Destiny.
That girl he’d pulled out of the river yesterday—she was harmless. She had to be. Even under the stress of trying to save her, Casey had seen the slightly altered facial features that denoted some kind of mental disability, and it had been clear that her thinking wasn’t following logical pathways when she’d ignored his pleas on the bridge. Surely she couldn’t do anything as heinous as the first two men. She was just a teenager, and really short on thinking capacity. Surely she couldn’t hurt anyone.
Could she?
He hoped not, but if so, there was nothing at all he could do about it now. If those cops had any brains at all, they would figure out a way to deal with it.
But what about tomorrow?
“He’s just some guy, Casey, like you but a couple of years older. I can’t see all the details, but there’s something about a German tourist who says something to him and doesn’t like his answer. It’s not like a movie in my head, you know? I can’t hear the words. I just feel the emotions. This guy has a big future ahead of him that’s going to be cut off. He’s going to die, Casey. Can you stand back and just let that happen? Can you look at yourself in the mirror every day and live with the fact that you could have stopped it and you didn’t?”
But what if stopping it was the last thing he should do? What if it ended up in disaster?
Casey put his hands back over his face and cried.
Eighteen
It had taken everything Gina had not to close the store and go home after she’d thrown that woman out this morning.
Doing something like that would have gotten her fired, and since she’d been lying about where Vance was for going on two weeks and things were starting to get testy between her and the administrators over at North Park, instinct told her she needed to keep from doing anything so foolish. If she got him back—
No, she told herself grimly. Not if. WhenWhen she got him back, he would be out of work for a long time, recovering not only from the horrible loss of his finger and, God help him, anything else that had been done to him, but from psychological damage, too. People didn’t just bounce back from trauma like this. She would be supporting herself and him, and doing a lot of things on her own that she’d thought they’d be doing together—moving, planning, living. In today’s world that meant having a viable income and a cash flow, so she’d ducked into the restroom, cleaned up her face, and kept things going for the rest of the interminably long morning.
But now . . .
Oh, now it could all sink in—the way the woman had grabbed her, the way she’d . . . what? Read her mind? Somehow Gina didn’t think so. It was more like she saw inside Gina in the way Gina saw into somewhere else by touching the printed version of someone’s name. Gina had long ago accepted what she herself could do, so it wasn’t a stretch to believe someone else might have an ability, too. Like that guy who’d come in the store last summer, who’d said his mother—or had it been his sister?—had also seen visions. She didn’t know how or what he’d done, but she was absolutely sure that he had somehow started this whole thing, that he was ultimately responsible for Vance’s disappearance.
Finally at home, Gina changed out of her work clothes and put on a pair of jeans and a button-down shirt, the turquoise-striped one that Vance liked so much. She paced the apartment and barely stopped herself from going to the freezer; if she didn’t leave the finger in there it was going to decay even more, and she already wasn’t sure the appendage could be saved. She should go to the grocery, get the clothes together and go downstairs to the laundry . . .
No, what she should do is call the police.
She slumped onto a kitchen chair, staring unseeingly at the cabinets. What that woman had said, that she could find Vance, had shaken her to her bones. What was she—a psychic? Could she actually find him? Maybe. The bigger issue was could she do it without the person who had Vance suspecting it, knowing about it and following through on all the ugly threats that had come over the telephone line in every phone call. That this person would somehow find out, that he or she would know, had been the thing that had terrified her so much in the store and made her demand that the woman leave. Yes, the store had been empty, but if Gina could see the things she could, and that woman could see the things she could, was it so far-fetched to think someone else could see a few things, too?
“God,” she said aloud. Her voice sounded like a scratchy record in the dim living room—she’d been keeping the curtains drawn since this ordeal started, a subconscious decision to guard herself against a set of unseen, spying eyes. “Why is this happening? Is it really so much to ask to get my husband back?”
Who was she kidding? In her darkest moments, she didn’t think she would ever see Vance again. So many things were wrong about this entire situation, from that very first horrid phone call all the way through to the woman in the shop this morning. And what had started it all? Let’s just spit it out: infidelity, that’s what. She was a cheater, and a liar. She’d told Vance she was going out with girlfriends, but what she’d really done was go to dinner with an old boyfriend, a guy with whom she’d been an item for a couple of years after high school and who she’d once thought she’d end up marrying. Their breakup had been neither pleasant nor unpleasant—it had just been, and every now and then she’d find herself wondering how things would have turned out if they’d stayed together. When he’d called her out of the blue one day, she’d readily agreed to have dinner with him. Afterward, she’d thought about calling back and canceling; then a little voice in her head had suggested that how quickly she’d agreed might be saying something telling about her current state of mind. The same state of mind that had made her tell Vance just the night before that yes, she would marry him.
