William Bernhardt - Dark Eye

“I want to assure you,” O’Bannon said firmly, “that this will not in any way affect your consulting relationship with the LVPD. As soon as you’re released, if you want to continue working, we want you.”

“Thanks, Chief.”

“Although I think it might be best if we took you off this case.”

“No way in hell.”

Silence.

“Look, I wasn’t drinking. I don’t care what it looked like in those pictures. I wasn’t drinking.” At that time.

“Susan-”

“I’m telling you, I didn’t drink!”

Patrick grinned, damn him. “I know.”

“You-do?”

“Blood test. Your blood alcohol was a big fat zero. If you’d been drinking, we’d have found a trace, even after all the time you spent out in the desert. He used his drug on you.”

Thank God I managed to resist Edgar’s little bottle of temptation. “So I can stay on the case, right?”

I could see O’Bannon wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t going to argue with me. While I was stretched out in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm, I had the upper hand. Momentarily.

Darcy was the one who broke the silence. “Why didn’t they bring you ice cream? When you’re in the hospital, they’re supposed to bring you ice cream.”

I couldn’t help but grin. “As soon as I get loose of this joint, Darcy, you and I are going on a custard binge. We need to make up for all those potential Very Excellent Days I missed.”

“Is there anything more you can tell us?” Patrick asked. “Did you see his face?”

“Yes. And as it turns out, I’ve seen him before. But he was disguised. He’s smart, Patrick. Smarter than we ever realized.”

“I think that has become abundantly clear. It’s just unfortunate that you were drugged. I wish to God we knew where he took you.”

I drew in my breath, wriggled up against my pillow. I had to seem strong for this. “I know where he took me.”

“What?”

I let the memories trickle in, unwanted as they were. The rushing of water, even when I was flat on my back on his table. We were near the dam, even then. And I saw enough of the interior to make a pretty good guess about the exterior. “Approximately. I can find it, anyway. But I want to go with you.”

“Susan-he could still be there.”

“No. He’s smart, remember? He’s gone somewhere else.”

“But you can’t be sure-”

“Oh, yes,” I said, hoping my resolve was evident. “I can be sure. But we still might find something of interest. Now how fast can you get me out of here?”

“Susan, the doctors say-”

“I don’t care. We have to act fast. And no, I can’t give you directions. I have to go.”

“Susan, you’ve been through a horrible ordeal.”

My eyes narrowed. “And I want to make sure Edgar never has a chance to do that to anyone else. Ever.”

The doctors pitched a fit, but I lied through my teeth and told them I felt fine, and eventually the need to track down this maniac won out over medical prudence. They gave me some pills to help with the pain and a few hours later I was in a car with Patrick trolling around the dam, searching for something I recognized. I knew I could find it. And I did.

“This is it,” I said.

I was certain I was right, even though I’d never seen it from the outside. It was a small cabin, a shack, really, stuck in some of the scrubbiest country you could imagine, not far from the Hoover Dam. The spindly trees and faint vegetation weren’t enough to make anyone forget we were in the desert. The joint was probably intended as a weekend retreat for boat or fish fans. “Let’s go.”

“We need a warrant,” Patrick cautioned.

“You’re a fed. Don’t you carry them around in your back pocket?”

“No. But I can send a fax via my cell phone. And my address book has the numbers of a lot of judges.”

Well, that wasn’t too shabby. Granger put a phalanx of officers around the perimeter, and we waited.

An hour later we were inside.

The ground level was perfectly ordinary. Tacky furniture, no food, a dinky television. But I knew there had to be more. It didn’t take me long to find the basement door. It was locked, not that it mattered.

The light switch didn’t appear to work, so we had to resort to those cool pencil-thin flashlights like you see cops use on television. It was dark and dank, stereotypically basement-like. There was no wind, but I felt a chill just the same. I usually got my impressions from people, not places, but this little dungeon had a palpable ambiance. It was terrifying, threatening, oppressive. Insane.

“Maybe you should stay upstairs,” Patrick whispered to me.

No. In truth, I still felt weak, nauseous, barely able to stand, but I wasn’t going to let them shut me out. I inched forward, shining my light ahead. The more I saw of this room, the more I recognized. The warped wooden walls. The high window, probably the only source of exterior light-and the passageway for the sound waves that brought me back here. The table. His goddamn table with the restraining straps. And there was a stench. A putrid, almost unbearable stench.

I heard a sound, sprang around. The beam of my flashlight crisscrossed the room. Just Granger, creeping up behind me. This was a big basement, I saw now. Maybe it was just an illusion, but it seemed as if it was bigger than the house. Like it stretched on forever.

Then I jumped. Way up in the air, like a human bottle rocket. Dropped the flashlight and everything. And I had practically been expecting what I found. But that isn’t the same as seeing it.

There was a body hunched behind the table. A corpse. My God-had she been there the whole time I’d been held down here? The whole time he’d been playing with me?

It was Fara Spencer. Her eyes were wide open, her face frozen in an expression of fear or panic or whatever her intense final horrific emotion had been. Her skin was gray and seemed stretched, barely covering the prominent bones of her chin and cheek. She was naked, with a huge blood-caked cavity in her chest. She’d been decomposing for more than a week, but you could still tell who it was. Even if you wished you couldn’t.

I clamped a handkerchief over my mouth. The nausea was almost overwhelming. “Call the coroner,” I muttered.

“Already on it,” Granger said, and I guessed he stopped to dial his cell, and Patrick was getting a close-up look at Fara, which explains why I was the first lucky devil to see the really big surprise Edgar left for us.

For me.

At first I thought it was plowed soil. Had he been gardening down here? I wondered. Potatoes, maybe? But my first impression was wrong. There was dirt, and evidence of digging. Two spades were propped up against the far wall.

Not a garden. A graveyard. A real one, this time.

The mounds went wide across the floor and deep into the background. But they weren’t buried. Not entirely. As if to create a memorable tableau, he’d left parts sticking up out of the ground. A decayed arm. A rotting leg. Sometimes a face. And at this stage of decomposition, they all seemed sadly the same. Small. Young. Female. Dead. Long dead.

My God, I thought, as the aching in my gut, in my heart, intensified to unbearable proportions. Must be more than a dozen of them.

We thought Edgar had five victims. We thought he began with Helen Collier.

We were wrong.

My head became unbearably heavy. My legs began to ache, pinpricks running up and down them. I remember thinking, I ought to get to a chair. But there was no chair, and I sure as hell wasn’t going back to that table. I heard Patrick scream out my name. I saw the dirty ground, the corpse-strewn soil rushing toward me.

And then I was out.

So they finally found it, he observed, smiling to himself. The audi-tion. The warm-up act. It seemed more impressive, viewed from this height. Almost disturbing for its… wastefulness. But this had been the work of his previous incarnation. Not him. Another person altogether.