The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) Read online

  Talley shook her head. “None we’ve been able to find. He could have parked it off on the road and walked.”

  She let her eyes wander about the cabin’s interior. It was ordinary in all regards except for two things. The first was an entire wall devoted exclusively to weapons. Pistols, muskets, ancient swords, sabers and knives hung in no discernible pattern, some as good as the day they were made. The second was an odd contraption that looked like a movie projector with dozens of lenses extending out in all directions.

  “Multidimensional television,” Kimberlain said by way of explanation. “Friend of mine designed it for me, the same friend who’s up at The Locks now trying to figure out how Leeds and the others got out.”

  Talley’s eyes gestured toward the far wall. “And the weapons?”

  “I restore them. It’s very soothing. You should try it. Civilized weapons for more civilized times.”

  Talley gazed over the impressive array. “Some would take issue with that.” She hesitated. “Do you really think Leeds might come back here? I could have a team sent up … Set a trap.”

  “That would be the surest way to insure he never reappears.”

  “These men are good.”

  “So is Leeds. He’d sense them from a mile away.”

  Talley’s dark eyes flashed beneath her flowing auburn hair.

  “How much do you really know about Andrew Harrison Leeds, Ms. Talley?”

  “I read the file, the trial transcript.”

  “They were based only on what could be proven. They tell only a fraction of the story, one-fifth at most and very probably less.”

  “The identity business you mean.”

  “Leeds had five of them we know of. Before the killings that earned him the nickname Candy Man, he was a professor of forensic pathology at the Brown University medical school. Like to hear about that one?”

  When Talley made no reply, Kimberlain continued.

  “Class was dissecting cadavers one day, Leeds demonstrating every step of the way on a raised platform. Trouble was his cadaver wasn’t dead, just anesthesized. He performed an autopsy on a living coed.”

  Talley’s eyes wavered.

  “His third identity was as a physician, family doctor as a matter of fact. Killed twenty-two of his elderly patients twenty-two totally different ways.”

  “My God …”

  “Number four was a psychiatrist. His patients swore by him. Then seven failed to return home the same day. They were all found in his office, seated as for a group therapy session. They were all dead. Leeds strangled them, then cut out their eyes, ears, and tongues.”

  Talley wavered. “Can I sit down?”

  “Be my guest.”

  She sank into the couch. “Why wasn’t any of this in his file?”

  “I followed it up on my own. You don’t publicize what you can’t prove.”

  “You tracked all of this down yourself?”

  “I followed the trails, the patterns.”

  “He wanted to be caught, is that it?”

  “Not at all. He wanted to be noticed. The act is meaningless without recognition. People like Leeds live off raw emotion. What they bring about feeds their ego, and in turn their ego needs to be fed more. They’re almost like infants in that respect.”

  “People like Leeds,” Talley echoed. “What does that mean?”

  “Monsters. Behavioral science can call them any psychiatric term you want, but that’s what they are.”

  “What about his fifth identity?”

  “Private school teacher. Seventh grade somewhere in Florida. Took his class on a field trip one day… .”

  “Oh no …”

  “Not a single body was ever found.”

  Talley was looking very pale. “He was the worst, wasn’t he?”

  “Or best. Depends on your perspective.”

  “Jesus … How do you do it, go after them I mean?”

  “Because I have to … just like they do.”

  “And in this case you’ve got to get him before he gets you, is that it?”

  Kimberlain moved closer so that he was at the center of the glare reflecting off the many lenses of the multidimensional television apparatus. For just an instant Talley imagined he was actually a projection, a ghostly specter projected in six hundred horizontal lines of resolution, instead of a man.

  “Not at all,” he told her. “If Leeds came here, it’s because he’s secure in the notion he’s got the perfect place to hide.”

  “Meaning …”

  “Meaning a sixth identity I never uncovered, a sixth identity he can safely disappear into. And once he does, we’ll never find him.”

  “Where will you start?”

  “With an expert,” the Ferryman told her.

  The day was more than half gone by the time Kimberlain pulled his Nissan Pathfinder off the road and drove it as far as the Maine woods would allow. The walk that would follow was all of two miles. There had once been a road a four-wheel drive could negotiate easily. But that had long been camouflaged to cover the cabin’s existence and current resident from unwelcome scrutiny.

  Kimberlain reached the cabin, careful not to conceal his presence but also not to announce it too boldly. It looked considerably different from when he had occasionally used it himself. The trees and undergrowth had been unopposed in their attack. Vines slid across its roof and wrapped about the front porch beams. The cabin looked more as though it had grown out of the forest now, rather than having been built within it. Kimberlain wasn’t surprised.

  Whack!

  He instantly pinned the sound’s origin to the rear of the house. Circling round, he heard it three more times before his eyes locked on the massive bare shoulders and bulging arms that wielded the ax effortlessly.

  Whack!

  Another log splintered in two and dropped from the cutting board. The neatly stacked pile that formed most of the open area between the cabin and the woods was enough to last two winters, even three. Still, Kimberlain knew it grew bigger every day.

  “Hello, Ferryman,” Winston Peet said without turning, as he brought the ax slamming downward again. “I knew you’d be coming.”

