She believed Daniel Beach was mostly the man she saw now, the pleasant all-around good guy. The attraction for the avaricious ex was understandable. He was probably easy to fall in love with. After some time had passed, enough time for the ex to take love for granted, she would have been able to shift her focus to the things she didn’t have—the nice apartment, the big ring, the cars. She probably missed this side of Daniel now, the grass always being greener and whatnot.
But there was also darkness in Daniel, buried deep, perhaps born from the pain and unfairness of losing his parents, aggravated by his wife’s betrayal, and then ignited by the loss of his final family member. That darkness would not surface easily. He would compartmentalize it, keep it away from this gentle life, pack it into the dark spaces where it fit. No wonder he could speak of Mexico so blithely. He would have two Mexicos: the happy one the teacher loved, and the dangerous one the monster thrived in. They probably weren’t anything close to the same place in his head.
Not a true psychotic, she hoped. Just a fractured man who didn’t want to give up the person he thought of as himself but who needed the release the darkness gave him.
She felt comfortable with this assessment, and it changed her plan a little. There was a great deal of performance to what she did. For some subjects, the very clinical and emotionless persona worked best—white coat, surgical mask, and shiny stainless steel; for others, it was the threat of the crazed sadist (though Barnaby was always more successful with that play; he had the face and hair for it—unruly spikes of white, I’ve-just-been-electrocuted hair). Every situation was slightly different—some feared the darkness, some the light. She’d been planning to go clinical—it was the most comfortable role in her wheelhouse—but she decided now that Daniel would need to be surrounded by darkness to let that side come to the surface. And Dark Daniel was the one she needed to talk to.
She did a little evasive driving on the way in. If someone had been tracking Daniel’s clothes or possessions, she didn’t want that person coming along any farther on this trip.
She considered the possibilities again for the millionth time. Column one, this was a very elaborate trap. Column two, this was for real and a million lives were on the line. Not to mention her own.
During her long drive, the balance finally shifted to rest solidly on one side. This wasn’t a government agent in her car, she was sure of that. And if he was an innocent citizen, picked at random to draw her out, then they’d already missed their best opportunities to bag her. There hadn’t been one attack, not one attempt to follow her… that she’d seen.
She thought of the mountains of incriminating information on Daniel Beach, and she couldn’t help herself. She was a believer. So she’d better get to work saving lives.
She pulled into the farmhouse drive around eleven, dead tired and starving but 95 percent sure that there was no trail that could lead either the department or de la Fuentes to her doorstep. She looked the house over quickly, checking to see if anyone had broken in (and died, as he or she would have upon opening the door), and then, after disarming her safeguards, she drove the car into the barn. As soon as she’d pulled the barn door shut and reset the “alarm,” she went to work getting Daniel prepped.
All the other tasks were done. She’d bought timers from a Home Depot in Philly and plugged lamps into them in several rooms of the farmhouse; like a traveler leaving for a few weeks, she made certain that the place looked occupied. A radio was plugged into one of the timers, so there would be noise, too. The house was good bait. Most people would clear that before progressing to the dark barn.
The barn would stay dark. She’d constructed a kind of tent in the middle of the barn space that would hide light and muffle sound, while also keeping Daniel completely ignorant of his surroundings. The rectangular structure was about seven feet high, ten feet wide, and fifteen feet long. It was constructed of PVC pipe, black tarps, and bungee cords, and lined inside with two layers of egg foam duct-taped into place. Rough, yes, but more functional than a cave, and she’d handled that in the past.