Or someone who was just remembering how to write after an absence of many years.
Yes, Brian thought. That was exactly what the shaky letters looked like, and he recalled the previous message, with its random vowels and consonants that seemed to be trying to break through the straitjacket of the alien language. It was as if his dad were gradually regaining his faculties, coming up from the bottom of some mental well and slowly remembering life in the real world.
STOP ME.
Brian’s chest tightened as he reread the message. It was the plea of a tortured serial killer, and the shred of doubt to which he’d been clinging had vanished the second he saw those words. His dad was not an unwilling accomplice or someone who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a murderer, responsible for the death of Reverend Charles and God knew who else.
But was his father really responsible? Brian wondered. The fact that these bloody rampages seemed to be spreading like a plague across the land and that nearly all of them seemed to be accompanied by messages written in the same alien language indicated that there was something bigger at work here. His father was undoubtedly a killer, but he was also a victim, and whatever person or power or virus was making him do this was ultimately accountable.
Brian still continued his search through the house, going through all of the cupboards and drawers, but he found nothing, and an examination of the front, back and side yards similarly yielded no results, although if he returned in daylight he still might conceivably find something. Locking up the house, he knew what he had to do, but first he stopped off at a twenty-four-hour Kinko’s and made a copy of his father’s message.
Then he drove to the police station and gave the original to the cops.
Wilson St. John arrived home after dark, an event that to his chagrin was becoming all too common. One of the things he’d always liked about the financial beat was that, for the most part, it allowed him to keep banker’s hours. But looking into these murders and suicides was time consuming.
Consuming.
That was a perfect word for it. Because investigating this . . . situation was quickly becoming an obsession with him—if it wasn’t already—eating up not only his work hours but his personal time. He was sorely tempted to call Brian on his cell phone and find out what he’d learned, but Rona was probably mad that he was late for dinner. As she had every right to be.
Bringing work home after coming back at such an hour would be adding insult to injury.
Besides, Brian would call him if he found out anything important.
Wilson opened the front door and walked inside. ‘‘I’m home!’’ he called. He didn’t wait for an answer but tossed his newspaper on the coffee table and sat down on the couch to take off his shoes. He smelled what he thought was spinach quiche. Not one of his favorites, but coming home this late, he didn’t dare complain. He stood up and walked through the dining room into the kitchen. ‘‘So—’’ he began.
And stopped.
The kitchen was empty. The oven door was open, and cold quiche sat untouched on the tiled counter. Rona could be in the bathroom. Or helping Julie with her homework. But the house seemed too quiet. And Rona never left the oven door open, never left food out.
Something was wrong.
‘‘Rona?’’ he called. ‘‘Julie?’’
Where were his wife and daughter?
The lights went out.
They went off all at once, every light in the house. It could be the circuit breaker, Wilson thought, but that was just wishful thinking. Feeling his way through the darkness, he stumbled past the refrigerator into the hall. He wanted to call Rona’s and Julie’s names, but he was afraid. He didn’t know who—what—was out there, or where, and he needed to be careful. He followed the hallway wall until his hand reached the open space of Julie’s bedroom doorway. He was drenched with fear sweat, and he didn’t know whether to whisper her name, go silently into the room or keep walking on down the hall.
‘‘Your daughter’s here. I killed her.’’
The voice, wild and crazy sounding, came at him from somewhere deep within Julie’s bedroom. Fear was shoved aside by anger, and Wilson stepped through the doorway. ‘‘Julie!’’ he called.
There was a soft click, and a red dot of light in the darkness.
Someone was videotaping this.
‘‘Julie!’’ He stumbled forward blindly, hands extended, dimly aware that the red light of the video camera was moving around him, behind him. He nearly tripped over something pillowlike on the floor but quickly caught himself and grabbed a corner of the bedpost.
It was wet.
The lights flipped on.
The pillowlike thing on the floor was Rona’s body. She was curled into a fetal position, her clothes shredded, and the skin of her arms and legs had been sliced open and peeled away. Julie’s body lay on the bed, savagely eviscerated. The tendons of her face had been slashed, and her mouth was stretched out in a grotesque parody of a smile. His hand was covered with her blood.
Wilson heard screaming, terrible cries unlike anything his ears had ever before experienced, and it took him a moment to realize that they were coming from him.
The walls, he saw through the haze of his anguish, were covered with symbols scrawled in blood, the primitive scrawls and squiggles that he recognized from the other murder scenes and from Brian’s letters. There was no sign of the person with the video camera, but he caught a glimpse of movement in the dresser mirror and turned around to see what it was.
The man who emerged from the hall was naked and horribly deformed. Parts of his body had scales instead of skin, and there were ridges along his hairy back that resembled those of a stegosaurus.
He was also a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who last year had spent millions of dollars on an unsuccessful run for governor.
Wilson recognized him immediately. Arthur Fawcett.
