by Jonah Paine
He arrived on Sundquist's doorstep to see the doctor showing a male patient out. The doctor gave him a guarded look, which Sam took to be protective instincts: clearly any man who was seeing a psychiatrist would not be happy to see the police sniffing around his doctor's office. He gave the doctor a quick smile and moved past the two of them, inside and up the staircase towards the doctor's office. He had no reason to violate doctor/patient privacy, so he intended to give the two of them their space.
He found the doctor's office much as he had remembered it. He was impressed once again with how carefully arranged the contents of the office seemed to be. The doctor's office seemed not so much a workspace as an idealized vision of what a workspace might look like. The desk was immaculate, the art on the wall was impeccably chosen, and he got the distinct impression that dust had not been observed in this room for many years. He wondered how the doctor managed to keep everything so clean, so perfect. All Sam had to do was sit at his own desk, and in a moment's time everything started to fall into disarray.
Killing time, he moved through the room, looking casually at the artwork and reading the titles of the books in the bookcase. None of the books interested him, but Sam had never been able to be in the presence of a bookcase without carefully inspecting its contents.
A framed letter caught his attention. It was written on the letterhead of a local school district, and in three flowery sentences recognized the doctor for his work with local teens, delivering a series of lectures on depression and suicide prevention. Sam smiled wistfully at the thought of that. It must be nice, he thought, to have the sort of professional skills that can help people like that. Not for the first time, he wished he had stayed in school longer. Maybe he would have been able to....
A thought passed through his mind, and with it he could feel his pulse skip a beat. His eyes remained glued to the yellowed letterhead and the too-earnest congratulation. The good doctor had delivered his lectures, the letter said, at a number of area schools. There was a good chance, Sam realized, that Dr. Warren had delivered these lectures to groups of students that included, by turns Jasmine Martin, Betsy Patterson, and Pamela Wilson.
His breathing sped up. The doctor could have encountered all three girls. He may even have spoken to them. This same doctor had a close professional relationship with Tyrone, the self-confessed abductor of the girls, and his office contained the files that documented sexual sadist methods.
He heard a sound, and turned to see the doctor enter the room. Warren Sundquist's eyes flitted from him to the framed letter, and for the briefest of instances a small smile played over his face before it was replaced by a doctor's impassive mask.
"How can I help you?" he asked smoothly.
Sam felt a jolt of adrenaline that was a mixture of excitement and a dawning awareness that he might be in danger. "I'd like to ask a favor of you, doctor," he said, moving to the center of the room.
"And what's that?"
"Would you please remove your jacket and roll up the sleeves on your shirt?"
Warren smiled at him again, but there was no human emotion in the gesture. "And why should I do that?"
"I am interested to see whether you have scratches on your arm."
"And these scratches would have been inflicted by whom, or what?"
"By Betsy Patterson."
Warren smiled more deeply. "I see. I'm afraid that I cannot oblige you until I've spoken to my attorney. I'm sure you understand."
It was Sam's turn to smile. The game was afoot. "Of course I do. Thank you for your time, doctor."
Walking to the office doorway was one of the most uncomfortable periods of his life. At any moment, he expected Warren to leap at him with a scream. There was no yell, though, nor was there a wild attack. Despite his anxiety, Sam was not really surprised. He was now convinced that he had found Tyrone Pasco's accomplice in the killings, but attacking him now was not Sundquist's style. He would stop, think, and plan like a spider in its web.
Let him, Sam thought as he hurried to his car. While he's coming up with a new and horrible plan, Sam would be bringing the full power of the police down on his head.
As Sam drove the rain-slicked streets, he muttered a prayer to an uncaring God. He prayed that he wasn't too late. He prayed that his blindness and caution hadn't cost a young girl her life.
He prayed that he would have no more blood on his hands. He prayed that Pamela Wilson was still alive.
Sam wished that he lived in a different world. He wished that he lived in a place where, once he realized that Warren Sundquist was a cold-blooded killer, he could simply pull a gun from his holster and keep shooting until the bad guy was dead and the girl was safe. That wasn't the world he lived in, though. The world he lived in required warrants and paperwork, and if these requirements were not filled the bad guys went free. If he didn't do the things he hated to do, people died.
Now the warrant was on the seat next to him and, if he had rolled down his window, he might have heard the sirens of the cop cars that were coming to arrest Warren. Sam hadn't waited for backup, though. That was the one last delay he was not ready to make, and now he was driving at suicide speeds through dark and wet streets. He didn't care anymore. He had a girl to save, and nothing else could matter nearly as much.
Warren knew that Sam recognized him for what he was. He knew that he had been caught, and he knew that he didn't have much time left. If he was smart, he would just run, but there was a chance that he would try to silence any eyewitnesses before he disappeared. If Pamela Wilson was still alive, she might have only a few minutes left.
His car squealed around the final turn and lurched as if it might go up on two wheels, then settled roughly back onto its chassis. Sam threw open the door while the engine was still wheezing its way to silence.
Sam had one more prayer on his lips as he hurried out into the night.
