Blind Pursuit

by Michael Prescott

  The clean lines of her neck, the bare skin stretched taut over her thin collarbones, the scatter of reddish freckles on the margin of her cleavage, cupped in the buttoned neckband ...

  He reached for the top button, wanting to see her breasts....

  No.

  He jerked his hand away as if slapped.

  His mouth twisted. A noise that was both grunt and gasp hiccupped out of him. Its echo hopped like a frog among the metal stanchions of the carports.

  Dirty. Unclean. Corrupt.

  Quickly he taped her mouth, then clawed a blindfold out of his pants pocket and snugged it over her eyes, knotting it in the back of her head.

  Helpless now. Deprived of mobility, speech, sight. She was a free agent no longer. She was his.

  Erin Reilly was his.

  The Ford’s trunk thumped shut like a coffin lid.

  4

  Her keys gave him access to her apartment. Strange to be here, in another person’s living space, and in a home so different from his.

  No dull glaze of dust on the tables and fixtures. No soiled spots in the carpet, long ignored and now permanently set. No brittle carapaces of dead insects lining the baseboards, shiny in the lamplight.

  His own apartment was a ground-floor unit, cramped and airless, the windows staring blankly at the stucco wall of the building next door. Erin Reilly’s place conveyed a sense of openness and freedom, with its views of the city and mountains, its promise of light and air, its immaculate floors and whitewashed walls, its silent testimony to the serenity of a well-ordered life.

  He almost hated Erin for having all of this around her—and then he remembered that she would have it no longer.

  In the bedroom closet he found a set of three valises, small, medium, and large. He chose the medium-size suitcase. Opened it, then began pulling random clothes off hangers and stuffing them inside.

  No. Random was wrong. He forced himself to concentrate on selecting items that went together as outfits. It must look as if she had done the packing.

  What else? Footwear. He tossed in a pair of fringed western boots.

  Undergarments. They were neatly folded in a bureau drawer.

  Toilet articles. In the bathroom he collected them. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Shampoo. Deodorant. Comb. Hairbrush. Other things, including some feminine products he’d never seen before and couldn’t identify.

  Stationery. His gloved hands rifled the drawers of a mahogany desk in the den. He found a bundle of pale olive envelopes and matching sheets of writing paper that bore her letterhead.

  The suitcase was bulging when he zipped it shut.

  As he toted it to the front door, worry nagged him. He was certain he was forgetting something.

  Of course.

  Slung over a chair in the dining room was her purse. He rummaged through it, taking inventory of its contents.

  Wallet, thick with credit cards and currency.

  Compact. Lipstick. Eyeliner.

  Appointment book.

  Spiral-bound memo pad and pen.

  Bottle of pills, nearly empty—birth-control, he assumed without reading the label.

  Miscellaneous other items, none of significance.

  He pocketed the cash, then shrugged the purse’s strap over his shoulder.

  Leaving her apartment, he turned off the lights. It was something she would do.

  He avoided the elevator, afraid of encountering one of the tenants, took the stairs instead. The suitcase felt heavier at each landing, heavier still as he lugged it outside.

  The parking lot remained empty of people. He put the suitcase in the Ford’s backseat, then opened the trunk.

  Erin was beginning to stir as the effects of the stun gun wore off. It was preferable to keep her unconscious as long as possible.

  He took out the Ultron, pressed the switch. Lightning flickered between the two electrodes in a blue crackling arc, the noise too faint to be heard from the building.

  He shoved the gun into her chest, held it there for a full five seconds.

  She was twitching again as he withdrew the gun. Briefly he worried that with her mouth taped, she might choke on saliva.

  Oh, nonsense. She would be fine.

  He climbed behind the wheel, adjusted the driver’s seat to fit his longer frame, then started the car.

  Out of the parking lot. Two blocks east on Broadway. Then onto a residential side street, an older subdivision of tract homes, ranch-style brick houses landscaped in cactus and yuccas.

