Nest

by Terry Goodkind

  There were predators who could recognize her ability to see them for what they were.

  Kate felt as if her heart had come up into her throat.

  If she could see evil, then evil could see her.

  And the photos of her that had been on the refrigerator at her brother’s house were now missing. It had to be that the predator who had recognized and killed John for his special kind of vision had taken those photos because of what he also saw in Kate’s eyes.

  The devil had her picture.

  The lamp on the side table beside the couch suddenly clicked on. Kate jumped.

  She put a hand over her hammering heart as she realized that the lamp was on a timer. With the shades drawn it was meant to look from the outside like someone was home. In the gloom, she saw the red light still blinking on the answering machine. She hadn’t bothered to stop long enough to check that message and erase it. She saw that there were now three messages.

  Kate just wanted to brush her teeth, take off her makeup, maybe take a quick shower if she could muster the energy to stand that long, and go to bed. She knew that she needed sleep in order to be able to think clearly. She headed for the kitchen to set down her laptop and plug it in to charge for the night.

  As she walked into the kitchen, out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of something moving outside the window over the nook. She set down her computer case and peered out the window, but with the under-counter lights on she couldn’t really see much out the window. She wondered if the door on the shed had come unfastened. The wind sometimes worked the latch loose.

  She flipped open the deadbolt, thinking she ought to run out back and secure the shed door. She opened the kitchen door enough to stick her head out, trying to see better. She couldn’t really tell if the door on the shed, at the far end of the backyard, was closed or not.

  Fitful gusts of wind clattered branches together, sounding like bones rattling. She hated windy nights. She debated whether the shed door was important enough for her to go stumbling out in the dark and risk breaking her neck tripping over a tree root. The light over the back door had burned out and she hadn’t gotten around to changing the bulb. She tried to remember where she’d left the flashlight last, but she was too tired to think.

  The shed door might bang around a little if the wind picked up, but it wasn’t going to blow off. She decided to go to bed instead. She shut the kitchen door and turned the deadbolt.

  Curiosity, or maybe it was merely an ingrained sense of obligation, finally got the better of her on the way out of the kitchen. She pressed the play button on the answering machine.

  A mechanical voice reported the time and date. The first message had been from several days before Kate had returned from Dallas.

  “Miss Bishop,” a voice said, “my name is Jack Raines.”

  Kate was instantly wide awake.

  “I’m … an acquaintance of your Uncle Everett. As I’m sure you must know by now, he was murdered a few weeks ago. I only just found out that Everett had relatives. If no one has informed you yet, then I apologize for being the one to bring you the news this way.”

  It was a bad cell connection and it was hard to hear. Kate leaned closer to the phone. “Miss Bishop, I’d really like to talk to you as soon as possible.” There was a pause, as if he wanted to add something, then changed what he had intended to say. “Please call me as soon as possible.”

  Kate stood stiff and wide-eyed as he gave his name again and his phone number.

  Why would Jack Raines be calling her? AJ said that it had been difficult for her to contact him.

  “Please,” he added, “call me as soon as you can.”

  She wondered if he wanted to tell her something about her Uncle Everett. Or possibly about his murder.

  Kate had intended to talk to AJ about Jack Raines after dinner and after looking at the photos. Kate had wanted to ask about the reviews from law enforcement personnel that said Jack Raines was a phony, or a detective wannabe, and that he didn’t know what he was talking about. AJ had seemed to think a lot of him. Kate wanted to know why there was such a discrepancy. But the photos had been the priority and then AJ had left in such a rush there hadn’t been time to bring it up.

  She thought from what AJ had told her that Jack Raines might be able to provide better explanations, or at least context, for what she and John were able to do, but the reviews had caused her to dismiss Jack Raines as a legitimate authority.

  Kate pressed the play button for the next message. It had been left the day before. It was also from Jack Raines and nearly identical. The connection was much better this time. His voice struck her as intelligent and sincere.

  Kate had dealt with people who sounded intelligent and sincere, but turned out to be con artists of one sort or another. People who were stealing from KDEX, or up to no good of some kind, could almost always make their excuses sound perfectly reasonable. That type of person was good at sounding convincing, much the way serial killers were often charming.

  Maybe that had been what fooled AJ. Maybe the reviewers, who were real criminal profilers, were right about the book. Or, maybe they were the ones deceiving readers.

  With trembling fingers, Kate pressed the play button for the final message. It had been left earlier that day but it started a little differently. “Miss Bishop, I realize that I must sound like a crackpot or something, and that’s probably why you’re not returning my calls, but it’s very important that I speak with you. I don’t want to explain why on an answering machine. Please call me as soon as possible.”

  She could read the stress in his voice.

  He again left his phone number. Kate played the last message over so she could write the number on the back of AJ’s business card. After thinking about it a moment, she pulled out her phone and also added it to her contacts list. Her name and number were blocked, so if she did decide to call him on her cell, he wouldn’t be able to see her number.

