While the Savage Sleeps (26 page)

“
Would you please tell me what in God’s name you’re talking about?” Frank asked, practically shouting. “Because I haven’t a clue. What the hell did he say in there?”

“
He had no idea what I was talking about, Frank—none of it. When I showed him the poem, he looked at me like I had two heads. He was disgusted by the words, said he’d never seen them before.”

“
And you believe him?”

“
I can’t explain it. There’s this innocence about him, a naiveté,” Cameron said. “Trust me—the way he was talking, the fear in his eyes—the kid doesn’t have the sophistication to lie like that. There’s a disconnect. That kid in there is scared to death.”

Frank looked away, throwing his hands up in surrender. “I don’t get it.”

“
Think about it for a minute. Nothing
is fitting. I think we’re way off track.”

“
So how do we get back
on
track?” Frank asked. It sounded more like a demand than a question.

“
For one, we can’t trust the obvious because the obvious doesn’t work. Nothing is as it seems …
nothing
. We know that, Frank—we’ve seen it over and over. And I just saw it in there.

Frank said nothing, leaning against the wall, folding his arms, and shaking his head.

“
Something strange is going on here, and I have a bad feeling it’s gonna get worse … a lot worse.”

“
What the hell are you talking about? Where are you getting all this?”

“
Wanna know where I’m getting it? I’ll tell you where: from Ben Foley, from Ryan Churchill, and from Judith Hedrick—that’s were—that’s what the evidence is telling me. That’s what
they’re
telling me.

“
Wait a minute …
Judith Hedrick
?”

Cameron breathed deep, let it out quickly. “That’s what I wanted to tell you before the news about Ryan.”

“
I don’t understand. Judith—she’s a victim.”

Cameron shook his head. “Judith’s not a victim, Frank. She’s a suspect.”

“
A
suspect
? A suspect in
what
?”

“
In the murder of Felicity Champion,” Cameron said, regret creeping into his voice. “That green fiber—I think it came from a sweater she owned. I think Judith killed the girl, and now she’s on the run.”

“
What the
…?” Frank said, now sweating visibly.

Cameron pulled the photo from his pocket, the one with Judith wearing the lime-green sweater. He held it out.

Frank snatched it and glared at Cameron before studying it. After he did, he looked back up, wide-eyed. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

“
Believe it, Frank. And as long as we’re dealing out the shocking details, I’ve got another one for you. Try this one: Ryan Churchill may not recall anything about Alma’s murder, but there’s one thing he
does
remember.”

“
What’s that?”

“
Coming down with flu symptoms the same morning she was killed. And that’s about
all
he remembers. After that, everything’s just a blur.”

Just then, Margaret burst through the door and headed down the hallway.

“
Christ,” Frank said, shaking his head, “There’s a shitload of trouble coming down the pike … and it’s headed straight toward us.”

Chapter
Fifty-Three

San Mateo Boulevard

Albuquerque, New Mexico

It was late afternoon, the start of rush hour. Traffic was getting thicker by the minute, patience among drivers growing thinner. As Kyle waited at the light to cross Central Avenue, she began feeling light-headed. Almost immediately, the visions started again.

She sat, paralyzed, gripping the steering wheel as if hanging onto it for life. Somewhere in her outer consciousness, she could hear the other drivers sounding their horns, but it didn’t matter—they couldn’t compete with the noises inside her head.

This must be what it’s like to lose your mind
, she thought. Was she losing hers?

Red—that was all she could see at first—just red and nothing else. Thick as syrup, deep and velvety, like a rose petal.

The color of pain.

It whirled before her eyes, separating, becoming thinner with each round until disappearing into nothingness. Kyle heard a scream, then an explosion. She felt almost certain it was a gun blast. After that, an image came into focus: a hand, pushed against a sheet of glass, moving downward, and leaving a long streak of smeared blood behind it.

Then a crackling clap, followed by a blinding light.

Kyle’s back felt like it was glued to her seat. She drew her hands up to her face and covered her eyes, trying to clear the images from her mind; her head fell down onto the steering wheel, and her own horn started.

She knew she was blocking the road, knew she was holding up traffic. She also knew there was nothing she could do about it. The raging storm of sounds and images had now taken center stage, taking over her thoughts, taking over her mind.

The images continued to turn at warp speed, materializing as a long, protracted blur. Just as before, every few minutes the thread of pictures would slow to a stop, like video fast-forwarding to a specific point. During one of those breaks, Kyle saw a man’s face, eyes closed, and head shaking rapidly back and forth. His movements looked bizarre and unnatural, the intense vibrations making his features look distorted and out of shape—less like a human, more like a freak.

Again, the speed picked up, fast-forwarding to the next scene. A smear of colors blazed past her, along with a series of whines and high-pitched squeals. Kyle felt dizzy and disoriented.

Then, almost instantly, she found herself transported somewhere else. It was that hospital again—and again, she was standing in the middle of it.

But this time she was in a different part. Kyle saw blood splattered walls, tried to get a better look, but suddenly heard something behind her. She spun around and found two men attacking one another—no weapons, just bare hands. To her right was a long glass window; it was some kind of observation booth with a man and two women standing inside. They watched as the conflict escalated—half-interested, half-indifferent—doing nothing to stop the two men as they tried to kill each other.

One of the men reached for the other’s throat so his thumbs were just below the Adam’s apple. He pushed hard, breaking skin, and causing blood to spill down. The other man let out a fierce howl. Kyle screamed too, but nobody seemed to hear her.

