Heart Of The Night

by Gayle Wilson

  His gaze shifted for the first time from its competent, professional focus on Barrington. It moved to search her face. Seeking acceptance of what he had done? she wondered briefly before she realized he had given her the opening she needed.

  She threw herself at the hand holding the revolver, hoping that if nothing else she might disrupt his aim enough to give Thorne a chance to run, to disappear into the darkness of the narrow hall behind him—if he were still capable of running. Instead of the gun, it was the flashlight that fell. It bounced across the bare wooden boards of the hallway, and then began to roll, its light spiraling in revolving patterns along the wall.

  Kahler grabbed her around the waist with the arm that had been occupied with holding the light. In the sudden darkness of the hall she could hear Thorne running. Toward them, she had time to realize. Toward them and not away as she had intended. He was reacting to the chance she had tried to give him by charging Kahler, again trying to protect her. Not trying to avoid Kahler’s gun or the bullet, a bullet fired by a professional—calmly, coolly and accurately. Even in the darkness, the hallway was so narrow there was little chance Kahler would miss such a big target.

  And of course, he hadn’t. She knew that from the noise Thorne’s body made as it fell against the wall and then heavily onto the wooden floor. With the realization that Barrington had been shot, she began to struggle again, fighting against Kahler’s hold, writhing fiercely to free herself. Kahler took a step backwards, trying to control her, but she twisted her body from side to side, hating him. Needing to get to Thorne. A primitive urge to protect. She wasn’t intellectually aware of all that was fueling her desperation to get away from the arms that held her. Arms that she didn’t want around her. Arms she had never wanted there.

  “Stop it, Kate,” Kahler ordered, but it had no effect on the frenzy that possessed her. She dug her heels in, pushing backwards, turning and twisting in his hold. He moved again, dragging her arching body with him, fighting to control her. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all over.”

  Insane, she thought. He really is insane. Beneath all that cold control is only madness.

  The sound was subliminal. Like the crystal teardrops. Something she had heard before. Somewhere. Sometime. But she couldn’t place it.

  Not Barrington, she had time to realize with despair as the shadow launched itself out of the darkness at their struggling bodies, clearly outlined against the night sky behind them. The retriever hit with all the momentum of his sixty-five pounds. Big enough and strong enough to push them through the doorway and out onto the top of the wooden stairs.

  She was aware that Kahler’s arm released her as they fell backward, the three of them falling together, her body sandwiched between the man and the muscled, silken frame of the dog.

  The sound of splintering wood seemed to register on her consciousness simultaneously with the force of Kahler’s palm against her back. He shoved hard, throwing her body toward the doorway, back toward the hallway where Thorne Barrington lay, and away from the rotten banister.

  Unbalanced, hampered by the frightened dog who was struggling to find his own footing, Kate fell—forward and not back—to lie stunned over the threshold of the doorway. Kahler made no sound as he continued to fall, the impact of their bodies having shattered the railing behind him. But the noise as he struck the tiled roof of the portico three stories below was like nothing she had ever heard—dull and leaden and somehow, she knew, very final.

  Kate lay a moment where she had fallen, her mind struggling to accept the fact she was still alive. The retriever had made it to his feet, apparently unhurt. He stood beside her now, whining, his cold nose examining her out-flung arm before he turned to disappear into the darkness of the hallway from which he had appeared like a miracle. Elliot’s watchdog.

  Charlie’s bark, sharp and loud, came from the darkness down the hall. He was trying to arouse his master. Kate got to her knees, and then, using the frame of the doorway she had been thrown into, finally to her feet. She staggered, knees shaking, toward the light of Kahler’s flashlight. It had all happened so quickly that the big, black handle was still rolling, moving slightly back and forth in an ever-decreasing arc, over the smooth wooden floor.

  She picked it up and, more in control now, she ran down the hall toward Thorne’s sprawled body. She pushed the dog out of her way and knelt beside the man. She put her hand against the side of his neck and felt the reassuring pulse of blood through the carotid artery. Alive. Thank God, he was still alive.

