The Silent Corner

by Dean Koontz

  Among Overton’s collection of expensive luggage, she found a leather tote bag with a zippered closure. She put the Colt and the silencer in it. She added two boxes of ammo. And his smartphone.

  Overton had lied about the half million. The safe contained a hundred and twenty thousand. Twelve banded packets of ten thousand each. She put the money in the tote bag.

  She had noted earlier that the only security cameras in the house were in the ground-floor and upstairs hallways. Each was ceiling mounted behind a plastic bubble. Night-vision capability.

  She had thought the recorder might be in the safe. It was not. Nor was it anywhere in the master closet.

  After a fifteen-minute search of likely places, using Overton’s house keys, she opened a locked door in the garage, found a storage room, and located the recorder in a cabinet. From the machine, she ejected a disc that saved images for thirty days before recording over them. She put it in the tote with the money and the gun.

  Before she had entered the house the first time, earlier in the day, she had put on the black gloves with silver stitching. Never having taken them off, she could have left no fingerprints.

  She had not taken a drink from any glass, had not shed a drop of blood, leaving nothing that would give them an easy DNA match.

  Inevitably, she had lost a few hairs in the house. But CSI had to find them, which wasn’t as easy as it was portrayed on TV.

  She almost went back through the house to turn off the lights, so they would not burn all weekend and perhaps make someone curious, suspicious. She could not do it. She surprised herself that she could not do it. Dead men do not get up and walk again. She did not believe in ghosts. But she could not do it. Let the lights burn.

  She left by the back door and locked it with Overton’s keys. She dropped the keys in the tote bag and zippered the bag shut.

  Walking residential streets at night in Beverly Hills was viewed by the local police as an all-but-certain sign of criminal activity, especially if the suspect in question was carrying a bag larger than a clutch purse. She had to walk to the end of the block and around the corner, where she had left the Ford Escape. If she happened to come to the attention of the city’s finest, she was screwed, because she would not shoot a cop.

  As Jane stepped off Overton’s driveway and onto the public sidewalk, the moon watched blinkless, a milky and accusing eye.

  She reached the Ford without incident. She drove back to the San Fernando Valley, where she would spend a second night in her most recent motel room and move on in the morning.

  Tomorrow, she would start with Dr. Emily Jo Rossman, the L.A. forensic pathologist who examined the brain of Benedetta Ashcroft, the woman who had committed suicide in a Century City hotel. The autopsy report, provided by Robert Branwick, alias Jimmy Radburn, referenced photographs, but the photos were not in the file.

  Jane didn’t know where she would go after Dr. Rossman. Sooner than later, she had to make a move on Bertold Shenneck. But getting at him on his seventy-acre property in Napa Valley looked like a job for a Navy SEAL team, not for a lone woman.

  She had half an idea, a crazy and reckless idea, based on a wild guess. But she had come to a crisis point in the investigation. There was no way back, and she was at a brink. If Overton’s body was discovered on Monday, his associates in Far Horizons might assume that he’d earned his death by some bit of shady business unconnected to them, but they were more likely to raise their guard even higher than it already was. With a cliff ahead and no way back, crazy and reckless ideas had an appeal if they were the only ideas you had.

  20

  * * *

  NOW THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY. The monocular moon in the black cowl of the sky. Friday-night traffic, drivers jostling for every advantage. The attack in Philadelphia, not yet five days in the past, had been consigned to a memory hole as everybody hurried to one weekend pleasure or another before there might be no pleasures anymore.

  Jane stopped at Pizza & More to get takeout. Two submarine sandwiches and an order of pepper slaw.

  At the door to her motel room in Tarzana, she put down the tote bag with its incriminating treasures and the bag of takeout. She fished the key from a pocket of her sport coat and suddenly thought, He’s in there waiting for me.

  The he in this flash of fantasy was the hulk from Palisades Park, the same who had come blasting a shotgun into the kitchen at the Branwick house the previous night.

