Habit (30 page)

Once more, he decided to press on without the flashlight. His heart pounded in his chest, and sweat ran from his temples. It was warm in the building, almost balmy. He took pains not to touch the sweat with his hands, lest he wind up with a slippery grip on his gun. He held it with one hand and braced the wall with the other, moving towards the corner ahead.

As he went, the sound of the baby’s cries grew louder. At least he was headed in the right direction, he thought.

As he reached the turn in the hallway, he suddenly had the idea that the killer could have gone a flight down, or taken the stairs up, and gotten around behind Brendan. He could be coming up the hallway behind Brendan now, ready to pounce.

Brendan swung around. His eyes were adjusting to the dark. He thought he saw the glimmer of the glass doors further down. There appeared to be no one on his tail.

He faced forward again, and took the right turn in the hallway with a fast swing around the inside wall, both hands now on his gun.

Before him was another stretch of corridor. Straight ahead was a window to the outside. The hallway then banked left. There were half a dozen classroom doorways, two on the left, four on the right. Brendan proceeded to check them all, occasionally flipping the light switches, just to see if they would work. None did, and he continued in near-darkness. Even the emergency lights were dark; perhaps the construction company hadn’t rigged them with batteries yet, or wired them to turn on in a power failure.

He realized that the killer must have gotten somewhere where there was access to the building’s power. A room with all of the breakers. Would such a room be up on the third floor? Maybe there was one for each floor. It was possible that the floors below and the one above still had power.

But the cries of the baby had intensified. He decided that it sounded like a girl after all, though he couldn’t be a hundred percent certain. Her cries seemed to resonate through the building, as if each room portended the appearance of the captive child.

The sweat continued to pour down the sides of the detective’s head. He went into the last room in this section of hallway and did a quick sweep.

When he’d finished and was about to leave, he saw there was a man standing in the doorway.

CHAPTER FORTY / MONDAY, 8:44 PM

“Little pig, little pig, let me in,” said the shadow standing in the doorway. It was the voice from the phone.

“Don’t move.”

Brendan aimed his gun at what he thought was the center of the killer’s body, his chest. He was distantly aware that his nerves had settled. His heart had eased into a steady rhythm. His mind felt clear, as if the sun had momentarily appeared in an otherwise overcast day.

“I was born under the black smoke of September.”

A chill ran through Brendan, rippling his calm. He focused.

“I want you to take out your weapon and toss it into the room.”

“You like that? I wrote it years ago. Years, I mean, God, how time flies.”

“Take your gun by the very end of the handle and toss it into the room. Do it now.”

“You hear that baby? I have to feed her. We’ll have to postpone this for now, Detective Healy. The needs of the child come first. You ought to know that. You’re a parent. Or, woops, sorry,
were
a parent. Didn’t put the needs of your child first, though.”

“I’m going to tell you this one last time, and then I’m going to shoot you. Take your gun and toss it into the room. After that, you’re going to get on your knees. Do it now. The place will be surrounded in minutes. You don’t want to go the other way, unless you’re into suicide by cop.”

The words just came out, as if by some other force. Brendan had been in tense situations during his time on the beat, but he’d always had Argon to back him up. And nothing, really, had ever been quite like this. He’d only ever had to draw his piece once in Hawthorne, and it had turned out to be nothing. Yet he felt like he’d been here before. He felt like he’d been doing this his whole life.

Tracking. He was a tracker. And now he had his quarry.

“No,” the killer drawled. “There’s no police squad en route, no SWAT team about to come ramming through. It’s just you, Detective. It’s just you and I.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“I don’t have to count on it. I know it’s true. Now, it’s been fun playing cat and mouse with you. Of course, you probably think you’ve been the cat, just like you probably believe someone is coming to help you. But I really do have to go see to that baby.”

Brendan opened his mouth, and the shadow slipped out of the doorway.

“Hey!”

Brendan jabbed the gun towards the hallway in a helpless gesture. His finger pressed against the trigger, but not hard enough to release a round. Instead, he snapped into action and followed.

As soon as he reached the doorway he stopped. His pulse had quickened again, his preternatural calm had left him. He breathed and his hearted thudded and he imagined the killer just a few feet away against the corridor wall, taking aim.

Shit. Shit shit shit shit

Brendan jumped out of the doorway. He managed to clear such a distance that when he landed, his hip flared with bright pain, as if he’d ripped open the stitches, or aggravated the damaged cartilage.