No more death tonight.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Warren Sundquist sat at his desk and fought for inner quiet. His desk was correctly aligned now, with the pen aligned with the paper and both parallel to the edge of the desk.
From where he sat in his Aero office chair, the furniture and artwork were perfectly balanced. Sundquist had worked for many years to make his office perfect, not just in the way it met the eye but across all the senses: sight, touch, smell, even sound. This was his refuge from the shrieking, stinking, rotting insanity of the outside world.
Now his refuge had been invaded and polluted. Now his safe space had been made into a place of danger. Sundquist was enraged at that, and he savored the anger like a man warming his hands over a fire. Still, though, he knew that it was his own fault. He had grown careless, and Sundquist was a man who despised carelessness. Success had made him overconfident, and overconfidence had allowed sloppiness to slip into his world. He shook his head in chagrin. The plan had been perfect. The plan deserved better.
It had been a long time in taking shape, forming slowly from the ideas floating in the back of his mind. In a way, Sundquist had been working on the plan for his entire life. He majored in psychology at college because even his teenaged self had known that he didn't know enough. Carefully, incrementally, over the years he had pieced the plan together, examined the risks, and found solutions.
The plan was the great work of his life, and now it was at risk. That was unacceptable. Sundquist knew that some day he would fall. His body would falter, his mind would fail. He would die, but the plan was eternal.
He liked to play it out in his mind. It was his favorite leisure-time activity. The core of the problem for committing any crime is, how do you cover your tracks? In a modern, surveillance society, even the act of covering your tracks creates new tracks for the police to follow. If you succeed only partially in covering your tracks, you have helped the police to focus their attention. The average policeman, in Sundquist's estimation, was barely more intelligent than a cockroach, but the one quality they had in abundance was stubborn, dogged
persistence. Give a cop one thread to follow and he'll catch you even faster than if you had done nothing at all.
That problem had occupied him through college and his first few years of graduate school. He turned it over like a puzzle, looking for the solution. Then one day it came to him. At his moment of illumination he was in a meeting with his dissertation supervisor, and had spent several interminable minutes pretending to listen to the man's inane prattle. All at once the solution to the puzzle burst on him like a starburst. Sundquist had been so delighted that he laughed, stood up, and left the professor's office without explanation. Let the moron bluster and protest; Warren had work to do.
The solution, in retrospect, had been in front of him the entire time. Take clues away from the cops and you help focus their limited intellects. Give them too many clues, though, and they'll be incapacitated.
That had been the key. The plan had unlocked his work. Absently, Sundquist unlocked a drawer in his desk and took out the polished teak box inside. He opened it and ran a finger lovingly over its contents. Inside were carefully-bound locks of hair from the girls who had been subjects in his study. Displayed in aggregate, this was Warren's work. In the end, his life and his purpose boiled down to these locks of hair that he had clipped from the heads of 32 young women in the prime of their lives, right in the moment before he killed them, right in the moment when he looked into their eyes and glimpsed, for the briefest of instances, the answer to the riddle of life.
The plan had defined his entire existence. It had also taken him places he didn't want to go. Sundquist didn't like disfiguring the bodies. It was dirty and unpleasant work, but in the end it was necessary. Mutilation confused the police, and that allowed him to continue his work.
Until now. Sundquist had been careless. He had come to rely too heavily on Tyrone, and that proved to be the one thread that allowed a cop as stupid as Sam to find his way to Sundquist's door. He should have disposed of Tyrone months ago. That would have been the clean and orderly way of enacting the plan.
Now a new plan was taking shape in his mind. There was some small risk, but he could see that it was the solution to everything. It would cut the thread. It would allow him to continue with his work.
It was perfect. Sundquist would make it perfect, because the plan required nothing less of him.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
When she heard the footsteps coming closer, Pamela was ready. She had been waiting for hours—or maybe it was days? Something had changed up above.
Something had happened to disrupt the horrible routine of being locked up down here, in a cage, in the dark. Something was different now, and Pamela sensed instinctively that this meant one of two things: she was about to be set free, or she was about to die.
She was ready for either possibility. Pamela had wept and cried and prayed to see the sun and her family and friends again, but she knew she might die down here and a part of her had come to terms with that. Go free or die, she thought. The only thing she could not accept was the thought that her life in this dark, damp hole might continue.
She felt the pain in the palm of her hand and squeezed her fingers tighter, relishing the sensation. She had come across the shard of glass the day before—or maybe it was a week? It hadn't been there when she first woke up in the cage, she was sure of that. Someone must have inadvertently kicked it in with a booted foot while entering the cage to change her water or leave a hunk of the stale bread she'd been living on.
When Pamela first found it, her first thought was to use the sharp edges to open the veins in her wrists or throat, to bleed out and be done. It was a seductive thought, and she nearly sank into it. But then another thought intruded, sweeter still: before she died, she could make them hurt. She need not be the only one to bleed down here in the dark.
Now the shard of glass was wrapped tightly in her right hand. Pamela listened to the sound of footsteps approaching, and waited. She was very much afraid: of pain, of death, of slashing out with her weapon and missing her target. Tears stained her cheek and she gripped the glass tighter still. Not long now.
