Soul Thief (Blue Light Series) (10 page)

Doug shook his head.

“Tell me,” Jennings said, after a long moment in which he had absorbed Doug’s startling disclosure, “back when they used to talk to you, what did they say?”

“They talked about the
Collector.”

“The
Collector?” Jennings said, his interest piqued. “Is that the name they’ve given the dark thing you see in your visions?” Doug nodded. “Did they say who this . . . Collector was?”

“They didn’t know.”

“What else did they tell you, Doug?”

“
That he’s very sad.”

“Why’s that?”

“He doesn’t want to do what he does. He has to.”

“You mean someone makes him do it?”

“I guess so.”

“I see,” said
Jennings. “Did they say how this Collector treated them?”

Doug shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, I guess. They said it was lonely and they didn’t need to eat. And there were lots of bones there. Mostly they were the bones of birds.”

“Why birds, Doug?”

“I don’t know.”

Jennings nodded. “Did they say anything else?”

“Yeah, it’s cold there, so cold and so empty.”

Doug was hauled out of his reverie by the sound of Theo talking on the phone in a low voice, but mostly he wasn’t talking at all, just listening with an occasional, yes, sir, or no, sir thrown in for effect. Doug understood that he was receiving instructions from his master.

A left turn took them to an iron gate of considerable height. The limo stopped and a uniformed guard came into view. Theo nodded and the gate began to trundle open. On either side of the gate, a massive stone fence, equally as tall as the gate and topped with ominous strands of razor wire, stretched in a convoluted route along the borders of the estate like some miniature and menacing version of China’s Great Wall. Doug understood that this was a prison of sorts, designed more to keep the outside world at bay than to keep people in.

Stationed along the fence were more guards; others walked the estate’s perimeter, some with dogs.

They drove through the gates of De Roché Manor and into another world; lawns laid out immaculately on either side of the paved driveway; a distant aspect of woodland off to the left which disappeared behind a line of cypresses as they bore around toward the house itself. Off to the right stretched a line of one hundred foot sand palms; there was an enormous marble pond with a spurting fountain surrounded by carved marble figures, human and animal alike, and in the distance, the Gulf of Mexico gleamed at them through a line of beach pines, shimmering like freshly polished silver in the brilliant southern sunshine.

The main building was less spectacular than Doug remembered; just a large, stone, three-story Greek-revival house, solid but plain, with modern extensions sprawling away from the main structure on either end. They drove past the front door, with its formal Corinthian-columned porch, and stopped on a tarmac near a side entrance.

“Mr. De Roché is waiting in his study,” Theo told them.

Doug grunted his thanks, wondering if Theo was just a simple errand boy, but knowing down deep that he wasn’t.

Annie needed to think. She should not have taken the drugs. But she’d been angry at Doug and she’d done it out of defiance. Now she was sorry. Her actions had reminded her of the other Annie, the one she’d left inside the walls of this soulless house more than a decade and a half ago. That Annie was not the woman she was today; confident, self assured, happy. The other Annie was sullen and pensive and almost always afraid; a little girl who had hidden in her room and had welcomed the dreams because reality was so painful. When she’d become old enough she’d left of her own volition. The shock had been almost too much for her father to bear. He’d never suspected there were two Annies. The need for the drugs as well as the dreams had ended with their parting. So much had happened since that day. She’d found love beyond her wildest expectations, happiness with a good and kind man so unlike her father. Daddy worshiped money and power, and what had it gotten him? His own self-imposed prison, a place to hide from the very things he’d once sought with such fervor. Doug needed none of those things. He knew exactly who he was. He had his morals, his confidence, his manhood, his soul.

Now her mother was gone. She’s the one who’d paid the ultimate price for
daddy’s sins. It was true. But was Mama totally guiltless? Annie guessed not. She’d played the part very well. Rachael had been a good actress, but Annie knew down deep that despite the pretences, she’d never had real happiness with her father. And now, she’d been mercilessly killed by one of her father’s enemies. How could daddy have been so careless? The thought that wanted to intrude upon her unspoken question made her heart hurt so she pushed it aside.