Fawcett was laughing, a low, steady Renfieldian laugh that threatened never to stop. At some point, Wilson had quit screaming, and now he just stood there mute and drained as the cackling millionaire advanced on him. The man’s hands looked normal, but his scaly feet had nails like needles. With one quick flip, Fawcett was walking on his hands, his legs in the air, not sticking straight up but moving around, seemingly just as agile as a monkey. His head was near the ground, but his face was still looking at Wilson and laughing that endless laugh, his feet jabbing and thrusting, the needlelike nails swishing through the air.
Wilson stood in place, not running away, not trying to defend himself, his mind numbed into immobility by the horror of what he’d seen.
The five nails of Fawcett’s right foot lashed out and struck the side of his face, opening up parallel gashes that sliced off his ear, cut through his cheek and caused his head to whip hard to the right. Wilson found himself staring at his daughter’s naked eviscerated body. ‘‘Julie,’’ he breathed.
And then the nails of Fawcett’s left foot severed the arteries in his neck.
Eighteen
She’d bought new underwear.
Carrie hadn’t said a word about it to anyone, was pretending even to herself that it was just a coincidence, that it didn’t mean anything. But the fact remained that Friday night she had braved the after-work traffic and made a special trip to the mall, where she’d looked through all three department stores and five specialty shops—including Victoria’s Secret—before buying herself sheer black lace panties and a matching bra that cost as much as all of her other lingerie combined.
And of course she was wearing both today.
Just in case?
She didn’t know.
Maybe.
So far, the day had been going well. Extremely well. Lew had picked her up from home in a chauffeur-driven limo shortly after breakfast, and they’d spent the morning touring a piece of land that he had donated to the city for a park. A planner for the city met them there, as well as an urban landscaper and playground designer Lew had hired to map out the
park.
For lunch, they went to Alioto’s, one of those places she’d always heard about but had somehow never gotten around to visiting. ‘‘Touristy but fun,’’ Lew told her. She didn’t find it at all touristy, but she didn’t tell him that, not wanting to reveal herself for the rube she was. Lew, of course, made a point of ordering organic food off the menu.
If on their first date they had purposefully kept the conversation superficial and work related, intellectual not emotional, they talked more personally this time, about who they were, about things that mattered. He seemed to find it hard to believe that she wasn’t seeing anybody.
‘‘You mean to tell me there’s no special someone?’’ he teased.
She shook her head. ‘‘Not for a long time. Too long.’’
‘‘And you’re not even dating?’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘The old Freddy Fender situation.’’
Carrie looked at him, puzzled.
‘‘Wasted days and wasted nights?’’
She shook her head, still confused.
‘‘Never mind. It’s an old song. Anyway, I guess the next question is: Why?’’
So she told him about Matt, revealing much more than she intended, more than enough to scare off anyone who wasn’t seriously interested.
But he wasn’t scared off.
After a leisurely meal, the limo drove them to Marin, to Lew’s estate, which was the most amazing place she’d ever seen outside of a movie. The driver parked at the head of a circular driveway that appeared to be made of unpolished marble. Through the front windshield was a massive house of burnished steel and darkened glass that looked more like a museum or a theater than a home. Exotic trees and flowering plants grew in abundance, some neatly trimmed, others germinating wildly, creating a controlled chaos that perfectly complemented the smooth lines of the building.
They got out of the car, and Lew pointed to the left. The view was breathtaking, a stunning panorama with the bay in the foreground, and the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco visible in the distance. She was pretty sure she’d seen the same vantage point in a movie before. ‘‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’’ he said. ‘‘You should see it at night.’’
Was that a hint? She examined his face for clues, but his expression gave nothing away.
He put his left arm around her shoulder and with the right gestured expansively about them. ‘‘Ready for the tour?’’
She nodded happily.
‘‘Let’s walk off that lunch,’’ he suggested. ‘‘I’ll take you around the grounds, show you the cactus garden, the Japanese garden, the duck pond. One of my interests, you know, is sustainable farming. I have quite a bit of land here, and a few years ago I decided to dedicate a portion of it to growing organic fruits and vegetables, enough to provide for myself and my entire staff. I can afford to buy food, of course, but I think it’s important for a man in my position to set an example. As our population grows, it becomes more incumbent upon each of us to leave a smaller footprint on the planet.’’
He continued talking as they walked down a cobblestone path that led through the veritable jungle that grew on the side of the house. There was indeed a duck pond surrounded by cattails, fed by a stream whose waters flowed under a Japanese-style bridge farther up the hill. Beyond the bridge were a host of Asian plants and trees, as well as a suiseki rock garden. After that, the path forked. Lew started toward the trail on the left, which obviously led to the cactus garden—Carrie could see the century plants and exotic succulents from here— but she stopped him, pointing to the right. ‘‘What’s that building?’’ she asked. ‘‘A barn?’’
‘‘Yes!’’ he said excitedly. ‘‘I’m glad you asked. I was going to take you to it later, but we might as well go there now. That’s where I get my milk.’’
‘‘Oh, you have cows?’’