"You are awake."
It was the other one, not the man who usually came down here. Pamela had never thought to give them pretend names, they were simply the two voices in the dark. This one scared her more than the other. When he spoke to her, which was not often, she could hear no emotion in his voice. It was flat and cold, like the sounds a machine might make.
"I can hear your breathing. Don't pretend. You're awake and listening to me."
Pamela lay still. If she raised her head and responded to him, he might not come inside the cage. He might not come close enough for her to make him bleed.
"Since you've been here, you've probably wondered why it's you who's down here, and not some other girl. Do you want to know why I chose you?"
Pamela lay still and fought to control her breathing.
"It's not because you're special or important. You're neither of those things. I chose you because you were the most perfectly average and uninteresting person I had ever seen. Your stupid, unattractive parents rutted together and managed somehow to create a stupid, unattractive child. And I've always wondered, what does life mean to someone like you? Why should you care whether you lose a life that was never going to be worth caring about?"
Pamela lay silent and allowed the words to slip over her. She was beyond caring about his insults. All she cared about was whether she'd hear the sound of a key turning in the cage's lock.
"That's why you're here. That's why I brought all of them here. So I can take you to the edge and see what you see at the moment when you begin to fall into the pit. Until that moment, your entire life is a lie. For one instant you see a truth. That's the only thing of yours that I want, and once I've taken it from you, you'll be nothing at all."
Pamela's heart leapt. She could hear the turning of a key. The cage swung open.
"Time to fulfill your destiny."
Pamela struck, swinging her arm in a wide arc. The sliver of glass in her hand cut through the air and then thunked into something solid. She couldn't tell what she had hit—an arm, a leg, a torso—but she heard a grunt of pain and surprise.
She leapt to her feet. She knew that she had mere seconds, if that. Even in the dark, she had been down here long enough to know exactly where the door was. She burst through it and fled down the hallway, towards the stairs she had seen before.
She heard cursing behind her, the man's voice so furious as to be almost bestial. Fear bloomed in her chest and added speed to her shaky legs. Pamela reached the staircase and scrambled up it on all fours. She knew there would be a door at the top. She didn't know whether it would be locked. If it was locked, she would be dead soon. If it was unlocked, maybe she would live for a little longer.
There were feet on the steps behind her. She could hear the angry breathing of the man who was going to hurt her. Pamela burst against the door at the top of the stairs and flew through it, her shoulder bruised but her momentum carrying her forward into a dark room with a wooden floor.
Her eyes scanned desperately for an exit, a window or a door. The monster on her tail was not far behind. She flew down the hallway, dimly noticing rugs beneath her bare feet, and with a thrill saw the house's front door.
Now, for the first time, Pamela was truly afraid. Fear did not capture her until now, when escape seemed a possibility. Her heart hammered in her chest and her arms and legs tingled with anxiety as she hurried to the door. Would she be able to open it before the man was upon her? Would her hands fumbled on the knob, or would there be a lock that she'd be unable to open in time? She couldn't breathe. Her back twitched at the thought that a knife would plunge into her at any moment.
She was at the door. Her right hand went to the knob, her left hand turned a simple lock at the top. The lock slipped back, the knob turned, and then the door was open and Pamela was out into the night. She felt grass beneath her feet. She gasped in clear, cold air.
&
nbsp; She heard her death hurrying up behind her, closer than before. Pamela tried to find enough breath to scream.
Sam first thought that a dog was loose and bearing down on him, angry that he'd invaded its territory. Instinctually he shifted into a defensive pose and drew his firearm.
Sam prided himself on how long it had been since he'd fired his weapon anywhere but on the firing range. He would shoot to save a life, though, even his own.
As his eyes adjusted, though, he realized that what he was seeing stood too far off the ground to be a dog. Instead, he was seeing a person, not running exactly, but stumbling in an awkward gait. And this person was being pursued by an adult male.
Sam's senses came to full alert all at once. He raised his weapon and took aim. "Freeze!" he shouted. "Police!"
At the sound of his voice both figures faltered, then the one out front—a young girl, Sam now realized—turned and scrambled toward him. He could hear her now, her breath ragged, and something that sounded like near-hysterical sobbing just beneath the panting. Meanwhile the man who had been chasing her turned and ran into the shadows.
Sam had a choice, to pursue or to protect, and that choice was easy. Keeping his weapon at the ready, he reached out a reassuring hand to the girl as she approached him.
"It's OK now," he murmured, keeping a sharp eye out to ensure that he was not making a promise he couldn't keep. "You're safe now. You're safe."
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The hospital room was a war zone of conflicting priorities. Nurses and doctors, the protectors of life, stood in equal numbers to the heavily armed police officers who were there to protect against those that might take life.
Sam surveyed the scene and tried to shrug off his discomfort. Since he was a boy, he had hated the sights and smells of hospitals. He understood why it was important for the environment to be antiseptic, and he appreciated the professionalism of the hospital staff, but there was something so cold and clinical about it that seemed counter to the purpose of nurturing life.