turned and walked rapidly away. I followed. His car was parked farther down the block. It had been pulled so hastily to the side of the road that two of its wheels were propped up on the sidewalk and the driver’s door still hung open. Danny hopped inside, anxious to get away before he was spotted. As he pulled from the curb, I saw that his old clunker was just as dented and dirty as ever—but not more so. He had not run Peggy off the road.
But someone else had. I knew with a certainty that someone had tried to kill Maggie. And Peggy had paid the price.
And Danny had been nearby. He would know who had done it.
I walked back toward the wreck, scanning the crowd and the cars crawling down the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of Alan Hayes. But there were too many people, too many lights flashing, too much newly descended dusk, and way too much confusion to separate all the sounds and sights and voices coming at me. Hayes would be long gone by now, anyway. He’d have left, thinking he had succeeded in stopping Maggie.
I thought about how Hayes had not tried to take her or torture her, as he had the others. He had not had the courage for that. He had simply tried to stop her as expediently as possible.
He was afraid of her.
It gave me some satisfaction.
Rescue workers had extricated Peggy from the car and were securing her to a spinal board. The shards of glass embedded in her cheeks and forehead glittered in the glare of the overhead streetlights.
Maggie was crying openly and holding her friend’s hand, murmuring to Peggy as the emergency medical technicians transferred her to a waiting stretcher. No one dared tell Maggie to step away. No one stopped Maggie from climbing inside the ambulance with Peggy. No one even stopped her when she drew her gun and took a seat by her unconscious friend, then placed her gun across her lap and scanned the crowd, as I had scanned it, searching for Hayes.
She, too, had put it all together. She would be on her guard now.
Hayes had made a mistake in failing when he tried to take Maggie out. With someone like Maggie, that one mistake might be all she needed to survive—and to conquer. She would be looking for him now.
Gonzales stood near a rear bumper of the wrecked car, staring at it without inspiration. He seemed distracted, irritated at his job being made once more, somehow, harder, just when he thought he had contained the damage.
An older couple stood behind him on the sidewalk, taking it all in, and a third figure huddled in the shadows behind them, looking like a man trying to disappear from a too-jangled world: Bobby Daniels and his parents.
The older Daniels was examining the crowd methodically, his eyes alert, an odd look on his face. It was a look I thought a man could easily come to fear.
He knew, I thought. He knew, somehow, that Alan Hayes had caused all this. He felt it, too. He could feel when Hayes was near.
With that thought, a wild hope shot through me. I was not alone. I was not the only one who saw Alan Hayes for what he was. I was not the only one who would be trying to help Maggie.
For once, Alan Hayes would be the hunted.
Chapter 35
Where would Hayes go? He could not go home—his house was being watched. Nor would he dare return to his office at the college. He had to be wherever he took his victims. His hidden safe house was nearby somewhere.
I made my way to a pond the town had dug several years before in the center of its downtown park. I was always alone there at night. No one else felt safe there, far from civilization—and far from screaming distance—once the office workers had all packed up and gone home. At this time of year, not even the bums sought a good night’s sleep on the benches that rimmed the pond. But I did not need to fear muggers, or the night. I liked to sit on the bench at the far end of the pond, just beyond a spotlight cast by a street-lamp overhead on a circle of rippling water near the intake pipe. The ripples sparkled in the night, reflecting stars and clouds, creating a patch of endless universe undulating on the water’s surface that fascinated me. This