Where Evil Waits (29 page)

V
ERY GOOD,”
S
ASHA SAID,
taking the phone from the boy. He glanced up to the balcony where his father sat in the chair and hoped the old man hadn’t fallen asleep while Sasha had been out getting Seth and setting up birthday surprises around the perimeter of the stable. The kid had been easy—having Aidan Chandler’s phone was a boon. Seth had made his way to the Dumpster behind the neighborhood pool. Sasha rolled up and asked if he was looking for Aidan, and Seth came right up to the van.

Of course, now Sasha had to move. He only had a few more hours until Kara would come waltzing through the door.

Well, maybe not waltzing, but he had no doubt she would come. For one thing, he’d issued a dare, and Kara Montgomery was too haughty to resist that. She’d proved that seventeen years ago. But more importantly, if she didn’t come, the boy was going to die. And Sasha knew she wouldn’t stand for that.

It would have been better to have Aidan, but this would do. In fact, having the FBI provide him with the added
challenge was… invigorating. They had called for brilliance and Sasha had risen to it.

So there, Dad.

“Move,” he said to the kid, whose hands were tied behind his back. “I have a very special place for you.”

Luke made the ninety minutes to Hayden, Georgia, in sixty-five. Kara had never been there before but looked it up on the way: It was a tiny little unincorporated township that had no police department and shared a sheriff with the rest of Pickens County. En route, they arranged for a local crop duster to fly the sheriff over the stable area—they didn’t want to use a marked helicopter—and look for any strange activity. When Kara and Luke arrived, the sheriff reported that all was quiet. There was no sign of Sasha.

No sign of Seth.

Kara closed her eyes, trying not to picture it.
Seth.
Poor child had just lost his father and thought he’d lost Aidan, and now—

Look what you’ve done.

They gathered in—of all places—the local elementary school. They needed a place where they could set up computers and communications equipment that was big enough to gather area SWAT teams and deputies. Two other agents had come with Mike—the Special Agent in Charge—a man named MacGregor, and a tech specialist who would keep everyone hooked up. In addition, a half dozen Pickens County deputies gathered at the school, obsequious in their offers to help with something that would no doubt be the case of the decade: Assistant District Attorney Kara Chandler was alive. The FBI was chasing a serial killer who strangled his victims with barbed wire. A teenage boy and an elderly man were hostages.

Exciting stuff.

Kara shook that off and looked at the computer screen. The group gathered around and the tech guy said, “Hold on,” and pushed some keys, and the display on the desktop appeared on a whiteboard on the wall. It was live feed of the stable, showing four different views on a four-way split screen.

“Christ,” Mike said, seeing the stable closer up for the first time. “There’s no place to hide. What are those fields, corn? Shouldn’t corn be as high as an elephant’s eye or something?”

“Not quite yet,” said a deputy, “but it still—”

“He cut it,” Luke said, pointing at one corner of the screen where the lay of the ground was more visible.

“We wondered about that,” the deputy said, scratching his chin. “Me and Truitt rode past there a week ago and saw it bein’ mowed down. All belongs to Bob Tucker. An’ there was Bob, out cuttin’ down his own crop a good two months before harvest.”

“What do you mean?” Kara asked.

“I didn’t talk straight t’ Tucker, mind you, but heard in town that the owner of the stable paid him three times what he’d get at harvest to take it down now. Owner told him it was diseased an’ had to go.” The deputy scoffed. “No disease. That stable guy just didn’t want it there.”

Kara started to ask why—why would a man pay to have cornfields taken down?—when the answer came clear on the live images on the wall: Along the east side of the stable, about fifty yards out, a line of SWAT officers could be seen jogging into place around the buildings.

“He can see us coming from any direction,” Luke said. “Jesus, there’s not a damn thing to use for cover.” He turned to MacGregor and Mike. “I don’t like this. Sasha
Rodin is a marksman with long-range rifles, and he’s gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to make sure he has a clean view from that stable. Kara, didn’t you tell me there’s a balcony along one wall of the arena?”

“Like an interior skywalk. It looks down onto the arena in one direction and the lobby and stalls in the other.”

“And it has windows?”

“Facing east and west, yes. Not north and south.”

MacGregor shook his head. “We can’t wait until dark. I’m not risking that boy’s life because we’re afraid to be seen.”

Agent Hogan said, “It wouldn’t matter, anyway. Anything this well planned is ready for the dark. He’ll have night-vision equipment.”

