We were both silent for a short while as Felicity pressed the Jeep along, occasionally shifting gears up and down to adjust speed for the various intersections we crossed. The pulsing yellow and red signals gave warning at each junction, serving also to punctuate my realization that the hour had grown later than I realized.
“How’s your head?” Felicity finally asked.
“Still hurts-hang a right up here on Ashby-but not as bad as before.” I settled back in the seat and closed my eyes for a moment. “I took a handful of aspirin earlier, and they’re starting to kick in. Not quite as fast as willow bark tea, but they don’t leave an aftertaste.”
“I know what you mean.”
I could feel the Jeep sway to the left, centrifugal force acting in opposition to the right-hand turn. My eyes were still closed, and I heard the smooth, metallic click of the stick shift as the gears were shifted down then back up. The hum of the tires against pavement was pinpricked by a low, quick, electronic beep as Felicity’s watch announced the half-hour.
“What time is it anyway?” I asked, still resting limply in the seat. Before she could answer, I began a wildly disorienting carnival ride between realities.
“ Hey, mister, what time is it?” A little, strawberry-blonde girl is talking to me. She is dressed in white lace and is tugging franticly at my sleeve. “What time is it? Hey, mister!”
“It’s twelve-thirty,” she answered.
“ Hey, mister, what time is it?” The little girl is pointing above the horizon. The pregnant globe of the moon is lifting itself heavily, casting its reflected light down upon her upturned face. The hands of a clock spin urgently about the mottled silvery-white surface. “What time is it? Hey, mister?”
“Rowan? Rowan? Are you okay?”
There is a grove of trees surrounding a small clearing. Centered in the clearing is a hooded, robed figure standing with hands raised high. Moonlight glints from an object held in those hands. Moonlight glints from an athame.
A small figure lies prone before the cloaked one. A small figure clad in white lace. Preened and arranged. Unblemished and virginal.
“Rowan! Answer me!”
Trees begin to erupt from the landscape, and the earth begins to tremble and sink. The depression fills with dark water and ripples in the slight breeze. The moonlight reflects in a shimmering stripe.
Another stand of trees erupt skyward. The tall pines form a line before us, completely obscuring the view except for a few small glimpses of the shallow lake.
“ What does it say, mister?” The little girl is pointing at a small sign. Bold letters spell out PLEASE DO NOT FEED GEESE.
“Rowan! Breathe, dammit!”
I can’t breathe. My lungs are on fire, and the flames are licking up my throat. My chest feels heavy, and there is something tightening about my neck. The atmosphere feels thick and fluid around me. I want to gasp for air, but something is telling me I shouldn’t. My thoughts are beginning to cloud; my mind is turning murky and dark.
“ROWAN!”
I snapped fully back into conscious reality when Felicity combined her urgent voice with even more urgent one-handed jostling. We had just rolled to a halt in a bus turnout near the off-ramp onto Midland. The Jeep made a jarring lurch as she franticly switched off the engine and in her haste, released the clutch pedal a second too soon. At almost the same instant, I gasped, ravenously sucking in the cool air.
“Rowan! Answer me! Are you all right?”
I choked and sputtered on the intoxicating oxygen and wheezed in more as I began to catch my breath. The dull ache that had been residing in the back of my head for the majority of the evening was now making an all out assault on my skull, pounding rhythmically through my scalp. The faint tickle of oncoming nausea started down the back of my throat, and my mouth began to water slightly. I fought it back, concentrating on my breathing and forcing myself to at least try to relax.
“Okay,” I sputtered between breaths, “I’m okay.”
“What happened?” Concern permeated Felicity’s voice. “You stopped breathing.”
“The vision.” I was no longer gulping air, and my respirations were beginning to slow. “The vision came back.”
“What did you see?”
“The little girl. A small clearing and some trees. The full moon,” I described slowly, reviewing the brilliant Technicolor playback of the memories in my mind. “The moon had hands on it. Like a clock. They were spinning around, and the little girl kept asking me what time it was.” My speech started coming quicker as the vision flooded in. “There was a lake too. And a row of pine trees that hid the clearing. The little girl was pointing at a sign.”
