“Well”—he sounded nettled—“if you will not oblige me in my small request, then what is it I can do for you?”
“You can text-message Elise from your cell. Tell her to meet you someplace at eight o’clock.” That would be after dark. According to the Los Angeles Times, delivered to her door daily, sunset was at seven thirty p.m. “Where’s a spot you might go at night?”
“There are many. We frequent alternative bookstores, underground clubs, experimental theater, poetry recitals—”
“I get it. The classic bohemian lifestyle. Pick one. Not the poetry thing. Something less ... boring.”
“Do art galleries bore you?”
“Yeah, but I can handle it. What gallery?”
“The Unblinking I, on Melrose. Tonight they’re showing the works of Piers Hoagland. Do you know him?”
“Didn’t he play Screech on Saved by the Bell?”
Faust seemed to take the inquiry seriously. “I do not believe so.”
“Then no.”
“He is a native of my country. A holographic artist who specializes in images of death.”
“Sounds peachy.”
“Tonight is the opening of the exhibit. Elise and I had considered going.”
“Don’t. I don’t want you there. I need to get to know this guy, and that won’t work if he’s tailing you. Just send the text message, stay put, and hope he takes the bait.”
“You are the boss. Is there anything else you require of me?”
Abby hesitated. “Where’d you get the branding iron?”
“Why should this concern you?”
“I’ve been reading your book. There’s a picture of the branding iron. I just wondered how a person acquires an item like that.”
“Perhaps you are interested in making such an acquisition for yourself?”
“No, I’m not really into pain, self-inflicted or otherwise. So where’d you get it?”
“An antiquities shop in Berlin. I do not think the proprietor even recognized the symbol. It has been prohibited in Germany, you know, along with the swastika and other insignias of the National Socialists.”
“You just found it lying around?”
“Indeed. It was most—what is the term?—serendipitous. I took it as an omen. A harbinger of my destiny.”
“You’re a superstitious guy.”
“I am a believer in fate. In what the Greeks called Moira, necessity. We are all players in a game, the outcome of which is predetermined. We can do no more than act out our parts.”
“And Emily Wallace’s part was to be branded by you?”
“Yes.”
“And to die at your hands?”
“Yes. Are there further questions?”
“Did you brand her before or after she was dead?”
“Before. It was the penultimate act. I seared my totem onto the back of her hand, and then I brought out the strap and with it I encircled her slender neck. Your neck, also, is most slender and well shaped.”
“That’s not what I’d call a compliment. More like grounds for a restraining order.”
“You, of all people, must know how useless a restraining order can be.”
“Are you trying to scare me, Mr. Faust? Because you need to know, I don’t scare that easily.”
“I am merely indulging in some harmless conversational byplay. Why should I threaten you? We are on the same side.”
Abby didn’t like that thought. “Yeah. I guess we are. So do your part and make the call. Remember, eight p.m.”
“There is never a need to tell me anything twice.”
She believed him. She heard the click as the call ended.
On the same side. She really wished he hadn’t put it that way. Still, it was true. She was working for a man who had branded a young woman before killing her, a man called the Werewolf.
And tonight—also according to the LA. Times—was the first night of a full moon.
9
Raven wasn’t scared.
She was past all that. Fear had been a constant presence in the room with her for so many days. Yet now it was gone, just gone, and she felt nothing.
She had seen an old-fashioned device in her parents’ attic once. Her grandmother had used it. You put wet clothes between two wooden dowels and turned a crank, and the dowels squeezed the water out of the clothing as it rolled through. A wringer, it was called. That’s where the expression came from—put through the wringer.
And now she knew how it felt to be put through the wringer. Because she had been wrung out, wrung dry, every living feeling squeezed from her body until she was limp and numb.
Not all of her was numb, though. Her teeth ached from biting down on the linen gag knotted around her head, the gag that had made her want to retch when it was first tied on. God, he had tied it tight, with the knot at the back of her head, digging into the base of her skull.
And her wrists—they weren’t numb, either. They stung like crazy. The steel manacles had chafed her skin raw and left bleeding sores that were starting to ulcerate. The sores stood out against her pale skin, as did the large purple bruise on her thigh where he had punched her after she tried to kick him. The bruise was high up on her leg and normally would have been concealed by her shorts, but she wasn’t wearing anything. She had no idea what he had done with her clothes.
The bruise had hurt at first, but she no longer felt it. Her wrists were the focal point of her pain now. Of course, she wouldn’t have abraded them so badly if she hadn’t spent hour after hour tugging on the manacles, trying pointlessly to free herself. Even as she’d done it, she had known it was no use. She lacked the strength to pull free, and even if she did somehow get loose, she would still be trapped in the room.
The room was windowless and uncarpeted. It contained only two items of furniture. One was the bed on which she lay, a bare mattress with a steel frame and a brass headboard. Her wrists were cuffed to the headboard, impossible to work free. She was unable to get off the bed, and though she kicked and thrashed on the mattress, she had not succeeded in moving it or in making any significant amount of noise.
