On her way home Abby stopped at a music shop in Westwood Village and hunted down a copy of Flammen in the International section. Geschwur’s four band members glowered up at her from the CD package, youngish men in severe black ensembles, their hair close-cropped, their faces clean shaven. The color scheme was red, black, and white—the colors of the Nazi flag. The photo looked like a recruiting poster for the Hitler Youth.
The clerk ringing up the sale looked at her with a hint of interest. “You into these guys?”
“Someone recommended them.”
“They’re great,” he said, the words sounding less like an endorsement than like a dare.
She played the CD when she got home.
The first track opened with a rush of electric guitar chords and the shrieks of a soprano choir, which gave way to loud, pounding drums. The music abruptly dropped in volume as the lead singer began growling into the microphone. He had a harsh, raspy voice that reminded her of the devil in The Exorcist, only deeper and more seductive. Seductive but sickening—he spit some of the words with such amplified force that he sounded like a man retching. His every utterance was laced with contempt, the guttural quality of his German intentionally exaggerated to suggest the grunts and barks of an animal. It was the voice of a psychopath.
Abby liked good headbanging, balls-to-the-wall music as much as the next person, but there was something unmistakably creepy about this stuff. It was the audio equivalent of weird old German movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—the vocals distorted, the sounds grating and unpleasant, the tone unremittingly dark. And all of it was dominated by the lead singer, rasping in her ear like a pervert making an obscene phone call, his voice conveying the message that life is ugly, bleak, dark, and meaningless, and there is no escape, no hope except surrender to violence and craziness. She wasn’t sure that a nation with Germany’s history was doing itself any favors by listening to that voice. Four million copies sold, Faust had said ...
The first track ended with the wails of the choir, sighing and moaning like lamenting ghosts. She sat through two more tracks, mostly indistinguishable from the first, before shutting off the CD player. She’d heard enough.
She wasn’t in touch with pop music very much anymore, certainly not with metal bands, and obviously not with European metal bands. It was music for the alienated, the outcasts. She had ascribed Faust’s celebrity status to his charisma, but she began to think it was something more. He had killed for pleasure and gotten away with it. He had lived out the fantasy of all those angry adolescents, those sulking narcissists, those budding sociopaths. He was their spokesman, their role model.
She wondered just how much influence he had, and how far it extended. She thought of the clerk in the music store—
The intercom buzzed, interrupting her thoughts. “Yes?”
Gerry’s voice came over the speaker. “Mr. Bryce is here.”
She frowned. Bryce was the name Wyatt used when he visited. She wished he hadn’t come now. She wasn’t in the mood for another confrontation. But she could hardly send him away.
“Miss Sinclair?” Gerry asked.
“Okay, let him come up.”
She was still ticked off at him. And though she hated to admit it, she was also feeling guilty. She could still feel Brody’s touch on her skin.
After a few minutes there was a rap on her door. She opened it and wordlessly let him in.
“I won’t stay long,” he said. “I imagine you’re working.”
“Gotta pay my bills.” She was straining for a light tone but missing it.
“Right. I just wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Okay.”
“First of all—I’m sorry. I mean, for the things I said. I was unfair. It wasn’t the right way to say it, or the right time, or anything.”
“We were both a little worked up. I’m sorry, too.”
“Thanks.” He stood there awkwardly. “That’s not all I came here to say.”
“All right.”
“I still want us to be friends, Abby. I’ll help you out when I can. You can come to me for info. I won’t complain. But ...”
Suddenly she knew where this was headed. The part about still being friends was the tip-off. There was only one place he could go after that. But she couldn’t quite believe it, had to hear him say it.
“But,” he went on, “I don’t think we can be more than friends anymore.”
She took a breath. “You’re saying ... the party’s over?”
“I’m saying we’re over. Us. Our relationship, or whatever the hell this has been.”
There was no way he could mean it. No way. He had been part of her life for so long that she couldn’t imagine him just going away. It wasn’t possible.
She reached out her hand to him. “Vic, I know you’re upset ...”
He ignored the gesture. “I’m not upset. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Months. I guess most guys would say I’m crazy. They’d tell me I have it all—sex without commitment. Who would give that up, right? But I want something else, Abby. I want a future. A family. I want ... more.”
Of course he wanted more. He’d been telling her as much for months, maybe for years. She hadn’t listened.
“Maybe I can give you those things,” she said, but the words sounded false even as she heard them.
“You can’t. You know it. It’s not in your game plan. You won’t settle down. At least not anytime soon. And I can’t wait any longer.”
His last words pricked her. She felt she was being accused of something.
“It’s not like I kept you waiting,” she said. “I never made any promises.”
“I know that. I’m not blaming ... anyone. It’s just one of those things. We want different lives.”
She extended her hand again, and this time he took it. “We can work it out, Vic.”
“I don’t think so. What we had”—she noted the past tense—“it worked for you, I guess. But not for me.”
“I didn’t hear any complaints for most of the time we were together,” she said softly.
