When he didn’t, she softened a little. “You know the saddest part of all? My mother has never known anything else. Her father was just like him. In fact, my father was my grandfather’s protégé when he was first stationed at Fort Stanton. When my grandfather was sent to the Pentagon, my father took over as base commander. He’s a lot older than my mother, and I always wondered if he married someone so young just so that he could try and mold her into the kind of wife he always wanted.”
“Is that the reason you became a cop?” Deacon asked. “So you could be in control?”
Marly was surprised by his insight. “Partly, I guess. And partly because I knew my father wouldn’t approve. Men like him have certain expectations for women, and being a cop isn’t one of them.”
“What about your brother?” Deacon asked carefully. “Does he take after your father?”
“Sam? You’ve met him. He’s nothing like my father.”
“But he followed in your father’s footsteps, didn’t he? I heard he was in the army for a while.”
Marly’s gaze narrowed in suspicion. “Why are you so interested in Sam?”
Deacon lifted his coffee cup. “He’s my landlord. And he also happens to be your brother.”
“Why are you so interested in me?” Marly demanded.
Because you’re fascinating, Deacon wanted to tell her. “Because I need your help. And you need mine.”
“To find a killer who doesn’t exist.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t know what I’m even doing here,” she muttered.
Deacon leaned toward her. “Because you know I’m right. You know he’s out there somewhere.”
“I’m just supposed to take your word for that?” Marly let out a long breath. “You waltz into town making all kinds of outrageous claims, and I’m just supposed to blindly trust you? I don’t know anything about you.”
“You know enough.”
“I know nothing,” she said angrily.
He sat back and studied her for a moment. “That would help? To know something about me?”
She shrugged. “It couldn’t hurt.”
“What is it you want to know?” Deacon asked reluctantly.
“I don’t know.” Marly tucked her hair behind her ears. “Since you’re so interested in my family, why don’t you tell me something about yours?”
“I don’t have any family.”
“No one?”
He shrugged. “It’s better that way. If you don’t have a family, no one can use them against you.”
“Use them against you? You sound like you’re in the mafia,” Marly said dryly.
“Not the mafia. But I do deal with some pretty dangerous people in my line of work. People who aren’t exactly happy with what I do now,” he said cryptically.
“And what exactly do you do?”
Again he hesitated, as if debating on how much he should tell her. How much she would believe. “I work for an organization that tracks killers.”
Marly caught her breath. “You mean like…the FBI?” she asked inanely.
“No, not like the FBI.” His gaze lifted. “Do you remember what I told you last night about the Montauk Project?”
“You said something about a black special ops team,” Marly said. “Super soldiers with—what did you call it? Psionic abilities?”
“Five years ago, a team of these soldiers boarded a submarine for a clandestine rendezvous in the North Atlantic. The mission was so highly classified the men were to be briefed only minutes before they reached their destination. But there was an explosion on board before the drop. The submarine crashed to the bottom of the Atlantic, trapping everyone on board. By the time the rescue team arrived several days later, it was too late to save most of the crew. Six members of the special ops team were the only ones who survived the accident.”
Marly stared at him in confusion. “What does that have to do with you? With what’s happening in Mission Creek?”
“I’m getting to that.” Deacon waited until the waitress had topped off his coffee before continuing. “After the men recovered, they underwent rigorous debriefing sessions that included comprehensive brainwashing techniques that not only destroyed their memories of the mission, but also of the experiments they’d been subjected to, in some cases for years. They were discharged from the military as mentally unfit to serve, which meant if any of them ever talked, no one would believe them.” He leaned toward Marly. “The problem was…they’d been trained to kill, you see. And some of them didn’t know how to stop.”
“And that’s where you come in,” Marly said.
He nodded. “The organization I work for has been tracking these men for years. Not just the survivors of the submarine accident, but the ones who went through similar experiments at the abandoned Montauk Air Force station on Long Island.”
“Tracking them how?” Marly asked. “You have a list of names?”
He shook his head. “It’s not that easy. The names of all the subjects were purged from the files when the project was abandoned. But we have other ways of finding them,” he said ominously.
“Such as?”
“When they use them, their special abilities cause talk,” he said. “We follow the rumors. And in some cases, the trail of dead bodies.”
Marly suppressed a shudder. “This organization…is it connected to our government?”
“In a manner of speaking. But if you were to ask anyone in the intelligence community, they would deny its existence, just as they would deny the whole Montauk fiasco.”
That sounded a little too convenient to Marly. As if he were covering his bases, making sure she had no way to check out his story. “You said the special ops team aboard that submarine was on a highly classified mission. If it was so secret, how is it you happen to know so much about it?”
“Because I was on board that submarine. I was a member of that team.”
Marly glanced up, her gaze wide. “Are you saying you were…a super soldier?”
“Yes,” Deacon said grimly. “I was trained to kill. And I did so with ruthless precision.”
Chapter Ten
Contrary to what Deacon had told Marly earlier, his questions about her brother were generated by far more than just casual interest. One of the darker secrets of the Montauk Project was that they’d used the children of military personnel as their test subjects. Their victims of choice were males between the ages of nine and twelve who excelled in both athletics and academics. Deacon suspected that Sam Jessop, the son of an army colonel and the grandson of a general, had been the perfect candidate.
