by Dean Koontz
Besides, his wife of twenty-six years, Rebecca, was able to detect oncoming arrogance when it was still just smug presumption, and she could chasten him with a look or a few loving words. He tried never to forget that his actions reflected on her and on their two children as well, which was another reason why he was dismayed that the higher authorities had left him with so little to do when locals would expect—rightly—a great deal from him.
He worried that the investigation had too quickly narrowed to a single track: Cora Gundersun. He’d known Cora for twenty years. She wasn’t capable of such horrific violence.
Yes, but. Every human being was a mystery, each mind a maze of passages and secret rooms. No one ever really knew anyone or what they might be capable of doing. Except for a spouse. And even then, not always.
Cora worked wonders with special-needs kids, and no one had an unkind word to say about her. Nevertheless, as much as Luther might not want to believe that either a worm of evil or madness had curled in the core of her, he was too much cop to rule it out.
Little remained of her SUV, a twisted mass of steel and melted fiberglass, and even less remained of Cora, too little to make a positive identification other than by DNA. Numerous witnesses who knew her well were willing to testify that she had been driving the burning Expedition, that she had appeared to be laughing as she accelerated, and that no one else had been in the vehicle.
Her house, in a more rural area of the county, was also being searched by the FBI. Right now, Luther could do nothing there but observe—and be made to feel underfoot.
At 6:42, after he had crossed the street to talk with the county fire marshal, more to have something to do than to gather any vital information, his phone rang.
The caller, Rob Stassen, was the deputy whom Luther assigned to Cora’s house, to assist the Feds.
“Sheriff, if maybe you’re not too busy there, you should come on out here.”
“Right now,” Luther said, “the only difference between me and a hibernating bear is I don’t have a cave. What’s happening?”
“Nothing. That’s just it—they’re gone.”
“Who’s gone?”
“The FBI.”
The Feds had established an incident-response staging center in the library on Main Street, half a block from the Veblen Hotel. From there, a contingent of four had set out for Cora Gundersun’s house at 3:30. Two additional special agents, among later arrivals from Quantico, laden with cases of equipment, had followed at 4:30.
The house was not the scene of a crime; but the assumption had to be made that it was where planning had been done and preparations made. A first comb-through of the premises, if as thorough as a case of this importance required, should have taken the forensic team at least until midnight.
As Luther looked down at his snow-caked boots and worked his cold toes to keep them from growing stiff, he turned away from the fire marshal and lowered his voice when he spoke into his phone. “Did they say when they’re coming back?”
“I don’t think they are,” Rob Stassen said.
Luther’s intuition told him—had been telling him for a while—that something wasn’t quite right about some of the federal agents. A few of them seemed dispassionate to a disturbing degree, detached from the horror all around them. Of course, investigators, like first responders, needed to remain composed and subdue their sharpest feelings. But even the most professional of them, hardened by dark experience, should be shaken and moved by such a scene as this; and though they might not express their distress and pity in words or give way to tears, their feelings should have been easily read in their faces. At least four of these faces, both men and women, were cemented with indifference, as though the minds behind their eyes were not capable of recognizing a common humanity between them and the blast-torn, fire-charred, broken victims pinned and lifeless in the rubble.
“I’m alone here now,” Rob Stassen said. “There’s a weird feeling about the place, Sheriff. You better come have a look around.”
23
* * *
The library lay quiet at the tail end of the afternoon, the banks of overhead lamps lit only in alternating rows, perhaps to save on the electricity bill, the many-paned tall windows little illuminated by the gray blear of the rain-washed day.
There were aisles of book-laden shelves, though fewer than would have been the case in earlier decades, more space having been given over to DVDs, a storytelling corner for children—and, toward the back of the large main room, an array of computer workstations available to patrons.
Smartphones and electronic tablets and laptops all had their unique identifiers and were locatable by authorities in real time. Therefore, Jane Hawk had resorted to library computers, browsing incognito, since she’d been on the run and off the grid. Even so, if her search strings included certain people and things that her pursuers knew interested her—David James Michael, the company Far Horizons, nanomachines, brain implants, and others—she might trigger tripwire alarms at websites where her enemies abided, initiating their track-to-source security probes. Consequently, she kept her library visits short.
She was alone among the workstations and hoped for solitude until she finished.
Two subjects of interest. The first was Randall Larkin, the attorney. When she hadn’t called Lawrence Hannafin at noon, they probably concluded that she had brooded about her encounter with the journalist and decided not to trust him. They couldn’t know that she had listened to his phone conversations with Larkin.
Because she’d never worn eyeglasses before, the plain-lens prop began to annoy her. The tabs irritated the bridge of her nose. The end piece on the right stem rubbed sore the skin behind her ear. Soon enough she would go to ground for the night and take them off.
The law firm—Woodbine, Kravitz, Larkin, and Benedetto—operated from an address on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Randall Larkin’s name led to numerous links. She jotted down salient details in a small notebook and soon had what she needed.
Before moving to her second subject, after scoping the room to be sure that no one was within sight, she took off the glasses and massaged the indentations they had left on her nose.
