The Silent Corner

by Dean Koontz

  “Did the maid find a cell phone, a smartphone, in either room?”

  Barrera looked surprised. “No. But it’s funny…another maid found an iPhone in the trash can at the diner next door.”

  “Where is it?”

  “The phone? It was broken.”

  “But where is it, Mr. Barrera?”

  “I think she still has it. The maid.”

  18

  * * *

  SEEN THROUGH THE WIDE WINDOW above the sink, in radiant white arrayed, pale-blond hair piled up and pinned, Inga Shenneck looked too celestial for kitchen work. Even with the powerful magnification that the binoculars provided, Jane couldn’t tell what the woman was doing. Maybe washing vegetables or fruit.

  “Ground floor, left,” Dougal said.

  Jane followed his advice. She saw another figure passing the wall of glass doors between the back terrace and the family room. Almost certainly a man. But he was too far from the glass to be identified.

  Shenneck or one of the rayshaws?

  He disappeared behind granite, but then reappeared in the kitchen. He embraced Inga from behind, cupped her breasts in his hands, and buried his face in her neck.

  She tipped her head back to allow him more of her throat.

  After nuzzling her, he raised his head. Bertold Shenneck.

  19

  * * *

  PILAR VEGA, MAYBE THIRTY years old, pretty and self-possessed, was not humbled by her job or by her maid’s uniform, or by being a person of interest to the FBI. She assumed that they had come upon her while she was cleaning Room 36, after a late checkout, because they had mistaken her for an illegal alien.

  “I’ve always been a legal resident,” she said proudly. “For a year now, I’ve been a citizen.”

  “We aren’t interested in your immigration status, Ms. Vega,” Silverman said.

  “I have the same rights as you. They can’t be taken from me.”

  If her boss, Tio Barrera, had not been present to reassure the woman, Silverman and Harrow might have needed even longer to allay her doubts about their motive.

  “What we’re interested in is the phone you found in the trash can this morning,” Silverman said.

  “I didn’t steal it,” Pilar Vega said, taking offense at the imagined accusation, raising her head defiantly, chin up, eyes glittering with challenge. “I never steal.”

  Frustrated but well aware that patience would be rewarded more quickly than intimidation, Silverman said, “I have no doubt of your honesty, Ms. Vega. Not any doubt at all.”

  Tio Barrera took longer to smooth the woman’s feathers this time. At last she seemed to believe they saw her as a source of important information, not as a target.

  “I came to work early. I was sitting in my car outside the diner. I was drinking coffee. This woman dropped something in the trash can. It looked like a cell phone. She went into the diner.”

  Silverman showed her the photograph.

  “Yes, that’s her. She came out with a large coffee and a bag of something. After she was gone, I looked in the trash can. It was a phone she threw away.”

  “I understand you may still have the phone,” Silverman said.

  “It’s broken.”

  “Yes, but do you have it?”

  “She threw it away. Now it’s mine.”

  “But if it’s broken—”

  “Maybe it can be fixed. I know someone who can fix phones.”

  “Ms. Vega,” Harrow said, “that phone was involved in a crime.”

  “What crime?”

  “Murder.”

  “Who was murdered?”

  “We’re not at liberty to say. But we must have the phone.”

  “The woman who threw it away doesn’t look like a murderer.”

  “No,” Silverman agreed, “she doesn’t. The phone is evidence, Ms. Vega.”

  Reluctantly, Pilar Vega took the phone from a skirt pocket of her uniform and surrendered it.

  The casing was dented and slightly torqued, but the screen appeared not to have been damaged. When he tried to turn it on, a pulse of pale gray light washed from the top to the bottom of the screen, just once, but no display appeared.

  “Battery’s got juice,” Harrow said.

  “No use as a phone,” Silverman said, “but obviously the locater still transmits.”

  Just then his own phone rang. He handed Overton’s iPhone to Harrow and took the call. “Silverman.”

