Hosts

by F. Paul Wilson

  Sandy had never heard of the man but didn't want to look dumb. "Sounds familiar but I can't place him."

  The Savior sipped from his Gatorade bottle. "You may have heard it on the news this morning: he was murdered last night."

  "Oh, man! And you were supposed to protect him!" Sandy put two and two together. "Is that why you were poisoned?"

  The Savior nodded. "Fielding wouldn't tell me why, but for some reason he was afraid of a former patient named Terrence Holdstock. He said he didn't have enough to go to the police, but he feared for his life."

  "Some sort of malpractice thing?"

  "I'm not sure. I did a little investigating—in fact I was on my way back from doing just that when our friend on the Nine started shooting. What I learned is that this Holdstock is the leader of some sort of cult."

  "A cult? I helped research a feature we did on local cults a while back but I never heard of him."

  "It's a small cult, and relatively new. And get this: all members are former patients of Dr. Fielding."

  "Oh, that's weird. That's really weird."

  "Wait. It gets weirder. They drew lots and Holdstock won: he got the honor of murdering Fielding. And not by just any means—by strangulation."

  Sandy leaned back and stared at this man. Yes, he'd saved Sandy's life, but he'd also lied to him. Was he lying again? Sandy prayed not. Few things on earth were sexier—news-wise, of course—than a murder cult.

  "How do you know all this?"

  "I can fill you in on the how later. What matters is Holdstock succeeded, and damn near offed me in the process." He lifted his Gatorade bottle. "I tend to drink this like water. But yesterday they spiked it with something that was supposed to kill me."

  "Why kill you?"

  "Because I knew too much. And I stood between Fielding and the cult. But they must have miscalculated the dose because it only put me down, way down, but not out. I couldn't move but I could still see, and I watched Holdstock strangle Fielding with an electrical wire garrote."

  "You're an eyewitness? Oh, man! Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man! You can put this guy away!"

  Sandy's mind was ranging back and forth, inspecting the story from all angles. If it was true—and please, please, please, God, let it be true!—and if Sandy could break the story…

  But the Savior was shaking his head. "Not me. I'm not putting anyone away."

  "Why not?" And then he remembered. "Oh, shit, yes. You're wanted."

  "Right. And as if that's not bad enough, I left the scene—dragged myself away is more like it—and didn't report it. If I open my mouth I'm open to even more charges. That's where you come in."

  Sandy sensed what was coming and he liked it. Liked it a lot. He leaned forward. "What do you have in mind?"

  "Holdstock goes down." His mouth tightened into a grim line. "I

  took on a job and didn't get it done because of him. That hurts my rep. I work on referrals and this will be bad for business. But even worse, he damn near killed me in the process. So he's going down."

  "Where do I come in?"

  "You must know cops. You call one of them and tell him. I'll be a confidential source, someone who witnessed the murder but can't get involved. I saw your name in The Light and figured you're the one to call."

  Something about this bothered Sandy. It was too easy, too pat. If this didn't pan he could end up looking like a gullible fool. But why would the Savior dupe him? What did that gain him?

  Unless he was crazy, a complete paranoid who'd dreamed this whole thing up.

  Which would make him an armed paranoid.

  Or even worse, what if he'd killed this doctor himself?

  Sandy felt his buttocks clench. He'd better be very careful what he said right now, and how he said it.

  The murder was easily verifiable, but what about the rest?

  He cleared his throat. "I'm all for helping you, but I can't just call up the NYPD and say, 'So-and-so did it.'"

  "Holdstock. Terrence Holdstock. Lives in the Bronx. I'll give you his address."

  "Great. But I'll need more."

  "You can tell them about the electrical wire garrote. I'll bet they've figured that out by now but haven't released it."

  "That'll help. But if there's no known motive, what do we have to connect Holdstock to this doctor, besides being his patient?"

  "How about a handprint at the scene of the crime?"

  Sandy straightened in his chair. "You're sure about that?"

