“Mr. Campbell?” Dinah repeated. She stood up from behind her desk.
He nodded. “Uh huh.”
Dinah turned up the dispatch radio a bit, but it sounded like several voices speaking in monotones all at once. She turned it down again. “Oscar wants me to tell you they’ve caught her.”
Trey glanced up at the clock on the wall.
It was almost ten p.m.
61
Half an hour later, Oscar stepped into the police station, soaked to the skin.
“The damn waves,” he said, “I was either throwing up or getting soaked. We could barely see anything because the fog’s coming in. I was sure we were going to crash into each other.”
Trey had been pacing for almost a half hour. “So what’s the story?”
Oscar glanced at him like he was the last person in the world he wanted to see. “The story is just about the way I’d’ve played it. We went out to those caves. My men and women are already coming down with colds, and the ones out of San Pedro think I’m a joke. We spend an hour and a half shining flashlights up and down the slimy walls of that Capila Blanca. Although I must admit, that central room, the round one with the well in the middle, is pretty interesting. I’ve lived here for fifteen years, and never went through there. It’s amazing how those monks lived...” Realizing he was getting off the subject, he backtracked. “So we spend half the night looking there, and I get this call. Not on the general police band, but on my private band. Turns out the coast guard picked up a woman matching Hatcher’s description, soaked in blood, on a sloop just up out to sea a bit. She was easy to subdue, and they’re taking her to the mainland. So, we’re all a little furious we ran off on a tip from a paranoiac. And I don’t mean our friend Cobra.” Oscar sneezed, and walked past Trey.
Trey stood there in the center of the office.
“I don’t believe it,” he said.
Oscar stopped at the door to his own office. He shook his head. “Believe it, Campbell. All I can say is, I hope they fry that woman. She deserves worse, but if there’s a hell, she’ll work out her damn karma from there.”
“It’s not her, Oscar,” Trey said. “I know it.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Instinct,” Trey said.
Defeated, Trey walked out the door, out of the police station, into the cool night. He passed the closed up storefronts where Carly had window-shopped earlier that same evening. The ice cream stand, where he’d been sitting, thinking how good life could be. It can all turn on a dime. He remembered a biblical quote: In the twinkling of an eye. He wished he could step back through time, to that moment in the morning when he had forbidden Mark from coming horseback riding. If he’d followed through on Carly’s plan, even Jenny and her boyfriend would still be alive, because the cottage would’ve been empty. Then, he might’ve been able to prevent those murders. And he would’ve prevented his son and daughter from having been exposed to that...creature. The thought gave him shivers: Agnes Hatcher kissing her son on his forehead. Like an animal cleaning another before the kill.
The Gorgon was in his life again. For all the good he tried to do her, none of it mattered. He had tried to understand her pathology when she’d been first admitted to Darden. He had been young and idealistic and essentially, stupid. He had given her information which fueled her fantasies.
Trey could not have felt worse.
He walked down the street to the docks. When he reached the pier, he sat down and gazed out at the night. The fog was light, and he could see the darkness of sea. He closed his eyes, sending a prayer out for Mark to get better.
And then, with sudden clarity, he remembered something that Agnes Hatcher had once told him.
He’d been sitting with her playing chess. She was a much better chess player than he’d ever be. It was in the recreation room at Darden State. Orderlies were standing guard at the doors. Agnes was a rarely allowed around any other patients.
She wore the hospital gown, and green slippers. Her hair sparkled in the sunlight which cut through the barred windows.
He leaned back in the chair. It was his move, but he couldn’t figure out for the life of him how to get around her queen.
She said, “It’s a strategy.”
He grinned, back then. He was only twenty-three, and he still believed that people could be saved from themselves. From their past, their psyches. “What is?”
“This,” she indicated the plastic chess pieces. “It’s my strategy. You don’t have one. You’re just reacting to mine. That’s not how anyone wins.”
“How can I win? You’re going to put me in check soon. You always do.”
She looked quite seriously at him. “I would never do anything to hurt you. I don’t want you to lose this game.” She said it then as if what she were saying was of some great importance. “I want you to win.”
“Why?”
“Because you understand.”
“About chess?”
“About how all of it is one. Chess, life, death...You’re not like the others. You have special knowledge. Only you need to open the door to it. You need the key. I am the key.”
He let this go. He knew that she was insane. There were some things that the patients said which were indecipherable.
Then, she said, “Remember this. I always have a strategy. In this game, have you watched? I moved my men around to this side, and so you followed. And then, to the other side, and then, you followed again. And back and forth. But if you watch the pattern of what I did, you’ll see a thread through the middle. This is where I moved my queen. This was no strategy at all.”
“Right where you started. All your other moves were distractions from that main move,” he nodded. “I wished I had noticed it. That’s some strategy: I’m dumb and you’re smart.”
