by Dean Koontz
Most wives so much younger than their mates would resent him bringing his work with him to a getaway house. Inga encourages him to mix work and play.
In the chair beside hers, he sits with his laptop, entering commands that radiate from the microwave transmitter on the roof.
As dusk gives way to deeper night, the coyotes begin to arrive, slinking out of the tall grass and weeds beyond the mown lawn, eyes luminous with reflections of the low yard lights. They come within five feet of the terrace and sit at attention, one after the other, until a dozen are lined up side by side, as wild as any coyotes in appearance but at the moment as docile as family dogs.
“Make them lie down,” Inga says.
Bertold’s fingers fly across the keyboard.
Starting with the rangy specimen farthest to the left, the coyotes lie on the lawn, forepaws serving as chin rests, easing to the grass as though they are a series of slow-falling dominoes.
“Does anyone in the world have a more impressive security system?” Inga wonders as she considers these cousins of wolves.
The twelve predators watch the good doctor and his wife drink cabernet sauvignon and watch them eat roast-beef sandwiches and watch as well when Bertold and Inga share a single lounge chair for intimacies that both husband and wife find more thrilling because of the presence of an attentive audience.
1
* * *
MOSHE STEINITZ ASKED HER to stay for dinner and said he was lonely. She accepted—and discovered that he had an ulterior motive.
Earlier in the day, he’d made a crab quiche, which now he heated. Jane mixed a salad. Moshe set the table, sliced a loaf of French bread, opened an icy bottle of pinot grigio.
She found it endearing that he put on a sport coat before sitting down to dinner at the kitchen table.
They talked about many things but didn’t speak of suicide or of her investigation until, as they were enjoying a simple dessert of fresh strawberries and sliced kiwi, he asked how her son was coping.
She had come to him for his analysis and opinion of the notes, but she hadn’t thought through what responsibility she would have to him once he had obliged her. She saw now that she owed him the truth to ensure that he would not endanger himself.
“This investigation of these suicides—it’s not Bureau work.”
“I didn’t think it was.”
“I’m on leave. And the last two months I’ve been off the grid to an extent that most end-times preppers only think they are.”
She told him about Mr. Droog, who had sent Travis to her with messages about natsat and milk bars and a game called rape.
Pulsing candlelight reflected in his eyeglasses, obscuring his eyes, but she read the shock in his face, in the way he put down a berry that he was about to eat, as if he had no more appetite.
“My boy is safe. And I don’t want to put you in danger, Moshe. Tell no one I’ve been here. I’m being hunted, and if they think I’ve shared too much with you, I don’t know what they might do.”
His solution was reasonable, but not feasible in this time of unreason: “Suicides are public record. If you get a few journalists interested in the story, and they break it open, then you’re safe.”
“If I knew a few journalists I trusted.”
“There must be one.”
“Maybe at one time. Young guys making their bones. But it so happens they’re among the suicides that didn’t leave a note behind.”
He removed his glasses, as though he realized that she was straining to see his eyes through the candle glare.
“Don’t use your computer to research any of this,” she said. “Don’t draw attention to yourself. They cast a wide net, and it seems to be sized even to the littlest of fish.”
“They with an uppercase T. Do you have some idea who They are?”
“They. Them. A nameless confederacy. I don’t know where the center lies, though it might involve private-sector biotech.”
“And government?”
“I think inevitably.”
“The FBI?”
“Not the Bureau as a whole. But some people in it? Maybe. I can’t take a chance turning there for help.”
He sipped his wine, not so much as if he savored it, but as if he were delaying his response in order to think.
At last he said, “You’re painting a picture of such isolation, I don’t know how you can come out a winner.”
“I don’t, either. But I will. I have to.”
“Have you considered…maybe you’re too invested in this to be the best one to get at the truth?”
“Because of Nick, you mean. Yes, it’s personal. But it’s not vengeance, Moshe. It’s about justice. And keeping Travis safe.”
“There’s more than Nick that drives you on this. And more than your boy. Is there not?”
She could see his eyes now. His gaze was direct and clear, and she was pretty sure she could read it. “You mean my mother.”
“You’ve spoken of her in passing a few times over the years that I’ve known you, but you never mention her suicide.”
She recited the reputed facts without emotion. “She took an overdose of sleeping pills. To seal the deal, she sat in a hot bath and slashed her wrists. I was nine. I’m the one who found her.”
“The first time I worked on a case with you,” Moshe said, “I was impressed with your intelligence and dedication. I wanted to know more about you, and so I did background.”
“Well, it is what it is. But this current situation doesn’t have anything to do with my mother.”
He offered her more wine. She shook her head.
He pushed aside the candles, so they would not reflect in the lenses, and he put on his glasses again, as if he wanted to see her clearly, to be aware of every nuance of expression.
