Twice

fear, out of need to please, out of something-who knows really why? Somehow you feel if you don’t play the music that’s written for you, then you’re guilty of the chaos that ensues. None of the other players know how to proceed. It’s so frightening for everyone.”

Lydia had no idea what she was trying to say, but again she let silence do the coaxing.

“Especially when the queen doesn’t get her way,” she continued.

“The queen?” Lydia asked, but remembered that that’s how she referred to her mother during their last visit.

“The Queen of the Damned,” she said, with all the cool seriousness of a college professor.

“What happens when the queen doesn’t get her way?” Lydia asked, even though it was pretty clear that Julian Ross was quite insane.

Julian smiled, a disturbing twisted grin. “Then off with your head,” she said with a hard laugh. “Of course.”

Julian’s answer sent a chill through Lydia, as the images from the Richard Stratton crime scene came to her head.

“So Eleanor, your mother. She’s one of the destroyers.”

“I’d say so,” Julian said indignantly.

“And your brother, James? What about him?”

“Oh, no,” she said with gravity. “Not Jamey. He’s one of the angels.”

“But he tried to kill you, didn’t he? He tried to burn you and your mother alive.”

“No,” she yelled suddenly, scaring the hell out of Lydia. “That was a lie. A fucking lie that they used to put him away, to keep him away from me.”

The person before her had changed. She had transformed from a meek, scared little waif into the very embodiment of rage. She jumped up from her perch and moved toward Lydia, who immediately stood. Julian’s face had gone red, and the muscles in her arms and neck were taut and straining against her skin. A moment earlier she had looked like a strong wind would knock her down. Now she seemed to possess a kind of wiry strength, as though she were made of cord pulled tight, ready to snap. Her eyes were dark and unseeing, as her chest began to heave.

“Take it easy, Julian,” said Lydia, trying to keep her voice calm as she edged toward the door. “I’m on your side.”

But Julian, seeming not to have heard her, kept moving closer. In her face, which she’d pulled into a kind of grimace, Lydia could see the potential for all the things of which she hadn’t believed Julian capable. Rage, violence, murder. Lydia felt the cold finger of fear poke her in the belly as her exhaustion was replaced by a burst of adrenaline.

“Guard!” Lydia called. Then, summoning her most authoritative voice and looking the other woman directly in the eye, “Julian, you need to calm down.”

Julian laughed, and it was a frightening sound. The woman had turned into a ghoul; Lydia half expected to see that she had grown fangs. Lydia felt a surge of panic as she realized that she wasn’t sure she could fend Julian off. She felt a physical weakness that was unfamiliar to her, as if her body were in rebellion after all the abuse it had suffered.

“Guard!” Lydia called again, this time louder.

Julian looked ready to lunge and Lydia flashed on the attack in the basement of the Ross home. She couldn’t believe it. The bruise on her face hadn’t even healed yet and she was going to get her ass kicked again.

The door opened suddenly and the young officer entered. Lydia sighed with relief, as Julian seemed to deflate like a blow-up doll. Julian sagged to the floor and started to cry, to sob like she was filled with all the grief and pain of the world. The guard shot Lydia an accusatory look as he helped Julian to her feet. She looked about as menacing as a piece of string.

“Please help me,” Lydia heard Julian call as she rushed down the hall, eager to get as far away from Julian Ross and her nightmare existence as possible.

chapter twenty-seven

Central Park was a postcard. A light snow fell, glimmering window lights from the buildings surrounding the park glowed against the blue black of the night sky. The air was crisp but not painfully cold against Jeffrey’s skin as he stood, ignored by the throng of police officers and FBI agents swarming the crime scene. He felt helpless, useless, an outsider in the kind of situation where he was accustomed to being in control. But tonight he was a rogue private investigator, someone at least partially responsible for the dead woman lying naked and unprotected from the chill of winter and the eyes of a hundred agents of the law.

Jeffrey considered himself to have a particularly high threshold for stress. But standing behind the crime scene tape that surrounded Rebecca’s body as it lay against a giant oak edging the Great Lawn in Central Park, he felt like he was pretty much at the edge of what he could endure. There had been too much loss, too much grief. He felt a kind of hollow space in his stomach, a heaviness in his heart, as though it were filled with stones.

Then there was the simmer of anger in the back of his mind, a nebulous area of negativity where thoughts of violence, revenge, and vigilantism dwelled. He wasn’t proud of these feelings, which had grown stronger since he and Dax had followed Jed McIntyre into the tunnels below the city. He couldn’t deny them, either. Unlike Lydia, in the cosmic scheme of things he didn’t necessarily believe that these feelings were inherently wrong. But he did acknowledge that they felt like a kind of spiritual poison, a psychic hallucinogen that slipped through his veins igniting visions and desires that he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of.

Over his grief ran a current of panic; Jed McIntyre had made an offensive strike. He was no longer on the run from them. He was moving in. And the only comfort Jeffrey had in this moment was that Lydia was safe at home with Dax.

Jeffrey was looking at a parody of Marion Strong’s crime scene. No doubt that was McIntyre’s agenda. Rebecca’s throat had been cut, her legs bound, her arms bound and nailed above her head to the tree under which she rested. It was the way Marion and his twelve other upstate New York victims had been posed, albeit in their bedrooms, nearly seventeen years ago now. Sitting as yet untouched in Rebecca’s lap was a white number ten envelope. In the glare of the flashbulbs from the crime scene photographers’ cameras, he could see Lydia’s name carefully printed in black. The forensics team would wait until the photographers had finished their work before dissecting the scene, hair by hair, fiber by fiber, print by print. Everyone was waiting to read the contents of that letter. Jeffrey only hoped that Goban wasn’t going to be a prick and shut him out.

Jeffrey remembered the first letter Lydia had received from McIntyre, while he was still incarcerated, just after the release of her first book, With a Vengeance, which detailed McIntyre’s murders and much of his life. Every month after that, he’d sent her a letter. Letters she received but never opened. It had been a recurring topic of argument between Lydia and Jeffrey. He thought that they should be returned; but Lydia insisted that they be kept, locked away in a drawer. She said they were reminders to her that he was locked away forever, that he was just a mentally ill man who could only reach her by the U.S. mail and that she had the choice to read or not read his communications. His letters, she claimed, comforted her that he was mortal, caged away from society, and not a demon that could materialize from her nightmares. Jeffrey had eventually given up on arguing about the letters, came to understand the peace she had derived from them. This letter, however, proved just the opposite. That he was a demon, come to destroy them all.

Poor Rebecca. Her face was pale and calm like the face of an angel, her glassy eyes cast heavenward. He was glad to see that her face hadn’t frozen in the mask of terror and pain that he had seen too often on murder victims. It made him think that she had found a moment of peace before she died. He held on to that hope as he turned away from her.

Jeffrey was about to approach Goban, who he could see pale beneath the spotlights, huddled with the other members of his team, when his cell phone chirped. He saw Dax’s number on the caller ID display.

“What’s up?”

“Hey. I’ve got big news. You have to meet me.”