Luke and Hogan exchanged a look; Kara tried to ignore it and think about what she was going to say to Sasha Rodin—that is,
if
they let her go in. As it was, they had agreed to get up here and get everyone into position, and then Luke had said, “We’ll talk about it.”

She didn’t need to talk about it. If Sasha would trade Seth’s life in order to talk to her, so be it. She wasn’t anxious to be a martyr, but she didn’t have to do this alone. She had the FBI behind her.

Resources,
Varón had once said to her.
I believe they’re the reason you hired me.

Oh, yes.

“They’re ready,” MacGregor said to the room, and then into the microphone that jutted down from an earpiece, he said, “It’s all yours, Douglas.”

They watched the screen. A second passed, then two, then three, and then, the soldier at the northeast corner came up from the shorn corn. He duck-walked two yards and another came behind him, following, and—

Bgroohm
.

A
N EXPLOSION BROKE THE
sky. Sasha watched from the east window of the balcony, the rifle smoking in his hands. He wanted to dance with glee. Stupid SWAT team had scurried around the buildings like lines of black ants, then broke formation and started toward the stable. Surprise, motherfuckers. Two of the black ants hit the ground and army-crawled back; another hit the ground and stayed. A second later, he was dragged back into the line by his buddies, but things had changed. Suddenly the marching ants weren’t so interested in coming closer anymore.

Sasha moved to the other side of the building and aimed for another land mine. He fired and it blew. No one was near that one, but he enjoyed sending his message:
You can’t get to me. I can get to you
.

He smiled with the pleasure of it.

Then he called Kara.

The command room jumped in unison.

“Christ,” MacGregor shouted. Flames and debris shot into the air in one of the four corners of the screen. The
room filled with shock, but just when MacGregor began shouting into his headset, another explosion went off in another quadrant.

Luke stared, feeling as if his heart had turned to stone. Mike glared at the screen and along with everyone else in the room, watched and waited for more explosions.

They didn’t happen.

“Get me a report,” MacGregor was saying. He’d ceased shouting, but the intensity in his voice couldn’t be missed. He waited, listening, and a moment later, said, “Do it,” and ripped off his headset.

“We have one man down,” he said. He was almost huffing. “He’s not dead, but he’s leaving his leg in the fucking field. From about fifty yards in, that whole field is booby trapped. They’ve spotted at least three more explosives, and that’s just a cursory look.” He cursed. “We’re pulling out ten more yards—”

A phone rang. It was Kara’s.

Everyone stared and she picked it up. The caller ID said
Aidan.

“Can’t be,” Luke said. “Aidan doesn’t have that phone anymore.” An errant thought snapped like a rubber band: throwing Aidan’s phone away in the woods before the house fire. In a heartbeat, Luke knew how Sasha had gotten Seth.

Mike came up beside Kara. “Put it on speaker,” he said, and she did.

“Hello?”

Sasha’s voice came on. “Oh, my, Kara. Look what you’ve done.”

Kara went hard as steel. She wanted to wilt to the floor and hide her head and pray that it would end. But she’d just watched a man going to the place
she
was supposed
to go and lose his leg, and the helpless horror in her breast congealed into sheer hatred.

“No,” she spat into the phone, “look what
you’ve
done.”

Luke moved closer, his hand coming to the small of her back, his strength a palpable thing.

“You think this is so brilliant,” she taunted, “re-inventing my birthday party, but now you’ve got the whole FBI and half of Georgia’s law enforcement knocking on your door. You’ll never get out of this alive.”

A moment of silence swelled in the air, then he chuckled. “Oh, I think I will. I have it all planned. But first, you and I have a little unfinished business. Remember, Kara? Do you remember the last birthday party I attended?”

“Where is Seth?”

“Focus, Kara.”

“Where is your father?”

“Kara.”

“What do you want with me?”

Silence. When he spoke again, his voice sounded strained, like she’d angered him and he was trying to control it. “Well, then,” he said, “down to business. What do I want? First, I want your FBI lover to call off the hounds. All of them. They’ll never get in here; the whole place is booby trapped.” He paused. “Oh, wait, I probably don’t have to tell you that, do I? You probably heard or saw the whole thing, holed up somewhere with your new friends.”

“Go on.”

“Second, I want you to come to my party. But this time, I get to make the rules.”

“What rules?”

“At eight fifty-two, drive to the end of the driveway. Alone. Get out of the car and bring me the keys. Now, here’s an important little tidbit, Kara: Walk straight in the middle
of the driveway. I know it’s a long walk on gravel, but trust me, you don’t want to veer one way or the other. You’ve seen what happened to the little black-clad army men.”

