Scavenger

by Tom Savage

  Tracy was staring now, concentrating on Mark’s face. Then, for the flash of a single second, she saw it. It was what she had been hoping, praying, she would not see.

  Rage.

  In that instant, she knew that Seth Carlin was telling the truth. When he had told her, repeatedly, last night and earlier today, she had assumed he was insane. But he wasn’t insane.

  He was right.

  Now Mark was looking at her, into her eyes, and she knew what was going to happen next. She closed her eyes again, bracing herself for it. The blade pressed in once more.

  “You killed my family, Matthew Farmer,” Carlin whispered. “You killed everyone I loved, and now I am going to kill the woman you love.”

  She had to see what happened next, but she could not open her eyes. She heard the sudden movement, and the click, and her lover’s voice. It was cold, dead, completely uninflected. It was his voice, but not a voice she had ever heard before.

  “No, you won’t,” Mark Stevenson said. “I will.”

  Then she forced her eyes to open. Mark stood before them, aiming the revolver he’d grabbed from the table directly at her chest. She looked up into his eyes: they were as dead as his voice had been. He wasn’t Mark Stevenson anymore. He wasn’t even Matthew Farmer. He was The Family Man.

  He fired.

  54

  Mark fired at Tracy’s chest. Then he swung the gun over and fired twice at Seth Carlin, directly into his grotesque, staring face. So much for him, he thought. Too bad about Tracy. I really did love her, but she had heard. She knew. Now I just have to find Ron O’Hara and get rid of him before he finds me, then get the hell out of here. The keys are in the car—

  He stopped, blinking, then stared at the sight in front of him. He had just shot them, but they hadn’t moved. Tracy sat in the chair and Carlin stood beside her, slowly lowering the knife to his side.

  They were both looking directly at him.

  As Mark stared at her, Tracy brought her unbound arms around from behind the chair and reached up to slowly pull the tape off of her mouth. She dropped the tape on the floor, still gazing at him. He saw tears in her eyes. Then, with a little sigh, she lowered her head and wept.

  Seth Carlin still had the knife in his right hand, but he reached his left arm across Tracy’s shoulders and held her gently.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Morgan,” he said.

  Mark looked down at the gun in his own hand.

  “It’s over, Farmer,” said a voice behind him.

  He whirled around, the useless gun falling to the floor. Ron O’Hara stood just behind him, aiming his weapon, loaded with real bullets, at Mark’s chest. Just over his shoulder, Mark could see the big man with the scar, the man he had thought was Scavenger, standing silently by the chair in which he’d been sitting, removing something made of rubber from his neck.

  “You!” Mark cried.

  “Yes,” the former agent said, his voice low and calm, his aim steady. “I told Mr. Carlin about the music when he first contacted me. He’d read Dark Desire, and he was curious about the music at the murder scenes. He asked if there had been music anywhere. That was four months ago: it took us that long to put together this little game for you. I hope you enjoyed it. I know I did. I’m going to enjoy watching you get the needle even more. I’m going to dance on your grave.”

  Mark stared at the man, and at the other man behind him. Then everything exploded. With a bellow of rage, Mark threw himself directly at O’Hara, pushing him over backward to the floor. O’Hara’s head smashed into the concrete with a sickening thud, knocking him unconscious. The weapon fired, sending a bullet into the ceiling before skittering away. As plaster rained down on him, Mark lunged, snatched up the weapon, and scrambled to his feet. He aimed the gun directly down at O’Hara’s slack face.

  “Sorry, Ron,” he said, “but nobody’s going to dance on my grave.” He took a deep breath, preparing to fire.

  The eight-inch blade entered Mark’s right shoulder, and the gun fell from his hand. He staggered backward, nearly falling as the sudden, unexpected pain tore through him. He looked blankly down at the black handle protruding from him, then up at the man who had thrown the knife from the other side of the room, the man with the scar. Into his eyes. They stood staring at each other for a long moment. Then the tall man with the scar took a step toward him.

