Thinking of Lauren had him off track, as usual. He knew he’d fathered many, many children over the years, but he’d never seen any of them grow past the first few days of infancy.
He shook off the memories, the maudlin excuses. He had screwed up, royally, and he had to find a way to make things right. Over twenty-five years of service, with everything happening the way it was dictated by the stars and the moon and Curtis, had made him complacent, and sloppy. Doug would be his undoing.
His reverie was interrupted. The light in the bedroom went out, drawing his attention back to the house.
His pulse picked up. Two in the morning now, and the night had gone silent with its sleeping. He walked with a hunter’s stealth into the backyard, climbed over the fence. McDonald didn’t have dogs, the idiot. Dogs were the best deterrent, though Adrian knew many ways to circumvent them. A juicy steak laden with ketamine was his favorite method. He recognized the irony—humans were fair game, but he would do most anything to avoid killing an animal.
But there were no dogs here, no electronic monitoring or well-armed security system, just the peaceful certainty of a man who slept with a Remington shotgun within easy reach that he could handle any and all situations that might arise in the night.
He’d never experienced a nightmare like Adrian, though.
He was across the lawn in five short seconds, walked directly to the back door, used a simple set of lock picks to open it.
He stepped inside, testing the air, smelling, feeling, seeing, tasting, using every one of his predator’s senses to ascertain the situation.
He was in the basement. His eyes adjusted to the murky interior, and he started across the room toward the stairs. The house had three floors, and a wide, curving staircase wound to the upper floors.
He’d just put his foot on the first riser when he heard the deep, unearthly metallic clang of a shotgun jacking a shell. His body coiled and his heart nearly stopped.
“I’ve been waiting for you, you big-assed son of a bitch.”
And the man pulled the trigger.
As he fell, Adrian thought of the light that was his great Mother, and the strawberry blonde girl who had set him on the path of the damned.
Chapter
42
Washington, D.C.
THEY WERE GOING in circles, and Fletcher was getting frustrated.
Rachel Stevens had been missing for over twenty-four hours and the window to find her safe and unhurt was rapidly closing. The media firestorm was at a fever pitch. Every news station, local and national, had trucks parked across D.C.—at the snatch site, at FBI Headquarters, in the Stevenses’ neighborhood—their satellite dishes pushing constant updates into the D.C. night. Blame would be next, aspersions toward law enforcement, most of whom hadn’t slept and had barely eaten for the past day as they searched for the child.
At least they hadn’t made the connection between Kaylie Rousch and Rachel Stevens yet. That would drive them into a tsunami.
Fletcher was on his way to Bethesda again to talk with Rachel Stevens’s parents—the mother was back from her overseas assignment and Fletcher wanted a chance to go at her face-to-face—when he got the call. They had a break in the case, and he needed to get his butt back to the Hoover Building.
Fletcher dodged through the suburbs into the Washington streets, the ever-familiar white marble and snapping American flags, worrying about Sam and the Matcliff case, and about young Rachel Stevens. Worried about the case that wasn’t his, the clouded eyes of a young man, staked to a dock to drown. Worried himself right into an upset stomach, stopped and fanned the flames with a Super Big Gulp of Diet Coke. He finally had to dig some antacid tablets out of the glove box to calm things down.
He blamed it on getting older, this worrying, not being able to turn off his emotions as well as he used to. When he was on patrol, and even in the early days in homicide, he was the iceman, able to stomach the most obscene crime scenes imaginable—and in D.C., there were plenty—without a qualm.
But five or so years ago, he’d felt a change. Cases began coming home with him at night, seeping into his dreams, following him on his runs. He’d done the rational thing—too much drinking, too many affairs, a toot here or there, until his wife got fed up and left him, taking his only child with her. His ex was remarried now, and had just had twins with her new husband.
They’d patched things up recently, and that made him happy. He’d gotten himself straight, done his job with his son, refocused his attention on his career. He’d been a man about it all. But the darkness was always with him now, the edge. It wouldn’t let him forget how close he’d come to throwing it all away.