Twice

there was only the sliver of a moon in the sky. He should have waited for morning. But with the kids missing now, there wasn’t a second to waste. He was a homicide detective, so finding out who killed Richard Stratton might be the only way he could help Lola and Nathaniel. Maybe he should have brought someone with him. But he needed Malone and Piselli working the crime scene, working with the task force assembled to find the twins. He reached for his cell phone to call Malone, let them know where he was headed. But the thing was dead. Goddamn things always ringing, never charged when you need them.

Anyway, he wasn’t going to go breaking into the Ross house in the middle of the night, he wasn’t going into the Hodge residence looking for Annabelle and Maura. He was just going to look around, absorb the situation, see who was coming and going. Before he made a move, he’d get some help, maybe stop by the precinct and get a hand from old Henry Clay’s boys.

He found the drive leading to the Hodge house, then found a spot and pulled the car over, gave it some thought, and felt a little conspicuous beside the gate. So he drove a few yards farther until he found a place where he could move his vehicle slightly into the trees and out of the path of approaching headlights, giving him a little more cover. Then he cut the engine and settled in. It was going to be a long, cold night. But at least he could think about Rose and hope that this was going to be one of his last nights without her.

chapter thirty-four

How do you have a conversation with your worst nightmare? Lydia wondered. How do you do something as mundane as move your lips to talk when looking into the face that has become in your imaginings the embodiment of evil?

Since the murder of her mother, in Lydia’s nightmares and daydreams Jed McIntyre had become Freddy Krueger and Jason and Charlie Manson in one horrible form. Standing across from him, she looked at his hands and knew that the bones within them bent to grip the knife that killed her mother, that part of him touched her in her last moments. It was almost too much for her mind to get around. She felt a part of herself shutting down, slipping into a kind of shock, a welcome emptiness.

But so close to him, seeing him in flesh and blood, seeing his chest rise and fall with his breath, smelling the stench of his body, in fact, took some of his power away. He was just a man with a beating heart, with skin, muscle, and bone. He was not a demon, a supernatural force the way he’d seemed to her since his mistaken release. He was just a man with an evil heart and a sick mind. Someone who would meet his end like the rest of them. Hopefully sooner.

“Where are they?” she forced the words from her mouth like they were children clinging to her coattails.

“We’ll go to see them. Would you like that?”

She nodded.

“I wish I didn’t see so much hatred in your eyes, Lydia. That’s not what I’d hoped for,” he said, and he really did sound disappointed.

She shook her head, reminded of how insane he was. He moved closer to her and she shrank from him. A look of hurt flashed in his eyes and she almost laughed.

“What did you expect?” she asked, not wanting to feel his name on her tongue, as if to say it would validate him in some way.

“I just thought maybe somewhere inside, you’d come to feel about me the same way I feel about you. That we are one mind, one heart. Sure, we have a complicated past. But can’t we move beyond that?”

She had heard this tone of voice before. It was the tone of the manipulator, the controller, the tone of righteousness implying that all you think and all you feel, the things you believe, are wrong-headed. It was the tone of the angry and abusive man, the one who coaxes at first, then turns to violence when challenged. She’d heard it before, a couple of points lower on the Richter scale. It made him less frightening somehow, reducing him to his twisted psychology. She wondered how delusional he really was, how easily she could fool him. She forced herself to smile, though she wasn’t sure she could make it reach her eyes. Pretending was not one of her strong suits.

“I don’t hate you,” she said softly. “Not at all.”

He was a coil of energy, wound tight and ready to spring. She tried to look into his blue eyes but saw only a flat deadness reflected there. It was as if the thing within us that makes us human hadn’t been granted to Jed McIntyre. Seeing him confirmed her long-held belief that evil was the absence of something, rather than the presence of something. He was a golem, a hideous creature in the tunnels below New York City, hated and reviled, hunted, made wretched and alone by his own terrible self. Even in his grasp, he was less terrifying to her than he had been in her imagination.

“I’m crazy, not stupid,” he said, echoing exactly the words Jetty Murphy had said to Ford McKirdy. Funny how things came in circles.

He grabbed her arm and put the barrel of the gun to her temple. “We’re in the endgame now. Let’s not dawdle.”

They came to a place where a rumble of trains could be heard far in the distance above their heads, a place where pieces of concrete fell fine and glittering like snow. Though Lydia couldn’t imagine what their source could be, thin, very faint shafts of light came through the spaces between metal beams, revealing walls covered with graffiti, an old sagging couch, and other abandoned furniture. A school desk balancing on three legs, a toppled standing ashtray, a card table, its vinyl surface ripped and pouting like a mouth. A filthy pile of school lunch trays and milk cartons lay near the tracks. Unbelievably, a small tree stood in the dirt. It looked as though it had struggled in the dim light, then gave up the fight, its dead branches radiating an aura of abandonment and failure. Lydia tried to imagine the journey of each of these objects, how each of them had wound up in this place. It was something her mind was doing to distract her from the situation she was in; a kind of coping mechanism to keep the brain from being devoured by the chemicals of terror.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” said Lydia, her flippant tone belying the fear that had burrowed a home in her belly.

“Mi casa, su casa,” said McIntyre with a smile.

She hated him so much she felt like her heart would turn inside out. Death was too good for him, too easy, too quick a way out. She wanted to make him pay, not just for the things he had done, but for the way she had felt over the last sixteen years of her life. She had carried this hatred around with her for so long, it had poisoned nearly every experience she’d had, impacted nearly every decision, it had, in effect, changed the entire vector of her life. She hadn’t realized the intensity of her pain and her anger she had carried on her back all these years until just this moment.

Again, she thought about the curse of Annabelle Taylor. She thought of how hatred and righteous anger had warped generation after generation of two families. And then she thought about her own lost child. She had to wonder if a child could survive in a body so consumed by pain; what child would want to be born to such a woman, whose whole life had been directed by vengeance? She looked at Jed McIntyre and for a second she wondered if she was any better than he. Maybe the only difference between them was that she didn’t kill others to mitigate her own suffering. Maybe that was the only thing that separated them. That we are one heart, one mind. Maybe he was right.

Just let it go, a voice inside her head whispered. Be calm, focus.

“We’re here,” he said as they stopped in front of a metal door locked by chains. “I’m going to let go of your arm right now to unlock this door. Remember, if you try anything, I’ll kill them both and let you live. Remember that-life will be your punishment.”

She nodded and looked expectantly at the metal door, praying that when it swung open she’d see Jeffrey and Dax safe and sound. She closed her eyes, unable to bear the waiting, the awful desperate feeling of hopeful expectancy that bloomed inside her.

But when the beam of the flashlight filled the room, there was only a toppled chair and scattered pieces of duct tape. Inside, she smiled. They got away… but how? she wondered. The door had been locked from the outside.