He looked away. “At first it was great. It was perfect. But you know, things change. I’m almost forty. I want ... I want a wife.”
She said nothing.
“Kids,” he added. “The whole suburban deal.”
Just like Brody, she thought irrelevantly.
“I don’t even know if I’ll be a cop much longer,” he said. “Another few years and I’ll have put in my twenty. Maybe I’ll leave L.A., move someplace that’s not so insane.”
Her throat was dry. “You ... and your wife and kids.”
“In a minivan, probably.” He tried to smile.
“You have anyone in mind for this wife position that’s just opened up?”
“Nope.”
“But you’re sure she’s out there?”
“I won’t know unless I look.”
She couldn’t argue with that. It was funny, though. She would have preferred it if he’d had another woman lined up, even if he’d been boffing her on the side. That way would have been less humiliating. To be thrown over for a rival was one thing. To be dumped for nobody, just the hope that someone better might come along—that was worse.
“So this is really it?” she whispered. “End of the road?”
“I said I want us to stay friends. I wasn’t kidding. You can come to me anytime. For anything. Except ...”
“Yeah. Except.”
The hell of it was, they probably would remain friends. And she would come to him for inside info. She wasn’t proud.
“If you think about it,” he said gently, “you’ll see it makes sense. For both of us.”
This pained her. “Since when are relationships supposed to make sense?”
She wanted him to argue, to fight. If they fought, there would be a connection. But he only smiled.
“You got me there. I’d better be going. You’ve got work to do.”
“Work. Right.�
��
“Take care, Abby.”
He didn’t kiss her. She watched him leave.
18
Tess leaned back in her window seat with the notebook computer on her lap. The disk from Behavioral Analysis was in the DVD drive. Noise-canceling headphones, purchased at an airport gift shop, sat on her head. Her seatmate, an obese man with a ZZ Top beard, had drifted off to sleep. There was no food service on this flight. No more excuses for delay.
She had thought she wanted to see the interview, but strangely she found herself hesitating. It had been years since she had heard Peter Faust’s coolly urbane elocution or had seen the malicious merriment in his pale blue eyes. She wasn’t sure she wanted to open this particular door into her past.
But her past had many doors she preferred not to open. She couldn’t avoid them all.
She activated the disk and switched off the reading light above her seat, allowing the screen to glow in the darkness. Legalese prohibiting the distribution of this recording to non-FBI personnel appeared and vanished. A menu came up. The two items on the disk were the interview and the LAPD search of Faust’s home. Procrastinating, she clicked on the search video.
Handheld camera footage fed the screen. She watched as the video cam followed the search team, traveling into one room after another. The sunken living room with its high, barreled ceiling and casement windows letting in a flood of sunlight. The dining room, one wall lined with French doors that opened onto a columned terrace. The spacious kitchen and adjacent breakfast room, overlooking a garden. The library, the family room, the paneled foyer, the guest bathroom, the walk-in closets, the master suite with its elaborate baths.
Nothing had been found. At the end, the camera caught a glimpse of Faust, arms folded across his chest in a pose of satisfaction, a cool smile on his lips. Tess wished desperately that there were a way to erase that smile.
The menu returned. She could put it off no longer. She selected the interview.
This time there was no shaky handheld footage. The video had been taken by a stationary camera mounted in an upper corner of a windowless interrogation room in the Denver field office. Faust was seated alone at the table, his hands steepled before him. Tess remembered watching this very image on the monitor in the observation room.
“An interview with the vampire.”
That’s what the tech officer had called it as he adjusted picture and sound. He was a wispy, bright-eyed guy, almost too short to meet the Bureau’s height requirement, and he talked constantly.
Tess had just looked at him, not getting the reference.
“He’s Lestat, you know?” the technician said. “That’s the way I think of him, anyhow. But not Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise was all wrong.”
She wondered if everyone in the world was movie-crazy except her. “Tom Cruise?”
“He played Lestat in the movie. But that’s not the right look for Lestat. They should’ve gotten Faust. He would’ve been perfect.”
“When did the movie come out?”
“Maybe ten, fifteen years ago.”
“Fifteen years ago Peter Faust was still unknown. Ten years ago he was in a mental hospital.”
“So he wasn’t a viable casting choice—is that what you’re saying?”
Was that what she was saying? Surprisingly enough, it actually was.
The man’s chatter died down when Tess ostentatiously began reviewing her notes. She had researched Faust’s history after being informed that he would speak only to her. She had offered to fly to Los Angeles, but Faust had proved remarkably accommodating, jetting to Denver for the interview. He’d explained that he planned to get in a little skiing in Aspen later in the week.
She had expected him to arrive at the field office with a phalanx of lawyers, but as it turned out he had no legal counsel present for the occasion. “I have nothing to hide,” he’d told the ASAC with a smile.
Tess knew that wasn’t true. Everybody had something to hide.
