A Darker Place Page 8

  Three years went by after that last cold hospital conversation, three years and seven months before the Friday afternoon when he picked up a letter from his desk and saw, in the instantly familiar handwriting, the terse message off the fax machine:

  Glen—I must talk to you.

  Anne

  He did not hesitate—or at least not more than an hour or two. She was not at home or in her office, but when he reached the departmental steno pool, the secretary said she was around, and indeed, twenty minutes later he picked up his phone to hear her voice, tight and low.

  “Glen, I have to see you.”

  “That’s what your note said. What’s it about?” He was pleased to hear that his voice sounded calm, professional, normal.

  “Not over the phone. Are you free this weekend?”

  He had not expected this. After a minute he said, “I am, but I have to stay available for an investigation I’m coordinating. I can’t leave town.”

  “I’ll come out,” she said immediately. “Shall we say five o’clock tomorrow? Where shall we meet?”

  Glen offered the name of a restaurant where they had eaten before, but she rejected it.

  “I don’t want to talk in front of waiters. Your office?”

  “How about if I meet you at the airport and we can decide on the way in?”

  She agreed, and called back half an hour later with the flight information, her voice still tight with inexplicable tension. That tension and her refusal to say what it was about had given him a sleepless night, as a parade of possibilities marched through his head, ranging from a bone cancer induced by the injuries to the revelation of a four-year-old child resulting from one of the dusty packets of condoms she had taken from her bedside table.

  This last irrational thought had sent him angrily for the rarely used bottle of scotch, and he gulped down the dose like medicine. No pregnancy could have been concealed during those months of intense medical care, he told himself, and went with spinning head back to bed.

  Her flight was due into Kennedy at three forty-five. At two-thirty, something came up that demanded his attention, or seemed to, and so he sent a driver to meet the plane and take her to her hotel. Finally, at six, he had to admit that the need for his immediate presence was long over, and he phoned her room to suggest she meet him down in the hotel restaurant.

  “I’m in Room 546, Glen, just come up. We’ll order room service if you want something.”

  “I, er—”

  “For Christ sake, Glen, I’m not going to eat you. I’m not even going to rape you. Just get here.”

  The phone went dead. Still, she had sounded more businesslike than seductive. She also still sounded tense, almost fierce. He put on his coat and took a taxi to the hotel.

  Glen McCarthy was a pragmatist, and no romantic. He was good at his job; good, too, at allowing the past to fade. However, he had to admit that on the rare occasions when he was ambushed by memories, more often than not they were linked with this strange, damaged woman and the emotionally draining cases she was involved with. Odd things such as the sound of children in a park would jolt him with a palimpsest of horror overlaid with pleasure, a clear image of an array of young bodies, lovingly laid out and murdered by a madman, superimposed by a strong tactile memory of the small mole on Anne’s left breast, a low bump tantalizing to the fingertips, two inches northeast of the nipple.

  He was hit by such a memory as he stood in the anonymous hallway of the New York hotel, a vivid picture from the days when he was trying hard to shape her into some semblance of a law enforcement professional, driven by the uncertainty of what the hell he thought he was doing and the fear of how utterly unprepared she was for the position in which he proposed to put her. He had shouted at her, in doubt and anxiety, that Jesus Christ, you never open a door if you don’t know what’s on the other side. There in the hotel corridor, he saw the tiny dot at the center of the glass eyehole darken as she looked through it. She had not forgotten, he thought in relief, and he was oddly sad that she had not.

  The security bolt rattled, the door opened, and the four-and-a-half-year-old memory of a mole, lodged deep in the skin of his fingertips, flitted through his awareness before retreating again into deep storage.

  “Hello, Anne.”

  “Glen.” She retreated a step and he followed her into the room.

  “Sorry I couldn’t meet you. Something came up. How are you?” He watched her loop the security device back over its knob and then limp over to the chairs by the window.

  “Not bad. With cortisone injections and a knee brace I can almost do an eleven-minute mile, but I hate the brace and the shots, and in the end I decided to make the limp a part of my new persona. I even carry a cane. You want a drink?” The room had a tiny locked refrigerator filled with tiny expensive bottles, but a normal-sized bottle of a California zinfandel stood uncorked on top of the desk and Glen told her he would have some of that. She stripped a glass of its sanitary wrapping, poured it half full, and raised her own glass in a toast.

  “You look well,” she said. “You’ve lost some weight.”

  “I’ve been working out. How was your flight?”

  “Lousy.” She put down her glass and reached over to the desk. “I have something I want you to look at.”

  To his astonishment and dismay, when her hand came back it was holding out a manila envelope, the same kind of envelope she herself had received from him three times now. He took it reluctantly, studying her face for clues, but she got up and went to stand looking out of the window at the traffic and buildings. Her hair was beginning to go gray, he noticed, but it curled gently down between her shoulder blades, still looking thick and very touchable.

  Abruptly, he bent to tear open the envelope. With one glance at the top clipping his heart tried simultaneously to sink and speed up.

