Preview: Trail of Madness

Prologue

Thursday, August 22, 1996, 12:45 pm

Odessa, Texas

She stands in her bedroom by the closet door. Her gaze drifts around the room slowly, but while nothing appears to be out of place, she knows instinctively that something is not right.

There is a soft, wet sound that she cannot place, but which causes her more distress the longer she hears it. She searches her room to find the source of the sound, but she is alone.

Though every instinct tells her not to move, she walks to the bedroom door and opens it. Her mother’s body is in the middle of the living room floor. She sees the haunted, fearful look frozen forever in her mother’s dead eyes, and she utters a whimper as the eyes move to stare at her.

“Why couldn’t you save me?” her mother whispers.

She tries to look away from her mother, only to find her father hunched over in the corner of the living room. His bloodshot eyes gleam at her as he chews on his wife’s heart, and she realizes that the sound she hears is wet flesh tearing.

Wendy’s terrified scream drew Jobe out of his thoughts, and he turned from the window to move to the bed. He tried to take hold of her arms to calm her down, and she panicked, thrashing her legs as she struggled to get away.

Wendy’s knee thumped into Jobe’s ribs below his bandaged wound, and the scab over the cut split. The knife wound, dealt by Wendy’s father only six days before, was slow to heal, because Jobe had not seen a doctor to have the wide, deep gash stitched properly.

Jobe said, “Wendy, it’s me.” Her knee rose up to strike his side again, and his fractured ribs protested the abuse. But in spite of the pain assaulting his senses, Jobe tried to keep the tone of his voice gentle. “It’s only a nightmare, okay?”

He pulled Wendy against his chest and patted the back of her black, curly hair until she began to calm down.

“I’m okay.” Wendy gave Jobe a strained smile as he sat back from her. “I’m sorry that I keep waking you up like this.”

“Nah, I’ve been up for a few hours,” Jobe said. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for anyway. After everything you’ve been through in the last few days, you deserve the chance to break down.”

Wendy’s smile faltered as her mind looped through the dream again. She shook her head, both as an objection to what Jobe said, and to help her banish the memories. She said, “We don’t have time for me to break down.”

“Wendy, you can’t keep this bottled up forever.” Jobe reached out to rub her back. “I know you’re tough, but if you don’t let this out now, it’s going to keep eating away at you.”

Wendy’s mouth bowed tightly, and she fought with the lump forming in her throat. “But this isn’t something I can just...I miss Sam,” she whimpered as her pale face started to crumple. Her eyelids squeezed shut over her glassy blue eyes, spilling tears down her lean cheeks.

Once she’d let one source of grief slip from her control, the others quickly followed. Her parents were dead, and she’d seen them both die.

She was already sobbing by then, but the emotional flood continued, and her anguish mingled with her guilt over killing her father. She was scared too, and uncertain of her future. Each negative emotion fed the others, and their power shook Wendy’s slight frame, forcing her to huddle over and clasp her arms across her aching chest.

Unsure of what else to do, Jobe leaned over to hold Wendy, and he remained silent while he listened to her cry.

It had only been two days since they had left Devine to search for Candy Duncan, the woman who could supposedly lead them to Gene Stoffel’s new contact. Jobe wanted to begin right away, but it had become obvious that Wendy was an emotional train wreck that hadn’t yet finished the crash. He didn’t need his reflection to tell him that he had to wait out her grief, because he knew that he would need Wendy’s help to find her father’s kidnappers.

Wendy stilled and began to sniffle, raising her hands to wipe her cheeks.

Jobe cleared his throat as he looked toward the mirror. He asked, “Hey buddy, where’s the wonder twin?”

Although the reflection was a doppelganger of Jobe in appearance, he stood by the dresser with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his baggy jeans. Nodding his head across the room, the reflection said, “He’s in the chair to the left of the table.”

Jobe turned to face the chair. “Jamie, if it’s all right, I need you to scout around on the campus. We don’t know much about the person we’re looking for beyond a name. So for now, I need you to start finding the local dealers. Three or four of them are supposed to work for Candy, so maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Tell him that I appreciate him making the effort to look at me,” Jamie said as he got up from his chair.

Wendy relayed the message and sat back on the headboard while she wiped her eyes with the neck of her shirt.

