Out of Touch, page 16
But this time felt different somehow. She didn’t know why, but she couldn’t just leave this call unanswered.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hello, Dylan. It’s lovely to hear your voice again.”
Dylan shivered with horror and almost dropped the phone on the bus station floor.
There was no mistaking that voice.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
As Dylan fought down a wave of panic, the voice on the phone kept speaking in a perfectly casual tone.
“It seems like a long time. Or at least it does to me. But it hasn’t really been that long, has it? Two or three weeks maybe? I was still in Atterfield Penitentiary, when you were kind enough to pay me a visit or two. Or was it three? Anyway, I do miss talking to you.”
It was definitely him.
The serial killer who had once been her mentor was on the phone, talking as if there was nothing remarkable about this call.
Dylan’s mind raced as she tried to decide what to do. She wished Mike was here. Maybe he’d be able to track this call to its location.
But it probably wouldn’t matter.
As Mike and Detective Redfield had suggested yesterday, Dr. Charles Cameron would only call from a burner phone. Even if they could get a location, he would be long gone before anybody could get to him. She was sure the discarded phone would offer no clues as to where he was or even where he’d been before he made that call. The man was brilliant, after all.
Meanwhile, she didn’t want anyone in the crowded bus station to overhear her conversation. She got up from her chair and hurried out of the building to a quiet place on the sidewalk.
“Are you still there, Dylan?” Dr. Cameron was saying. “Have we been disconnected?”
It took a massive effort for her to open her mouth and speak.
“Where are you?”
Dr. Cameron let out a friendly chuckle.
“I’m not sure that’s the right question, Dylan. Where I’m going to be might be more pertinent.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you in a moment. But what’s our hurry? Let’s chat for a few minutes. I want to catch up with what’s happening in your life. When last we talked, it sounded as though things were rather difficult between you and your boyfriend—isn’t Andrew his name? Is everything better now?”
When Dylan didn’t reply, Dr. Cameron kept talking in an eerily calm voice.
“You know, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that young man. It’s true that I’ve never met Andrew in person, but judging from some things you’ve told me about him … well, I just have a bad feeling about him. I can’t help worrying that he’s not right for you. You’ve got a remarkable mind, Dylan. You’re going to do great things in the world. You need a man who can appreciate that, and can even challenge you, keep you on your toes, up to the mark. Someday you’ll find such a man. But you haven’t found him yet.”
Dylan’s teeth clenched. She knew she mustn’t get drawn into this sinister chitchat, particularly knowing as she did that Cameron had deliberately sabotaged her relationship with Andrew.
“But never mind all that,” he said. “I suppose it’s none of my business anyway. I imagine you’ve figured out … the answer by now.”
“The answer to what?”
“Oh, my dear, you do know what I mean. The answer to a certain riddle.”
For a moment Dylan was puzzled. But again she flashed back to something he’d said when he’d hypnotized her.
“Someday you may wonder something, Dylan. You’ll want to know … how I did it.”
“So did you?” Cameron said. “Figure it out, I mean?”
Dylan felt an increasingly eerie pull at the sound of his voice.
Don’t engage with him.
But somehow she couldn’t help responding to his query.
“I know how you engineered your escape,” she said. “I know you planned it … from the start. From before the start. You set things up even before you were arrested. You even set up your own arrest.”
Cameron chuckled a little.
“Very good, Dylan. Those are memories that not just anybody would be able to retrieve. You used self-hypnosis, didn’t you? I knew you’d revisit our little session sooner or later. And I knew you’d figure out the answer to that riddle. I also suppose you’ve been working with the FBI again, trying to help them catch me. In fact, I’m sure of it. I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
As Dr. Cameron continued purring on, Dylan felt more and more unsettled by the steady, calm tone of his all-too-soothing voice. Then she heard another sound—a repeating tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
The metronome.
Is he playing the metronome over the phone?
It took her a moment to realize that the metronome was only ticking in her head—a memory of her fateful hypnotic session with Dr. Cameron.
I don’t have to hear it.
I can make it go away.
She focused her mind on the street sounds around her, and sure enough, the ticking in her mind faded away. But she couldn’t make Dr. Cameron’s voice go away. He was real, not just in her head, and his voice persisted.
“Did you tell any of your FBI colleagues the truth about my escape? Did they believe you? I suppose it must have sounded rather unbelievable, at least to people with ordinary mental capacities—people not the least bit like the two of us. Such people would never be able to imagine such a thing. Were you able to persuade them? No? I suppose they must have thought you were crazy. Maybe you even doubted your own sanity. Let me assure you, you’re perfectly sane. I know that better than anyone.”
Then with a chuckle, he added, “I know you better than anyone.”
No, you don’t! Dylan wanted to cry out.
But she couldn’t make herself say it. She wanted to hang up, but she needed to keep him on the line. She needed to turn the tables. If she couldn’t manipulate him, she at least needed to get him to say something that might lead to his capture.