  He could not possibly have tracked her to this place. Her alarm had no origin in intuition or even in cruder instinct. The events of the evening had pulled her nerves as taut as bowstrings.

  She considered drawing her pistol, but she did not, could not. If she started doing firearm protocol because of an obviously bogus threat, there would be no end to the bogeymen springing from her imagination. The edge she needed would be worn away until she would one day mistake a real threat for just another phantom.

  She unlocked the door. Reached inside. Flipped the wall switch.

  No one waited for her in the bedroom.

  She picked up the tote bag and the takeout and went inside and pressed the door shut with her hip. She set down the tote bag and engaged the deadbolt.

  After putting the takeout on the small table, she went to the bathroom, pushed open the door, turned on the light. No one.

  She returned to the bedroom with a drinking glass and put it on the table, and then she slid open the closet door. The only things in there were suitcases and the trash bag full of autopsy reports.

  “Better have a peek under the bed,” she said sourly as she took off her gloves, but she didn’t allow herself to look.

  She went outside to the nearby vending-machine alcove to fill the ice bucket and get a couple of Cokes.

  When she returned to her room, she did not check the bathroom and closet again.

  Coke and vodka over ice. She took a drink. Added some Coke.

  She went into the bathroom and washed her hands and dried them and stared at herself in the mirror and thought she looked different in some fundamental way, though she couldn’t name the difference.

  In the bedroom, sitting at the table, for a while she held in her hand the half of the locket, the silver oval with the soapstone cameo. Then she put it on the table beside her drink.

  She tore open the takeout bag and used it as a placemat. She took the meat and cheese and other filling from one sub and stuffed it into the other sandwich, and discarded the empty bun. There was a plastic fork for the container of coleslaw.

  She didn’t turn on any music. At the moment, it seemed that music might mask some other sound she would need to hear.

  Later, lying on her back in bed, the Heckler & Koch under the neighboring pillow, she thought about how she had killed two perps in almost seven years as an FBI special agent, about how she had killed two more in just the past two days, and she wondered who she would be a year from now, or tomorrow.

  She thought of LuLing, those dark eyes of oceanic depths in which little or nothing swam.

  When she slept, she dreamed that she was naked, lying on a slab of stainless steel, alive but unable to move. The two men whom she had most recently killed now appeared as they had been in life. With great solemnity, they rolled the steel slab toward the flame-filled maw of a cremator. Although paralyzed, she was able to speak, and in the voice of LuLing, she said, “I would like nothing more than to make you happy.” The two men gazed down at her and opened their mouths to speak, but instead of words, from them issued white mice swarming as if they were bees.

  21

  * * *

  AT TEN O’CLOCK FRIDAY evening, Bertold Shenneck rolls a kitchen cart onto the terrace of his house in Napa Valley.

  The clarity of the cool air is such that the sky is replete with stars uncountable that are rarely if ever seen above cities.

  The moon rides high. Its secondhand sunlight haunts the dark valley and paints an ectoplasmic glow along the crests of the mountains to the west.

  On
the two shelves of the kitchen cart are dishpans containing raw chickens that one of the rayshaws purchased at the supermarket in town that afternoon.

  Shenneck carries a dishpan into the yard. He places the poultry at intervals across the grass. The pale flesh glisters in moonlight.

  The coyotes are not at the moment present. These are their hunting hours. They prowl the meadows and the woods singly and in small packs, chasing down rodents and rabbits and other prey.

  From the second dishpan, Shenneck plucks the denuded birds and distributes them as he did the first group.

  There is some evidence, far from definitive, that the coyotes he controls are proving to be less successful hunters than they were prior to their brain implants. Until he can study the matter further and gather more data, he finds it advisable to augment their diet in this manner.

  In the past month, there have been two incidents that Shenneck doesn’t want to see repeated. The coyote, Canis latrans, is a fierce predator, but it is not among the very few species that will eat its own kind. Yet twice in this very yard, during the night when Inga and Bertold have been asleep, one coyote has attacked another and killed it and partly eaten it.