“It’s the least I can do for all the help you provide,” Jobe said. He returned his attention to Wendy. “Are you hungry? You haven’t eaten anything for a day and a half now.”

She nodded and sniffled again as she slid her legs off the side of the bed. “It’s been too hard to eat with my head full. All I can think about are the bodies, and my stomach locks up. Nothing appeals to me right now.”

“We need to have you fake it for today.” Jobe got up and moved to the table to grab Wendy’s backpack. He held it out to her and watched her shuffle into the bathroom before he looked at his reflection. “How long?”

The reflection shook his head, his shaggy chestnut-brown hair swaying down over his brown eyes. “It’s hard to say.”

The reflection’s sunken, sickly pale face was tight with concern, and instead of looking at Jobe, the reflection’s gaze stayed focused on the bathroom door. “She’s a mess, and you can’t rush the grieving process.”

“I’m not trying to, but we need to find out what happened to her father,” Jobe said. “If he never made it to the meeting, then it stands to reason that we should find the contact fine, fit, and clueless as to what happened to Gene.”

“Yes, and both Wendy and I will be able to confirm that,” the reflection agreed before shrugging his shoulders. He frowned at Jobe, unable to hide his skepticism over the plan. “But Jamie is more limited in his search. Someone really would have to drop Candy’s name for him to find her.”

“Yes, but Jamie can find the small time dealers working the campus and lead Wendy and I to them.” Jobe glanced toward the bathroom door as the shower came on. “Once we get close enough, we can stake out the dealers until we find someone who works for Candy.”

“Okay, so far this sounds like a reasonable plan.”

“Thank you,” Jobe said as he sat down in the chair. “Now that we’re clear on who you are, you won’t be telling me about my messages coming from the ‘holy one’ anymore, right?”

“No, mainly because you wouldn’t believe me,” the reflection said. He leaned against the edge of the vanity and folded his arms over his chest. “It’s my current theory that if this case plays out the way you think it will, it’s going to prove that Jamie is right, and I’m just a fractured part of your personality. But that places the burden of doing the work solely on your shoulders. I can tell you which people are bad, but it has to be left up to you what you’ll do about them.”

Jobe nodded, returning his thoughts to his current, and far more pressing problems. “I don’t know whether this contact will give us any other leads or not. That’s what worries me. These guys aren’t likely to conduct two tests in the same time period, and unless they’re still hanging out in the city, Wendy and I won’t find them by walking around.”

“So why not work backwards if this lead doesn’t pan out?” the reflection suggested. “We can head to Montana next to check up on Neal Mosley and see if there was something to connect him to Gene.”

“It’s a long shot,” Jobe said. “Still it’s not like we’ve got much to work on here.”

***

Thursday, 12:50 pm

The white van that pulled into the Comfort Suites motel parking lot drew a few stray glances from people leaving their rooms or walking to their cars, but nothing seemed extraordinary about the vehicle. It looked mundanely similar to the other work vans in the motel parking lot, and the two men who sat in the front seats didn’t appear out of place in their denim work shirts and dark, navy-blue baseball caps.

The magnetic decals on the doors declared that the occupants were employed by Fender Brothers Construction and Contracting, though in fact, no such company existed. The men all carried identification, but as with the company they worked for, their identities were complete works of fiction.

The van pulled around to the back of the parking lot while the driver and passenger scanned the area for witnesses. The back of the motel was quiet, and the driver turned the van into a parking slot before he cut the engine off.

Getting out of the van first, the driver again glanced around with narrowed eyes. He walked to the door of the room in front of the van, moving in a way that might have seemed suspicious if anyone had seen him.

Yet no one did, and the driver dug the motel key out of his pocket to unlock the room before he moved to the side door of the van.

The driver opened the door, and two men backed out of the cargo bay carrying another man between them. The unconscious man groaned as they took him into the room, but he made no effort to resist them in his drugged condition. He was laid out on the bed, and the two men walked back outside to the van.

The driver went to the nightstand beside the bed to set down the room key before he backed up to the door. Locking the door from the inside, he shut it and returned to the van with the same cautious stride while he surveyed the parking lot. Their deposit had gone unnoticed, and within minutes, the van was back on the highway; easily ignored, and easily forgotten.