“When Nick died, you were determined he couldn’t have killed himself. You became obsessed with proving he didn’t, which led you to the discovery of this increase in suicide rates, which then became your greater obsession.”
“It’s all real. And there are people trying to silence me any way they can. I’m not delusional, Moshe.”
“I don’t think you are. I believe everything you’ve said. My only point is that a person driven by obsession may not have the patience, the prudence, or even the fullest clarity of mind to investigate such a Byzantine conspiracy with any success.”
“I know. I really do. But there’s only me to do it.”
“I might worry less if you were aware of the fullness of your obsession, the extent of its roots. Then you might be sensitive to how it could make you reckless, injudicious.”
“Moshe, I can only assure you that I’m still the investigator I’ve always been. There’s nothing more I can say.”
For what seemed like a minute, he regarded her with his onion-peeling stare, which she met forthrightly. “Do you remember when you and Nathan and a few others came to dinner three years ago, the celebration after your capture of J. J. Crutchfield?”
“Of course I remember. It was a happy evening.”
“You played the piano at my request. Played remarkably well.”
She said nothing.
“Other guests had questions about your father, but you avoided the subject with practiced grace.”
“When you have a famous parent, you learn early not to open the family to the world.”
“Family secrets to protect?”
“Just a need for privacy.”
“You praised your mother for encouraging your musicianship.”
“She was a fine pianist herself.”
“You rarely speak of her, but always with the highest regard. You speak even more rarely of your father—with cold indifference.”
“We were never close. He was so often away on concert tours.”
“Your coldness signifies more than dislike.”
“Tell me, doctor, what else does it signify?” she asked, and was dismayed to hear the dismissive note in her voice.
“Deep
distrust,” he said.
She broke their staring match, but then resumed it, lest he read some arcane meaning in her disengagement. “All children have issues with their parents.”
“Dear, you must excuse me if I push some buttons.”
“Isn’t that what you’ve already been doing?”
“I can’t play the piano as well as you, but I’m a reasonably competent button-pusher.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands on the table. “It isn’t sexual.”
She frowned. “What isn’t?”
“The problem with your father. You weren’t molested. You have none of the issues of a sexually abused child.”
“He’s a creep, but he likes younger women, not children.”
“He married a year after your mother’s suicide.”
“What could I do about it?”
“You wanted to do something.”
“He dissed my mother’s memory by marrying Eugenia.”
“That isn’t the issue, is it?”
“It’s an issue with me.”
“But not the issue.”
“He was banging Eugenia’s brains out when my mother was alive.”
“Is that crude expression meant to stop me from going further?”
She shrugged. “Go where you want.”
“Why do you believe your father killed your mother?”
Earlier, she had pushed aside her half-full wineglass. Stunned by his insight, she picked up the glass and drank.
Moshe sampled a little of his wine, as if this drink they took together was some kind of communion that bonded them.
“There’s always an autopsy after a suicide,” he said.
“There’s supposed to be, but there isn’t always. Depending on the jurisdiction and the circumstances, the coroner has discretion.”
He said, “So did you have evidence of any kind?”
“He’d flown out that morning. He was supposed to be in a hotel four hundred miles away. He had a concert in another city the next night. Yet when I woke, I heard them arguing.”
“What did you do when you heard them?”
“Put the pillow over my head. And tried to go back to sleep.”
“Did you go back to sleep?”
“For a while.” She set her wineglass aside. “He was there that night. I heard him. I have another reason to be sure he was there. But no hard proof. And he’s a master of intimidation, manipulation.”
“You were afraid of him.”
“Yes.”
“You’re still angry at yourself for having been afraid of him.”
She said nothing.
“Do you blame yourself?”
“For what?”
“When you heard them arguing, you went back to sleep. If you’d gone to them instead, do you think your mother would now be alive?”
“No. I think…I’d be dead, too. He would have staged it to look like she killed me before killing herself.”
Moshe’s silences were as exquisitely placed and maintained as those in Mozart’s K. 488, which had been playing earlier.
Jane said, “What I blame myself for is never speaking up later. For letting him intimidate me.”
“You were only a child.”
“Doesn’t matter. In the crunch, you give it or you don’t.”
Moshe corked the wine bottle, which was almost half full.
He said, “This obsession doesn’t begin with Nick’s death. It has roots that go back nineteen years.”
He ate the strawberry that earlier he had set aside.
He said, “You want vengeance for both Nick and your mother—but that isn’t the primary thing you want.”
She waited as he took off his glasses, plucked the display handkerchief from his breast pocket, and polished the lenses.
He said, “You want to break this conspiracy, imprison whoever’s behind it, kill them if necessary, resolve the injustice, balance the scales, so there will be no danger that your boy might forever have the feeling that there’s something he should have done or still could do to right the wrong. You can’t spare him from grief, but you want to spare him from the guilt that has eaten at your heart all these years. Could that be the case?”