  Martin Cranmer. One of a number of midwest messiahs, there was a growing file on him in Glen’s own office cabinets, including this very clipping. In the photograph, Cranmer was surrounded by the children of the school that he had just donated to the nearby town, there in the Kansas wheat fields. The school was built with his money and the labor of his followers, staffed by fully qualified volunteer teachers from the huge, heavily fenced farm where they all lived, a community outreach project that saved the local children an hour-long bus ride to the next nearest school, a noble gesture that got his picture in the weekly paper and reduced the anxiety level of the suspicious local farmers by a great deal.

  McCarthy, when the action came to his attention, had not been so reassured. Neither, apparently, was Anne Waverly.

  Her file missed some of the material his contained, mostly letters and missives sent out over the growing international computer network. It did, however, contain half a dozen items his lacked, two of which, had they come to his attention earlier (despite being illegally obtained and therefore legally inadmissible) would have upgraded the level of concern over Martin Cranmer’s enterprise a number of notches.

  Three of the pages were photocopies of letters to the editor of the county’s local newspaper, complaints about suspicious activities on the Cranmer farm. They had not been published, an oddity that took on distinctly sinister overtones when coupled with photocopies of six months of a man’s bank statements clipped to an unsigned letter that read:

  Dear Professor Waverly,

  I know I said I couldn’t help you, but I got to thinking, and I don’t like the idea of what may be going on. I won’t go into detail, and I won’t testify or anything, but still, you may be able to use these somehow.

  “Who’s William Denwilling?” Glen asked, reading the name from the checking account statements.

  “The owner and editor of the local paper.”

  Denwilling had received a postal order for five hundred dollars in the middle of each of the months for which there were photocopies. Glen read on.

  The second alarming factor Glen missed at first, because the name on the photocopied obituary, a f
orty-six-year-old farmer killed in an automobile accident, meant nothing to him. However, the next page Anne had included was an assessor’s map with the boundaries of two adjacent properties highlighted: Martin Cranmer’s name was in one, the dead farmer’s in the other. With that, a small bell rang, and Glen leafed back through the file to find that the man had been one of the three residents who had written irate yet unpublished letters to William Denwilling’s newspaper, complaining about problems with their weird neighbors.

  The rest of the file contained no revelations. However, the familiar material, from the harangues across the Web to the stockpiling of foodstuffs, took on a darker meaning with the knowledge of editorial bribery and the death of an outspoken critic.

  He reached the end of the file, folded the earlier pages back, and sat for a moment studying the grainy photo of Cranmer, the smiling, bearded farmer/prophet.

  “There’s very little of this I can use, you know,” he said.

  “You won’t have to if I go in.”

  Even with the evidence of her carefully compiled file in his hand, the blunt offer startled him. He had never expected to use her in anything but an advisory capacity again, and then only as a last resort.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Anne,” he said carefully.

  “Is there anyone else?”

  “We have a couple of—”

  She interrupted. “Anyone as good?”

  He was silent. She turned back from the window then to look at him, and she was smiling.

  “If I don’t do it one more time, I’m going to live the rest of my life with the taste of failure in my mouth. My clumsiness in Utah killed seven people.”

  “Anne, your skill and your willingness to sacrifice yourself saved all the rest of them.”

  “From a situation I put them in.”

  “For Christ sake. Anne, not even you can stop an avalanche. Not even you could second-guess a man like Jeremiah Cotton.”

  “In my head, I know that, Glen. In my gut, I need to try one more time.”

  “And if it happens that this one goes bad?”

  “Well, I guess I’ll just shoot myself,” she said, still smiling.

  “Anne…”

  “I’m joking, Glen. Surely you must know that if I were going to commit suicide, I’d have done it a long time ago. And anyway, this one won’t go bad. We’re early enough with Cranmer, we can certainly defuse him and may even get enough evidence to put him away for a while. Very different from the last time. And a nice, tidy investigation might take your boss’s mind off Waco.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with Waco,” he said quickly.

  “I didn’t think you had.” It was a simple statement, but Glen heard Anne’s faith in his abilities behind it. He looked down at the envelope.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll push a little harder.”

  He had pushed, and Anne had gone in, and in fact, they had been early enough: Cranmer was in prison now for a variety of offenses. However, the night before Anne had gone to Cranmer had not been an easy one. It had taken Glen two hours of concentrated effort to gain Anne’s full and undistracted attention, and he had felt distinctly triumphant when she had fallen asleep afterward. When she came back from Kansas, however, she looked immensely tired and had lost an alarming amount of weight. Besides, she was beginning to make him feel… uneasy. He went through the motions of preparing a new identity for her, but privately he vowed that he would not again pull her into one of his investigations.

  Over the course of his nearly forty years, Glen had been forced to break any number of vows, some of them serious, but never had he gone back on his private word with greater reluctance than with the case that had taken him into Anne Waverly’s lecture hall two weeks before that morning, and into her bed last night. In fact, it was something of a surprise that his reluctance had not manifested itself physically. Perhaps if Anne had not been so… uncontrolled, he might have had time to consider what he was doing and created difficulty for himself, but she had been. God, had she been.