  In one swift motion, Mark bent down, picked up O’Hara’s gun again, and fired twice at the big man. The man dived for cover, landing on one of the couches, toppling two of the mannequins to the floor.

  Mark ran. He clutched the gun against his chest, wincing at the pain that was now spreading throughout him. He pounded up the steps, reaching up with his left hand to pull out the knife as he went. He ran across the dark living room, colliding with the edge of the coffee table in his flight. Fresh pain shot through him as he staggered, dropping the bloody knife on the carpet, then regained his balance and plunged on, knocking over the chess table on his way to the foyer. The heavy chessmen clattered to the floor behind him. His right arm was throbbing, but he managed to keep the weapon clutched in his right hand as he reached out with his left hand and threw open the big front door. He stumbled out onto the porch, thinking, The car. Just get to the car—

  And he stopped short, staring.

  The front lawn was no longer dark. It was lit by bright floodlights, and there were people there. He blinked in the sudden glare, looking wildly around him. Several men in blue uniforms knelt in a semicircle on the grass, aiming rifles at his chest. Beyond them, near the flashing police cars and vans on the lawn, he saw all the others.

  Millicent Call, wearing a Kevlar vest over her white nurse’s uniform, was aiming a handgun at him. Behind her, protected by Agent Call’s body and a car, stood Sarah Tennant Gammon. The red-haired man next to Sarah was obviously her husband, Robert Gammon. The dead Los Angeles motorcycle cop was standing on the other side of the car, aiming a rifle. The blond woman from Chicago was behind the motorcycle cop, standing with a tall blond man Mark had never seen before.

  The big, blue-uniformed man in the center of the rifle line raised a megaphone to his lips.

  “Matthew Farmer, drop your weapon and raise your hands above your head.”

  The second white explosion of rage in Mark’s brain coincided with a bright flash of lightning. He was running through a rainy graveyard, pursued by the monster he thought he had destroyed. The pious, grasping, abusive bully who had tormented him in the name of God. But there was no God, not then and not now. As the thunder crashed, he threw back his head and screamed.

  “Fuck you, Jacob Farmer!”

  Then Mark stepped forward to the edge of the porch, bringing up O’Hara’s gun and aiming it directly at the man with the megaphone.

  This time, the eight-inch blade entered the back of his neck, severing his esophagus. The tip of the knife came out the front of his throat in a spray of blood as rifle bullets tore through his body. He felt the impact from both directions, a thousand explosions of pain.

  And then he was falling. He tumbled forward down the steps and rolled slowly out onto the grass. He landed on his back, on the knife handle, burying the dagger in his throat. He lay there, no longer feeling the pain, no longer caring if he did. He could not see them, but he sensed the presence of the people moving silently forward to crowd around him, staring down at him. The last words he heard were uttered by Sarah Tennant Gammon.

  “Thank God!”

  His penultimate thought was of his father, and of the family who had turned their backs on him, deserted him, ostracized him. The reason for everything he had done. The reason for The Family Man.

  His final thought occurred to him through a veil of red, as the sky finally opened and the first cold drops landed on his upturned face.

  Yes, he thought.

  Yes, of course.

  Rain.…

  55

  Tracy could not weep anymore. A feeling of exhaustion, of numbness, was beginning to set in, replac
ing grief.

  She did not look at Seth Carlin. She reached up and removed his arm from her shoulder. Then she stood up from the chair and went over to kneel beside former FBI Special Agent Ronald O’Hara, the man who had chloroformed her and bundled her into the van in New York City two nights ago. He was sitting up on the floor now, rubbing his head.

  “Are you all right?” she asked him.

  He nodded. “I’ll be okay.” As she rose and turned away from him, he added, “I’m sorry about all this.”

  She looked back down at him. “Don’t worry. We made a deal: if you turned out to be right about him, I wouldn’t press charges for kidnapping me. I won’t.” She headed for the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” O’Hara asked.

  She turned around again, and their eyes met. “I have to see.”

  He nodded again and looked away from her.

