by Dean Koontz
“Handsome,” she said. “Kind of a punky John Wayne.”
In truth, without the beard, he looked at least a decade older than forty-eight, and he had a doleful quality. He smiled at her compliment, but his face was not enlivened, and in fact the smile itself was sad. Almost forty years of grief and settled sorrow had worked upon the flesh and bone, and a single smile—perhaps even ten thousand of them—could not erase the engraved melancholy.
“Don’t blow smoke at me,” Dougal said. “I look like I was sewn together in a lab, brought to life by lightning. Let’s check out of here and get lunch. Then we’ll see a man about a helicopter.”
6
* * *
STANDING IN FRONT of the hotel, waiting for Harrow, Nathan Silverman didn’t understand himself.
He kept thinking about what Ancel Hawk had told him in Texas: So they come into her home, and they promise to rape and kill Travis if she doesn’t drop it. That confirmed Gladys Chang’s contention that Jane wanted to sell the house fast, below value, because she was afraid for her son. Then there was the implied threat in Booth Hendrickson’s chatter at the Austin airport. Until a short while ago, Silverman had remained convinced that whatever her situation, Jane must be a victim, not a victimizer.
How had one phone call from Randolph Kohl of Homeland Security caused him to accept that Jane was guilty of a series of crimes? Yes, Kohl had a good reputation. But Silverman didn’t change his opinion of anyone based on unverified secondhand information.
Yet he had at once called John Harrow and put the relentless machinery of the Bureau into gear against Jane. Why?
There was also the disturbing fact that he couldn’t recall with what detail Kohl had supported the charges against the woman.
As the traffic rushed past him on Wilshire Boulevard, Silverman was overcome by nausea. He was disoriented, as if he had stepped out of the hotel expecting another city a thousand miles from Beverly Hills. He put one hand against a nearby lamppost to steady himself.
He had felt something akin to this in Texas, standing on the porch of the Hawk house, looking out at an enormous flatness of wild grass under a sky so big it seemed that up and down were about to reverse, that he would fall away from the earth into the heavens.
In that instance, there had been a reason for what he felt: the unfamiliar vista so vast that it fostered in him a recognition of how small he was in the scheme of things. But in this case, he was in his element, city all around him, traffic humming. There seemed to be no external cause for his distress.
The nausea and disorientation passed quickly. He lowered his hand from the lamppost.
Perhaps he should not have put so much credence in Gladys Chang’s claim that Jane feared for her son. After all, the Realtor was a stranger to him. He had been charmed by her; but he had no reason to believe that she was a keen observer of people.
And Ancel Hawk was not merely a stranger to Silverman but almost an alien, hailing as he did from the plains, a world far different from Washington and Alexandria and Quantico. Besides, Ancel only knew what Jane told him. He could not verify her story. She had lied to the hotel manager in Santa Monica, claiming to be an agent on a case, and surely she had lied to Branwick and his crew, because lies and deception were their coin and currency. So if she was lying to some, there was no reason to think she wouldn’t lie to all, to her father-in-law and to Silverman as easily as to a hotel manager.
The indignation he’d felt earlier, the piercing disappointment in Jane, welled in him once more, sharper and more acidic, corroding his mood, shading his every memory of her with darker colors.
John Harrow pulled to the curb in a Bureau sedan. Silverman got in the passenger seat and shut the door.
“Ramos and Hubbert will meet us at the house with the warrant.”
Silverman knew Ramos and Hubbert. “Good. If she forced Branwick to give her Overton’s name at gunpoint, we better expect the worst.”
Harrow seemed surprised. “You’ve made the leap that it was her at Branwick’s house?”
“I hope I’m wrong,” Silverman said. “But I doubt it.”
7
* * *
SILVERMAN HAD BEEN in this neighborhood before, more than once, but it felt different this time.