  The bullet had struck his temple, and the wound was bleeding. Like all head wounds, it was bleeding a lot. There was a frighteningly large pool of blood already under his head, and she knew that she had to get help. Call 911. Call somebody. Find a phone. She stood up, and the dog looked up at her, trusting eyes following her movements.

  “Stay with him,” she said. “I’ll be right back. I have to get help.” He whined and then barked once, the noise echoing loudly in the narrow passage. “It’s okay,” she said, touching the retriever’s head. “Everything’s all right. He’ll be all right.”

  She was reassuring a dog, she realized, when she should be getting help. Shock? Was that what was wrong with her? Was that why she was still standing here in the ruined house, trembling, fighting sobs that were pushing upward from her chest. What the hell was wrong with her?

  “Stay with him,” she whispered the command past the knot in her throat, and then she ran into the darkness to find someone who would help.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The media circus of the next four weeks was far worse than Kate could ever have imagined, and this time, of course she was in the center ring. The local news crews had arrived almost as soon as the police that night, camera lights providing graphic illumination for the work of the paramedics.

  She had said too much in her panicked call for help. She should never had mentioned the Tripper bombings, never have said Thorne Barrington’s name, too well-known to go unnoticed by those who avidly listened to the scanners. The public’s right to know, she had to remind herself, but the phrase echoed in her heart with bitterness now.

  News of Jack the Tripper’s death had spread like the proverbial wildfire, attracting national attention. Of course, it had been a national story all along. Kahler’s victims had been scattered across the country, connected only by the thread of the drifting, aimless life of a young prostitute, a life which had ended one night, virtually unnoticed, in a Georgia jail cell.

  What had Jenny Carpenter been doing in Atlanta? Kate often wondered. Had she come here to find her brother? Had Kahler known she was in his city? Was that what had precipitated Jenny’s tragic suicide—the fear that Kahler might find out what she’d become? Or the fear that she might embarrass the brother who, despite incredible odds, seemed to have transcended their tragic, broken beginnings?

  The authorities were still studying the diaries they had found during their search of Kahler’s apartment, but they had discovered no bomb-making paraphernalia there. The speculation was that the bombs had been put together elsewhere, somewhere safe and private—a small, lock-it-and-take-the-key storage building maybe, the necessary equipment concealed in strongboxes. All Kahler would need would be a folding table and chair, easily stored in the same building, maybe in another city, hundreds of miles away from the public life Detective Byron Kahler had lived.

  Despite the publicity, no one had come forward claiming to have knowledge about such a rental. Just as no one had ever claimed to have seen him mail the packages through the years. He had been too smart for that. None of those accidental sightings, no bystander’s intuition, would have brought Kahler down.

  After Kate had told her story—at least half a dozen times, it seemed to her—the police had asked her to read through Lew’s neatly labeled folder containing the material the paper had collected on Byron Kahler. They wanted to know what Garrison had found that had gotten him killed. Despite her feelings about all that had happened, Kate wa
s surprised to find that she, too, still needed an answer to that question.

  What she found in the folder wasn’t even an interview, not like the other “hunter” files she had read the night she’d received the envelope. Kahler’s file contained only two sheets of paper. One of them was a polite letter from the public information officer of the Atlanta PD, which explained that, due to the press of official business, Detective Kahler was forced to deny the request for an interview at this time.

  But the helpful officer had supplied what small bit of information she could—something she obviously had not cleared with Kahler. She had sent the newspaper a photocopy of Kahler’s employment application. Despite the detective’s refusal to do an interview, the department had attempted to cooperate with Lew’s request, to provide some background on the person who was carrying out the official investigation of the Atlanta bombing. Knowing Kahler, Kate suspected that this single sheet of paper was all the personal information the department had.

