Diabolical (23 page)

The general leaned forward, looking down toward some point beyond the bottom of the screen. Hatcher raised a hand, lunged toward the image.

“Wait!”

Too late. The screen flickered once, then went dark.

Goddamnit.
Hatcher rolled his head back and stared at the ceiling, gritting his teeth. What did Bartlett mean by that last crack about rookie mistakes? What had he missed?

He sprinted toward the foyer, letting his momentum die as he got there. A small pool of blood on the floor, with some smears and streaks near it. But no Ellis. He walked past the blood, looked through the door.

Out on the drive, the headset was gone, too.

He hadn't secured his prisoner. Hadn't secured him or killed him. Bartlett wasn't just talking. Under different circumstances, such an oversight could have gotten him very dead.

The general was right, but he was also hiding things, things more relevant than what he would have Hatcher believe. Selective honesty couldn't be trusted. Unfortunately, there was one thing Bartlett alluded to that he couldn't dismiss.

He wiped down the M4 with his shirt and left it in the foyer, then hurried to the Cruiser. It took him almost forty-five minutes to reach the hotel. He banged on the door, phoned the room from his cell, and with a small bribe and some begging, finally persuaded a housekeeper to open the door for him.

The housekeeper screamed before he was even across the threshold.

A body lay on the bed, naked save for the rolled silk red panty around one ankle. The smooth white skin of her legs was marred by red streaks along the inner thighs. Thick strings of damp blond hair obscured her face, allowing just a glimpse of eyes that beamed a vacant, milky stare from her skull. It sat atop a crimson pillow almost a foot away. Perched in a splash of blood, balanced upright on its stump. One bloody arm lay along the edge of the mattress.

That was all there was. Her entire torso, along with her right arm, were nowhere to be seen.

Hatcher fell back against the wall as the frantic housekeeper pushed past him, still screaming wildly. He squeezed his eyes shut and lowered his head against the heel of his palm.

HATCHER GOT TO THE CAVE JUST BEFORE SUNSET. HE PARKED in the same place from the night before, pulled the flashlight out from beneath the seat, and walked to the same spot Edgar had led him. He followed the same path. Climbed the berm and crossed the rocky flat. There were no vehicles he could see. No one was around.

He stood at the mouth and peered inside. There was something inviting about an opening in the ground like that. It made you want to go inside, even if it might be dangerous. Maybe because it might be.

Two days had passed since he'd found her body. This was the first time he'd emerged from his apartment. Other than eating and sleeping, both of which he'd engaged in minimally, he divided his time between staring at the window thinking of Vivian and staring at the ceiling plotting his next move.

It would have been easy to wallow, to swim in an emotional cocktail of guilt and loss, and he was tempted to do just that. While he wasn't normally the type to allow his feelings to run wild, hating—fearing, even—the lack of control that implied, he couldn't pretend what happened hadn't produced a painful mix of anxiety and grief, topped off by fury and hate. It was a potent blend that churned uncomfortably through his chest, worming its way to his core.

But by the end of the first day, anger and determination were the last men standing. What had started as a sense of urgency grew into something he found himself needing to keep in check. Whatever course of action he was going to take, he accepted that it would have to be thought through first.

The police might be looking for him. Not just a man described by the housekeeper, but him specifically. He couldn't rule it out, and couldn't waste the countless hours it might take for them to finally realize he didn't kill her, if they ever realized it. But even if they weren't looking for him yet, they were probably looking for her rental car. He was trying to figure out what to do with it, his gaze was fixed blindly on the ceiling as he pondered whether to use the car for a while and try to keep a low profile, leave it somewhere with the keys in it, or park it at the rental agency, when something clicked.

Barely thirty seconds later he was rummaging through the car's interior, first the glove box, then the center console. He found it in the console, neatly folded into three sections. The rental agreement. She hadn't rented the car. Bartlett had. Using the Mulholland Drive address.

It didn't give him the info he'd hoped for—a fresh address to check out—but it did convince him the car was probably safe to drive. Maybe.

He started to get out of the car, return to his room to do more thinking, but stopped. He reached over to the glove box again and dropped it open. There were only two items inside. One was a map from the rental car company. It was the other that had drawn him back.

A brochure. Glossy, tourist type, like the ones near motel check-in counters. Only this one happened to be for the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, advertising a touring exhibit that ended over a month earlier, the next stop being San Francisco. The name of the exhibit was a single word, presented in large red letters across the front fold, stylized to look both ancient and ominous.

Below the word was some sort of painting, a depiction of Christ with people ascending toward clouds and others held back. Near the bottom center was a dark opening in the ground.

So he drove back to the cave and now found himself standing at the mouth, staring.

There were footprints all over. Boot over boot over boot, a fresh trail worn into the ground. Hatcher turned on the flashlight, raised the beam along the trail into the blackness. He paused for a few seconds, then followed it inside.

The entry was a steep incline that leveled out after a few feet. He saw them right away, the conical stretch of light bouncing over one, illuminating several others. Crates. Stacks of them. He swept the beam into the distance and back. Two rows, each taller than he was. Each two crates wide.

