The Burning Man (19 page)

It was like a ruin of an ancient civilization—one that practiced human sacrifice. A dark, brooding place haunted by evil memories. Only one of those bad memories had come back to life, and was waiting for her inside.

Olivia crept up the porch stairs, avoiding that third step without even thinking about it. The front door had been padlocked at some point, but the lock was gone, the rusty hasp left hanging and empty. She cautiously reached out to push it open, half expecting to see her nine-year-old self standing on the other side of the door with a gun.

She didn’t of course. All she saw was a dim, empty, and squalid room. The layout was just as she remembered it. To the left, the archway leading into the now-empty kitchen. In the back, the door to the downstairs bathroom and the stairs up to the second floor. Someone had started a half-assed tag on the right hand wall, but had either been caught or just lost interest before he finished. In the far corner was a soggy pile of discarded clothes and newspapers, all wet from spilled beer and urine and something else.

Blood.

She took a reluctant step closer to what she had first mistaken for a pile of dirty clothes. That was when she spotted a gaudy fake-gold glint in the pile. A woman’s earring.

She was looking at a corpse. And not just any corpse, but the corpse of the homeless man from her waking nightmare. His head was tipped too far back, dust and clumps of hair sticking to the clotted slash in his grubby throat. The cloudy surfaces of his wide-open eyes were also dusty, and something about that seemingly minor fact made it so awful and so real. It made him seem so much more dead than the ugly gash in his throat.

If you were alive,
she thought,
you would blink and wipe the dust from your eyes.

Olivia felt a rush of nauseous revulsion as she took an involuntary step back, her hand flying up to cover her mouth. She always assumed, naturally, that she would eventually encounter dead bodies—both in the military and in her career as an FBI agent. She had always felt sure that she would be able to handle it with calm, reserved professionalism.

Now that she was actually confronted with a real corpse for the first time, she was repulsed, and appalled at her squeamish, girly response.

Get it together, Olivia
, she silently told herself.
This is just part of the job. It’s just part of the job.

She forced herself to think—not about the dead man, but about his killer. To shut down her natural disgust and look at the body as a clue, instead of a person.

The man’s throat had been cut, so clearly the killer had a knife. Of course, that didn’t mean he wasn’t carrying other weapons, but she knew that at the very least, she’d be dealing with some kind of bladed weapon. The cut was clean and decisive, the work of a person who had done this before. It made her realize how totally out of her league she was.

Just because she’d been able to get the drop on him once before, hitting him with the car door outside the police station, she’d let herself get cocky. Now reality was starting to sink in. She was an unarmed sixteen-year-old girl going up against a violent and disturbed adult with law enforcement training and a clear lack of remorse.

She had no gun.

She had no plan.

All she had was her wits and her ferocious love for her little sister. She was smart and level-headed, and willing to do anything to save Rachel. It had to be enough. She couldn’t let herself be intimidated into giving up.

All she could do was keep focusing on Rachel. Whatever happened, even if she had to trade her own life for her sister, she had to make sure that Rachel was safe.

In the process of fighting through this raging inner battle with herself, Olivia had put her inexplicable waking nightmare out of her mind. Instead of dwelling on the corpse, she made herself search slowly and meticulously through the first floor.

No sign of the killer—or Rachel.

Then she heard a cry that sounded almost like a baby, followed by a quick scuffle coming from upstairs. Her head whipped around toward the sound.

“I’m here!” she called, climbing up the first couple of stairs, fighting to keep her voice strong and steady. “I’m here to give myself up—now let Rachel go.”

There was a muffled, mewling sound that made her think that Rachel might be gagged. Then she heard the bastard’s voice.

“Why don’t you come up and join us?” he asked, as if she was an old friend who had just popped in for a visit.

“Send Rachel down first,” she said. “I want to see my sister.”

“She’s fine,” he replied. “Why don’t you come on up and see for yourself?”