  The moon had set. Stars burned pinholes in the sky. A false dawn, the russet glow of the city’s ambient light, faintly brightened the horizon.

  He slowed the Taurus and parked at the curb behind a gray Chevy van.

  His van.

  It was a 1988 Chevrolet Astro, a cargo model with bucket seats up front and no seating accommodations in back. He’d bought the vehicle used; the previous owner had logged nearly 100,000 miles on the odometer while putting dents in the fenders and side. The price had been reasonable.

  The Astro had come equipped with an optional heavy-duty towing package that permitted it to haul up to six thousand pounds. That feature, which had made it possible for him to hitch a U-Haul trailer to the van not long ago, would now come in handy again.

  Quickly he hooked the van’s towing bar to the Ford’s front end, stringing safety chains on either side. He keyed the Ford’s ignition to the “accessory” position, shifted the transmission into neutral, checked to confirm that the parking brake was released.

  Somebody’s dog began to bark. The racket might draw attention to the street. Better hurry.

  The Astro had both a sliding side panel and dual rear doors. He opened the latter and looked in on the windowless, uncarpeted cargo compartment, empty except for a small huddle of items draped by a tarpaulin. Under the tarp were two red canisters, a coil of rope, a mallet, and a pair of metal stakes.

  The stakes were meant for putting up a badminton net, but he had found another use for them.

  He opened the Ford’s trunk and transferred Erin to the rear of the van. Checked again to confirm that the rope and blindfold were knotted tight.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” he muttered as he swung the doors shut, “Dr. Reilly.”

  He slipped into the driver’s seat of the Astro, started the engine. A V-6, 150 horsepower. Noisy as hell.

  The van rumbled like an unmuffled Harley as he steered it away into the night.

  He drove for two and a half miles, heading east on Broadway, past the lighted islands of shopping plazas and the dark, rustling stretches of undeveloped land.

  At Houghton Road he turned south. He was near the outer edges of town now. Rare horse ranches and isolated patches of tract housing were all he saw around him.

  By the time he passed Escalante Road, more than two miles south of Broadway, even these proofs of habitation had largely vanished. His surroundings were a great starlit expanse of mesquite trees and cactus, rippling like some strange ocean, extending in every direction to the mountains outlined against the blue-black sky.

  He was outside city limits now. A psychological barrier had been crossed, and irrationally he felt safer. Driving with one hand, he removed the baseball cap, red wig, and false beard.

  Without the disguise he was a balding, moon-faced man of forty-six, his pale cheeks as smooth as a child’s.

  In profile his chin was weak, and his nose, badly broken in a long-ago fight, was flat and shapeless. Tufting his scalp were scraps of hair, straw-colored once, now prematurely gray.

  The lights of the dashboard played on his face, gifting him with the illusion of expressiveness and life; but the light did not touch his eyes. They lay in shadowed hollows under thin, feminine brows.

  The job, he thought, had gone flawlessly so far. Better than expected. Surpassing all hopes.

  He nodded, satisfied, but he did not smile.

  Harold Gund never smiled.

  5

  Erin regained consciousness and fo
und herself in the dark, the absolute dark of a nightmare, and she couldn’t move, she couldn’t move.

  Seizure, she thought in blank confusion. Had a seizure, and now I’m paralyzed somehow.

  But that couldn’t be it. She hadn’t had an epileptic episode since she was fifteen. And besides, she was forgetting something, something vitally important, something that had happened to her just a short time ago.

  The lobby.

  Man in a baseball cap.

  Electric pain shocking her body.

  Kidnapped. Not a seizure. She’d been kidnapped.

  A scream of blind terror welled in her throat but found no release. Her mouth wouldn’t open. Her lips were sealed.

  She twisted wildly, found her legs lashed together at the ankles, her wrists tied.

  And her eyes—heavy cloth was stretched tightly over them, imprisoning her in darkness.