“What did it say?”
“Please do not feed geese, in bold letters.” I painted the image for her. “It was black on white. Like a road sign.”
“A park sign maybe?” she ventured.
“That would explain what it said,” I agreed. “And the lake and trees too. Do you have your cell phone with you?”
“Sure.” She pulled it from a pocket on the side of her purse and offered it to me. “Who are you going to call? Ben?”
“Yeah. I promised I’d let him know if I remembered any of the vision. This whole park thing might be important.”
Thumbing the power switch, I began stabbing out Ben’s number on the lighted buttons. The amber, segmented digits advanced across the small display, and a second later there was a brief, mechanical trill from the earpiece as the phone rang at the other end.
“Storm,” Ben answered with a sharp, frenetic tenor to his voice.
“Ben, it’s Rowan. I remembered some of the vision.”
“Hold on a second…”
I could hear him exchanging words with someone in the background. Various noises were issuing from the small speaker in the handset. Those sounds, coupled with his tone of voice, led me to believe that all hell had broken loose, and the MCS command post was at ground zero.
“What’s the story?” Felicity queried, noticing my expectant silence.
“He’s got me on hold,” I answered. “It sounds like everything’s hitting the fan over there. I guess we can go ahead and get moving. No use in just sitting here.”
She nodded and reached for the ignition. There was a muffled plastic rattle on the other end of the phone and the clunk of a door being shut, followed by a relative hush.
“Sorry ‘bout that,” Ben’s voice issued forth again. “It’s a fuckin’ circus down here.”
“What’s going on?”
“Aww, the parents made an appeal to the kidnapper on the ten o’clock news. We’ve been gettin’ crank calls ever since you and Felicity cut out. Forget about that, whaddaya got?”
The engine on the Jeep had sparked to life and was now idling smoothly. Felicity popped the vehicle into gear and started rolling forward.
“I remembered the vision,” I expressed. “I’m not sure what all of it means, but I’ve got some ideas.”
“Shoot.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure he’s going to do the ritual outdoors where he can see the moon. I think he might be planning to do it in a park or something.”
“Any idea which one?”
Felicity gunned the engine slightly and eased from the bus turnout onto the off-ramp leading into the city limits of the small Saint Louis suburb of Overmoor.
“Not for sure. In the vision, I saw trees and a small lake,” I explained further. “The only specific thing about it I can remember is a sign that said ‘please do not feed geese’.”
“No offense, white man, but do ya’ know how many parks with lakes and geese we have in the metro area alone? Not to mention the state.”
“Too many.”
We continued down the small incline, past a wide opening in the chain link fence that ran alongside the ramp. I watched out my window as the obese moon lumbered across the night sky, arcing high above the trees. Apparently, a slight breeze was blowing, as I noticed the boughs of a stand of pine tre
es were gently waving. A line of tall pines obscuring all but the smallest glimpses of the lake behind them.
“Stop,” I almost whispered at first and then spoke louder. “STOP!”
Felicity immediately cranked the steering wheel to the right, pulling us onto the shoulder. The tires ground coarsely against the loose gravel when she jammed on the brakes and brought us to a sliding halt.
“What? What’s wrong?” she appealed.
Similar questions, only spoken by Ben’s voice, were issuing raspily from the cell phone as I handed it to her and opened my door. Slowly, I covered the short distance between the Jeep and the fence, staring out across the moonlit landscape. I twined my fingers through the links and pressed my face against the warm, galvanized metal, intently studying the scene.
A line of tall pine trees reached upward to the star- speckled night. Between them, I could see the occasional shimmer of moonlight reflecting from rippling water. At the head of what appeared to be a trail, a small white and black rectangle was affixed vertically to a short post. It was too far away to read with the unaided eye, but I didn’t have to make out the words to know that it simply said, PLEASE DO NOT FEED GEESE.
