Wait for Dark: A Bishop/Special Crimes Unit Novel - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

KAY HOOPER is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of the Bishop/Special Crimes Unit series, including Fear the Dark, Haunted, Hostage, Haven, Blood Ties, Blood Dreams, and Blood Sins, and the Bishop Files series, including A Deadly Web and The First Prophet.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Wait for Dark

Prologue

Clarity, North Carolina

July

It didn’t seem like a big deal when Clara Adams saw, a couple of blocks ahead of her car, what looked like a child playing in the center of the road, almost directly under a streetlight. Dumb, but no big deal, after all.

Idiot kid, playing in the street. Where are the idiot parents?

She put her foot on the brake pedal to slow down, already mentally rehearsing what she wanted to say to the kid.

The pedal went all the way to the floor. And the car didn’t even slow down.

Clara hadn’t been going very fast since the downtown speed limit was only twenty and rose only to thirty-five in the residential areas surrounding downtown. But as she gripped her steering wheel in growing horror, her foot pumping the unresponsive brake pedal, she realized that the car was not only not slowing—it was gaining speed.

She pressed frantically at the car’s horn button, but there was no response. Pushed the button for the car’s emergency flashers and, again, no response. No way to warn the little boy she could see more clearly now playing contentedly with a toy dump truck. Even with no one else in sight, she tried to lower the car’s window so she could yell a warning at the child. But that didn’t work either. Even the steering wheel was fighting her.

As if the car wanted to run over the boy.

The needle on the speedometer inched higher, matching the blue numbers in the digital readout that were inexorably climbing as the car’s speed increased.

Clara had no more than seconds to choose between horrible alternatives, and all she knew for sure was that she could not run over a child. So she used all her strength to wrench the resisting steering wheel to the right, trying to aim the car between two others parked at the side of Main Street just before the next intersection. Beyond them was a construction site, as one of the businesses set back from the street was being given a facelift.

A stack of lumber, she thought, was probably the most forgiving barrier she could see.

The car turned—but just enough to avoid the child, shooting past the opening between the two parked cars, crossing into the empty intersection, and then, engine screaming, speed increasing, plowing headfirst into the thick iron post that held the streetlight out over the lanes.

Clara never heard the awful crunch of metal or the screaming engine dying with a sputter. She never heard the car’s horn begin to screech, or smelled the gasoline.

Or saw the first flickering flames.

A blessing, most said later, when word got around. That she never saw. Never knew. A true blessing.

The little boy stood up, holding his dump truck, and looked with a singular lack of expression at the wreck no more than fifty yards away from him. Then he turned, still expressionless, and walked away, unnoticed by the people spilling out of restaurants and the businesses still open, uninterested in their cries of horror, of frantic shouts for someone to call 911.

He stopped briefly on the sidewalk, an expression of confusion passing suddenly over his face. He heard the shouts and the first sounds of emergency response people and vehicles, and looked over his shoulder to see flames shooting into the air. It was all he could see, really, because of all the parked cars and all the people.

He wanted to drop his toy and run in that direction along with everyone else, wanted to see what had happened. It looked awfully interesting, and different for Clarity, where nothing ever really happened.

He hesitated only because he had a strong feeling his ma would not be happy about him near a fire.

And now that he thought about it, why was he here? Hadn’t he gone to bed? It had to be late, or at least it felt late, and he could have sworn he had gotten into his pajamas and gone to bed—

“Sean.”

He didn’t even have a chance to look up before a large, heavy hand gripped his shoulder. And for an instant, things whirled and flipped inside his head, making him dizzy.

The sounds down the street died into a peaceful silence, and he realized he just wanted to go home. To go home and . . . and slip in through the side yard to the window into the laundry room, the one with the broken lock.

It was the way he always slipped in and out of the house whenever he wanted to break one of his ma’s rules or just sneak out to join friends even if he was grounded.

He got grounded a lot.

“Time for bed, Sean.”

Yes . . . that was it, that was where he was supposed to be. In bed. He’d leave his dump truck outside near the driveway, where his ma would expect to find it. And then he’d get back into his pajamas and go to bed.

“It’s just a dream, Sean. Just a dream. You’re fine. You’re absolutely fine.”

The soothing voice made sense, and Sean accepted the information it offered. He was asleep and dreaming.

He just needed to go get back into bed so when he woke up, he’d know for sure he’d been dreaming.

“I’m fine. I’m absolutely fine,” he murmured.

The heavy hand fell away from his shoulder, and eight-year-old Sean Brenner walked away into the unusually cool evening.

He didn’t look back.

One

August

Thursday

“Accident,” Deputy Emma Fletcher said, her tone that of someone who had convinced herself of truth.

Sheriff Malachi Gordon frowned at her. “Yeah? And how many years has Brady Nash used his harvester without getting thrown out of a closed cab and into the teeth of the machine?”

Emma winced, even though describing it, she thought, was never going to have the shock value of seeing . . . what was left of a man she had grown up knowing. Spread out behind the machine in a bloody trail of . . . shreds of flesh and jarringly white shards of bone mixed in with the ripped brown stalks and leaves of corn. Like some obscene salad.

Emma fought a sudden urge to gag and silently told herself to stop with the gross mental images.

“Well?” Mal demanded.

Grateful, she dragged her mind back to being a cop. “I don’t know. A lot of years. Since I was a kid. I remember seeing him plowing his fields in the spring to plant. Harvesting in the summer and into early fall, sometimes late fall. Plowing everything under after the harvest to get ready for winter. He got older and older, but he never seemed to get any slower.” She scowled at him. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“Just wondering how long it’s taken you to convince yourself this was an accident.”

“All morning,” she confessed.

Mal took a couple of steps back away from the front of the hulking machine until he could look behind it, at the trail of mangled and bloody corn stalks and shreds of human flesh that stretched back for at least a hundred feet.

“No sign it even slowed down.”

“I noticed. And he had to have . . . He must have gone into the blades way back there, or else there wouldn’t be . . . all the blood and stuff.” Field salad. People salad. Farm salad. Stop it! She added hurriedly, “And it’s a straight path; a car with nobody at the wheel definitely would have wandered left or right. Would a machine like this keep going in a straight line if it wasn’t being steered?”

“No idea. I’d assume so, given ground this level.”

“Even with the ruts?”

“Especially with the...