  The Savior nodded. "Holdstock covered his tracks, very careful not to touch anything in the house, but I saw him lean on the dining room table right after he finished with Fielding."

  "Now you're talking."

  Sandy's thoughts raced ahead. Worst case scenario: This is all a load of bullshit. If so, the worst that can happen is the cops think I'm just a reporter who got a bum steer from a wacked-out source. I can live with that.

  How about best case scenario? If it's all true…

  Sandy had to grip the edge of the table to keep from soaring away. If it's all true it means he'll be instrumental in exposing not only a murderer but a murder cult. He'll be all over the front page again. But more than a brighter spotlight, this new story will earn him real credibility. His amnesty campaign for the Savior will make his bones in advocacy journalism while this murder cult story will simultaneously establish him as a major investigative reporter. No one will be able to call him a flash in the pan or a lucky one-hit wonder. Sandy Palmer will have arrived.

  Harvey Weinstein can develop the subway massacre into a studio property, but Sandy could see the murder cult story going up for auction.

  Hold on, he thought, reining in his fantasies. We're not even to first base here yet.

  "All right," Sandy said. "I'll run it up the flagpole with some cops I know and see if they salute."

  The Savior squinted at him. "You're going to what?"''

  "I'm going to run with it. But I've got to ask: what do you want out of this?"

  "Besides anonymity? I want Holdstock in Rikers getting passed around the showers like a party favor."

  Sandy shuddered. "You have to know this might mean I can't devote as much time as I'd like to your amnesty cause."

  "Told you I'm not interested in that."

  Maybe not, but I am.

  But even if the Savior should skip town as Sandy had feared this morning, he still had this murder cult to keep him hot.

  "You should be, but right now I guess we've got a hotter fish to fry." He pulled out his notepad. "Okay, let's get some of these details down so I have my facts straight when I call the cops…"

  5

  Kate came out of Jack's kitchen when she heard the door open. He looked terrible as he stumbled across the front room like an exhausted homing pigeon flapping toward its roost. She followed and watched as he tumbled face first onto the bed she'd just made up. She'd opened the window to freshen the stale, sick air.

  "Jack, are you all right?"

  "Just swell," he said, his words muffled by the bedspread against his face.

  "You could have fooled me."

  "Imagine what's left of the Hindenberg on the Lakehurst tarmac after burning and crashing and you have the beginning of a hint."

  "I was worried about you."

  Those words startled her, not because they weren't what she'd intended, but because she wasn't saying them. A stormwave of terror smashed against her.

  Someone else had control of her voice.

  The words were true—he'd been gone awhile and she'd waited with growing concern—but the words weren't hers, and she couldn't stop them.

  "Where did you go?"

  Of course. That's what the Unity wanted to know. It had overheard him mention a countermove.

  "Out."

  "What did you do?"

  "Nothing." He turned his head and looked at her with one eye, like a cat. "Is this a conversation or the title of a book?"

  Kate tried to gesture to Jack, to let him know that she wasn't in
command anymore, but her hands remained at her sides.

  "If you're worried about the Unity listening in, it's okay. It's left me for the time being."

  Lies! Jack, don't listen!

  "Why would it do that?"

  "I think it waited as long as it could for you to come back, then had to focus its attention elsewhere."

  Jack rolled onto his back, staring at her, not quite convinced.

  "You're sure?"

  Kate felt her head nodding, tried to stop it—and succeeded. It worked! She wasn't completely helpless. But her voice… she still couldn't reclaim her voice.

  "All right," Kate's voice said. "If you've still got your doubts—and I can't say I blame you—don't give me any details. But I'd like to know something. After all, I'm involved in this too—more than you."

  Don't listen to me, Jack. It's trying to sucker you into revealing something.

  He sighed and ran a hand over his pale face. "You've got a point there, I guess. Sorry."

  "Well, then, how did it go? Were you successful?"

  "I think so. I put some wheels in motion. We'll see if things turn out like I hope."

  "Which is?"

