Where Angels Rest (2 page)

“John Huggins had an affair with Lauren McAllister. She was afraid of him. He changed his name and ran away. He had another affair with a woman in Virginia and she’s believed dead, too. Besides, Justin wasn’t with her that night. He
wasn’t
.”

“So he claimed,” Victor said, a weary sigh in his voice. “But you’re the only one who believes that. You have no proof, Erin.”

“What about the picture of Huggins that Lauren drew?”

“It was dismissed as irrelevant—again—just like everything Justin claimed to know about Huggins and Lauren. Look, Erin, this is a stay, not an acquittal. It doesn’t mean you won’t be here next Thursday night, doing the same thing you’re doing now.”

Erin closed her eyes. Damn him, he sounded just like David. Giving up without a fight. On the trial, on their marriage, on Justin’s life.

Well,
she
wouldn’t give up. She couldn’t. “Then why the reprieve?”

“The AG’s giving authorities a week to talk to the Calloway fellow you found in Ohio and see if he’s really Huggins. And to look into the Virginia woman’s disappearance.”

Erin balled her hands into fists. “Authorities?”

“The sheriff in Hopewell, Ohio—the town where Calloway lives,” Victor said, rooting in his breast pocket for a scrap of paper. He unfolded and handed it to her. “Nikolaus Mann. A good German name, probably a no-nonsense kind of guy. He’ll determine if Jack Calloway on the Internet is really John Huggins.”

“When?”

Victor hedged. “It’s the weekend…”

“Justin has seven days,” she snapped. “A weekend is a third of his life.” Every tendon in her body constricted. She couldn’t leave this to the authorities over their precious weekend—

“Erin,” Victor said, with a warning in his voice, “don’t even think about. Leave it to Sheriff Mann. Don’t forget that Huggins still has a restraining order against you in North Carolina. Let the system do its thing.”

“The
system
just tried to kill my brother.” Her voice vibrated with emotion, but Victor was unfazed. He was a lawyer; he belonged to the system. Or, she thought—the expression on Victor’s face lifting the hairs on the back of her neck—there was something more. Something he wasn’t telling her.

“Victor?” she asked.

He dropped his head, then blew out a breath and looked at her. “I’m finished, Erin. If you want to go forward you need to find another lawyer.”

“If I want—” Her blood stopped moving. “You don’t mean that.”

He took her arm, lowering his voice. “Do you know that my secretary was afraid to come to work today? That I found graffiti painted on my car when I left my office this afternoon?” Frustration morphed to something that sounded like true fear. “Damn it, I don’t want to be on the wrong side of McAllister anymore.”

Erin’s bones went cold. She glared in the direction McAllister had gone, anger and powerlessness colliding in her chest. She couldn’t believe Victor was bailing. He was a friend; he’d stood up with David at their wedding and stuck by her when even David hadn’t. To lose him now, when a sliver of hope glimmered on the horizon…

“One more week, Vict—”

“No,” he said, with a finality she knew was real. He glanced around, as if an assailant might be lurking along the dark edges of the prison yard. “I wish you luck, Erin. Really, I do. But I’ve got a wife, kids. I’m finished.”

He turned away and Erin snagged his arm. “Wait,” she said. Tears came in a flash. “Did you see him? Did he see you?”

“I saw him, through the one-way window. He didn’t see me.”

“A-and?”

“He’s thin but strong; his hair’s long again. He looks—He looks okay.” Victor put up a hand before she could ask more. “Don’t picture the details, Erin. It won’t help.”

He headed for the parking lot and Erin looked at the stone sprawl of buildings that made up the Florida State
Prison, forcing herself to visualize Justin no longer strapped to a gurney with IVs in his veins and witnesses watching through one-way glass. She closed her eyes. Picture him in his cell, no IVs, sitting up. Alive.

She pulled out a copy of the Internet picture she’d given to Victor three days ago. It was too dark to see the details, but they were emblazoned in her memory: a large, scenic inn in rural Ohio, with a folksy Pennsylvania Dutch pineapple stenciled on a sign that said W
ELCOME TO
H
ILLTOP
H
OUSE
. It did indeed appear to be set on a hill, surrounded by sprawling yew and chesty oak trees, with a whitewashed porch and homey ferns hanging at even intervals. Along the front walkway, ceramic sculptures of a girl and boy waded through beds of coreopsis and snapdragons. And on the front steps of the inn, the proprietor leaned against the porch railing with a caption that read, O
WNER
: J
ACK
C
ALLOWAY
.