Having been briefed by the profiler assigned to this office, having studied Faust’s crime and his psychological analysis, and having watched him on the monitor for the last ten minutes, Tess was ready. She entered the interrogation room and calmly shook Faust’s hand, then seated herself across from him. Her first question was why he had insisted on speaking only to her.
“I have wished to meet you,” he said, “since reading of the Mobius affair.”
“Why?”
“Because I am a killer. And you are a killer of killers.”
“I killed Mobius in self-defense.”
“Of course. And that man in Miami, the drug merchant—that was self-defense as well?”
“If you know about that, then you already know the answer.” And Miami, she thought to herself, was a long time ago.
“Still,” he said, “it is rare. Few federal agents ever so much as discharge their sidearms in the line of duty. Fewer still have killed a man. You have killed two.”
“I’m not proud of it.”
“But you should be. You are a successful combatant on the battleground of life. You have exhibited a flair for survival that is positively Darwinian.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“As do we all,” he said with another charming smile.
She expected to see dark depths in his eyes, like wells of shadow, but instead they were open and clear. Somehow this bothered her more. The man was a snake, and he should have a serpent’s eyes, hooded and cold.
She asked him about Roberta Kessler, the dead girl in L.A. He gave all the predictable answers. He’d never heard of her until the police came calling. They had searched his home thoroughly and found nothing. The authorities’ continued interest in him was beginning to constitute harassment.
“My attorneys have advised me that I may decline to cooperate in this investigation. They have suggested that I give you the—what is the idiom?—the cold shoulder.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I have given my reason already. I wished to meet the great Tess McCallum, the fastest gun in the West.”
“Only the luckiest.”
“False modesty is most unbecoming. A woman of your skills should not adhere to such trite conventions.”
She disliked receiving compliments from him. “A patron of the bar where Roberta Kessler was last seen—”
“I was not at the bar.”
“—says she saw you—”
“She is mistaken.”
“—talking to Roberta.”
“It was another man. I do not go clubbing. It is a childish pastime. At any rate, your witness cannot say for certain that I am the one she saw.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because if it were otherwise, I would have been arrested by now.”
This was true. The witness had provided a description so vague as to be almost useless as evidence. The fact that she had been doing bourbon shots and Ecstasy for a good part of the night added nothing to her credibility.
“Why do we not desist from these games?” Faust went on. “They bore me. This murdered female, Roberta Keller—”
“Kessler.”
“She bores me. Every aspect of this situation is tedious to me except one. You, Special Agent McCallum. You intrigue me.”
“We’re not having this meeting to satisfy your curiosity.”
“Oh, yes, we are. That is the one and only reason I am speaking to you. I called for you and only for you. I wanted to take your measure.”
Tess met his gaze. “And I wanted to take yours.”
“Have I measured up?”
“You’re exactly what I expected.”
“I do not think so. You expected a monster.”
“That’s just what I found.”
She could not read his expression, could not tell if her response pleased or displeased him.
The interview continued for more than two hours. At one point Faust took a scrap of fabric from his pocket and began toying with it. She asked
what it was. His good-luck charm, he said, his talisman. She asked to see it, and he courteously obliged.
It was a collar tab, black, with the wolfsangel symbol sewn on in white thread.
“This was worn, circa 1944, by an SS officer in the Landstorm Nederland, the Nazis’ Dutch grenadier division,” Faust said. “I purchased it at an auction in Santa Barbara. Smell it. Inhale its aroma. It still carries the scent of the battlefield, the scent of death.”
“It’s just a piece of old cloth.”
“To the undiscriminating eye. But to the connoisseur it is so much more. A fragment of history.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you’d be nostalgic about the SS.”
His expression soured. “Please. I have no interest in such things. I am entirely nonpolitical. What fascinates me about this artifact is that it is a mere symbol, and yet it had the power to spur men to kill and die. Think of it. These Dutchmen volunteered to fight for the Nazis. This was after Hitler’s armies had overrun Holland and turned it into an occupied territory. What would make a man side with his own oppressors, his conquerors? Why would he fight for them and not against them?”
“Maybe he wanted to be on what he thought was the winning side.”
“Yes, certainly. But why was it the winning side? Not simply because the Netherlands had fallen after a mere five days’ resistance. It was because the Nazis were larger than life, invincible, indestructible. A force of nature, an irresistible tide. This was the general belief—and it was grounded in symbolism. Symbolism like this.”
His finger stabbed at the cloth in her hand.
“Men must believe, you see. It is in their nature to believe. And this SS rune, this totem worn as a symbol of power, fed that belief. The man who wore this insignia on his collar believed he had assumed the cunning and ferocity of the wolf. He believed he was undefeatable in battle. He believed he was part of a superhuman tribe, at the vanguard of a new world order. All this power and meaning he invested in what you call a mere piece of cloth.”
“And he was wrong. The Nazis lost the war.”
Faust sighed. “How prosaic your mind is. It is of no importance which side wins or loses. This is not a game in which one keeps score. What matters is only what this man felt. His raw experience. For those hours of combat he was truly alive. He was afire with reckless courage. He blazed like the sun. He lived.”
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