The stranger cleared his throat respectfully, then reached out and gently plucked the baby girl from Robert’s left arm. He tucked her away exactly as Robert had done, and then lifted the baby boy from his other arm. Robert did nothing to stop him.
Then the stranger looked at Robert and nodded. He said nothing. There was nothing to say. The man turned and walked back to his car, seeming to dissolve into the inky night thanks to his black clothing. He fastened the babies expertly into identical car seats, positioned side-by-side in the rear of the vehicle.
The man walked to the front seat and climbed in, his feet crunching gravel. He backed out of Robert and Virginia Ayers’s driveway and accelerated smoothly forward. He turned left at the end of the lonely road and was gone.
CHAPTER 14
The Parkman Hotel was short and squat and had at one time been considered high-end, if not quite luxurious. It had been built in the late 1800s and in its day it had been the equal of any surrounding construction, according to the research Kevin had done on the Internet. The problem was, its day had passed decades ago and the building now appeared overwhelmed by the modern steel and glass high-rises surrounding it.
The room was clean, but the furnishings were dowdy and out of style, not that Cait cared. This wasn’t a vacation or a pleasure trip, but a fact-finding mission with a specific goal—to unearth as much of her family history as possible.
The trip from Logan Airport to the hotel in a Boston cab had been like some crazy amusement park ride, the driver whipping between lanes at will, driving one-handed, sometimes one-fingered, gleefully cutting off other vehicles like the fate of the free world rested upon his passengers arriving at their destination in the absolute minimum time possible. This vehicular insanity had elicited honks and angry gestures, but to Cait’s surprise most of the other drivers’ reactions seemed perfunctory, as if they had fully anticipated being cut off in traffic and were only responding because they knew it was expected of them.
“Christ,” Kevin muttered as he dropped their bags on the hallway floor and unlocked the door to their room. “I’m sure glad we didn’t tell him to step on it.”
Cait smiled her agreement. She trudged to the queen-sized bed in the middle of the small room and flopped down on it, too tired to unpack, surprised to discover the bed was fairly comfortable. She patted the blanket next to her. “Let’s get some sleep, I want to get up first thing in the morning and get an early start.”
Kevin grimaced. “It’s already first thing in the morning.”
“No rest for the weary,” Cait said, and as she did, a Flicker struck with such force her head was thrown backward, bouncing off the hotel room wall with a thud. She moaned and her eyes glazed over before her eyelids fluttered madly. In the Flicker, she was looking through someone else’s eyes, gazing at a schoolgirl standing on a drizzly Boston sidewalk. Upon closer inspection the girl turned out to be a young woman acting out what she thought might be a man’s schoolgirl fantasy. She stood on a wet sidewalk covered by a shroud of heavy mist, and whoever this Flicker belonged to was gazing at her with a predatory lust that was shocking in its intensity.
He—Cait knew it was a he, although she couldn’t have said how she knew—was talking with the young woman, joking, keeping the conversation light, but there was no real humor behind the words; they were a put-on, designed to keep the woman (the VICTIM) at ease until he could get her alone. He was tense and high-strung, not exactly nervous, more like excited, anxious to begin playing with (TORTURING) her.
The woman was a prostitute, that was obvious, but the man wasn’t interested in sex; at least not primarily, not right now. He wanted to hurt her, to do things to her, bad things; the evil oozed out of him, rolling off his body in waves like heat off a rapidly accelerating fire.
Cait wanted to shout at the girl, to tell her to run, to sprint in the other direction and scream at the top of her lungs, to alert everyone in this grimy neighborhood to the fact that there was a monster in their midst. But of course she couldn’t yell, she couldn’t warn anyone of anything, she wasn’t even really there. She was a mute witness to a random event occurring somewhere nearby.
The young prostitute was uneasy, but she allowed herself to be convinced to accompany the monster. He said something about his car being around the corner, which was patently stupid. It was raining and no one else was around, and there was no good reason in the world why any john would park out of sight and negotiate with a prostitute on foot before bringing her to his car. It was clear the prostitute knew something was not quite right, even the man (MONSTER) could see that, but he knew she would follow him anyway, and she did.
His thoughts were swirling and violent. He was picturing pliers and knives and what he would do with them, how he would use them to elicit shrieks of terror from the girl. He would taunt her with them, pinching her nipple lightly, just enough to cause her to gasp in shock and fear and a little pain; then he would move down her body and stroke the skin of her inner thigh with the back edge of a knife-blade, barely touching her but demonstrating his evil intent with crystal clarity.
Then he would get down to business in earnest. He would open the jaws of the pliers wide and he would—
—and then the Flicker was gone and Cait’s eyes snapped into focus to see a worried Kevin leaning over her. Concern was written on his face as he held her hand and stroked her arm gently. She bolted upright and pushed him out of the way, sliding off the bed and rushing into the tiny bathroom where she puked, her partially digested dinner of chicken parmesan with rice and vegetables searing her throat on the way out.
Kevin followed her and rubbed her back wordlessly until she had finished. She relaxed and then abruptly dry-heaved into the bowl in a kind of horrible exclamation point. Sweat rolled down her face and Cait felt jittery and washed-out, like a marathoner who had run an entire twenty-six-mile race without drinking any water. She struggled to her feet and staggered to the sink, dizzy and woozy, thankful for Kevin’s strong hands supporting her.
Cait splashed cold water on her face and then shuffled out of the bathroom and sat down on the bed, her shoulders slumped and her head resting on her chest. She thought she might get sick again and clamped her jaws shut, swallowing hard.
“What was that all about?” Kevin asked quietly.
She shook her head, instantly regretting it, clenching her teeth until another wave of dizziness and nausea passed. “I’m not sure.”
“Is it something you ate? Maybe you’re just overtired and stressed out about seeing your biological mother for the first time.”
“No,” Cait said, her voice shaky and reed-thin. “It’s nothing like that. I’m nervous about seeing my mother, that’s true, but this was unrelated to that. It was the Flicker.”
“I don’t know,” Kevin answered, clearly skeptical. “I’ve seen you have Flickers plenty of times but you’ve never reacted to one like this before.”
“That’s because this was different from a normal Flicker, if there even is such a thing. Usually I see random events or occurrences that have no value judgment attached to them. Like yesterday in the grocery store when I saw the little old lady had dropped her checkbook on her kitchen floor. It wasn’t anything good or bad, it just was. Do you understand what I mean?”
Kevin shrugged. “I guess so.” He was still watching her closely and Cait knew he was worried she might toss her cookies again.
“Well, this Flicker wasn’t like that. This was evil personified. I was in a man’s head, and the man was looking at a woman—a prostitute—and he was planning to do things to her.”