  “Play Manchurian with me, Nathan.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “This is Randolph Kohl from Homeland Security. Are you alone that we might speak?”

  The voice was that of Booth Hendrickson, of the Department of Justice, and though Silverman knew it was Booth’s voice, not that of Kohl, he heard himself say, as though from a distance, “Give me just a moment.” To Harrow, he said, “It’s Homeland. I need to take this in private.” He went into the bathroom and closed the door and turned on the water in the sink to mask his voice from those in the adjoining motel room. He said, “Yes, Mr. Kohl,” confused about why he should be playing along with Booth in this manner.

  “Update me, Nathan. Have you gotten a lead on Jane Hawk?”

  “We’re closing on her. She killed a man named William Overton in Beverly Hills, in his home, evidently on Friday night.”

  “Overton? Sterling Overton, the attorney?”

  “Yes. William Sterling Overton.”

  “Bloody hell. How did the stupid bitch finger Overton?”

  “Through Robert Branwick, alias Jimmy Radburn.”

  “I don’t know who that is,” Booth Hendrickson said. “Why don’t I know who that is?”

  “He was a Dark Web entrepreneur. We had him on the hook, but he didn’t know it. We were letting him run to see what other fish he’d lead us to. Overton hired him to hack someone, and Branwick hacked Overton, too. Is this really Mr. Kohl or is this you, Booth?”

  After a silence, Booth said, “Play Manchurian with me, Nathan.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  Randolph Kohl said, “Who am I, Nathan?”

  “Who are you?” Nathan said, perplexed that the head of Homeland Security should ask such a thing. “You’re Randolph Kohl.”

  “You said you’re closing in on her. How so?”

  “We found the motel where she stayed last night. We’re here now. She brought Overton’s phone, got from it whatever she wanted, dropped it in the trash.”

  Kohl said, “You think he gave her his password?”

  “The condition he was in, yes. She put him through a wringer.”

  “Where is this motel?”

  “Just outside Napa.”

  “Holy shit! She’s going after Shenneck.”

  “Who?”

  Kohl gave him a rural-route address. “That’s where she’s going. Be there now, Nathan. Kill her. Kill her. I’ve got to make a call.”

  Booth hung up. Kohl. Kohl hung up.

  A rushing sound. Like something coming fast at Silverman. No. Just the water in the sink. He cranked off the spigot.

  He still felt something coming fast at him.

  20

  * * *

  AS BERTOLD POURS TWO glasses of pinot grigio and brings them to the cutting board beside the kitchen sink, the nearby wall-mounted phone rings. It had also rung a few minutes earlier; but he is in a mood that doesn’t welcome an interruption. As before, he lets it go to voice mail.

  Inga glances at her wine and smiles, but she continues to scrub the potatoes.

  With his glass of wine, Bertold stands watching her. There is something erotic about the way her elegant hands fondle the tubers.

  Usually one of the rayshaws, programmed with a thousand and one recipes, prepares lunch and dinner for the Shennecks when they are in residence at the ranch. During this visit, however, Inga has become convinced that the rayshaws aren’t maintaining their personal hygiene to the standard required of them, that in particular the one who cooks isn’t washing his hands as
frequently as he should and that he may be touching himself in unclean ways during his culinary duties. As a consequence, she insists on making their meals until Bertold can study the problem and find a fix for it.

  Bertold is not convinced that the rayshaws are, in Inga’s words, “on their way to becoming dirty little animals.” She has observed two or three small aberrations in their behavior, from which she has elaborated an imagined catastrophe impending.

  Her insistence on the rightness of her conclusion and her nagging about the matter are annoying.

  The nearby wall phone rings yet again. Even though the number is unlisted, they have been plagued recently by robocalls placed by marketers of everything from time-share condos to organic steaks. Again, he lets it go to voice mail.

  As a student of history, he has long believed that a man who seeks to reach the heights of power is most likely to fulfill his ambitions if at his side is an equally ambitious and ruthless wife. No matter how brilliant the man, the mate who is twined with him in the pursuit of dominion brings to the enterprise a female insight and cunning that must not be undervalued.