I turned my gaze upward at the almost perfectly round disk floating in the sky. Marbled grey and white, its luminescence cast the view in an eerie glow. In my mind, I could see the minute hand relentlessly chasing its smaller and slower rival about the surface. Overtaking it and repeating. Overtaking it and repeating.
A familiar, searing fire sprinted suddenly up my spine, bringing with it a dark foreboding. The hair stood out from the back of my neck, and my body felt like a living pincushion in a vat of alcohol as every other follicle stiffened to attention. Crackling static danced across my skin, setting its already tortured surface ablaze.
“ Hey, mister, what time is it?” The little girl tugs on my sleeve. “I have to go soon. What time is it? Hey, mister!”
The hardened steel wedge of realization buried itself soundly between the hemispheres of my brain and drove relentlessly inward. I scrambled back to the Jeep in a frenzy, awkwardly slipping and falling on the loose gravel twice before making it. Felicity had the cell phone pressed to her ear and was apparently filling Ben in on my sudden, inexplicable behavior. Sensing what I was after, she handed me the device before I could snatch it away from her.
“It’s happening now, Ben!” I fired into the phone with absolute certainty.
He began protesting immediately, “Wait a minute, you said the full moon would be on Friday.”
“It’s after midnight, Ben,” I appealed, fighting to keep from shouting. “It IS Friday. Look at a calendar or a newspaper or something. What is the exact time the moon will be full?”
“Hold on…”
I could hear the door swing open and his distant voice as he called out for a calendar. Quickly, he returned, joined by the sound of rustling papers and other voices.
“It’s not on here, Rowan,” he responded in exasperation. “It’s got the phases but not the times. Wait a minute… what’s that?” One of the muted voices interrupted him, and he left me hanging for a thirty-second eternity. I could hear frantic muttering in the background before he returned. “Benson’s kid is an astronomy student. He got her on the horn and she says that in our time zone, it’ll be one-thirty-seven A.M.”
“What time is it now?” I appealed to my wide-eyed wife.
“Ten till one,” she answered.
“Less than an hour, Ben,” I told him insistently. “He’s going to kill her in less than an hour.”
“But where? He could be at almost any park in the state. Shit, he might not even be IN Missouri anymore.”
I realized that in my rush to convince him of our severe deficit for time, I had not yet voiced my other revelation. “No Ben, he’s still in Missouri. In fact, he’s right here. Right now. I can feel him.”
“Right where?”
“Wild Woods Park, just inside the city limits of Overmoor.” I turned to face the gently waving pine trees once again. “I’m standing right outside the fence.”
“Are you sure about…” He cut himself off before he could finish the question. “Forget I said that. Stay right where you are, Rowan. You understand me? I’m callin’ Overmoor and gettin’ some squad cars over there right now. We can be there in fifteen minutes, twenty tops. Don’t go in until we get there, Rowan. You hear me? Don’t go in the fuckin’ park.”
CHAPTER 27
True to what Ben had said, two Overmoor squad cars descended upon us at almost the same instant I switched off the cell phone. At my urging, we moved the three vehicles farther down the shoulder in order to remain out of the line of sight of anyone in the park. Seventeen lethargically oozing minutes later, Ben and Detective Deckert arrived, followed hotly by a dark sedan bearing U.S. government plates.
Special Agent Constance Mandalay looked far more intimidating than attractive in the muted glare of the distant streetlamp. The strict angular shadows that sliced through the sodium vapor glow painted her slight figure in an almost violently imposing likeness as she fixed her angry gaze on me.
“Did I not make myself clear, Mister Gant?” she javelined the query tersely. “You are no longer a part of this investigation. Period. Now, since Detective Storm seems intent on following you blindly about, you’ve not only bought yourself a world of trouble, you’ve managed to jeopardize his career as well.”
