She looked down at the desk for the longest time.
“At least answer that, Rachel.”
“I saw him in the hallway, too,” she said softly. “Earlier. After I left you. It made me so angry that he was there, that Backus brought him out. It all boiled up. I wanted to hurt him. Humiliate him. I needed . . . something.”
So with a promise that she’d be waiting, she sent him out to the drugstore for a condom. But she was gone when he got back.
“I was in my room when you called and knocked. I didn’t answer because I thought it was him. He must’ve done the same because twice people knocked. Twice they called. I never answered.”
I nodded.
“I’m not proud of what I did to him,” she said. “Especially now.”
“Everybody has things they’re not proud of, Rachel. It doesn’t stop them from going on. It shouldn’t.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I’m going now, Rachel, I hope things work out for you. And I hope you’ll call me sometime. I’ll be waiting.”
“Good-bye, Jack.”
As I moved away from her I brought my hand up. With one finger I traced the line of her jaw. Our eyes briefly met and held. Then I walked out.
51
He huddled in the dark of the storm-drainage tunnel, resting and concentrating his mind on mastering the pain. Already he knew there was infection. The wound was minor in terms of damage, a through-and-through shot that tore an upper abdominal muscle but little else before leaving, but it was dirty and he could feel the poisons beginning to move through his body, making him want to lie down and sleep.
He looked down the length of the dark tunnel. Only stray light leaking from somewhere up above made it this far down. Lost light. He pushed himself up the slippery wall until he was standing and then he began moving again. One day, he thought as he moved. Make it through the first day and you’ll make it through the rest. It was the mantra he repeated in his mind.
In a sense, there was relief. Despite the pain and now the hunger, there was the relief. No more separation. The facade was gone. Backus was gone. Now there was only Eidolon. And Eidolon would triumph. They were nothing before him and could do nothing now to stop him.
“NOTHING!”
His voice echoed down the tunnel into the blackness and disappeared. With one hand clamped over his wound he headed that way.
52
In late spring a city Department of Water and Power inspector, investigating the source of a foul odor that had drawn complaints from the residents living above, found the remains of the body in the tunnels.
The remains of a body. It carried his identification and FBI badge and the clothes were his. It was found, what was left of it, laid out on a concrete shelf in an underground intersection of two stormwater drainage culverts. The cause of death was unknown because advanced decomposition—sped along by the damp, fetid surroundings of the drainage culvert—and disturbance of the remains by animals precluded accurate autopsy results. The medical examiner did find what appeared to be a wound channel and a cracked rib in the rotting flesh but no bullet fragments that could conclusively tie the wound to Rachel’s gun.
As far as the identification went, it, too, was inconclusive. There was the badge and the ID and the clothing but nothing else that proved that these were indeed the remains of Special Agent Robert Backus Jr. The animals that had attacked the body—if it had truly been animals—had made off with the complete lower mandible and an upper bridge which precluded a comparison with dental records.
That seemed too convenient to me. And others. Brad Hazelton called me to fill me in on these facts. He said the bureau was officially closing the case but there would be those who would still look for him. Unofficially. He said that some people viewed the discovery in the drainage tunnel as nothing more than a skin Backus had left behind, probably a homeless man he had encountered in the pipes. He said they believed Backus was still out there and so did I.
Brad Hazelton told me that while the official search for Backus might be over, the effort to explore the psychological motivations was continuing. But cracking the nut of Backus’s pathology was proving difficult. Agents spent three days in his condominium near Quantico but found nothing remotely indicative of his secret life. No souvenirs of his kills, no clipped newspaper stories, nothing.
There were only little things known, small clues. A perfectionist father who never spared the rod. An obsessive-compulsive fixation on cleanliness—I remembered his desk at Quantico and his straightening of the calendar after I had sat there. An engagement broken off years earlier by a bride-to-be who told Brass Doran that Backus required her to shower immediately before and after they made love. A high school friend who came forward and told Hazelton that once Backus had confided to him that when he wet the bed as a boy, his father would handcuff him to the towel bar in the shower—a story denied by Robert Sr.
But these were only details, not answers. They were fragments of the much larger fabric of personality that they could only guess at. I remembered what Rachel had told me once. That it was like trying to put together a shattered mirror. Each piece reflects a part of the subject. But if the subject moves, so does the reflection.
I have stayed in Los Angeles since it all happened. I had my hand repaired by a Beverly Hills surgeon and it only hurts now at the end of a long day at the computer.
I’ve rented a small house in the hills and on good days I can see the sun’s reflection on the Pacific almost fifteen miles away. On bad days the view is depressing and I keep the blinds closed. Sometimes at night I can hear the coyotes whining and barking at each other in Nichols Canyon. It is warm here and I have not had the desire to return to Colorado. I talk to my mother and father and Riley regularly—more so than when I was there—but I still fear the ghosts back there more than the ones here.
Officially, I am on leave from the Rocky. Greg Glenn wants me to come back but I have held off on an answer to him. I have the leverage. I’m now a celebrity journalist—I’ve been on “Nightline” and “Larry King Live”—and Greg wants to keep me on staff. So for now, I am on extended leave without pay while writing my book.
My agent sold the book and film rights to my story for more money than I could make in ten years working at the Rocky. But most of the money, when I get it all, will go into a trust fund for Riley’s unborn baby. Sean’s baby. I don’t think I could manage with so much in my own bank account and I don’t feel deserving of it anyway. It’s blood money. I put aside just enough of the first payment from the publisher for living expenses here in L.A. and the possibility that I might make a trip to Italy after I finished the first draft.
That’s where Rachel is. Hazelton told me. When they told her she was being transferred out of the BSS unit, out of Quantico, she took her own leave and went overseas. I’ve waited to hear from her but there has been no word. I don’t think there will be now and I don’t think I’ll be going to Italy as she once suggested. At night, the ghost that haunts me the most is the thing inside of me that led me to doubt the very thing I wanted most.
53
Death is my beat. I have made my living from it and forged a professional reputation on it. I have profited by it. It has always been around me but never as close as those moments with Gladden and Backus, when it breathed right into my face, put its eye to mine and made a grab for me.
I remember their eyes the most. I can’t sleep without first thinking of their eyes. Not for what was in them but for what was missing, what was not there. Behind them was only darkness. An empty despair so intriguing that I find myself fighting sleep to think about it sometimes. And when I think of them I can’t help but think of Sean as well. My twin. I wonder if he looked into the eyes of his killer at the end. I wonder if he saw what I saw. An evil as pure and as scarring as a flame. I still mourn for Sean. I always will. And I wonder as I watch and wait for the Eidolon when I’ll see that flame again.
The Poet
Michael Connel
ly
Denver Post crime-beat reporter Jack McEvoy specializes in violent death. So when his homicide-detective brother kills himself, McEvoy copes in the only way he knows how: he starts work on an investigative report about police suicides.
But soon his research reveals a sinister pattern—‘suicides’ by detectives in other cities that are strikingly similar to his brother's. McEvoy suspects a serial murderer is at work—a devious cop killer who's left a trail of poetic clues.
It's the news story of a lifetime—except that ‘the Poet’ already seems to know that McEvoy is trailing him. . . .
Michael Connelly, The Poet
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