The light flashed off a metal cabinet in the distance, throwing its shadow on a wall of rock behind it. There didn't seem to be any descending tunnel. The cave simply stopped about twenty yards in.

The crates were nailed shut. Reaching up to the closest stack, Hatcher tried to move one from the top. It was heavy. He put the flashlight down and managed to slide it over the edge of the one beneath it, then tipped it until it fell. The casing splintered on impact.

Hatcher removed the broken pieces of wood, yanked a few more planks off. Inside were boxes of ammunition. Nine millimeter. Plain brown cardboard, simple descriptive print. Government issue.

He moved down the row to where the crates were slightly larger. The next one didn't break, but he managed to kick the lid with his heel hard enough to open it on the fourth shot. U.S. Army–issue MREs. Meals ready to eat.

At the rear, eight metal containers were wedged between the last set of crates and the back wall of the cave, four on each side. About six feet tall, maybe three feet wide. Each had a combination dial and a large wheel latch. Solid steel walls and doors. Gun safes. A ninth one, slightly larger than the others, stood in the middle of the aisle, backed up against the cave wall.

Running the flashlight along the rows, he did some quick math. Hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, at least. Probably a hundred thousand MREs. Maybe more. Dozens of weapons in each safe.

What the hell was Bartlett up to?

He walked the aisle between the stacks, probing them with his flashlight. There only seemed to be the two types of crates. The rows terminated at the end of the cave.

His foot caught on something as he started walking back. He shone the light where he'd stepped, crouched down to take a closer look.

A piece of metal, protruding slightly. He flashed the light along the cave floor, toward the mouth, saw the slope, and that's when the realization hit him. The interior didn't just level out. It had been leveled. The floor of the cave was flat. He aimed the flashlight at the metal, rubbed his thumb along it. Rebar.

Cement. Relatively fresh.

He stood, walked back toward the opening, sweeping the light over the crates. Something flashed between two of them. He backed up, pointed the light into the space. It looked like a piece of glass. He bent down and reached as far as he could, grazing it a few times with his fingertips before he was able to scoot it close enough to pick up. A shard of broken mirror. About six inches long and a few inches across at the widest.

Hatcher swept the area one final time, the light moving unevenly across the crates.

If nothing else, Hatcher told himself, at least he'd come back and torch this place.

 

 

AFTER THE CAVE, HATCHER DROVE TO SAN FRANCISCO. HE LOCATED the museum easily enough, but it was three o'clock in the morning when he got there. He found a parking space, reclined the seat as far as it would go, and tried to sleep.

Sleep didn't come easy, but he managed a little over an hour's worth. The sun woke him, and his first thought was San Francisco was damn cold. The museum didn't open until ten, so he walked to a nearby breakfast place, steeling himself against the chill, and forced down some eggs and toast and a generous amount of coffee.

When ten o'clock arrived, he was the first one to buy a ticket. The only one, as far as he could tell. A young Asian gal sold it to him, smiling broadly, as if she were almost embarrassed for him. He didn't smile back.

He followed some velvet cordons to the entry under a large sign for the exhibit. It fed him into a corridor that took a sharp left after a few yards. The first display was at the corner, a glass case containing several tall tablets. The tablets were arranged like pages, with lines and columns, each filled with small symbols that Hatcher took to be glyphs and colored etchings of masked individuals in ornate feathering and primitive attire, all rubbery limbs and monstrous faces. There was a quality to the drawings, a cluttered arrangement of asymmetrical shapes that looked familiar in an abstract, academic sort of way. Like stuff he'd seen pictures of in textbooks. The information plate below identified the tablets as replicas of a Mayan codex.

Above the display, a flat monitor ran a video. Images of ancient texts and artwork cascaded through the screen, each one zoomed in upon slowly before dissolving to make way for the next. A sonorous narrator provided a voice-over:

Hatcher left the entry display and entered the exhibit hall. He forced himself not to think about Valentine and the freak creation he called the Get of Damnation, or the psycho's ramblings about prophecies and Hell. He had to keep himself focused on the task at hand.

Bartlett had mentioned this exhibit during their first meeting, when he was explaining about the Hell Gate. If there were answers here, clues as to why Bartlett would want his nephew, he was determined to know what they were. Even if Bartlett was telling the truth, the more he knew, the more he might be able to figure out how to track down who did take the boy. And doing that would likely lead him to whomever was responsible for Vivian's death.

And then there was really going to be hell to pay.

He entered a wide room with black walls, a black ceiling, and black carpeting. Dim red lights guttered in the corners to create an ominous mood. There were pictures on the walls, with information plaques beneath or next to them, illuminated by LED spotlights. Tiny rows of bulbs along the ground marked a path around glass display cases in the center of the room, each in its own cone of light from lamps suspended overhead.

The paintings were of gods and devils, weighted heavily toward the non-Christian religions in what was obviously a conscious effort at inclusiveness. The cases housed various artifacts. A small sculpted fetish from the Middle East, a wood carving from the Middle Ages, a scroll of parchment. Several displayed books; small, dark tomes dating back centuries. Hatcher glanced over all the items but began to feel impatient. He realized this was going to take much longer than he'd anticipated. The fact he really had no idea what he was looking for didn't help.