Paul Johnston - Maps of Hell

Then there was Special Agent Dana Maltravers. He had picked his assistant with extreme care. Her record was spectacular-law and criminology at Columbia, a Yale MBA, top of her intake at Quantico and a four-year posting at the Miami field office that had her superiors singing “Halleluiah.” Even when her brother committed suicide by jumping from his thirtieth-floor apartment in New York a couple of years back, she hadn’t let him down. Until now. It wasn’t just that she’d been incommunicado for two hours yesterday. She’d claimed her cell-phone battery was playing up, but he knew how unlikely that was-Dana was the kind of person who never had technical problems. No, she’d been strange ever since they got involved with the D.C. murders. He couldn’t believe she was just squeamish. In the violent-crimes team, they’d seen the worst that America’s sickos could offer, from skinned corpses in a Utah mining shack to piles of heads in a hacienda in New Mexico. By those standards, the occult killer was a pussycat.

Sebastian looked at his notes again. There were things he couldn’t do till the other agents got in, like check on Harry Slater’s Hate Crimes-he had passed them the details of all three murders. And he needed to push the document analysis about the drawings-those squares and rectangles weren’t just random doodles, he was sure of that. He called up the three patterns of shapes on his screen once more. They meant something, either singly or in conjunction with each other. He moved them around, trying to make a coherent design, but again got nowhere.

Then his cell phone rang. He identified himself and listened, his jaw dropping. Some asshole captain in the New York State Police had waited until the operation was well under way to inform him that Matt Wells was being arrested.

The evening had gotten cold. Outside the office building in central Washington, Richard Bonhoff shivered. He was used to winters in Iowa, but there he always made sure to wear the right clothes. Right now, he wished he had bought another sweater and a woolly hat rather than the useless Redskins cap. At least it had shielded him from Lister successfully, though he wasn’t sure that would happen again when the newspaperman reappeared. He looked at his watch. Over an hour had passed.

He had been thinking about the three people who had gone up in the elevator. The fifth floor was taken up by the offices of a partnership of lawyers. Richard had decided against following them up. He’d have stuck out even more among the sharks in suits than he did already. Then again, Gordy Lister’s appearance-leather jacket and cowboy boots-didn’t exactly conform. The woman in her plain suit was more like it, but she was young-he reckoned she couldn’t be much more than thirty. Maybe she was a call girl whose job it was to service Lister and the tall man.

Richard shook his head. There was more to the woman than that. She was attractive enough to be a hooker, but too serious. The same went for the older guy-he wasn’t out for a sexual jaunt. His eyes had strayed toward Richard once and they had made him avert his gaze immediately: they were pale blue and ice-cold. Who was the guy? He didn’t look much like a lawyer, either.

Then it struck him that the three might go their separate ways when they came out. Which would he tail? Lister was the one who knew about the twins, but he didn’t seem to be giving the orders. He didn’t know anything about the woman. That left the tall man. Yes, he was the one, Richard decided. He’d wasted enough time with Gordy Lister. He fingered the screwdriver he’d bought earlier. As a weapon, it was better than nothing and, when he was young, he’d been trained how to kill with whatever was to hand. His gut flipped. He thought of the twins and pressed his lips together. He was ready to do what it took to get them back.

Twenty minutes later, the woman came out. She looked up and down the street before walking away to the left. Richard was in a darkened doorway, so she didn’t spot him. A few minutes afterward, Gordy Lister appeared. He headed to the right, his head down. Richard’s heart started to pound. The tall man was next.

He finished buttoning his coat, then adjusted his hat. He didn’t pay any attention to the street, concentrating on taking a cigarette from a silver case and firing up with a matching lighter. Richard was struck by how self-assured the man looked, as if he owned the place. Maybe he did. After inhaling deeply several times, he strode away to the left. Richard gave him fifteen seconds, then slipped out of the doorway. He stayed on the opposite side of the road, his head bowed.

The tall man turned left at the next junction and walked with measured, long strides, never looking round. After he took another turn, Richard realized he was heading for the lot that Lister used. That was bad news. Once he’d got into his car, the tail would be over. Richard slowed down, wondering what to do. The best he could come up with was to continue tailing the guy. Maybe he would meet someone, or make a call that gave something away. He knew he was clutching at straws. This was bullshit. He should have gone to the cops. Tomorrow he would do that. He needed professional help.

The man dropped his cigarette outside the parking lot entrance and crushed the butt with a highly polished shoe. He still didn’t look around. It struck Richard, out-of-towner that he was, that this guy wasn’t exactly streetwise. A stoned mugger could have crept up on him. Richard timed another fifteen seconds and then followed. He was in luck. The tall man was still on street-level, moving toward the far corner of the parking area. Now it was easy. Richard bent over and used the vehicles to shield his approach. His target was standing next to a top-of-the-line BMW.

Richard got to within ten yards and was behind a dark blue Japanese SUV when he felt cold steel on the back of his neck.

“Hands on the floor.” The voice was low and menacing. Strong fingers gripped his body and he realized that there was more than one man to deal with. The screwdriver was taken from his pocket and tossed away.

“That’s it,” said a second voice gruffly. “Get up, asshole.”

Richard raised himself slowly, preparing to go into action as soon as the barrel moved away even slightly. Then he felt a sharp pain in his lower back.

“We heard what you did last time,” the first man said. “We aren’t scared of ex-marines, pal. In case you’re wondering, this is a combat knife and I’ve used it to gut twelve people.”

Richard knew immediately that the man was telling the truth. He let himself go slack. Then he took a heavy blow to the head and crashed to the concrete. The last thing he knew was another hit. It cracked his skull from one side to the other.

The twins hadn’t died in the wreckage of the Italian sports car in the Catskills back in 1972. They instead watched as two unconscious young people of matching gender and build were taken from an eighteen-wheeler loaded with lumber. Their bodies were doused with petrol and then the car pushed through the crash barrier by the lumber truck. Men were already waiting in the gorge below to check that the bodies were burned beyond recognition. The twins climbed into the rig and went on to their new lives.

In later years they sometimes talked about whether their deaths had really been necessary. Larry, as the male now called himself, tended to think they’d been overcautious, but reinventing himself as a rich man’s son from Colorado had given him the opportunity for much creative thinking. His sister, now Jane, was less concerned with external appearances. She spent most of her time in the lab, developing drugs and treatments that brought in millions and had impressed several government agencies. Of course, their father would have been impressed by their daring and their subsequent achievements. They hadn’t told the old man that they were going to start their lives again, so he had been forced to mourn their deaths before facing his own. It wasn’t in them to regret his passing.