His arm and gun was out in front of him like a spear. He was squeezing the trigger so hard that he inadvertently fired.

There was no one in the hallway, and the bullet punctured the glass and flew out into the night.

He stood, stunned, motionless, breathing hard. Then he forced himself to move again. He was limping worse than ever. Every step sent a bolt of pain up his side, and tentacles of pain around his midsection, knotting in his lower back. His ears rang from the explosion of the gunshot.

He reached the left turn and continued on with his weapon in front of him.

This hall was different. The wall to the right was an exterior wall, and there was more light coming in from the windows lining it. There was only one doorway on the left that he could see. Another set of double doors.

The crying was coming from there – as the ringing in his ears faded, Brendan was sure of it.

He headed towards the doors as quickly as he could, his whole body rigid with flashing pains.

The doors opened outwards and Brendan yanked on one and stabbed the gun in. To his surprise, the room was lit up.

It was one of the lecture halls he’d seen on the building map down in the lobby. The room was large, arranged theater-style with a raised platform featuring a lectern and a retractable screen at the front. The chairs were bolted into the floor – maybe two hundred seats in all. With the downward slope, Brendan figured the room cut into the second story, below. And it was a clerestory space, so it took up the floor above it as well.

There was a door on the left of the platform with the screen and lectern. Everything was still, and Brendan scanned the room. The baby was still crying – and it was coming from beyond that closed door.

Then, a second after Brendan decided this, her cries fell silent.

What in the hell was going on?

An icy pit formed in his stomach. Had the killer just done something to silence the child?

Brendan started running. It was a painful, hobbled run through the dimly lit auditorium, his .38 caliber out in front of him. He felt nothing but cold, nothing but terrified as he imagined what lay beyond that door, and summoned the courage to go through it.

* * *

A moment later, he reached the door and flung it open.

Reginald Forrester was standing there with a baby in his arms. The child had a bottle in its mouth, and was sucking greedily. This room was well-lit, with the fluorescents shining down from above. It was a private quarters, a place where perhaps the teacher would retreat to grade papers or favor a nip of brandy, while the bright young business minds of tomorrow took their tests on economic models and S-corp fundamentals in the lecture hall outside.

The killer was leaning on a heavy oak desk, holding the baby. Behind them, handsome shelves were filled with colorful books. An Apple MacBook sat on the desk. An antique chair was in one corner; a flat screen TV in another, on a stand with DVDs and Blu-rays arranged beneath. There was a hutch next to this with expensive looking liquors on display. It reminded Brendan a bit of Donald Kettering’s office in Boonville, only with a million dollars thrown at it. And on the floor was a bassinet, a pile of blankets, baby toys, and what looked like a diaper bag.

Brendan stood, out of breath, gritting his teeth through the nearly blinding pain his leg and hip were pumping out through his body like hot, electric shocks. He kept his gun level and carefully observed the baby.

He’d been right; it was a girl. She was wearing pink pajamas. He put her at about ten months old, give or take. There was a tear that had tracked down the side of her face, but otherwise she appeared content for the moment. Yet she wasn’t exactly plump, with a radiant glow. Brendan was no pediatrician, but he’d done three solid years of basic medicine. This baby was not in very good health. She looked tired and malnourished.

His eyes flicked up to Reginald Forrester’s face.

The man looked older than in his Cornell picture. His hair had gone almost completely gray.

Brendan didn’t know what to say or do first. Nothing could have prepared him for this, whether he had believed Heilshorn or not. It was tough, for one thing, to threaten a man with a helpless baby in his arms. None of it made any sense. The room – the office, or study, whatever one wanted to call it – was clearly used, and used a lot. It appeared to be Forrester’s hideaway, or something like it. It had “English professor” written all over it. The books, the liquor, the thick oak desk. Yet it was in the middle of a construction site. There was no way that Forrester had been here with a tiny baby for any extended period of time, not without being noticed. And if he was, that meant every carpenter and electrician who’d seen him would have to be in on Titan’s other businesses, or at least have had to sign some form of gag order before being hired.

“You’re having a hard time working it out,” said Forrester. His voice was almost a whisper. The child looked up at him as she drank. She was clearly used to the man. That, or grateful for a merciful feeding.

