“Yessir.”
“See, the only reason you’re being released is because I flipped a coin. You were heads, it landed on heads, you get to live.”
“Why are you doing this?”
She smelled his lemony breath in her face and his words came very even and very quiet.
“You think this is all about you you arrogant twat?”
“No, I—”
“I only took you and Elizabeth Lancing to get someone’s attention. Can you guess who it is?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should know. You’ve fucked him. Well, I’m just making an assumption there but—”
“I don’t know who you’re—”
“Andrew Thomas.”
“What do you want with him?”
“Seven years ago, Andrew shot me, left me to die in a snowy desert.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“No, don’t be. What I’ve got planned for him is going to make it all worthwhile. One last thing. Think hard before you answer. Do you believe you’re an evil person?”
“No, I’m—”
“Why not?”
Her captor’s breath warmed her mouth as she thought of all the charitable acts she’d performed in the last year—Wednesdays in the soup kitchen on 54th, the new writers she’d guided to publication, the angel tree at Ice Blink.
“I’m a decent person,” she said.
“And me? From what little you’ve seen. Am I evil?”
“No sir. I don’t believe you are. I don’t know you. I don’t know what sort of parents you come from. I don’t know if tragedies have happened to you. I’m sure things have caused you to behave…”
“Destructively.”
“Yes.”
“Is anyone evil, Karen?”
“People get damaged. They malfunction. But no, I don’t believe in evil.”
“I see. Thank you for talking so candidly with me.”
The blindfold was removed.
Karen stared through iron bars across a half mile of pines and marshland and dunes to the Atlantic. From this height and distance the ocean was mute though in the light of the yellow moon she could make out the ragged thread of surf extending for miles down the coastline.
Her captor was gone.
She managed to sit up and saw that she occupied a small observation deck encircled by iron railing. At her back a ladder climbed the last six feet of the tower up to the lantern room of the Bodie Island Lighthouse.
Its beam was blinding. It flashed on for 2.5 seconds. Off 2.5 seconds. On 2.5 seconds. Off 22.5 seconds. This rhythm repeated, dusk to dawn, and she could not behold the mighty lens as it magnified its 160,000 candlepower beacon out to sea.
Karen strained against the rope but the knots held. As she dragged herself around the platform, her eyes followed the ribbon of Highway 12 as it skirted beach and marsh and finally, three miles south, traversed the troubled waters of Oregon Inlet onto Pea Island. From there it would be sixty miles of desolate sound and seashore and tiny beach communities and then Cape Hatteras and Ocracoke and the Core Banks.
But she didn’t know place-names.