  Don't answer!

  As Jack opened his mouth to reply, Kate willed her hands to move, to wave in the air before her.

  Jack's eyes widened. "Kate? What's up?"

  And suddenly her voice was hers again. She sagged against the bed.

  "Oh, Jack!" she gasped. "That was the Unity! It took control for a few minutes there and I…" A sob burst from her throat. "It was awful!"

  Jack sat up and gripped her hand. "But you fought them off. Keep fighting, Kate. We should know by late this afternoon if my plan works. Can you hang in till then?"

  She nodded. "I think so. But don't tell me anything, Jack. Even if I'm in control, the Unity is part of me. It's always there, always listening."

  His features hardened. "I shouldn't have let you talk me out of Plan A, damn it."

  "Don't talk like that. You promised, remember."

  "Promise or not, Kate, if Plan B doesn't work, it's back to A."

  "It will work," she told him, and sent up a silent prayer that it would. "Whatever it is, it will buy me enough time for CDC and NIH to come up with a cure." If they can.

  "It better." He flopped back onto the spread and closed his eyes. "And they'd better. Because if they don't, I'll use my own virucidal agent. Don't know about theirs, but mine's administered via nine-millimeter, hollow-pointed injection."

  How could he speak so casually of killing eight people? Could he do that? Could her brother be such a cold-blooded murderer?

  Looking at his features now as they relaxed toward sleep, she found it hard to believe. She touched Jack's cheek.

  "Get your rest," she whispered.

  She had an uneasy feeling he was going to need all his strength back, and soon. She'd sensed something while the Unity was controlling her voice. The same background of ecstatic anticipation she'd experienced last night, and something else: fear. The Unity feared her brother. It had feared Fielding, too, and look what happened to him.

  Kate went to the front door and locked it.

  And then an awful thought jarred her, stiffening her limbs with dread: How much of her would remain in the morning? Would she have enough of her own volition left to fight off the Unity and go home for Lizzie's concert? Maybe the distance to Trenton would attenuate its influence.

  She prayed so.

  6

  "They didn't arrest Holdstock?" Sandy said into his cell phone. He wanted to shout but this was an NYPD detective he was talking to. "Why not? I served him up to you on a silver platter."

  He'd called in his "tip" to McCann—the only NYPD detective he knew by name—who relayed it to the Queens precinct investigating the murder. Sandy had figured if the Savior's info was true, Holdstock would be locked up in no time. But when he'd called the 108th Precinct to confirm the arrest, he was told Holdstock had been sent home and no more. Unbelievable. He'd been trying to get hold of McCann ever since. Finally McCann had returned his call.

  "You should get stuff appraised before you buy," Detective McCann said, his voice thin through Sandy's cell phone. "That silver platter of yours was mostly tin."

  Sandy felt a twinge of nausea. Had he been set up?

  He was seated in the dark in the front seat of a car he'd gone out and rented immediately after hearing the news. He was tempted to roll down a window for a breath of night air, but didn't. After what he'd seen a few moments ago, he wanted the windows up and the doors locked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Had an alibi," McCann said. "Airtight, as they say on the tube."

  "Who?"

  "The seven other members of his cancer support group say he was with them at a meeting at the time of the killing. Hard to argue with that."

  Cancer support group? What the—? Of course! The cult.

  Sandy fumed. He should have foreseen they'd band together and cover for him.

  "But the handprint—"

  "Was just where you said it would be, and a perfect match."

  That was a relief. At least he knew the Savior had been telling the truth about that.

  "Well? Doesn't that prove he was there?"

  "It does, but it doesn't tell us when. Holdstock says he must have left it there when he visited Fielding last Thursday."

  "He's lying. He was there last night."

  "He says different. It's not like they didn't know each other. Fielding treated Holdstock, and Holdstock says they struck up a friendly relationship."

  "Bullshit. When was the last time your doctor invited you over to his house? And that's not a cancer support group Holdstock's been meeting with, it's a cult, and he's their leader."

