“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.
“I just wanted to make sure you spelled my name right when you filed the charges,” my wife told her flatly. “I’m going in too.”
Special Agent Mandalay simply turned and stalked off into the night, waving for the others to follow. Ben, F
elicity, and I brought up the rear, quickly and quietly covering the forty odd yards along the shoulder to the park entrance. As a group, we advanced across the small paved parking area to the trailhead and proceeded up the short path to the starting marker. There, low to the ground, a white metal rectangle was bolted securely to an earthbound wooden post. PLEASE DO NOT FEED GEESE was embossed on its surface in bold black letters.
The group fanned out, following the trail in opposite directions, skirting around the lake on both sides. Everyone moved as quietly as possible, and I was fighting to contain several pained groans that threatened to seek release as the white-hot intensity of Roger’s presence burned up my spinal cord and into my brain.
A bright stripe of cold moonlight traced a ribbon of white across the rippling surface of the dark water. The night was silent save for the occasional light breeze through the upper reaches of the trees. Even the crickets were refusing to sing their songs. We continued to creep along the path, moving as hastily as discretion would allow.
Ahead of me were Agent Mandalay and Detective Deckert; to my left, Felicity; and behind, Ben. The other officers were no longer visible, having slipped around to the other end of the lake and into the thickening woods. I cast a quick glance to my right and captured an instant flash of movement near the rocky shoreline. There immediately followed a loud plop as something hit the water.
Like sharply honed combat veterans, Mandalay and Deckert dropped to one knee, pistols directed at the fading sound. Ben did the same, dragging Felicity and I downward with him. Taking aim, he instantly snapped on a small but powerful flashlight, sighting it alongside his weapon. A muted glow diffused eerily through the water from the tightly focused beam.
The forced hush was thick around us, and I swallowed hard to evict my heart from my throat. The five of us stared almost unblinking into the murky water seeking out any and all movement. More than a few of our precious seconds expired before we pinpointed the source of the sound. Centered in the ribbon of moonlight, a rounded stub protruded upward from the water, followed by an ovalish dark hump, roughly the size of a dinner plate. Slowly, the large turtle began to paddle away.
After releasing soft relieved sighs, we regained our upright stances and proceeded deeper into the park. As we rounded the easternmost end of the shallow lake and made our way around to the backside, Ben quietly solicited Felicity’s and my attention and motioned for us to stop.
“I want you two ta’ wait right here,” he whispered.
“But Ben,” I objected, “what about...”
He didn’t let me finish. “Right here!” he insisted, whispering through clenched teeth.
I had no choice but to stand silently watching as he moved past us along the path with Agent Mandalay and Detective Deckert. In mere moments, the three of them shrank to small blue-black silhouettes on the dimly washed landscape then disappeared as they seemed to melt and join with the shadows.
The antimony-veined disk of the moon jeered down at me when I allowed my gaze to drift upward. Though imperceptible to the naked eye, I knew only a thin thread-like arc of darkness remained along its edge. Looking back down, I pressed the side of my watch, and a dim blue-green glow illuminated its face. In less than twelve minutes, even that dark wisp of a thread would be gone.
We stood alone in the uneven shadows, mutely straining to glean whatever details we could from the silent landscape. I kept watch on the opposite end of the lake, expecting to catch a glimpse of the uniformed officers through some of the thinner sections of the trees. They had a slightly farther distance to travel, as the trailhead had started closer to our end. However, our momentary diversion, courtesy of the lake inhabitant, should have evened out the time.
Should have, but for some reason the four patrolmen still hadn’t appeared, and a gnawing worry was starting to brew deep in my stomach.
“Something’s wrong,” I whispered to Felicity.
“You feel it too?” she half asked. “I’m freezing.”
Felicity always sensed ethereal presences as coldness, no matter what the temperature truly was. The less pleasant the energy she sensed, the colder she got. She was shivering as she leaned against me.
“The other cops. They should have come around the end of the lake by now, but I don’t see them.”
“What do you think happened?” she questioned through chattering teeth. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet that...”
I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to complete the sentence. A sixteen-pound sledgehammer, swung at full force, impacted squarely with the back of my head, shattering my skull and spilling its contents onto the path. At least I can only imagine that to be the closest example to the unbearable pain that suddenly stole away my breath, my sight, and even my very thoughts.
I doubled forward involuntarily.
Voluntarily.
With extreme prejudice.