  Then she went up the basement stairs to the living room. She had heard the sounds of gunfire, and she braced herself for the worst as she crossed the living room, kicking aside stray chess pieces from the overturned game table, and went out through the front door.

  She saw that it was raining, and several of the people here, the civilians, had moved up onto the porch. The big man, Ivan, who had rushed from the basement after Mark, was standing at the top of the steps, looking down. She walked past him and down the steps to the lawn, not feeling the cold rain as it pelted her. The crowd of police and federal people turned to look at her, and they parted, silently moving aside as she passed, including the two federal agents she’d met earlier today, the woman in the nurse’s uniform and the man dressed as a motorcycle cop. She knelt beside Mark in the rain, gazing down.

  Still she did not weep. She stared down at his face, at his bloody neck, at his bullet-riddled body. The body she had loved, had made love with. She did not touch him. She merely stared, making a study of him for several long, quiet moments. Then she stood and went back up the steps to the porch.

  Ivan was sitting on the top step now, staring at the body on the lawn. She could not read the expression on his face. The people on the porch, whom she had met a few hours ago, kept a respectful distance from her, avoiding her. She was the pariah here, the enemy. They respected her because she had finally, reluctantly helped them. But they despised her because she had loved him.

  She looked over at them. The blond woman, Ellen Harvey, was a Hollywood makeup expert, recruited by O’Hara’s wife, Wanda Morris, the movie star. Ellen had performed her magic on Robert Gammon in New Orleans and the “cop” in Los Angeles, going so far as to use pig’s blood on his fake wounds, and she had created the head in the box in Chicago. Tonight, Tracy had watched as she gave a reluctant Ivan a very convincing slit throat, pouring a vial of blood from the local butcher shop over her handiwork. Blood has a distinctive, strong odor, she explained. A blend of corn syrup and food coloring was fine for the movies, but in the theater of the real only real blood would do. She had also told Gammon to wet his pants in the house outside New Orleans, for the same reason.

  Ivan had been upset tonight because he had been promised by Seth Carlin that he would be the one to kill Mark in retaliation for his wife’s death, and they had just told him that the plans had changed. They weren’t going to kill Mark at all: they were going to arrest him, try him, convict him. Execute him. That had been the plan, anyway.

  Well, Ivan had gotten his wish, after all.

  The blond man next to Ellen Harvey was her husband, Fred, a freelance filmmaker and computer whiz. He had made the phony newspaper in New Orleans, and he’d filmed the phony newscast in Los Angeles with a friend of his, a Chinese actress named Sandra Chan. The guest house proprietor, Mrs. Mullins, and the hotel management in Los Angeles had cooperated with Seth Carlin and Ron O’Hara, delivering the newspaper and the closed-circuit television transmission on schedule.

  Furthermore, the blond husband and wife had acted as spies, following Tracy’s movements in New York and Mark’s progress in Los Angeles and Chicago. Fred had also assisted Ron O’Hara in her abduction: he had been driving the van. Once here, he had filled Ivan’s role as manservant until Ivan had returned from Chicago. Seth Carlin was paying the couple a great deal of money for all this. Tracy had heard their story over dinner with them in the dining room tonight.

  The dark-haired woman was Sarah Tennant Gammon, who had so convincingly utilized her acting training in the Pontchartrain Clinic in New Orleans, where she had never been a patient. Seth Carlin had made a generous donation to the facility in exchange for the use of it for the afternoon. Now Mrs. Gammon came over to her.

  “Thank you for believing us,” she said. “I’m sorry for you, for what you’ve been through, but I’m not sorry about him.” She blushed and looked away from Tracy, and the rest of her words were spoken in an embarrassed whisper. “Anyway, I—I just wanted to say thank you.”

  Tracy nodded mutely, and the woman moved away, rejoining her husband on the other side of the porch. She had a right to feel that way, Tracy supposed. Her family had been Mark’s first victims.

  Mark.

  Matthew Farmer.

  The Family Man.

  She swayed slightly, reaching out to grasp the porch railing. She leaned against it, staring out through the rain as the Green Hills police zipped Mark’s body into a body bag and carried him over to an ambulance. Millicent Call and the other FBI agent followed them.