  Because of the nature of her security position, her number and home address were unlisted. The people she dealt with knew to give out her office phone number, and not her cell number. If someone called KDEX wanting to speak with her and she was away from the office, they connected the call to her cell rather than give out her number, or they took a message. She usually returned calls on the landline in her office.

  KDEX computer-security people had seen to it that the cell number had never appeared on the internet search sites where such information was typically available. Brian, ever watchful over her, had gone to even greater lengths to insure that she was invisible and to a certain extent off the grid.

  That was probably why Jack Raines had called her home phone—it was an old number that he might have gotten at her Uncle Everett’s place. She hadn’t spoken to her uncle in years and he wouldn’t have known her cell number, but he might have had her home phone number.

  It also occurred to her that the hacker who had lifted her personnel file had gotten garbage information. Her cell phone in that file was wrong, so whoever stole that file wouldn’t have been able to call her cell. But they might have been able to find the old number of her landline.

  Kate reminded herself that Everett had been murdered.

  John had been murdered.

  She unlocked her phone and with her thumb scrolled through her contacts list. She stopped at a listing under S and pressed the cell number.

  After it rang half a dozen times, he answered.

  “Jeff Steele.”

  “Jeff, it’s Kate Bishop.”

  “Kate—good to hear your voice. Kind of late for you to be calling. Are you checking up on your friend from Dallas?”

  “No. This is about something else.”

  Because Jeff Steele had occasionally pulled off the seemingly impossible for her, Kate sometimes called him her “man of steel.” He was the one she called with difficult security situations. She had one of those now.

  His tone immediately changed. “What is it? You sound upset.” />
  “I need a favor.”

  “Anything. I owe you more than one. What can I do for you?”

  “Can you please find out what you can about a man named Jack Raines. R-a-i-n-e-s.”

  “Jack Raines. Got it. What’s this about? What kind of trouble is he causing for KDEX?”

  Kate hesitated. “It’s nothing like that,” she said. “Could you please just find out what you can for me?”

  “Not a problem.”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “Are you in some kind of trouble? Is this guy causing you—”

  “No, it’s not that,” Kate said as she paced across the living room, holding the back of her neck with her free hand. She cleared her throat. “My brother was murdered.”

  “John? John was murdered?”

  “Yes, just yesterday. I found out about it when I got back into town yesterday.”

  “Good lord, Kate, I’m really sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do? Anything at all, just name it.”

  “Yes, find out what you can about Jack Raines for me.”

  “Do you think he’s involved in the murder somehow?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. This is about something else. I’ve become friends with the detective working on my brother’s murder. She told me about a book called A Brief History of Evil written by Jack Raines, but I don’t know if the guy is legit. She only mentioned it because she thought it might explain some things about my brother.”

  “What kind of things?”

  Kate pressed trembling fingers to her forehead, doing her best to hold back tears. “Jeff, I’m exhausted. Can we talk about it once you see if you can find anything on Mr. Raines?”

  “Sure. Sorry, Kate. You get some rest. I’m on it. I’ll call you.”

  “Thanks Jeff,” Kate said before pressing the END CALL tile.

  With the back of the hand that held her phone, she wiped a tear from her cheek on her way down the hallway.

  She turned off the hall lights, then sat on the edge of her bed and opened the bottom drawer of the nightstand. She slid her fingers into the recesses of the safe and let her muscle memory quickly press each finger in the correct sequence. The safe door popped open.

  She reached in for her semiautomatic handgun. As she lifted it, she slid her trigger finger over the raised indicator behind the ejection port, confirming that it had a round chambered. She always kept it loaded and ready to fire, but she still always checked.

  It had been Jeff Steele who suggested she get a gun, a Glock 19 in particular. It was difficult to legally possess a gun in Chicago, but Jeff had helped her get through the tangle of legal requirements so that she had all the proper permits. He had also used his contacts to get her proper instruction on using the weapon.

  She set the gun on her nightstand before going into the bathroom to get ready for bed.

  She knew. The devil was on the hunt.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  Late in the afternoon the next day, Kate finally had time to head down to the tenth floor. As she walked past the long stretch of glass panes, past the rows of servers continuously humming away at their work, she thought about how all the while, every moment of every day, they were ceaselessly being attacked from all around the planet.

  Most people didn’t realize that computer security was a losing war. There was no longer anything in the digital realm that hadn’t been successfully attacked. Nothing was secure anymore. Now, it was a matter of damage control.

  It really was the modern equivalent of the Huns rupturing every crack in the defensive walls, swarming over the civilized world, and leaving ruin and destruction in their wake.

  It at least felt good to walk after sitting all day in long meetings with various departments, going over laundry lists of issues. At the top of the list of general security concerns had been executive security in particular. The nature of the breach Brian had discovered was certainly sobering.

  Even though the intruder had gotten into only one of Brian’s honeypots and had stolen only useless, fictitious information, it was worrisome that it had been executives the hacker had gone after. Executives on that list had been made aware of what had happened and that security in general had been heightened.