With his fingers still lodged in the man’s throat, the attacker guided his victim down backward, toward the ground, until he was lying flat. Raising one foot high into the air, and with all the force he could muster, he slammed it hard onto the victim’s chest. Kyle could hear cartilage grinding and bones cracking as the wounded man’s body skipped a few inches off the ground, then fell back again. A circlet of fresh blood instantly materialized around the victim’s head, spreading out onto the floor.

One of the observers glanced down at his watch, as if he had somewhere to go. The other jotted a few notes on a clipboard.

The attacker stood over his prey with an expression of superiority. He was tired, breathing heavily, thrilled by his own accomplishment. His eyes looked unnatural, almost black. Kyle looked away.

Suddenly, a loud horn blasted. Then another sound: a voice. Kyle couldn’t make out what it said through the booming echoes, but the attacker did. Obediently, he backed up to the same wall where the observation window was located. Locking his hands behind his back, he eased them into a metal re-enforced opening inside the wall. One of the observers leaned forward and reached through, grabbing the man’s wrists. When he pulled them back out, they appeared to be locked inside some sort of contraption, a square metal box with openings on the ends, one for each hand. A restraining device, Kyle thought, but she noticed the latch on one side wasn’t closed properly. Still, the man stood, compliant.

The loud buzzer sounded off again, followed by a mechanical noise, like heavy pieces of steel disengaging from one another. A giant door slid open, and two males dressed in white emerged. They moved toward the other two men, pushing a gurney, the wheels emitting a loud, squeaking noise—it sounded like a child’s hysterical laughter; they maneuvered the assailant onto it.

Kyle looked at the victim, still lying on the floor, surrounded by his own blood. She watched helplessly as he stopped breathing, finally giving in to death.

Nobody seemed to notice the man on the gurney still had one hand free—one deadly hand.

Chapter
Fifty-Four

Sheriff’s Station

Faith, New Mexico

It was time to start facing facts: whatever was taking over the town seemed to be spreading fast, becoming more unpredictable, more deadly, while at the same time, as far as Cameron could tell, going virtually undetected.

What the hell is it?
he wondered
while driving home from the station that evening.

He needed to find out.

Armed with the news about Judith, Margaret was off running around town, trying to chase down leads. Meanwhile, for him, more time meant the possibility of more lost lives. He couldn’t afford another second of it. Nobody could.

Once again, Cameron began thinking about Sherlock Holmes, wondering what he might do in the same situation. And then, as if from the legendary detective himself, he got his answer:
There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact.

The facts need a makeover,
Cameron thought
, a new perspective.

He needed to go back and begin re-evaluating every piece of evidence, starting with the most obvious one: although each case appeared isolated, and different suspects kept emerging, there was still a strong chance they were all connected in some manner. Margaret had suspected that, but Ryan’s flu symptoms seemed to confirm it.

As it turned out, Judith in the role of suspect rather than victim was not an entirely bad thing. She’d given him one more person to use for comparison—that could come in handy while searching for similarities among the cases.

Getting back to Holmes, there was one obvious fact in particular that still wasn’t adding up, never really had, and that was this flu virus. Ryan and Ben were the only people in town to contract it, and both just happened to be murder suspects.

Quite a coincidence. That alone was enough to cause suspicion, but here was another: The influenza virus is highly contagious. Even if the boys
had
managed to catch a rare case of summer flu, it would have gone around town by now—and it hadn’t. All this led Cameron to think that perhaps they weren’t really dealing with a virus at all. Maybe, he thought, it was something else, something just mimicking one.

And that wasn’t all that was bothering him. If Ryan had in fact murdered Alma Gutierrez, he appeared to have no memory of it. Cameron felt certain that was no act: the boy seemed to be as confused as he was, maybe more so.

Cameron shook his head. Ben was dead, Judith was missing, Ryan was in custody, and the person who killed Witherspoon—whoever that was—seemed as elusive as the facts themselves. That murder seemed to be the missing link, one he had yet to find, one that was still eating away at him.

In the meantime, there were other things to consider. Susan Swift had second-guessed her own theory about what had happened to Ben. Looking back now, her words seemed to resonate almost prophetically. She’d said she thought there must have been some kind of outside element involved, that Ben could never have done such an awful thing on his own. That seemed to be the central theme in each of the suspects’ lives: good one minute, evil to the core the next.

But what outside factor? Who–or what–is really in control here?

Now more than ever, it seemed, Cameron was battling against two increasingly fierce enemies, neither of which he could see or hear: one was whatever was turning good citizens into vicious monsters.

And the other was time.

Chapter
Fifty-Five

San Mateo Boulevard

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Neither saw it coming: the man they were placing on the gurney pulled out his free hand, grabbed one orderly’s neck, and hit him over the head with the metal restraining device. Then he did the same thing to the other one.

It all happened in a matter of seconds.

As the two men lay motionless on the floor, soaked in their own blood, Kyle screamed out, but it did no good; nobody could see or hear her.

The patient disappeared out the door before anyone in the observation booth could stop him. Almost immediately an alarm sounded, followed by an ear-piercing siren.

Kyle heard screaming, turned around, and saw chaos everywhere, people running in all directions. Meanwhile, the renegade patient went from room to room releasing occupants, using a key he’d taken from one of the fallen orderlies. Sirens continued to shriek as more patients filed out and even more rushed into the courtyard.