The Fifth Angel Page 13

  CHAPTER 31

  Jack stepped on the gas and leaned forward, feeling for the knob that would make the music louder.

  Beth seemed to sense his discomfort. She reached over and ran her fingers along the back of his neck. He took a few moments and concentrated on his breathing, regaining his composure.

  When he looked at her, he couldn’t ignore the hint of youthful hunger in her expression. He forced his mind back into the here and now. If he was going to pull this off, he had to appear normal.

  Inside the cabin they undressed each other and slipped beneath the clean white sheets worn soft from years of use.

  The chill of the mountain air had crept into the cabin, but Jack didn’t notice until Beth was asleep in the crook of his arm. By the light that spilled into the room through a crack in the bathroom door, Jack thought he even detected the wisps of his own breath.

  He tried to ignore it and pulled Beth’s firm naked body tightly to his own. She was nearly flawless.

  “. . . heat,” he murmured.

  It was too cold to ignore. If he didn’t do something, they’d wake up with frost on their eyebrows. He slipped out of the bed and danced lightly across the icy floor. When she awoke to a toasty cabin he could tell her what he’d done. A real gentleman. Beth groaned sleepily and snuggled down deeper into the blankets and the warm spot he’d left behind.

  Jack rotated the thermostat dial upward. The luxury of heat from a dial seemed almost out of place in a cabin built from rough-cut cedar planks. It stared back at Jack like a rheumy eye, unblinking and unaffected. There was no sound, no click from the mercury switch, and no aching groan from the metal registers near the floor. He bent down and touched one of the long narrow metal boxes. It was stone cold.

  “Damn,” Jack said. He listened to the silence. He twisted the dial back and forth several times and flicked the switch on the side up and down. Nothing worked.

  His hands were now stiffening in the cold. He puffed them full of warm air and cursed again. The warmth of the bed was beckoning like a siren, but he had to do something. He pulled on his jeans, stiff and chilled from their abandonment on the floor, and stepped into his shoes. There was a heavy jacket in his travel bag. He took it out along with a change of clothes and shoes and buttoned it up, covering his bare chest. Quietly he opened the door, but instead of following the gravel drive he jogged down the sandy path that went through the trees and back to the office. He could see more clearly now, coming from this angle, that the office was nothing more than a room attached to the side of the Steffenhausers’ house.

  There was a light on downstairs in the house. Jack walked into the office, circled the desk, and rapped on the door that led to the Steffenhausers’ kitchen. Old man Steffenhauser appeared with his finger straight up in the air and jammed tightly against his constricted lips.

  “Shhhhhh!” he said.

  Then, after rolling his eyes warily at the ceiling and a moment of silence, he said in a quiet voice, “Mrs. Steffenhauser’s asleep and she’ll kill us both, by damn. Quiet. Just be quiet.”

  The old man’s emphatic expression would have been comical if Jack didn’t suspect that he was actually afraid. Instead Jack felt mildly annoyed.

  “We need some heat, Mr. Steffenhauser,” he said in a quiet voice, but refusing to whisper. “The heat’s not working.”

  “Shhhhh!” the man hissed again, his eyes rolling in panic at the ceiling. “I’m coming. I’m coming.”

  Without bothering to put on a coat or even a pair of shoes, the old man took a flashlight from the shelf, then grasped Jack by the arm and led him out into the night. Barefoot and wearing a pair of red-and-white striped pajamas, Steffenhauser led Jack back up the path, speaking in a panicked whisper as he went.

  “You don’t want to wake Mrs. Steffenhauser,” he said. “She’s as mad as a wet hornet when woken. She’d kill the cat. She’d cut out my liver. She’d burn the house down. She’d . . . she’d be God-awful mad, my friend,” he said, apparently having run out of horrible things he could think of. “I know just what you need and I can do it in the blink of an eye better’n telling you.”