  Strange to call this man a friend now, since the first time they had met six years ago each had tried quite determinedly to kill the other.

  Fifteen murders had been committed before behavioral science called in the Ferryman. All the bodies had been found with their heads missing, ripped from the torsos by hand, explained pathologists, following death by strangulation. Impossible strength was clearly involved. Don’t look for a man, the advice went, look for a monster.

  In the end, Kimberlain found the answer to the question of how to catch him had been right in front of everyone’s eyes all the time: each killing had taken place in the previous victim’s birthplace. The first had been killed in Boston. That victim’s birthplace was Gilford, New Hampshire; the victim there was born in White Plains, New York. And so it went in state after state.

  The sixteenth victim had been born in the town of Medicine Lodge, Kansas. It was there, in the kitchen of the town’s bar and grill, that Kimberlain first met Winston Peet. He stood over the corpse of the bar’s lone remaining waitress. Kimberlain had met plenty of giants in his time, either abnormally tall or abnormally well muscled, but had never laid eyes on a creature who was so much of both.

  The monster grinned from beneath his bald dome and slid the pretty waitress’s head across the floor toward the Ferryman’s feet. The fight that followed made history of a sort, lasting exactly the fifty-seven seconds it took for the bureau men to be attracted to the sounds of a struggle. They found Kimberlain standing over the giant with pistol in hand. The arm holding it hung crooked from a dislocated shoulder. His other wrist was broken. He was already coughing blood from numerous internal injuries, including a severely lacerated kidney. The monster, for his part, was bleeding badly from around the collarbone, courtesy of the meat cleaver Kimberlain had driven deep, the wound that ha
d ultimately toppled him.

  Kimberlain had steadied the gun as he heard the FBI charge through the entrance of the bar.

  Fire, he told himself.

  Shoot me, the monster’s sagging eyes seemed to beg.

  The Ferryman held the gun rigid, and then the FBI men took over, their pistols and rifles ready as if this were a wild beast finally cornered in the jungle.

  Not far from that, was the judgment of the court. They found Winston Peet to be totally incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong and sentenced him to The Locks. Kimberlain figured he was done with Peet at that point, but then the letters started and kept coming.

  Two of the letters concerned an especially brutal series of murders and it was this that had drawn Kimberlain to The Locks three years before. Peet seemed to have insight into the latest monster the Ferryman was pursuing. Less than a week after the meeting, Peet escaped from The Locks and appeared in a hospital room Kimberlain was temporarily confined to. He claimed to have been renewed, reborn, his former self slain by the Ferryman’s spiritual bullet. He wanted to help and insisted he was the only man who could.

  As it turned out, Peet was right. The turn of fate cast them as allies, and when it was over, Kimberlain owed the giant too much to return him to The Locks. So he had brought Peet here to a cabin he had built himself in the woods of Maine to live out his life alone and in peace. He visited the giant at sporadic intervals, more for his own needs, he had to admit, than Peet’s.

  Winston Peet was turning around now, facing him with ax in hand and massive bare chest muscles rippling.

  “Let’s talk about Tiny Tim, Ferryman.”

  Chapter 8

  “HE’S NOT WHAT I came about.”

  Peet rested the ax against the log pile and started forward. A man his size should have pounded the earth with each step, but Peet’s stride was light and graceful, the moccasins he had sewn himself barely grazing the hardened ground. His bald dome glimmered with sweat. He stopped a yard away from Kimberlain and didn’t offer his hand.

  “But he is out there, Ferryman, and only you can bring him in.”

  Kimberlain gazed up at the giant, and his eyes locked briefly on the neatly lined scar that he had put through the left collarbone with a meat cleaver. “How’d you know I was coming?”

  “You need me again. Your need reaches me like a rope that would pull me back into the world you helped me leave.”

  “The FBI came to see me, young lady from behavioral science with her own theory about Tiny Tim. She figured out you may be still alive. She thinks you’re him.”

  “Does she?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “Like I said, that’s not what brought me here.”

  “You can check my feet if you want.” He gazed at the ax still held by his side. “Perhaps I chopped part of my left one off by accident since I’ve been here.”

  “Someone clever wouldn’t need an ax to leave behind whatever clues they wanted.”

  “Someone like you, Ferryman.”

  “Except the young lady doesn’t suspect me.”

  “Because she doesn’t know you as well as I do.”

  “Meaning?”

  Peet’s face was expressionless. “Accept what you are, Ferryman. Stop using me for scale to place yourself at the level you desire. Even the young woman from the FBI looked at you and knew.”

  “Knew what, Peet?”

  “That she was facing what she was after. Perhaps not in name, but certainly in feeling. The other level, Ferryman. She knew that only one who dwells there could do what her quarry has done. You, me, and now Tiny Tim. She accused me, but she might just as easily have accused you.”

  “I don’t want to believe her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it would mean I was wrong about you.”

  “No—because it would mean you were wrong about yourself. Your misjudgment of my character would mirror your misjudgment of your own. If I could still be guilty of such an act, then so could you.”

  “And could you?”