  And what a bonus it is that Inga, in addition to her unslakable thirst for ever more wealth and ever more power, is so exquisitely and entirely hot.

  The drawback to such a wife, of course, is that she is intent on having her own pleasures and satisfactions, which requires of him both time and energy—and not least of all the sharing of the power that they have acquired. There are times when he thinks an Aspasia girl could be programmed to be tireless and ruthless in helping her husband to reach Olympus and yet remain sublimely submissive to him, so that he would not have to humor her about such fanciful concerns as that the rayshaws are not washing their hands often enough.

  As he watches her begin to peel the potatoes, which for some reason is less erotic than watching her wash them, he hears a harsh noise and looks at the sky beyond the window. At first it sounds like one of the low-flying executive helicopters that ferry other émigrés from Silicon Valley to their getaway homes in this land of wine and roses.

  The wall-mounted phone rings, rings. Bertold impatiently plucks the handset from its cradle. “This better not be phone sales.”

  “She’s coming for you,” says Booth Hendrickson, their good friend in the Department of Justice.

  Those words are at first mystifying, but they begin to take on meaning as Bertold realizes that the racket outside doesn’t have the air-chopping rhythm of a rotary wing.

  “The Hawk bitch,” Booth elaborates. “She’s coming now.”

  “What the hell is that?” Inga asks.

  Bertold’s attention is drawn from sky to land, to movement on the long, sloped meadow behind the house. Racing toward them through wild mustard and grass and exploding flocks of butterflies is some damn thing that seems to be half SUV and half tank.

  He drops the phone as Inga drops potato and peeler, for it seems as if the armored car might crash through window and wall, shoving the sink and the cabinets into them and crushing them into the center island. The Shennecks are strangers to fair combat, and for a crucial moment their reason is plucked from them by the claws of panic. He steps right as she steps left, knocking against each other, unbalancing each other, for it seems that whichever way they run, they will pitch into the impending destruction instead of escaping it. The weirdness and suddenness of the assault paralyze them, the hurtling mass less like a vehicle than like an instrument of divine wrath thrown out of the sky, its judgment inescapable.

  An instant later, the machine veers away from the kitchen, jumps the few low steps between lawn and terrace, crashes through the view wall, quaking the entire house, breaking upon the family room in a glittering surf-spray of shattering glass, like some Leviathan of the deep beaching itself in sparkling foam, though it does not lie helpless. The armored behemoth might have collapsed the floor into the basement if there had been a basement, but the house was built upon a slab. Instead, it plows forward, shoving aside what furniture does not splinter apart under its hardened tires, turning toward the breakfast area and kitchen, and the open floor plan is nearly as accommodating as a carpool lane.

  The house includes a safe room, with secret doors and walls of steel plate, with its own air and power supply, where Bertold and Inga could safely wait out a home invasion, but there are just two entrances, the first in the living room, the second in the master suite. They can reach neither as the massive vehicle roars into the breakfast area, scattering into splinters a pair of Palecek chairs, and halts, engine idling with a sound like the panting of a panther god out of some Congolese myth.

  The front passenger door is thrown open, and out steps a tall man with a pistol-grip shotgun. He has a face for noir films, made hard by dark experience, and his gray eyes cut at the Shennecks, so that they hold fast to each other in a way that they have never done before.

  But it is the woman stepping out of the driver’s door who for the first time in Bertold’s memory gives him cause to take seriously his mortality. For a moment, he thinks that she must be a girl from Aspasia, her intellect and personality restored by some failure of her control mechanism, for she turns on him a blue-eyed stare as bright with the memory of suffering as with the fire of vengeance. But then he recalls Booth’s words, which in the midst of chaos did not fully register—The Hawk bitch, she’s coming now—and he knows that before him stands the relentless force that has for two months evaded steadily growing legions of searchers, she whose husband might have had a post-military career in politics if the computer model had not identified him as a problematic individual, she who has successfully hidden her child from those same legions. She holds a pistol in a two-hand grip, arms straight out before her as she approaches him, and it seems that he will die here before the rayshaws can arrive from the gatehouse.

