy mixture which looked purple. He feared the worst, got a grip on his senses and called for Boutine several times. But Boutine was still out at the car.

He gritted his teeth, placed his fingers on the light switch and closed his eyes for a moment.

He hit the switch and the room was bathed in a soft red glow, just as the living room had been. The bathwater was also a deep crimson color, almost matching the shower curtain.

“ Sick bastard,” muttered Brewer, who went to the sink and turned on the tap, half expecting blood to flow from it. He repeatedly threw cold water into his face, trying desperately to accept what his eyes had presented to him.

Boutine reentered with no further news on Jessica, except that she was still not answering at the hotel. Boutine's agitation was near crippling. Brewer stumbled from the bathroom, visibly quaking.

“ I know how you feel about her. Otto, but we've got to believe she's okay.” Brewer's voice was shaking unevenly.

“ What'd you see back there?” he asked. “You're white as a ghost.”

“ Fucking bathtub is filled with blood.”

“ Christ.” Otto stepped around Brewer to see for himself.

“ We've got to do a top-to-bottom of this place. Find every scrap of evidence so the break-in won't be held against us. We'll need to take samples of the bath”-Joe Brewer was about to say water, then blood, but he was unable to know what to call it-”the stuff in the bathtub.”

Brewer had been transfixed. Now Otto came back ashen as well. “Just imagine how many people have provided this bastard with his kicks. Imagine him using your blood for his bloody bath.”

“ The kitchen, Otto. Let's check the fridge.”

“ Be my guest.”

They toured the kitchen and found the refrigerator near empty, with no jars filled with blood.

“ Not much of an eater, is he?” said Brewer.

“ What's down here?” asked Boutine, locating a door to a basement area. It was dark and dirty below, and once more the bulb light that flickered on did so beneath a curtain of streaked-on blood. The basement floor was dirt, the shelving laced here and there with cobwebs, but the shelves clear of dust. There were no power tools to be found, and the centerpiece of the room was a large, floor-model freezer, quite old, with the word Philco nearly invisible on its front.

“ Must've taken the tools with him,” Brewer was saying when Boutine, ahead of him, said, “The freezer.”

Boutine pulled the top back and stared down at a handful of blood packs and a few jars of frozen blood. “He's cleaned out his stock. This tears it. He knows we're on to him, and he's cleared out.”

“ But how? How'd he know?”

“ Earlier conclusion. From the papers, from something Jess said to the press, who knows? Overplayed his hand killing Lowenthal, knew we were close on his ass, panicked, rushed outta here in one hell of a hurry.”

“ Yeah, left his tub full of blood, left his cat, too, all locked up. I don't know. Seems to me he plans to come back.”

“ Should've listened to Jess. Should've known better,” Otto lamented.

“ Hey, the bastard had us all fooled with Lowenthal's suicide.”

“ Not Jess. She knew. She knew it was phony, and she tried to tell me so. And somehow he knows that she knew, that she is a threat to him.”

“ You're jumping to wild conclusions, Otto.”

“ Am I? Christ, I wish I were.”

More cars arrived outside, both police and FBI, strobe lights alerting the entire neighborhood to their presence. Boutine turned to Brewer and sadly said, “If I only knew where she was.”

“ Sit this one out, Otto. Take my car. Get out to Lincolnshire and find her. You'll see, she'll be fine.”

“ I've already sent cars out there, dammit. No one can locate her.”

In Matisak's den, where he had written his letter to Jessica Coran, there were blood splotches on the pad over the huge oaken desk, and a pen like the one found at Lowenthal's.”

“ Don't touch anything,” said Otto. “Bag it all. It'll prove to be the same blood used in the letter to

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