  The faintest hint of a smile crossed Winston Peet’s lips. “My eyes, however strong or weak they may be, can see only a certain distance, and it is within the space encompassed by this distance that I live and move. The line of this horizon constitutes my immediate fate, in great things and small, from which I cannot escape. Around every being there is described a circle, which has a midpoint and is peculiar to him. It is by these horizons, within which each of us encloses himself as if behind prison walls, that we measure the world… .”

  “And how does Tiny Tim measure it?”

  “The evil of the strong harms others thoughtlessly—it has to discharge itself; the evil of the weak wants to harm others and to see the signs of the suffering it has caused.”

  “You’re saying Tiny Tim is weak.”

  “Physically, he is a match for us, but in no other way. How many now?”

  “Over two hundred. Two separate towns in less than a week.”

  Peet seemed to dwell on that briefly. “He likes what he does, Ferryman. I have felt him out there, a black vacuum sucking in what little it can accept.”

  “But you didn’t send for me. You didn’t want to …”

  “Help?” Peet completed. “I didn’t because I can’t. I can’t help you with Tiny Tim because the dark world he inhabits lies on the fringe of our own. To pursue him I will have to cross over, and once over I fear I will never come back.”

  “In other words, you’re afraid of becoming the man you used to be.”

  “Because I never stopped being him, Ferryman. I merely redefined his essence. To pursue Tiny Tim, I would have to redefine it again.”

  “In hunting a monster, one must avoid becoming one,” said Kimberlain, paraphrasing Nietzsche.

  The giant smiled broadly. “And when one stares into the abyss, the abyss stares back.”

  “I’ve just come from there,” Kimberlain told him. “And it’s empty.”

  “Leeds is out,” Kimberlain said when they were inside the cabin, watching as Peet’s features became tense. “He escaped from The Locks three days ago with the rest of the population of MAX-SEC.”

  “How many?”

  “Eighty-three.”

  “I did not feel them, Ferryman. Strange.”

  The cabin’s interior was furnished with a combination of the furniture Kimberlain had built before abandoning the project and that which Peet himself had constructed. The lines of Peet’s pieces—a couch with handmade cushions, a kitchen table made of birch, bookshelves only sparsely filled—were much rounder and softer. Kimberlain realized the hard squareness of his own work mirrored the difficult times that had seen its construction. He sat on the couch, dwarfed upon it. Peet, of course, had built everything to his own massive scale. The giant stood motionless in the open kitchen area, suspended between the task of making breakfast and the chore of accepting Kimberlain’s words. On a nearby counter lay a powerful shortwave radio that was Peet’s only contact with the outside world. Kimberlain figured the batteries would probably last him a lifetime.

  “Leeds came to my house,” he continued. “Walked right up to my door and left me a note.”

  “And how do you feel about that?”

  “Violated.”

  “Yes, Ferryman, but not because he invaded your property as much as your mind. Have you forgotten everything you have learned from me, Ferryman? For Leeds the end is without worth. His essence lies in the means. Not the kill, but the chase leading up to it. Only a game, but no fun unless there is someone to play with.”

  “You’re saying he wants me to go after him again.”

  “More, that he expects you to and he wants you disadvantaged by the illusion of his own superiority.”

  “Maybe it’s not an illusion.”

  “And that’s what this is about, isn’t it? For the first time you, the Ferryman, must face someone getting the better of you. If anyone given a whole sack of
advantages finds in it not even one grain of humiliation he cannot help making the worst of a good bargain. Leeds has humbled you not once, but twice.”

  “Twice?”

  “A man like Leeds, once beaten, would never taunt the one who bested him. He would taunt him only if he wanted the other to know he had not been bested at all.”

  “Meaning …”

  “We sit within our web, we spiders, and we can catch nothing at all in it except that which allows itself to be caught.”

  “You’re saying I caught Leeds because he wanted to be caught? So he could end up in The Locks?”

  “And now, Ferryman, he is out of The Locks with eighty-three others.”

  “Then he leaves me a note… .”

  “His way of letting you know he was the better all the time.”

  The sense in Peet’s argument was twisted, perverse, but undeniable.

  “Why?” Kimberlain asked.

  “A purpose we cannot see.”

  “Why me, I mean.”

  “Predictability. A great strength but also a profound weakness. There is more, though. Leeds would never have bothered with his taunting visit unless he feared you. You occupy his thoughts because of that fear. Sometimes one attacks an enemy not only so as to harm or overpower him but perhaps to test how strong he is.”

  “He could have just killed me.”

  Peet smiled. “Just as you could have killed me when given an even better opportunity that lifetime ago. Simple, Ferryman. He who lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in seeing that his enemy stays alive. Leeds needs you. You provide him with an object of hate that drives the madness within him.”

  “How can I make that work for me?”

  “By finding his purpose, the truth behind what brought him into The Locks … and what brought him out. It lies in his past, and it is there you must go.”

  “Alone, Peet?”

  The giant’s expression looked suddenly sad. “I’m sorry I cannot help you.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  “Enter that void and maybe you revert to the monster you used to be.”

  “Or simply redefine the monster I am now.”