  Kate scanned the lines of the form that had been neatly filled in more than fourteen years before, the ink faded, but Kahler’s printing almost as meticulous as Lew’s. Her eyes moved down the page to next of kin, and what she found was a little surprising. No name had been entered in the space.

  She almost turned the form over without reading anything else on the front, but somehow a word caught her eye. Pennsylvania. It had almost jumped off the page at her, and then she looked at the town printed before it in Kahler’s distinctive hand. Falls Bend. Place of birth. Falls Bend, Pennsylvania.

  She knew immediately where she’d heard that name—during Jackie Draper’s whispered narrative, but she also knew she had never transcribed her notes from that interview. She hadn’t had time. Too much had happened and that task had been forgotten. So how would Lew have made the connection?

  The cop to whom Kate made her request looked skeptical, but eventually he brought what she had asked for. She was right. None of the news releases in the file on Hall Draper mentioned his birthplace. Community activities in Tucson. Boy Scouts. Little League. Church. Nothing about his childhood, about where he had grown up, the tiny coal-mining community where he had known a girl named Jenny Carpenter, but probably, Kate realized, given the difference in their ages, not her older brother.

  Hall Draper’s death would have posed the greatest risk for Kahler, of course. There was always the possibility, however remote, that someone might make that connection. In remaining as reticent about his background as he had always been, Kahler had, before he’d ever embarked on his quest for revenge, unwittingly done everything that could be done to prevent any link to that past. And he had saved for last the two people who were connected to Falls Bend. One had been the old man in Austin, who, given his age, must have been his mother’s boyfriend that Kahler had told her about, the one who had taught Jenny the dark lessons that had haunted her life. He might have had only a tenuous link to the town, a transient in all probability.

  And the last victim, the strongest link to Kahler’s past, would have been Hall Draper. Lew couldn’t have known the name of the town where both Kahler and Draper had been born, she finally concluded. The name wasn’t anywhere in the Draper file. Only in her notes. Had Lew put it together on the very remote link provided by the state of Pennsylvania?

  Maybe important. Maybe nothing. Lew wasn’t stupid He would never have let it slip to Kahler if he’d discovered he and Draper were from the same town, but maybe, just maybe, he’d mentioned Falls Bend, or mentioned that he’d been given Kahler’s application form.

  Maybe Kahler had heard something in Lew’s voice. Maybe the thought that Kahler and Draper might have known each other had struck Lew in the middle of that conversation. He certainly had had access to the information that they had been born in the same state. She herself had told him about Draper. Would that have been enough to make an old journalist like Lew Garrison suspicious? Maybe, she thought. Maybe just enough.

  No one would ever know exactly what had happened, but Lew had said or done something that had made Kahler afraid it was about to come unraveled. Maybe Kahler had realized if Lew had the application form, and if he were curious enough to check on the name of the town where Draper had been born, it was all over.

  Then, after he had killed Lew, he had come to Kate’s apartment to wait for her because, she had finally realized, he had to find out if Garrison had told her what he had discovered. While he was there, she had played Lew’s message in his hearing—and in doing so, she had saved her own life.

  Finally, only Thorne Barrington stood in the way of having it finished. I wanted it to be over, Kahler had told her. Because he had loved her. In his twisted, insane way he had paid that debt, too, when he had pushed her away from the splintering railing. There was no doubt in Kate’s mind that had been deliberate, the last act of the man who had been Byron Kahler. And Jack the Tripper. In his insanity, he had collected Jenny’s debt, but he had also paid his own. He had given Kate her life.

  Experts all over the country were explaining what had made Byron Kahler tick, examining every detail of the painful past he had seemingly escaped, laying out all its dirty secrets for public scrutiny. All the things Kahler had hidden through the years—the grinding poverty, his stepfather’s abuse, his mother’s addictions—were now the property of a detailhungry media.

  The public’s right to know.

