Paradise County (4 page)

He had his favorite spot in the deep shadows at the very edge of the woods: a fallen log on which he could sit and watch the comings and goings at the rest area without anyone seeing him. Sometimes he had to wait a long time to get what he wanted, but then, he never minded waiting. Waiting was part of the hunt.

Sometimes he didn’t get what he wanted, and had to go home unsatisfied. Then he would hunt the next night, and the next, all over his farflung web, for as long as it took, anticipation building inside of him all the while.

Sooner or later, he always got what he wanted.

He sat there in the waning of that cold October night, patient as a trapdoor spider at the mouth of its lair, watching as the moon rose high in the sky and sailed toward the west, watching the shadows of the tall pines shift clockwise across the edge of the parking area, watching as cars and trucks and vans and SUVs pulled in and out, disgorging and then reclaiming their passengers.

When they came, he almost didn’t recognize them. There were two of them, a young man and a girl, college-age he guessed, in a new, pale
blue Volkswagen Bug that the girl was driving. He would have let them pass—two were twice as hard to take as one, after all, and twice as likely to be missed, and he wasn’t a fool, getting caught was not on his agenda—but when the girl walked through the diaphanous glow of the streetlamp he saw that she was beautiful, so beautiful in just the way he liked. She had long straight blond hair that shone in the light, and she looked unbelievably slender and lithe in a tan car coat and jeans. She was laughing, laughing back over her shoulder at the young man, her straight white teeth gleaming, the sound of her laughter merry in the cold night
—ha ha ha.

“Can I help it if I always have to pee?” she asked, and laughed again.

He was a sucker for beautiful laughing blondes. Even beautiful laughing blondes that had to pee.

The young man answered something, but the predator barely noticed him, except in terms of sizing up possible resistance: maybe five-ten, thin, a kid. Not expecting trouble. Not prepared for any.

Piece of cake, the predator told himself, and, leaving his scooter behind, stood up and walked briskly over to the brick building. He looked around, assured himself that the blue Bug was alone in the parking area, then followed the kid into the men’s room. He would deal with him first; on her own, the girl would be easy.

The kid was at the urinal, taking care of business. In response to the sound of the opening door the kid glanced back over his shoulder. For a moment their eyes met.

Predator and prey, he thought, amused, although the prey didn’t know it yet.

“Nice night,” the predator said aloud, stepping inside and heading for the sink as though to wash his hands. In the silver-framed mirror he saw himself: an ordinary-looking fellow with a friendly smile. Nothing about him to suggest a threat.

“Kinda cold,” the kid answered, finishing and zipping up his jeans. Turning on the rusty water full blast to mask any possible sounds, the predator was disappointed when the kid headed toward the door without bothering to wash his hands.

Nasty habit, that. Germs were everywhere.

“Take care,” the kid said, and reached for the door handle. But the predator was ready, had been ready since entering the bathroom. He could leap on the kid and simply overpower him, but this way was more fun.

“Ah-ah-ah,” he gasped just as the kid’s hand curled around the silver handle, and slumped forward over the sink, clutching at his heart with one hand. The other was already sliding into his pocket.

Watching his prey through the mirror, the predator was pleased to see the kid behave as expected. He turned to look at the stricken middle-aged man, a concerned frown on his thin young face.

“Mister… .”

“My pills,” the predator groaned, clawing at his chest. “In my shirt pocket.”

The kid left the door and came over to help him. As soon as he touched him, the predator struck. He grabbed the kid’s wrist with his right hand, yanked him across the sink, pulled his taser from his pocket with his left and jammed it against the kid’s side, all in a lightning blur of movement. A sizzling sound, the slightest smell of burning—sweet, tantalizing burning—a faint cry covered by the rush of the running water, and the kid was his. Eyes rolling back in his head, the prey collapsed in the predator’s arms. From experience, the predator knew that he would be out cold for a good quarter of an hour. By the time he came around, it would be too late.

The whole exercise had taken perhaps a minute and a half.

Supporting the kid as he slumped to the floor—he would have let him drop but didn’t want to risk any injuries to the head—he crossed quickly to the bathroom door and stepped into the yellowish pool of light just outside. If the girl was out already—she wouldn’t be, girls never were, they took altogether too much time in the bathroom—he would summon her to the men’s room to aid her mysteriously stricken boyfriend. If another car had arrived in the meantime, which was always a possibility and added a certain fillip of danger to the excitement of the occasion, he would simply walk away. The kid wouldn’t remember
much of what had happened, and no one else had seen him. But in the absence of these two possible variations to the scenario, he would surprise the girl in the ladies’ room, hit her with the taser, and carry them both off in the blue Bug. When he had them secure, he would return on his scooter for his car, and they would all three vanish into the night without a trace.

The young couple in the blue Bug would never be seen again.

Humming under his breath, the predator walked around the building, pleased to see that the Bug was the only car in the parking area. Everything was going according to plan, just as if it was meant to be. In fact, sometimes he wondered if his victims’ fate
was
meant to be. If he was their destiny, so to speak.

If so, they must have been very, very naughty in a previous life.

Just as he reached the sidewalk leading to the ladies’ room, the girl emerged, shaking back her long blond hair. His heart rate increased at the sight of her. What a truly beautiful creature she was; well worth the extra effort of taking her boyfriend too.

Their eyes met. Hers widened, in instinctive fear, he thought, at encountering a strange man in a deserted area so late at night.

Girls were so wary nowadays.

He smiled at her.

“Did you pee?” he asked genially without ever breaking stride. He was almost upon her. The brick wall that provided privacy for those entering the rest room blocked her escape.

