by Dean Koontz
“There’s probably something in Gordon’s study upstairs. I’ll go look. More coffee?”
“No, thanks. I had a lot with breakfast. What I do need is a bathroom.”
“There’s a half bath off the hall. Come along, I’ll show you.”
A couple of minutes later, in the spiderless, spotless powder bath, as Jane washed her hands at the sink, she met her reflection eye-to-eye. Not for the first time, she wondered if by setting out on this crusade two months earlier, she’d done the very worst of wrong things.
She had so much to lose, and not just her life. Least of all her life.
From the roof, by way of the bathroom-vent duct, the growing wind spoke down through the second floor to the first, like some troll that had moved from under his traditional bridge to a home with a view.
As she stepped out of the bathroom, a gunshot barked upstairs.
8
* * *
JANE DREW HER PISTOL, held it in both hands, muzzle pointed to her right, at the floor. It was not her FBI gun. She wasn’t allowed that weapon while on leave. She liked this one as much, maybe even better: a Heckler & Koch Combat Competition Mark 23, chambered for .45 ACP.
The noise had been a gunshot. Unmistakable. No scream before it, no scream after it, no footsteps.
She knew she hadn’t been followed from Arizona. If somebody had already been waiting here for her, he would have taken her when she was sitting at the kitchen table, widow to widow, her defenses down.
Maybe the guy was holding Gwyn captive and fired one round to draw Jane to the second floor. That didn’t make sense, but then most bad guys were emotion-driven, short on logic and reason.
She thought of another possibility, but she didn’t want to go there yet.
If the house had back stairs, they would likely be in the kitchen. She hadn’t noticed them. There had been two closed doors. A pantry, of course. The other was most likely the door to the garage. Or to a laundry room. Okay, the front stairs were the only stairs.
She didn’t like the stairs. Nowhere to dodge left or right. No possibility of retreat, because she’d be turning her back on the shooter. Once she committed, she could go only up, each of the two narrow flights like a close-range shooting gallery.
At the landing between flights, she stayed low, slipped fast around the newel post. Nobody at the top. Heart knocking like a parade drum. Bite on the fear. She knew what to do. She’d done it before. One of her instructors had said it was ballet without tights and tutus, you just needed to know the moves, exactly where to make them, and at the end of the performance, they would throw flowers at your feet, metaphorically speaking.
The last flight. This was where a professional should try to take her. Aiming down, his gun would be just below eye level; aiming up, hers would be in her line of sight, giving him the surer shot.
Top of the stairs and still alive.
Stay crouched and close to the wall. Both hands on the pistol. Arms extended. Stop and listen. No one in the upstairs hall.
Now it was all about clearing doorways, which sucked nearly as much as the stairs. Crossing a threshold, she could be hosed, right here at the end of it.
Gwyn Lambert occupied an armchair in the master bedroom, head rolled to the left. Her right arm had fallen into her lap, the gun still loosely held. The bullet had entered her right temple, tunneled her brain, and broken out the left temple, spattering the carpet with chunks of bone and twists of hair and worse.
9
* * *
THE SCENE DIDN’T APPEAR to have been staged. It was a true suicide. No scream before the gunshot, no footsteps or other sound afterward. Only the motion and the act, and terror or relief or regret in the instant between them. A nightstand drawer hung open, where the home-defense weapon might have been kept.
Although Jane hadn’t known Gwyneth long enough to be wrenched with grief, dull but awful sadness and sharp anger afflicted her, the latter because this was no ordinary suicide, no consequence of anguish or depression. For a woman only two weeks from the loss of her husband, Gwyn had been coping as well as anyone might. Baking muffins, soon to take them to family and friends who had supported her in the current darkness, looking to the future. Besides, of the little she had learned about this military wife, one thing she knew beyond doubt was that Gwyn would not have tormented another grieving widow by putting her in the position of having to be the first to discover yet another suicide.
A sudden beeping caused her to pivot from the dead woman and bring her pistol up. No one. The sound issued from an adjacent room. She approached the open doorway with caution until she recognized the tone as the AT&T signal alerting its customer that a phone had been left off the hook.
She crossed the threshold into Gordon Lambert’s study. On the walls were photographs of him as a younger man in combat gear with brother Marines in exotic places. Gordon in dress blues, tall and handsome, pictured posing with a president. A framed flag that had flown in battle.
Trailing on its coiled cord, the handset of the desk phone lay on the carpet. From a jacket pocket, she fished a cotton handkerchief that she carried for no purpose other than fingerprint avoidance, and she cradled the handset, wondering with whom Gwyn might have spoken before making her mortal decision. She lifted the phone and entered the automatic call-back code but got nothing.
Gwyn had ostensibly come upstairs to find a brochure or program from the What If Conference. Jane went to the desk, opened a drawer.
The phone rang. She was not surprised. There was no caller ID.
She picked up the receiver but said nothing. Her discretion was matched by the person on the farther end of the line. It was neither a phantom call initiated by a system glitch nor a wrong number. She heard music in the background, an old song by America, recorded before she’d been born: “A Horse with No Name.”