I was willing to do almost anything to make it stop. The ripping spasm escaped down my spine and out through every nerve ending I possessed. My knees buckled, and I pitched to the ground. I don’t know if I was screaming; I might have tried, but my hearing had fled with my other senses. Pure indigo darkness tugged at my soul, insisting that I enter into marriage with it.
“Why, Rowan, why?” Ariel Tanner stood before me shrouded in white lace, wisps of her strawberry-blonde hair floating gently on the breeze.
“I don’t know, Ariel. I don’t understand,” I groaned.
“Yes, you do,” her melodious voice sang. “You have always known. Tell me again, what does Rowan mean?”
I choked the answer out from behind blinding pain, “Strength…Security…Protector.”
Ariel smiled knowingly. I began to feel energy flowing from her and into my body, chasing away the ravaging spasms. It was then I realized that the question had not been hers, but my own all along, “Why me? Why was it I who had been chosen to pursue this killer?”
The answer was as simple as my name.
I returned to reality curled into a ball on the mossy ground, breathing in the loamy odor of the soil. Roger’s telltale fire still licked viciously up and down my back, but gone was the unbearable agony that had recently occupied the space where my head should have been. Clarity and focus had crept up from behind and ousted it from power.
“Rowan! Rowan, what’s wrong?!” Felicity was insistently shaking me as she whispered.
I emulated her hushed tone as I climbed to my feet. “How long? How long was I out?”
“A few minutes. You just fell to the ground and curled up into a fetal position. What happened?”
“I’ll tell you about it later. Did the other cops ever come out of the woods?”
“Not that I saw,” she shook her head. “I was a little preoccupied with you, so I wasn’t really watching.”
The night grew suddenly still and impossibly, even more silent. I looked up into the inky sky at the moon bursting into fullness then down to my wide-eyed wife. Less than forty yards away, up the hill and to the right, the fragile pane of silence was shattered into innumerable glistening shards by a woman’s terrified scream.
My heart double-skipped then settled into a steadily increasing rhythm as the adrenalin injected itself into my system. I had no idea what I was going to do. I only knew that before the piercing, horrified sound even began to fade, my legs were pistoning, pushing me up the hill toward its point of origin. Stealth was no longer an issue, and my feet were thudding loudly against the carpet of thick vegetation. I thrust my hands outward, warding off low hanging branches, which sought to assault my face with stinging, leafy slaps as I weaved through the increasingly thick woods.
Somewhat lighter, but no less frantic, footfalls echoed behind my own. I knew them to belong to Felicity as she followed me on my insane headlong rush into whatever peril awaited.
A second shattering scream pierced the air, easily overcoming the manic kettledrum my heart was creating in my ears. Thickly foliaged bushes
and young trees had continued to grow more numerous as I pushed farther away from the marked path, and they now presented themselves as an almost unbroken barrier before me. Yellow flickers of light I knew to be burning candles teased me through small bare spots in the oncoming brush. A third scream followed weakly on the heels of the second, telling me I had no time to search for the clearing’s entrance.
Still clueless as to what I was going to do, I tucked my face behind the protection of my arms and plunged forward into the thicket. Burrs and needle-like spines tore and stabbed at my flesh while ground-hugging vines attached themselves ropelike around my ankles. My progress slowed as the sinewy ground cover seemed to pull against me in an attempt to drag me downward. Deep sobbing reached my ears, and I pumped my legs harder, tearing free and bursting scratched and bleeding through to the other side.
When I pulled my wildly lacerated arms from my face, the scene before me was much as I had witnessed in my vision. The young girl was laying on her back near the center of the small clearing, clad in silky white lace. Her glassy eyes stared upward through the dark green canopy of the trees, unblinking. Candles burned, red, yellow, blue, green, and white about the perimeter, black near her head. I had only a split second in which to take in the details of the display as my attention was immediately diverted by yet another fearful scream ice-picking my eardrums.
Special Agent Constance Mandalay stood transfixed on the opposite side of the clearing, her unfired sidearm tossed carelessly to the ground out of reach. Her eyes were wide in absolute terror, and her mouth trembled as thin tears wetted her cheeks. In the dimness of the shadows, I could see a sparkling halo of energy surrounding her. My eyes instinctively followed the crackling ethereal tether that whipped snakelike through the air, ending unsurprisingly at Roger Henderson’s black-cloaked form.
Harm None: A Rowan Gant Investigation Page 33