  Jack followed in silence, shivering and marveling at the cabin owner’s obvious disregard of the frigid night. When they got to the cabin Steffenhauser swung the beam of his light side to side and rounded the corner to the back. Tucked behind the gleaming hundred-gallon tank of propane gas that fed the stove was a breaker box. The old man popped it open and flipped a switch.

  “That’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll wait on the porch, just to make sure. You go in and give her a try, son.”

  Jack did. He heard the rapid click of expanding metal as the coils inside the registers—crammed with current—began to glow. Outside on the porch Steffenhauser waited patiently, staring out over the rippling water at the hulking mountains and the brilliant star-studded sky beyond. Jack, relieved and confident that he and Beth wouldn’t freeze to death during the night, noticed the view that had mesmerized his host.

  “You still like to look at it?” Jack said stepping lightly out onto the porch.

  “Oh yes, son,” Mr. Steffenhauser said without turning his head. “Oh yes.”

  “Would you like to borrow my jacket, Mr. Steffenhauser?” Jack asked, glancing down at the old man’s wide flat feet, which were splayed out on the plank floor like raw pancakes.

  Steffenhauser wiggled his toes.

  “No son, but that’s mighty kind of you. I’ll just move on back to the house warmed to my core by the fact that Mrs. Steffenhauser is still asleep. I don’t want to alarm you but I do believe it was a near run thing back there when you failed to whisper. Not that I blame you, son. You haven’t lived with the missus these forty-seven years and more, so you can’t know the hellfire of her wrath. Hellfire it is, pure and simple. Best avoided at all times but absolutely essential after dark.”

  The old man chuckled wisely, then with a slap on his leg he said, “Well, I best be getting back. You got your heat now and I got . . . I got the missus.”

  “Mr. Steffenhauser,” Jack said. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “You spoke earlier about Tom Conner,” Jack said.

  The old man’s merry countenance melted.

  “And I wondered what it was exactly that he did . . .”

  Steffenhauser turned toward him and flipped on his flashlight, shining it on the floor, illuminating them both in an eerie glow.

  “You’re serious,” he said, peering at him gravely. It wasn’t a question. It was an affirmation.

  “Yes,” Jack said, his blood suddenly racing.

  Steffenhauser stared for a moment, then shut out his light. Everything went black.

  CHAPTER 32

  While their eyes adjusted to the night Steffenhauser said, “For several years there’d be a girl or two every summer who would disappear. Most people thought they was lost, wandered off into the woods, that kind of thing. Then they found one of them way out in the woods. She’d been hurt and beaten, beaten bad and left to die. It was Tom Conner that did it.”

  In the blackness, the old man’s voice was rich with hatred and disgust. He paused for a minute, and then continued.

  “He was working for Governor’s at the time, a boat rental place on Fourth Lake. He’d see a family or a group of teenagers come in and he’d get their vacation address from the paperwork. Then he’d get them at night. Every one of the girls who disappeared had gone to Governor’s within a week of having disappeared. But no one ever put the whole thing together until that one girl identified him. They were mostly girls who belonged to city people on vacation, but a few were high school kids from right around these parts.

  “They never did prove it was Tom Conner that did it to the others. No one ever found those other girls, but folks knew pretty damn well that it was him. There was some talk about some of the boys taking him out in the woods and shooting him between the eyes like a rabid coon, but it was just talk. That was back in July
of ’eighty-eight. I’ll never forget that summer. He got out maybe four years ago. Didn’t seem like he spent enough time in jail for what he did . . .

  “But,” the old man said with a heavy sigh, “they couldn’t prove he shot no one, and it was the first time he’d been caught doing anything bad. That’s the law. I tell you true, though, if it’d been one of my daughters or one of my grandkids he did that to, I’d a taken my deer rifle out and killed him myself.”

  The old man flashed the light back on and Jack saw the wild look in his eyes.

  “I mean it, son,” he said, his bushy white eyebrows knit into a fearsome scowl. “I would have.”

