easy chairs, heavy unadorned end tables. Encouraged, Ellen pressed her face to the glass and peered more intently inside. There was a huge bull-elk head mounted above the mantel, and several shotguns hooked on the wall. She scanned the interior, looking for photographs. There were none. A window at a time, she worked her way around to the side of the house.
The panorama was truly magnificent, made even more so by the sun, now in descent toward the mountains. The house, while not built on a sheer drop, was set on the top of a steep slope. Ellen stepped to the edge. The slope was mostly dirt, weeds, and rocks, littered with boards, strapping, and chunks of concrete from the construction, left to be cleaned up when the place was finally landscaped. It was then she realized that the house wasn't one story as it appeared from the road, but two and possibly even three, the others having been hewn into the hillside. She took a few tentative steps down the hill and gasped. There were two stories of living space — the floor she had examined and another beneath it. Each featured a solid wall of tinted glass, running the entire length of the house. And underneath the lower story was a garage — also built into the hillside, and accessed by a narrow driveway that arced far out to her right, then undoubtedly upward to a spot not far from where she had parked.
In the garage was a large, black Jeep 4X4.
Ellen felt a sickening tightness in her chest at the sight of it.
'Well, now, what have we here?'
Vinyl Sutcher's booming voice was a spear through Ellen's heart. Startled beyond measure, she whirled, stumbled, and fell to one knee, landing on a jagged piece of concrete. She leapt to her feet, mindless of the pain, the tear in her slacks, and the circle of blood rapidly expanding around it. Sutcher was standing above her, twenty feet or so away, hands on hips, his huge, flat face grinning down at her.
'I knew it was you,' Ellen said contemptuously.
'Get up here…I said, get the fuck up here!'
Ellen hesitated, then slowly did as he demanded. She had made a terrible, terrible mistake and now she was going to pay for it in pain, and then, sooner or later, with her life. If the slope behind her was just a little steeper, she might have ended it quickly right there, or at least have tried to pull him over with her. As things were, the driveway below would stop any fall. All she could do was stand there and face up to him.
'How did you find this place?' he demanded.
'Isn't it a horrible moment when you realize you're not as smart as you think you are?' she said, as much to herself as to him.
Sutcher was dressed in black jeans, a black short-sleeved dress shirt, and black boots, and looked to Ellen as malevolent as any person could. His narrow rodent's eyes glared down at her.
'I asked you a question,' he snarled.
He closed the last ten feet between them, grabbed Ellen's wrist, and, with his other hand, forcefully flexed her knuckles inward until she dropped to her knees, crying in pain.
'I know who you are and I know what you did,' she managed.
Sutcher pulled her to her feet, but maintained his grip on her hand.
'What are you talking about?'
'Do you get much pleasure out of hurting ladies that are old enough to be your mother?'
'I get pleasure out of hurting anyone. Now, I'm going to ask you one more time before the real hurting begins, how did you find me?'
Ellen pictured her granddaughter, sleeping in her room while this monster took photos of her.
'I just stood downwind and sniffed,' she said. 'Then I followed the smell and here you are.'
Without hesitation, Sutcher hit her — a vicious openhanded slap that spun her around and sent her tumbling down the slope like a rag doll. Battered and bleeding, she came to rest halfway down to the driveway, on her belly, her arms and legs splayed, her gashed cheek grinding into a chunk of concrete. She was awake and alert, but hurting in so many places that in some strange way she wasn't hurting at all. She remained motionless, her eyes closed. What was next? From up above, she could hear Sutcher's grunts and the clattering of stones as he worked his way down the slope toward where she lay.
She opened her eyes a slit. Resting beneath her right hand was a three-foot-long thin slat of wood, and protruding from the far end of the slat was a nail — two inches long, maybe two and a half. She was going to lose to the monster, that was a given, but not without at least trying to hurt him first. Moving nothing but her fingers, she closed them about wood. Her only chance, if there was a chance at all, was to swing at his face and hope to catch an eye. Her hatred for the man was such that the idea of blinding him brought no distaste.
His labored breathing was getting closer. At least once she thought she heard him stumble. Good!.. He was there now, next to her, nudging her over with the toe of his boot. If he noticed her hand clutching the slat and stepped on her wrist, her one chance to inflict any damage would be gone. But he seemed more intent on determining whether or not she was alive. To make it more difficult for him, she held her breath.
'Come on, over you go,' he said, working the toe of his boot underneath her.
Ellen allowed him to turn her nearly over before she finished the job. With a loud screech, she rolled to her back and swung her weapon in the same motion. The nail sank to the hilt through Sutcher's cheek, less than an inch below his eye. He howled an obscenity and lurched backward, clawing at the wood. Just as he pulled it free, he fell heavily, tumbling over and over down the steep, rubble-strewn hill. Ellen was on her feet before he reached the driveway. Ignoring the pain of many wounds, she scrambled up the slope.
'You bitch! I'm going to kill you!' Sutcher bellowed. 'You're dead meat!'
Even if he had the key to his Jeep in his pocket, there was no way he could get to her before she reached her car. Half stumbling, half running, gasping for air, she charged across the dirt lawn to the Taurus. Moments before she reached it she was seized with the fear that he had flattened a tire or in some other way disabled the car. Neither was the case. Turning her car around before leaving it stood out as the lone bright spot in an afternoon of stupidity. She scrambled awkwardly behind the wheel and in seconds was skidding off down the road.
With her eyes darting from the narrow roadway to the rearview mirror and back, she negotiated the dirt track as rapidly as she dared. Nearing the end, she chanced fishing out her cell phone from her purse. Praying she was in range of a transmitter, she dialed the number Chief Grimes had given her. She was surprised when he answered himself.
'Mrs. Kroft, that certainly wasn't a very wise thing to have done,' Grimes said after she gave him a quick summary of her situation.
Tell me something I don't know, she thought. 'I think he's coming after me,' she said. 'What should I do?'
'I'm in the cruiser right now,' he replied. 'Just keep driving as fast as you can until you see me coming the other way, then pull over. I'll have the flashers on so you can pick me up.'
'Oh, thank you,' Ellen said, feeling her pulse rate begin to recede into the thousands.
'It's okay, Mrs. Kroft. You've done a really dumb thing, but luckily you're okay. I'll take over from here. Just take a deep breath and let it out real slow. You're safe now.'
'No! Absolutely not! We've got a baby sleeping in here. Now go away, please. No more interviews.'
Don Cleary slammed the door shut and stalked back into his apartment, cursing the locked downstairs door and buzz-in security system, neither of which had been functional for a year or more. Damn, but it was going to be good to get out of the projects once and for all, he thought.
'More reporters?' Sherrie asked sleepily, from her spot on the sofa.
'They're crammed on the stairway like rabbits, and there're camera crews on the walk outside.'
He, Sherrie, her mother, and some friends had watched the Omnivax television program after being told about it by a woman named Tricia from Lynette Marquand's office. As the woman promised, in order to protect their privacy for the moment, their names weren't broadcast on the air. Of course, after the actual injection was given, things were going to change. That, they could count on. Mrs. Marquand, Tricia said, would be happy to provide them with a publicity person who would help them after the injection to deal with the press and also to benefit financially in any way possible — and there were bound to be a number of offers.
Then, just an hour or so after the program ended, the phone had started ringing. No one who called seemed to know exactly how they had gotten the Clearys' phone number or Donelle's name. At first, he and Sherrie had been excited. They gave a taped interview to a reporter from one of the Washington television stations and allowed