  He would have thought a mountain lion had done the deed, but the security camera had revealed the disturbing truth.

  Shenneck assumes that a diminishment in the coyotes’ ability to track and seize their usual prey has left some of them hungry enough to turn on others of their kind. He is, however, considering other curious aspects of these incidents that may give rise to another theory.

  Because he can electronically track every individual that has been injected with a self-assembling nano-implant, he knows that the other twelve are still mobile and alive. The only two that have fallen victim to other coyotes are the two killed on this lawn.

  Why here rather than in the wild?

  It almost seems to the good doctor that these two killings have a ritualistic quality, as if they were meant to make a statement of some kind. This is not possible, of course, because beasts of such low intelligence have neither the capacity to formulate rituals nor the desire to make a statement. And yet…

  Shenneck rolls the cart into the kitchen and switches off the backyard lights. He leaves the dishpans for one of the rayshaws to clean and put away in the morning, and he goes upstairs to bed.

  He sleeps well and deeply, but he does not dream.

  His considered belief is that men dream primarily for two reasons. First, in life they are routinely frustrated and tormented, with the consequence that all their angers and anxieties are shaped into nightmares while they are unconscious. Second, if their dreams are pleasant, it is obviously because they yearn for a perfection of experience that they cannot hope to find in life, and so they dream of it.

  Shenneck rarely dreams, because he has full command of his world and is never frustrated or tormented. And as for a perfection of experience, he intends to fashion the utopia that humankind has long pursued and failed to establish, and to live in the perfection that he has created.

  1

  * * *

  DR. EMILY JO ROSSMAN, formerly a forensic pathologist, worked now as a veterinary technician in her sister’s animal hospital.

  Jane was waiting as employees came to work at seven o’clock Saturday morning. She recognized Dr. Rossman from her Facebook photo: freckled face; bobbed auburn hair; bangs almost to her eyes.

  The woman appeared younger than thirty-eight and had a tomboy air. Her hazel eyes were so lively, her smile so quick, it was difficult to believe that she had ever wanted a career in a morgue.

  When shown Jane’s FBI credentials, Emily responded as if it were still the age of Norman Rockwell, when trust in government had been well deserved. “My sister’s off today. We can use her office.”

  The office walls were hung not with the expected portraits of animals, but with prints of the fashion—rather than fine—art of Kandinsky, elaborately decorated amoeba forms. Jane suspected that she would not have found much common ground with the absent sister.

  Instead of sitting behind the desk, Emily took one of the two client chairs and angled it toward the one in which Jane sat. “I hope I know what this is about, I really hope I do.”

  “What do you think it’s about?”

  “Benedetta Ashcroft.”

  Jane said, “Killed herself in a hotel suite, last July.”

  Thumping the side of her fist twice into the arm of her chair, Emily said, “Yes. About time somebody took this seriously. It damn well wasn’t what it seemed.”

  “But didn’t your autopsy report confirm suicide?”

  “A massive overdose of a tricyclic antidepressant—desipramine. With vodka. A lethal combination. She’d swallowed more than forty one-hundred-milligram capsules. That takes determination. And another thirty-six capsules were on the nightstand.”

  “That’s more than one prescription. So she was saving them up?”

  “No. No way.” Emily pushed her thick bangs off her forehead, and they at once fell back into place. “No prescription. The pills weren’t in pharmacy bottles. Just a Ziploc bag on the nightstand.”

  Jane said, “Street purchase.”

  Emily shook her head adamantly. “Benedetta wouldn’t have known how to make a street purchase. She was a Mormon. She didn’t drink. Didn’t do drugs. Twenty-seven years old, with a devoted husband. Two children. She was a counselor for kids with severe disabilities, and she loved her work.”

  Jane thought of Eileen Root in Chicago, who’d been an advocate for people with disabilities. In Shenneck’s new world, designed by a computer model, there evidently would be no place for paraplegics, quadriplegics, the blind, the deaf, the infirm of any kind.

