Savich heard the man yelling again, his panicked madness giving way to something like determination, and acceptance. “I mean it! It has to stop. I won’t let them hurt her. Leave. Tell them they can’t have her!”
Savich climbed over Dr. Janice’s fence and dropped onto Kara Moody’s side yard. There were only three high windows on the near side of the house, no chance the man would see him. Savich pushed through a planting of red petunias and white impatiens, cut through a huge star jasmine that covered a root cellar door at the back of the house. Dr. Janice had lived next door for fifty years and knew the original owners had dug out the space to use as a bomb shelter, something from another age.
He moved the jasmine away, saw the moldy wooden door Dr. Janice had described to him. It wasn’t locked. The rusted handle creaked and groaned as he pulled it open and looked down at rotted wooden stairs that disappeared into blackness. He pulled out his cell phone to use as a light, and carefully stepped down the stairs until he felt the rotted wood begin to give way, and jumped, knees bent, to the dirt floor. He felt a rat carcass crunch beneath his boot, breathed in stale, nasty air, cooler than outside, and nearly coughed, but managed to hold it in. He doubted anyone had been in this shelter since the Nixon administration. His cell light haloed spiderwebs draped from open beams, crisscrossing the space, and more rodent carcasses littered the dirt floor. Jars were lined up on warped wooden shelves, covered with mold, dirt, and spiderwebs. Straight ahead another set of sagging wooden stairs led up to a door. Dr. Janice had told him it opened into a closet in the second bedroom, the baby’s room.
He thanked heaven for small favors when the stairs held his weight. He tried the narrow door at the top. It was locked. He grabbed the wooden rail to steady himself, reared back, and slammed his shoulder against the lock. It held. He reared back again and this time he kicked it, nearly lost his balance, and felt his heart do a mad flip. The door popped open. He prayed the man hadn’t heard him.
He shoved the door slowly outward, pushing aside cardboard boxes stacked against it, until he had enough of a path to pass. He eased the outer closet door open slowly and looked into a room painted a light blue. A bright mobile with the name Alex hung over a crib, and next to the crib was a rocking chair with a blue throw and a dresser painted with Walt Disney characters. Everything was ready for the baby’s arrival.
He stepped quietly into the hallway, guessed he was thirty feet from the living room when he heard the man screaming at the cops again. “Bastards! They sent you, didn’t they? But they don’t want me dead, not yet at least, so he told you not to kill me.”
Savich heard Kara Moody’s voice, soft and low, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. She sounded controlled, trying to keep him calm. He prayed she could hold herself together a bit longer. It might help keep the man from shooting her . . . and then possibly himself.
Savich held his Glock at his side and walked as quietly as he could through the updated kitchen toward an arched opening to the dining room. The L-shaped living room was beyond it, and he saw Kara Moody first, her ankles and wrists duct-taped to a chair, her long straight dark hair straggling around her face. A burgundy Redskins T-shirt covered her big belly and her loose white cotton pants. Her narrow feet were bare. She was in her midtwenties, and pretty. Her eyes were fastened on her feet, trying to avoid the man’s eyes, and his attention. Savich moved forward, saw the man standing by the window in profile, the assault rifle held loosely at his side. Savich wondered where he’d gotten hold of that killing machine. He was swaying back and forth. Was it from stress or drugs? Probably both. He’d sounded young, but still, Savich was surprised to see he was no older than twenty-five, slight, maybe one forty, and no taller than five foot nine. There was a light beard scruff on his narrow face. He might have been good-looking if rage and fear weren’t contorting his face. He wore a wrinkled shirt over baggy chinos that looked like he’d lived in them since he’d escaped from wherever he’d been held, from the people who’d probably been trying to take care of him. Were they the gods he was running from, the gods he believed had found him so quickly and sent the police to bring him back?
Savich flattened himself behind the dining room wall, next to the arched opening, and calmed his breathing. He heard Detective Mayer’s voice on the bullhorn trying to reason with a man who had no tether to reason, offering to provide him whatever he wanted if he didn’t harm Ms. Moody.
The man screamed, “You’re a liar! I don’t believe you, not a word! I won’t let you take me, or take her. Do you hear me?” He let out a high, mad laugh. “I will not let you win!” He screamed the words again, wailed them. Then he stopped, turned to face Kara Moody, and whispered, “I don’t know what to do. I’ve got to figure this out. I want what’s best for you, I do, only not how you’d think. But maybe it doesn’t matter now.
He began shaking his head, and his free hand tugged at his hair. He was ready to break and yelled, “What am I going to do?”
Kara Moody raised her head, and Savich realized she knew as well as he did it was crunch time and she had to try. “Please listen to me. Please tell me who you are and why you want me to go with you. Go where? Who is after you? After us? Can’t you see I’m pregnant?”
He ran to her, leaned forward, cupped her chin in his hand, and jerked her face up. “Of course you’re pregnant. Why do you think I came? Did you call them? Did you tell them I was here?” He stopped again, shook his head, as if trying to straighten out his thoughts. “No, you didn’t call them; I didn’t let you. I had to tie you up, you know that, don’t you? You’d have run before I could convince you to come with me. Wait, then who called them? I don’t understand. I don’t understand!”
Savich couldn’t act, the man was too close to her, his face nearly touching hers, close enough to kiss her. Her voice remained amazingly calm as she whispered into his face, “No, I didn’t call them. I don’t like them, either. I don’t want them to get near me. Who are you? Have I seen you before? Were you in Baltimore?”
“Baltimore,” he repeated, as if trying to make sense of it.
He reared back and screamed at her, spittle flying, “I’m an enigma. He keeps telling me that’s what I am, that is what we are. I can’t let them take me, can’t let them take you! It’s evil, a monstrous evil!” He shoved himself back away from her.
“Drop the gun now!”
The man whipped around at the sound of Savich’s voice and yelled, “No!” He jerked up his rifle, screamed, “How did you get in here?”