The other item in the room was a tall cabinet that stood against the far wall. The cabinet had never been opened in her presence, and she had no idea what secrets it held. She didn’t think she wanted to know.
On one wall there was a strange buzzer thing—she didn’t know what it was—some kind of intercom, maybe, though she had never heard any voices on it, just an occasional buzz, prolonged and insistent, like an angry bee. She thought it might be a signal to indicate that the doorbell had been rung, but she wasn’t sure. It was hard to imagine visitors ever coming to this place.
There was nothing else in the room, only four walls and a ceiling with a single bare lightbulb. And the door. The locked door. She knew it was locked, even though she couldn’t reach it, because she heard the jingle of keys whenever her captor came to visit.
Each time he entered, she tried to see beyond the doorway and the figure of the man silhouetted in it. Tried to see something, anything, even if it was only a sliver of daylight or a corridor that led nowhere—some proof that there was a world outside, that she was not alone in a universe that had shrunk to the dimensions of this room.
But she had seen nothing. Only darkness.
So perhaps there was no world beyond this one. Perhaps all the rest of her life had been only a dream, or a series of vivid hallucinations, and there was no sky or green grass or lilacs blooming in the spring, and she had no mother who looked the other way while her father crept into her bedroom at night, no home she had abandoned for life on the street, no friends who congregated beneath an underpass to exchange smokes and lies, no cubbyhole in a deserted building where she slept at night, shivering under a thin blanket.
All of that might have been only imagination. For all she knew, she had been born in this room and she would die here, if she ever died, if her captivity did not continue for all eternity.
Or maybe she was already dead, and this w
as purgatory or hell, where she had been condemned to suffer for her small sins, endlessly. If that was true, then the man who came through the doorway must be the devil himself.
She had never believed in such things in her former life. But if that life had been purely imaginary, then perhaps everything she had dismissed as illusion was real.
She didn’t know. She didn’t care, much. She was past caring, too. She was past pretty much everything—hunger and thirst and exhaustion and hope. She only wanted it to be over. She wanted it to stop.
Life and death—those were just words. Here in this room there was no life, and there was no death. There was only the waiting and the visits, and it was hard to say which was worse.
No, not hard to say. The visits were worse. His hand in her hair. His hand that stroked and caressed, so gently, as if he were petting a tremulous animal. His hand and his closeness and the hatred she felt for him, the hot, helpless hatred that made her want to leap up and lash out, all the while knowing she couldn’t, because her wrists were chained.
Blinking, she raised her head. She realized she’d been wrong. She was not past everything, not yet. She still felt one thing.
She still felt rage.
Maybe it was her rage that was keeping her alive. If so, she ought to find a way to lose it, cast it off and be done with it, so she could finally die.
But in her heart she knew she didn’t want to die ... unless he died first.
10
Abby didn’t like to be slowed down by a heavy meal before a job. She fixed herself a small salad of mango, pineapple, and banana, and ate while standing on her balcony overlooking rush hour on Wilshire. She found the sight oddly soothing. The endless tide of traffic reminded her of the procession of waves to the shore.
She showered and changed into an outfit that, she hoped, combined a certain art-house sophistication with more than a hint of sexual availability. It also matched her purse, the one with the special compartment for her .38. She checked the gun: fully loaded.
Her purse held other secrets, among them a tiny vial of white pills—Rohypnol, the date-rape drug. It was illegal in the U.S., but she never let little things like criminal statutes get in her way. The newer version of Rohypnol had been designed to turn blue when it dissolved, tipping off a potential victim. Luckily for her, the older kind was still available on the black market. It dissolved clear.
She selected her fake ID for the evening from among several possibilities. The wallet, complete with driver’s license and credit cards, went into her purse also.
She felt the itchiness that usually came over her at the start of an assignment. She was glad to feel it. After so many jobs, she sometimes worried she was losing her edge. A slight case of the jitters reassured her that her head was still in the game.
Tonight she might have more reason than usual to be nervous. It was rare for a stalker to intercept his quarry’s phone calls. If this guy was doing so, he was a cut above the average in terms of smarts and resources. She would have to watch herself.
But then, she always did.
At seven thirty she left the condo and descended to the garage, where she got into the Hyundai, her undercover car. She joined the ocean of traffic, which seemed hardly diminished, and drove east, with the dying sunset in her rearview mirror.
Her route took her to the junction of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevard. She turned onto Santa Monica, then hooked east on Melrose. The cobalt blue immensity of the Pacific Design Center, known to locals as the Blue Whale, passed on her left. The building, crowded with the showrooms of interior designers, was a fun place to go for a stroll. There were lots of neat getaways in West Hollywood—WeHo to residents—a chic community that blended the upscale lifestyle of West L.A. with the funkiness of Hollywood proper. Its largely gay population had earned it the nickname Boys’ Town. She smiled, thinking of a onetime WeHo gym called the Sports Connection, which had been so popular with gay cruisers that it became known as the Sports Erection. Although Bally had bought the establishment a few years ago and changed the name, the tag still stuck, at least for folks with long memories.