Annie wondered why
she’d
been left alone until now. Surely her father’s enemies had known for years where she was. If they’d wanted her dead they’d certainly had ample opportunity to carry out such a wish. Had she been left alone because she posed no real threat to them? After all, she knew no names. She’d never cared enough for her father’s concerns to inquire. Faces she remembered, for all the harm that could do; most were just vague recollections as they came and went in an endless parade, bearing gifts and peddling deals, pandering shamelessly to daddy, but hiding secret thoughts of jealousy and hatred for his power and his successes. She thought of the whispers she had managed to overhear from the sanctity of her haven, whispers grasped by childish ears as unwilling to listen as they were alert for forbidden information.

She felt an uneasy chill come over her at the dim recollection of those times. These were things she had never discussed with Doug, things even she had never been able to quite grasp herself, the details lost in the reticent silence of this old southern house and its mysterious aura. Now the house was awakening something inside her, reminding her of things best left
forgotten.

Doug’s suspicions intruded once again, and she wanted to dismiss them out of hand. She wanted to get angry at him all over again for even suggesting . . . but she could do neither of those things. She knew her father. Doug was right about that. And she knew this house. This is the house she had been brought to on the day she was born, and it was as much a part of her life as the house on
Beacon Hill overlooking Boston Harbor. But the house was not what mattered. After all, it was merely geography, wasn’t it? Wherever she had lived the restraints, and yes, the nightmares had always been the same. The outside world was something to be witnessed from a distance, to be protected against at all costs; as though the traffic that droned by beyond these hallowed grounds had been part of a world that didn’t exist. More, she understood now, a world that had been abjectly denied her.

It isn’t safe out there, darling. There are those who wish us harm simply because of who we are, because we are more fortunate than they are.

But Annie knew the real truth of the matter. It wasn’t her father’s good fortune that made people hate them. It was much more complicated than that. Ah, but now she was too tired to pursue demons. Perhaps later. Now it was time to see to her father, and get the details of her mother’s murder.

Édouard De Roché sat alone in his private study tucked away in the east wing of his house. He had given strict orders not to be disturbed until his daughter and the man she had married arrived. The telephone beside his deep leather chair was on a private line, the number known only to a select few individuals. The study, though it boasted several lamps, was nearly in darkness. Only the small leaded glass lamp on the antique stand beside his chair burned, and that threw its light onto the burnished mahogany table top rather than into the room. The curtains were all drawn. On the lamp table sat a half-filled bottle of single malt Scotch whiskey and an almost empty glass.

The only sound
s in the sanctuary were the soft, undulating stirrings of Strauss’s Operetta Indigo coming out of twin speakers on a bookshelf above the desk. Indigo was De Roché’s favorite operetta, but he loved the waltzes as well, especially Blue Danube and Rosen Aus Dem Suden. He always thought more clearly while under the influence of such timeless masterpieces. They did not make music like this today. They hadn’t in years, perhaps never would again. The stuff he heard occasionally at intersections that blasted from car speakers was a travesty; all low-end and no substance. Primal trash conjured by simple minds, as far removed from real music as paste was from unblemished diamonds. Perhaps when he was king of the world he would destroy all those who pursued such endeavors.

The thought caused a small smile to form on his handsome face, but his moment of self absorption was short-lived, for now it was imperative that he think clearly.

Rachael was gone, snatched from his grasp and slaughtered like an animal before his very eyes. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been expecting
something.
Since the announcement of his possible presidential candidacy, (perhaps the biggest miscalculation of his long and eventful life) his friends, and his enemies, had all been frantically jockeying for position. Everyone wanted to be on board for the game of the century. The old axiom, ‘keep your friends close, your enemies closer,’ had never held greater meaning. The problem was, he could no longer tell one from the other. Had it been friend or foe that had struck at the very heart of his defenses, rendering his security forces and their accompanying technology mute? He could not be sure. No one had seen or heard anything until it was too late. It was as if a ghost had entered his house, slaughtered his wife and then vanished without a trace.

He’d been awakened in the night by a scream.
He turned on the bedside lamp, his heart pounding in his chest. The illumination sent a soft umbrella of light into the bedroom. Glancing toward the far side of the bed, he was shocked to see that his wife was absent. Frantic, he picked up the phone and called security. Assured that the perimeter was secure, and that nothing was out of the ordinary, he began to relax.

“
Another terrible dream,” he said to himself.” Lately he’d been having far too many of them. Was it a signal that something was changing? He could not be sure.

