Rick R. Reed WRITER

Deadly Vision will be published by Quest Books in January 2008 and will be available from all major booksellers. Visit the publisher's website at www.regalcrest.biz

Deadly Vision:

Book One of the Cassandra Chronicles

Novel excerpt © by Rick R. Reed

“I scent the track of crimes done long ago.

“Have I missed the mark, or, like a true archer, do I strike my quarry?

“Or am I prophet of lies, a door-to-door babbler?”

Cassandra, in Aeschylus' Agamemnon

Prologue

“First of all, there are rules.” She sits back in her chair, green eyes regarding the young couple. “Before we go any further, you have to agree to them.”

            The young couple is desperate. The woman nods, eyes rimmed in red, moist. The man says, in a husky whisper, “Yes. Yes. If you can help us find him, we’ll agree to anything.” He rubs his hands on his khaki pants and she notices they are already stained dark with sweat. She feels a glimmer of sympathy, but then checks it: she’s learned that it’s best not to get too involved. There are things she might discover that will make their pain hers, and she’s had enough of that.

            “The rules.” She meets each of their eyes, even the woman’s, for which she has to wait until she looks up from her gaze down at the nap of the carpet. But she waits, tacit agreement in the meeting of their eyes. “The rules are simple. First, I will not get involved with the police. No matter what. You’re free to consult them after you speak with me. You’re free to work with them, but I will not. Use what I tell you, but don’t ask me to tell them.” She pauses, cocks her head, listening for the sound of her own son upstairs. The floor creaks and there is a burst of canned laughter from his portable TV. She sighs. “Second: I can make you no promises. If we’re lucky, I’ll get some impressions. But that’s all they are. Impressions. Do you understand?”

            The couple nods. The man whispers, “Sure.”

            “I don’t get anything definitive. I may be able to help and then again, I may not. I just want you to understand that going in.”

            “But you’ve been able to help…”

            She holds up her hand.

            “I know what I’ve done. And for every success, there are two failures. At least. You hear more about the successes than the failures. I get impressions. I don’t know where they come from. I don’t know why they come. But understand, sometimes they don’t come at all. And other times, they lead nowhere.

            “The third condition is that I take no money for what I do. So please, no matter what the result, do not offer me money.” She’s had problems with credibility in the past because of this.

            The couple nods again and she can see they’re getting impatient. She wants to help them, but fears so much what she might discover that she feels something very much like a rat gnawing at the inside of her stomach.

            “Have you brought me something? Something of your son’s?”

            The woman digs in her purse, sniffling. A tear drops from her eye and falls to the black leather of her purse. She hands her a Kleenex. The woman brings out a mitten, bright red, knitted, and a little dirty. The mother’s  voice wavers, but she speaks as clearly as she can, holding back the sobs that are lurking just beneath her quavering voice. “They found this in the back yard when he disappeared.”

            She nods and takes the mitten. She doesn’t really need it, having already seen what they have come to her for. But she hopes holding something from the missing five-year-old will add more detail to the portrait she saw in a dream just last night. She turns the mitten over in her hands and closes her eyes.

            The room is silent; the ticking of the wall clock the only sound as its minute hand counts off the seconds.

            Behind her eyelids, there is a swirl of colors, red predominant among them. Her throat is dry and she tries to work up some saliva.

            She sees a house with a stone chimney. A thin plume of smoke emerges from the chimney and the house is old, two stories, a dingy white with the paint peeling back to reveal rotting wood. The windows downstairs are covered with plastic; the kind of stuff you’d get from the dry cleaners. Upstairs, one of the windows is boarded over, the other cracked.

            “I see an old house,” she whispers, knowing that this clue is useless unless she can provide some real geographic markers.

            “The house is on a hill, about halfway up.” She sees the tree line above and below the house, the way the backyard rises steeply into the woods. This is a house that’s not far away. She gets something, then: a detail that may help them.

            “The house sits back from a cinder road, black cinders, like coal.”

            She breathes deep, turning the mitten over, forgetting for the moment, where she is, and the people in the room with her.