She hung up first. Considering the large properties in this neighborhood, it was unlikely the single shot had been heard. But she had urgent work to do.
10
* * *
MAYBE SOMEONE WAS COMING. Or maybe they had no agent in this vicinity, but prudence required that she expect hostile visitors. She had no time to search the general’s office.
On the ground floor, she wiped everything that she remembered touching. She quickly washed and put away the coffee mugs and spoons. Although no one could hear, she performed each task quietly. Week by week she had grown quieter in all things, as though she was preparing soon to be a ghost and silent forever.
In the half bath, the mirror captured her attention briefly. Such was the fantastic nature of the mission she had set out upon, so strange were the discoveries she was making, sometimes it seemed reasonable to think that the impossible might be possible—in this instance that, when she left the room, her image would remain in the mirror to incriminate her.
When she departed the house by the front door, she felt not unlike the angel of Death. She came, a woman died, she left. Some said that one day there would be no death. If they were right, Death, too, could die.
As she walked past the neighbors’ houses, she saw no one at a window, no one on a porch, no child at play in risk of the pending storm. The only sounds were those that the inconstant wind stirred from the materials of the day, as though humanity had been expunged, its constructions intact but now to be erased by eons of weather.
She drove to the end of the block, where she could either turn left or continue straight. She motored ahead half a mile, made a right turn and soon a left, with no immediate destination in mind, glancing repeatedly at her rearview mirror. Confident that she had no tail hanging at a distance, she found the interstate and drove west toward San Diego.
The day might come when the earth fell under such precise and continuous observation that vehicles without transponders were no less trackable than those lawfully equipped. In such a world, she would never have made it to the Lambert house in the first place.
11
* * *
ONE
NIGHT the previous November, six days before Nick’s death, while she’d been waiting in bed for him as he brushed his teeth, she had seen a story on the TV news that intrigued her and that lately had circled back again and again in her memory, as though it must be pertinent to what she was currently enduring.
The piece had been about scientists who were developing brain implants using light-sensitive proteins and fiber-optics. They said that we had a ceaseless conversation with our brains: our senses “writing in” information, our brains interpreting it and “reading out” instructions. Experiments were being done in which cerebral implants could take the brain’s instructions and transmit them past points of communication breakdown, such as stroke and spinal-nerve damage, making it possible for a paraplegic to operate prosthetic limbs just by thinking about moving them. People with certain motor neuron diseases that locked them in their bodies, even denying them the ability to speak, might be able, with such implants, to think their side of a conversation and hear it spoken. Their thoughts, translated into luminous pulses by light-sensitive proteins, would be processed by software and rendered into speech by a computer.
At the time, Jane had marveled that everything was changing so rapidly, that ahead seemed to be fast coming a world of miracles and wonders.
Now she was trapped in a world of violence and horror to which that old news story seemed to have no relevance. And yet she kept recalling it, as if it mattered profoundly.
Maybe she remembered the story not because of anything in it, but because of what Nick had said to her shortly thereafter. He came to bed exhausted from a hard day, as she also was exhausted. Neither had the energy to make love, but they enjoyed lying side by side, holding hands and talking. Just before she fell asleep, he raised her hand to his lips, kissed it, and said, “You rock me.” His words followed her into the most lovely dreams, where they were spoken in a variety of whimsical situations, always with great tenderness.
12
* * *
IN BENNY’S AT THE BEACH, the attack on Philadelphia commuters was as commanding of the clientele as would have been the Stanley Cup. Twenty-four/seven, there was enough TV sports coverage, live and replay, to satiate any fan, but on this lunch hour, the two bar screens were tuned to cable news, the bottom crawl devoted to death counts and statements of outrage from politicians rather than to past victories and player stats.
Benny’s was not in fact at the beach, but two blocks from the sound of lapping surf, and if it had been a San Diego favorite for fifty years, as its sign claimed, it most likely was no longer owned by someone named Benny, if it had ever been. The customers appeared to be middle-class, a shrinking demographic during the past decade. At this hour, none had drunk enough to bluster in the face of horror, though Jane found almost tangible the anger, fear, and need for community that had brought them to their barstools and chairs.
She ate in the last booth, which was narrower than the others, made for two instead of four. The laminated-granite tabletop had surely been Formica when Benny ruled the room. The tables and the designer fabric on the booth-bench cushions and the barstools, along with a marble-tile floor in a harlequin pattern, laid a claim to prosperity and status never quite fulfilled but so American that Jane found it surprisingly poignant.
Among the customers, a columnist for the local newspaper was having lunch and a beer or two, though he could not restrain his reportorial instincts. She watched him moving through the long room with notebook, pen, and bottle of Heineken, passing out his card and engaging patrons in discussions of the latest act of terrorism.
He was about forty, with good hair that looked as if he spent more on styling than an accountant would have advised. He was proud of his tush, wearing his jeans the slightest bit too tight. He liked his manly forearms as well, and wore his shirtsleeves rolled up on a day not warm enough for that.
