Michael Prescott: Next Victim

And just a few minutes ago, when she’d raised the possibility that Hayde was a red herring, Michaelson had practically gone apeshit.

Proof? No. But Wait.

She had opened the second-to-last URL. This one was different from the others. Not a diary or a record review. Evidently a public library in New Mexico had gone to the trouble of electronically scanning old newspapers into digital files and posting them on the Web.

What she had opened was the front page of the September 21, 1968, edition of the Albuquerque Tribune, datelined Alcomita, New Mexico.

The headline read: "WIPE OUT" IN ALCOMITA HOJO’S.

She skimmed the article. A woman, Melinda Beckett, had abducted her eight-year-old son and driven him from Casper, Wyoming, to New Mexico. A standoff with sheriff’s deputies had ended with Melinda’s suicide-and with the attempted murder of her son.

Her eight-year-old son…in 1968…

The boy would be in his early forties now.

The right age for Mobius.

And for Michaelson.

She read further. Deputies said the woman had been playing the song "Wipe Out" over and over on a portable phonograph. An eight-track tape containing the song had been found in her car.

"Wipe Out." Violent death. Insanity. A traumatized boy.

It was coming together.

But was the boy Michaelson? Or was he Hayde?

The article gave no further information. Details about the child apparently had been withheld to protect his privacy.

She opened the last URL and found that it was part of the same Web site. A later edition of the Tribune, containing a follow-up to the "Wipe Out" case.

The boy, near death, had been revived in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. After extensive surgery and therapy, he was said to be okay. His name still wasn’t given.

But there was a photo.

It showed the boy as he’d looked on the day of the standoff, when he was carried into the hospital on a stretcher. His face was turned toward the photographer, and the strong southwestern sun lit the planes of his cheeks and brought out the sharpness of his staring eyes.

His eyes…

In three decades, everything about that boy had changed-except his eyes.

They were eyes she had seen before.

Not William Hayde’s eyes.

And not Michaelson’s, either.

She turned, half rising from her chair, knowing only that she had to get help, she was in danger-they were all in danger-and then he was there, filling the doorway, the knife in his hand.

He looked at the computer screen, then at Tess, and he smiled.

"Wipe out," Andrus said.

The knife came at her fast. She threw herself away from the desk and hit the floor, rolling. Her gun-she needed her gun In her purse.

On the desk.

Out of reach.

She thought about shouting for help, but Andrus had already kicked the door shut, and she knew her voice would never carry far enough to be heard in the main room over the bedlam of conversation.

Andrus was closing in.

She kicked out with both legs, connecting with the desk chair to send it rolling on its casters. The chair banged into Andrus’s knees. He pushed it aside, and by then she was on her feet. She grabbed for her purse, but he was too quick, almost intercepting her hand with his knife, and she had to retreat. She backed away as he advanced. The office was small, and the only exit was the door behind him, the door he had closed.

No way out.

"Gerry…" She could try to reason with him.

Didn’t work. The knife sprang at her again. She dodged sideways, evading the blow, but now she was trapped in a corner, with the file cabinet on one side and a blank wall on the other, Andrus drawing near.

He was tall. She had never realized how tall. In all the time they’d worked together in Denver…

Denver.

He’d been right there during the Mobius killings. And when he’d left town, the killings had stopped.

She should have seen it. Somehow she should have known.

The knife again. Circling toward her. She yanked out the top drawer of the file cabinet, blocking Andrus’s reach. He banged his wrist on the metal drawer and jerked his hand back, then jabbed at her underneath the drawer. He was quick; the strike just missed, the knife blurring past her midsection and driving into the wall. It was caught there, imbedded in the drywall that separated this office from the one next door.

She dived to the floor and snap-rolled past Andrus, or tried to, but he grabbed her by the hair. Sizzles of pain shot through her scalp as he wrenched her backward, and then she was staring up at him as he struggled to work the knife free of the wall, and she knew that once it was loose, he would run the blade across her throat.

His gun rode in his waistband holster, just above her. She grabbed at it, tried to wrest it loose. He released her hair and snatched her wrist, and she sprang upright, jerking him off balance as she threw her body sideways across the desk, slamming his elbow on the desktop, freeing her wrist from his grip, and now the purse was within reach and she closed her fingers over the strap.

He struck her face with the flat of his hand, a powerful blow that nearly knocked her unconscious, but somehow she held on to the purse and now her hand was inside, groping for the gun.

She curled her forefinger over the trigger and squeezed once, blowing a hole in the handbag.

The gunshot was curiously muffled. The purse had acted as a silencer, absorbing the noise. The dull crack of the gun’s report was a sound in a dream, and only the hard recoil made it real.

Andrus spun. She thought he’d been hit. No, he was pivoting away from her, diving behind the desk, and she knew he would draw his own gun, and in these close quarters the two of them might easily kill each other.

She took cover by the file cabinet, not an ideal position but the only one available.

Then Andrus was up and he fired twice, not aiming. She ducked as plaster showered her. Then the door was open, and Andrus was gone.

He’d fled into the hall. Maybe he was on his way back to the main room, hoping to take out some of the crowd Take out some of the crowd.

She looked at the computer on the desk, still displaying the newspaper story of a traumatized boy who had Gerald Andrus’s eyes.

And she knew.

Mobius had never been interested in the murder of random strangers. He had planted VX on the subway merely to implicate Hayde and give himself cover.

The deaths that mattered to him, the ones that counted, were always traceable to the defining incident in his life, the standoff in 1968, and the way it had ended-with his mother shooting him, then killing herself.

He hated her for what she’d done. Hated all women. Sought to dominate them, to bring them pain, and finally to take their lives.

But not just women. His mother hadn’t acted alone. In his mind, at least, she’d been driven to her final acts of violence-she’d been trapped, cornered-left with no escape except death.

They had done that. The sheriff’s deputies. Men with guns and badges. Officers of the law. Upholders of authority.

He must hate them, too.

All of them.

And now he had a command center crowded with them-windowless, airtight, five stories underground. A full complement of the top law enforcement officers in the city, along with the politicians they reported to.

A crowd of men with guns and badges, men he hated, men he intended to kill.

He hadn’t used most of the VX. He’d been saving it.

For them.

For now.

She had to warn them. No one had come this way, so presumably Andrus’s gunshots had gone unheard in the main room. As for Andrus himself-he was probably on his way out of the command center, leaving his victims to die when the VX was released…if it hadn’t been released already.