“Storm! Storrrrm…warning. First ta’ reach her, salvage is mine…mine…mine…mine.”
She had to stay calm. She couldn’t heed the jerky movements or the eerie voices of the robotics. When she moved again, a sailor with the insignia for the Maine seemed to leap ahead of her in her path. He hadn’t moved. She was terrified, and she knew that someone had hit the mechanization that Craig Beckett made.
They were just robotics. Just robotics coming to mechanical life. She had to ignore them.
She had to get downstairs to Sean.
She started to walk again, and then she heard stealthy movement. Not a robotic.
Someone was stalking her in the darkness. She made her way carefully then, letting the robotics talk and move, and using them for cover.
She came to the robotic of Ernest Hemingway. He jerked and spoke, complaining about his wife, Pauline. He said, in grating and broken words, that he’d set a penny into his patio-because his wife had certainly taken his very last penny. Katie slipped by him, glad of the noise he was making, and headed down the servants’ stairs to the exhibits below.
She paused, having reached the first floor. She was going to have to sneak across the open entryway to get to the left bank of rooms if she didn’t go through the pantry corridor in the back.
She didn’t want to go through the pantry corridor; it was too narrow. If there was someone there, that someone could too easily nail her.
As she hesitated, she heard a strange whooshing noise, and, at first, she thought one of the robotics was speaking in a rusty voice once again.
“You…you…you…you…you. You are going to die. Come out, come out, wherever you are! We’re locked in, and your poor brother! Paying for the fact that you had to sleep with a Beckett!”
She froze. The voice was near. But from which direction?
She streaked out from the passage beneath the stairway and raced over to the left hall of exhibits where she had left her brother. She burst in on Robert the Doll. In silence, he was jerking back and forth on his stand.
She nearly tripped over a body. She hunched down. It was Sam Barnard. He was wearing handcuffs, and when she gingerly touched him, she discovered a plastic bag wound tightly around his head. With trembling fingers, she ripped it away from him.
“Katie!”
The whisper was Bartholomew’s. His hands were on her shoulders. He motioned her to silence, but beckoned her to follow him.
Her brother was stretched out in the facsimile of the cemetery, where the servicemen from the Maine were buried and honored. A bag was on his head; it wasn’t tightened. She ripped it away from him, and lay against him, desperate to hear his breathing.
He had a pulse. There was a gash on his head; she knew from the stickiness beneath her fingers when she touched him.
“Oh, God!” she prayed in a breath.
“Katie!” Bartholomew warned her again.
“You…you…you…you…you…are dead!” The words were followed by laughter. She tried to rise carefully, to start to move.
“Katie, the other way!” Bartholomew urged her.
Too late. She ducked to avoid a nineteen-twenties flapper, and crashed right into the wall of a big man’s chest.
He reached for her. He was wearing gloves. The gloves he had always known to wear. Diver’s gloves, so plentiful in the Keys!
His hands wound around her neck. She struggled.
He winced and jerked suddenly, as if he’d been hit from behind.
Katie took the moment. She pushed against him and bit his arm, bit as hard as she could. She clawed at his flesh.
If she died, which well she might, the bastard wasn’t getting away with it again.
Nor would he blame David Beckett.
“Bitch!” he roared.
His huge hand came flying across her cheek. The blow was stunning; she felt it with her jaw and head, stars sprung up before her eyes.
And then a darkness deeper than any she had ever imagined.
David slowed when he reached the lawn of the museum. Any alarm now would cost Katie her life, and he knew it. He had to believe that he had a chance. That the killer was determined to tease and taunt her before ending it. He wondered if she was meant to be his finest work. Katie O’Hara, so well-known and beloved in Key West. Beautiful, and a songstress. With a family as old and renowned as his own.
And Sean was in there, somewhere.
The door hadn’t been locked. It remained open. He couldn’t be sure how the killer would act and react, and he was certain that Liam would turn the house upside down. But he had to hurry-if sirens suddenly riddled the streets, if he knew that time was nearly up, the killer would work faster.
The killer had made a mistake. He wouldn’t be able to cast suspicion on David or anyone else. But David thought that he was so overconfident now in his quest for some kind of belated family vengeance that he wouldn’t believe that. He would still believe himself invincible.