He came to her booth as both a reporter and a man, with the calculation in his eye that some women found offensive but that she did not. He wasn’t boorish, and he had no way of knowing she’d taken herself out of the game. She was well aware that men noticed her in any circumstance, and she knew that if she refused a three-minute interview, whether politely or dismissively, she would linger longer and more vividly in his memory.
His name was Kelsey, and she said her name was Mary, and at her invitation he sat across the table from her. “Terrible day.”
“One of them.”
“Do you have friends or family in Philadelphia?”
“Just fellow citizens.”
“Yeah. It still hurts, doesn’t it?”
“It should.”
“What do you think we ought to do about it?”
“You and I?”
“All of us.”
“Realize it’s part of a bigger problem.”
“Which is?”
“Ideas shouldn’t matter more than people.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s interesting. Explain a little.”
By way of explanation, she reversed the order of two words and eliminated a contraction: “People should matter more than ideas.”
He waited for her to continue. When instead she took the next-to-last bite of her burger, he said, “My column’s not political, it’s human-interest stuff. But if you had to put a political label on yourself, what would it say?”
“Disgusted.”
He laughed, making notes. “Might be the biggest political party of all. Where are you from?”
“Miami,” she lied. “You know a story you should look into?”
“What’s that?”
“The increasing rate of suicide.”
“Is it increasing?”
“Check it out.”
He watched her even as he tipped back his bottle of beer and drank. “Why would a girl like you have such a morbid interest?”
“I’m a sociologist,” she lied. “You ever suspect that shit like this Philadelphia attack gets used?”
Although he wrote a column of human-interest stories, he had police-reporter eyes that didn’t just look at things, that flensed them layer by layer. “Gets used how?”
She gestured toward the nearer TV. “That story they give like a minute to every hour, between bouts of Philly coverage.”
A former governor of Georgia had shot and killed his wife, a wealthy contributor to his campaigns, and himself.
“You mean the Atlanta atrocity,” Kelsey said, which was the tabloid title already slapped on that case. “Hideous thing.”
“If it happened yesterday, it would be the big story. But it happens same day as Philly, and no one remembers by next week.”
He didn’t seem to get her implication. “They say the wife and the deep-pockets donor were having an affair.”
Having finished her burger, she wiped her hands on a napkin. “There you have one of the greatest mysteries of our time.”
“Which is?”
“Who the hell ‘they’ are that we’re always hearing about.”
He smiled, indicated her empty bottle. “Buy you a Dos Equis?”
“Thanks, but one’s my limit. You know the murder rate has also been going up?”
“We’ve done stories on that, sure.”
The waitress appeared, and Jane asked for the check. Leaning across the table toward Kelsey, she whispered, “It’s a good bet what numbers will be up next.”
Leaning toward her, taking her intimacy for some kind of invitation, he said, “Tell me.”
“Murder-suicides. The governor might be an indication of things to come. The next phase, so to speak.”
“The next phase of what?”
Having been sincere to this point, she played it deadpan when she slipped into fantasy that would send him on his way. “Of what started at Roswell.”
He was too practiced a journalist to let his smile freeze or his eyes glaze over. “Roswell, New Mexico?”
“That’s where they first landed. You’re not a UFO denier?”
“Not at all,” he
said. “The universe is infinite. No thinking person would believe we’re alone in it.”
But by the time the waitress brought the check, Kelsey had declined to take the bait when she asked if he believed in alien abductions, had thanked Jane—or Mary from Miami—for sharing, and moved on to another interview.
After paying cash and wending through the lunchtime crowd, she glanced back, perhaps intuitively, and saw the columnist staring at her. As he looked away, he brought a cell phone to his ear.
He was just a guy who had come on to her, a guy whom she had turned away rather cleverly, just a guy who still liked what he saw. The phone was a coincidence; it had nothing to do with her.
Nevertheless, once outside, she moved fast.
13
* * *
WHITE KITES against the looming storm’s volcanic-dark plumes, gulls swooped in from the sea and scalloped down the sky to safe roosts in the eaves of the buildings and among the fronds of phoenix palms.
Jane could have parked in the restaurant lot. She had not. She had left the Ford at a meter around the corner and two blocks away.
She approached the vehicle from the farther side of the street, seeming to have no interest in it, all the while surveying the scene to determine if the Ford might be staked out.
Not for the first time, she told herself that this was how fully formed paranoids jittered their way through life, but she still believed in her sanity.
Although she saw no surveillance, she walked a block past the Escape before crossing the street and approaching it from behind.
The reporter had thanked her for sharing, and in fact she had always been a sharing person in the sense that she had been open with others regarding her feelings, hopes, intentions, and beliefs. Her current isolation, therefore, proved that much harder to bear. Because friendship required sharing, she had to forgo seeing old friends and making new ones for the duration. Sharing might be the death of her or of those with whom she shared.