Richard’s mind was in turmoil. He wanted to find Cari to kill her for what she’d done to his wife. John wanted to find her to be reunited with his lover. IT wanted to find ITs master and share the fruits of ITs labor.

That was the hardest part for Richard to reconcile. He knew the consuming darkness from which IT was born. Yet to think that IT had a master. That IT had a superior. That IT was not the darkest thing in existence. It scared Richard to his very core. It shook his foundation and threatened to throw open the gates with which IT was bound in the back of his mind.

For whatever the reason, he knew he had to find Cari. He knew he had to kill her before IT realized what was happening and wrestled control away from him. The dark kinship that existed between IT and Cari was too frightening to think about and to see it in reality would drive anyone else mad.

Richard turned his mind towards the prison in Oregon and, though the power of his mind’s eye, began searching through the general population for Cari. He reached out and latched on to the Records with all his strength and let its power course through his mind, making him real enough in Oregon to walk through the halls and see what was going on, but not real enough that anyone there would notice. No, it wasn’t time for him to be there. Not just yet.

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Alan had more evidence than anyone had ever had in one of these cases. The forensics were astounding! They proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the victim was in fact Mary Drake. They were also able to match fingerprints found on the scene with the fingerprints taken from Rick’s wine glasses. The best he could put together, the man involved had been the primary butcher – the prints on the surgical instruments all belonged to him. The woman had helped hang the plastic sheeting and apparently had set up Mary’s restraints.

It was the most horrific crime scene the department had ever seen, so they called in help from the FBI field office, who flew in the agents that had investigated the other killings. They’d never found the actual crime scene before, but Alan quickly figured out why.

The building where they’d found Mary’s discarded corpse had been scheduled for demolition by implosion the week after her disappearance. From what he gathered from the contractors who were hired to perform the demolition, their team would never have had to enter that particular room. Their charges would have primarily been set around the perimeter of the building, depending on its weight to pulverize and destroy the interior.

After showing the foreman the location of the room where they’d found the body he was confident the scene was well planned. There would have been a large charge placed on the other side of the wall – Mary’s body and everything else in the room would likely have been vaporized in the explosion.

“That explains why they didn’t bother with gloves. The explosion would’ve covered everything up perfectly.”

He had started piecing together bits of information from the other disappearances. In each case, there was a building somewhere in town that had been imploded within the same week. Of the ten different cases they were aware of, four only had one implosion within a week. Of those, only two of the sites were still accessible. The Feds dispatched agents to sift through the rubble. It took a few days, but they managed to uncover fragments of human bone at each site.

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I woke up early this morning with a headache. My head felt like it was being held between a jackhammer and an anvil, and I had no idea why it should hurt so much. I swallowed a couple of aspirin before taking a shower and committed myself to actually getting up. Despite the pain behind my eyes, I was going to see Jackie today and the forced early start would give me an advantage.

I was ready to hit the road at just after seven o’clock in the morning. I had packed everything that I thought I would need for the weekend and changed into my gym clothes. My girlfriend, Jackie, and I were planning to head straight to the rock gym when I got to town for an early workout. I did not want to waste any of the time the two of us had together this weekend; being dressed for the gym when I got there would save the unnecessary minutes it would take to change in her apartment. That, and I wanted to use those extra minutes to make her a surprise breakfast when she woke up.

Jackie lives about a hundred and fifty miles north of me. She works at the local hospital and lives in one of the newer apartment complexes nearby. It is convenient for us because the athletic center with the rock gym completely takes up the first floor of the complex. It is one of those new space-saving architectural concepts you read about sometimes in the newspaper. I really think that should have made the rent for Jackie’s apartment more expensive, but she had negotiated a student discount with the manager. She was crafty like that.

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