  McCann's chuckle grated through the little speaker. "You're a piece of work, Palmer. You come up with this interview with the Savior that says he's a former SEAL—which we're pretty sure now he's not—and now you come up with this eyewitness to a murder who says it was done by a cult. Where do you find these people?"

  "I don't. They find me. And as for the cult, I'm sitting half a block from Holdstock's place now and believe me, this is a cult."

  "Don't do anything stupid, Palmer."

  "Not me. I'm just watching."

  It was stuffy in the rental, the warm air tinged with the sour smell of old spilled coffee, but Sandy kept the windows up. His quick peek through one of Holdstock's windows had sent him scurrying back here with a bad case of the creeps. All those people sitting around the living room, grinning and humming as they stared into space. He shook off a chill and took a tighter grip on the phone.

  "Listen, detective, every member of that cult is a former patient of Fielding's." Sandy hoped the Savior had his facts straight because he was going out on a limb here. "My source says they developed some delusion that Fielding had caused their tumors just so he could experiment on them, and so they decided to kill him."

  "Let's put the cult aside and talk about your source," McCann said.

  "The boys over at the One-Oh-Eight are still looking into Holdstock as a possible, but they're very interested in your source. They'd like to speak to him."

  "Her," Sandy said.

  That should throw them off. Sandy had been expecting this and figured he'd cover himself the same way he had after the Savior interview.

  "Okay… her. She knew about the handprint and the electrical wire. Only way she could know that was to be in the room when the murder went down."

  "She told me she was outside, looking through a window."

  "The One-Oh-Eight boys say you'd have to be nine feet tall to see through the dining room window."

  "Maybe she plays for the Liberty. I've never seen her, only spoken to her on the phone." Sandy smiled, happy with the way he'd slipped that in there.

  McCann sighed. "Gonna run that on me again, are you, Palmer? No personal contact, everything over the phone, right? Well, listen up. The guys at the One-Oh-Eight think y
our source knows too much, and might be the killer himself."

  "I told you she's—"

  "Yeah-yeah, I know what you told me. But the killer wasn't a woman. It was a fairly strong guy. So if your source is really a guy, watch your back."

  And then McCann cut the connection.

  Sandy hit END on his phone and considered McCann's parting words. It had occurred to him before but now McCann had brought it up: could the Savior be the real killer and trying to use Sandy to divert attention from himself?

  But why? Reading between the lines of his conversation with McCann he'd gathered that the cops in Queens had no suspects beyond what Sandy had provided. And Holdstock's print was there, just as the Savior had said.

  And as for watching his back, if the Savior had wanted to harm him, the perfect time and place would have been at Julio's this morning: nobody had seen Sandy go in, and no one would have noticed if he never came out.

  So far everything the Savior had lold him about the murder had been dope. Still, you couldn't be too careful…

  What Sandy needed was a story beyond the crime itself. He needed to link Holdstock and his cult to the crime. And since the cops weren't doing it, it was up to him.

  That was why he was sitting here. In the dark. In the Bronx.

  But hey, that was what investigative reporting was all about, right?

  He stared at the lighted windows of Holdstock's place, partially visible through the trees along the sidewalk. He'd watch, but from here. No way he was going back to that window and listen to that humming.

  Maybe he'd be lucky. Maybe they'd kill someone else tonight.

  7

  Kate yawned. Tired. She'd watched the eleven o'clock news for further word of the Fielding murder but it wasn't even mentioned. James Fielding, MD, pioneering medical researcher, had been reduced to a statistic.

  Sic transit gloria.

  She unfolded the couch in Jack's TV room, expanding it to a bed, then went through the apartment turning out lights. In the kitchen she noticed the dinner dishes still in the drainer. Might as well put them away.

  Jack had awakened around five, feeling better but still far from a hundred percent. She'd heated a couple of the frozen entrees from his fridge and wanted to know if he lived on that stuff. He'd explained that like many New Yorkers, he rarely ate in.