Erin didn’t think so. This had to be Huggins. Even if the photo was too distant to see his eye color, even if there were thousands of men of his age and build, even if it were true that everyone had a lookalike somewhere in the world, those two ceramic sculptures in the garden gave it away. Erin would swear Huggins’s wife had made those.

The adrenaline that had sustained her for the past three days leaked from her limbs. She tucked away the picture, then put a finger to her lips and breathed a kiss and a promise toward the prison. She started for the parking lot. A security guard muttered “ ’Night, miss” as he pushed the various buttons that swung the final gate open and closed behind her. She headed across the pavement toward her car, fifty yards away, and squinted when she glimpsed a straggling figure standing in the far corner of the lot. A woman, she realized, the silhouette of a
long, flowing skirt moving as the figure scurried into the darkness.

Mrs. McAllister? She glanced around. The skirt was right, but the senator’s entourage was gone. Bitterness rose to Erin’s throat: just one more gawker. Executions were good entertainment.

A raindrop hit her cheek and she looked up. A thin smile of moon slipped out from behind a cloud, mocking her, the same moon that looked down just now on John Huggins a thousand miles away. Hopewell, Ohio. A small town with a quaint bed-and-breakfast and a no-nonsense sheriff. Online, it had all the earmarks of a Norman Rockwell painting, a place so peaceful people probably didn’t even lock their doors. The perfect haven for a murderer.

Not anymore.

Determination straightened Erin’s spine. She did the math: a five-hour drive back to Miami, put her caseload on hold, pack a bag. She could be in Ohio by tomorrow afternoon. Erin knew the way authorities worked. No way would she leave her brother’s life to some sheriff who wouldn’t care whether he lived or died, and if Victor wasn’t going to help her anymore, then she’d do it alone. God knows, she’d learned how to fight her own battles when she was sixteen years old.

An engine turned over. Erin jumped; she hadn’t noticed another vehicle. She glanced around. Nothing. Just the hum of an engine somewhere in the darkness.

Her pulse kicked up and she clicked her key fob—twice, three times—but her car was still too far away to read the signal. The engine grew louder and she picked up her pace, her skin pulling into goose bumps. She looked behind her. Darkness, but instinct pushed her to start jogging, her fingers frantically working the key fob to her car.
Finally, her headlights blinked but the phantom engine drew nearer. Two columns of lights swept across her back.

She veered right, running now, the headlights bearing down. She glanced over her shoulder and winced, blinded by the glare. The white disks barreled in, the car coming fast. She lunged for the fence and tried to scream to the guard.

The sound never came.

Thursday, November 8

Hopewell, Ohio

11:58 p.m.

M
IDNIGHT,
a silver of moon hanging over the rooftops and a couple of chimneys still breathing into the air. It was a settled neighborhood, the kind grown comfortable with squeaky screen doors and broken sidewalks. The kind that leeched kids into the streets on Saturday mornings and where folks let themselves into the house next door to borrow an egg. The kind whose residents would be seen on tomorrow morning’s news, white-faced, saying, “We never thought something like this could happen here…”

The Angelmaker sat in a new Ford F-150, munching saltines, keeping track as the last few night owls turned in. A couple of houses down the street, the Richardsons’ front door cracked open to swallow a howling cat. A half-block behind the truck, the lights of Yaeger’s television snapped to black. And at the end of the street, where a
single light burned in the front window, Rebecca Engel stepped out onto the porch.

The Angelmaker stopped chewing.
Rebecca
. Right there, just yards away, and alone. She was one of the chosen ones—able to see things she shouldn’t—yet there she was, oblivious to the fact that she was about to die.

She dropped down the front porch steps, hunching into her coat and throwing a scarf around her face to ward off the sleet. She climbed into an old Camry and headed east, then north out of town. The Angelmaker followed, headlights picking out thin veins of fog. Easy now. No need to hang too close—there was no doubt where she was going. She’d be headed to Ace Holmes’s place, twenty miles out on County Road 219, just over the Hopewell County line. The middle of nowhere.

Perfect.