***

Thursday, 1:30 pm

Jobe smiled as he watched Wendy pack away her second order of pancakes. He had already finished his breakfast, and he nursed a third cup of coffee while Wendy seemingly tried to make up for lost meals.

She finally set the fork down, shaking her head as she let out a small sigh. “Okay, I surrender. The pancakes have won.”

“You may have lost the war, but many pancakes fell to you,” Jobe joked, though his expression was still filled with concern. “Should we head back to the motel?”

“No, we’re just wasting what little money we have by sitting around.” Wendy paused to sip her orange juice. “We need to find Candy, and we have better chances of doing it than Jamie does.”

“I thought that Jamie knew everything.”

“No, he doesn’t. I think I understand what happened, and I know why Jamie can’t really know everything. Jamie gains his information through my contact with other people, just like your reflection gets his messages through your telepathic ability.

“There weren’t too many people in Devine that I didn’t know, so Jamie had a pretty good understanding of everyone’s patterns and habits, right up until...” Wendy trailed off, shaking her head in an effort to deny her bleak feelings. “Right up until my dad showed up under the effects of the virus. All it took was one random mind to throw off his ability to know everything.”

Jobe rested his head on his hand as he regarded Wendy quietly. “That still leaves the unexplainable visions you had of the phantom car.”

“I’ve got nothing on those,” Wendy said. “Which of course brings us to the question of whether they were a miracle, or if this kind of vision is another ability of mine. I have to wait and see if anything like it happens again.”

“You have a second soul, but you can’t believe in a miracle.”

“You don’t either.”

“Maybe a little bit, yeah,” Jobe said and shrugged. “I couldn’t believe that God was talking to me, but I did for a while.”

“So why did you stop believing?” Wendy asked.

“Guilt, mostly. Bit by bit, I began admitting to myself that it was more likely that I was talking to a hallucination instead of God’s messenger. Ultimately, that admission led me to second guess every decision I’ve made over the course of several jobs.”

Jobe’s eyes glazed as his senses turned inward toward his muddled thoughts. “I was already questioning my hallucination’s information before I met you, and Jamie validated most of my suspicions. I still think there might be a God, but I know for a fact that he isn’t talking to me.”

“But because of what happened in Devine, you’ve confirmed that the people you killed were criminals.”

Jobe nodded, dropping his head as he lowered his voice. “Some of them were, but I still have other people on my conscience who weren’t guilty. There’s no one to blame but me for being indiscriminate in my attacks, so even if my reflection was giving me the truth, it doesn’t really excuse the things I’ve done.”

Wendy pouted, and she gave voice to the worried thought that had just come to mind. “If you’re feeling guilty about your past, what exactly is our plan once we catch up to the people who infected my dad?”

“I’m really not sure. To be honest, I haven’t sorted out how we’re going to find them yet. I may have made it sound like I could easily hunt these guys down, but I’m not a detective. This is the first time that I’ve had a job where the point was to look for someone specific. Even if we can find this contact, there’s a good chance they’ll be a dead end. After that, there isn’t much else for us to work with.”

“Sure, but we do have another lead to check on with Neal’s case.”

“The reflection pointed that out to me while you were in the shower,” Jobe said, his face drawing into a look of doubt. “But locating any information on Neal presents us with the same problem. This is a cold case, and we aren’t detectives. We’re extremely limited in our resources, so all we’ve got to work with is publicly available information.”

“We’ll sort it out after we’re ready to leave town,” Wendy said. “For now, I’m more concerned with our budget. We’ve only got enough money left for four or five more nights at the motel, depending on how often we eat. So we really ought to sort out some way to get some money together. The truck won’t run on prayers, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jobe agreed. “But the only things I can come up with are either that I work in day labor, or we try to sell the truck for—”

“I’m not walking,” Wendy said, cutting him off.

Jobe nodded and said, “Right, so we need a plan C.”

***

Thursday, 3:06 pm

He woke up slowly, opening his eyes to stare at the ceiling in confusion. Rolling his head to the side, he looked at the unfamiliar furniture in the room, wondering how he had arrived. He sat up, puzzled by his surroundings. The room was alien to him, and the deafening silence left him feeling increasingly claustrophobic.