“It is the case. But there’s so much more. I want for him a world where people mean more than ideas. No swastikas, no hammer-and-sickles, no bowing down to inhumane theories that result in tens of millions dead. I see the look you’re giving me, Moshe. I know I can’t change the world. I’m not suffering from Joan of Arc syndrome. Those things are what I want for him, but if all I can do is spare him from the guilt, I’ll have done something worthwhile.”
He put on his glasses. “If you realize precisely what powerful emotions drive your obsession, maybe you’ll recognize when emotion begins to trump reason. If you can subdue the temerity that emotion fosters, rein in the recklessness, you might have a chance.”
“The slimmest chance is all I need to keep going.”
“Good. If your assessment of the situation is correct, the slimmest chance is probably all you have.”
2
* * *
IN THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY, in her motel room, Jane had neither the energy nor the clarity of mind to review the material that she had gotten from Jimmy Radburn. She put the heavy trash bag full of documents in the closet.
She didn’t need vodka or music to sleep. She was in bed by nine o’clock and soon in dreams.
Near midnight, gunshots woke her. A racing car engine. In fact, two cars. Tires squealed. A man shouted, his words unclear. Three more shots in quick succession, perhaps return fire.
She drew the pistol from under the pillow where no head had rested. She sat up in the dark but didn’t get out of bed.
A metallic shriek suggested one vehicle sideswiped another. Maybe one of the two in motion had skinned a parked car.
Then they were away. The Doppler shift of engine roar, fading to lower frequencies, receded in two directions, as if the drivers, following the exchange of gunfire, had fled from each other.
She remained sitting up for a while, but nothing more happened. No police siren in the night. No one had reported the gunfire.
She put the pistol under the pillow once more. After all, this wasn’t the murder capital of the country. That honor belonged to Chicago, although other jurisdictions strove to be competitive.
As she was lying down again, she thought the incident had been only white noise, the continually simmering violence and chaos that was the backdrop of contemporary life. People became so accustomed to the white noise that episodes of violence with greater meaning, such as the rapid rise in suicides, escaped their notice.
She didn’t lie awake. She thought of Travis safe with Gavin and Jessica, the German shepherds taking turns patrolling the house at night, and she slept.
3
* * *
JANE WOKE AT 4:04, showered, dressed, and sat at the small round dining table to pore through the medical-examiner reports on suicides in thirty-two jurisdictions. Four were from large cities, twelve from medium-size cities, eight from suburbs, and eight from areas of lower population, where one county coroner served all the surrounding little towns.
Each report came with photographs of the corpse in situ. She tried not to look at those. But the rebellious primitive that lived in the back of every human brain was drawn to what the forebrain deemed too dark for civilized consideration, and the eye sometimes turned traitor.
Although technically the law required an autopsy in the event of suicide, most jurisdictions allowed the medical examiner or the coroner, whichever title applied, some leeway in cases where he or she determined there was no doubt the deceased had self-destructed. Death by cop, which was a form of suicide, would always be followed by an autopsy as well as by a media frenzy and possibly a trial. By contrast, in the case of someone with a history of depression, who made previous attempts at suicide, blood tests would be conducted to detect drugs, and the corpse would be subjected to a thorough visua
l inspection for signs of violence unrelated to the cause of death; but in the absence of any indications of homicide, dissection and examination of internal organs wouldn’t routinely occur.
When Jane sampled files from two large cities—New York and Los Angeles—she made three discoveries of interest.
First, the number of cases in which the suicide appeared to have been a well-adjusted member of the community, mentally stable, physically sound, with an intact family, prospering in his work, was higher even than the national statistics indicated. The phenomenon was so striking, medical examiners and deputy coroners who conducted basic or extensive autopsies often remarked on it in their reports.
Second, in New York, the state attorney general in concert with the district attorney of New York City had approved new guidelines for medical examiners that not only allowed but encouraged a much higher percentage of suicide cases to be closed with only a visual examination of the body and the usual toxicology tests. They cited budgetary constraints and a lack of sufficient personnel. These new guidelines so disturbed some examiners that they made reference to them in their reports, in terms meant to insulate themselves from possible claims of dereliction in days to come.
Third, in California, some medical examiners were disturbed that the state attorney general had the previous year cited budget shortfalls and personnel shortages when issuing an advisory—not mere guidelines, as in New York—coupled with a warning of funding cuts to any city or county in which the coroner’s office continued at its discretion to conduct full autopsies in “cases not involving clear evidence of or reasonable suspicion of murder, second-degree murder, or manslaughter.” The reason given for curtailing autopsies in certain cases was the desire to focus in a more complete and timely manner on the rising number of homicides committed by drug-gang members and terrorists. Some coroners referenced the advisory in their reports or attached it complete, to protect themselves.
The growth in the number of government employees in recent years seemed to belie the claimed personnel shortages.