He got out of bed, put his robe and slippers on and went looking for
Rachael.

Out in the hallway, not more than a dozen steps from his bedroom door he found her hanging on a wire, suspended from a ceiling light-fixture, a massive steel fish-hook piercing her trunk. Her head was canted to the side and her tongue hung from her mouth. Her eyes were wide open and vacant. Blood ran from her nose, her mouth and the wounds on either side of her body, dripping from her saturated nightgown and pooling on the fine Oriental carpet beneath her.

In a state of shock, the horror rising in him like a tide, De Roché backed away from the carnage that had once been his wife and stumbled against his bedroom door. “Dear God!” he said in a small, moaning whimper. “That son of a bitch did this. That monster violated my sanctity.”

Within minutes security guards were taking the dead woman down and a small army of them was searching the rooms and grounds of the estate.

They found nothing.

“
It couldn’t have been him,” Theo said in an attempt to set his boss’s mind at ease. “We have cameras trained on every inch of this place and I can assure you that no one entered or left.”

“No one you could see,” De Roché
replied. “He’s a supernatural being, a magician of the highest order. No, something’s happened. I’ve been having dreams. He’s toying with me.”

“
You think
he
did this?”

“Maybe.
I don’t know. He senses my deceit. I can feel it.”

Theo nodded. He had only a vague understanding of the creature De Roché spoke of and even less of an understanding of the nature of its relationship with his boss. And as far as any sort of deceit was concerned, he did not have a clue what the old man was talking about. Theo had never actually seen the being, and truth was, he doubted it even existed outside the imagination of De Roché. The idea of a supernatural creature living in his midst had always seemed a little preposterous to him. But considering the enormous salary De Roché paid him, discretion had always been his best strategy. Eccentric men did things for their own reasons, and who was he to question? He’d always done what he was told and he would continue to do so as long as De Roché took care of him.

He’d never asked why t
he old man kept a large stone fire pit in the shape of a pentagram out near the creepy old stone house on the back quarter, or why on certain nights De Roché would order a fire built in the pit and then he would go out there all alone and just hang out, sometimes until the wee hours of the morning. Theo was once told by Joe Remy, the dog handler, that the old man was conducting some sort of ritual to keep the creature at bay. Theo wasn’t sure what that meant. He knew Remy to be an eccentric old coot. He also knew that the only reason the old man kept Remy around was because of his nearly supernatural ability to handle the dogs.

But
Mrs. De Roché
was
dead; no doubt about that, killed in the most brutal way imaginable and Theo had no explanation for it. He supposed it was possible that his boss was telling the truth about the being. The old man seemed afraid, and Theo did not like it when De Roché was afraid.

De Roché’s first reaction after seeing the carnage was that the Collector had killed his wife. However, after listening to reports from his security personal and giving it some careful consideration, he was no longer as convinced as he had been in his initial moment of terror and grief.

De Roché’s enemies were many and varied. One did not live the kind of life he lived without making them. He supposed it could just as easily have been a traitor in his ranks, or a conspiracy of two or more who’d planned it to make him think it was the
Collector. After all, the people closest to him knew of the demon’s existence and of what it was capable, although, as far as he knew, none had ever confronted it.

He’d looked at the cameras a dozen times since last night. They told him nothing. One moment Rachael was walking down the hallway toward the bathroom, the next she was hanging from the hook. The particularities that existed between those two events had been skillfully eliminated from the recordings. He and his security chief did not know how this was possible, for the technology was digital and there had been fail safes installed to prevent tampering. Further reason, he supposed, to suspect the
Collector’s cruel cunning. The beast was a master of sleight, a magician of the highest order.

But even though he knew these things, he was still not entirely convinced the murder had been committed by the demon. The audacity of such an act was almost too blatant, even for him. It had been years since he’d se
en or heard from the Collector; as far as he knew he was locked up safe and sound in his house of bones; and although De Roché had wished a thousand times that he’d never struck the bargain and that the demon would vanish from the earth, down deep he knew that it was far too late for such a wish. Trying to put the Collector in any single context was a very difficult thing to do. The Collector was a monster, this was indisputable, but De Roché was no fool. He knew the monster was out there, in his midst, hiding in plain sight, waiting, and watching. And he would get what he wanted when the time was right. Or so he believed.