            “The yard’s messy. The grass wasn’t cut in the summer and it grows high and yellow. There’s all sorts of crap in the grass, an old lawn chair, rusty, with dirty green and white webbing that’s ripped and shredding.” Damn, she thinks, why all the detail about a lawn chair instead of something meaningful?

            She tries to relax, putting herself in this cold place, standing on the road in front of the house. And she gets something she thinks might be useful.

            “The house looks down on Summitville.” She says, naming the place where the three of them live, a little Ohio River town that’s as far west in Pennsylvania as one can go before crossing the border into Ohio. “I can see the curve of the river and the bridge to New Hope.”

            In her mind’s eye, she turns, swears she can feel the cold snap of the wind on her cheeks, smell the snow that’s in the gray, low-hanging clouds, pressing in, ready to break open.

            Is the boy in the house? Somehow, she doesn’t think so. Somehow, she knows the house is nothing more than a marker. These facts come to her minus logic, but she trusts them, knowing implicitly that they’re right.

            They always have been.

            She closes her eyes more tightly and looks down the road. It ends in a copse of woods not more than a hundred yards or so from the house. There’s a stand of pines, maybe some maples, and beyond them, a grassy field.

            The grass is trampled down in one spot. She moves closer, and sees the boy, face down in the snow.

            She snaps her eyes open, the bile rising so strong she grips her desk for a moment, trying to center herself, wishing she hadn’t seen what she saw. She lets the reality of the room filter back in.

            “You’ll find your boy near that house. A house on a hill just up from where the bridge crosses from Summitville into New Hope. There’s a cinder road that leads up to this house.”

            She feels her skin going pale and clammy. She can’t tell them. She can’t mete out that cruelty. Or would it be kind? She can’t call it, but she doesn’t want to be the one to tell them their little boy is dead.

            “Is he okay?”

            She shrugs. “I can’t tell you that.”

            “But…” the father says.

            She holds up her hand. “One more rule: when I’m finished, I’m finished.” She looks at them, biting her lip, ignoring the ball in her throat. “Now go see if you can find your boy.”

Part One
Chapter One

She was only thirteen. It wasn’t fair she now lay, bound, waiting for death. Before, there had been struggling: clawing and fighting, scratching their faces, pulling at their hair, batting at whatever part she could reach. Her breath had come in choking spasms, adrenaline pumping, burning, anteing up the hysteria so much she thought her air would be blocked. Then had come the dread that made her lose most of her fight, when her terror-addled brain had begun to accept her fate was to die here, in this tiny, hot room, with the only witness to her demise the sparkling eyes of her killers and the maddening, crooked whirl of a ceiling fan long past its prime and wobbling, doing nothing more than blowing the overheated, moist air around the room. The dread had risen up, a nausea twisting her gut and making her afraid she would vomit. And then had come the numbness, a dull tingling throughout her body that precluded movement and, as it dripped into her being with all the precision of an IV, began to strip her of coherent thought.

            They stood above her. Faces she had trusted, faces she had seen before, around her neighborhood. The man she and her friends had had a crush on. He used to drive by her little house on Ohio Street in his old red Mustang, looking the picture of youth, confidence, masculinity. His hair was dark, cut bristle brush short and his face always clean shaven. Thin lips bordered rows of perfect white teeth and when he had smiled at her, only hours ago, she had lit up; a tingling had started in her toes and had worked its way up, until she felt she was infused with yellow light, bordering on red. The crimson had caused her face to burn, the color to rise to her cheeks. At her young age, the interest of a man in his twenties was inconceivable, although it had been something she had hoped for since the first day she had seen him, back at the onset of summer, when the sky had turned white hot, burning up the grass and making illusory waves rise from the hot, cracked sidewalks.

            He had pulled to the curb and sat there, car idling. She sat in the front yard, sorting through Barbie clothes: ball gowns and swimming suits, miniskirts and stretch pants. He didn’t say anything, not right away. She had looked at him once, then looked away, certain his interest could never be in her. Suddenly, she felt ridiculous with her metal trunk, her Barbie dolls, and all the outfits she had once been so proud to collect. Swiftly, she returned the clothes to their case and slammed it shut.

