The Narrows - Michael Connelly [129]
More sounds and voices came to her. Murmurs mostly and every few moments a recognizable word, sculpted in anger or fear.
“You thought . . .”
She bent down and left the flashlight on the floor. She had not used it yet and couldn’t risk it now. She moved into the deeper gloom of the hallway. She had already checked the front rooms and knew the voices were coming from somewhere further into the house.
The hallway led to a foyer from which doors opened in three different directions. As she got there she heard the voices of two men and thought for sure that they came from somewhere to the right.
“Write it!”
“I can’t see!”
Then a popping sound. A ripping sound. Curtains being pulled off a window.
“There, you see now? Write it or I’ll end it right now!”
“All right! All right!”
“Exactly as I say it. Once upon a midnight dreary . . .”
She knew what it was. She recognized the words of Edgar Allan Poe. And she knew it was Backus, though the voice was different. He was using the poetry again, re-creating the crime taken from him so long ago. Bosch had been right.
She moved into the room to the right and found it empty. A billiard table stood in the middle of the room, every inch of its surface taken up by stacks of more books. She understood what Backus had done. He had lured Ed Thomas here because the man who lived here—Charles Turrentine—was a collector. He knew Thomas would come for this collection.
She started to turn in order to retreat, to check the next room off the foyer. But before she had moved more than a few inches she felt the cold muzzle of a gun pressed against her neck.
“Hello, Rachel,” Robert Backus said with his surgically changed voice. “What a surprise to see you here.”
She froze and in that moment knew that he could not be played in any way, that he knew all the plays and all the angles. She knew she only had one chance. That was Bosch.
“Hello, Bob. It’s been a long time.”
“Yes, it has. Would you like to leave your weapon here and join me in the library?”
Rachel put her Sig down on one of the stacks on the billiard table.
“I sort of thought the whole place was a library, Bob.”
Backus didn’t respond. She felt him grab the back of her collar, press his gun against her spine and then push her in the direction he wanted her to go. They left the room and went into the next, which was a small room with two high-backed wooden chairs arranged to face a large stone fireplace. There was no fire and Rachel could hear rain dripping down the chimney into the hearth. She saw that it was creating a puddle there. Windows on either side of the fireplace had rain washing down them, turning them translucent.
“We happen to have just enough chairs,” Backus said. “Have a seat, won’t you?”
He roughly brought her around one of the chairs and pushed her down into it. He made a quick check of her body for other weapons and then stepped back and dropped something onto her lap. Rachel looked into the other chair and saw Ed Thomas. He was still alive. His wrists were held to the arms of the chair by plastic snap-cuffs. Two more cuffs had been joined and then used to hold him by his neck to the back of the chair. He had been gagged with a cloth napkin and his face was overly red with exertion and lack of oxygen.
“Bob, you can stop this,” Rachel said. “You’ve made your point. You don’t —”
“Put the cuff around your right wrist and lock it to the chair’s arm.”
“Bob, please. Let —”
“Do it!”
She wrapped the plastic cuff around the arm of the chair and her wrist. She then pulled the tab through the slide lock.
“Tight, but not too tight. I don’t want to leave a mark.”
When she was done he told her to put her free arm on the other arm of the chair. He then moved in and grabbed the arm to keep it in place while he looped another snap-cuff around it and locked it. He stepped back to admire his