by Dean Koontz
damage he caused or whom he destroyed in the process.
On a tree-lined residential street, he pulled to the curb. He switched off the engine and got out of the car. He might not have much time before Blick and the others caught up with him.
The queen palms hung dead-limp and whisperless in the heat, which currently seemed to be as effective an embalming medium as a block of fly-trapping amber.
Joe looked under the hood first, but the transponder wasn’t there. He squatted in front of the car and felt along the underside of the bumper. Nothing.
The clatter of a helicopter swelled in the distance, rapidly growing louder.
Groping blindly inside the front wheel well on the passenger side and then along the rocker panel, Joe found only road dirt and grease. Nothing was concealed inside the rear wheel well, either.
The chopper shot out of the north, passing directly overhead at extremely low altitude, no more than fifty feet above the houses. The long graceful fronds of the queen palms shook and whipped in the downdraft.
Joe looked up, alarmed, wondering if the crew of the chopper was looking for him, but his fear was pure paranoia and unjustified. Southbound, the aircraft roared away across the neighborhood without a pause.
He hadn’t seen any police seal, any lettering or insignia.
The palms shuddered, shivered, then trembled into stillness once more.
Groping again, Joe found the transponder expansion-clamped to the energy absorber behind the Honda’s rear bumper. With batteries, the entire package was the size of a pack of cigarettes. The signal that it sent was inaudible.
It looked harmless.
He placed the device on the pavement, intending to hammer it to pieces with his tire iron. When a gardener’s truck approached along the street, hauling a fragrant load of shrub prunings and burlap-bundled grass, he decided to toss the still-functioning transponder among the clippings.
Maybe the bastards would waste some time and manpower following the truck to the dump.
In the car again, on the move, he spotted the helicopter a few miles to the south. It was flying in tight circles. Then hovering. Then flying in circles again.
His fear of it had not been groundless. The craft was either over the cemetery or, more likely, above the desert scrub north of the Griffith Observatory, searching for the fugitive woman.
Their resources were impressive.
TWO
SEARCHING BEHAVIOR
5
The Los Angeles Times booked more advertising than any newspaper in the United States, churning out fortunes for its owners even in an age when most print media were in decline. It was quartered downtown, in an entire high-rise, which it owned and which covered one city block.
Strictly speaking, the Los Angeles Post was not even in Los Angeles. It occupied an aging four-story building in Sun Valley, near the Burbank Airport, within the metroplex but not within the L.A. city limits.
Instead of a multiple-level underground garage, the Post provided an open lot surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with spirals of razor wire. Rather than a uniformed attendant with a name tag and a welcoming smile, a sullen young man, about nineteen, watched over the ungated entrance from a folding chair under a dirty café umbrella emblazoned with the Cinzano logo. He was listening to rap music on a radio. Head shaved, left nostril pierced by a gold ring, fingernails painted black, dressed in baggy black jeans with one carefully torn knee and a loose black T-shirt with the words FEAR NADA in red across his chest, he looked as if he were assessing the parts value of each arriving car to determine which would bring the most cash if stolen and delivered to a chop shop. In fact, he was checking for an employee sticker on the windshield, ready to direct visitors to on-street parking.
The stickers were replaced every two years, and Joe’s was still valid. Two months after the fall of Flight 353, he had tendered his resignation, but his editor, Caesar Santos, had refused to accept it and had put him on an unpaid leave of absence, guaranteeing him a job when he was ready to return.
He was not ready. He would never be ready. But right now he needed to use the newspaper’s computers and connections.
No money had been spent on the reception lounge: institutional-beige paint, steel chairs with blue vinyl pads, a steel-legged coffee table with a faux-granite Formica top, and two copies of that day’s edition of the Post.
On the walls were simple framed black-and-white photographs by Bill Hannett, the paper’s legendary prize-winning press photographer. Shots of riots, a city in flames, grinning looters running in the streets. Earthquake-cracked avenues, buildings in rubble. A young Hispanic woman jumping to her death from the sixth floor of a burning building. A brooding sky and a Pacific-facing mansion teetering on the edge of ruin on a rain-soaked, sliding hillside. In general, no journalistic enterprise, whether electronic or print, built its reputation or revenues on good news.