When Jane opened her eyes and put on the glasses, a woman stood not fifteen feet away, at the end of an aisle of shelves, watching with a faint expression of puzzlement. Mid-thirties. Rubber-soled walking shoes, tan skirt, white blouse. She had a cart of books and was returning the volumes to their proper positions in the stacks.
Jane smiled, the woman smiled, and Jane returned her attention to the monitor, affecting unconcern. She remained peripherally aware of the librarian as she quickly sought any news item about the death of Sakura Hannafin a year earlier and found what she needed.
“Excuse me,” the librarian said. She had moved closer, the book cart empty. “I’m just sure we’ve met, but I can’t think where.”
Affecting a Texas accent, Jane said, “Darn if I didn’t have the same feelin’ when I saw you. Ever lived in Dallas, thereabouts?”
“No. Always California.”
“I’m stayin’ with a friend up to Oakdale Avenue, couple blocks off Saticoy, while I find my own place. You know Oakdale?”
“Is that in Winnetka?”
“Sure enough.”
The librarian shook her head. “I live in Canoga Park.”
“Just next door. So maybe you and me shop groceries at the same Pavilions.”
“No, I don’t go there.”
Jane frowned, shrugged. “Hey, you figure maybe we knew each other in a previous life?”
“Well, I’ve always felt drawn to ancient Egypt, pharaohs and sphinxes and all that, as if I lived there once.”
“Maybe that’s it, girl! Me and you and Tutankhamen.”
They traded smiles, and Jane turned her attention once more to the computer, as if she still had work to do.
The librarian drifted away, pushing the empty cart. She might have glanced back once. Jane watched her
only indirectly.
As soon as the woman turned out of sight in the maze of stacks, heading toward the front desk, Jane shut down the computer, grabbed her large purse and umbrella. Loath to leave by the main entrance, she walked quickly to a door bearing a sign that promised RESTROOMS.
Beyond lay a corridor, egg-crate overhead fixtures dropping cubes of light to glisten on the pale-blue vinyl floor. At the nearer end, a glowing red sign above a door announced EXIT.
Stepping out into the rain, she found a shallow parking lot that might have been for library employees.
Her Ford Escape was two blocks away, on a residential street. For just this reason, she never left it close to a library in which she conducted research. If they got a description of her vehicle, she would have to abandon it, steal a car, and drive to Nogales, Arizona, to work a trade-in with Enrique de Soto. All the devils in Hell—or at least their surrogates—were looking for her, however, and she didn’t have time for Nogales.
Without stopping to put up the umbrella, she hurried between two of the parked cars. As she splashed into the puddled alleyway, a man called out behind her, “Hey, you!”
She glanced back and saw a guy in a uniform. Not a cop. Green-and-black uniform. Gun on his hip. Maybe a security guard. Did libraries have armed guards these days? Hell, yes, even churches probably had armed security guards these days.
A palisade of shops and restaurants backed up to the farther side of the alley. She raced past their back doors and dumpsters. The guard shouted. He was coming after her.
24
* * *
New drifts blanketed old, the layered bedding of a landscape deep in slumber, mounded as though with the forms of sleepers dreaming. The bone-pale skeletonized limbs of winter-pasted trees, chokeberry and moosewood and gray poplars, and the storm-crusted boughs of evergreens more white than black, not green at all in the night, rendered a monochromatic scene in the spectral light of the snowfields.
In his sheriff’s-department Jeep, Luther Tillman drove alone into the out-county, by the mile further convinced that the mass murder at the Veblen Hotel was not an insane incident complete unto itself, but was only the beginning of something. The contentment and many pleasures of his much-blessed life rested on the thinnest ice.
With no light in any window, Cora Gundersun’s single-story white-clapboard house, nestled in late-winter swaddling, did not loom into view suddenly complete, but instead gradually articulated in the headlights. He turned onto the driveway, which had not been plowed, drove around to the back of the house, and parked behind Rob Stassen’s Jeep. He killed the headlights and the engine.
Exhaust vapor plumed from the tailpipe and crystalized as Rob got out of his vehicle and closed the door.
As Luther approached the deputy, Cora’s long-haired dachshund sprang into the driver’s seat of the Jeep and peered out the side window with solemn interest.
“Dixie won’t have had her dinner,” the sheriff said.
“I thought of that.” Rob was thirty-six, ten years a Navy MP before he had enough of foreign ports and came home to help keep the peace. “I found her kibble. Had to coax her to eat. Even then, she wouldn’t eat much. She trembles and whimpers, poor thing. It’s like she knows.”
“Dogs know,” Luther agreed.
“Cora of all people, Minnesota Teacher of the Year. It takes the wind out of you to think about it.”
Heading toward the nearby back porch, snow crunching-squeaking as it compacted under his boots, Luther said, “One way or another, this Cora today wasn’t the Cora we knew.”
“You mean like a brain tumor or something?”
“We’ll never know. Not enough left of her for an autopsy.”
The porch steps had been swept clear of snow. Climbing them, Luther said, “No police notice on the door, no seal?”
