She moaned in agony. Blood spat out of her mouth. "You bastard!"
He fed on her fear. Seeing her at his feet, helpless and desperate, made him feel like a reptile sloughing off an old, unwanted skin. He was reborn out of ten years in hell, a new man.
With a great crash, the half-window notched into the concrete wall of the cellar erupted inward, and water poured through in waves. The smell was fetid and moldy. The cop screamed as dirty water puddled around her. "Oh, Jesus, the river's flooding. We've got to get out of here."
He laughed at her. "We?"
"You can't leave me here, for God's sake. I can't get up."
Three inches of water swirled around his feet and grew steadily deeper. He watched as the cop pulled herself up and then splashed back as her splintered bones gave way. She flailed at the water and shouted for help, but her voice was a whisper as the storm assaulted the house.
"Please," she begged him. "Please."
He became physically aroused watching her. He rubbed himself through his jeans and listened to the sounds of her pain. She went under for the first time when the water was up to his thighs. She came up again, coughing and gagging, and then swallowed as the water closed back over her head. Each time she rose up, she screamed obscenities now, railing at him because he was the one in control of her fate, he was the one with absolute power, he was the rock-hard instrument of life and death. There was no escape.
A metamorphosis took place before his eyes. He no longer saw her face. Instead, he saw the face of the bitch who had taunted him like a devil for ten years, and he knew there would be no escape for her now, too.
"That's the thing about floods," he told the cop, the last time her face broke free of the dank river water. "They wash away your sins."
PART ONE. I KNOW WHO IT IS
1
Maggie awoke with a start, dreaming about sex. She wondered if she had dreamed the gunshot, too.
She lay tangled in the black sheets, her skin moist with a sheen of sweat. As she blinked, her brain tried to stutter out of the dreamworld, but the nightmare held her in its grip. Her eyes were open, but she was blind. She felt impossibly strong hands on her body, holding her down. A stench of dead fish overwhelmed her nostrils and made her want to vomit, but her mouth was clamped shut. She thumped against his flesh with her fists, but it was as if she were a fly tapping against a glass window, trying to get out and getting nowhere. He laughed at her, a mean rumble of pleasure. She screamed.
Her eyes snapped open. She was awake. Except she wasn't.
Stride was sitting on her bed. She heard herself say, "Hey, boss," making it sound seductive, which it wasn't. He was smiling at her, his eyes maddeningly dark and ironic. She opened her arms wide, and he came into them, and she was ready to taste his kiss when he crumbled into sand.
That was when she heard it. Muffled and distant. Bang.
Maggie sat up in bed. Her breaths pounded in and out of her chest. She looked at the clock on her nightstand and saw that it was three in the morning. She had been asleep for two hours, although it wasn't sleep so much as a drunken unconsciousness filled with strange dreams. That was all they had been-dreams.
Except she wondered about the gunshot. Something had awakened her. Maybe it was Eric, moving around restlessly downstairs. Or maybe it was the violent wind outside, making the timbers groan. She sat in bed silently, her ears pricked up. Snow had begun-she could see the white rain through the window-and tiny flakes of ice hissed like whispers on the glass. She listened for footsteps, but she heard nothing.
She remembered what Stride always told her. Never listen to worries that come to you in the middle of the night.
Maggie realized she was cold. The bedroom was drafty, and her skin was damp. Even in January, she slept only in panties, not liking the confines of clothes under the blankets, but it meant she often woke up freezing. She got out of bed and scrambled to the thermostat, bumping it up several degrees. Down in the bowels of the house, the furnace rumbled to life, breathing warm air into the room.
She went to her closet to grab a robe. There was a full-length mirror on the door, and Maggie stopped to look at herself in the moonlit shadows. She had spent years finding things wrong with her body. She was too short, not even five feet tall, and too skinny, with bony limbs and breasts that were like twin bunny slopes. Like a doll in her mid-thirties. Her black hair was cut as it always was, in straight bangs across her forehead. She was pretty-everyone told her that. She didn't see it. Her nose was small and pert, but her cheeks were too round. Her almond-shaped Asian eyes were so dark as to be almost black, with a few yellow flecks in an irregular pattern. Her features were too symmetrical. She could make her face do amazing things, twisting it into sarcastic expressions, making her mouth into a tiny O rimmed with cherry-red lips, like a fish gulping for air. But pretty? She didn't think so.
She held up a forearm. There were goose bumps on her honey-colored skin. She took a hand and laid it on her bare, flat stomach and watched herself in the mirror as she rubbed her abdomen in slow circles. Her vision blurred as she began to cry. She opened the door so she didn't have to look at herself anymore and slipped a silk robe off a hanger. She shrugged it on and tied it with a tight knot.
Maggie turned away, sniffled, and wiped her eyes. She felt dwarfed by the huge master bedroom and its massive mahogany furniture. On the far wall was a burgundy dresser, taller than she was; she had to stand on tiptoes to see inside the top drawer. Four hand-carved wooden posts loomed on each corner of the great empty stretch of the king-sized bed. It was too much bed for her by herself, which was how it had been for weeks. She hated even being near it.
She took a step and her head spun. She still felt the effects of the wine she had drunk in the park. She steadied herself with a hand on her night-stand. When she looked down, she saw her shield and felt all the complex emotions that came with ten years on the job. She hadn't expected to be working now, but there was a part of her that couldn't leave the Detective Bureau, that wanted and needed to be with Stride. Or maybe it was because, step-by-step, the rest of her life had become a horror in the past year, and being on the job was a way to forget.
She stared down at the nightstand again and felt unease worm its way into her stomach. Something was wrong. She mentally retraced her steps, what she had done, where she had gone, hoping she had simply made a drunken error. But she hadn't. She had come upstairs and dropped her shield, her wallet, her gun, her keys, on the nightstand by the clock.
Now her gun wasn't there.
It had been an ugly Wednesday night. Bitter cold, the way January always was. By ten o'clock, Eric hadn't come home. Maggie had ginned up the courage to talk to him, but when he didn't show up, she felt herself growing angry. He had been secretive and withdrawn in the week since the holidays. She couldn't blame him for that. They had been strangers for weeks, arguing constantly. It was her fault. She was the one who had closed herself off, who had shut him out, because she couldn't deal with everything that had happened to her.
She grew sick of waiting for him and left the house. She took a bottle of chardonnay and a corkscrew. She bundled up in her Russian sable coat, a wedding gift that she didn't wear often, but it was warm and made her feel like royalty. The snow hadn't started yet, and the streets were clear. She drove down into the city, which was still festive with holiday lights, and then north along the shoreline drive until she came to a turnoff by the lake. It was deserted. She parked and opened the wine. When she got out of the truck, the wind blasted her face, but she ignored it as she followed a snowy trail to the dark, moving mass of Lake Superior. The stars winked down at her, undimmed by the glow of lights from the city to the south. The branches on the evergreens drooped with snow. Her boots sank into the drifts. Her coat hung to her midthighs, and between the fur and her boots, the cold slashed at her legs.