John Connolly - The Killing Kind

The Killing Kind by John Connolly

Also by John Connolly

EVERY DEAD THING

DARK HOLLOW

THE KILLING KIND

John Connolly

The right of John Connolly to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form orby any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or coverother than that inwhich it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purelycoincidental.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Connolly, John, 1968.

The Killing Kind

I. Suspense fiction

I.Title

ISBN 10: 0340771208 / ISBN 13: 9780340771204

Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh Printed and bound in Great Britain byClays Ltd, St. Ives

pic Hodder and Stoughton

A division of Hodder Headline 338 Euston Road London NWI 3BH

* * * * * *

For my Mother

* * * * * *

Part One.

And heavy is the tread Of the living; but the dead Returning lightly dance ...

Edward Thomas, "Roads'

PROLOGUE.

This is a honeycomb world. It hides a hollow heart.

The truth of nature, wrote the philosopher Democritus, lies in deep mines and caves. The stability of what is seen and feltbeneath our feet is an illusion, for this life is not as it seems. Below the surface, there are cracks and fissures and pockets ofstale, trapped air; stalagmites and helactites and unmapped dark rivers that flow ever downward. It is a place of caverns and stonewaterfalls, a labyrinth of crystal tumors and frozen columns where history becomes future, then becomes now.

For in total blackness, time has no meaning.

The present is imperfectly layered on the past; it does not conform flawlessly at every point. Things fall and die and theirdecay creates new layers, thickening the surface crust and adding another thin membrane to cover what lies beneath, new worldsresting on the remains of the old. Day upon day, year upon year, century upon century, layers are added and the imperfectionsmultiply. The past never truly dies. It is there, waiting, just below the surface of the now. We stumble into it occasionally, allof us, through remembrance and recall. We summon to mind former lovers, lost children, departed parents, the wonder of a single daywhen we captured, however briefly, the ineffable, fleeting beauty of the world. These are our memories. We hold them close and callthem ours, and we can find them when we need them.

But sometimes that choice is made for us: a piece of the present simply falls away, and the past is exposed like old bone.Afterward, nothing can ever be the same again, and we are forced to reassess the form of what we believed to be true in the lightof new revelations about its substance. The truth is revealed by a misstep and the fleeting sense that something beneath our feetrings false. The past bubbles out like molten lava, and lives turn to ash in its path.

This is a honeycomb world. Our actions echo through its depths.

Down here, dark life exists: microbes and bacteria that draw their energy from chemicals and natural radioactivity, older thanthe first plant cells that brought color to the world above. Every deep pool is alive with them, every mine shaft, every ice core.They live and die unseen.

But there are other organisms, other beings: creatures that know only hunger, entities that exist purely to hunt and kill. Theymove ceaselessly through the hidden cavities, their jaws snapping at the endless night. They come to the surface only when they areforced to do so, and all living things flee from their path.

They came for Alison Beck.

Dr. Beck was sixty and had been performing abortions since 1974, in the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade. As a young woman shehad become involved in Planned Parenthood following the rubella epidemic of the early 1960s, when thousands of American womendelivered babies with serious birth defects. She had progressed to outspoken membership of NOW and the National Association for theRepeal of Abortion Laws before the changes for which they fought enabled her to establish her own clinic in Minneapolis. Sincethen, she had defied Joseph Scheidler's Pro-Life Action Network, his sidewalk counselors and bullhorn mafia, and had stoodhead-to-head with Randall Terry when Operation Rescue tried to blockade her clinic in 1989. She had fought against the Hydeamendment of '76, which cut off Medicaid funding for abortions, and had cried when the anti abortionist C. Everett Koop became U.S.surgeon general. On three separate occasions butyric acid had been injected into the clinic walls by antiabortion activists,forcing it to close its doors for days until the fumes had dispersed. The tires on her car had been slashed more times than shecould count, and only the toughened glass on the clinic window had prevented an incendiary device housed in a fire extinguisherfrom burning the building to the ground.

But in recent years the strain of her profession had begun to tell, and she now looked much older than her years. In almostthree decades, she had enjoyed the company of only a handful of men. David had been the first, and she had married him and lovedhim, but David was gone now.

She had held him as he died, and she still kept the shirt he had worn on that day, the bloodstains like the shadows of darkclouds floating across its once pristine whiteness. The men who followed offered many excuses for departing, but in the end, allthe excuses could be distilled down to one simple essence: fear. Alison Beck was a marked woman. She lived each day in theknowledge that there were those who would rather see her dead than have her continue her work, and few men were willing to standbeside such a woman.

She knew the statistics off by heart. There had been twenty-seven cases of extreme violence against American abortion clinics inthe previous year, and two doctors had died. Seven abortion doctors and assistants had been killed in the preceding five years, andmany others injured in bombings and shootings. She knew all of this because she had spent over twenty years documenting theincidences of violence, tracing common factors, establishing connections. It was the only way that she could cope with the loss ofDavid, the only means she had of making sure that some small good might arise from the ashes of his death. Her research had beenused to support the abortion providers' successful invocation of the RICO antiracketeering laws in their fight against theiropponents, alleging a nationwide conspiracy to close down clinics. It had been a hard-won victory.

But slowly, another, more indistinct pattern had begun to emerge: names recurring and echoing down the canyons of the years,figures half glimpsed in the shadows of violent acts. The convergences were visible in barely half a dozen cases, but they werethere. She was certain of it, and the others seemed to agree. Together, they were drawing closer and closer to the truth.

But that brought with it its own dangers.

Alison Beck had an alarm system in her home, linked directly to a private security firm, and two armed guards were always onduty at the clinic. In her bedroom closet was an American Body Armor bullet-proof vest, which she wore while traveling to and fromthe clinic despite the discomfort involved. Its twin hung on a steel rail in her consulting room. She drove a red Porsche Boxster,her only true indulgence. She collected speeding tickets the way other people collected stamps.

Alison was a conservative dresser. She typically wore a jacket, unbuttoned, which hung to midthigh level. Beneath the jacket shewore pants with either a brown or a black belt, depending on the color of her ensemble. Attached to the belt was an Alessi holstercontaining a Kahr K4O Covert pistol. The Kahr held a five-round magazine of .40 caliber ammunition. Beck had tried using six roundsfor a time but found that the extended magazine sometimes caught in the folds of her shirt. The Kahr had an abbreviated grip thatsuited her small hands, for Alison Beck was just a shade over five feet tall and slightly built. On a range, with the Kahr's smoothdouble-action trigger pull, she could put the five rounds through the heart of a target thirty feet away in under ten seconds.