Gina had told herself she was just going out with a friend, she was just curious and not sure she’d made the right decision. In retrospect, making sure of something about Vance should not have made her lie about where she was going. It also shouldn’t have involved enjoying an intimate dinner for two at one of Chicago’s most romantic restaurants, and leaving a trail of clothes from the living room to the bedroom of her ex-boyfriend’s very bachelorized condominium off Rush Street.
Sometime after one in the morning she’d woken up in his bed with a martini hangover and a knot of guilt in her gut that was so big she felt like she was eight months’ pregnant. She’d been dressed within two minutes, and when the ex came wandering out of the bedroom, she’d told him it was all a mistake and to please not call her again. The truth was, he hadn’t looked upset at all. He might have even smirked.
And that was the double-whammy the voice on the telephone had on Gina.
There had to be a way out of this, somehow, that didn’t involve telling Vance she’d slept with another man the night after he’d asked her to marry him. That was bad enough, but how could she ever face him again if he found out he’d been kidnapped and his finger cut off because of Gina’s infidelity? One was tied to the other: The voice had originally demanded she use her visions, and she had refused. The voice had then tried to blackmail her, and when she hesitated, whoas behind it had stepped into the arena of no take-backs by somehow snatching up her husband and mutilating him. Vance would never forgive her—how could he?
She had to do something before Vance ended up dead. But what if she tried, and that was the catalyst, the thing that drove the voice to do the unthinkable? Then on top of everything else, all the wrongs that had been committed, all the people who had died—and yes, she felt responsible for each and every one of them—she would lose the person who in all the universe was the most precious to her.
The telephone rang.
For a second, all the air went out of her lungs, out of the room, out of the world. Mentally she saw herself get up and calmly walk over to the phone, pick it up and hold it to her ear; in reality, she was frozen on that damned kitchen chair, as though someone had cemented her butt to it. Her body quivered, her lungs hitched, but nothing actually moved.
The answering machine clicked on. She blinked and her simple, four-word recording of “Please leave a message” was over. The next thing she heard was also four words, but they had so much more dark potential that nausea suddenly boiled up her throat.
“I know you’re there.”
Gina’s paralysis broke and she lunged out of the kitchen and over to the bookcase. She reached for the phone, knowing the machine would stop when she picked it up. On impulse, she pushed the REC button. “I’m here,” she said.
“A good thing. You wouldn’t want me to get impatient.”
Her fist curled around the handset. “Where’s my husband?”
“In the shower,” the voice said. Then it laughed, as if that statement were the funniest thing in the world.
“I want to talk to him,” Gina said. She tried to make her voice firm.
The voice paused, as if thinking it over. “No,” it said finally. “I don’t think so. I want more—”
“No!” Gina suddenly shrieked. “I will not give you anything until I know he’s all right. You give him back to me, damn you, or I’m going to hang up and call the police!”
The silence on the other end was long enough to make Gina think the voice had hung up. “The police will be useless to you, so that part doesn’t scare me. But I don’t like being threatened,” it said. “Perhaps instead of his finger, or even his hand, I shall send you his head.” It paused, then added, “Would you like that, Georgina?”
There was so much obscene glee in the voice that Gina’s nausea won out and she leaned over and threw up on the floor in front of the bookcase. She tried to answer then retched again, gasping for air and afraid that if she didn’t say something, the maniac on the phone would break the connection and do exactly what it had suggested.
Instead, after a few more seconds, the voice continued as though nothing bad had ever happened and not an iota of ill will existed between them. “A name, if you will. You may have to hunt a bit. I want it to be someone as worthy as the one you gave me yesterday. You remember him, right? He’s going to be the most fun yet, and I think it should only get better from here, don’t you?”
With the smell of her own vomit filling her nose, Gina fumbled for the neighborhood directory and flipped it open.
CASEY WAS NEVER GOING to go along with this.
Gina had cleaned up the vomit and thrown open the windows to air out the room, letting the first real sunlight into the apartment in over a week. She’d brushed her teeth and changed her shirt, but she thought she could still smell it, a sour tinge that floated past her nose but was too faint for her to find the source and eliminate it. Now she was sitting on the couch and staring at the darkened television screen while a hot breeze made the curtains flap back and forth and somewhere outside a couple of young kids were screeching as they chased each other around. It was all so . . . normal.
She had grown up believing in God in that off kind of way that people do when they’ve never had any formal or strict religious education—you believe because you’re a kid and most of the people around you do, too. She hadn’t thought much about faith or God or whatever, and she rarely discussed it. She wasn’t an atheist, but she wasn’t exactly a Christian or agnostic, either. God was God, and He seldom had anything to do with her life or her world. If there was such a supreme being, He was certainly too busy to concern Himself with Georgina Renee Whitfield or any of the other paltry human beings in her existence. That obviously explained why there was so much misery in the world, wars, disasters, and generally rotten things happening to decent people like Gina’s mother. Or even herself.
