Jack was silent, thinking about it as they drove through the city toward the bar.
Finally he said, “I don’t know if that’s true, Angela. Your natural genetic ability may simply be more advanced than it is in other people—like people who are born smarter, with a higher IQ than anyone else. You may be the first of a better kind of human—better than those of us who can’t do what you can. You’re special, Angela. Don’t you ever forget that, and don’t you ever doubt it. You’re not a freak. The world needs you.”
“You mean you want to use me for what you do, like you do in Israel. Use me like the other people you find who can recognize killers?”
“None of them ever knew what killers had done, or what they were thinking. Only you, Angela, can see into their minds. That’s incredibly special.”
“Not so special,” she said as she looked out her window again. “Seeing into the minds of killers is like being part of their world of madness. Seeing the things they’ve done and how it makes them feel is not special. It’s a curse. I have to live with the things I’ve seen.
“I see those things when I try to go to sleep. I see them in my sleep.
“It’s a lonely kind of insanity.”
“I can only imagine,” he said in soft consolation.
When they got to the bar where her truck was parked, the bar was just closing.
“Nate was the one who told me what happened to you. He will want to know that you’ve been released and that you’re safe.”
“Would you mind going in and telling him? I’m really tired.” She hesitated. “Besides, I’m kind of embarrassed that he saw me being handcuffed and carried away like that.”
“Sure,” Jack said. “Wait while I run in and tell him so I can follow you to make sure you make it home safely. But you shouldn’t be embarrassed. You did nothing wrong. They did.”
Sitting in her truck waiting, Angela saw Nate pop his head out of the door with Jack and wave. She waved back.
She rolled down the window when Jack reached the side of her truck.
“He was pretty relieved,” Jack told her. “He was really worried for you.”
She glanced back at the bar. “He’s a nice guy.”
“Maybe the guy for you?” Jack asked.
“I’m not a nice girl,” she said as she started the truck.
She was still wired from her anger over those men snatching her, so at least that kept her awake on the ride home. At her road off the highway, after she’d driven her truck in, Jack helped her put the cable back up across her drive. She didn’t think she had the strength to do it by herself. Now that she was home and safe, her eyes kept closing.
“Your second wind is running out,” he told her. “Get some rest.”
“What’s this?” she asked as he handed her a phone.
“It’s a disposable phone no agency knows about, so they won’t be listening in on it. It has my number programmed in. Just hit the first speed dial if you need me.”
Angela nodded. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Have a good sleep, Angela. We’ll talk then.”
He waited until he saw her truck go up the road through a meadow and then vanish into the trees. Twin mountains, lit by the moonlight, looked to be welcoming her home.
FIFTY-NINE
Angela was in the sleep of the dead when her eyes suddenly popped open and she sat bolt upright in bed.
She didn’t know why, but her heart was hammering.
The room was pitch black. She couldn’t have been asleep for more than an hour or two. It was still somewhere in the middle of the night.
She had been so tired she hadn’t bothered to shower or take off her makeup. She simply took off everything but her panties and fell into bed. She had been asleep before she’d had a chance to savor the feel of being all alone in her own bed in her own house.
Even though she was suddenly awake, her brain was still having trouble emerging from a mental fog of sleep deprivation. She couldn’t quite figure out what had made her wake up so suddenly. For a fraction of a second, she thought that maybe she was dreaming. But as soon as she’d had the thought, she already knew she wasn’t dreaming.
Something was wrong.
In her dead-tired state, her normal thought process wasn’t up to speed and she just couldn’t figure out what was out of place.
She carefully put her bare feet on the floor and stood in one fluid, quiet motion. She waited for a second, listening, thinking that maybe it had been a deer coming close to the house. Still in somewhat of a mental haze, she took the three silent, familiar steps to the light switch at the right side of the doorway.
Wiping her face with her left hand, trying to banish the sleep from her eyes, she turned on the light with her other hand.
There was a man standing in the doorway.
A big man.
Angela froze, standing naked except for her panties right in front of him. A slow smile contorted his cruel features as he looked down the length of her.
He had on a baggy, collarless, V-neck, long-sleeved linen shirt. His loose-fitting pants seemed to be made of the same light linen material. His hair and beard were both black and short, framing his compacted, square features and the deep lines of his face. Even though he had on a shirt, she could tell by his bull neck and the width of him that he was big-boned and heavily muscled.
She had seen his photo. Two of them, in fact. She knew without a doubt that this was the international serial killer, Cassiel Aykhan Corekan.
Angela had seen plenty of scary guys. Cassiel was the king of scary.
She wasn’t sure what other people saw when they looked at this man, but what she saw was a deadly predator, a killer without a shred of remorse or mercy. This was death itself in the form of a living man.
Standing close in front of this powerful figure, looking into his dark eyes, she was overwhelmed with images flooding through her mind. Scene after scene of him murdering people flashed past her mind’s eye at lightning speed, each one gruesome, each person she saw in the grip of horror under this ruthless monster.
And then those scenes rushing past started to slow. They came to a stop on her grandparents.
Angela stood frozen, her eyes wide, as she stared up into this man’s eyes, stared into the vision of him with Vito and Gabriella on their knees, facing away from him. Angela saw Cassiel step forward and shoot her grandfather in the back of the head. As simple as that, the man that had meant so much to her was dead. He collapsed into the tall, dusty weeds beside the road.
Her grandmother was on her knees beside him. She was weeping silently. Her head was bowed and her hands were together in prayer. Cassiel put the barrel of his gun to the base of her skull and pulled the trigger. There was a bang and a flash. She fell beside her beloved husband.
Cassiel had been in a hurry. For that reason only he hadn’t made their death as grisly as most of the others. He had simply wanted to dispatch family members of people with the vision to recognize killers. It was not mercy. He was in a hurry to go rape a young woman he had tied up in a basement in a nearby town. It was all he could think about. He kept getting an erection every time he thought about her and what he was going to do to her. But first, he wanted to eliminate these two members of the Constantine family.
In that instant, Angela’s grandparents had ceased to exist. Their light went out of her world. Her whole life had been cast into darkness.
Angela could feel tears running down her face.
“ ‘Dark Angel,’ ” Cassiel said in a mean, gravelly voice as he read the tattoo across her throat. He reached out and gently took hold of her left nipple between a thumb and finger. He could see in her eyes that she recognized him as a killer. “I knew that those four fools wouldn’t be able to kill a woman like you. It takes a man like me to do that. And I knew that a woman like you would be living in this remote place your grandparents built.”