Paul Johnston - Maps of Hell

“Please, Matt,” she said, her voice breaking. “I…I want you.”

I went over to the bed and picked up her towel. She grabbed mine and pulled it away. Her fingers moved on to my cock, which responded in a way I couldn’t control.

“Mary,” I said, before she locked her lips on mine. Her nipples, large and firm, pressed against my chest. I felt the blood burn in my veins as lust took command. I stopped resisting and fell gently forward. The hairs in her groin crushed against my belly.

“Matt,” she said, the breath catching in her throat, “you know you want this.”

I closed my eyes and let her guide my fingers inside her. She was wet, soft and yielding.

“Oh, Matt…”

And then I saw the other woman, the one I knew I loved. Her hair was spread out around her face and her lips were slightly open. “Matt,” she whispered, her body arching as I entered her, “I…love…you.”

In that instant, her name came to me. Karen, she was Karen. Karen Oaten.

I pulled rapidly away from Mary.

Her eyes sprang wide-open. “Matt? What is it?”

I had grabbed my towel and wrapped it round me again.

Mary stretched forward, but I stepped beyond her reach.

“Please, Matt,” she pleaded. “Tell me…tell me what’s the matter.”

I crashed to my knees, head to the floor. I hadn’t just remembered Karen’s name. I now also knew that she was over five months pregnant, carrying our son. My God-she had disappeared-she was lost. Had they killed her? Great sobs tore out of my chest as I banged my forehead on the thin carpet. I felt Mary’s arms round my shoulders.

“Matt, please…don’t be like this…please…Matt…”

I couldn’t tell her. She couldn’t help me find Karen. She didn’t deserve to be caught up any deeper in my screwed-up world.

“I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes and pulling away from her. “I’m sorry, Mary. I can’t do this. It’s not you, it’s me. I’m sorry…”

I couldn’t look at her as she shrank away. I heard the door close after her. I wiped the back of my arm across my eyes and stood up unsteadily. Karen, I was thinking, Karen, where are you? What’s happened to you? At the back of my mind was the thought that I should get out of the motel now, get down to Washington as soon as I could. There would be leads to follow up-she couldn’t just have vanished into the air. Then I saw images of offices, concerned people, some in suits, some in uniform, and I knew that I’d already followed everything up before I was taken to the camp. There had been no traces of Karen, either in D.C. or in the Shenandoah Valley. She really was lost. But I couldn’t believe she was dead, I couldn’t believe that.

I collapsed on the bed and fell like a stone into the empty darkness.

I woke up with a start. According to the radio clock, it was 5:43 a.m. I stood up, my arms and legs still half-asleep and looked around the room. Then I remembered the night before-Mary, and my remembering Karen.

Pulling on my clothes, I collected the guns. Mary had the pickup keys, but I wasn’t going to deprive her of the vehicle. I would slip away and hitch a lift south. I went to the window and opened a couple of the blind’s plastic strips.

Then froze.

A pair of police cruisers was pulling into the parking lot, their lights off despite the early-morning gloom. I looked to the left and saw Mary standing outside her door. She turned toward me and the cold fury on her face told me immediately that she had betrayed me. In truth, I could hardly blame her.

More police vehicles came into the parking lot. Among them were unmarked cars. All were pointing toward my room. I was caught like a rat in a well-deserved trap.

Peter Sebastian was sitting in his office on the third floor of the Hoover Building. He had spent the night on the sofa there and was now compiling a report on the so-called “occult murders.” The media, especially the evening TV news shows, had gone after the killings from every weird angle they could come up with. There had been theories that Professor Singer had been one of Monsieur Hexie’s customers, that Loki and the Giants were a front for a far-right terrorist organization, and that the killer was a former cult member with a grudge against any and all mystic sources of knowledge and power.

At least the FBI’s involvement with the investigation was behind the scenes and he hadn’t been required to make a statement. That tiresome duty had fallen to MPDC Chief of Detectives Rodney Owen. In front of the cameras, he had been tight-lipped and decidedly non-user-friendly-which was unsurprising, given that his detectives had failed to make any progress with the three murders.

Not that Sebastian blamed them, despite his dislike of “Versace” Pinker. He had checked both detectives’ records and knew that they were as good as anyone under Owen’s command; the chief himself had made sure there were plenty of people backing up Clem Simmons and his partner. The problem was the series of killings itself. Sebastian had the feeling this was one of those once-in-a-lifetime cases-one that either made or broke the careers of the officers. Not that he or Dana Maltravers had been able to make any meaningful contributions. Not even the Bureau’s experts had been any help so far. The truth was, they were up against a meticulous murderer with an impenetrable agenda.

Sebastian got up and poured himself another cup of coffee. He hadn’t eaten anything apart from sandwiches for the past three days and his stomach was giving him hell. Too bad. Like his family, none of whom he’d seen for those three days, his body was going to have to take whatever was thrown at it till the case was solved. He looked at the notes he had made. With Matt Wells out of the frame for the professor’s killing, building a case against him was hard. Sebastian asked himself why he was so sold on the Englishman. The fingerprints at Monsieur Hexie’s place were a solid piece of evidence, but it was hardly conclusive. Okay, the guy was a smart-ass writer with ties to Detective Chief Superintendent Karen Oaten of the Metropolitan Police, and he’d made a lot of money from the book he’d done about the White Devil, but it was hardly his fault that he’d been chosen by that crazy killer as both scribe and victim. Nor was it Wells’s fault that his ex-girlfriend, the one who called herself the Soul Collector, was a multiple murderer.

Still, Sebastian didn’t buy everything about Wells. People who attracted trouble like the Brit had always had something to hide. It seemed likely that Matt Wells knew a lot more about the White Devil and Soul Collector murders in London than he’d disclosed in his book or newspaper columns, and Sebastian had read them all. It could also therefore be expected that he knew plenty about Karen Oaten’s disappearance, as well as Monsieur Hexie’s death. After all, why had he run from the state troopers up in Maine? Why had he still not come forward?

But right now, Peter Sebastian had other problems to deal with. The first was the pressure he was getting from the CIA. He’d been tapped by the Agency when he was in the Bureau’s Puerto Rico field office. They wanted him to keep them advised on his activities. If he hadn’t got himself in a mess with the wife of a local banker who worked for a drug gang, he’d have told them to suck their own dicks. As it was, the monthly deposit had been a big help over the past twenty years. And it wasn’t as if the Agency had ever put him in a tight spot. Until now. They had an even bigger hard-on for Matt Wells than he did. He was beginning to wonder why. Could the disappearances of Karen Oaten and Wells have something to do with his number-two employer? The implications of that thought were making him jumpy. The CIA had a history of going to bed with people you wouldn’t want your mother to meet.