            She leaned back, resting on her palms, and lifted her face to the sun. Its heat beat down relentlessly, making the skin on her face feel tight.

            She felt his eyes on her still. She opened her own eyes a crack and regarded him peripherally. He really was looking at her! The adorable little smile that caused a dimple to rise in his right cheek deepened in the sun’s play of shadow and light. She leaned back more, left hand reaching out to surreptitiously move the Barbie trunk further away. In this posture, here on the withered and brown grass, she felt that her breasts, little more than two tiny bumps an unkind boy at school had once referred to as her anthills, looked larger. She could be eighteen, couldn’t she? With the right make-up and her hair pulled up....

            But now her long blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, clipped with a pink plastic barrette. She wore a pair of cut-off shorts and an oversized South Park T-shirt belonging to her older brother. He would have killed her had he known she was wearing

it. But he was away at the Y’s summer camp and would never know the difference.

            The idling of the car was like an animal purring.

            And then the sun disappeared and she sat in darkness. Beneath her closed lids, she sensed someone standing over her.

            Why hadn’t she heard the slam of the car door? Her eyelids fluttered, but she did not open them. It would be just like her mother to come outside now and stand above her, hands on hips and ask her what she thought she was doing.

            “Lucy?”

            Finally, she opened her eyes and blinked at the brightness of the August day. He was smiling. So unlike the other boys in Summitville, he was dressed in pressed black slacks and a collarless white shirt, buttoned to his neck.

            “How did you know my name?”

            “Oh, I make it my business to know the names of all the pretty young ladies around here.”

            Lucy felt the heat rise to her face once more. She grinned and could not think of a single word to say.

            “Playing Barbie?”

            She shoved the case further away, until it was completely out of her grasp. The case lay in the white heat, glinting, looking, she hoped, as if it had nothing to do with her.

            “What? Oh...no, no. These are my little sister’s. She always makes such a mess of things and I was just organizing for her.”

            “What a good sister.”

            “Yeah, well...”

            The two said nothing for a while and Lucy began to grow uncomfortable under his gaze. She shifted her long, tanned legs in front of her, crossing them at the ankle.

            “I was driving by and saw you sitting there and I had to tell you....” he hunkered down beside her. “what a lovely sight you are. It made me stop, just to have a better look.”

            She laughed and thought she sounded way too much like the thirteen-year-old she was. “Thank you,” she whispered, wondering to where her voice had disappeared.

            “No, thank you, for being here, for making the heat of this day a little more pleasant.”

            Oh, stop! she wanted to cry out, but whispered again, “Thank you.”

            He leaned closer, enough for her to feel his breath near her ear. In spite of the day’s heat, it caused gooseflesh to rise on her arms, her spine to tingle.

            “Listen.” He glanced around the empty street with eyes like none she had ever seen: green, ringed with thick black lashes. And in his gaze was a conspiracy that included only the two of them. “My car has air conditioning. I know this is out of the blue

and all, but I wondered if you’d like to go for a ride with me.”

            Lucy glanced back at her house. She wished suddenly she lived in a bigger house, in a better neighborhood. Here in this modest neighborhood close to the river, her small white clapboard house was surrounded by other houses very much like it, some of them sporting tar paper that masqueraded as brick. She pictured her mother inside, on a vinyl covered kitchen chair, watching All My Children on a 13-inch portable TV on the Formica-topped kitchen table. Her mother, she knew, would never approve of what was transpiring here, right in her front yard.

            He stood suddenly. “Okay, okay, I get the message.”

            “Wait.” She sat up straighter. A pick-up rumbled by and left in its wake a smell of exhaust and a rush of hot air.

            He turned. “What? Need to get your mom’s permission?”

            “Of course not!” Her voice came out higher than she would have liked, the whiny protest of a child. She stood. “I’d like to come with you. But I can’t stay out too long.” She was about to say, “My mom will be worried,” but realized how immature that would sound. “I’ve got some people I have to meet in a little while.”

