Centralia (5 page)

Footsteps sounded outside the door. The familiar steps that came every day at the same time. Three men. Always three men. But never the same group of three. Always, though, they were large, broad-shouldered, thick-chested, and stern. Rarely did they speak more than two or three words, usually just commands.

The woman clutched her daughter and put her face in the girl’s hair. She drew in a long breath. “Be strong. Be strong.”

The girl hugged her mother. “Mommy, I can feel your heart beating.”

Of course she could. Each time the men came, the woman thought her heart would bound right out of her chest. “I know, baby. It means I love you so much.”

The girl lifted her face and kissed her mother on the cheek.
The touch was so gentle, so tender, so sweet and innocent and everything a little girl’s touch should be. When she spoke, her voice was hushed but not hurried. Never hurried. “Don’t worry, Mommy. God’s with me. I know that. Do you know that?”

“Yes. Yes, baby, he is. I know it. Always remember that. Hold it close to your heart.”

The men were just outside the door now, talking in quiet but harsh tones.

“I’ll be here when you get back. Like always. Okay?”

“Okay, Mommy. Don’t worry about me. God will protect me.”

The woman wiped tears from her eyes, smearing them across her cheeks. She sniffed and forced a smile to hide the fear that gripped her heart like an iron claw. “I’ll pray for you. The whole time.”

The lock disengaged and the door swung open. Light from the hallway slanted across the concrete floor. Two of the men entered, both wearing khakis and black long-sleeved polo shirts. One was taller than the other and bulkier. The smaller one wore glasses and had his head nearly shaved. High and tight, military style. The woman’s father had been in the Army, a career soldier; she was raised a military brat. Her husband had been in the Army too. She knew the type when she saw it.

The men said nothing because they didn’t need to. The woman and her daughter knew the routine. Her daughter pulled away from her and approached the men like a willing sacrifice resolved to place herself on the altar. They looked at her as if she were some lab freak and handled her indifferently, clinically: no emotion, no tenderness, one hand on the upper back, keeping an arm’s distance between them.

If they only knew how sweet she is, how innocent. How brave. They wouldn’t treat her so coldly. They couldn’t.

Before she left the room, the girl turned, made eye contact with her mother, and smiled. It was a smile that said everything would be okay, a smile that told her mother not to worry, to trust God because he would protect his child. Then the door closed, and the woman was once again alone with her tears. And guilt.

Every day they took her daughter, and every evening different men returned her. The girl said they did things to her
 
—she called them “experiments”
 
—but she never went into detail. The woman prodded her, even pleaded with her to tell her what they did, but she would never say. She’d only ever say that God was with her, that he gave her strength and protected her. At least she referred to experiments and not abuse, and there were never any marks on her. But did an eight-year-old even know what abuse was?

Regardless, the girl was immovable in her faith. It was incredible. Almost inhuman. As far as the woman knew, her daughter had performed no miracles, but still she should be sainted for her faith.

The woman went to the bed and sat there, her hands in her lap, tears falling from her eyes. She thought of her husband as she did every day. They told her he was dead, that he’d died a hero’s death and that she should be proud. She was proud, but she was also angry. Not at him
 
—goodness, no. They had both agreed that he needed to do what he’d done. It wasn’t his fault. She was just angry. Maybe at herself, maybe at God
 
—it was hard to tell. But besides anger, there was the guilt
 
—such terrible guilt. It was her job to protect her daughter, to make the right decisions, to keep her sweet, precious girl from harm, but instead she’d led them right into the devil’s lair.

They’d been in this place so long she’d lost track of the time. It could be weeks but was probably months by now. Time seemed
to move in a circular fashion here rather than linearly as it did in the outside world. Days ran together, and if she didn’t know better, she wouldn’t be surprised if they repeated themselves. If days became more days before turning into weeks. Maybe weeks didn’t even exist here in this secluded world, months or years either. It could just be days and days and more days. Just an endless string of hours ticking by with no beginning and no end.

She didn’t know who it was who held them, but their captors provided decent care. Three meals a day, a shower a day, and the room. It was nothing special, certainly no five-star accommodations, but it had a double bed, a dresser, a table and chairs, some area rugs, and a lamp. Everything she and her daughter needed to at least not be uncomfortable. There was no television, but they supplied her with books to pass the time, mostly classics like Austen and Brontë and Steinbeck and Twain. She’d never been much of a reader before, but now she devoured books
 
—sometimes two a day. After all, there was little else to do. After a while, passing the time in one’s own mind could lead to all sorts of thoughts. The mind had a tendency to wander, to meander to strange places and alternate realities. Rooms in the mind opened to more rooms, which opened to yet more rooms, and in each one resided endless possibilities for the imagination. The woman felt it was best to stay out of those rooms as much as possible, and the books allowed her some different rooms to explore.

There were no windows in their cell, leading the woman to believe they were either in an interior room of some thick-walled building or possibly in a subterranean bunker of some sort. Maybe a military installation.

On the rare occasions when she wasn’t reading and she did let her mind drift in and out of those dangerous rooms, she thought
about the days before any of this happened, before the cursed room, before the men who came every morning to take away her daughter, before she’d lost everything and become nothing more than a caged animal, the mother of a lab rat.

And when she wasn’t reading or remembering, she kept her mind busy and focused by praying. Sometimes, admittedly, she had to force herself to pray. Her faith was not as strong as her daughter’s. It faltered; it failed. She questioned and sometimes cursed. But when she saw her daughter, her faith was renewed. The girl had that effect on her and used to on everyone she came in contact with. It was a gift, no doubt about it. She was special. So special.

And that’s the reason they were here.