“There’s nothing to work out. You’re going to hand me that baby. Then I’m going to leave with her.”

Brendan realized that he had no handcuffs with him. He was regretting more and more the hasty manner in which he’d left Rome. He felt more like a civilian who had taken the law into his own hands than a police detective.

He thrust the gun forward.

“Now.”

Forrester looked back at him and didn’t move. The man had crow’s feet around his eyes that made him appear happy, or smiling, but his mouth was set in a grim straight-line. He was broad in the shoulders and chest. He probably outweighed Brendan by thirty or forty pounds. Brendan took aim at his shoulder. The baby girl in his arms was just out of the line of fire.

Brendan’s eyes dropped as he caught sight of the killer’s own weapon, tucked into the waistband of his pants, near the small of his back.

Why was Forrester being so cavalier? What cards did he think he was holding?

Of course, the child in his arms made him a less than optimal target, even at close range. He could place her in the line of fire the second he saw Brendan’s trigger finger twitch. Still, Brendan held his weapon steady. He considered aiming higher. For the head.

Then, of course, he would know nothing about the others Heilshorn spoke of.

Brendan was not getting a response from Forrester, who continued to hold and feed the baby, bouncing her faintly, absently. He may have had some experience with children, Brendan thought, but if he was enjoying himself, it was an act.

“Who else is here in this building?”

Forrester looked at him. Inside the thatches of crow’s feet, his eyes were dark and blank.

“Little pig, little pig, let me in.”

“I get it. That was you on the phone. Amazing.”

After this sarcastic comment, Brendan felt a sudden thrill – a sense of possible enlightenment. It was as if Forrester had a secret, and he was dying to reveal it.

“You wrote the poem on the back of Rebecca’s pictures?”

“Not really a poem,” the killer said right away. “More like flash fiction with a poetic bent.”

“You wrote it all, the night you met her?”

“No, no.” Forrester shook his head, irritably. “You know better than that. I wrote that during my visits. I was at that old farm . . .” He glanced up to the ceiling. “Oh, four or five times, I guess.”

“Why did you write it?”

He shrugged.

Brendan cocked his head. He affected an amused face. “Are you the clichéd writer-that-never-was? A teacher who lost his tenure for feeling up the co-eds, a failed author with nothing more than a swollen liver to show for his talent?”

Forrester didn’t flinch. “I suppose so. Just like you are a failed husband, a failed father, a murderer of his wife and child.”

He continued to gently bounce the baby. Now he looked down at her. His face pulled back in a death mask smile. “There we are,” he said in a sing-song voice. “There we are.”

The child had almost finished the bottle. Brendan saw the door behind Forrester and figured it led to a private bathroom. He bet if he entered the room he would find baby bottles and formula. He hoped there would be nothing else.

“How long have you been keeping her here, Forrester?”

The man looked up from the baby, as if he’d forgotten Brendan was there. “How long? Oh, not quite two weeks now.”

Just since he killed Rebecca
, Brendan thought.

“And you go unnoticed by the construction crew? How is that possible?”

Forrester scowled. “You’re not very good at detecting, are you, detective? The job has been shut down for almost a month, caught up in bureaucratic bullshit. Same shit, different day. That’s higher education for you.”

“So no one knows you’re here?”

“Well, someone does,” Forrester said with a sly look.

He’s crazy
. Brendan felt that inner glow of illumination again. He was growing more and more assured of something with every second he stood in the room with this man: Forrester was deranged.

Brendan’s mind raced. He constructed the scenario in seconds: Forrester meets Rebecca, an undergrad. The two have an affair, which leaks out. Between that and publishing his manifesto online, Forrester gets fired. Afterwards, she turns to prostitution. Or, it was more likely that Forrester recruited her, getting her involved in XList, which is his new business. Rebecca repeatedly tries to leave, but Forrester has the videos to blackmail her. Maybe he threatens to blackmail Heilshorn, too. It made sense – Stemp may not have been a whistleblower; he could have called in what Heilshorn already knew. In the meantime, Rebecca gets pregnant. Maybe it’s the baby of one of her clients – or maybe it’s Forrester’s own. She has the child in secret but Forrester finds out. He comes after her and kills her.

The baby was near the very end of her bottle.

Forrester was staring at Brendan, as if watching him think. A question hung suspended in the room, and Forrester answered it.

“You’re going to wish you never came here.”