However, this thing with the voice . . . it did kind of put a spin on belief, didn’t it? Because if someone like her could see stuff, and someone else like Casey was strong enough to step in and change it—change the future—and still someone else like the voice was bent on orchestrating it all to a darker end, it kind of insinuated that somewhere was a written . . . what? Script or something, setting out the things that were supposed to happen and the things that weren’t. If that were true, then it followed that something had written that same script, something big, and was standing back and shrugging while something else—the voice—fucked around with the originally intended results.
She sat there until the room was dark and hot, then finally got up and closed the windows so she could turn the air-conditioning back on and draw the curtains. With the room reduced almost to black, she flipped the switch on a single low-wattage bulb. The light it gave off was softer than she thought she deserved, but anything brighter seemed wrong, a false statement that somehow everything would go on, with or without Vance’s safe return. Hey, everybody—look! The sun still comes up in the morning, the world still turns, and Vance Hinshaw is just one more missing man who makes absolutely zero difference in the universal scheme of things. She just couldn’t bear it.
What, Gina wondered, was Casey’s stance on God? All those lunches together, but she couldn’t recall if they’d ever talked about God or religion—she didn’t think so. There were so many versions. Benevolent, vengeful, forgiving, angry. Which one of these had control over her life? It had to be the vengeful one, because she hardly ever saw anything but the bad in her visions, and after her mother had ended up institutionalized, her family had pretty much gone to hell.
If she had to see something, why couldn’t she see something useful, like the best job to apply for, the right answer to a test question, or hey, how about those elusive lottery numbers? What she was seeing and passing along to the voice wasn’t meaningful or good. It was horrifying and dangerous, something that should be left alone to happen the way it was meant to. When a person messed with stuff he shouldn’, he ended up with appalling developments, like what had happened with that murderer, Glenn Klinger. That wasn’t Casey’s fault, it was hers, and any way she tried to justify it—she hadn’t known what would happen, Vance’s life was in danger, whatever—didn’t change that a whole bunch of people were dead and she was not a single inch closer to getting her husband back.
There was a stack of unopened mail on the coffee table and Gina flipped through the envelopes without really seeing them, just to have something to do with her hands. One envelope was from Harold Washington College, where she’d taken five or six courses over the last two years, with the vague idea of finally getting a degree. Because she’d managed to keep her GPA high, once or twice a year she got a form letter inviting her to join the honor society. Form letter applied only to the contents—every letter was personally signed by the president of the honor society, the envelope individually printed.
She stared at her own name on the front of the envelope. Only once, back when the visions had first started, had she attempted to see something on herself. It had been a failure then, but should she try it now? And if she did see something, would it help or hurt?
Her forefinger seemed to move of its own will, sliding over the surface of the cream-colored paper. She hesitated just before the pad of her finger touched ink, but something in her subconscious stepped in and seemed to shove her hand forward, as if her mind had finally just had enough of this waiting game. Her hand jerked—
Nothing.
No vision, no twinge, not a damned thing.
Gina tossed the envelope back onto the coffee table in disgust, then rubbed her hands together nervously. She’d been doing that so much lately that her knuckles were cracked and raw, but she never remembered to put lotion on them even though she had a bottle of Jergens in the bathroom. She should do it now, while she was thinking of it, but . . . whatever. Her gaze went back to the mail and she picked up the stack again and dug through it until she found what she was looking for. A week before they’d decided to elope in Las Vegas at the end of August, she and Vance had gone to a travel agent and talked to a representative about a cruise wedding. The numbers had gotten real high, real fast, and they had told the woman it was out of their league. Insisting she could get
the cost down to something more reasonable and citing sales coming up in September, she’d talked them into leaving their names. She had no way of knowing they’d surrendered to impulse the next weekend, and so here, apparently, was the cruise sale she’d promised.
Gina fingered the edge of the envelope—that’s how she handled almost every pece of paper—and felt her heart begin to pound. Vance’s name was on it, right below hers. The postmark read the day before yesterday, from the Clark Street station in Lincoln Park. The woman’s name wasn’t on the outside envelope, just the name and return address of the travel agency.
She placed the envelope on her knees and stared at it, terrified. Could it . . . would it, tell her what she wanted to know? Did she want to know that much? She wasn’t sure, because she wasn’t so brainless that she didn’t realize the dangers of trying something like this. That, perhaps, was why she had blocked out even thinking about it before now.
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