Why are you going on-”
Emery abruptly stopped speaking, and Diane looked at him. He stood motionless, holding the gun on her, looking bewildered. There was something familiar about the expression. As he dropped to the floor she saw the same expression on Emery’s face that she had seen on Mike’s when he was stabbed.
Chapter 45
Diane was paralyzed with confusion and fear. Her six-foot-four-inch head of crime lab security lay limp, facedown on the floor. There was a wet, dark stain on the back of his jacket. In his place stood a much smaller man. In his right hand was a long knife dripping with Emery’s blood. The bad aroma she’d detected earlier wafted through the air. Not for even a moment did she believe she had been rescued.
A cold fear clutched at Diane’s heart, worse than what she’d felt with Emery. It was a primal fear that choked her in its grip. The thought passed through her mind that he wasn’t a man at all, but some demon rooted up from the bowels of the museum subbasement.
He was dirty. She could see that and smell it, but it wasn’t just body odor. Another smell clung to his dark, mangy clothing. His coat, perhaps at one time a wool suit coat, too warm for their weather, had been on his body so long it had merged and transformed and become a part of him, like scales or a molting skin. But it wasn’t his odor, the filthy clothes or his short, ratty hair, but his eyes that frightened her the most. They were flat-black, almost dead eyes devoid of humanity-or any emotion found in the human world.
She had once looked into the eyes of Ivan Santos, the man who slaughtered her daughter and her mission friends and hundreds of others during his horrific reign. In his eyes she thought she had seen the devil. But as she looked at this man, she realized that what she had seen in Santos’s eyes that one time was arrogant, self-centered hatred and anger. He was evil, but this man before her now was something different, something beyond that. Looking into his eyes was looking into a dull, black. . nothing.
“Who are you?” Diane found a fragment of her voice. It was shaky, but audible.
He kept staring for a long moment. Diane looked at the knife in his hand. His fingers. The tips of his fingers on his left hand were deformed, curved in some funny way, and the nails were thick and split, some of them missing. One finger on his right hand was severely deformed, and on that hand he wore a ring with a red stone.
In a flash, Diane put it together, the thing that had been nagging at her that she couldn’t remember-the bloodred ring and injured finger of the man the Odells had seen at the graveside service, the impression in the clay from Neva’s break-in showing a deformed finger. The evidence had pointed to the same person, but she had missed it until now. He was the one who had wrecked Neva’s house. He was the one who had stabbed her and Mike at the cemetery. But who was he, and what possible motive could he have for the brutal and murderous things he was doing?
Diane moved her fingers slowly to punch the remaining numbers to her vault, hoping to rush in, lock the vault door and call for help. He slashed out at her hand. She pulled back quickly, his blade just missing her fingers. She backed away, looking for a table to put between them. But the tables were too far away.
“Who are you?” she repeated.
Again he said nothing, just stared at her with his blank eyes, easing toward her with the knife tip pointed at her, making little jabbing motions. She saw his eyes dart to the tables, and a little smile crept onto his thin lips and he parted them slightly. His eyes lit up suddenly.
“What do you want?” she asked, trying to pull his attention to her, away from the table.
It startled her when he answered in a high-pitched voice, “Rabbits. I want rabbits.”
“What does that mean exactly?” said Diane. “Why did you stab me?”
“It’s what you do with rabbits.”
“And Mike. Is he a rabbit too?” If she could get him talking, maybe she could get some sense out of him.
He frowned; his eyes went dark again. “Tried to steal my rabbits.”
“You know, fella,” said Diane, “you aren’t making a lot of sense.”
“You don’t have to make sense to a rabbit.”
“For the sake of argument, pretend for a moment that I’m not a rabbit. What the hell are you talking about?”
She made a dash for the nearest table and stood at one end. To her good luck, the brakes were off and it rolled easily. She held on to it as if it were a weapon.
He crouched and began easing around the table. She moved so that it stayed between the two of them. She backed up then and ran at him, pushing the table into him, knocking him onto his back on the slick floor. His knife bounced into the corner.
She ran for Emery’s gun, but the man jumped to his feet with an inhuman swiftness and ran at her, screaming. She tried to get away, but he knocked her sprawling against a table, overturning it with a bang. The table just missed falling on her. She tried to scramble up, but he caught her foot and dragged her to him. She kicked and he twisted her foot. She cried out in pain.
“Gotcha, rabbit.”
She looked for any kind of weapon, but there was nothing. She tried to scramble away from him, grabbing at the table for leverage, something to hold on to to keep from sliding in his direction. She kicked as she scrambled, freed herself and almost made it to her feet before he caught her legs again and pulled her toward him. Damn, he was strong.
He hit her across the jaw, stunned her and picked up his knife from the floor.
“You’ll mind what I tell you,” he hissed. “Get on the table.”
“The hell I will.” Diane punched him in the throat with her fist.
He squealed and raised his knife over his head.
The shot was deafening in the enclosed room. The specter paused, knife in midair. Diane didn’t wait to scramble away from him. He fell forward.
She looked over to see Emery half propped up with his gun aimed in her direction.
“I hope you don’t intend to shoot me after all this,” she said.
He lowered the gun. Diane went to him. He collapsed again into a pool of his own blood on the floor.
“Don’t tell my family, please. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll tell them you’re a hero,” said Diane.
He closed his eyes and Diane ran for the phone. It had been pulled out of the wall. She ran to her office phone. It was dead. She opened the vault. The phone in there was working. She dialed 911.
When she came out of her office, she expected to see the wild man gone, vanished the way demons did. But he lay on his face still, his blood spilling into an expanding puddle.
She felt for a pulse in Emery. There was none. His life had been shorter than he thought. In some odd way, his fall from grace may have saved her life. If Emery hadn’t been there, the madman would have killed her. She shivered at the thought. The smell that clung to her clothes sickened her. She went to the sink and threw up.
Her crew, including Mike and Korey, came in with the paramedics. They stood in the doorway like a startled Greek chorus and stared at Diane and the bloody scene. Garnett appeared soon after, looking equally as baffled.
“What happened here?” He went over to look at Emery, then at the stranger. “Who is he?”
“I have no idea. Emery saved my life. The other man was trying to kill me.”
Garnett looked at her and they locked gazes for several moments. “Okay, that works for me,” he whispered. “You have no idea who this other man is?”
“He’s the one who stabbed me and Mike.”