Big houses, deep lawns. Huge trees overhanging the street. In some yards, jacarandas were in early bloom, blue blossoms cascading through the branches like fireworks frozen in mid spectacle. If the day had been sunny, the effect would have been dazzling.
In the somber light of a gray overcast, however, the beautiful street had a funereal quality, as if all of this—including the culture that produced it—was in its twilight, as if something new and disturbing might be rising to take its place, so that one day, even when the sun shone, the scene would be ashen and bleak.
They parked in front of Overton’s house. Within minutes, Ramos and Hubbert arrived with a warrant specifying that the search was essential to preserve the lives of innocents under imminent threat.
There was no reason to suppose a citizen of Overton’s stature might be a serious physical danger to the warrant-serving officers, regardless of what illegal and ugly business he might have been doing with Robert Branwick. He was a winning attorney whose weapon was the system, which he used against the system, and he didn’t need to turn to violence. A SWAT team was not deemed necessary.
After Harrow rang the doorbell repeatedly and no one responded, Ramos and Hubbert went around the house, looking for evidence that someone might be in residence, but found none.
With a lock-release gun, the front-door deadbolts were disengaged. When Harrow opened the door, the house alarm did not sound, suggesting that someone must be home.
Harrow loudly announced that they were FBI, acting with an emergency search warrant. No one responded.
Lights glowed throughout the house. The gray day wanted lamps, but this was lighting suitable only to a house at night.
The silence seemed to be more a substance than a condition, so heavy that it repressed the sounds the agents made as they cleared the ground floor, being careful to touch nothing. Ramos remained at the foot of the stairs, while the other three ascended.
By the time Silverman followed Harrow and Hubbert to the second floor, the silence thickened. Experience and intuition—and perhaps the unconscious awareness of a subtle malodor—told him this must be the silence of death, coiling through the fashionable house from the slack-jawed mouth of a screamer no longer capable of screaming.
When they entered the master bedroom, the bad odor was not subtle anymore.
Cut-away clothes, linked cable ties, and a few drops and smears of blood on the limestone floor of the adjoining bathroom did not bode well for William Overton.
In the walk-in closet warmed by overhead lights that had been burning a long time, the bad odor became a stench. Leaking onto a carpet that must have cost upward of two hundred dollars a square yard, the corpse might have been Overton’s; but identity would have to be determined by the medical examiner. Judging by the progress of putrefaction—a greenish discoloration of the lower abdomen, lesser discoloration of the head and neck and shoulders, swelling of the face, and marbling—the victim, dressed only in briefs, had been dead longer than thirty-six hours.
If Robert Branwick had been killed Thursday evening, as the condition of his corpse had suggested, Overton had been killed about twenty-four hours thereafter.
They retreated to the upstairs hall, where Harrow called the Beverly Hills Police to report a homicide.
Silverman said, “Security cameras in the hallways.”
“Yeah. We need to find the recorder.”
“Then we’ll know she did it,” Silverman said, and he wondered that he had not said, Then we’ll know if she did it.
His certainty could have been intuition, although it felt like something far more intense. It felt like an article of faith, as if Jane’s villainy were the central dogma of a new religion that had come to him fully formed by divine
revelation. Once he’d thought of her with admiration and affection. But now in his mind’s eye, she had a dark aura, and there was a wickedness in her face that he had not recognized before. A voice spoke to him, an interior voice but not his own, and the voice named her for him: Mother of Lies.
8
* * *
VALLEY AIR SOLD, LEASED, repaired, and garaged helicopters, serving corporations and well-to-do individuals. The company also maintained a helo air ambulance under contract to several hospitals in Napa and Sonoma Counties, and operated a crop-dusting service.
The co-owner of Valley Air, Ronnie Fuentes, was waiting for them in the front office, though this was a Sunday. In his late twenties, he had the self-possession of an older man and the manners of an earlier century.
“Sergeant,” Fuentes exclaimed at first sight of Dougal, “you’ve been groomed and broomed! Are you planning to re-enlist, sir?”