  She watched them go, and she looked around at all the other people assembled here, and she thought: I will survive this. I will get over this numbness, and the shock and pain that will soon follow it. I will go back to the city, to my life. To my mother and my work and my friends. I’ll find something for the baby shower. I’ll handle my authors. I will find Jared McKinley and explain this to him as well as I can, and I’ll try to keep him from getting drunk when he hears it. Then I’ll do the same with Carol Grant. But I will go on. I will not be The Family Man’s final victim.

  As the ambulance drove slowly away, she felt a hand on her arm.

  “Come back inside, Ms. Morgan.”

  She turned around and looked at Seth Carlin. His scarred face seemed softer now, filled with concern for her. She forced a weak smile to her lips.

  “Please, call me Tracy,” she said.

  He smiled, too. “Only if you’ll call me Seth.” He turned to the other people on the porch. “It’s over now. Thank you for your help, but go home now, all of you.” Then he turned back to her. “Come inside, Tracy. Mr. O’Hara is waiting for us. I have brandy, and Ivan will build us a fire.”

  She nodded. He reached out to take her hand, and she allowed him to lead her into the house. Ivan Kolnikov followed them inside, closing the door firmly behind him.

  Yes, she thought as she went. Brandy, and a fire, and the long road back.

  EPILOGUE

  GAME OVER

  It was nearly dawn now, but still he continued to read.

  Seth Carlin had started the manuscript yesterday, and he had immediately printed out the pages he had written. He read it over dinner last night, oblivious of the comings and goings of his servant. He ate heartily of the food Ivan placed before him, and he drank several glasses of wine. When his meal was finished, he carried the pages here, to the living room. Ivan had brought another bottle of wine for him, rebuilt the fire, and retired to his rooms upstairs.

  Seth was now comfortably ensconced in his favorite armchair, in the middle of his third reading of the opening chapter. He was working slowly, carefully, making certain that everything was there. He wanted his biography of Matthew Farmer to be as convincing as possible. He wanted everyone to know his version of the story of The Family Man. Most of all, he wanted to publish a fully detailed account of the game he had devised to trap the notorious killer.

  He was calling it Scavenger.

  Ronald O’Hara and his friends, “Nurse” Call and the “cop” named Barton, would assist him a great deal in this, as would the others: Sarah Gammon and her husband, Ellen and Fre
d Harvey, Ivan.

  And Tracy. He smiled when he thought of her.

  Seth had gone to Chicago last week and tracked down a relative of Judy Barlow, who agreed with his theory that Mark had drugged the girl to sleep that Christmas Eve, driven to his family home in the earliest hours of Christmas Day, done his business, and been back in bed beside her before she woke up. The relative, an aunt, also agreed with Seth’s theory that Matthew Farmer had provided Judy with the overdose that killed her a few months later, in case she ever remembered his absence from the bed that night.

  The director of the market research firm that had employed Matthew Farmer during The Family Man’s reign of terror was a woman named Alice Powell. She would not agree to speak to Seth, so the theory he was going to describe in that part of the book—that Matthew had found the other four families, with complete descriptions of every family member including gender and age, in his own client base—was mere speculation. But it would make for interesting reading.

  Seth would not speculate as to why Matthew had changed his modus operandi after killing his own family, why he had apparently changed his cutting implements and dropped the musical motif for the last two families. In fact, he wasn’t going to mention this at all in the manuscript. After much thought on the subject, he had decided to leave it out.

  He sipped his wine now, in the living room, and slowly read the completed pages. There was much more still to write: the murders of the five families. And then the scavenger hunt, from the moment Seth had heard about the book, Dark Desire, to the moment in April, two weeks ago, when Matthew Farmer had fallen, dead, on Seth’s front lawn. This would be his own contribution to the legend, and he was proud of it. He had read Dark Desire, and he had called Ronald O’Hara in Washington. O’Hara had been convinced when Seth brought up the details about the music.