  Bound. Muzzled. Blindfolded.

  Helpless.

  The pounding drumbeat of her heart, the choked grunts behind her closed lips, the snorts of breath flaring her nostrils—these were the only sounds in her world, her only reality.

  He could do anything he liked with her, anything at all, and she was powerless to defend herself. At this moment he might be standing over her with a knife or a gun, might be preparing to slice her throat or put a bullet in her, or something worse, inflict some variety of slow torture, and there was nothing she could do about it, no way out, no chance for her, no hope—

  Stop it.

  The voice in her mind, firm and authoritative, was her own.

  Stop it, Erin, come on now, stop it and think.

  Think. Yes. She had to think, because thinking was the only recourse left open to her. Had to think and understand.

  With trembling effort she forced down panic, struggling for calm, directing the splintered chaos of her thoughts into straight-line patterns.

  First question: Where was she?

  She lay still, listening hard. Over the violent rhythm of her heart she heard the throb of an engine.

  A vehicle. Was she in the trunk of a car?

  No, she sensed somehow that the space around her was bigger than that. And the cold metal surface beneath her, vibrating with the engine, felt like the uncarpeted floor of the cargo compartment in a truck or van.

  Moving pretty fast, she’d guess. Maybe forty or forty-five miles an hour. No stops for traffic signals. On a highway, but not an interstate. The road was too rough. One of the older highways that led out of town.

  Out of town ...

  Into the desert? There could be reasons for taking her to an isolated spot, far from buildings and people.

  Fear rose in her again, squeezing her heart in its cold grip. She thought she might pass out.

  No. She had to remain conscious. It was her only chance.

  There was a possibility he would unseal her lips at some point, if only to hear her scream or plead. Should he do that, she would reason with him, try to establish contact. Dealing with irrationality was her daily business. There ought to be some way for her to get through.

  Then she remembered his eyes, so blue, so cold.

  Well, she could try, anyway. If he let her talk at all.

  And if for some reason he untied her? What then?

  She would have to fight.

  The idea was not entirely desperate. Three years ago she’d taken a class in tae kwon do, the Korean form of karate, as part of a training program designed to help therapists defend themselves against violent patients.

  She was by no means a martial-arts expert—she’d earned only a yellow belt, qualifying her as barely more than a beginner—but if she could deliver a snap kick to her abductor’s kneecap or a palm-heel strike to his throat, she might be able to drop him to the ground long enough to flee.

  In practice sessions, at least, she’d done well enough. Annie, a suitably impressed spectator, had dubbed her Erin-san, the Irish Ninja. But then, what could you expect from a woman who’d named her cat Stink?

  Annie ...

  The voice over the intercom. Annie’s voice.

  Oh, God, did he have her, too?

  Erin wished she hadn’t been gagged. Wished she could call out Annie’s name, learn if her sister was somewhere nearby. Perhaps trussed and silenced as she herself was, sharing the nightmare.

  Would he have wanted them both? Why? They had no enemies. It didn’t make sense.

  Who was he, anyway? She’d seen his face only briefly; it had seemed utterly unfamiliar. That thick red beard and shock of carrot-top hair ...

  But perhaps the beard was a disguise. If so, he could be nearly anybody. One of her patients, even.

  Any therapist could become a target. That was why she’d been careful to keep an unlisted address, and why she’d chosen to live in a security building.

  Three of her current patients had shown occasional violent tendencies. Nothing like this, though. And none of the three had those chilly blue eyes.

  Well, maybe he was someone she’d treated years ago, during her internship at a psychology clinic downtown. Or one of the numberless transients she’d met while doing pro bono work at the local shelters—sad, lost men whose faces she never would remember, because they were all alike.

  Her speculations led nowhere. His identity was unguessable, and without knowing who he was, she couldn’t know his intention in abducting her. But on that point she had to assume the worst.

  Had to assume he meant to kill her.

