Kate opened her hands. “The night I met AJ. She told me about your book, and how it might help me understand the changes I’m going through. After she left, I went online intending to order a copy, but then I read the reviews and I didn’t.
“After everything you’ve done for me you especially don’t deserve me believing that such lies were true. I’m ashamed to say they influenced me.”
He smiled a little. “Ah. That explains a few things.”
She scrunched up her nose. “Can you forgive me, please? I feel terrible for how I treated you because of it.”
He dismissed it all with a self-conscious gesture. “Don’t give it a second thought. We have much bigger things to worry about. Forget about it. Really, I mean it.”
Kate smiled and put her arms around him in gratitude, laying her head against his chest as she hugged him tight.
The embrace had been unplanned. It wasn’t like her to give hugs. But it felt right.
Actually, it felt more than right.
She was relieved to have cleared the air.
Jack put his hands on the back of her shoulders, holding her as she hugged him. “It’s okay, Kate. Don’t give yourself a hard time about it. It’s just words.”
She was relieved that her own impressions of him had been right all along.
“Sorry,” she said again as she separated herself from him, a little embarrassed that she had hugged him out of the blue.
He gently grasped her by her upper arms as he also held her in his gaze. “It’s all right, Kate. We’re good, okay?”
She suddenly sensed a shadow of something in him, a hint of sorrow about something, a reluctance, passing across his eyes.
All of her instincts as an investigator, her intuition about people, and she supposed her newly discovered inner ability kicked in and came together in an instant.
It suddenly hit her.
“One of the women on that list meant something to you. You cared about one of those women who was murdered, didn’t you?”
He straightened. “What makes you say that?”
“I find connections and put things together. It’s what I do. I’m pretty good at it.”
He nodded. “I guess you are.”
“I’m sorry.” She turned up a hand. “I’m sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong. I’m sorry. I know—I seem to be saying ‘I’m sorry’ a lot all of a sudden, but I’m sorry.” Her own words felt incredibly awkward to her. She realized that she had inadvertently stepped into a very dark place. She couldn’t seem to make herself shut up. “Really, I am. I’m sorry.”
Jack was still looking at her, looking into her eyes that way that made her feel like he was looking into her soul.
“You have no need to be sorry,” he said in a quiet tone. “You find answers. Like you said, it’s what you do. You have sound reasons for wanting answers to fill in the blanks of things that are so new and confusing.” He put his hand behind her neck, holding her head for a moment as he looked at her. It was a gesture of reassurance. “If I expect you to put your life in my hands, you deserve to have answers to your questions about me.”
His beautiful eyes, the way his gaze stayed fixed on her, made her feel weak.
“When I came back into the country I landed in New York,” he finally said as his hand dropped away. “I stayed in the city for a while. I found her by chance one day. It was her eyes. They took my breath away.”
He flashed a brief, self-conscious smile. “It’s rather hard to walk up to a woman and tell her out of the blue that you know she can recognize killers.”
“Is that what you did? Tell her that right off?”
His achingly sad smile returned. “We were both standing at the curb, waiting to catch a cab. I couldn’t stop looking at her. She noticed, of course. I realized that I had to be making her nervous, so I told her that she had remarkable eyes. She said that wasn’t a very original line and challenged me, asking what was remarkable about them. She thought she was putting me in my place by putting me on the spot.
“Without a second thought, I said that with those eyes of hers she could see evil. Her face turned white and I knew in that instant that she knew all too well what I was talking about.
“She agreed to share a cab ride with me. In the cab, she asked if I was talking about ‘Sid.’ I told her I didn’t know, and asked who he was. She said it was just a guy who worked in her building, and then she dismissed it, saying she didn’t want to talk about it. I could tell that she meant it, and if I pressed her I’d lose her, so I didn’t.
“I had worked with a number of people—like I told you before, it’s my calling in life. I’d just spent five years in Israel helping to find men and women like her, working with them, helping them. It was exhausting and I was burned out.
“I had already done a lot of research, and I was beginning to have a handle on the whole picture, beginning to see how it all fit together. Yet there are things going on that I can’t explain.”
“Like what?” Kate asked.
“Well, for whatever reason, I’m finding people like you more often than chance would suggest is to be expected. Same thing with your kind and killers crossing paths. It shouldn’t be happening as often as it is. The odds of these encounters are far too remote—like your chances of winning the lottery. Yet it’s happening.
“I suspect that it may be something unique to nesting periods.
“Chance or not, I couldn’t let her get away from me. That first day in the cab I talked her into dinner, putting her at ease by promising not to mention her eyes. After that we had a few long walks in the city, met for lunch a couple of times.
“I could tell by her eyes that she had already crossed paths with a killer, and I knew she would again. I also knew how vulnerable she was. I wanted to help protect her and I wanted to teach her how to protect herself. I just didn’t know how I was going to do that.
“She was one of those rare and wonderful souls whose smile brightened everyone’s day. She was open and innocent and grinned at people all the time. She was a special person. People who met her instantly liked her.