Rebecca’s car led the way for fifteen minutes, then the Angelmaker hustled around back roads and jumped ahead, got back on 219 and nosed the big Ford halfway across the double yellow line. Parked and popped the hood to wait. Two minutes after the truck was in position, the Camry’s headlights pierced the mist.

Rebecca neared, slowing her car. Blood rushing now, the Angelmaker got out and circled the truck, exhaust fumes rousing a cough. It was a nice touch: a lone driver stranded at night in the cold, hacking up a lung…

The Camry rolled closer, unable to pass, and the driver’s side window cracked an inch. The Angelmaker’s fingers tightened around a stun gun, a surge of power flooding in. Such a simple device: plastic-cum-mother-of-pearl, one hundred thousand volts, seventy-five bucks on the Internet. It was no bigger than a cell phone, no louder than
a whisper, and for twelve years now, all it had ever needed was a couple of three-volt lithium batteries.

“Rebecca.” Use her name, take away that edge of natural fear.

Her window slid open a little farther—just a few inches, but enough for the stun gun. The Angelmaker stepped closer. “Rebecca, I need help. I need a phone. Do you have a phone?”

“What?” she said. Cautious, but not overly fearful.

“Rebecca.”

“I’m not…”

Another cough. “P-please, a phone.”

“Hold on.” She cranked the car into park and twisted toward the passenger seat to find her phone. The Angelmaker reached in.
Pzzt.
The stun gun sizzled against her shoulder.

Rebecca collapsed.

Now time surged forward, racing as if God had pushed a button on a remote. Move, move. Ditch the car, get the truck turned around and get Rebecca home and into the workshop. So much to do—the transformation, the possession, the preservation—and the clock started running from the first shock of the stun gun.

The Angelmaker opened the driver’s side door and Rebecca lolled sideways, hanging half out onto the pavement. A click of the seat belt released her and she tumbled to the ground, a baffled
uhhhh
vibrating in her throat and the scarf dragging from her face. She was a pretty girl, but wore too much makeup. Always caked on like—

The Angelmaker froze. What? The girl’s face glowed in the truck’s headlights.

Rebecca?

No.

Panic leaked in. This wasn’t right, this wasn’t right. Who was this girl? Not Rebecca. This girl was a stranger, a nobody. She was
nothing.

Shock hardened to sheer rage. Stupid,
stupid
girl. Goddamn, stupid bitch, pretending to be Rebecca—

Her arm moved, trying to fight the leaden state brought on by the stun gun.
No.
The Angelmaker swallowed back a primordial scream, hooked a foot beneath her ribcage and shoved. Her body rotated half a turn. Again, another half-turn, and again and again, and five kicks later, gravity took over and rolled her into the gully along the road. She groaned and the Angelmaker followed, dropped a knee into the middle of her back and straight-armed her face—that
wrong
face—into the mud, pressing down on the back of her head and neck. The girl who wasn’t Rebecca gasped for air, sucking rain and wet clay up into her nostrils. Her sinuses filled with mud and her lungs seized and the Angelmaker held tight, muscles screaming with tension while the girl made a series of wet, rasping sounds, jerked, then went limp.

Bitch. Stupid girl. Wrong girl. How dare she?

The Angelmaker staggered out of the ditch, panting. The wrong girl lay dead in the mud. Not Rebecca. A nobody.

The magnitude of that error clenched inside, and the weight of failure bore down like a hand from heaven, pushing, pushing. The Angelmaker fought the invisible weight, tapping every last ounce of strength, and looked up at the sky.

The sight set every bone to shaking: The moon was smiling.

The dream was the same as always—a three-year-old boy hiding in a cardboard box while his mother lay in a
Dumpster, choking on the fragments of her own hyoid bone—except this time the phone cut in. Nick Mann jolted from bed, reaching for his gun and the phone in one motion, then stood by the bed blinking details of the here-and-now into focus. Thursday night. Friday morning, really. The house was empty, the clock on the nightstand punching red numbers into the darkness: three-sixteen a.m.

The phone rang again and Nick frowned. Eight deputies had the overnight shift. If a call was coming through in the middle of the night—

His gut tightened and he grabbed the phone. “Yeah,” he said, trying to holster the gun. No place to put it. He was wearing SpongeBob pajama bottoms.

“Sheriff.” The dispatcher’s voice vibrated with tension. “Jensen just took a call at LeeAnn Davis’s out on Pine Lake Road. There’s an intruder in the house.”