I went out in the hall and I saw Thorson. He was coming from the drugstore. You sent him didn’t you?”
She looked down at the desk for the longest time.
“At least answer that, Rachel.”
“I saw him in the hallway, too,” she said softly. “Earlier. After I left you. It made me so angry that he was there, that Backus brought him out. It all boiled up. I wanted to hurt him. Humiliate him. I needed . . . something.”
So with a promise that she’d be waiting, she sent him out to the drugstore for a condom. But she was gone when he got back.
“I was in my room when you called and knocked. I didn’t answer because I thought it was him. He must’ve done the same because twice people knocked. Twice they called. I never answered.”
I nodded.
“I’m not proud of what I did to him,” she said. “Especially now.”
“Everybody has things they’re not proud of, Rachel. It doesn’t stop them from going on. It shouldn’t.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I’m going now, Rachel, I hope things work out for you. And I hope you’ll call me sometime. I’ll be waiting.”
“Good-bye, Jack.”
As I moved away from her I brought my hand up. With one finger I traced the line of her jaw. Our eyes briefly met and held. Then I walked out.
51
He huddled in the dark of the storm-drainage tunnel, resting and concentrating his mind on mastering the pain. Already he knew there was infection. The wound was minor in terms of damage, a through-and-through shot that tore an upper abdominal muscle but little else before leaving, but it was dirty and he could feel the poisons beginning to move through his body, making him want to lie down and sleep.
He looked down the length of the dark tunnel. Only stray light leaking from somewhere up above made it this far down. Lost light. He pushed himself up the slippery wall until he was standing and then he began moving again. One day, he thought as he moved. Make it through the first day and you’ll make it through the rest. It was the mantra he repeated in his mind.
In a sense, there was relief. Despite the pain and now the hunger, there was the relief. No more separation. The facade was gone. Backus was gone. Now there was only Eidolon. And Eidolon would triumph. They were nothing before him and could do nothing now to stop him.
“NOTHING!”
His voice echoed down the tunnel into the blackness and disappeared. With one hand clamped over his wound he headed that way.
52
In late spring a city Department of Water and Power inspector, investigating the source of a foul odor that had drawn complaints from the residents living above, found the remains of the body in the tunnels.
The remains of a body. It carried his identification and FBI badge and the clothes were his. It was found, what was left of it, laid out on a concrete shelf in an underground intersection of two stormwater drainage culverts. The cause of death was unknown because advanced decomposition—sped along by the damp, fetid surroundings of the drainage culvert—and disturbance of the remains by animals precluded accurate autopsy results. The medical examiner did find what appeared to be a wound channel and a cracked rib in the rotting flesh but no bullet fragments that could conclusively tie the wound to Rachel’s gun.
As far as the identification went, it, too, was inconclusive. There was the badge and the ID and the clothing but nothing else that proved that these were indeed the remains of Special Agent Robert Backus Jr. The animals that had attacked the body—if it had truly been animals—had made off with the complete lower mandible and an upper bridge which precluded a comparison with dental records.
That seemed too convenient to me. And others. Brad Hazelton called me to fill me in on these facts. He said the bureau was officially closing the case but there would be those who would still look for him. Unofficially. He said that some people viewed the discovery in the drainage tunnel as nothing more than a skin Backus had left behind, probably a homeless man he had encountered in the pipes. He said they believed Backus was still out there and so did I.
Brad Hazelton told me that while the official search for Backus might be over, the effort to explore the psychological motivations was continuing. But cracking the nut of Backus’s pathology was proving difficult. Agents spent three days in