She watched him with those eyes that had him sweating. “Why? What is this photo supposed to tell me? That I should go out dancing with you?”
Jack couldn’t help smiling at the way she’d put it. “No. I’m not trying to get you to go out with me. I’m not hitting on you, I swear. Just take a look at it, okay? This is really important.”
Her steady gaze was still locked on him. “Important to who? To you, or to me?”
“Just look at it, would you, please?” He hated the way he sounded like he was begging. But he supposed he was.
She let out a deep breath and stepped from the driver’s door to the opposite side of the hood of her truck from where Jack stood waiting.
“And once I look at this photo, then will you leave me the hell alone?”
Jack nodded his sincerity. “If you want me to, yes.”
“All right. Show me this super duper special fucking photo.”
Jack pulled the photo out of his shirt pocket. It had been printed on photo paper from a negative. Only a photo printed on photo paper from a negative would work for people with the ability he now knew Angela had. Any other kind of digital photo or electronic representation lost some essential quality that they would otherwise be able to see in a killer’s eyes. Those other types of photos were useless for Jack’s work.
For a person with Angela’s ability to recognize a killer, if she couldn’t see him in person, then the photo had to be a photo printed on photo paper from a real negative.
Jack set the photo down on the hood of the truck, turned it to face toward Angela, and with two fingers carefully slid it toward her across the gray-primer hood of her truck.
Angela finally took her eyes off him just long enough to lean in a little and glance down at the photo.
He didn’t think she had looked at it for a full second when she twisted her arm back and in a lightning-fast move came back up with a gun. Before he knew it, she had it pointed right between his eyes. The click he had heard was the safety coming off as the weapon came out of her holster.
Jack froze.
Even more disturbing, that gun had a suppressor. By how steady the weapon was in her hands, he had no doubt that she knew how to use it. Her first finger wasn’t resting along the side of the slide, which would have been somewhat less alarming, but was instead on the trigger. One twitch and he would be dead.
This stunningly gorgeous young woman was more than she at first appeared. A lot more.
Slowly, not making any fast moves, Jack put his hands up.
“Where is he,” she hissed. “Tell me where I can find him.”
This girl was a live hand grenade wrapped in a lollipop shell.
Without realizing it, he had just pulled the pin.
FORTY-SEVEN
Jack tried to keep his voice calm. “What do you see, Miss Constantine, when you look at this photo? When you look at his eyes?”
“Where is he!” she screamed.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to find him myself. That’s why I wanted you to look at the photo. I was hoping you might be able to help.” Jack kept his hands up, hoping she wouldn’t shoot him. He wasn’t entirely confident of that. “Do you know this man?”
“No, I’ve never seen him before.”
Jack let one hand come down just enough to gesture toward the photo lying in front of her on the hood of the truck. “Miss Constantine, can you tell me what you see when you look at this man?”
“What are you, some kind of fucking cop?”
“No. I’m not any kind of cop, or anything like that. Please, tell me what you saw when you looked at the photo of this man?”
She still had her gaze, as well as her gun, locked on him. It was pointed right between his eyes and rock-solid steady. When he shifted his weight to the other foot, the gun barrel tracked that minimal movement without the slightest deviation from its target.
“Please, Miss Constantine, what did you see when you looked at him?”
“That man is a killer.”
“Are you sure?”
She glared at him a moment before speaking. “When he was still in his teens, he had a girlfriend, Zahra. She had long, straight black hair. He called her his little princess. One day she went to visit relatives. He thought she was visiting a lover. He found her cutting through an alley on her way home. He called her a whore. He hit her in the face and threw her on the ground. He straddled her and hit her with his fists as she begged him to stop. The begging excited him. He picked up a brick and used it to pound her face as hard as he could. He didn’t stop until her head was smashed flat in a puddle of bone and brains and blood.
“Then he spotted an old man nearby who had been sleeping in the alley under some cardboard. The old man was horrified. Enraged that someone had seen what he had done, he found a piece of scrap metal, held the old man down with a knee on his chest, and used the piece of metal to gouge out the old man’s eyes, then he strangled him to death.
“That night in the alley he learned that killing was more exciting than anything he had ever done. It made him feel powerful.
“After he was grown, and had killed several more times, he grew bored of the place where he had been born, so he traveled to Jordan. He found that he liked the nomadic lifestyle, traveling as he wished with money he took from victims. He killed an entire household in Jordan because he could see that the husband knew him for what he was. He killed them all—father, mother, grandmother, two children. He held them captive the entire night, every hour or two he started cutting on another one of them before slicing their throats. He likes bloody kills, like that first time with Zahra, who he thought was a whore and had betrayed him.
“He killed eleven members of the Maarouf family in Egypt. The mother could recognize him as a killer by looking into his eyes, just as he could look into her eyes and see her ability. He tied them up, and then bashed in their skulls with a hammer. One at a time. The children first. He likes to hear people scream in terror. They lived in an apartment over a nightclub, so that night no one heard those screams.
“He killed a woman in Germany—an immigrant. He could tell by her eyes that she could see the truth about him, just as I can. She had long black hair. She reminded him of Zahra, his first love he thought had cheated on him. Her name was Ibadah. He raped her first, stabbed out her eyes, cut out her tongue—while she was still alive.
“He made it last because it had been a while since he had killed and he was hungry to do it again. He finally cut her throat. When he was done carving on her to see what she was made of, to see if she was really Zahra, his first love, inside someone else’s body come to taunt him, he threw the remains off a high bank into a river.
“It Italy, he tracked down a man he had seen. He had recognized that same, rare ability in the man’s eyes. He went to the man’s house in a bad neighborhood of Naples where there is a lot of crime, and played a recording of a baby crying outside the door. When a woman, Camilla, heard it, she thought it might be her granddaughter. She was frightened for the little girl’s safety. When she opened the door, without knowing it, she let death itself into her house. Her daughter was in a back room with the little girl. He slaughtered the whole family.”
“Do you know their last name?”
“Constantine.”
The hair on the back of Jack’s neck had stood up on end. The blood had drained from his face as he’d listened.
The Mossad had known some of it, but not nearly all of it. The intelligence agencies hadn’t even known about some of those killings, much less suspected Cassiel. They also hadn’t known, of course, what drove him to kill.
He was one of those super-predators who hunted people with the ability to recognize him as a killer.