She didn’t answer, and took a deep breath, marshalling her courage. He could be waiting up there with a gun, ready to blow her brains out as soon as she was in range. But Olivia knew that she didn’t have a choice. Somehow, she managed to keep her feet moving, and climbed the rest of those creaky old stairs.

At the top was a small landing with three doors. To her left was the first one, which led to the upstairs bathroom—a cramped and windowless space that had been young Olivia’s sanctuary. The only door in the house with a lock, where she could sit in the bathtub with a book and be safe from Randall, even if only for a few fleeting minutes at a time.

Now the doorknob was gone, along with the lock, leaving a round hole in the splintered door. She toed the door open and peered into the dark space. She was pretty sure it was unoccupied, but the unbearable stench that wafted out was enough to discourage further investigation.

She quickly recoiled and let the door swing shut.

That left the two bedrooms. The doors were side by side on the other end of the L-shaped landing. On the left was the narrow room she’d shared with Rachel. It was so small that when their cheap, white metal trundle bed was open at night, it took up more than half of the floor space. They couldn’t get into their closet while Rachel’s bed was out, so they had to slide it back underneath Olivia’s bed every morning so they could get ready for school.

She pressed her ear against the door. Silence. But she couldn’t hear any sounds coming from the other room either. Why wasn’t Rachel making any noise? Was she okay? Olivia reached out an unsteady hand to push the door to her old bedroom open.

No one was inside. Just an old, black-laminate dresser with no drawers, tipped over on its back. The room looked half the size of what it was in her memory, like a prison cell. Under the broken window was a large water stain on the grubby carpet, where rain had blown in.

That left only one last option. The larger master bedroom on the right. Randall’s lair.

Many were the times the sisters had been forced to tiptoe around the entrance to that sinister cave, for fear of waking the hungover dragon. If they made even the softest sounds before he was ready to wake up, there would be hell to pay. On weekends, the girls would have to sit silently in their room until well after noon. Olivia vividly remembered a Sunday morning, just a few weeks before the shooting, when Rachel had wet her pants because she was too scared to walk past Randall’s door to get to the bathroom.

It made a terrible kind of sense that Olivia would be forced to confront this monster from her past inside the abandoned lair of another.

Suddenly, she was overwhelmed by the strangest feeling of timelines intertwining, of who she used to be, who she was in this moment, and who she would be once she pushed that door open. Pathways intersecting and melding together. She paused for a moment with her palm against the door, fighting to slow her breathing and heart rate.

To clear her head. To forget about the past and the future and concentrate on
now
.

She pushed the door open.

Inside Randall’s old room, backlit and silhouetted against the dusty window, stood the one-armed cop.

He had Rachel kneeling in front of him with duct tape over her mouth. Her eyes were red and puffy and her nostrils flared with rapid, frightened breaths. Her hair was a stringy, tangled mess, several wispy tendrils stuck under the right side of the tape. She was dressed strangely in ill-fitting pink polyester slacks and a blue T-shirt featuring a Persian kitten in a flower pot. On her feet were clunky brown orthopedic shoes.

She was cradling a little black girl in her arms. A toddler around two years old in a pink T-shirt and a diaper.

But Olivia’s attention immediately locked onto the most important detail.

There was a sinister black knife blade at Rachel’s throat, forcing her chin to tip up and back.

It took a second for Olivia to realize that the onearmed cop wasn’t actually holding the knife. He’d replaced the hook on his prosthetic arm with this wicked-looking blade.

“Rachel,” she cried, taking a step toward her sister. She glared at the cop. “Let her and the baby go, you bastard!”

“That’s close enough,” he said, pressing the blade harder against Rachel’s dirty, vulnerable throat.

Rachel let out a tiny muffled whimper, and her eyes went huge. In her arms, the baby started crying.

“Look,” Olivia said, palms held up and out. “I did what you told me to do. I’m here. Alone. Now you have to honor your end of the bargain.”

The cop stuck his good hand in his pocket and dug around for a second, then pulled out a red bandana. He balled it up and tossed it to Olivia, who caught it against her chest.

“Tie that around your eyes,” he said. “And no tricks. I can tell.”

