somehow, in some way he couldn’t fathom, the dream had been real? No! It had to be some old memory from one of the drives he, Anne, and the kids had taken over the years. That must be it — although he had no conscious memory of it, the campground must have registered on his mind long ago. He slowed the car, ready to turn in when the side road became visible, but as he rounded the next turn in the road, he saw a police car blocking the entrance, and a State Patrolman waving him on by. As they passed, he was barely able to catch a glimpse of several other police cars parked in the lot at the end of the narrow lane.
“What’s happening, Dad?” Kevin asked, twisting around to stare out of the back window. “Can we stop and find out? Maybe a bear got someone!”
“We’re not stopping,” Glen told Kevin as the boy faced forward again in his seat. “And fasten your seat belt, okay?” He glanced over at Kevin, and as his eyes fixed on his son, he heard a voice in his head:
Remember the cat?
Glen tensed, his fingers tightening on the wheel.
We could do it, the voice whispered. We could do it, and no one would ever know.
Suddenly Glen’s eyelids felt heavy and the road ahead blurred. A fogginess began to settle over his mind, and he felt sleepy. If he could just close his eyes for a—
No!
He jerked his eyes open, sitting straight up in the seat. No blackouts! Not today! Not with Kevin here with him. He pictured the car careening off the road, hurtling through the guardrail to plunge into the river a hundred feet below, and just the image was enough to send a shot of adrenaline into his bloodstream. As the heat of the hormone spread through his system, his heart began to pound and the strange lassitude that had settled over him while the voice whispered inside his head evaporated.
A new sign appeared ahead. Even before Glen saw it clearly, he knew what it was — a sign indicating a side road a quarter mile farther up.
He would turn there.
A few moments later, as he came closer to the narrow track leading off to the right, he once again experienced a strong sense of deja vu; this looked exactly like the place where he’d dreamed he was fishing.
Fishing nude, with a vague memory of having killed a woman, of having opened her chest, of having—
No! It had only been a dream, and Dr. Jacobson had found rational sources for every image in it! It wasn’t real — none of it! Braking harder than he’d intended, Glen turned the car onto a steep road that wound so closely through the trees that branches scraped against both its sides.
“What if we can’t turn around?” Kevin asked, instinctively ducking as a branch slapped against the windshield in front of his face.
“Don’t worry about it,” he heard his father reply. “I’ve been here before. Lots of times.”
Something in his father’s voice caught the boy’s attention. Kevin’s gaze shifted away from the trees.
The eyes of the man and the boy locked for a moment, and then Kevin looked away.
There was something in his father’s eyes he’d never seen before.
Something that scared him.
CHAPTER 59
Anne heard the sound of the mail dropping through the slot in the front door and seized the opportunity to shift her eyes away from the monitor, relax the muscles of her neck, then stand up to stretch her whole body. Could it really be almost three hours since she’d sat down at the computer in the den to review a few of the interview files? Now that her concentration had finally been broken, she realized that it felt like even longer — her legs were stiff, and her right shoulder was sore from manipulating the mouse she’d been using to navigate through the files. So far she’d gotten nothing for her very literal pains. Only a long and tedious review of information that was already so familiar to her that she felt she could have repeated it in her sleep.
Richard Kraven, whether or not he was the serial killer she’d made him out to be, had been a man of many parts. He’d mastered both biology and electrical engineering, and had studied religion and metaphysics as well. He’d loved the arts, especially dance, contributing at least a thousand dollars each year to the ballet.
Dozens — hundreds — of people had known him.
And no one had thought of him as a friend.
Over and over the people she’d interviewed had used the same words. A lot of them had been complimentary: “Charming … Fascinating … Well-read … Genius …”
But other words kept recurring as well: “Cold … Distant … Detached … Remote …”
Sighing, her certainty fading that she would find something in the files she’d overlooked before, Anne moved through the living room into the foyer.
She saw it even before she bent over to pick up the mail strewn across the floor. A plain white envelope — the kind you could buy anywhere — with her name and address written across it in the same spiky script she’d seen only a few days ago when she followed up the police call to Rory Kraven’s apartment. Leaving the rest of the mail where it lay, Anne snatched up the envelope and tore it open. She was about to pull the single sheet of paper out when she stopped herself.
Fingerprints! Maybe, just maybe, whoever had written the note had gotten careless. Her hands trembling, she brought the letter to the kitchen, found a pair of tongs, and carefully pulled the neatly folded sheet out of the envelope. Her heart pounding, she spread it open so she could read it.
Dearest Anne,
An explanation: As I’m sure you’re aware, I had no opportunity to hone my surgical skills during my recent incarceration. Hence, the incident with your daughter’s cat; I simply needed something to practice on. Perhaps I should have left my signature on it, but it was only a cat, and not truly representative of my best endeavors. By the way, no one let the cat out. I came in and got it, just as I came in and left the note on your computer. I can come into your house any time, you know. Any time at all.
An icy numbness spreading through her, she read the note a second time, then a third. She felt panic rising in her, felt an insane urge to run through the house locking the doors and windows and pulling the curtains. But it was broad daylight outside — eleven o’clock on Saturday morning. What could happen to her? Besides, if Richard Kraven—
No! Not Richard Kraven! Richard Kraven was dead!
She took a deep breath. If whoever had written the note really intended to come into her house, why would he warn her?
He was only trying to scare her.
Her panic of a moment before now yielding to anger, Anne carefully reinserted the note into the envelope, then picked up the telephone and dialed the number Mark Blakemoor had given her after their last meeting. “Call me any time,” he’d told her. “If anything happens, or you find something, or you even think of something, call me.”
She let the phone ring a dozen times — didn’t he even have a machine? What kind of cop was he? Finally, she hung up, and dialed his office number from memory. On the fourth ring someone picked it up.
“Homicide. McCarty.”
Jack McCarty? What would the chief of Homicide be doing in the office on a Saturday? “I’m looking for Mark Blakemoor,” Anne said. “This is Anne Jeffers.” When there was no immediate reply, she added, “It’s important. It’s about the Richard Kraven killings.” She hesitated, then took a gamble: “The new ones.”
“What did Mark tell you about them?” McCarty growled suspiciously.
“He didn’t tell me anything,” Anne said quickly, remembering Mark’s warning not to repeat anything he’d told her. “But I have something to tell him. He gave me his home number, but he’s not there.”
“He damn well better not be,” McCarty replied. “He’d better be up on the Snoqualmie, doing his job.”
“The Snoqualmie?” Anne echoed, feeling a chill of apprehension creep over her skin. “What’s going on up there?”
There was another silence, then McCarty spoke again, his voice dripping with the contempt he held for every
