The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (11 page)

“No!” Kimberlain screamed down, but it was too late.

Automatic fire echoed from three floors down. Screams of pain and death followed instantly. The ill-prepared policemen had been dropped in their tracks. No more would follow for a while now. The killer had what he wanted.

Kimberlain scrambled up to the fifth floor and stopped inside an open space the size of four unfinished rooms. Huge table and band saws rested atop massive piles of sawdust, the residue of the most recently completed work. Too bad they were too bulky to hoist and use as weapons.

That thought gave him a idea. He dragged a table saw closer to the doorway he had passed through and covered the blade with handfuls of sawdust. Next he made sure the plug was out and flipped the power switch to ON. Then he scampered to the electrical outlet the plug rested by and had just reached it when the footsteps of his adversary could be heard down what would eventually be a corridor.

Kimberlain glimpsed the figure passing into the darkness, the meager light in the hallway just a memory. He continued to glide forward warily, machine gun sweeping before him. His steps made a swishing sound as they grazed over the construction debris layering the floor. Kimberlain counted the seconds until he would cross through the doorway near the table saw.

The killer had drawn up even with the saw when the Ferryman jammed the plug back into the socket. The table saw spun with a grinding wail, coughing the sawdust away from it in waves that crested in all directions. The gunman maintained the presence of mind to bring only one hand up to his ravaged eyes, while the second stayed on the machine gun. But Kimberlain was in motion by then.

The gunman saw him at last and brought the gun round. Kimberlain locked a hand on its stock and forced it down. The clip drained into the floor, as his other fist slammed into the man’s jaw. The Ferryman felt the teeth give and jaw retract. The man gasped and uttered a scream inaudible beneath the constant raging of the saw.

The gunman gave up on the machine gun and whirled in against Kimberlain. The two were equal in size and, as Kimberlain discovered, in strength, too. Locked against each other, they twisted across the floor in a bizarre pirouette. Kimberlain continued to pound the assailant’s face, but had his ribs thrashed in return. He felt his feet teeter on the edge of a rectangular cutout in the floor where someday a stairway would descend. In the haze of semidarkness, the assailant tried to thrust him over the side, but Kimberlain twisted and slammed the man backward into the nearest wall.

The entire structure seemed to quiver. The assailant took the full brunt of the impact and spun away from the wall, the Ferryman’s control over him gone. Kimberlain turned from one blow, but a second pounded his kidney and a third buckled his knee.

The pain sent electric shocks through him. Kimberlain righted his balance and kicked out with his legs, but another blow hammered the rear of his head. Then he was being slammed forward, directed toward another wall, he thought, until he saw the still-churning table saw.

His hands grasped the table and held just before his face met steel. His nose flirted with the spinning saw, oil and more remnants of the sawdust spitting up into his eyes. The assailant shoved onward, sensing the kill now. It took all the strength the Ferryman could muster just to hold his ground, and this left his position virtually indefensible. He couldn’t maintain the stalemate for much longer. A precarious shift in position was his only hope.

Kimberlain spun his entire body around in a sudden motion. Face to face with his assailant now, his arms jammed into the man’s shoulders. The man shoved hard, and the back of the Ferryman’s head flirted with the spinning blade. Dead eyes glared at him, hands struggling to summon enough strength to force him the rest of way down.

Kimberlain jabbed his right arm into the assailant’s windpipe, found his Adam’s apple, and squeezed. The man gave ground backward, which allowed Kimberlain to sweep his left hand toward the saw’s on-off switch.

Click
.

The assailant’s savage, enraged thrust wedged Kimberlain against the blade just as it spun to a halt. The Ferryman twisted his Adam’s apple some more.

The man wailed and hoisted Kimberlain upright. The Ferryman went with the motion. The assailant probably thought he had him, right up until Kimberlain’s hands locked onto him, grabbing hold of his lapels with both hands as the momentum brought him forward. Still holding fast, Kimberlain ducked down and jammed his own shoulders against the plywood floor with a foot wedged in the man’s midsection. The assailant could do nothing to thwart the maneuver, and he was pitched airborne. He twisted to brace for the fall and then realized too late that he was heading for the empty hole where the stairwell was to be. His arms flailed desperately for something to grab but came up empty. His scream split the night, ending with a thud six floors below.

