Speaking in Tongues

want to be heard. He was sneaking up on her. He was playing the invisible monster; she’d seen that story in one of the comic books. Some creature you couldn’t see snuck into girls’ locker rooms and raped stragglers after gym class. The comic had been limp, as if Peter’d read that one a thousand times.
    He moved forward another few cautious steps.
    Her hand started to shake.
    Should she jump out into the corridor and just run like hell?
    But he couldn’t be more than ten feet away. And he’d looked so big in the photographs! He could lunge like a snake and grab her by the throat in two steps.
    Suddenly a flash of pain went through her hand—from one of the blisters—and she dropped the knife. Gasped involuntarily.
    Megan froze, watching the knife tumble to the floor. It can’t break! No . . .
    Just before the icy glass hit the floor she shoved her foot under it, waiting for the pain as the tip of the blade sliced into the top of her foot.
    Thunk. The knife hit her right foot flat and rolled, unbroken, to the floor.
    Thank you, thank you . . .
    She bent down and picked it up.
    Another two footsteps, closer, closer.
    No choice. She had to run. He was only three or four feet away.
    Megan took a deep breath, another. Jump out, slash with the knife and run like hell toward the trap.
    Now!
    She leapt out, turned to the right.
    Froze. Gasping. Her ears had played tricks on her. No one was there. Then she looked down. The rat—a large one, big as a cat—standing on his haunches, sniffing the air, blinked at her, cowering. Then indignantly it turned away as if angry at being startled.
    Megan sagged against the wall, tears welling as the fear dissipated.
    But she didn’t have much time for recovery.
    At the far end of the dim corridor a shadow materialized into the loping form of Peter Matthews, hunched over and moving slowly. He didn’t see her and disappeared from view.
    Megan paused for only a few seconds before she started after him.
    •   •   •
    The Shenandoahs and Blue Ridge keep the air in northwest Virginia clean as glass in the spring, and when the sun sets, it’s a fierce disk, bright as an orange spotlight. Newscasters report on “sun delays” from the glare at various places on the highway.
    This radiant light, behind Tate, lit every detail in the trees and buildings and oncoming cars as he sped down I-66 at eighty miles an hour.
    He skidded north on the parkway, then east on Route 50, pulled into the county police station houseand climbed out of the car. He practically ran into Dimitri Konstantinatis as he too happened to arrive, carrying two large Kentucky Fried Chicken bags.
    “Oh-oh,” the detective muttered.
    “What oh-oh?”
    “That look on your face.”
    “I don’t have a look,” Tate protested.
    “You had it comin’ into my office when you were prosecutor and you needed that little bit of extra evidence—which’d mean I’d lose a weekend. And you’ve got it now. That oh-oh.”
    They walked inside the building and into Konnie’s small office.
    “You didn’t call me back,” Tate said.
    “Did so. Ten minutes ago. You musta left. What’s that?”
    Tate set the letter Megan had written him and the knucklebone he’d found in his house that morning, both in Baggies, on the cop’s desk.
    “Prints,” Tate said.
    “A prince among men—yes, I am. So, what’s going on?”
    “I want you to run the letter through Identification. Something’s up. Bett’s acting funny.”
    “You complained about that when you were married,” Konnie pointed out. “Crystals, mumbo jumbo, long distance calls to people’d been dead a hundred years.”
    “That was cute funny. This’s weird funny. Witnesses’ve been disappearing and not calling back and it’s just too much of a coincidence. And I think I know who’s behind it.”
    He also told Konnie about his run-in with Jack Sharpe.
    “Ooo, that was bright, Counselor, and you were packing your gun to boot?”
    Tate shrugged. “Was your idea for me to get one.”
    “But it wasn’t my idea to threaten an upstanding member of the Prince William mafia with it. Grant me that at least.”
    “I’ve been on his bad side since I routed his lawyers at the injunction hearing last week.”
    “What’s wrong with a nice theme park ’round here, Tate? You’d rather have what we got now in Manassas? A track fulla big wheels slugging it out in a mud pit. I’d vote for Disneyland, with them fun rides and cotton candy and