Olivia looked down at Rachel—who was pleading silently with her eyes—and then back up at the smirking cop.

“Then you’ll let my sister go?” she asked.

“Then I’ll let your sister go,” he replied.

Olivia frowned down at the bandana. It wasn’t very clean. She shook it out and then folded it over a few times until it was a flat, wide strip. Holding the ends of the strip in each hand she raised it to the level of her chin.

“Okay, let her go,” she said.

“Not until your eyes are covered,” he said. “Take your time. We’ve got all day.”

Olivia cast one last glance at Rachel, then tied the soiled bandana as he had demanded.

“Now put your hands behind your back,” the cop said.

Olivia did what he asked, fists clenching against the small of her back and teeth clenched hard enough to crack.

The toddler continued to wail, making it difficult for her to hear anything else that was happening.

“Shut that damn baby up, Rachel,” he snapped.

Olivia could hear her sister making muffled soothing sounds, trying to comfort the little girl. Whose baby was that, anyway, and why did Rachel have her in the first place?

It didn’t matter. Olivia wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to the baby
or
her sister.

“Let them go,” she said, her voice tight.

The baby stopped crying.

Nothing happened for several seconds. She strained her ears, listening, and thought she heard soft footsteps to her left, but couldn’t be sure. Then the cop spoke up again and he was suddenly so close that Olivia could feel his rank breath on her cheek. She jumped, startled, but managed to hold her position.

“I just did,” he said. “Or did I?”

“Rachel?” Olivia called, frowning. “Rach, are you still here?”

No reply. Had he let Rachel and the baby go, or silently slit her throat and left her to bleed to death, just inches away from Olivia’s feet? Her hands flew up to the bandana, but froze when she felt the point of his blade against the hollow beneath her right ear.

“No cheating,” he whispered.

Olivia dropped her hands and put them slowly behind her back. She had managed to get herself into the worst possible position. While she’d already resigned herself to doing whatever it took to save Rachel— including risking her own life—here she was in a totally helpless situation with no idea if Rachel was safe or not.

How could she have let things go so wrong?

* * *

Tony couldn’t help prolonging the moment as much as possible. He’d waited seven long years—a lifetime it seemed—to have this special moment with Olivia.

As soon as she’d blindfolded herself, he’d hustled Rachel out the door, shooing her like an annoying pet. She stayed silent, as she’d agreed, and had taken the baby. From there, she was free to stay in the house or run away screaming. Tony didn’t care one way or the other. He had everything that he wanted in that room.

He reluctantly stepped away from the blindfolded demon girl and bent down to retrieve a claw hammer he’d stashed off to the side. He smiled and raised the hammer above his head.

Olivia had her blind face tipped up and slightly to the right, her lower lip caught between her teeth. The temptation to touch her soft, slender neck was almost overwhelming. He didn’t want this special moment to end, but he knew he had no choice.

Shooting her would be far too impersonal, and too quick to be satisfying. So he’d decided to knock her unconscious, so she wouldn’t be able to burn him with her hellish powers. Then he would cut her throat while she was out of it. Watch the life drain out of her.

He was about to strike, when he was overwhelmed by an epiphany so staggeringly profound that he nearly dropped the hammer.

He realized in that moment that from the very start, his thinking had been all wrong. Suddenly, he knew that, in seeking simply to end her life, he’d been circumnavigating his own destiny.

Tony let the hammer drop to the floor and put his good arm around the demoness, pinning her arms to her side and pulling her to him. She resisted, but he outweighed her by a good measure. Then he used the blade on his prosthetic arm to cut the bandana from her face.

He needed to be able to see her eyes.

“Burn me,” he whispered. “Burn us both.”

* * *

Olivia struggled against the sick cop’s sweaty embrace, twisting her face away from him and squinting against the flood of light that streamed in through the filthy window.

“Burn me,” he whispered. “Burn us both.”

She had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, but his words brought back terrible, vivid memories of the night the house had caught fire. The night she shot Randall.