She swallowed. The entire room held its breath.

“Walk up to the main entrance of the stable and into the lobby. And, oh—did I remember to mention?—I want you naked when you do it.”

Luke’s body went even tighter. She looked at him:
It’s not important,
she said with her eyes, but Mike was frantically shaking his finger at her.
Don’t concede that.

She swallowed. “I won’t come to you naked, you bastard. You know as well as I do there are three dozen men out here.”

That made him laugh. “Oh. Well, yes, I didn’t think about that. Underwear, then. But no bulletproof vest, no weapons, and no wire. I want to be able to see that you’re clean. Do you understand?”

She looked up at Luke.
Déjà vu.

“Do you know what will happen if you do something different than what I’ve asked? And I mean,
one
little difference? Seth will die.” He snickered. “Well, actually, he may die anyway, come to think of it—that depends on how well you perform. But if you change my instructions for coming in here, I can assure you he
absolutely
will die.”

“Where is he?”

“Ah, Kara. You’re smarter than that. If I have a nice time at your party tonight, then I’ll tell you. Otherwise, I won’t and he’ll starve to death right where he is. Or, rather, he’ll die of dehydration. I guess that would come first. Either way, he won’t be going home to his mother.”

“How do I know he’s alive?”

“You’ll have to take my word for it. Those are my instructions, Kara. Don’t fuck it up.”

K
ARA SANK TO THE
edge of the table when he hung up. Luke was there. Wrapped her up and pressed her cheek against his chest.

“You’re okay,” he murmured, his lips in her hair. “You were good.”

Kara pulled back. “I need a car.”

Luke paled.

“I have to do this,” she said, and tried to ignore the true fear in his eyes. She laid a hand on his cheek, comforting him instead of the other way around. “I won’t be doing it alone, right? For God’s sake, Luke, look at all these resources. You figure out how you want to back me up—I trust you. But I have to do what he says.”

The tech guy said, “MacGregor,” and MacGregor went to look over his shoulder.

“This is yours, Hogan,” he said, pointing at the laptop. “The Illinois information you were waiting for. Skyped.”

Mike made a beeline to the table. “Dr. Lyons,” he said, looking at the screen. “Give me one minute, let me find a place…”

He picked up the laptop and gestured for Luke and
Kara to come. Luke held out a hand to Kara and they followed Mike into the next room, where he set the laptop in front of all three of them. A middle-aged black man with a goatee looked back at them from the screen, a single gold earring winking.

“Dr. Lyons,” Hogan said, “I’m here with Special Agent Lukas Mann and Assistant District Attorney Kara Chandler. She’s the one who’s at the center of Rodin’s killing spree. This is Doctor Alvin Lyons. He’s one of the psychiatrists who does group counseling at the Marion, Illinois, Penitentiary.”

“Did,” he corrected. “No more.”

“He knew Sasha,” Mike said.

Luke peered into the computer screen. “We only have a few minutes, Doctor. We don’t have time to dick around with issues of confidentia—”

“Fuck confidentiality,” Lyons said. “This guy is a monster.”

Sasha looked at his watch: Eight thirty-three. He watched from the balcony, his father slumped in his chair ten feet behind him, dozing, smelling bad. Disgusting. But for now, Sasha would let him sleep. He’d wake him for the final round.

He left his father in the balcony facing the lobby and went downstairs. It was almost time. He’d cleaned up the tack room, making everything exactly as he remembered it: saddles here, feeding items there, articles for grooming on the third shelf, bridles and crops hung on the wall. He’d even moved out his cot, so that everything appeared just as it had seventeen years ago at Kara’s party.

Except one thing: The giant coil of barbed wire was missing. He wondered if she would notice.

He went to a large basket and picked up a towel, rolled it thick and threw it around his neck, then walked over to his satchel. He pulled out the garrote, admiring it, stroking the handles as if they were the breasts of a woman, then looped it over the back of his neck like a stole. The cherry handles hung down either side of his chest and the wire nestled in the towel at the back of his neck. He ducked into the bathroom to look.

Yes. He was ready.

“I have to get ready,” Kara said, putting a hand on Luke’s chest. “Back off.”

Luke didn’t budge. He couldn’t bring himself to sever contact with her. “Dr. Lyons says it’s about his brother. Play that card if you can.”