“At the same time she was also one of those fragile creatures that just didn’t have it in her to fight back. She was petite, delicate, a wisp of a woman, physically, with short blond hair. Despite how delicate she was physically, she was a force of vibrant personality, but she wasn’t a woman of imposing presence like you.
“She saw darkness in the world and tried to overwhelm it with sunshine. She didn’t like me talking to her about danger. It frightened her when I did, so I had to back off, hoping that at some point I would be able to start to ease her into the subject so I could help her to be safe.
“Having that kind of vision is one thing. Fighting to survive is something else entirely. I’ve found that they are only rarely present in the same person, as they are in you. What you did last night fighting that killer was quite remarkable, not just your physical ability, but your inner strength as well. That part is so key that without it, physical ability is next to useless.
“Anyway, before anything could really come of it …” He paused to swallow. “Before anything could come of it and I could convince her of the things she needed to do to start to protect herself, she vanished.”
Kate touched his arm. “I’m so sorry, Jack.”
He pulled his lower lip through his teeth. “The guy posted torture videos of her on that site. Every day for a week. She lasted a little over a week.”
“Dear god …” Kate, her eyes widening, put both hands over her mouth.
“Seeing that kind of changed me, you know? It made me kind of ruthless in how I go about what I do. It’s also the reason I wrote the book.
“I’ve always had this ability for recognizing people who in turn had the ability to recognize killers. Somehow I’m drawn to them. I wish I had their ability, but I don’t.
“Throughout my life I’ve run across a number of people with your vision. I have an inborn drive to prote
ct them. I guess I’m kind of like a shepherd dog—I want to protect the innocent from the wolves. Too often the wolves take them.
“After … after she died, I had the idea of using a book to help bring some of those with the ability to see evil out of the shadows so I could help them.”
“So you wrote the book because of her?” Kate couldn’t muster the courage to ask her name. She didn’t want to make him say it out loud.
He nodded. “I had been doing research and I had already started, but after she was gone I really devoted myself to it. I wrote just enough into the book so that those who had the vision you have, or who knew of them, like AJ, would grasp what I was saying and hopefully contact me. I didn’t want to hear from a lot of curious people, I only wanted the special few to seek me out. The effort it takes to get in contact with me is a kind of vetting process in and of itself. It shows a certain sense of inner will.
“I wrote the book because of her. So, in a way, even though I couldn’t save her, she helped me save others.
“I dedicated it to her, to ‘R.’ I didn’t want to use her name, Rita, because I didn’t want the killer to recognize it.”
“Was he ever caught?” Kate asked in the dragging silence.
“No,” Jack said, shaking his head. “He still visits the site I took you to. I recognize his postings. He’s still out there, hunting people like you. I suspect he killed another woman—same build as Rita, slight, with short blond hair—but I can’t be certain.”
“So … were you and she … close?”
“No,” he said, suddenly realizing what she was asking. He gestured to help dismiss the notion. “I never really got to know her all that well because we had only met and we had precious little time together. We never had the chance to get to know each other. She had a sunny disposition and was open and cheerful to everyone, but only up to a point. Beyond that, she was actually pretty cautious and private.
“She was just so special, though, that I thought maybe someday, something might come of it, that a real relationship might develop, you know? But it never got that far. Just … all of a sudden … she was gone.
“When she disappeared, I frantically tried to find her. I managed to hunt down the sweaty little goon named Sid she had mentioned when we first met. His main job was operating a floor buffer in the building where she worked. I knew the instant I saw him that he knew something. When our eyes met, he turned and tried to leave, but I stopped him. He put a hand in front of his mouth when he answered my questions. He touched his eyes a lot. He offered rambling answers to things I didn’t ask. He tried to tell me everything except what I wanted to know.
“So I took him somewhere we could have a more private conversation. Because when I first mentioned her vision, Rita had asked if I was talking about Sid, so I knew that even if I couldn’t see it in him, she recognized that Sid was a killer.
“He insisted that he had nothing to do with Rita’s disappearance, but when pressed, he admitted that on occasion he had been with this guy, Victor, when Victor ‘got into his crazy-shit moods about women.’ He said he owed Victor a favor—Victor generously provided Sid with date-rape drugs. So, knowing Victor’s type and to repay him, Sid tipped Victor off about this woman in the building where he worked. Rita.”
Kate squeezed his arm. “It’s okay, Jack, you don’t need—”
“Sid was how I found the Scavenger Hunt site.
“He hadn’t been with Victor when he took Rita, and didn’t know where he would have taken her. He said he met up with Victor in a bar from time to time. That’s all he knew. I haunted the bar and put out generous offers for anything on Victor, but nothing ever turned up.”
Jack stared off into the distance. “I went back to where I had Sid tied up and started to cut off his fingers, one at a time, each time asking him again where I could find Victor. After three fingers he finally gave me an address of a flophouse. But Victor had long since moved out.
“When I went back to Sid, I started in again, asking him after each finger where I could find Victor. Sid was in tears by then, of course. His skin was cold and pallid, his breathing irregular. I could see the carotid artery in his skinny little neck going a mile a minute. At that point he would have given over his mother if I had asked. I told him he had better think real hard and come up with a place I could find Victor.
