I thought of the way Fish had tortured his victims for hours or days before finally strangling them or stabbing them to death. All those young women had been loved by their friends and their families. I thought about their mothers, and tears came into my eyes.
I clamped my lips together, using the back of my hand to dry my eyes. I was thinking of Julie. I couldn’t bear to think of losing Julie.
I heard Fish say, “Hey, Ron. I recognize that rocky outcrop. I climbed past it and turned left at the top of the ravine. There’s a trail up there that goes off to the east.”
We crossed a brook and dug our hands into crumbling earth in order to climb up the side of the ravine. We turned left at the rocky outcropping and continued east on a deer path.
Fish, looking as pale as the underbelly of a trout, said to Parker, “It’s been a while since I’ve been here, but see that tree limb that looks like an elbow? You’ll find what you’re looking for under that.”
The dogs snuffled but didn’t alert. The guards shoveled dirt, but only uncovered roots and stones. Fish suggested that they try just a few more yards up the trail, and they did. After some digging, a shovel hit something that caused interest.
Parker hiked up his pants cuffs and squatted near the hole. He reached in and removed a bone from the freshly turned earth. Then he pulled out a skull—with antlers.
Fish laughed.
“I don’t think I had anything to do with killing that. But I can’t say for sure.”
He called out to me, “Lindsay, I haven’t been here in a long time, you know?”
Fish had manipulated all of us to get his outing in the woods. I was mad at myself for letting Ron Parker waste my time. As we hiked back to the road, I called Joe to get an update on our baby girl, but he didn’t answer the phone. I left him a message to call me, and a few minutes later I called him again. Still, Joe didn’t answer.
Fish was walking backwards, talking to me, telling me he was as surprised as we were that we hadn’t found Sandra. “I’m not so sure what I remember. You know, being in a coma for two years is a big deal. In fact, I’m not sure if I ever knew Sandra Brody or if I just got her name from you.”
He was screwing with my head.
I thought maybe God was messing with me, too.
BOOK IV
ECLIPSE
Chapter 68
PROFESSOR PERRY JUDD tried to make sense of the enormous black hole that had opened in front of him. It was like a portal ringed with light, a tunnel of some sort, and he was being pulled through it as if he were being drawn into an eclipse of the sun.
The image was stunning, and the feeling of effortless movement was heady. At the same time, the professor knew that what he was experiencing could not be real.
Either he was dead—or he was having a dream.
A dream.
That had to be it.
He had prepared himself for the possibility of a waking dream by marking an X on the back of his left hand before going to sleep. Now he held out his hands, palms facing away from him, and spread his fingers wide. The bluish light limned each of his fingers, and he could clearly see that there were no Xs, no marks of any kind on the backs of his hands.
He was almost certainly dreaming, but to be sure, he ran another reality check. This time he pushed two fingers of his left hand into the palm of his right.
The fingers went straight through his palm.
He had really done it. He was lucid, aware that he was inside a dream, and that meant that he had control of the story and the ending.
But first—where was he?
He was sure he had never been in this place before, but then the location came to him. This had to be the Aquarium of the Bay. He had seen a video of it on the Web. He had planned to take his nephew there one day.
The main feature of the aquarium was a moving walkway that went through a long glass tunnel, and the fish swam above and around the walkway.
The shapes he saw bobbing in the halo of light were sharks. Perry Judd didn’t feel that this was a dream about sharks. But he did sense danger.