“She heard him, Luke, she was there,” Hogan said. “And it’s not about his brother.”

“Jesus,” Luke said. He dropped his hand from Kara’s cheek. He didn’t step back, but she did, clad in black lace underwear and bra, getting ready to go meet a psycho-killer whose shrink said he had class issues or maybe father issues or maybe sexual issues, but who deep inside longed for his lost brother. None of that seemed to add up for Hogan, who swore there was something they were missing. “It doesn’t matter,” Luke said. “Go in, get him to talk about whatever shit is in his head until he tells you where Seth is. That’s the goal. And keep space between you. The only thing everyone agrees on is—”

“—that he won’t shoot me from afar. He’ll want to kill me up close and personal with the barbed wire garrote. I’m
special
.”

Luke swore. The SWAT team was still outside—one man less, but in place, for all the good that did. They
couldn’t close in, not with Sasha’s booby traps in place. The FBI was here, along with most of the Pickens County sheriff’s department and some Atlanta police who’d accompanied MacGregor. They all knew who Sasha was and where he was and what weapons he liked; they’d learned enough of his psychology to know that somehow, Kara Chandler represented something so hateful to him that he’d go to any lengths to teach her some ‘truth.’

But in the end, none of that made a damn bit of difference. She would be inside with Sasha and everyone else outside, held fifty yards out by land mines they had barely seen when it was still light and might not see at all now in the dusk.

Sasha Rodin had planned it well.

The techie said, “Here,” and walked over with a hair pin. It contained a microphone. “Where do you want it?” he asked, with the tiniest smirk, and Kara rolled her eyes. She felt around in her short hair and stuck it in. They tested it, looked at the clock, and MacGregor said, “You’re good to go.”

They walked to the car that was waiting, dusk looming. Luke wanted nothing more than to pull her against him and shield her from the world. Instead, he fisted his hands, keeping them at his sides. “First thing when you get in there,” he said, “pull him away from the west doors and windows. That’s first so I have a line in. Remember, the snipers are ready. Try to get him to the east window, but be sure to be out of the wa—”

“I have to find Seth first. Don’t let anyone shoot until we find Seth.”

“When you get him out of the sight line of the driveway, let me know. I’ll be listening to every word.”

“I know.”

“And I’ll be inside with you as soon as I can.”

“I know.”

He stopped, spinning her around to him. “Kara, for God’s sake. Say something other than—”

She looked up at him, her face a mixture of determination and chutzpah and utter faith in him, and Luke cursed. “On second thought, don’t say anything.”

He kissed her, open-mouthed and deep, her warm skin beneath his hands, her heart beating against his. A moment later he ripped himself away and touched his knuckle beneath her chin. “You can do it,” he said.

He only hoped
he
could do it, too.

Kara drove to the mailbox with Luke hidden in the backseat. It was time. She angled the car so Luke would have the clearest view from a hole they had drilled through the back passenger-side door. He was to watch her walk up the drive. “If I step on a mine and blow up,” she had told him, “don’t step there.”

He hadn’t been amused.

“Here goes,” she said to Luke.

“Kara—”

“Lukas Mann, I swear, if you say one more fucking thing to me I’ll kill you myself.”

There was a second of silence, then Luke said: “Go.”

She got out, keys in hand, and began walking toward the stable. She watched her steps, barely noticing that she was barefoot on gravel, skimming the path in front of her for the little metal caps MacGregor had described to her: explosives. Some might be remotely controlled; some might detonate when they were disturbed by a footstep. But Hogan didn’t really think he was that sophisticated. He thought they would need gunfire to set them off.

It didn’t much matter. Sasha had already proved himself capable of that.

The bastard.

The walk was surreal, approaching a stable she’d approached a thousand times before and a thousand years ago, the sprawl of buildings looking identical to the ones she’d spent her childhood trying to make warm. She passed the wishing well Sasha had constructed and marveled at the imitation, noting that he’d forgotten to string the bucket onto the rope but that otherwise, it was just like the one at home. She imagined the interior of the stable would be equally accurate and ran through the layout yet again… where the doors were, where the windows were, what equipment was there. Dr. Lyons had predicted that Sasha would be thorough.

The sun sank below the horizon as she neared the doors, plunging dimness into darkness. She opened the stable door and stepped inside.

She winced, blinking at the white fluorescents, momentarily blinded. When she opened her eyes again, Sasha Rodin was there.

“Well, well,” he said, his voice filling the lobby. “Hello, Kara.”