Lew shook his head. ‘‘It isn’t natural for humans to drink the milk of cows or goats or other species. It’s disgusting when you think about it, stealing the lactation from a female animal that was intended for its offspring and feeding it to people.’’ He leaned closer, and Carrie saw a fervency in his face that made her feel uncomfortable. ‘‘That’s why I collect my own milk here on the property. Fresh. Organic. Come on, I’ll show you.’’
She didn’t want to go. All of a sudden, the wonderful day she’d been having seemed to evaporate, leaving behind unease, uncertainty, and the definite sense that something was wrong, that the day had gone far off the rails. It was the same feeling she’d had when entering Holly’s tenement, an almost psychic sensation, more felt than thought, and some primitive instinctual part of her was telling her to run, flee, get as far away from here as quickly as possible.
But, passively, she went along with him, allowing Lew to lead her up the path, over a small grassy area to the building, which, this close, did not resemble a barn at all but looked more like a hospital annex. As opposed to the ostentatious showcase that was the house, it was clearly designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, and Carrie realized that it could not be seen from the driveway or from any point that might be visible by guests or visitors not already walking along the path through the grounds.
It was purposely hidden.
Her inner alarm was working overtime, but still she accompanied Lew as he slid open the oversized metal door of the building and led her inside, flipping on the lights as he did so.
The interior of the structure was a single room filled with row after row of wooden holding pens no more than three feet long by two feet wide. Crammed into those pens were dozens upon dozens of women. Naked women, all of them on their hands and knees in straw fouled by their own waste. Industrial-strength breast pumps were attached to each, and intertwining hoses led to a central storage tank made of gleaming steel. All of the women were dark, and Carrie remembered what Lew had said about hiring immigrants.
At least he’s not a racist, she thought, and the quip, so wildly inappropriate, helped ground her, kept her tethered to the real world in the face of this insanity.
The woman in the pen closest to where they stood looked over at them with dull, lifeless eyes. Carrie would have thought she was drugged, but Lew’s insistence on having everything organic pretty much ruled that out. No, it was hopelessness that had dulled those features, hopelessness and despair, and Carrie observed the same slack, zoned-out expression on each of the women she saw as Lew held her hand tightly and walked proudly up the wide aisle between the pens.
He seemed completely oblivious to the suffering women around him, but Carrie wasn’t, and she grew more and more horrified as she saw how many women were here, as she saw their hanging breasts pulsate with the suctioning force of the pumps.
Her feelings must have been visible in her expression because he squeezed her hand gently, reassuringly. ‘‘I know what you’re thinking, but these women aren’t here against their will. They work for me. I hired them to do this. It’s the same basic concept as a wet nurse, only I’ve devised a way to harvest the milk and make it available to more than just one child.’’ He gestured around the huge open room. ‘‘Our operation is laid out in this way because, physically and ergonomically, it makes more sense.’’
She nodded silently, not trusting herself to do anything else. These women had not been hired. This wasn’t their job. One look at their faces and the physical condition of their pens told her that they were prisoners being held captive against their will. She imagined that most of them were undocumented workers who had been captured and whose absences would not be reported.
‘‘Human beings are supposed to drink the milk of human beings,’’ he declared, and the fervency was back in his voice. ‘‘Not animals. It is my hope that in the future we will be able to completely do away with traditional farms and ranches where milk is extracted from beasts and replace them with co-ops where we pump the milk from women.’’
They had reached the steel storage tank, on which had been stenciled the words: ORGANIC MILK. A
n array of pipes and valves ringed the bottom of the tank, and one clear tube led to a freestanding metal box that looked like a water cooler without the bottle at the top. From a dispenser on the side of the box, Lew took a paper cup. He placed it under a spigot, pressed a button, and milk flowed through the clear tube, squirting out of the spigot into the cup. He drank the contents, closing his eyes in satisfaction. ‘‘Fresh. Still warm. There’s nothing finer.’’
He filled another cup, offering it to her. ‘‘Try it. It’s delicious.’’
Carrie backed up, feeling sick. Her impulse was to run away screaming, but she looked at Lew and at the women all penned up like cattle and knew that if she tried to do so she might end up like them. Not only was Haskell rich enough to do what he wanted and get away with it, but his craziness was not of the ranting and raving variety. It was like that of the Nazis—methodical, systematic, organized. She needed to play along with him, find some way to ease out of this situation, get away and then call the police. Her cell phone was in her purse. If she could just find a way to grab a few moments of privacy . . .
The bathroom!
Carrie shook her head, made a motion of pushing away the cup. ‘‘I’m not feeling quite right,’’ she said. She frowned, feigning stomach cramps. ‘‘Is there a restroom I could use?’’
He looked honestly concerned. ‘‘Sure,’’ he said. ‘‘There’s none in here, of course, but outside, around the side of the building, for the employees . . .’’
Her brain tuned out everything that followed. The employees. That meant that others knew about this, that he had helpers. It also meant, as if she’d needed more proof, that the women confined in the pens were not employees.
Lew led her outside, and it was not until she was once again in the open, breathing fresh air, that she realized how fetid the stench had been inside the building. ‘‘Over here,’’ he said, walking around the corner, and pointed to what looked almost like an attached outhouse.
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