“No,” she said, leaning across the board to touch his hand. “My strategy is making you see that there is no strategy. All of it is chance. Fate. Fate is the guiding star. I believe Fate guides us to where we need to go. I may appear to win this game, and you may appear to lose it...” The warmth of her hand grew stronger until he wanted to draw back from it. It was too warm. Too inviting. “But Fate is what draws my queen to her destination. The men may go to the left to fight, and to the right, but the players move where they are meant to, regardless. Your castle is mine, your kingdom, because it was meant to be mine.”
With that, she moved her queen, and won the game.
He opened his eyes. The bay at Avalon was before him. He stood up on the pier. He tried to look out to the bend of the island, but could not see any of the Kirk In The Rocks.
The men may go to the left to fight and to the right.
But the players move where they are meant to.
My strategy is no strategy.
Fate is the guiding star.
Your castle is mine.
Your kingdom.
62
Agnes knelt in darkness on the deck of the boat. She waited until the last patrol boat had rounded the curve of the island. She had used the boat’s police radio, and, from her years lecturing to police academies, she knew which band to use to make the frequency appear distant enough to fool the local police. She had spent most of her childhood and youth observing and studying the police. It always came in handy.
She was less exhausted than exhilarated from the day’s kill. Operating on the boy and girl at the cottage had been refreshing, and she had showered in the spray from the teenaged girl. When she heard the other girl, the little one, go running and screaming, she knew she had to get out of the cottage fast. She did not intend to be caught before she attained fulfillment.
She would’ve taken his son, then.
The beautiful boy, so much like his father’s smell.
But there had been no time that afternoon.
Instead, she had gone back inside the cottage, pulled some clothes from the woman’s closet and changed into them. They were long for her, the shorts and t-shirt, but she had no time
to worry about such things. She wrapped her jeans and sweater in a bundle with the soul-catchers. Then, she went out the front door of the cottage, leaving Cobra shivering in a corner of the kitchen, spineless man that he was.
Since the little girl was screaming at the road behind the cottage, no one seemed to notice the woman in shorts and t-shirt jogging down the side-path, as if she were just out for exercise.
The policewoman was easy to take care of. She was down at the docks, totally inexperienced, young, too—perhaps only twenty-one.
She was alone, because all the other cops had gone up to the cottage. Except Paula Stouffer had not wanted to. She’s been scared. She’d never done more, probably, than catch a teenager shoplifting. She might have even known the girl and boy who had been slaughtered up the hill.
It was easy to approach her as a tourist and tell her that there was someone funny in the restrooms at the pier. Someone funny, not too scary. Just a weirdo.
“I’ll go with you,” Agnes had said. “I just think there’s something wrong with the poor man.”
Paula Stouffer was undoubtedly relieved that she didn’t have to deal with murder and mayhem. Only someone funny, perhaps a homeless person, in the women’s restroom.
When Agnes had her inside the filthy walls, she ripped the knife across Paula Stouffer’s throat, using her own sweater to sop up the blood so that it didn’t ruin the police uniform.
She stuffed the body into the last stall. Covered her with one of the dark plastic bags that was used to line the restroom garbage can. She closed the stall door, locking it from the inside. Then she climbed over the top of the stall.
But only after she scalped her, for Paula had beautiful auburn hair.
It had been that simple. She knew that there would be a boat to the mainland with his family on board. She’d been hoping he would come to. But it was enough that she had his family.
Their lives, their sacrifice, would be more crucial toward immortality than any others.
There was no moon that night. The fog came and went as if an unfelt wind moved it along. The boat was dark, too, for she’d shut off all the controls.
But even so, against the stars and mist and indigo sky, she saw the great Church of Fate rising, triumphant.
She glanced at the silhouettes of her prisoners:
The woman handcuffed to the girl, and the boy. The woman was gagged, and Agnes had draped a piece of cloth, torn from Officer Erskine’s shirt, over her face. She would feel what Agnes had felt all those years. She would know what Agnes had been through.
And the boy. So like his father. He would not try and escape. She knew that.
She held tight to the fishing knife. It was so much like the knife they had used together in the fall of 1888. The taste of the blood that day had reminded her of all the lives they’d captured then.
Of all the lifetimes they had acquired.
He would come to her now.
He would come.
63
“She is there,” Trey said.
Oscar glanced up. “Mr. Campbell.” He didn’t seem as furious as Trey had expected him to be.
The police chief looked sad, his eyes bloodshot.
“We were wrong,” Oscar said. “There was no coast guard pick up. I located the frequency of the call—the one that claimed that Agnes Hatcher had been caught. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”
Trey stood still.
“Your family hasn’t been sighted near the mainland. They should’ve been close to docking by now.” Oscar said, “She somehow managed to take the boat. Overcome the officers. We found one of them, dead, scalped. Paula Stouffer. In the beach restroom, in a locked stall, covered with a garbage bag. Hatcher’s been out to sea almost four hours. She destroyed any equipment on board, so we can’t track her. She has your family.”
Trey Campbell said, “I know. That was her goal all along. Checkmate.” Oscar looked at him, perplexed.
“She’s at Capila Blanca.”
