This was it. She had come far enough in this business without having to tear around on someone else's ghoulish errands in the dead of night.
It ended with this one. If Kaspar wanted more girls, then let him go out and get them.
The money was good—that much was certain—but every time she'd had to go out on one of these damn missions, she found herself digging in the Ranch Rag-narok survivalist rations for painkillers just to relieve the stress-induced migraines that invariably followed. She had taken almost a dozen ibuprofens since the afternoon just to get through this night's ordeal.
Enough was enough.
She'd get this one, but then Esther Clear-Seer was cashing out of the virgin-procurement business for good.
As for Kaspar—well, he would just have to worry about the next one on his own.
That decided, Esther mounted the wooden steps of the deck double-time and slid stealthily across the green plastic outdoor matting mat had been designed
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to look like grass by someone who had apparently never seen a square inch of genuine lawn.
As foretold, she found the back door key in the clay saucer of a potted plant beside the rear steps. She let herself into the large house.
By the harsh floodlight glow pouring in through every window, Esther made her way easily through the rear mud room, along the central hallway and to the main stairwell at the front of the house.
The stairs were carpeted, and she made no sound as she climbed carefully to the second floor.
Kaspar had told her that the fourth step from the top squeaked loudly, and so she avoided it, stepping gingerly from the fifth to the third.
When she reached the second story, Esther moved quietly left. She counted down two doors. With more calm than she felt, she removed a small plastic sandwich bag from her pants pocket. Inside lay an ether-soaked square of surgical cotton. She pulled the moist wad free, stuffing the bag back into her pocket.
She took one last deep breath, careful not to inhale any of the ether herself, and placed the palm of her free hand against the smooth painted surface of the heavy oaken door.
The door swung inward on silent hinges.
It took a moment for Esther's eyes to adjust to the room's interior.
The shades on the two large windows had been drawn down to the sills, but stabs of light from outside sneaked around the sides of the shades and into the room.
Stripes of light, like fire in the dead heart of night,
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burned across the ceiling, the round braided rug and the plain white walls.
A single beam crossed the peaceful, sleeping features of a young girl, no older than her late teens, stretched carelessly in an oversize T-shirt across the rumpled bedcovers.
Even in the nearly complete darkness, Esther could see that the girl was beautiful. She had that wholesome, middle-American quality that Hollywood could never quite get right no matter how artfully the makeup technicians tried.
There was also something strangely familiar about her. No big deal. Esther assumed she had seen the young girl in town.
On tiptoe, Esther crossed over to the bed.
She could hear the girl's breathing. A tiny, hissing intake of air, nearly inaudible.
Esther looked down at the youthful, innocent features and, without hesitation, slapped the wad of treated cotton over the girl's mouth and nose.
Green eyes snapped open; the head thrashed. Hands came up, first in shock, then in desperation, trying to ward off the terrifying attack.
Esther immediately dropped onto the girl, using her imposing weight to pin the younger woman to the bed. It worked.
In a second all resistance faded. The girl's arms dropped to her sides, but her fingers continued to move lazily, as if motioning for help to some unseen guardian.
Soon her eyes rolled back in her head, and the lids gently fluttered closed.
Testing, Esther pulled the cotton slowly away. She
couldn't chance the girl playing possum. She stood ready to slap the ether-soaked wad back into place. But a minute passed and the young girl didn't move. Satisfied, Esther stuffed the cotton back in the sandwich bag and shoved the package into the zippered pocket of her baggy khaki trousers.
She got up from the bed and looked down upon the once more peaceful figure.
Now came the hard part.
Esther grabbed the girl by the arms and pulled her as gently as possible to the room's thick braided carpet.
As she dragged the limp body out into the hallway, she vowed once more that this was the absolute last one she was going to get for Kaspar. From now on the damn Greek was on his own.
With great difficulty, and many rest periods, Esther used a modified fireman's carry to get the girl outside.
The lights were on timers, set to go on and off at preset hours, and some had already snapped off by the time Esther reached the driveway. Most, however, still burned brightly; silent accusers in the chilly spring night.
With her heart pounding, she dragged the unconscious girl as quickly as possible into the relative cover of the nearby strip of woods.
It took Esther ten minutes to reach her car. Ten minutes. An eternity during which she could have been discovered by a nosy neighbor, a police patrol or anyone out for a late-evening drive.
Fortunately the furor over the early abductions was keeping folks indoors, and she made it to her car without encountering a solitary soul.
Once she had heaved the girl's limp body into the trunk and slammed the lid tightly closed, she allowed herself a second of relief.
Esther was sweating profusely and panting like a woman in labor. She wiped the sweat from her brow with her now grimy, bare forearm and, with a final glance around the desolate access road, she climbed behind the steering wheel.
As she drove back down Sagebrush Street, past the innocent-looking house and out onto the main drag, Esther, as she had coming in from the opposite direction, again failed to notice the mailbox at the end of the large home's driveway. It sat hidden between a well-tended rhododendron shrub and a hedge of budding forsythia bushes.
Kaspar wouldn't have been surprised by her lack of perception. The Pythia had foreseen it.
The mailbox sat atop a sturdy oaken pole and was designed to look like a scale-model barn. There was a tiny door for the hayloft, windows along the side, and the main barn door rested on a well-oiled hinge to allow for daily insertion of mail. The mailbox even had a freshly painted, bright red exterior, and a rooster weather vane perched atop the roof, shifting in whatever direction the breeze happened to blow it.
There was, however, one small concession to the box's practical purpose. A street address and a name had been stencilled on the tiny barn's side to identify the occupants of the large home beyond.
The street address was irrelevant to Esther, since she had gotten the number from the well-lit front door of