  Kate realized she had again been sitting, simply staring at her computer screen. Despite the managing editor’s repeated requests that she write the conclusion for her series, she was probably the only journalist in the country who had not written one word on the death of Jack the Tripper. Interest would eventually have to fade, she thought, and maybe she wouldn’t be forced to write the ending of the story she had lived. She had found that she had nothing to say about Kahler, nothing that could satisfactorily explain what had happened to the man who had at one time, she truly believed, been a good cop.

  She took a deep breath and expelled it loudly enough to cause a couple of heads to turn, a couple of quick glances in her direction. No one asked what was wrong, probably because they already knew. It seemed that everything about her life was now public knowledge. There had been heated speculation—more than speculation in the tabloids—about the relationship between Kate August and the two men at the center of the Tripper bombings.

  She had to admit that all the elements were there for a great story, begging to be sensationalized: the reclusive millionaire, the poor-boy-made-good cop who had gone so desperately wrong, and the woman between them. “The Eternal Triangle” one tabloid headline screamed. The grain of truth, Kate supposed, hidden in the mass of chaff that had been written about the case, about Kahler’s death, and about Judge Barrington’s injury.

  She had waited through the hours of surgery that night and had breathed a prayer of thanksgiving when she had been told that he’d survived the operation, but that his prognosis was guarded. Whatever the hell that meant. The police, who had waited patiently for her statement, would wait no longer, and when she had returned to the hospital, it was to find that the same impenetrable security that had been imposed at the time of the first bombing was again in place.

  She had been denied admittance to Barrington’s hospital room—she and every other reporter. Nothing she had said or done in the intervening weeks had made any difference to that wall of silence. For some reason Greg Sandifer blamed her for what had happened—or at least for the media attention. He had made that clear in the one conversation they’d had. Kate had gotten news about Thorne’s condition just like the rest of the world, through carefully phrased statements given by the hospital spokesman, always to the effect that “the judge was progressing as well as could be expected, given the seriousness of his injury.”

  There was no one living at the mansion, she knew. The gate was locked, and no one had answered the bell on any of her visits. She had no idea what had happened to Elliot or to Charlie. Even the unlisted telephone number had been disconnected.
Greg Sandifer, with the help of Barton Phillips and his firm, had succeeded in keeping the press at bay, but what they hadn’t taken into account was that their efforts had simply made the media more rabid to find out exactly what they were trying to hide.

  She hadn’t talked to the press, and she didn’t intend to. Not about her relationship to Thorne Barrington. What had been her relationship, she amended. That wasn’t and never would be public property. In the statement the paper had released on her behalf, she had told the truth, that Barrington had been shot trying to disarm Kahler, trying to save her life. That had only added fuel to the frenzy, the press turning Barrington into some kind of romantic figure: heroic, tragically wounded, and inaccessible.

  She thought about how much he would hate that image, and she smiled. But the inaccessible part was certainly accurate. She found herself wondering, as she had a thousand times, if that were his choice. Or if that decision had been made for him because he was no longer capable of making his own decisions.

  She closed her eyes, fighting emotion, fighting fear. When she finally reopened them, she had again found control, a control she had demanded of herself through these long weeks. But she might as well admit that she was wasting her time here. She wasn’t working, and she didn’t see much point in pretending.

  She opened her bottom drawer, took out the black leather purse, and, offering no explanations, walked out of the newsroom. Maybe another day she could do this—satisfy the public’s right to know. Maybe some day, but not today.

  SHE HAD SPENT a long time soaking in water into which she’d thrown a handful of Shalimar-scented bath crystals, leaving behind in the small bathroom a cloud of fragrant steam when she’d finished. She put on shorts and a tank top and walked barefoot into the kitchen to try to think about something for dinner.

  Eating had moved very low on her hst of priorities, and it was beginning to show. She had probably lost six or seven pounds, and she was disgusted. Being too upset to eat was about as neurotic as you could get, and she was determined to put an end to that ridiculous behavior. It was time to get on with her life. Especially since she had been left no other choice.