From the front window in his apartment, Deacon watched now as Sam came out of the house, climbed into his Jeep, and backed out of the driveway. Then he waited until the vehicle’s taillights were out of sight before he left the apartment and hurried down the outside stairs. He melted into the shadows of the covered patio to reconnoiter, but he didn’t think he was in any danger of being detected. The patio couldn’t be seen from the street, and the rain and darkness would protect him from any neighbors who happened to be glancing out their windows.
The lock on the back door was a flimsy, old-fashioned model that Deacon could easily have picked, but it wasn’t necessary because Sam had left the door unfastened. It was almost like an invitation, Deacon thought uneasily.
Letting himself inside, he paused in the kitchen to get his bearings. He’d committed the furniture placement to memory two nights ago, and now he made his way unerringly across the room to the door.
Slipping silently through the darkened house, he followed the hallway to the foyer. The front parlor was to his right, the stairway to his left. He went up quickly.
The first room at the top was a bedroom. He took out a flashlight and quickly circled the area with the beam. Everything appeared clean and orderly, but the scent of old memories seemed to permeate the space. Deacon remembered what Nona Ferris had told him about Marly’s grandmother that first day on the porch of Ricky Morales’s hou
se. She’d committed suicide years ago and Marly was the one who found the body.
Deacon wondered if this was the room where it had happened. He could picture Marly—small for her age and quietly intense—as she came slowly up the stairs, perhaps already sensing what she would find at the top.
A floorboard creaked somewhere in the house and Deacon whirled. He stood for a moment, listening to the dark, and then dousing the flashlight, he stole across the room to the door. Flattening himself against the wall, he eased down the hallway to the top of the stairs.
No one was there.
He started to turn away, but a subtle noise, like a pencil rolling off a desktop, caused him to freeze.
And almost instantly, he realized his mistake.
The noise had come from downstairs, but the intruder was already upstairs, using the power of his mind to create a diversion. In the split second before Deacon understood this, the killer came rushing out of the darkness toward him.
Deacon still had his back to the hallway, and before he could turn, something slammed into the back of his head. Pain exploded behind his eyes as he pitched forward, reaching blindly for the banister.
But he couldn’t stop his momentum. He went crashing downward, bones and flesh bouncing off the wooden stairs until he landed at the bottom with a jarring thud. He couldn’t tell how badly he was hurt because he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even lift his head.
But in that brief moment before everything went black, Deacon could have sworn he heard music. A monotonous tune that repeated itself over and over.
EVERY THURSDAY NIGHT, come hell or high water, Marly was expected at her parents’ house for dinner. The days leading up to that dinner had become something of a ritual for her. She started thinking about it on Monday, worrying about it on Tuesday, sweating over it on Wednesday, and by Thursday afternoon, she’d be almost sick with dread.
Marly often wondered why she kept punishing herself by going. Why not just put an end to the farce once and for all? The only logical answer she’d ever been able to come up with was that she did it for her mother. As much as Marly hated those Thursday night dinners, her mother looked forward to them. It was the one night of the week when she didn’t have to spend the evening alone with her husband.
As far as Marly knew, her father had never laid a hand on her mother, but he had other ways of intimidating. Other ways of tormenting. He was a cold, ruthless man with an uncanny knack for zeroing in on a person’s weaknesses, including his own children.
By the time Marly rang the doorbell, she’d worked herself up into quite a state. Her palms were already clammy, her stomach tied in knots. If Mrs. Hicks, her mother’s housekeeper, hadn’t answered the door so promptly, Marly might actually have turned and fled back into the darkness.
But it was too late now. Mrs. Hicks ushered her into the foyer and took her raincoat and umbrella.
“Where’s Mother?” Marly asked as she brushed raindrops from her hair.
“She’s running a little late tonight. She asked me to tell you she’ll be down shortly.”
Marly was instantly worried. Her mother was never late. Her father wouldn’t abide tardiness. “She isn’t sick, is she?”
“She didn’t mention anything about feeling under the weather.” Mrs. Hicks busied herself hanging up Marly’s coat and umbrella. “Colonel Jessop is in the den if you want to go in and keep him company,” she said over her shoulder.
Marly grimaced inwardly. That was pretty much the last thing she wanted to do. “I think I’ll freshen up first.” If she played her cards right, she could kill at least two or three minutes in the powder room before having to face her father.
She took so long touching up her hair and makeup that when she finally came out, her mother was just coming down. Marly went to greet her.
Andrea looked lovely as always. Her pale blond hair was expertly arranged in the sleek pageboy style she’d worn for years, and her stark, long-sleeve dress emphasized her narrow shoulders and tiny waist. Her makeup, as usual, was applied with a light hand. She looked classy, understated, and elegant. There was nothing in her demeanor or her attire that would raise eyebrows or cause talk. The years of being a colonel’s wife—and before that, a general’s daughter—had taught her well. No one could find fault with her appearance, although her husband frequently tried.