With the screech of more police sirens drawing ever closer, Kimberlain slid toward a rear exit and escape.

He called Talley’s number from a pay phone in a café a half mile south at the corner of Brook and Wickenden streets.

“Problems, Lauren,” he said as soon as she came on.

“Are you still in Providence?”

“At Brown, more or less.”

“Leeds?”

“Not exactly.” Kimberlain detailed in rapid fashion what had happened.

Lauren Talley accepted it all calmly. “I’ll have agents from our Boston office there in an hour. They’ll use discretion.”

“Tell them not to bother.”

“Can you get to the airport?”

“Soon as I grab a car.”

“There’s a plane leaving for Atlanta in thirty minutes. I’ll have them hold it until you get there. Go right to the gate. Sorry I can’t send the Lear.”

“I suppose you need it yourself.”

“I don’t want you going to Georgia on your own.”

“I didn’t know I was going at all.”

“We talked about it this morning.”

“I said later, Lauren.”

“And that’s what it is now, Jared.”

Chapter 11

“DAISY, GEORGIA,” LAUREN TALLEY
recited, reading from the yellow legal pad held on her knees. “Population 115.”

“Mostly black,” Kimberlain said from behind the wheel.

“Almost all. Sixteen white residents; thirteen of them comprised three of the town’s nineteen families.”

Kimberlain gripped the wheel tighter. Talley had been waiting at the Savannah International Airport, where a private plane had taken him from Hartsdale. Her rental car was parked on the tarmac, ready for the half-hour drive to Daisy.

“Do you think that means anything?” Talley asked him.

“The ratio in the other town was almost the opposite, but, no, I don’t think race has anything to do with how he’s selecting them.”

“You read the files.”

“Skimmed them.”

“They tell you anything I wasn’t able to?”

“He likes what he does, Ms. Talley.”

“You can keep calling me Lauren, you know.”

But Kimberlain’s mind was otherwise engaged. “This has become a game for him, a challenge—maybe the ultimate challenge.”

“How so?”

“Killing so many without being seen and leaving so little time in between his strikes. The others I’ve gone after, even Leeds and Peet, were tacticians, strategists. Every move they made had a method to it leading toward a definitive end, however repulsive. But Tiny Tim could be in this strictly for sport. Contemplation of the act and then reflection back on it isn’t enough for him, like it is for the others I’ve dealt with. Either his appetite for killing is insatiable, or …”

“Or what?”

“Something about the way he’s choosing the towns necessitates that he hit them with as brief an interlude as possible.”

“Because he’s afraid of being caught or wants to be caught?”

Kimberlain eyed her tensely. “That’s the behavioral science profile, isn’t it? Well, I don’t think it fits in this case. No, if his targets aren’t random, he’s got a very logical rationale for not spacing out his strikes.”

“And if they are random?”

“Then maybe he opens to a page in a road atlas of the nation. Maybe throws darts at a map. That’ll make it impossible for us to break into his pattern.”

“Meaning?”

“We’ll have to catch him based on what he left behind.”

Daisy came up suddenly in the night. One minute they were on the dark, country road, and the next they were on the main street of a town that would never wake up again. The Georgia Highway Patrol continued to leave a man stationed at both main entry routes twenty-four hours a day to discourage the morbidly curious and tourists with their autofocus 35-millimeter cameras. Lauren Talley flashed her ID, and they were passed through.

“Dixon Springs depended on seasonal skiing for its survival,” she reminded Kimberlain. “But Daisy was a working town. The ones who weren’t farmers drove maybe twenty, thirty miles to their jobs.” They were proceeding down Main Street. “Some of the houses are pretty isolated. Nice view of the mountains and a lake during the day. He started with those.”

Talley slowed the car to a crawl. On her right was a restaurant-bar called Belle’s. A municipal building containing the post office, sheriff’s substation, and bank lay directly across the street. There was a general store and livery. Between them stood a few small specialty shops that had catered more to outsiders and those passing through off the highway. There was a rooming house above what had been another restaurant. But Kimberlain could tell it had been boarded up even before Tiny Tim paid Daisy a visit.