  Walking into Brian’s cave, she hoped to hear that he had learned something useful. If it was an intrusion from overseas it was somewhat less of an immediate threat, but since Brian thought that it was an individual or small group, if the hack originated somewhere in the Midwest, and especially in the Chicago area, it was cause for immediate concern.

  The monitors were off in Brian’s cave. There was no telling how long he had been gone.

  She glanced up at the clock and saw that it was half past five. The day had flown by before she had realized it. Since Brian kept odd hours, she knew he could easily be at home asleep and not show up until the dead of night. Even if he was awake, working from a laptop at home, he usually left his phone turned off. For someone so fused into the world of technology, he remained oddly divorced from its most useful purposes.

  When her own phone rang, Kate pulled it out and saw that it was AJ. She leaned a hip against the counter in Brian’s empty cave and clasped her elbow with her free hand as she held the phone up to her ear with the other.

  Kate resisted the temptation to start out by asking if the detective had found John’s killer. “Hi AJ.”

  “Hi Kate. I just wanted to check in and see how you’re doing.”

  Kate knew by the sound of the woman’s voice that she had something more on her mind than checking up to see how Kate was feeling. As sympathetic as AJ was about John’s murder, she was also determined and focused in her job. Kate wondered if AJ had an urgent case and wanted her to look at more photos.

  “I’m good. What’s up?”

  “Hey, listen, Kate, Ryan had such a good time with you last night we’d like you to come spend the night with us. We have a nice guest room.”

  Kate was momentarily mute with surprise.

  “You want me to come over and have a playdate with your son?”

  “Sure, he’d enjoy that. But more than that, so would Mike and I.”

  “You know, AJ, I like you and all, but you’re a really bad liar.”

  AJ let out a sigh that she wasn’t fooling anyone. “Kate, you’re all alone. It’s a difficult time for you to be alone. Come have pizza with us and spend the night. It will do you good to be around some friendly faces.”

  Kate’s suspicious nature had already kicked in. “On one condition.”

  “What do you mean? What condition?”

  “Only if you tell me the truth of why you want me to spend the night at your house.”

  In the silence, Kate wondered if the call had been dropped.

  “AJ, all I’m hearing are crickets.”

  AJ finally answered. “We caught the guy who killed Wilma.”

  Kate’s weight came off the table as she stood up straight. “You got him? That’s great. But what does that have to do with me spending the night at your place?”

  Again there was a pause before the detective finally answered. “Other than a small amount of money, the guy didn’t have anything on him. No wallet, no ID. Nothing else … except a piece of paper with your name and the address of KDEX.”

  “My name?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Let me guess. Curly, bleached-blond hair, brown eyes, five-ten or so, wearing baggy blue shorts and a D.A.R.E. T-shirt. Black with red lettering.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “SWAG.”

  “Swag?”

  “Scientific Wild-Ass Guess. I bet he says his name is Bob.”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact he did, but I’m pretty sure that’s not his real name. We’re running his prints to see if we can identify him.”

  “You said it was nearly impossible to catch the guys in these kinds of random attacks. How did you get him?”

  “We found a survei
llance camera in the lobby of the building next door and we got lucky. There was a mirror on the wall beside the entrance where the camera was aimed. We caught the whole thing from the reflection in that mirror. From that, we knew what he looked like. An alert officer spotted the guy hanging around the area, just around the corner from the KDEX entrance. Since he had your name in his pocket, and was lurking around where you work, I suspect he got frustrated waiting to catch you the other day and took his frustration out on Wilma. I think that he came back looking for you.”

  Kate felt a pang of anguish for Wilma being in the wrong place at the wrong time, along with a dose of fear for herself.

  “Why was he looking for me?”

  “That’s the question that really worries me. The guy isn’t talking. Won’t say a word, except that he wants a lawyer. And medical attention.”

  “Medical attention? For what?”

  “He has a broken bone in his hand. It’s pretty swollen. Small wonder, considering how hard he hit Wilma.”

  “Do you have enough to convict him?”

  “It was a swarm attack, as it often is in these cases. There were seven guys in all. But when the guy who attacked Wilma swung around with the force of hitting her, there are several frames with some pretty clear shots of his face.”

  “I hope he gets locked up for life.”

  “Me too, but that’s not what concerns me at the moment. What worries me is why he had your name on him when he killed a woman where you work, and why he was hanging around there again.”

  “Do you think he could be the guy who killed John?”

  “No. He has a pretty good alibi for that.”

  “What’s his alibi?”

  “John’s killer was chained up, so it couldn’t be the same guy we arrested. Unless this guy unchained himself, went downtown, attacked Wilma, then went back and locked himself up again in John’s basement, then escaped a second time and killed John, and then came back to your offices again.

  “I’m not ruling anything out, but with all the DNA evidence at John’s house from the paper plates the guy was eating off of, it will be easy enough to eliminate this ‘Bob’ as the one chained up in the basement.