Behind the reception counter was Dewey Beemis, the combination receptionist and security guard, who had worked at the Post for over twenty years, since an insanely egotistical billionaire had founded it with the naive and hopeless intention of toppling the politically connected Times from its perch of power and prestige. Originally the paper had been quartered in a new building in Century City, with its public spaces conceived and furnished by the uberdesigner Steven Chase, at which time Dewey had been only one of several guards and not a receptionist. Even a megalomaniacal billionaire, determined to prevent the dehydration of his pride, grows weary of pouring away money with the tap open wide. Thus the grand offices were traded for more humble space in the valley. The staff had been pared down, and Dewey had hung on by virtue of being the only six-feet-four, bull-necked, plank-shouldered security guard who could type eighty words a minute and claim awesome computer skills.
With the passage of time, the Post had begun to break even. The brilliant and visionary Mr. Chase subsequently designed numerous striking interiors, which were celebrated in Architectural Digest and elsewhere, and then died in spite of his genius and talent, just as the billionaire would one day die in spite of his vast fortune, just as Dewey Beemis would die in spite of his commendable variety of skills and his infectious smile.
“Joe!” Dewey said, grinning, rising from his chair, a bearish presence, extending his big hand across the counter.
Joe shook hands. “How’re you doing, Dewey?”
“Carver and Martin both graduated summa cum laude from UCLA in June, one going to law school now, the other medical,” Dewey gushed, as if this news were only hours old and about to hit the front page of the next day’s Post. Unlike the billionaire who employed him, Dewey’s pride was not in his own accomplishments but in those of his children. “My Julie, she finished her second year on scholarship at Yale with a three-point-eight average, and this fall she takes over as editor of the student literary magazine, wants to be a novelist like this Annie Proulx she’s always reading over and over again—”
With the sudden memory of Flight 353 passing through his eyes as obviously as a dimming cloud across a bright moon, Dewey silenced himself, ashamed to have been boasting about his sons and daughter to a man whose children were lost forever.
“How’s Lena?” Joe asked, inquiring about Dewey’s wife.
“She’s good…she’s okay, yeah, doing okay.” Dewey smiled and nodded to cover his uneasiness, editing his natural enthusiasm for his family.
Joe hated this awkwardness in his friends, their pity. Even after an entire year, here it was. This was one reason he avoided everyone from his old life. The pity in their eyes was genuine compassion, but to Joe, although he knew that he was being unfair, they also seemed to be passing a sad judgment on him for being unable to put his life back together.
“I need to go upstairs, Dewey, put in a little time, do some research, if that’s okay.”
Dewey’s expression brightened. “You coming back, Joe?”
“Maybe,” Joe lied.
“Back on staff?”
; “Thinking about it.”
“Mr. Santos would love to hear that.”
“Is he here today?”
“No. On vacation, actually, fishing up in Vancouver.”
Relieved that he wouldn’t have to lie to Caesar about his true motives, Joe said, “There’s just something I’ve gotten interested in, a quirky human interest story, not my usual thing. Thought I’d come do some background.”
“Mr. Santos would want you to feel like you’re home. You go on up.”
“Thanks, Dewey.”
Joe pushed through a swinging door into a long hallway with a worn and stained green carpet, age-mottled paint, and a discolored acoustic-tile ceiling. Following the abandonment of the fat-city trappings that had characterized the Post’s years in Century City, the preferred image was guerrilla journalism, hardscrabble but righteous.
To the left was an elevator alcove. The doors at both shafts were scraped and dented.
The ground floor—largely given over to file rooms, clerical offices, classified ad sales, and the circulation department—was full of Saturday silence. In the quiet, Joe felt like an intruder. He imagined that anyone he encountered would perceive at once that he had returned under false pretenses.
While he was waiting for an elevator to open, he was surprised by Dewey, who had hurried from the reception lounge to give him a sealed white envelope. “Almost forgot this. Lady came by few days ago, said she had some information on a story just right for you.”
“What story?”
“She didn’t say. Just that you’d understand this.”
Joe accepted the envelope as the elevator doors opened.
Dewey said, “Told her you hadn’t worked here ten months, and she wanted your phone number. Of course I said I couldn’t give it out. Or your address.”