Even as he tried to calm himself, new questions passed through his mind that added to his growing sense of bewilderment. He had no idea how he had come to be in the room. But then, he also couldn’t remember anything to help him explain where he was, or even who he was.

He rolled off of the bed, moving to look at himself in a mirror, and he uttered a short, surprised groan at the sight of his own eyes. There were no traces of white surrounding his irises, only a shocking red stain that made the dark brown color of his eyes seem more menacing.

Nothing about his face was familiar to him; not the wide humps of his brow, nor the thickness of his chin and jaw. He raised a hand, running it through his stringy black hair before he pulled his hand away to stare at it.

He turned his hand over, finding a faint, round scar at the base of his thumb that appeared as if it might have come from some kind of burn. His eyes flicked back up to his reflection while he tried to remember how he had burned himself. When nothing came to mind, he instead began wondering what his name was.

He gave up, his gaze falling to the desk. The phone and memo pad felt both oddly familiar and maddeningly foreign to him at the same time.

He pulled the memo pad around to read the name of the motel, Comfort Suites, and then the address. Neither were familiar, and he furrowed his brow, trying again to remember any one detail about himself. Who was he? No answer. Where did he live? Nothing. The longer he tried to focus, the angrier he became.

He began balling his fists, clenching them so tightly that his knuckles were white.

The front door opened, and he spun his head around, confusion filling his thoughts as he watched the woman walking into the motel room. Her black dress and apron should have been familiar to him, and on some level, his mind registered that much.

Opening his mouth to ask the woman who she was, he drew in a breath, and her head snapped up at the sound. He took a step back, flinching in shock as she started to scream. He raised his hand, trying to calm her down, but she stumbled back out of the door. She paused long enough to regain her balance with a hand on the doorframe, and then she took off at a run.

He walked to the door hesitantly, peering around the frame to see the woman still screaming hysterically as she sprinted away from him. His attention wandered from her, and he glanced around the parking lot at the cars.

He blinked, looking down and wondering how he could know what cars were. Stepping outside, he wandered around a car to glance down at the trunk. Nothing about his circumstances made sense to him. He knew it was a trunk, but he couldn’t remember where he’d learned the term.

He looked down at the name of the car: Civic. He could read the word and understand it, but he had no idea where he’d learned to read.

Shaking his head, he looked back to where the woman was running, only to find her returning with two men. He noticed how both men slowed down well before getting close to him, and he began to suspect that they were afraid of him.

Raising his hands, he tried to assure them that he wasn’t dangerous, but his words came out sounding like gibberish in his own ears.

One of the men shouted something, but it was also incoherent babbling as far as he could tell. He made a half attempt to explain that he couldn’t understand them, but he gave up once it became clear that he was unable to understand himself.

He frowned, turning away from the men to study his reflection in the rear window of the car. He was dressed in a long-sleeve denim shirt and a pair of dark blue denim jeans, but neither they nor his black hiking boots felt familiar to him. He couldn’t remember putting the clothes on, and the more he tried to remember, the angrier it made him that every question he posed to himself was coming up as a blank for an answer.

He turned as a hand clapped down on his shoulder, and both of the men were behind him. They were standing so close that he felt trapped between them and the car.

He pushed the taller man’s arm away, shouting at both of the men to keep their distance. Again his words came out sounding garbled, and it only served to heat his temper further.

The taller of the two men shouted at him in more of the same nonsensical gibberish, and he growled, turning to walk away again. Both of the men moved to grab him, and he twisted his body sideways, driving his knee into the pudgy gut of the shorter man. The other man let go of his arm, and he drove his elbow up into the man’s chin. The man’s teeth clapped shut over the tip of his tongue, and blood poured from his mouth as he fell to the pavement screaming.

Settling his shirt back over his shoulders, he walked away quickly, ignoring the woman while she continued to shriek a high-pitched stream of babble at him.

***

Thursday, 4:19 pm

Jobe wandered around the campus bookstore, his search ending when he found a rotating case of reading glasses that sat atop a glass display case near the back corner of the store. He walked to the display, spinning the racks around to look for a pair of low power lenses in round frames.

Instead, he found a pair with a slender, silver frame around oval lenses. Pulling the glasses down, he slipped them on to make sure the magnification of the lenses wasn’t so strong as to be distracting.

