Page 74 of No Quarter

Without waiting for a response, Valerie turned and started walking away from the grave. She shone her flashlight into the dark corners of the graveyard, looking for any sign of Saldana. But there was nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing.

She moved in a circle between some graves and switched off her flashlight.

Above, broken shards of moonlight barely illuminated the gravestones.

She waited, her gun in hand, crouched behind a nearby headstone. The poor doctor’s gray outline looming over Saldana’s grandmother’s grave.

There was a lull on the wind, and in that, she heard movement. The dullthudsof footsteps.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” a voice said to Doctor Whitmore from the shadows.

Valerie couldn’t see where it was coming from. She had to wait until she knew where he was so she could try to arrest the killer.

“Logan?” Doctor Whitmore said to the night.

“Yes, Doctor, it’s me.”

Valerie listened intently, trying to pinpoint where the voice was coming from, but the wind swirled, making it almost impossible.

“Why are you here, Doctor?” the man’s voice asked.

Valerie watched as Doctor Whitmore changed his body language. He was clearly trying to move away from anxiety to an open, welcoming stance to set Logan Saldana at ease.

“I’m here to help you, Logan,” the doctor said.

“Help?” Saldana said from the darkness. “I just want to be safe, Doctor.”

“And being here with your grandmother makes you safe?” the Doctor asked.

“Yes ...”

“Why did you attack me at the retreat?”

“You’re one of them,” Saldana said.

“Them?”

“Yes. You’re with the demons who want me dead. Gillian Pugh told me about them. And once she did, I saw them too. The irony is, she had been turned into one of them in the end. The evil that makes a person a demon ... It’s contagious. It growsfrom one person to the next. And you’re one too. I have to stop it.”

Valerie knew now that Logan Saldana was living in a fractured frame of mind. He was killing patients because he saw the same demonic creatures that Gillian Pugh had. And he believed he had to wipe them out like a contagious disease.

Valerie hypothesized there and then that Agatha, Gillian, and Melanie were all seen by Saldana as carriers of the demonic disease. He was trying to stop it from spreading.

But Valerie couldn’t stophimuntil she knew where he was hiding.

As he spoke with Doctor Whitmore, she decided to move. Crouching down, she moved from behind one headstone to another, and another, and another.

But still the voice sounded like it could have been coming from several places.

“Logan, you can’t run forever,” Doctor Whitmore said. “Surely, deep down, you know all this talk of demons is the product of your mental illness returning?”

“No!” Logan Saldana’s voice echoed through the cemetery with anger.

That shout did something. As if her brain was reinterpreting the sounds, Valerie now sensed that the voice had come from up ahead and to the right.

“Please, Logan, I want to help you.”

“I think you came here to die tonight, Doctor,” Logan Saldana said. “To join all these people, six feet under.”

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