            He smiled. And the smile erased any nervousness she had about going with him. After all, she had seen him, dozens of times, around the neighborhood. He wasn’t

exactly a stranger, not really.

            “That’s fine, Lucy. I’ll have you back within an hour. I promise. I certainly wouldn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with you.” He winked and she followed him to the waiting car.

            Lucy tripped getting into the car. Her head bumped against the chrome surrounding the upper doorframe and her hand slid across the black vinyl seat. The

laugh that followed came out high and flighty: a little bird, and Lucy reddened once more, embarrassed by her klutziness.

            He was grinning, already behind the steering wheel. “Don’t worry about it. We are all prey to tiny lapses in coordination.”

            He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel while Lucy settled beside him, doing her best to recover her composure: with elaborate carefulness, she positioned

herself on the seat and crossed her legs. She admired her legs and hoped he did too: long and tan, smooth, the legs of a woman.

            It was then she felt, more than noticed, the presence of someone else in the car. Lucy turned and saw her for the first time. In the back sat a young woman. Her hair, like Lucy’s, was blonde, but more of a brassy platinum shade. She wore a pair of dark glasses, cat woman frames, bright red lipstick and a silk scarf tied around her neck. She wore a simple white shift that contrasted sharply with her walnut colored skin. Lucy thought she was about the most glamorous thing she had ever seen in Summitville.

            He noticed her looking. “This is my girlfriend, Myra. Myra, say hello to Lucy.”

            “Hello Lucy.”

            Did Lucy detect a very slight British accent in the gravelly voice? Whatever it was, this woman seemed so self-possessed and confident, Lucy’s dismay that this man had a girlfriend was almost overridden. Lucy was fascinated.

            Lucy turned back to the man. “I don’t think you told me your name.”

            He laughed and Lucy forgot about Myra. His laugh was musical, setting her heart to thumping. She wondered what it would be like to slide closer, to rest her head on his shoulder.

            “It’s Ian.” He slid a pair of Ray Bans over his green eyes and shifted the car into drive. They sped away from the curb.

            Lucy watched as her little white house grew smaller in the side view mirror.

            It wasn’t long before they were pulling up in front of a trailer on the outskirts of town. Lucy was disappointed; the dwelling didn’t seem to fit Ian’s character at all. She had expected something more romantic, a houseboat moored on the Ohio River, a high-rise apartment in nearby Pittsburgh, a mansion, a log cabin…anything but a trailer.

            And it wasn’t even a nice one. Set up on cinderblocks, the trailer was a big box wrapped in harvest gold and dingy white aluminum; a piece of the skirting had torn loose at one end; there was rust around the corners.

            Ian shut the car off and draped his arm across the back of Lucy’s seat. “It isn’t much, Love, but it’s all I’ve got. Care to come inside or should we take you home?”

            “Oh, just take her home, Ian. She’ll be late for supper.” Myra said from the back seat, where she hid behind a cloud of cigarette smoke.

            “I’d love to come inside. This is where you live, right?”

            Ian laughed. “Yes, for now. Are you sure you have time?”

            Lucy glanced down at her watch, embarrassed suddenly by the pink vinyl strap and the Hello Kitty face on the dial. She would have to get a new watch soon, no matter what. Mom would probably be wondering, right about now, where she had gone off to. “I have a little time. Let’s go in. I want to see.”

            Lucy followed the two of them toward the trailer. Ahead of her, there was a copse of maple trees on a bluff. The Ohio River, looking brown and stagnant in the milky white light, curved as it made its way south.

            Inside, the sudden change from the day’s withering brightness to the dark interior blinded Lucy and she felt her first moment of panic. Neither of them said anything and she suddenly felt helpless. For the first time that day, she questioned their interest in her

and thought herself foolish for not having wondered why a young couple in their twenties would want to bring her home.

            But she did look older, didn’t she?

            Of course she did. Ian confirmed it. “We’re going to have a glass of wine, Lucy. Would you care for one?”

            A flush of pleasure rushed through her. They did think she was older, a peer really. Perhaps they were just trying to make friends. Before the onset of the summer, she couldn’t recall having seen either of them before. But what would Mom say if she came home with liquor on her breath? She groped in her pocket, thankful for the piece of Bazooka there.