“It’s a good plan,” the reflection said, his voice coming from the mirror at the top of the case and from all of the lenses in front of Jobe. “With a normal pair of glasses on, I can relay you information as I get it.”

Jobe gave a short nod of agreement, slipping off the glasses and taking them to the cashier to pay for them. He put the glasses back on as he walked outside, glancing around to make sure no one was near him. “All right, now that I’m far enough out to test this, have you found anyone here who knows Candy?”

“No, I’m afraid not, but then making a specific search like this will take a few days at the very least. If you were just looking for random criminals, you’ve passed a hit-and-run drunk driver and a serial rapist.”

Jobe grimaced, shaking his head. “Spare me the details. They work small-scale evil, and whoever is behind this virus is working the upper end. For now, we just have to let the little ones go.”

“Yes, I figured as much,” the reflection said. In the lenses, Jobe could see a smaller version of himself frowning back at him. “I guess no longer being a servant of God, I have to stop thinking about all the women who have been hurt by one man.”

“What do you expect me to do?” Jobe asked. Frustrated, he glanced around and began walking back across the campus to look for Wendy. “I can’t make new weapons without money, and all I’ve got right now are my bare hands. Unless this guy keeps some kind of evidence that I can give to the police, I’d have to deal with him directly.

“More to the point, if I were a servant of God, I’d think that I would have to follow some of his rules, and I seem to recall one of them being pretty specific about killing.

“But I’m not a servant of God. I’m just a schizophrenic with paranoid delusions of grandeur. Lately, reality is starting to intrude on my fantasies, because for once, I’ve stumbled into a real conspiracy. If I’m not being guided by the holy spirit, I have got to prioritize which crime is worse.

“Which case would be more important to you? Do we need to murder a man for raping women, or do we need to find this group, whose favorite indirect targets are typically children?”

The reflection was quiet for a while before giving a short nod. “I don’t like it, but I’ll do my best to ignore the others.”

Jobe sighed. “I don’t like it either, buddy. But if we don’t stop these guys, I get the feeling there’s going to be a lot more ‘demonically possessed’ serial killers popping up all over the country, maybe even the world.”

“Yes, I can see what you mean,” the reflection said. “It isn’t just the children who need our help, but also the random victims and the infected killers themselves.”

“Imagine a killer like this in every town, and it’s that much easier to understand why I have to focus,” Jobe fell silent as a group of women walked past him. “The odds are good that this group will go into hiding before they try the same trick again. They can hide as long as they like, and we’ve got very little in the way of leads to find them before they’ve selected a new target.”

***

Thursday, 4:25 pm

Jamie sat down on the bench beside his sister, smiling at her with a hopeful expression. “You look better.”

“Give me a few hours and I’ll be in the mood for another crying fit,” Wendy muttered as she glanced around the mostly empty campus.

The classes were all in session, and so there weren’t any students within Wendy’s range without her wandering into classrooms.

Wendy asked, “Have you found any drug dealers?”

“Yeah, I found a lot of drug dealers,” Jamie said. “But nobody has mentioned their sources yet, as you might expect. Where’s Jobe?”

“He went to the campus bookstore. He said he had some kind of idea that might help him find Candy.”

“Don’t look, but a campus security guard is walking over here on your right.”

“It’s okay,” Wendy said. “I’ve got my story figured out already.”

She turned her head, smiling at the burly Hispanic walking toward her. He returned the smile, though as he got closer, she sensed that he was worried that she was homeless and begging for change on the campus.

“Good afternoon, officer,” said Wendy.

The guard said, “Good afternoon to you, ma’am. May I ask what you’re doing here?”

“Yes, my cousin is visiting the campus to see if he’d like to study here next semester. He’s at the bookstore now, I think.”

The guard nodded as his posture relaxed. “So, where are you from?”

“Arizona, originally. My family moved around a lot.”

“Do you just live with your cousin?”

“I do now,” Wendy said, her expression falling. “I lost most of my family very recently.”

“I see,” the guard said. “Does your cousin have a place for you to live?”

“We’re working on it now,” Wendy said and sighed. “I don’t mean to put you off, but do you mind not asking me about my family? I’m really not that far off from crying again if you keep this up.”

The guard looked down, his wide face filling with a look of discomfort. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, there you are,” Jobe said as he strolled up to the bench to stand beside Wendy. “Are you making trouble yet?”