  “Dr. Rossman, is it fair to say that in the absence of severe trauma to the skull, if an obvious other cause of death is present, the coroner’s office would not conduct an examination of the brain?”

  Emily leaned forward and spoke more quickly, as if defending her autopsy procedures. “I had a case where a young man fell off a ladder, twenty-two feet to the ground. Dead at the scene. No cranial fracture, no contusion, no laceration of the scalp. But examination of the brain revealed diffuse axonal injury. Small perivascular hemorrhages in the brain stem. Death was caused by the sudden acceleration-deceleration of the head, not by an impact fracture.”

  “All right. But in that case, no anatomic injuries supported the determination of accidental blunt-force trauma. So you had to look at the brain. But with Benedetta Ashcroft, the cause of death was obvious. And the security cameras in the hotel corridors proved no one entered her room until the maid found her body the next day.”

  Emily’s mouth set in a tight grim line, and then she said, “The family couldn’t believe she killed herself. Simply couldn’t believe it. They wondered—could her suicide be explained by a brain tumor?”

  “Does the coroner’s office conduct more extensive autopsies than its protocols require if the family insists?”

  “There was a time it did. No more.” She hesitated, holding her hands above her lap, frowning at them as if she didn’t recognize them as her own. “The public story is I grew tired of forensic pathology and quit. But if I hadn’t quit, I’d have been fired.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “I’m Benedetta Ashcroft’s aunt. I should have recused myself from performing the autopsy. Instead, I aggressively maneuvered to have it assigned to me, and I didn’t reveal my relationship to her.”

  “A misdemeanor. Or at least a reason for justified dismissal.”

  Emily’s stare was direct and unwavering as a laser beam. “The family was in shock. They needed to know. This lovely woman, always so happy, this devoted mother, checking into a hotel suite to kill herself…A brain tumor would have explained everything.”

  “The family could have paid for a private autopsy when the coroner’s office was finished with the body.”

  Emily nodded, but did not look away from Jane. “That would take time—days,
a week, or longer. Her husband, her sister, her mom and dad were in such grief, such anguish. I did what I did, and I’d do it again…but, God, I wish I hadn’t.”

  Here it was. If there could be any doubt that something new and terrible had entered the world, what Dr. Rossman saw when she opened her niece’s skull was about to banish any remaining skepticism.

  “I didn’t fully understand this part of your autopsy report,” Jane said. “Anyway, phrases and even sentences were redacted.”

  The pathologist took a deep breath. “When I looked down on the forebrain, the two hemispheres of the cerebrum, for just a moment, I thought I was looking at gliomatosis cerebri, a particularly vicious cancer that doesn’t produce a localized tumor. It spreads like a spiderweb across all four lobes of the cerebrum.”

  “But it wasn’t gliomatosis cerebri.”

  Jane’s sustained eye contact clearly suggested to Emily that they already shared the knowledge that she was about to reveal. “My God, you know. You know…what I found.”

  “Maybe. Tell me.”

  “It wasn’t organic. Not the chaos of cancer. I was looking at geometric, intricately designed circuits…a system, apparatus. I don’t know what to call it. It netted all four lobes, disappearing into various sulci, those fissures in the gray matter between the folded forms, between the gyri. It didn’t have a lot of mass, almost a fairylike structure, though there was a heavy concentration on the corpus callosum. Looking at it, I felt…I knew I’d never seen anything so evil. What was it? What was that thing?”

  “You could call it a control mechanism,” Jane said.

  Emily broke eye contact, looked at her hands, which tightened into fists. She shivered. “Who? Why? For God’s sake, how?”

  Instead of answering those questions, Jane said, “You had a camera running throughout the autopsy.”

  “Yes. But it didn’t capture that damn thing to the extent I would have liked. Shortly after I opened the skull, maybe as a reaction to contact with the air, I don’t know, this thing—this control mechanism, as you call it—began to come apart.”