“Hell, kid, I’ll always be too uncouth for today’s Army.”
When Dougal introduced Jane as his friend and associate, Fuentes bowed slightly from the shoulders and offered her his hand. “Friendship is as sacred to Sergeant Trahern as God is to a good priest. So it’s a real honor to meet you.”
Instead of decorating the walls with pictures of the aircraft in which the company dealt, management had chosen to hang large works of colorful military art—helicopter gunships and troop carriers and medevac units—portrayed under fire in chaotic and stirring circumstances.
“So your dad and mom are on a Caribbean cruise?” Dougal said.
“Yes, sir. For their thirty-fifth anniversary. Did you hear, Mom talked him into a year of dancing lessons before the trip?”
“Quito Fuentes on a dance floor. These must be the Last Days.”
“It’s the only time he ever used a pity defense,” Ronnie said. “Claimed it was cruel to tell a one-armed man he could dance.”
“Break dance, maybe.”
“They got darn good, sir. You should see them waltz, cha-cha, fox-trot.” He grinned at Jane. “Though Dad will never let his old sergeant here see him doing what he calls ‘fancy-boy steps.’ ”
Minutes later, when they got down to business, Dougal said, “You say no to what I want, nothing changes between us. Understand?”
“Valley Air always fulfills its slogan.” Ronnie Fuentes sang a variation of the lyrics from an old Joe Cocker song, “We lift you up where you belong,” as Dougal pretended to be pained.
Fuentes refused Dougal nothing, though they haggled over the price, Fuentes insisting there would be no charge, Dougal insisting the charge would be enormous.
9
* * *
IN THE OVERTON RESIDENCE, the FBI agents advised and watched over the Beverly Hills police, and the cops quietly asserted their authority. The exaggerated consideration that each of them gave the others could not disguise the frustration that stiffened every neck in the house.
Jurisdiction was clouded. Overton had been a target of an FBI probe, but no charges had been filed. From the perspective of the BHPD, this was the murder of a citizen—nothing less, nothing more. And the Bureau did not get involved in murder cases unless a perp operated across state lines or killed a federal officer.
Silverman felt it was best to allow the locals to proceed with quiet Bureau oversight, in the interest of expediting the search for evidence and perhaps for a clue as to where Jane had gone from here.
Although he was convinced she had whacked Branwick and Overton, he as yet had little admissible evidence to support his conviction. Likewise, he lacked a theory of her motive and future intentions.
Silverman kept thinking about Randolph Kohl’s phone call, after which he had officially labeled Jane a rogue and worse. He had told John Harrow that a warrant for her arrest would be issued by a judge at the request of Homeland Security, related to matters of national security. But when he tried to recall what else Kohl told him, his memory, previously a palace of brightly lighted chambers, seemed to have collapsed into a small and shadowy apartment.
Because of his murky memory and an unusual free-floating anxiety, Silverman thought that something must be wrong with him. Each time he began to doubt himself, however, he was propelled forward by a surge of self-confidence so powerful that it seemed chemically induced. These sharp swings in mood also disturbed him.
It was Ramos who realized that no cell phone had yet been found. Given the nature of William Overton’s professional and personal lives, the attorney would have been tethered to his phone almost as intimately as an unborn baby to its mother.
The initial areas of interest to investigators had been the closet where the dead man lay, the bath where the victim had been restrained for a time, and the bedroom. All drawers had been carefully opened, contents inspected visually but left undisturbed, lest evidence be compromised before the CSI unit arrived. No phone.
“If he entered the house through the connecting door to the garage,” Ramos said, “he might have left the phone in the kitchen.”
“Or forgot it in the car,” Harrow suggested.
Leaving Hubbert in the master suite, Silverman accompanied Harrow and Ramos to the ground floor, where a search for Overton’s phone proved fruitless.