Fearing the worst, De Roché had
pulled some strings and set things in motion to get his daughter back into the fold. It had been a dangerous and overly dramatic move, but carefully orchestrated. Annie was never in any real danger, or so he’d been told, and it was the only way he knew of to motivate McArthur into delivering her to him. Scare the hell out of him. It worked like a charm.

Beside him the telephone rang, interrupting his reverie. He stared at it in apprehension before picking it up.

“Yes?” he said, knowing instinctively who the caller was. “You did a fine job. They are here, safe and sound. I wish to thank you for your loyalty. You will be rewarded accordingly. Yes, I know you lost some good men. Chock it up to collateral damage. There are many more willing to fight and risk death for the kind of money I pay them.”

There was a long moment while the person on the end of the line spoke.
De Roché sat suddenly forward in his seat, a troubled expression on his face. “In New Hampshire?” he asked. “When? This morning? You say it’s on the television now? There were writings in Aramaic but they’re not being made public? Yes, I know what they mean. A symbol, you say? What sort of symbol?” De Roché listened for a long moment his face troubled. “Dear God,” he whispered. “He has renewed his search for the object. The signs couldn’t be clearer. Now listen to me and hear me well; I do not want it falling into his hands. It must never again come into his possession! The object is mine! I am the one who found it and I am the one it was meant for. Do you understand me? A meeting? Today? This might just be the opportunity we’ve been waiting for. I expect you do everything in your power to obtain the object. I expect to hear something positive by tomorrow.”

De Roché hung up the phone, picked the remote control unit off the table beside him and pushed a button. The stereo went silent as a paneled wall beside the fireplace slid to the side revealing a
large flat-screen television. De Roché snapped it on and tuned it to CNN. A chaotic mix of reports and video footage ensued, giving De Roché an overview of the situation in Exeter New Hampshire. There was nothing about a symbol or words written on a wall, of course. De Roché knew there wouldn’t be. The government would keep any such information tightly under wraps. But there was talk of three murders and a missing child, nothing else. The reporter said there were many questions and few answers. A news conference was scheduled for later and authorities were vowing to get to the bottom of the situation as quickly as possible.

“Sure,” De Roché said with a chuckle. “I won’t be holding my breath.”
After a few moments of the same repetitive garbage he snapped the set off. A small bitter smile touched his lips.
The Collector,
he thought.
The son of a bitch is out and on the hunt and he just left his calling card in New Hampshire. Why there? Why that family?
De Roché knew that the collector did not kill randomly. He did everything for a reason.
Perhaps he wants me to be afraid.
De Roché’s mouth felt dry and his tongue tasted like acid.

He picked his glass up and took a sip, licking his lips, trying to moisten them
as he thought about another unpleasant problem: his daughter’s husband. Now that Annie was pregnant and safely in his care, McArthur would no longer be needed. If allowed to live he could pose a serious threat to the future. But above all else McArthur’s death would be of great satisfaction to De Roché. He hated McArthur to the core of his being. He always had.

Édouard
De Roché knew things about McArthur. Perhaps things even McArthur himself had forgotten in his passion to be normal. The man possessed some sort of gift that made him much more complex than ordinary men. He saw things. He sensed things. He had the ability to see inside of people. He had the ability to see the future and perhaps change it. It was the very reason he had been chosen to be the father of Annie’s child. If the choice had been De Roché’s, McArthur would never have been a part of Annie’s life. As far as he was concerned McArthur’s gifts were dangerous. His life as a simple man, a carpenter, it was all bunk! De Roché was no fool. The man was an enigma. What bothered him most, however, was that he could not see deeply enough inside of McArthur to know the true heart of the man.

McArthur had been brought to De Roché’s attention many years ago, and he’d followed his many childhood escapades with great interest, as had others. In the end he had reluctantly given his daughter up to the man in exchange for the greater good. Now Annie was back in the fold, pregnant with the child that would alter the course of human history, and McArthur would not live long enough to be any
more trouble to anyone else ever again.

De Roché was not a man who believed in divine intervention, but he supposed that Rachael’s death had been the necessary catalyst to set the final act of this drama into motion. By serendipity or design it did not matter. The deed was done, and it was time to move on. Of course Annie could never know the real truth of her mother’s death. As far as Annie was concerned Rachael had been shot by an intruder. Period!