My head was still being relentlessly hammered from the inside, and fire danced up and down my spine, making me painfully aware of Roger’s presence in the moonlit park. The seemingly endless misery coupled with our race against time had begun deeply affecting my overall disposition. I was walking nothing other than the paper-thin edge between steady calm and explosive anger. The instant Agent Mandalay inserted herself into the grotesque equation, I lost all semblance of balance.
“Go fuck yourself,” I told her drily.
“EXCUSE ME?” she demanded incredulously, visibly taken aback by my uncharacteristic and graphic instruction.
The low chatter among the uniformed officers came to an abrupt halt, and everyone present turned their eyes upon the close-quartered standoff that had materialized between us.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” I apologized for my rudeness but still maintained my umbraged tone, “but you’ve had it in for me from the very beginning, and I have no idea why. To be honest, I don’t care that you don’t like me. Whether you want to believe it or not, Roger Henderson is in this park.” I stole a quick glance at my watch and then displayed it to her. “And in less than twenty-five minutes, the sonofabitch is going to stick his hand into a little girl’s chest and rip her heart out. Now, if arresting me makes you happy, then be my guest. Just do that little girl a favor and wait until after we’ve stopped this asshole from killing her.”
Agent Mandalay stared back at me with a slackened expression. A retort half formed, her lips parted suddenly then almost immediately closed without revealing the substance of the comment. The only sound to escape her was a reluctantly acquiescent sigh. “Okay. Fine. We’ll search the park, but rest assured, Mister Gant, I am not through with you.”
“Fine.” Still unflinching, I held her contemptuous stare. “All I want to do is save the little girl.”
She all but ignored my comment and turned her attention to the uniformed officers who had been observing our sharp exchange. “It looks like we’re in the middle of a residential area. How big is this park anyway?”
“We are, ma’am, and it’s pretty small,” a sergeant replied. “Just a few acres. It used to be the grounds of a seminary.”
“Doesn’t sound like a very secluded place for a ritual murder.” She directed her sarcasm toward me.
“Actually, it is fairly obscured. The idea was to leave it as natural as possible,” he offered. “With the exception of the trail, it’s pretty heavily wooded on the opposite side of the lake.”
He began stumbling over his words near the end of the sentence. I
could tell by his expression that if looks could kill, she had just stared him into an early grave.
“All right, Mister Gant.” She turned back to face me once again. “Any suggestions as to WHERE in the park we’ll find him?”
The details of my vision had become clearer and more precise with each painful recurrence. They were now so sharply in focus as to seem almost unreal.
“About thirty yards up the hill on the other side of the lake.” I described in words what my mind was replaying in overblown, pixilated color. “There’s a small clearing. It’s surrounded on all sides by trees and bushes. There’s an indirect entrance from the back.”
She looked back to the uniformed officers and raised a questioning eyebrow.
“Yeah, he’s right,” one of the patrolmen spoke up. “There’s a clearing there. We’ve caught a few teenagers hiding out in there, partying in the middle of the night.”
“Deckert,” she dictated as she unbuttoned her jacket and slipped her sidearm from its holster. “You’re with me. You four,” she directed herself to the uniformed officers. “Spread out and flank the clearing. Storm, you stay here with Mister Gant and his wife, and keep an eye on the entrance.”
“But…” I started to protest.
“Save it!” she shot back. “You’re staying here.”
Ben grabbed my arm and shook his head as I started forward. I could feel Felicity’s hand resting on my other shoulder, leaching her own mixture of fear, anger, and desperation into me.
“Look, Mandalay,” Ben lashed out. “If you want my badge then come and get it. But until it’s in your hot little hand, get off your power pony and give it a rest. I’m goin’ in and Rowan’s comin’ with me.”
“Suit yourself,” she remarked flatly. “But be aware that you’re kissing what’s left of your career goodbye and getting your friend charged with interfering in a federal investigation in the process.”
“O’Brien. That’s spelled capital O apostrophe capital B, r-i-e-n,” Felicity broke her self-imposed muteness.
“Excuse me?” Agent Mandalay demanded.
Harm none argi-1 Page 32