Stepping into the elevator, Joe said, “Thanks, Dewey.”
“Told her I’d send it on or call you about it. Then I discovered you moved and got a new phone, unlisted, and we didn’t have it.”
“Can’t be important,” Joe assured him, indicating the envelope. After all, he was not actually returning to journalism.
As the elevator doors started to close, Dewey blocked them. Frowning, he said, “Wasn’t just personnel records not up to speed with you, Joe. Nobody here, none of your friends, knew how to reach you.”
“I know.”
Dewey hesitated before he said, “You’ve been way down, huh?”
“Pretty far,” Joe acknowledged. “But I’m climbing back up.”
“Friends can hold the ladder steady, make it easier.”
Touched, Joe nodded.
“Just remember,” Dewey said.
“Thanks.”
Dewey stepped back, and the doors closed.
The elevator rose, taking Joe with it.
The third floor was largely devoted to the newsroom, which had been subdivided into a maze of somewhat claustrophobic modular workstations, so that the entire space could not be seen at once. Every workstation had a computer, telephone, ergonomic chair, and other fundamentals of the trade.
This was very similar to the much larger newsroom at the Times. The only differences were that the furniture and the reconfigurable walls at the Times were newer and more stylish than those at the Post, the environment there was no doubt purged of the asbestos and formaldehyde that lent the air here its special astringent quality, and even on a Saturday afternoon the Times would be busier per square foot of floor space than the Post was now.
Twice over the years, Joe had been offered a job at the Times, but he had declined. Although the Gray Lady, as the competition was known in some circles, was a great newspaper, it was also the ad-fat voice of the status quo. He believed he’d be allowed and encouraged to do better and more aggressive reporting at the Post, which was like an asylum at times, but also heavy on ballsy attitude and gonzo style, with a reputation for never treating a politician’s handout as real news and for assuming that every public official was either corrupt or incompetent, sex crazed or power mad.
A few years ago, after the Northridge earthquake, seismologists had discovered unsuspected links between a fault that ran under the heart of L.A. and one that lay beneath a series of communities in the San Fernando Valley. A joke swept the newsroom regarding what losses the city would suffer if one temblor destroyed the Times downtown and the Post in Sun Valley. Without the Post, according to the joke, Angelenos wouldn’t know which politicians and other public servants were stealing them blind, accepting bribes from known drug dealers, and having sex with animals. The greater tragedy, however, would be the loss of the six-pound Sunday edition of the Times, without which no one would know what stores were conducting sales.
If the Post was as obstinate and relentless as a rat terrier crazed by the scent of rodents—which it was—it was redeemed, for Joe, by the nonpartisan nature of its fury. Furthermore, a high percentage of its targets were at least as corrupt as it wanted to believe they were.
Also, Michelle had been a featured columnist and editorial writer for the Post. He met her here, courted her here, and enjoyed their shared sense of being part of an underdog enterprise. She had carried their two babies in her belly through so many days of work in this place.
Now he found this building haunted by memories of her. In the unlikely event that he could eventually regain emotional stability and con himself into believing life had a purpose worth the struggle, the face of that one dear ghost would rock him every time he saw it. He would never be able to work at the Post again.
He went directly to his former workstation in the Metro section, grateful that no old friends saw him. His place had been assigned to Randy Colway, a good man, who wouldn’t feel invaded if he found Joe in his chair.
Tacked to the noteboard were photographs of Randy’s wife, their nine-year-old son, Ben, and six-year-old Lisbeth. Joe looked at them for a long moment—and then not again.
After switching on the computer, he reached into his pocket and withdrew the Department of Motor Vehicles envelope that he’d filched from the glove box of the white van at the cemetery. It contained the validated registration card. To his surprise, the registered owner wasn’t a government body or a law-enforcement agency; it was something called Medsped, Inc.
He had not been expecting a corporate operation, for God’s sake. Wallace Blick and his trigger-happy associates in the Hawaiian shirts didn’t seem entirely like cops or federal agents, but they smelled a lot more like the law than they did like any corporate executives Joe had ever encountered.
Next he accessed the Post’s vast file of digitized back issues. Included was every word of every edition the newspaper had published since its inception—minus only the cartoons, horoscopes, crossword puzzles, and the like. Photographs were included.