To an outsider, L.A. was a shapeless sprawl, but to those in the know it was a complicated mosaic of neighborhoods, each one distinctive in its special shops or eateries or back streets. There were specialty bookstores and revival movie houses, sidewalk cafes and mom-and-pop diners, and assorted other treasures—but only for those who knew where to look. After more than a decade in this town, she knew it as well as any cabdriver. At times the city felt almost like an extension of herself, its landscaped gardens and graffiti-scarred walls mirroring her changing moods.
She arrived at the art gallery just after eight p.m. It was doubtful that Faust’s stalker would be here quite so early, but, as was the case in the coffee shop, she wanted to be first to arrive so she could scope out the territory.
By now the sun was gone, and the promised full moon had yet to emerge. She parked at the curb and walked to the gallery, her purse slung over her shoulder.
The Unblinking I was exactly the sort of place its name suggested, a self-consciously chic storefront operation selling overpriced objets d’art to self-consciously chic customers. Tonight’s opening had drawn a decent-size crowd comprised equally of men and women. The men could be neatly divided into two categories, the shaggy and the bald, with the shaggy holding a slight numerical advantage. The women were mostly clones of Elise Vangarten—too thin, too pale, too waiflike. Some of the waifs were pushing sixty, but they still had that anorexic, concentration-camp look.
At the door each customer was offered a booklet on “creative holography” and a tiny plastic cup of red wine. Abby was no connoisseur, but even she knew the stuff was cheap. It tasted like grape juice that had been left out on the counter too long.
Out of habit she noted the gallery’s layout. She was like a seasoned traveler who always checked for the exit nearest her hotel room. The gallery was built in the shape of the letter L, with the long arm running parallel to the street and the short arm extending behind the building as an alcove. There was just one story, although a door marked BASEMENT indicated some sort of room belowground. A couple of security guards observed the customers unobtrusively. There were no visible cameras, but she did see motion detectors, which would be used only when the gallery was closed.
As Faust had told her, tonight’s exhibit featured the works of Piers Hoagland, who had evidently received glowing write-ups in a variety of publications, including the L.A. Times. Having read the Times’s art critics, Abby knew there was no manifestation of psychopathy masquerading as creativity that they would not endorse. She expected no less from Hoagland, and he did not disappoint.
The long arm of the L was broken up by movable partitions into several inner rooms, each exhibiting a dozen or more of Hoagland’s artworks. People who hadn’t seen holograms usually pictured them like the three-dimensional images in science-fiction movies—animated, multicolored figures in the round, floating in space. The reality was slightly more prosaic. Hoagland’s holograms were somewhat flatter than the Hollywood version. Like the picture on a liquid crystal display, they could be seen only from certain viewing angles. Images snapped into view out of nowhere as she got within range. One moment there was nothing to see; the next, a seemingly tangible object was projecting into the air before her face. Parts of the images did seem to extend a few inches—even a foot or more—into space, but even the protruding parts were tethered to the vertical plane of the holographic plate.
And the colors were mostly limited to one or two primary hues. There was something unappealing, almost sickly, about the vivid boxes of pure red and pure green, standing out like the square panels of a comic strip.
Lighting in the exhibit rooms was low, and all windows had been blacked out. The holograms showed up clearly once they came into the viewer’s range. The largest plates, measuring three by four feet, were suspended from the ceiling. Smaller plates were mounted on black pylons that stood a
round the room at irregular intervals, or on small black pedestals. Above each installation was a ceiling minispotlight, the fifty-watt halogen bulb adjusted at a forty-five-degree angle to light the plate from the front and properly diffract the image.
All that Abby knew about holograms was that they were created by projecting a laser beam over the subject, and displayed by shining another ray of light on—or through—the resulting photographic plate. By some alchemy known only to physics buffs, the original object was reconstructed as a three-dimensional image, hauntingly real, encouraging the viewer to reach out and touch, but mocking these efforts with its insubstantiality.
According to the booklet, these were reflection holograms, viewable in ordinary incandescent light from a small light source. They were more practical for exhibition purposes than the older transmission holograms, which could be viewed only with the aid of a laser. They were suitable for home display, and were available for sale.
Abby wasn’t going to be making any purchases tonight. She had no idea who would see Piers Hoagland’s artwork as a decorative touch.
Hoagland’s principal motif was decay. He liked images of things that had been alive and now were not. Some of his subjects were harmless enough—fallen leaves rotting in a pile, fruit moldering in a cobwebbed bowl.
When he turned his attention to more advanced life-forms, things took a disturbing turn. A series of holograms addressed the subject of roadkill. Mangled and flattened squirrels, chipmunks, and possums hung in the air like ghosts. In one case the hologram had been artfully layered so that as the viewer moved past it, the dead animal dissolved through stages of putrescence, ending as a scatter of bones.
As she passed an artfully composed image of a garbage dump, a skeletal hand blinked in and out of sight. She had to shift back and forth until she saw it clearly. It was a single image embedded in the hologram, visible from just one angle. A subliminal effect.
The bone fingers seemed to be rising from the mound of refuse, clawing for the light.
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