  Twisting her wrists, she tried to loosen the cord that secured them. The bristly scrape of the binding against her skin told her that he had tied her hands with rope. Thick, stiff rope lashed around her wrists in multiple coils, python-snug.

  She had seen a calf trussed once at a rodeo, its hooves bound with a cowboy’s lasso. Though she had pitied the bleating animal, she had never imagined one day sharing its fate.

  Even its ultimate fate? To be led to slaughter, to sag under a butcher’s saw?

  The sticky stuff sealing her lips was tape. If she could lift her hands to her face, she could untape her mouth, then chew at the rope on her wrists until possibly the knot came undone.

  But her arms wouldn’t move. They were pinned to her right thigh by another loop of rope, knotted so tightly it threatened to cut off the circulation in her leg. She was unable to work it loose.

  Bending at the waist, she tried to bring her head closer to her hands, close enough that she could at least raise the blindfold.

  No use. She would have to be a contortionist to do it.

  Never had she been so vulnerable, so completely powerless. Even in her parents’ house on that August night twenty-three years ago, she’d been able to take action, fight for survival.

  The noise in her throat was a choked moan.

  Erin prayed that her sister wasn’t with her. Prayed that the voice over the intercom had been only a trick, and Annie was safe at home.

  She wanted one of them, at least, to survive this night.

  6

  The van’s high beams splashed white light across a blur of macadam and roadside mesquite shrubs as Harold Gund sped south on Houghton Road.

  He wondered if Erin was alert yet. The others had recovered quickly from the incapacitating shock. All three had been fully conscious when he’d carried them into the wilderness and hammered the stakes into the ground.

  The memory of those women, of what he had done to them in the woods, made him feel ...

  But he didn’t know how he felt.

  His hands gripped the steering wheel, the knuckles squeezed bloodless. From this clue he surmised that what he felt was fury.

  Fury at himself? Or at the women, for having been so damnably easy to abduct? Or at a world that could make possible a thing like him? And what kind of thing was that?

  He had no answers to these questions. Introspection was unknown to him. When he looked inside himself, he saw only darkness, as deep and still as the desert gloom.

  His turnoff was coming u
p shortly. He cut his speed a bit and leaned forward, eyes narrowed. The unmarked side road would be easy to miss, especially in this dark landscape devoid of variation, this infinite sweep of sameness.

  He wondered how many little lives were fated to be snuffed out tonight in the expanse of brush and weeds around him. How many cactus wrens would be plucked from their nests, how many rabbits would perish in their burrows? Even now, among the gnarled trees and glistening cacti, warm blood was being spilled, moist flesh tasted.

  He was not so different from the rest of creation. Perhaps it was the safely civilized members of the human species who were unnatural, not he.

  Or perhaps not.

  He shook his head, defeated, as always, by the enigma of himself.

  Sometimes he listened to the TV specials that promised to explain men like him, hoping for insight. So far he had been disappointed.

  The experts consulted by the police and the media were fools. Possibly they knew something about others of his kind, but of him they understood nothing.

  He recalled an interview with one such specimen, described as a psychological profiler. The man wore a gray suit and a red telegenic tie. He sat behind his office desk, haloed in diplomas, buttressed by shelves of books. His opinions were stated with the blunt obviousness of a factual report.

  The typical serial killer, or lust murderer as he is more accurately identified, the man explained in a bland, professorial tone, views murder as a substitute for sex. He attains sexual release by spilling his victim’s blood or by abusing the body afterward. For him, killing is a form of intimacy, the only intimacy he knows.

  The interviewer asked if such a man might experience twisted feelings of love for his victim. Oh, yes, the expert replied. Love or at least erotic desire. Often the woman is a surrogate for someone who rejected him or hurt him—a particular woman from his past.

  He killed strangers to avenge a past wrong? That’s right. And to give a purpose to his existence. The only organizing principle of his life, the only order and structure imposed on it, is his cyclic pattern of violence. He lives solely to kill.