“Sid was afraid of Victor, but he was more afraid of me. After I cut off one of his thumbs, he said that the only thing he could think of was this website Victor liked to go to, called Scavenger Hunt. He rattled off the site address over and over, like a prayer for salvation. I recognized that it was on the darknet.
“I went to the site. That’s when I found the first two videos of Rita that Victor had posted. They were torture videos. At the end of each one he leaned in to the camera—he was wearing a stocking mask with eye holes cut out—and said, ‘This is Victor, signing off until the next installment of fun time with this little bitch.’ ”
Kate felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
“I called my contacts in the Mossad and asked them to help me find something, anything, about the Scavenger Hunt site. I knew that she was still alive and I might be able to save her if I could get to her in time.
“But the site was down in the darknet, where the bogeymen hide, where monsters like Victor hide. As much as I know my Israeli friends desperately wanted to help me, they couldn’t. They knew what kinds of things I dealt with, and what was at stake. I had helped them save lives. I know they would have done anything in the world to help if they could have, but they couldn’t. That’s how anonymous everyone is in Onionland.
“Victor posted a torture video of her every day for a week. He had her in a dark room, tied to a chair, with a light on her so she was all you could see. Her legs were bare. As horrific as the things he did to her were, it was clear to me that he didn’t want her to die, yet. He wanted to keep her alive, keep the game going. He wanted her to be terrified. That’s what these kinds of predators get off on—control and terror. After that, they gorge on the final act of killing.
“Then in the next video, he wrapped a tourniquet tightly around her left thigh—she had slender legs—and used a hand saw to cut her leg off just above the knee.
“He didn’t gag her. He wanted everyone watching to hear her scream.
“In between her screams, she would say over and over, ‘Jack, please help me!’ ”
Kate could feel her knees trembling.
“The next day he put on a tourniquet and cut off her other leg. By then she was delirious and I could tell that she had given up all hope. The only mercy was that I could see she was going into shock.
“I watched Rita die in that last video.
“My Israeli friends did the only thing they could to help me. They made Sid’s corpse vanish.
“Victor still visits the Scavenger Hunt site. I recognize his postings, the phrasing he uses. He’s still out there, still hunting people like you. The only way to stop people like that is to kill them.”
Kate was frozen in shock at the story. She could hardly breathe.
Jack seemed to finally come out of his distant daze and looked down at her. “She’s gone now. I don’t know if anything would ever have come of us. We never had a chance to find out.
“Her suffering is over. I try to find comfort in that.” For a moment he searched for words. “I wish I could have buried her, you know? It would have at least been something to have been able to lay her to rest. But her remains were never found.
“Sometimes I lie awake, staring up at the ceiling, and I see her. When I sleep, she’s there in my nightmares screaming, calling my name, begging me to help her.
“The Valium helps me sleep without remembering the dreams. It’s a blessing not to remember your dreams. You know?
“I always figure that if Rita and all the rest I’ve seen becomes too much for me to take anymore, I can always use the whole bottle and just … go to sleep and not ever have to dr
eam again.”
Kate, her vision watery, pulled him into an embrace, where he found comfort for a moment before separating.
“I guess that’s why I can seem so cold. I don’t mean to be, but in the world I deal in, I can’t sugarcoat anything. If I do, I’m only hurting the people I want to help. Life and death are cruel and hard. I feel a sacred duty to at least give the people I find the information they need to survive. The rest is up to them.”
He stared off into the distance again. “But I can still see her eyes. Rita had the most remarkable eyes. They were the eyes of an angel. I had never seen eyes like that before, and never again since—until I met you.”
He looked down at Kate. “That’s why when we first met I was stopped in my tracks when I looked into your eyes. You have eyes like hers. You, too, have the eyes of an angel.
“Except that in you it’s more. You have the eyes of an avenging angel.”
Kate, her chin trembling, pulled him back into the embrace, where she hoped that he could for a moment pause time and find a brief bit of comfort in her sympathy and understanding.
After those moments of time suspended, she pulled back and wiped the tears from under her eyes. She wasn’t sure she was going to be able to speak, but she forced herself to find her voice. She knew what he needed to hear, what would help him more than anything else, what would be his anchor in the storm of a world sliding into chaos.
“Jack, I want to live…. Will you please help me? Teach me what I need to know?”
He smiled as he ran a hand down the side of her head. “Sure, I can do that.”
She nodded her gratitude.
“Why is it,” she asked, “that so many people around us, good people, people we care about, are being murdered like this?”
This time, he pulled her into a reassuring hug. “I’m afraid that we have the misfortune to have been born into a very dark moment in the long history of evil.
“But I’m going to teach you to survive.”
CHAPTER
FORTY-THREE
In the solitude of the bathroom, Kate stood in front of the mirror as she ran cold water. Tears tinted with mascara dripped into the white sink to spiral down the drain. She put a washcloth under the running water and wrung it out.