“Hey, cuz.” Wendy strained to fake a smile and gestured at the officer. “I was just telling Robert here about your interest in taking classes next semester.”

“Oh, well it might not work out,” Jobe said. “The tuition fees are a lot higher than I was expecting.” Jobe looked at the guard, who was staring at Wendy.

“How did you know my name?” the guard asked.

“I read it off your name tag.” Wendy stood up. “I’ve got good eyesight.”

“I guess so,” the guard said before his expression became apologetic. “Anyway, I’m sorry for disturbing you. I’m just—”

“Doing your job, yes,” Wendy interrupted him. “It’s okay. I understand.”

Jobe watched the guard walk away before he offered Wendy a concerned look. “Are you okay?”

“No.” Wendy let go of a shaking breath as her face fell into a troubled scowl. “The first thing he did was ask about my family, and it’s digging a hole in my stomach.”

“We can go back to the room if you want,” Jobe said.

“No, Jamie has some leads we should check out first,” Wendy insisted, her frown growing when Jobe turned to watch her with a conflicted expression. “I appreciate that you’re waiting for me, but this isn’t something I can get over, and we don’t have time to let me heal.”

Jobe sighed. A worried voice in his mind insisted that he was pushing Wendy to move on too quickly. But the trail was growing cold, and they needed to move fast.

He nodded and said, “All right, have Jamie lead the way.”

***

Thursday, 7:05 pm

Very little was said while they wandered from person to person, allowing Jobe’s reflection to sort through the thoughts of each dealer from a discreet distance. The long silence left time for Wendy to think over her problems once again. Though she wanted to stay focused on finding Candy, her mind kept returning to her nagging worries about Jobe.

Wendy couldn’t have made the trip to Odessa on her own. She knew she needed an adult to play the role of her guardian, and Jobe was able to provide that along with any number of useful skills. With his help, she could believe in the possibility of getting the truth.

Jobe had agreed to help her find the men behind her father’s kidnapping, and beyond that, the future for Wendy and her brother became frighteningly uncertain if he chose to walk away from them.

Wendy turned to study him as she considered her question. “Jobe, if we get lucky and somehow gather enough evidence to have these people arrested, what’s going to happen to us? I mean, are we going to part ways then, or will you be staying with us?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it much. The decision is more for you to make than for me. So long as you feel like you can deal with me, I could watch over you.”

“I don’t know,” Wendy said. “I’m not sure I could get used to your job.”

“Wendy, I think I’ve already made it clear that the direction of my future has been under question recently,” Jobe said. “You have my word that I’m not leaving after we expose this group, but there’s a lot of time between here and there.”

“Yeah. We don’t even know what to do about the kidnappers yet either.”

“Maybe we can get the police to show up at just the right time through some well placed anonymous tips.”

“That’s what I’m thinking as well,” Wendy said.

“We’ll worry about that once we know who the masterminds behind the experiments are. For now, I’d rather just focus on finding Gene’s contact. I’m already breaking my brains trying to figure out how to find them.”

“This guy isn’t employed by Candy either,” the reflection said.

Jobe sighed and glanced down at his watch. “We’ve got another loser. I’m voting we take a dinner break.”

“Yeah,” Wendy said. “My breakfast wore off a while ago.”

“It is a good sign that you’re willing to eat again,” Jobe said as they began walking off of the campus. “What are you in the mood for?”

“Anything edible.”

“Right, Chinese it is.”

Wendy smiled, but it fell quickly at a stray thought. “Jobe, did my mom ever say which college Candy’s people worked at?”

Jobe’s face blanched into a troubled look. “Uh, no, I don’t believe she did.”

“So how many colleges are here in town?” Wendy asked, shaking her head in the following silence. “Some detectives we are. Crap, we could be here forever and still not find Candy.”

“No, it’s still just a process of elimination. We’ll just track down all the dealers here, and if none of them work for Candy, we can check out the other campuses. Still, this is Odessa College, and she said ‘the college.’ I kind of hoped we might get lucky.”

Wendy stared at him with utter disbelief. “I’m sorry, did you just say that you were hoping we might get lucky?”

“It is something of a long shot, isn’t it?” Jobe conceded.