A cool breeze greeted them when they stepped out of the car. Unseen shutters flapped in the night. Somewhere a stray door was creaking open and closed. The Ferryman moved toward the entrance to Belle’s and stopped at the yellow
DO NOT CROSS
tape.

“How many?” he asked.

Talley consulted her legal pad, raising it close to her eyes to read the writing in the dark. “Five, including one bartender. The cook had already gone home. He doesn’t live in Daisy. We don’t know whether Tiny Tim killed them first or last be—”

“First,” said Kimberlain.

“Why?”

“Because they were regulars and he knew they would be there, just as he knew they represented his greatest threat. The phones weren’t dead, were they?”

Talley went back to her legal pad, flipping pages. “In Dixon Springs yes, but not here in Daisy. Too many underground cables, believe it or not.”

“He knew that.”

“Not terribly difficult to ascertain.”

Kimberlain moved a little toward her, gazing down off the porch. “How’d he take the phones out in Dixon Springs?”

“Incoming wires off the line. Three. No,” she added, correcting herself after finding the right page. “Four.”

“He cut any here?”

“No.”

“Not even the ones he could have.”

“I don’t see what—”

“His casing of these towns is more elaborate than you thought. He didn’t bother with the wires in Daisy because he knew the underground cables serviced a good portion of the town. He doesn’t like to waste effort.”

“So he hit the bar first.”

Kimberlain stepped down and walked past her. “And any other areas of congestion where people were still up.”

“It was late, remember. There weren’t many. In fact,” she added after a rapid skim of some pages, “this was the only one.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“People at home would have been watching television, reading, talking on the phone. Maybe they hear or see something, make a call that could put a crimp in Tiny Tim’s plans.”

Talley let the legal pad drop a little. “The randomness … we couldn’t account for it. He gets to the town and he hits one house but doesn’t come back for the others on either side of it for over an hour.”

“He got the houses where people were awake first.”

“How?”

“Let’s take a walk, Lauren, and I’ll show you.”

It was like strolling through a nightmare version of OZ. Instead of following the yellow brick road, they followed the line of yellow
DO NOT CROSS
strip barriers. Some had already given in to the elements and flapped in the wind like party streamers. Talley found she was quite cold, even though Kimberlain had given her his jacket. Even so, the Ferryman looked hot. Sweat had spotted his shirt and soaked it over his midsection. They came to a house that had been among the first Tiny Tim had entered. It was two solid-looking stories. Dull green in need of a paint job, with a walkout basement.

“Parents and two teenage children. Mother was a teacher at the school in Harnell where kids from Daisy are bused. Father owned a filling station on the highway,” Lauren Talley read from her pad. “All awake at the time of entry. Three silenced bullets for each. None of them struggled. Blinds were drawn. We don’t think he could have seen much from outside.”

“Sight had nothing to with it.”

“You said he knew they were awake when he made his pass by.”

“Not because of what he saw; it was what he heard.”

Talley was looking at him very closely now. She followed him around to the side of the house and a window well off the ground.

“You find any of his boot imprints here?” he asked her.

She had to check the legal pad and looked surprised at what she found. “Yes. Just about where you’re standing. But he couldn’t have heard enough to—”

“Not with the naked ear. He had help.” Kimberlain stretched his hand toward the window. “Brought a listening device with him. Attach it to the window with a suction cup and it would be like he was in the same room as anyone talking.”

“Suction cup,” repeated Talley, realizing. “He might have licked it.”

“Almost surely. It’s been how long now?”

“Three days.”

“Traces?”

“Maybe still present. He couldn’t have wiped all the secretions off the glass. I guess it depends on how much moisture’s been in the air since. I’ll have the lab here by morning to find out.” She paused. “How could we miss this?”

“Watch,” Kimberlain told her. He stretched to the tips of his toes and still could barely touch the glass of the window. “I’m almost six-two. Whoever used that suction cup has to be at least six, probably closer to eight inches taller.”