  He only hoped he hadn’t hurt her. Whatever had taken possession of her last night had wanted to be hurt, and although Glen knew full well that wife-beaters and sadists the world around always used that rationalization, in this case he thought it might be true. He even had to wonder if somehow he had known it was going to be that way. A month ago, when he was wrestling with the need to call Anne back into service, he had dreamed: He and Anne were lying together on the rug in front of the downstairs fire, just at that urgent stage between caresses and actual intercourse, when the smooth pink scars scattered across her body, remnants of glass shards and shotgun pellets, had awakened under his touch and begun to move, twitching independently of each other until they opened and became numerous tiny mouths, gaping against the palm of his hand and speaking to him in tiny, insistent voices. He instantly shot awake, revolted by the sick eroticism of the image but so turned on, he had stirred Lisa awake and crawled into her for relief.

  No, Anne had set the tone last night, as she always did in these encounters; he had only responded in kind. And it seemed to do the trick—she was always different after sex, softer and more womanly, and he knew that sex with him had become a part of the process by which she transformed herself into the character he had created for her. Sure, he had felt like he was knifing her last night when he stabbed into her, but she had responded, and that final gasp of pain had even set off her orgasm. And his.

  It was light outside now, and by experience he knew that Anne would soon stir, making a small questioning chirp of a noise in the back of her throat as she half woke to his presence and pressed her back against him. When his rough face had nuzzled its way through her thick hair to the nape of her neck and his fingers located the intriguing mole on her left breast, she would begin to push back with a greater urgency, until after a minute she would-twist around and fling her arms around his neck, and they would drown in each other until it was time to start the day.

  All in all, Glen thought, smiling into the pillow and stiff now against the sheets, a hell of a way to begin an FBI investigation.

  He turned then to reach for her, and sat up abruptly, his smile fading along with his arousal. The other side of the bed was empty.

  CHAPTER 6

  Anne Waverly, PhD

  Duncan Point University, Oregon

  Dear sir,

  As the millenium draws to a close, we must be prepared for a sudden rise in the popularity of apocalyptic teaching and millenarial movements. The search for meaning seizes many disparate and apparently irrational handholds, and signs are seen in comets and calendars and anomalous weather patterns.

  It is absolutely essential, therefore, that we develop a mechanism for communicating with these so-called cultists, a means of understanding their world-views, comprehending their symbolic language, and establishing a common tongue. In a situation involving a difficult, possibly hostile community, the primary act needs to be the establishment of a groundwork for communication between the governmental agencies involved and the religious community, and particularly the leader or leaders. The vocabulary and structure of apocalypticism may at first hearing seem irrational, even mad; however, if one regards it less as a symptom of delusional psychopathology and more as a complex language to be learned, a long step may be made on the road to communication, and an equally large step made back from the inevitability of confrontation. Previous experience has shown that if we can get the religious dynamics of the community under investigation down pat, when the time comes for intervention, armed or not, at least the two sides are able to speak a common language.

  I write, both as a theoretician in the field and as an occasional active participant in investigations, that the FBI Cult Response Team be upgraded, in manpower and in resources. It would be a serious mistake to be taken unawares by a situation we can all see approaching.

  Yours truly,

  Anne M. Waverly, PhD

  Excerpt from a memorandum sent
by Dr. Anne Waverly to the FBI Cult Response Team, undated

  The sudden panic that seized Glen and swept him to the top of the stairway went still with the awareness that someone was moving around down below and that the stairwell was warm from the woodstove. He stood, straining to hear, and abruptly relaxed into a relief that left him feeling queasy: Anne was in the kitchen, making breakfast.

  He stepped back into the bedroom to retrieve the dressing gown she kept in the closet (a man’s, size extra-extra large; he had never asked who had left it there, or who besides himself used it, although he knew that the man—or men—would have a lot of dark hair, a lot of upper-body muscle, and a real attitude). He started to pull it on, then changed his mind and went to take a shower first: If they did have a morning session, Anne might find a clean partner more appealing.

  He showered and washed his hair with her coconut-smelling shampoo, and as the smell of it hit his nostrils, a cold thought shoved itself into his simple contentment. He looked sharply down at his feet, but the drain was clean of hair. He rinsed off and got out of the shower, took a towel from the rack (dry, he noted) and scrubbed at his head and face, shoulders and chest, and then wrapped it around his waist, tucking in the ends even as he was bending to peer into the wastebasket. It held two tissues and a loop of hair pulled out of a hairbrush—not what he was looking for. The tile around the sink was clean, but hanging off the edge he found one hair, perhaps eight inches long. He dropped to his knees, and on the floor he found it: a swatch of perhaps a dozen brown and gray hairs, cut flat on one end. In the drawer were the scissors she had used, with another long hair caught in the hinges. He stood up, curled the hair around his finger, and absently dropped the tuft into the pocket of his borrowed robe. What had he expected? “No changes,” she had told him, and though he didn’t altogether understand it, he knew it always happened.

  Her toothbrush was not in its usual place in the cupboard, but he found the spares in her drawer and added a cellophane wrapper to the contents of the wastebasket so he could greet her with clean breath. He hung up the towel and put on the dressing gown, stuck another condom in the pocket, and pattered downstairs in his bare feet, happily registering the warmth of the woodstove and the smell of coffee emanating from the kitchen.