  Then it was black again. The two of them stood there for a long while, neither moving, both staring out at the bejeweled sky. A star suddenly tumbled headlong like a wayward rocket and disappeared behind the sleeping mountains. Jack felt a ridiculous urge to take this half-crazy old man into his confidence: to tell him that he, Jack Ruskin, had done what the old man yearned to have done himself.

  The moment seemed frozen in time and in it Jack felt the frame of his carefully constructed plan bow under the full weight of the terrible secret. What a relief it would be if someone else could just know and tell him it was good. He felt a pressure building inside him. He was risking his life for people he didn’t even know, but it was more than that. He had to do it.

  Jack opened his mouth to talk.

  “I—” he said. Then he stopped. His mouth began to move and the words began to spill out, words he couldn’t explain.

  “I think it’s important for people to forgive, Mr. Steffenhauser,” he said, lying with all his heart, sounding self-righteous, placing himself outside the realm of suspicion for the act he knew he was about to commit.

  “That’s what the Bible tells us,” he said. “That’s what God wants . . .”

  The old man shifted uncomfortably and Jack felt the tension on the little porch expand until it seemed there was barely room enough for the two of them to stand side by side.

  Finally Steffenhauser sighed heavily and spoke. “That’s what the minister said, son. But it weren’t his kids that it happened to. Seems to me that would change things a piece, but I ain’t going to argue with the Bible any more than I’d argue with the missus. That I won’t do, so instead, I’ll just say good night.”

  Jack watched the old man shuffle down the trail, his striped pajamas glowing faintly in the starlight. When he was gone, Jack slipped back into the cabin. Beth was sound asleep in the bedroom, and part of Jack envied her peaceful slumber.

  Then a wonderful idea came to him.

  From his briefcase, he removed his notebook computer. In the small living room off the bedroom was a desk that looked out through a picture window, across the porch and out on the lake. He set the computer down and accessed his law office over the phone line. He logged onto LexisNexis, a legal and news archive of colossal proportions. What did the old man say? The summer, July 1988. Jack searched that month joined with the name Tom Conner and the key words kidnap or sex crime or rape or sodomy. There were seven matches. One was an AP wire story, four pieces in the Utica Statesman, and two in the Adirondack News.

  Jack searched through them and the full horror of Tom Conner’s crimes came to life. His stomach tightened into a knot of rage. In one of the Utica paper’s stories was the thing Jack wanted: a quote from the father of a girl who had disappeared. As Steffenhauser said, her family had also rented a boat at Governor’s. It was presumed that Tom Conner had taken her and tortured her in the same way as the girl he had chained up, only this girl never made it home. Her father’s name was Arthur Campion. He was a doctor from Albany, and the emptiness of his words in print recalled for Jack his own shock after what had happened to Janet.

  “We just hope she’s all right. We have to hope.”

  Jack logged off of LexisNexis and brought up a new document within his personal files. Then he began to write. When he was finished, he went back through and edited, cutting and changing some things so as not to incriminate himself.

  He accessed the Albany phone directory and found an address for Dr. Arthur Campion. With that he was able to find an e-mail address on-line. When the time was right, Jack would attach a new wire story about Tom Conner that had yet to be written—gunned down in his Seventh Lake home and left to rot—to this letter and then send them both from a special Web site that guaranteed anonymity. Jack could send his e-mail to the doctor without leaving an electronic trail that the police could trace back to him. Not that Dr. Campion would want to lead them to Jack even if he could.

  Before Jack closed out the file, he reread the letter one last time. It was an explicit description of what he was going to do to Tom Conner and why. It said that he hoped that Dr. Campion would find some solace in the vengeance he was about to visit on the monster responsible for taking his daughter from him. It was unsigned, of course, and for some reason that bothered Jack. He wanted a moniker at least, something that connected the letter to him.

  He thought of his biblical words to Steffenhauser and on a whim he got up and went into the bedroom. Beth had turned over but was still sleeping quietly. In the drawer beside the bed was a green Bible. Jack took it into the next room and opened it to Revelation.