“Eric!” She stopped in her tracks, calling, he presumed, to her incapacitated boyfriend. Then she whirled, her hair swirling around her like a cape, tugging frantically at the handle of the ladies’ room as if she thought to escape him by running back inside.

“Silly,” he said almost fondly, and grabbed her arm, jabbing the taser into her side.

Three

I
t was cold, far colder than she would have expected Kentucky to be in November. She always thought of sunshine and horses and acre upon acre of lush green grass when she thought of Kentucky—but then, she’d only ever been to Whistledown Farm in the summer, and hadn’t been there at all for seven years.

Now tragedy had brought her back.

Alexandra Haywood shivered as she stepped out of the big white Mercedes that was one of several vehicles kept garaged on a year-round basis at the farm. Her hip-length, charcoal gray wool jacket had a black Persian lamb collar and cuffs and was belted at the waist. Zipped to the throat and worn with a black cashmere turtleneck, formfitting black leather pants and high-heeled black ankle boots, it should have been enough to keep her warm—but it wasn’t. She was freezing, forced to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering. Since the funeral she had lost weight, maybe as much as ten pounds from her five-foot-seven-inch frame, so that now she verged on skinny rather than slender. Her beauty had dwindled too, dimmed like a lamp with the wattage turned down. Her skin had lost color until it was almost milk white, paler even than the expensive platinum blond of her straight, shoulder-blade-length hair,
pulled back now into a sleek chignon at her nape. Her fine features had become pointier, pinched-looking almost, and the dark blue of her eyes was repeated in the shadows beneath them. She tried to hide the worst of the ravages grief had wrought, painting her lips Chanel red and patting concealer beneath her eyes, but the fact remained that she looked like a ghost of her former self. And felt like one, too.

It was a gray morning, with overcast skies threatening icy drizzle later in the day. The ramshackle barn on the muddy rise in front of her and the circular, covered-train-track-looking building behind it had weathered to a color that was almost as much graphite as black. The iced-over grass in the surrounding fields, the small pond to the right, the leafless clump of trees stretching skyward like gnarled hands to the left, even the narrow asphalt driveway on which she stood, were all varying shades of gray.

Her whole life had turned gray, she thought, and the thought brought with it a great burst of sorrow like blood gushing from an open wound. Alex winced, bracing herself as she had learned to do until the rush of pain subsided. A movement in the partially open door of the barn drew her eyes and attention, and, thankfully, she felt the acute stab of grief start to fade away.

A scalped-looking teenage boy in a navy Polartec pullover stood staring at her, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his baggy jeans, apparently drawn by the sound of her arriving car. Methodically, on autopilot as she had been since the funeral, Alex closed and locked the car door. It was too hard to remember that she was in Simpsonville, Kentucky, rather than Philadelphia and didn’t have to lock anything at all. Facts like that kept slipping away from her; she just couldn’t seem to concentrate. Meanwhile, the boy turned and disappeared back into the barn’s interior, yelling “Dad!” at a volume that made her wince.

Maybe that was a good thing, though. Maybe her hearing at least was beginning to return to normal.

Since the funeral, she had tended to experience her sounds, like her colors, as muted. This dulling of her senses was, she thought, nature’s anesthetic. It was meant to help her cope with crippling pain.

Her father was dead, a suicide. That’s what they said, all of them, the coroner and the lawyers and the police and all the other officials who’d been called in to give their verdict on the death of such a wealthy and prominent man. She’d read the autopsy report, seen the pictures, pored over everything, tried to learn any little detail she could about her father’s final minutes, hoping to understand, to salve her grief with knowledge. Nothing she had found had contradicted the ruling of suicide. But she still found it impossible to believe.

But then, everything that had happened over the past five weeks was impossible to believe. Like Alice, she seemed to have stepped through the looking glass. What existed on the other side was an alternate universe to the life she had known.

The boy was back in the doorway again, his gaze fixed on her, his expression openly curious. A man stood behind him, a head and more taller than the boy, a hand on the boy’s shoulder, his eyes narrowed as he watched Alex approach. The wintry sun was at her back, and she assumed his frowning, squinty-eyed expression was the result of staring into it, and not because of anything to do with her. He conformed to the general description she’d been given—a big man, tall, black-haired, late thirties—and she guessed that he must be Joe Welch, the farm manager.
Her
farm manager, now that her father was gone. Alex’s informant was Whistledown’s longtime housekeeper, Inez Johnson, who had also described Joe Welch enthusiastically as “dead sexy.”

If he was, Alex was in no state to recognize it. Like her ability to enjoy food and sleep, her ability to enjoy sex, or even the infinitesimal pleasure of recognizing and responding to a sexy man, had been stolen away by grief. Oh, she could see that this man was handsome enough, with a strong-featured, square-jawed face rendered even more formidably masculine by what looked like a couple of days’ worth of black stubble, but she did not feel the little tingle of male-female awareness that once would have told her that he was attractive. He was simply a tall man in a blindingly blue goose-down parka that made him look massive through the shoulders and torso, with narrow hips and long, muscular legs encased in faded jeans.

At least the parka was bright enough not to fade to gray like everything else in her line of vision. Fixing on it like a homing beacon, Alex headed toward it, placing her feet carefully on the pavement which she feared, from the temperature of the air and the icy frosting on the grass and pond, might be slick.

He remained unsmiling as he watched her approach, and Alex wondered if he knew who she was—and why she was there.

Probably not. Her father’s death had made all the major newspapers’ financial pages, along with reports that he had killed himself because of a cataclysmic business reversal. But there had been no pictures of her or any other family member, and barely any mention of them, either.