Where are you? she wondered silently.
How can I get you to tell me?
She heard Dr. Cameron let out a wistful sigh.
“Well, I suppose we must get back to your question. Really, though, it doesn’t much matter where I am at this moment. Like I said, where I’m going is what matters. I’d love for you to join me there. But before I tell you where I’m going …”
His voice faded for a moment, then he chuckled again.
“I suppose this is the part where I’m supposed to tell you not to bring anyone with you, least of all the police or the FBI. But no, I won’t do that. You decide for yourself what you want to do. You’re very self-aware. You know your own desires and wishes.”
Dr. Cameron fell silent for a long, long moment.
Dylan actually wondered whether he’d ended the call.
But finally he said three simple words.
“I’m going home.”
Then came a click, and Dylan knew the call had ended.
It felt like a spell had been broken. She was shaking all over, and her hands were cold and clammy. For a moment she couldn’t help but wonder …
Did that really happen?
Was that conversation real?
Or did I just imagine it?
She quickly realized that it had been quite real. She had just talked with Dr. Charles Cameron—although really, he’d done most of the talking. And she had the terrifying feeling he’d just gotten into her head again.
Did I say anything I shouldn’t have?
Did I tell him any secrets?
The conversation was still fresh and vivid in her mind. She felt sure she hadn’t given anything away that she should have kept to herself. But what should she do now?
I’ve got to call Mike.
I’ve got to tell him.
But somehow she couldn’t make her fingers tap his number on her cellphone.
Why not?
She needed to call him. It was the right thing to call him. She wanted to call him.
Or do I?
She remembered something Cameron had told her when he held her in that long-ago trance.
“You have the keys to your own mind.”
But did she really?
Did Dr. Cameron know her better than she knew herself?
He’d said he was going home—and Dylan was pretty sure she knew what he meant by that.
She also recalled what he’d said to her just now.
“You decide for yourself what you want to do.”
But did she even know what she wanted to do?
She breathed in slowly, and something dawned on her.
Yes, I know what I want to do.
I know what I’ve got to do.
I’ve got to meet him face to face.
Alone.
She glanced all around. The glass and metal bus station she was standing in front of was solid and real. The perfectly ordinary-looking people coming and going were clearly unaware that a serial killer had just spoken to Dylan on her phone.
Across the street was a familiar car rental service.
She started to walk toward it.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
“Damn it to hell,” Deputy U.S. Marshal Welch grumbled to Mike Flynn. “We’ve got the wrong man again. It’s the Vernon Woods situation all over again. What a waste of time.”
Mike silently agreed as the two men stood watching local cops lead a handcuffed man away toward their police vehicle.
It’s a bust, all right.
Just like that guy we tracked down in the woods.
The call from Welch had come as Mike was leaving the bus station. A man answering Dr. Charles Cameron’s description had been seen coming and going into a vacant house in a middle-class area of Baltimore. The house had a “FOR RENT” sign posted in front of it, so the sight of a stranger going in and out the back door had caught the neighbors’ attention, and they’d notified the police about it.
Their description of the intruder had drawn enough attention that Deputy Welch and his colleague Deputy Stark were called to participate in the arrest. Welch promptly contacted Mike to alert him to the news.
Mike arrived at the location just in time to see the man the cops were taking into custody.
It was not Dr. Cameron. It was just some would-be squatter guilty of nothing more than trespassing on private property.
The police car was pulling away now, taking the trespasser to the police station for booking. Mike and Welch sat down on the front stoop of the empty house.
“He sure does look like Cameron, though,” Welch remarked. “At least judging from pictures and descriptions.”
“I guess he does,” Mike agreed.
The photos Mike had seen showed Cameron in his teaching days and also in prison garb. Except for his intense gray eyes, he wasn’t a remarkable-looking man. He was variously described as dignified, enthusiastic, and scholarly, and his professorial images matched those impressions. He looked a bit more haggard in the mug shots, and he was expressionless except for a very slight upturn at the one corner of his mouth.
The man who’d just been arrested had a similar build and his posture was upright. His hair was graying. From a distance, he did look very much like the psychologist-turned-killer.
“I’d really gotten my hopes up,” Deputy Welch said with a sigh.
“I didn’t,” Mike said.
“No? Why not?”
“The very fact that he looked so much like Cameron tipped me off that it probably wasn’t him.”
Welch looked at him skeptically, so Mike tried to explain.
“The real Charles Cameron wouldn’t look like himself. He’d never let himself be recognized like that. He’s like a chameleon. He’s uncanny that way.”
“You’ve met him?”
“Not in real life. I’ve just seen the same pictures that you’ve seen. But you remember meeting Dr. First. I learned a lot from her.”
“About Cameron?”
“Right. She helped me trace his movements when he escaped from Atterfield. He’s got a tremendously powerful personal presence, and he seems to know how to trigger subconscious reactions without people even knowing it. He’s also an extremely skillful mimic. He was able to imitate his guard’s gait and voice perfectly. He literally made everybody believe he was that guard.”
