Death in High Places - By Jo Bannister Page 0,52

more time. I could have dealt with it, if I’d just had a bit more time…”

“But you didn’t say that, did you? Nothing to reassure or comfort him. And when he fell—”

“No,” he begged her, knowing what she was going to say.

“When he fell,” she went on remorselessly, “you thought it wasn’t an accident. If he’d given me more time … You thought he wanted to die, up there on Anarchy Ridge, in the pristine tumult of the snow—and he wanted you to die with him.”

“He fell,” whispered Horn. “He lost his footing. It was an accident…”

“Was it?” She searched his tortured face, learning nothing. “I can see how you’d want to think it was an accident. But the horror that stalks your nightmares is that Patrick Hanratty threw himself off Anarchy Ridge and tried to take you with him, because of what you did to him.”

“You’re not watching the monitors. Look at the goddamned monitors!”

Beth blinked and looked around her uncertainly as if she hadn’t realized they were no longer alone.

McKendrick was halfway down the stone steps, leaning over the iron rail. His face was dark with fury and he was stabbing a finger at the bank of screens. “I give you one job to do. One simple job—watch the monitors, call me if anything happens. And you’re so wrapped up in your own pathetic little melodrama you can’t even do that!”

In the moment before Beth understood that her father wasn’t shouting at her, her eyes filled with tears. It was as if she was losing everything—first Patrick, now Mack—as if neither of them had ever cared for her as she’d needed to be cared for, as she’d cared for them. She ached to be held, not shouted at. She’d never felt so lonely in her life.

Nicky Horn said, “I’m sorry, I—we…” His voice petered out as he took in what McKendrick was showing him.

Two of the screens were already blank. A third view of the grounds broke up even as he stared at it.

“He’s taking them out,” snarled McKendrick, though by then the others had caught up with him. “One by one, he’s taking them off-line.”

He grabbed Horn by the shoulder and hauled him bodily out of the way, dropping into the chair in his place. His long, strong fingers played urgently over the console, calling up other views. A lot of them were blank too.

Quick as it was in normal circumstances, most of Beth’s mind was caught in another place. “Is it a power problem…?”

“Yes, it’s a power problem,” snarled McKendrick. “He’s finding the cameras one by one and cutting the power to them.”

“I thought they were protected.”

“They are protected. But not against someone like him. As our friend here keeps telling us, this is a professional.”

And like a professional, he’d come equipped with a tool for every task. A moment before the next camera blanked, they actually saw him use the correct tool for neutralizing security cameras set high on unscalable walls.

“A slingshot?” exclaimed Horn. “A kid’s slingshot?”

But it wasn’t a child’s toy, though the man could have passed it off as a present for a young nephew if it had been found in his possession. It had a pistol grip of carbon fiber and yellow power-bands that owed nothing whatever to Granny’s knicker elastic, and it fired ball bearings that flew like bullets. Not the kind of slingshot to make little girls cry on school playgrounds—more the giant-killing kind. The steel projectile didn’t just break the tempered glass at the front of the camera, it trashed the delicate mechanism behind. A split second after they saw him take aim, the picture went black.

“Answers one question,” muttered Horn unsteadily, shaken not even so much by this development as at the specters Beth had raised. “He hasn’t gone home.”

McKendrick snapped like an overstrained hawser, the recoil threatening to take off limbs and heads. He was out of the chair in one fast, fluid movement, and one of those long-fingered hands that somehow wasn’t as soft as a pen pusher’s should have been gripped the front of Horn’s clothes, lifted him onto his toes, and slammed him back against the stone wall hard enough to drive the air from his lungs.

“You worthless piece of trash,” McKendrick yelled into his startled face, “you think this is funny? You bring a killer to my door, and you think it’s something to joke about?” The fist that wasn’t pinning Horn to the wall backhanded him across the mouth, spraying blood. “Laugh