She bent and gave Marly a hug. “It’s so wonderful to see you.”
Marly hugged her back, feeling the sharp ridges of her mother’s rib cage beneath the smooth fabric of her dress. Marly pulled back in concern. “Mrs. Hicks said you were running late. Are you okay? You’re not sick, I hope.”
“I’m fine, dear. I had a last-minute errand to run.” She lifted a hand to Marly’s cheek. “But it’s sweet of you to be concerned.” She smiled, and it suddenly hit Marly that there was something different about her mother tonight. Something subtle. Her hair and makeup were the same, but her eyes seemed to glow with an inner excitement.
Marly caught her breath. My God, she thought. She really is beautiful.
What had put that light in her mother’s eyes? Marly couldn’t help wondering. Surely something more than the anticipation of seeing her children at dinner.
The doorbell rang, and her mother gave her another quick squeeze. “That’ll be Sam. I’ll let him in. You go on in and join your father.”
Marly would much rather have waited for Sam, but her mother gave her a nudge, urging her forward, and reluctantly Marly entered the den where her father sat reading a book. He was tall and muscular, in very good shape for a man well into his sixties. He was still the same weight as the day he’d retired from the army, and he still retained the same rigid posture and adhered to the same meticulous care of his appearance, right down to the spit and polish of his black shoes. There wasn’t a speck of lint on his dark suit. There wouldn’t dare be.
“Hello, Father.”
He glanced up from his book. “Marlene.”
No one had ever called her by that name except her father and grandmother. She despised it.
His critical gaze swept over her leather skirt and black V-neck sweater. She had never been allowed to wear pants to the dinner table as a child and teenager, and for some reason Marly couldn’t break the habit now. But leather was pushing it.
“You look like a streetwalker in that getup,” was her father’s only comment.
Her skirt was a sedate cut and length, and the neckline of her sweater didn’t reveal so much as a hint of cleavage. Marly lifted her chin. “Just the look I was going for.”
Her father didn’t bother to respond. “There’s been another suicide, I hear. Navarro must have his hands full.”
“Yes, he does,” Marly agreed. “As a matter of fact, he’s assigned me to act as liaison for the police depart—”
“Liaison? I’m surprised you even know what the word means.”
Marly felt her face go hot with anger, but she held her temper. She wanted to keep the evening as pleasant as possible for her mother’s sake. “I’ll be working with Max Perry, the high school counselor, and various church leaders in the community to establish a suicide hotline and organize a series of meetings…” Her voice trailed off. She was wasting her breath. Her father had gone back to his book. “Congratulations, Marly. Well done, Marly. I knew you could do it, Marly,” she muttered.
He glanced up. “What?”
“Nothing. Here’s Mother.” She rose in relief as her mother and Sam walked into the room.
He put away his book then and gave Sam the same disapproving glare he’d accorded Marly. But there was one big difference. Sam no longer cared.
He hadn’t bothered to dress for dinner. Or, to be more precise, he had. The faded jeans and black turtleneck had been a deliberate wardrobe choice, Marly was quite certain. Jeans were outlawed in the Jessop household, and a row between father and son was already starting to brew. Marly could feel it. An uneasy chill rode up her backbone.
“Well,” her mother said with forc
ed cheeriness. “Isn’t this nice? All of us here together. What can I get everyone to drink? Your father is drinking scotch, and I’m having a glass of white wine.”
Which meant that Marly would be expected to have white wine as well, and Sam could either have scotch or wine, but it was always implied that a real man would go for the scotch.
“How about a martini?” he said.
There was nothing but silence. Marly shot her father a glance. Every muscle in his face had gone rigid. He knew Sam was goading him, but he wouldn’t rise to the bait until he was certain he had the upper hand.
Marly shifted her attention to her mother, who was already fussing with the sleeves of her dress. “I’m not sure we have vermouth,” she murmured.
Sam held up the paper bag he’d carried in with him. “I stopped by the liquor store on my way over. Allow me to do the honors.” He strode to the bar and began to mix and shake up a storm.
When he finished, he carried over a tray with three glasses. “Mother?”
She perched on the edge of the sofa, knees pressed together, posture as perfect as always. “Oh, I don’t know.” She glanced at her husband. “It’s been years since I’ve had anything stronger than wine.”
“It won’t kill you,” Sam assured her. “You might even enjoy it.” When she continued to hesitate, he urged softly, “Come on, Mom. Live a little.”
She gave a nervous laugh and accepted one of the glasses.
“Marly?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Marly didn’t usually drink anything stronger than wine, either, but not because of her father’s disapproval. She’d had a few bad experiences with alcohol in college.
Sam took the last drink and clinked glasses with Marly. “Here’s to your health. Not a bad toast, considering everything that’s going on around here.”
Marly grimaced. “Don’t remind me.”
“Oh,” her mother said, nursing her drink. “I heard about Ricky Morales on the radio. How awful for his family.”
“I wouldn’t waste my sympathy on the likes of him.” Wesley Jessop reached for the bottle of scotch he kept nearby. “The damn fool shot himself. I’ve got no sympathy for cowards.”
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