Welch stroked his chin and asked, “So what’s our next move if we don’t even know exactly what we’re looking for?”
I wish I knew.
The truth was, Mike was having trouble thinking clearly. The moment when he’d left Dylan in the bus station was still on his mind, and he was wondering whether he’d made a mistake by letting her out of his sight.
But the alternative would have been sitting with her in the bus station for forty minutes waiting for her to actually board the bus. He’d needed to get back to work.
Of course there had been another alternative that he hadn’t wanted to consider.
Maybe I shouldn’t have told her to go home.
Maybe I should have kept her working on the case.
He’d been panicked by what she’d told him about having been hypnotized by Dr. Cameron. The thought that a homicidal genius had literally been poking around inside Dylan’s mind had been just too much for him to deal with.
Now he was afraid that maybe he’d decided to send her away too hastily. Maybe she’d actually be safer working with him.
Something else was nagging at Mike.
He’d quickly dismissed that theory Dylan had come up with about Dr. Cameron’s escape. The idea that Cameron had plotted his escape before he’d even been arrested had seemed so preposterous when they’d talked about it, he’d refused to give it any credence.
But now …
He had to consider that the chameleon he’d described to Welch might have other remarkable characteristics that Dylan had spotted but he had missed.
He turned toward Deputy Welch and asked, “Do you know any of the marshals who were part of the manhunt around the prison after Cameron’s escape?”
“Yeah, I was actually one of those guys,” Welch said.
“What’s the working theory about how he got away?”
Welch shrugged.
“Well, he must have had someone waiting for him outside the prison, not too far away. It was pretty obvious that he couldn’t have gotten away from Atterfield on his own.”
Maybe too obvious, Mike thought, doubting his own judgment more by the second.
“Tell me more,” Mike said.
“It’s mostly just woods around the prison. But there’s an abandoned homestead about a half a mile away from it. It’s really isolated, on a dirt road nobody uses anymore. We figure he must have met somebody there—someone with a car and change of clothes and what have you. Of course we still don’t have any idea who that somebody was.”
“Describe that homestead to me,” Mike said.
“Well, there’s a farmhouse, but it’s boarded up as tight as a drum, and it didn’t look as though anyone had gotten inside. There’s a barn, but it’s all fallen down and in ruins, and its roof is gone, so it wouldn’t offer any shelter. And there’s a garage.”
Mike’s ears pricked up at this.
“A garage?”
“Yeah.”
“Was there any evidence of a car going into and out of that garage?”
“There were some tread marks on the garage floor, but they might have been there for years as far as we could tell. With all the rain that night, there weren’t any tracks to tell us whether anyone had pulled into or out of the drive leading up to that garage, or even whether anyone had driven on that dirt road. But we’ve definitely considered it. Cameron might have met someone in the garage—someone with a car. It’s as likely a theory as any. Why are you asking?”
Mike didn’t reply. His head was buzzing with doubts and worries.
A garage.
On an isolated homestead.
On a dirt road nobody uses anymore.
It was suddenly much easier for Mike to imagine how Dylan’s seemingly crazy scenario might really have taken place. Dr. Cameron could have stashed a car and everything else he needed in that garage long before his escape—indeed, before he’d even been apprehended.
As bizarre as it seemed that anyone would have planned their own arrest and incarceration long before a prison break, he now feared that he’d doubted Dylan’s theory much too hastily.
She knows Cameron a lot better than I do.
In fact, his gut was now telling him that Dylan had been exactly right. If so, he’d been downright stupid to send her away.
“I’ve got to make a phone call,” Mike said to Deputy Welch.
He got up from the stoop and walked a short distance away. He took out his cellphone and tapped in Dylan’s number. He got her voicemail and left a message.
“Dylan, this is Mike. Call me as soon as you get this, OK? This is really urgent.”
But as he ended the message, he had the gnawing feeling that Dylan wasn’t going to call him back. She’d probably silenced her phone so as not to be interrupted in …
Whatever she’s doing right now.
Which isn’t what I told her to do.
He felt an inexplicable near-certainty that Dylan had not boarded that bus. And given what she’d told him about her trance experience with Dr. Cameron, might she be under his control in ways even she couldn’t know?
And where the hell is she?
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
“I’m going home,” Dr. Cameron had told her over the phone just before he’d ended the call.
And Dylan knew that “home” could mean no other place but here.
The abandoned house loomed at the top of a small treeless hill. It was a handsome ruin—a large Victorian residence with cracked gray stucco walls. A porch trimmed with fancy ironwork wrapped around the sides. A cupola stood up from the center of the roof, its broken windows offering a view of the surrounding area.
Certain that she’d come to the right destination, Dylan got out of the rented car she’d parked on the street at the bottom of that hill. For a moment, she just stood gazing up at the impressive building.