            “Well, maybe I could have just a small one.”

            “Excellent!” Ian clapped his hands together and went toward the wall behind him, where a portable kitchen waited. He took a jug of white wine from the refrigerator and poured three glasses.

            After they were settled in the living room and Lucy’s eyes had adjusted to the dim lighting, she said, “This is much nicer than I thought.”

            Ian and Myra exchanged glances, laughing, and Lucy wondered why. The place was run-down: the carpeting, a beige and brown tweed, was threadbare and the furniture was a hodgepodge of mismatched pieces, all of it looking secondhand.  The scarred coffee table contained an odd assortment of items: a book called Crime and Punishment, a ceramic skull, and two black votive candles set on tin jar lids.

            But the dimness and stale air bothered her more than anything else. Why were all the curtains drawn? “It’s kind of dark in here, isn’t it?”

            That remark they found amusing as well; their laughter began to make her uncomfortable. She scratched her arm.

            Ian said, “Lucy, haven’t you noticed? It’s hot outside. It keeps things a little cooler if I keep the drapes drawn.”

            Of course.

            After they had finished their wine, well, after Ian and Myra had finished theirs, Lucy thought it tasted horrible, Ian disappeared for a moment. When he came back, he was carrying a video camera. It was one of those tiny ones you could almost palm in your hand, and the red light on it was blinking.

            What was going on?

            “Smile for the camera, Lucy.”

            Lucy tried to smile, but things were getting too strange. She managed to turn up the corners of her lips in a grin. Suddenly, Myra was on the couch next to her, too close really: Lucy smelled her perfume. It was too sweet, with a bitter undertone. It smelled like she had rubbed incense on herself. The scent of the perfume combined with cigarettes and wine caused Lucy to lean back, away from Myra. Suddenly, she didn’t seem as glamorous as she had in the car.

            Myra put her arm around her and mugged for the camera. “Come on, Lucy, smile!”

            Lucy bit her lip, thinking of the Barbie trunk she had left on her front lawn. Kelsey Timmons, just down the street, wouldn’t be above taking the whole trunk home, especially given the golden opportunity Lucy was bestowing. Kelsey had coveted Lucy’s Barbie collection since she had moved in down the street four years ago. “I think I’d like to go home now.” Lucy tried to look anywhere but into the lens of the camera. She wished he would turn it off.

            “Nonsense!” Ian exclaimed.

            “You just got here, dear,” Myra whispered to her. Her lips were too red and Lucy suddenly felt sick.

            “Please, I need to go home now.”

            “Just a few more minutes.” Ian hunkered down in front of the two of them, moving the camera slowly up and down their bodies.

            Lucy’s mouth was dry. She lifted the wine to her lips just to have something to quell the terrible dryness. She began to perspire, dampening at her armpits, her hairline. She whimpered, “You said no more than an hour.”

            “Such a pretty girl,” Myra whispered, lifting Lucy’s ponytail and turning it in her hand. “Oh, to have such tresses, what I wouldn’t give to have hair this color.” She giggled. “Naturally, I mean.”

            “Jealous?” Ian stood and aimed the camera down at the two of them.

            Lucy shot up, heat and fear coalescing to make her sick. The walls of the trailer closed in. “I don’t feel so good. Can we go now?”

            Ian set the camera down for a moment and gave her his most winning smile. “The answer to that question, my sweet, is no.”

            And now, here she lay on a mattress in the back of the trailer, arms and legs splayed apart, wrists and ankles bound by clothesline. The bindings were so tight, she could feel a needle-like tingling in her fingers and toes; the rope chafed against her, cutting into her skin.

            “Smile for the camera, Lucy!” Ian said, cheerful, as if this were a birthday party or holiday celebration rather than what it really was: an abduction. Lucy tried to turn her head away from the camera, but Ian followed her. “C’mon! I see that grin coming...”