“No,” Oscar said. “We went over every inch of that place. I’m sorry. She’s probably on the mainland by now, or near it. Maybe she’s hiding up at San José Island. Maybe she’s on the western side of our own island. We have helicopters coming from Los Angeles to check the local harbors. No more goose chases. I’m sorry. It’s out of my jurisdiction now. The state boys will have her shortly, I’m sure.” But Oscar said this as if even he did not believe it.
64
Trey ran down the streets of Avalon, his mind racing ahead of him. He had no one to turn to now. He was going to get no help from the police. They had their own agenda, their own strategy when it came to catching killers like Agnes. It often took days to track down such killers. By then, she might have added three more victims to her list. Usually, police were not that effective in the short term, for they didn’t understand the nature of the beast they were hunting. Trey felt a cold sweat break out along his scalp and neck. He had to do something.
Time was running out. His family may already have been killed. But that wasn’t what Agnes Hatcher would use them for. She would use them for drawing him to her.
He was not going to let anything happen to his wife and children.
He was not going to let them die at the hands of the monster.
He only had himself as a weapon.
But it was his best weapon, because Agnes Hatcher wanted him.
65
“Out,” Agnes said.
She had the boy handcuffed to her left wrist.
She motioned with the fishing knife towards the small beach of pebbles at the sea entrance to Capila Blanca. The waves crashed just beyond the larger boulders, but she’d been able to maneuver around them because the police boat was just small enough. But if they stayed in the boat much longer, a wave was likely to come over the rocks and do more than just spray them.
“I said ‘out’.” Agnes took the knife and held it against the boy’s neck.
The little girl, handcuffed to the woman, moved. Agnes could tell she was afraid of stepping out of the rocking boat. The girl’s mother, her face covered, her mouth gagged, made no sound whatsoever.
The girl gingerly stepped down into the ankle-deep water, shivering. Her mother followed; the girl helped guide her over the edge of the boat. The mother almost fell, but balanced herself against the girl.
The boy at Agnes’ side said nothing, but when she walked, he stayed with her.
Agnes grabbed two of the flares. She popped one of them, and a fizzing red flame struck at its tip. She handed this to the girl. “Use this like a candle,” she said. “If you try anything, I will kill your brother right in front of you. If you run off any path with your mother handcuffed to you, keep in mind, there are pits and chasms throughout these caves. You and your mother with both die if you don’t follow me exactly. Do you understand?”
The little girl nodded slowly, tears in her eyes.
Agnes lit her flare, also, and held it in the hand that was cuffed to the boy. She said to him, “You will do exactly what I say, won’t you?”
The boy looked up at her, staring blankly. He nodded.
“You saw what happened to your babysitter?”
Again, Mark nodded. He was not even shivering. It was as if he had adapted to this situation. As if some mechanism within his unconscious mind had kicked in, shunting fear aside for the time being. As if survival at any cost were enough to keep him functioning.
“She was very bad. She was vain. That means she thought the beauty of her face was more important than the gods. But I took that face from her. I bit it with my teeth.” Agnes leaned closer to Mark’s face. “I tasted her face. It was where she lived. Do you know where you live?”
Mark said nothing, but he didn’t take his eyes off her.
“You live in your heart, little boy. And that’s where I’ll go if I need to find you.” She stood up again. The girl’s face was red in the glow from the flare. “Be careful,” Agnes said, patiently. “Keep it away from your face
. You might burn yourself.”
She directed her captives to the cave’s entrance.
66
The Bayrunner Westcoaster was docked at the short pier. Trey Campbell had to climb over a low chicken wire fence to get to it; the rental boat dock was closed after dark, unless one had a key. He squatted down beside it, stepping, crab-like, into its stern. He slid across to one of the seats. He checked the motor for gas—there was still plenty. It took him several minutes to get it started, and when he did, he stayed down low in the boat, in case one of the local cops was still out, watching the docks. He loosed the boat from its mooring.
He drove the boat around the docks, going slowly so as not to bump any of the other resting boats. He steered it out into the bay, watching the shore to see if anyone followed him. The worst thing now would be if Oscar and his team of police followed him. Agnes would surely murder his family in that event. Only Trey knew that he held the key to stopping her.
The sea was calm.
Once he was out far enough from the town of Avalon, with its flickering lights, he noticed an incipient light across the sea, a greenish glow, as the waves crashed against rock and shoreline. He knew to keep the boat a good distance from the shore, because although part of the island was smooth with sand, there were outlaw rocks at sandbars just out in the bay, creating a fake reef. When the boat rounded the side of the island, to where Capila Blanca rose up, he turned the motor off.
It was a silent night.
The night mist moved silently.
Trey took the oars beneath the slats of the boat, and began slowly rowing towards the cavern’s mouth.
Agnes Hatcher’s words echoed in his mind:
My strategy is no strategy.
Then he thought: She thinks I’m Jack the Ripper. She believes we have to make things right together That’s what she’s after. Not Mark or Terry or Carly. They’re just in the way.
Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series) Page 16