The three ended up on the back patio, overlooking the spa and the immense pool, checking the chairs and tables, in case Overton had spent a little time out there when he’d come home. No phone.
“She took it,” Harrow guessed. “There was something on it she wanted.”
“If she’s had it since Friday night,” Silverman said, “she got what she needed and ditched the phone by now.”
“Maybe not,” Ramos said. “Maybe she figured nobody would find Overton sooner than Monday, so she had time.”
“We can hope,” Harrow agreed. “And the case file we’ve been building on Branwick includes the names and phone numbers of his clients, including Overton. If Homeland Security’s seeking a warrant for her arrest, maybe with some help we can get a current location on Overton’s phone. If she’s still got it, we’ll get her.”
Earlier, they had found the security-camera recorder tucked away in a garage cabinet. Jane had removed the disc and with it the evidence of her presence in the house. Silverman expected her to have been no less careful with the dead man’s phone, but it was worth an interagency request for urgent cooperation in the matter.
10
* * *
HAVING CHECKED OUT of the motel before coming to Valley Air, Jane now left her suitcases and the bag of autopsy reports with Ronnie Fuentes. She also left the tote containing sixty thousand dollars. Where they were going, they could not be encumbered, and the money would be a particular distraction.
Dougal entrusted his duffel bag to Fuentes, after taking from it a pistol-grip short-barrel pump-action twelve-gauge Mossberg shotgun plus two boxes of shells. He put the weapon and ammunition in the back of the Gurkha.
As she drove away from Valley Air, Jane said, “Ronnie’s dad, Quito—he served under you in Special Forces?”
“No. I served under him. He was my lieutenant for a while.”
“And you saved his life.”
“Forget about all that. None of it matters.”
“Well, but you did.”
“Don’t hose me with hero,” he grumbled. “Quito saved my life twice before that. I still owe him one.”
11
* * *
SILVERMAN MADE the phone call to the National Security Agency while walking beside Overton’s hundred-foot-long swimming pool. The wind had scattered scarlet bougainvillea petals on the lizard-skin-gray water, where his distorted reflection ghosted his every step.
Non-military organizations dealing with terrorism and national security—the CIA, the NSA, Homeland Security, and the FBI—had long been jealous of their turf and cautious of too much cooperation with one another lest they cede some of their authority.
The horrific terrorist attacks in Europe and South America the previous year, combined with four hund
red deaths in Seattle, led to a greater willingness of various agencies to work with one another.
As section chief of the Critical Incident Response Group within the FBI, Silverman phoned his counterpart in the National Security Agency, Maurice Moomaw, to request an urgent determination of the location of William Overton’s smartphone, for which he was able to provide the number.
“No problem,” Moomaw said. “In payment, you need only transfer to me your best Human Resources person and sixty million bucks.”
Pretending to be amused by bureaucratic humor, Silverman said, “We’re phasing out humans from the FBI, and anyway I only have three dollars left in my budget for the year.”
“Then I’ll settle for undying gratitude,” Moomaw said. “Back to you soon, Nate.”
At the end of the swimming pool, Silverman stopped and looked toward the house. Harrow and Ramos sat on patio chairs. In spite of the overcast, Harrow wore sunglasses. Ramos smoked a cigarette.
Something about the scene struck Silverman as deeply sinister, though he could not explain why. His inexplicable anxiety, unrelated to Jane, intensified. The skin prickled on the nape of his neck.
Maurice Moomaw would at the moment be in contact with someone at the Utah Data Center, built by the National Security Agency and completed in 2014, a facility with more than a million square feet under roof. Among other things, the Data Center was tasked with snatching from the air every telephone call and text message, as well as other digital transmissions, and storing them for metadata analysis. The NSA did not listen to the calls and read the text messages, but had the capacity to scan the exabytes of data for key words likely to indicate terrorist activity and to analyze signals of foreign origin to deduce the intentions of the nation’s enemies.