F. Paul Wilson - Haunted Air

"Did you happen to see his badge number?"

The maid shook her head. "No. I no think to look." She narrowed her eyes. "Now that I think, I don' remember seeing no badge."

"Did he mention me or Vicky by name?"

"No... I don' thin' so."

"Thank you, Rosa." Gia missed her first try on inserting the key, made it on the second. "I'm going to look into this."

Once inside the first thing Gia did was call the camp. No, they hadn't called the NYPD. Vicky and everyone else at the camp were fine.

Next call, her local precinct, the Seventeenth. No, they hadn't had any calls to send someone over to Sutton Square. He might have come from another precinct, but no one could say why.

Gia hung up, relieved that Vicky was safe, but unsettled by anyone, cop or not, asking about her daughter.

Had he been an impostor? No, Rosa had said he'd arrived in a cop car.

Gia thought of Tara Portman. What if Tara had been picked up by a police car? A cop saying her mother had been hurt and he'd take her to her. Vicky would fall for that. Any kid would.

Whoever the cop was, he hadn't learned anything other than the fact that Vicky was away at camp. And he didn't know which camp because Rosa couldn't tell him.

She wanted to call Jack, but what could he do? He was the last person on earth to have an inside line into what the NYPD might be up to.

All she could do was pray that-

Gia frowned. Pray... that was what you did when trouble came knocking. Even if you'd lost your faith, old habits died hard.

She'd pray that it was all a mix-up and the cop had the wrong address.

That would do until Jack got home.

13

"Let me see if I've got this sequence down right," Lyle said.

They had just about all the paneling stripped from the wall now, and were working on the bracing studs. They still hadn't found any loose stones. Every one so far had been mortared tight to its neighbors.

Something about these stones gave Jack the creeps. They gave off an alien vibe that made him want to cover them again, hide them from human sight. They didn't belong here, and it almost seemed they knew it and wanted to be back where they'd come from-Romania, wasn't it? The ones that had had their cross inlays ripped out were the worst. The empty pockets looked like dead eye sockets, staring at him.

As they'd worked Jack had told them how he'd come into possession of Tara Portman's key ring-leaving out names, of course, and sidestepping mention of his knife fight with Eli Bellitto.

Lyle began counting off on his fingers. "First you meet Junie Moon, you bring her here, you step across the threshold, and awaken Tara Portman. Two days later someone hires you to watchdog someone he says is his brother but who you later learn is an only child. In the course of guarding the brotherless man you snag a key ring off him which just happens to belong to Tara Portman." He shook his head. "Talk about wheels within wheels."

And no more coincidences, Jack thought glumly, wondering at the purpose behind all this. And why was Gia involved? This whole situation was giving him a very unsettled feeling.

Lyle pried a Frisbee-size remnant of paneling from a two-by-four stud and scaled it onto the growing junk pile at the back end of the cellar.

"But just having Tara's key ring doesn't make this guy her killer. He could have found it on the sidewalk or picked it up at a garage sale."

Jack wondered how much he could tell these two. Since they lived on his side of the law, he decided to trust them with a little more.

"What if I told you that I saw him snatch a kid while I was watchdogging him?"

Charlie gave him a wide-eyed stare. "You frontin' me, right?"

Jack shook his head. "I wish. And if that's not enough, this guy has a whole cabinet full of kids' junk. Like a trophy case."

"Oh, man." Lyle had a queasy look. "Oh, man. What happened to that snatched kid?"

"I unsnatched him."

"Yo! Yo!" Charlie pointed a waggling finger at Jack. "The Vietnamese kid! That was you?"

"I'd rather not say."

"It was you!" Charlie grinned. "You a hero, G."

Jack shrugged and turned back to the stud he'd been prying loose from the blocks. Words like "hero" made him uncomfortable. Like "art," it tended to be thrown around a little too easily these days.

"You'd've done the same. Anybody would have." He shifted the talk away from himself. "I'll bet anything there's a link between this guy and the late, great Dmitri Menelaus. If I'm right, I'm afraid we can count on finding more than just Tara Portman's remains down here."

Which would work right into Lyle's PR plans.

Lyle leaned against the wall. "A serial killer." He didn't sound happy.

"More than one," Jack said. "A ring of them maybe. If I can establish a link with Dmitri..."

"What then?"

He found a groove between two blocks behind the two-by-four and slipped the pry bar into it. To the squealing accompaniment of protesting nails and the crackle of splintering fir, he wrenched the stud free with a vicious yank.

"A few people are going to wish they'd never been born."

Lyle stared at him. "Someone hire you to do that?"

"No."

Jack still wanted to know who'd hired him to watch Eli Bellitto, but no, no one would be paying him for what was going to happen to Bellitto and his crew.

"Then why're you going after them? I thought you were a pay-or-play guy. Fee for service, and all that. Why the freebie?"

"Because."

"That's not an answer."

"Yeah, it is."

"Praise the Lord!" Charlie said. His eyes glowed like a miniature sun had lit in his head. "Praise the Lord! You see what's goin' down here, don'tcha?"

Lyle said, "I'm almost afraid to hear this."

"Jack, you an instrument of God."

"Yeah?" He'd been called a lot of things since he'd started his fix-it business, but never that.

"True that! The guy hired you to hound this killer? A messenger from God, yo. He point you at the killer so you be there when that little kid need you."

"Really. What about all those other kids this guy's done? The ones like Tara Portman and who knows how many others?"

"Dawg, don't you see? God sent you here to even the score."

"You think so," Jack said.

Lyle laughed. "Hey, that's one ass-backwards god you've got there, bro. Where was he when Tara needed him? I mean, he's not paying attention. If he was, there'd be no score to even. Too little, too late, if you ask me."

Charlie glowered at his brother. "Didn't ask you."

"And what happened to this demon you were talking about?" Lyle said. "First you tell us we've got a demon sent by Satan, and now we've got Jack sent by god. Which is it?"

Jack wanted to tell Lyle to ease up on his brother, but it wasn't his place. What was it with Lyle anyway? He seemed wound as tight as that clock Jack had bought yesterday.

"That's it." Charlie threw down his pry bar. "I'm outta here."

"No way. We have a deal. Two days."

"Yo, I ain't standin' here listenin' to you trash the Lord. Blasphemy wasn't no part of the deal."

Jack watched them, wondering what the hell they were talking about.

Lyle held up his hands. "All right, I'm sorry. My bad. I was out of line. It's been a tough day. Truce, okay?"

"Truce sounds good," Jack said. "Let's keep at this. We've only got a little ways to go before it's all down."

"A'ight," Charlie said. "We keep at it."

"If we're going to do that, can we change the music?" The endless progression of cuts from Miles and Bird and now Coltrane was getting on his nerves.

Lyle frowned. "Don't tell me you don't like 'Trane."

"I guess I'm not cool enough for jazz. Or maybe not smart enough."

"How 'bout Gospel?" Charlie said with a sly grin. "I got a whole collection upstairs."

Jack leaned on the wall. "You know... if it's got words and melody, I'm willing."