Peter pulled his Jetta into the driveway and shut off the engine. He’d tucked the intruders’ gray SUV into his own garage after backing out the Jetta. He didn’t need snooping neighbors prematurely stirring up trouble when they noticed the SUV hadn’t moved in a while. Anything out of place or out of the ordinary made them nosy. And nosy neighbors eventually surrendered to their curiosity and knocked on doors and peered into windows. And if there was no answer or if the home looked like it had been disturbed, nosy neighbors would sometimes take it upon themselves to locate the hidden key to the back door and let themselves in. All out of neighborly concern, of course. And when nosy neighbors found three dead bodies lying on the stairs and in the upstairs hallway, they called the police.

So because Peter didn’t want to add to any nosy neighbors’ curiosity, he left the house as naturally as he could. Just another day of heading off to a boring day at the lab. Nothing to look at here, folks.

Amy Cantori, assistant professor of psychology, lived alone in a two-story brick Victorian on the edge of Candleburg’s historic district. At twenty-five hundred square feet, the house was way more than she needed, but she managed to keep up with it.

A large maple with sprawling limbs that forked into more sprawling limbs shaded the front of the house. Meticulously clipped knee-high boxwoods lined the sidewalk, and twisted wisteria shoots, like the many entangled tentacles of a graceless octopus, framed the wide front porch. The lawn was freshly cut and edged with razor precision. She’d had the porch painted since the last time Peter saw it. The framing was now a light cucumber green.

Peter exited his car and stepped up onto the porch. It was nicely furnished with wicker chairs and a love seat, potted cannas and ferns. Stained natural-wood flooring had replaced the old worn boards. It looked to be a nice place to sit on a summer evening and enjoy a gentle breeze and iced tea.

The front door opened, and Amy folded her arms across her chest. “So this isn’t a friendly visit to make amends.”

Peter stopped. “I know we need to deal with that, and we can. Later. Can I come in?”

She stepped to the side. “Only if you tell me what this is really about.”

Walking past her and into the house, Peter said, “There’s not much I can tell.”

She closed the door. “Still as elusive as ever, I see. You said it was about Karen and Lilly. I’m sorry, Peter; really I am. And I’m sorry I didn’t come to the funeral. It just didn’t feel right after
 
—”

“I’m not here to talk about the funeral.” Peter scanned the foyer area. Not much had changed since the last time he’d been there. Amy had a distinct style of interior decorating, kind of a mash-up of early-nineteenth-century Victorian with its intricate woodwork and colorful fabrics and twenty-first-century modern with its smooth surfaces, sharp angles, and brushed steel. Normally the two would go together like bow ties and tattoos, but she had a way of pulling it off. “Place still looks the same,” he said.

“I like it. It works for me.”

“Me too. I always did.” He glanced at her. “Can I use your computer?”

“My computer? Is yours broken?”

“No. Can I use yours?”

He took a step toward the living room, but she stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Hey, are you okay? What does my computer have to do with Karen and Lilly?”

“Karen and Lilly are alive.”

Her hand dropped to her side. Confusion contorted her face. “Come again? I saw the obituary. It was the talk of everyone at the school. A lot of them were at the funeral. They told me about it. Peter, are you all right? I mean, you’ve gone through an awful lot. If you’re having a hard time dealing with all of this, you can always talk
 
—”

“Don’t analyze me, Amy,” he said. He pushed past her and entered the living room, a softly lit area furnished with a claw-foot sofa, a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, and two ornately carved end tables each topped with a brass lamp. Amy kept her laptop on an antique secretary’s desk in the corner. “I already have a shrink and do enough talking. I need a computer. Is your laptop still in here?”
How was he able to recall details of Amy Cantori’s house when he couldn’t even remember what happened yesterday?

Leaving her in the foyer, he found the computer on the desk, opened it, and sat in the chair.

But Amy was right there, shutting the laptop before he could get his hands on the keyboard. “Not till you tell me what’s going on.”

Peter sighed and sat back. “Okay, I don’t think Karen and Lilly died in a car accident.”

Lawrence Habit pulled his Lincoln into the driveway behind Peter Ryan’s Volkswagen, blocking any getaway. He cut the engine, removed his sunglasses, and examined his face in the rearview mirror. He hadn’t been particularly attractive even before the scar; he could admit that. He traced his finger along the length of the scar. It was smooth and numb and at various points sent electric zingers to remote locations on his face. It ached at the moment. It always did right before a kill.

Lawrence smiled at himself, checked his teeth, then tossed the glasses on the passenger seat and exited the vehicle. He made no attempt at being covert. For one thing, he was too big to be sneaking around, with his broad shoulders, deep chest, and thick arms. And second, that just wasn’t the way he operated. He wasn’t arrogant about it; on the contrary, he never boasted about his success rate. His foster dad had taught him that a humble man was a respected man. And an arrogant man would eventually wind up a prematurely dead man. Lawrence considered that the fear of death caused some in his profession to sneak and slink around, hiding in shadows and using the element of surprise. But to him, death was
a nonnegotiable part of life, something everyone had to deal with regardless of location or situation or occupation, so he dealt with it. He dealt with the fear head-on, not out of arrogance but out of practicality.

At the front door he didn’t bother to knock. He looked side to side and across the street, checking to make sure no neighbors were nosing around outside. The last thing he needed was for some little old lady out for a walk with her dog to witness him forcibly entering the home. She’d call the cops for sure, and those local schmucks were idiots. Fortunately the large maple and other assorted shrubs on the property provided seclusion and privacy the woman must have enjoyed. No wonder she had the front porch so comfortably furnished. It was a place where she no doubt spent much of her time.

Drawing his silencer-equipped Smith & Wesson from his shoulder holster, Lawrence took one step forward, lifted his right foot, and planted it solidly just to the left of the door handle. The door shot open, splintering the wood along the jamb, and Lawrence rushed in.