  She says, “If you didn’t put me on your Hamlet list, you should have. Because you’re sure as hell on mine.”

  21

  * * *

  UNDER A SKY DARK and swollen, two sedans raced east on the county road, into territory where neighbors were few and far between. They slid in hard turns onto the private drive and braked abruptly before a ranch-style gate that was fashioned from three-inch-diameter pipes. Silverman, Harrow, and Ramos got out of the first car, leaving their driver, a Sacramento agent, behind the wheel. In the second sedan were three more men out of the Sacramento field office.

  Far back on the property and uphill, under thunderheads that seemed to be avalanching toward it, a large ultramodern house with cantilevered view decks overlooked the valley, as if it were a fantastic glass ship washed up there by a flood.

  Near the gate stood a modest Victorian home.

  Before Silverman could push the button on the call box, the front door of the nearer house opened, and two men stepped onto the porch. They were of a type: tall, solid, clean-shaven, their faces expressionless, their eyes as watchful as those of Dobermans trained to protect and defend, kin to the wrong kind of hired muscle that you sometimes saw around certain entertainment-world celebrities unhinged by their sudden wealth and fame.

  One of the men came along the walk to the gate, while the other remained on the porch.

  Silverman flashed his FBI badge. “We need to see Dr. Shenneck right away.”

  “You’re not on the admissions list.”

  “Who are you?” Harrow asked.

  Instead of offering a name, the man said, “Security.”

  The guard’s stare was direct, even bold, yet Silverman saw no discernible emotion in it, just as there was none in his face, not the suspicion that his job required, not the latent hostility that motivated some men to take a job that might now and then provide an excuse for violence.

  “Call your boss,” Harrow said. “We need to see him right away, it’s a matter of life and death. His life and death.”

  From somewhere beyond the main house rose the racket of a racing engine. Both the guard who had spoken to Silverman and the one on the porch looked t
oward the noise.

  A thunderclap and its echoes masked the engine, but then the thunder faded and the growling of the unseen vehicle could be heard again.

  In addition to their size and demeanor, some elusive quality about these guards riveted Silverman’s attention. Their formidable appearance and direct manner seemed like a mask, their status as security personnel more of a role than a truth.

  From a distance, the growl of the engine rose to a roar, and a third man, alike to the first two, came out of the open front door, onto the porch. He looked uphill toward the main house, and then at Harrow, and then at Silverman, his comportment machinelike.

  Abruptly Silverman intuited that each man’s mask was less veil than gloss, that behind the mask was not a different man but instead an emptiness. He knew this because he saw himself in them, himself as he had been a few times during this strange day, as he had been at the Beverly Hills hotel when he had awakened in confusion, as he had been when he’d found the second gun—the .45 Kimber Raptor II—in his nightstand drawer, as he had been when he’d experienced nausea and disorientation while he stood in front of the hotel to wait for John Harrow, as he had been when an interior voice renamed Jane the Mother of Lies, as he had been when the jet lifted off from Van Nuys Airport and gravity seemed to be deserting him. At times today, he had felt lost, and these security guards looked as he had felt, lost beneath their gloss of dutiful concern and competence. He thought of the puncture mark on the vein in the crook of his arm, which he’d dismissed as an insect bite, of Randolph Kohl speaking with the voice of Booth Hendrickson, of how he twice forgot to call Rishona, whose heart and his were synchronized. A flash of insight told him that, impossibly but certainly, these three guards were hollow men, shape without form, shade without color, and that to some degree he was becoming like them. If he could be hollowed out, if he could become someone he had never been before, then anything could happen. In fact the impossible would happen here, now and going forward. In recognition of whatever horror was unfolding, he backed away from the ranch gate and from the guards.