  He had a vague idea about an avenging angel. That’s what he was. For fifteen minutes he searched, and then he found it: the fifth angel of the apocalypse. The fifth angel would bring a vial of death and pain to the throne of Satan. There, he would pour out its contents, mercilessly avenging the evil done by Satan and all his followers. That was Jack. He was the fifth angel and that was how he signed his letter.

  CHAPTER 33

  After closing the document and storing it in a secure file, Jack shut down his computer and searched through his duffel bag for a different set of clothes and a windbreaker. Hyped up by the existence of his letter and the sense of justice it would bring to the parent of another victim, Jack hurried outside. There was a slight incline down to the main loop and Jack put the Saab in neutral, letting it roll away from the cabin. When it stopped, he started up the car and rolled down the windows to listen. The engine purred quietly, making less noise than the sound of crunching gravel beneath the tires.

  The driveway—he knew from a small map given to him when he checked in—was a broad semicircle whose other end would take Jack to the highway without having to pass the main house. Nevertheless he crawled along with his headlights off until he came to the road. His hands trembled and he gripped the wheel tightly, forcing himself not to speed and breathing deeply in order to better concentrate on his impromptu plan. The sickening fear had crept up inside him, trickling into his core like a cesspool. He was going to kill someone and he couldn’t stop it. Even more, he felt compelled to do it. He found the bottle of Maalox but put it down untouched. The grinding in his gut would keep him alert.

  When he passed the inn and Tom Conner’s house he began to search for an appropriate place to pull off the road. Less than a quarter mile away he came to a gas station. There were several cars lined up outside awaiting repair, and Jack pulled in next to them. For several minutes he sat in the darkness, looking and listening. The engine ticked; otherwise all was quiet.

  He got out of the car and circled the building, searching for signs of people within. Satisfied that the place was just a garage, he went to the trunk of the Saab and removed a pair of leather driving gloves and then his gun and holster from its metal case. The road was empty and Jack reached the driveway to Tom Conner’s house in just a few minutes.

  He looked up the winding path at the old house that rose like a canker from the hilltop, gaping down upon the road and the inn across the way. Jack felt his face tighten into a grim mask. He looked around and then climbed the hill, quiet except for his own heavy breathing. As he reached the top, he could see a dilapidated green panel van parked next to the side of the house. Fresh tire marks in the sand told him the van was in use and suggested that Tom Conner was at home. He moved clos
er to the house, removing the pistol with its weighty silencer from the holster beneath his arm.

  The stillness of the run-down old house surrounded him like a heavy mist, pressing him from all sides. The weight of his foot on the first step caused its rusty nails to shriek in protest. Jack froze with his heart pummeling the inside of his chest like a fighter working the heavy bag.

  But the noise shouldn’t matter. He would have to knock anyway. The noise of his footsteps was a natural precursor to that. He took a deep breath and climbed to the porch amid a tempest of groaning planks and squeaking nails. The front door, battered from years of weather against its naked face, was nevertheless solid as rock slag. Jack rapped his knuckles against it, the sound barely resonating. In the door’s center was the snarling face of a corroded cast-iron lion. Jack lifted its massive lower jaw and slammed it down three times. Not a sound came from within.

  He waited several more minutes, then went to the nearest window and began rapping on its ancient panes. That’s when he noticed that one piece of glass was missing. He reached his hand through the opening and pushed aside the moldy-smelling curtain, peering into the darkness of the house where he could make out the faint outline of a doorway. His rush instantly returned. It appeared to be a door beneath the staircase. Was there a basement? If there was a basement in an old house like this, it was apt not to have windows.

  That would be the place someone like Tom Conner would be. It would also explain why no one had answered the door. Maybe that’s where he was, down there, planning, scheming, or secretly watching the kind of porn that stirred a really sick mind. Jack felt for the window’s latch. He found it and forced it open. Letting the curtain fall back into place, he grasped the frame of the window and tried to force it open. It was hopelessly jammed.