            “No.” Lucy whimpered, tears stinging her eyes, trickling down her face and into her ears, tickling. She tried to hunch up her shoulders to end the sensation, but it didn’t work. She could hear the whirr of the camera lens as Ian zoomed in for a close-up of her tear-stained face.

            “Please...I just want to go home, now.”

            “Why? The fun’s just beginning.” Ian nodded to Myra, who knelt beside the bed and began tugging at Lucy’s shorts. Ian moved around the room with the camera, getting different angles.

            Myra looked at Ian, helpless. “We should have gotten her undressed before.”

            “Scissors are in the kitchen drawer. You know where.”

            Myra left and came back in moments with a pair of kitchen shears. She knelt once more beside Lucy, snipping through her brother’s treasured T-shirt. Kevin would kill her. Myra then cut her shorts off.

            Lucy squirmed, helpless under the relentless eye of the camera. Everything was exposed. Everything. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

            And he kept moving around with that camera. What was he going to do with the tape? Lucy struggled against the bindings, the rope cutting deeper and more painfully into her wrists and ankles with every movement. She was panting. “Can I tell you something?”

            Ian lowered the camera for a moment, to run his fingers along Lucy’s naked body. “A splendid sacrifice,” he whispered, his breath coming in short pants now as well. “A splendid sacrifice for the Beast.”

            “Yes.” Myra reached over and cupped one of Lucy’s small breasts, thumb and forefinger moving around her nipple, pinching.

            “Please! I have to tell you something.”

            “For God’s sake, what is it?”

            Her breath was coming faster now, faster and she couldn’t seem to gulp in enough air. “I can’t breathe. Please.”

            Ian and Myra regarded one another and in Lucy’s wild gaze, they seemed to be snickering. What was funny about this?

            “Please, you have to let me go. I can’t breathe.”

            Myra said, “The Beast is watching.”

            “He’s waiting.”

            Lucy gasped. “I have to go now. My mom....”

            Ian picked up the camera and recorded while Myra ran her hands over Lucy’s body, harder and harder, the strokes hurting, chafing against her skin. “Please stop, please. You’re hurting me. Why are you doing this?”

            “The Beast is hungry.” Ian’s voice was dead, a monotone.

            “My mom and me, we have someplace we have to go. She’ll be looking for me.”

            Myra said, “She’ll be looking for a long, long time.”

            Lucy screamed.

            “Shut her up!” Ian barked.

            “Who’s going to hear her, all the way out here?”

            “Just shut her up, Myra! The Beast will not be pleased.”

            And then Myra disappeared. When she came back, she had a black bandanna and a roll of duct tape in her hands.

            “No, please. I’ll be quiet. You have to listen to me. Mom! Mom! Please you have to let me go. I swear on the Bible I won’t tell anyone what happened. Please.” The

tears were hot, salty; they stung her eyes.

            “Sorry, dear,” Myra said, “The Beast does not approve of screaming.”

            “I won’t scream. I promise. My mom...”

            But Lucy never got the chance to finish her sentence. Myra stuffed the balled-up bandanna in her mouth and deftly put two strips of duct tape across her mouth. Lucy kicked as best she could with the binds on her. She was going to suffocate and no one knew where she was. She saw her mother suddenly, standing in the yard and calling her name, telling her supper was ready. Her little brother, Todd, stood on the porch, sucking his thumb.

            Lucy turned, trying to hide her face from the camera. Myra slapped her. “You’re making this very difficult, you know.” Her face was sweaty and her

hair had come undone; wisps of it hung down in her face. “The more you struggle, the longer this will take.”

            And then Lucy was trembling. The shaking came of its own accord, but grew in intensity, rising with her fear, her body writhing on the bed.

            Myra held her down, straddling her. “Get the pictures, damn it!”

            And Ian kept moving, back and forth, getting closer, then further away. How would her eyes look on the tape? Did they reflect her terror?

            “To the Beast, we make this humble offering,” Ian said.

            And then Myra was sliding a pillow out from under Lucy’s head.

            And then she raised the pillow up.

            And then Lucy watched as the pillow grew larger and larger, until all that existed was the pillow, darkness, and no air.

No air.