“They were sort of going by the book at first, until that Hendrickson guy showed up. Then they went out of here with their tails between their legs.”
“What Hendrickson guy?”
“Booth Hendrickson from the Department of Justice. He must’ve cracked a whip, I don’t know why.”
The FBI was only a semi-independent agency, under the authority of the Department of Justice.
“You get his card?” Luther asked.
“He claimed he was out of them. Maybe he was. Too Harvard-and-Yale if you ask me. But his Justice ID looked real enough, and the specialists from Quantico knew him.”
“What did he say to them? Why did he pull them out?”
“Wasn’t privy, Sheriff. To Hendrickson, I was just a mall cop. House is locked. He took the key, so if you think we need to do this, we’ll have to force the door, maybe find an unlatched window.”
Luther said, “Cora hid a key in case she got locked out.”
He picked up a long-handled, stiff-bristled brush that leaned against the wall, and he scraped the snow off his boots.
“They already tracked it up pretty bad in there, sir.”
“We don’t need to add to it, Robbie.”
Rob Stassen used the brush while Luther felt for the key on the lintel ledge overhead. He unlocked the door, switched on the lights.
Havoc in the kitchen. Melted snow puddled the linoleum. Partial muddy footprints overlapped like some antic mockery of abstract art. Cabinet doors stood open. The contents of the trash can had been turned out on the floor, gone through, and then left uncollected.
Black fingerprint powder mottled the table, the refrigerator door, the cabinets. They would have been seeking prints other than Cora’s, in case she’d had co-conspirators. Nitrile gloves, worn by investigators to avoid muddling the scene with their prints, had been stripped off and thrown on the floor or left on counters.
“This look like the work of the FBI you know?” Luther asked.
“Scene’s been contaminated, Sheriff. It’s not movie FBI.”
“Maybe it hasn’t been for a long time. Were they collecting evidence or eliminating it?”
“Lord alive, did you really just ask that question?”
Luther stood by the dinette table, considering a thick spiral-bound notebook that had been left open. “This is Cora’s. Nobody I’ve ever known has handwriting half as neat as hers.”
“You’d think a machine wrote it,” the deputy said.
For this entry, she had used only the front of each page. The left side of the revealed spread remained blank.
On the right, starting at the top, she had written, Sometimes at night sometimes at night sometimes at night…As if she had sat here in some quasi-autistic state, her mind stuck like an old-fashioned phonograph needle in one groove of a vinyl record, those three words filled line after line.
Luther turned a page, then another, a fourth and fifth, all alike in content, until he came to where she continued the thought that she needed so badly to express: Sometimes at night, I come wide awake, I come wide awake, I come wide awake…
For six pages, Cora repeated only those last four words, which were formed time after time with eerie regularity.
When Luther found new material eight pages later, Rob Stassen, standing beside him, said, “I’ve got ice in my veins.”
25
* * *
With dusk rapidly coagulating behind the overcast, dark clouds having spent their fireworks, the sullen storm washed sour light upon the San Fernando Valley. Pursued by an armed security guard, Jane splashed through racing water that carried litter along the wide, shallow swale in the center of the alleyway. Past a dumpster, at a steel door labeled VALENTINO RISTORANTE / DELIVERIES, she sought entrance and was rewarded.
Beyond lay a receiving room, maybe twenty feet wide and ten deep. Concrete floor and walls. Empty metal shelves to the left and right. An inner door that probably led to the kitchen, the aroma of garlic on the air. They would not be open for dinner yet, but the staff would be on site, preparing.
She stepped to the left and put down her handbag and stood against the wall. The door swung toward her
and thudded shut.
If the guy coming after her wasn’t a policeman moonlighting for a private security company and if he wasn’t former military, if he was the usual cop wannabe who had qualified for an armed-response license, he would be too eager to prove himself. With an abundance of enthusiasm but little hard experience, he would charge in here under the assumption that she was bent on getting away through the restaurant and out the front door.
If he was a wannabe, she hoped only that he didn’t burst into the receiving room with his pistol ready. Some of these junior G-men lived to draw down on you, and some were half afraid of their guns.
The lever handle rattled, the bottom flap of weather stripping scraped across the threshold with a sucking sound, the door opened away from Jane, a wind-thrown spray of rain spattered into the receiving room, and there he was, two feet from her. He alerted to her presence when she pressed the spring-release button and, in a fraction of a second, deployed the collapsible umbrella in his face.
He cried out in surprise, perhaps not at once realizing what exploded at him. As black and sudden as the umbrella was, he might have thought that here came Death incarnate, wings flaring to enfold him. He stumbled sideways and fell.
Jane threw aside the umbrella and stepped on the fallen man’s balls hard enough to make him wish he had long ago been neutered. “Don’t make me hurt you worse,” she said, keeping her foot on the jewels. She need not have been concerned, because the crotch shot had robbed him of all strength. She bent and tore the pistol from his holster, stepped back, and aimed the weapon at him as the outer door fell shut. “Stay on the floor. Take off your pants.”
Shocked pale, wheezing in pain, he needed to hear her make the demand again before he understood, but he didn’t scheme to delay.