He initiated a search for Medsped and found six mentions. They were small items from the business pages. He read them complete.
Medsped, a New Jersey corporation, had begun as an air ambulance service in several major cities. Later, it had expanded to specialize in the nationwide express delivery of emergency medical supplies, refrigerated or otherwise delicately preserved blood and tissue samples, as well as expensive and frangible scientific instruments. The company even undertook to carry samples of highly contagious bacteria and viruses between cooperating research laboratories in both the public and the military sectors. For these tasks, it maintained a modest fleet of aircraft and helicopters.
Helicopters.
And unmarked white vans?
Eight years ago, Medsped had been bought by Teknologik, Inc., a Delaware corporation with a score of wholly owned subsidiaries in the medical and computer industry. Its computer-related holdings were all companies developing products, mostly software, for the medical and medical-research communities.
When Joe ran a search on Teknologik, he was rewarded with forty-one stories, mostly from the business pages. The first two articles were so dry, however, so full of investment and accounting jargon
, that the reward quickly began to seem like punishment.
He ordered copies of the four longest articles for review later.
While those were sliding into the printer tray, he asked for a list of stories the Post had published about the crash of Nationwide Flight 353. A series of headlines, with accompanying dates, appeared on the screen.
Joe had to steel himself to scan this story file. He sat for a minute or two with his eyes closed, breathing deeply, trying to conjure, in his mind’s eye, an image of surf breaking on the beach at Santa Monica.
Finally, with teeth clenched so tightly that his jaw muscles twitched continuously, he called up story after story, scanning the contents. He wanted the one that, as a sidebar, would provide him with a complete passenger manifest.
He skipped quickly past photographs of the crash scene, which revealed debris chopped into such small chunks and tangled in such surreal shapes that the baffled eye could not begin to reconstruct the aircraft from its ruins. In the bleak dawn caught by these pictures, through the gray drizzle that had begun to fall about two hours after the disaster, National Transportation Safety Board investigators in biologically secure bodysuits with visored hoods prowled the blasted meadow. Looming in the background were scorched trees, gnarled black limbs clawing at the low sky.
He searched for and found the name of the NTSB Go-Team leader in charge of the investigation—Barbara Christman—and the fourteen specialists working under her.
A couple of the articles included photos of some of the crew and passengers. Not all of the three hundred and thirty souls aboard were pictured. The tendency was to focus on those victims who were Southern Californians returning home rather than on Easterners who had been coming to visit. Being part of the Post family, Michelle and the girls were prominently featured.
Eight months ago, upon moving into the apartment, in reaction to a morbid and obsessive preoccupation with family albums and loose snapshots, Joe had packed all the photos in a large cardboard box, reasoning that rubbing a wound retarded healing. He had taped the box shut and put it at the back of his only closet.
Now, in the course of his scanning, when their faces appeared on the screen, he was unable to breathe, though he had thought he would be prepared. Michelle’s publicity shot, taken by one of the Post’s staff photographers, captured her beauty but not her tenderness, not her intelligence, not her charm, not her laughter. A mere picture was so inadequate, but still it was Michelle. Still. Chrissie’s photo had been snapped at a Post Christmas party for children of the paper’s employees. She was caught in a grin, eyes shining. How they shone. And little Nina, who sometimes wanted it pronounced neen-ah and other times nine-ah, was smiling that slightly lopsided smile that seemed to say she knew magical secrets.
Her smile reminded Joe of a silly song he sometimes sang to her when he put her to bed. Before he realized what he was doing, he found his breath again and heard himself whispering the words: “Nine-ah, neen-ah, have you seen her? Neen-ah, nine-ah, no one finah.”
A breaking inside him threatened his self-control.
He clicked the mouse to get their images off the screen. But that didn’t take their faces out of his mind, clearer than he had seen them since packing their photos away.
Bending forward in the chair, covering his face, shuddering, he muffled his voice in his cold hands. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”
Surf breaking on a beach, now as before, tomorrow as today. Clocks and looms. Sunrises, sunsets, phases of the moon. Machines clicking, ticking. Eternal rhythms, meaningless motions.
The only sane response is indifference.
He lowered his hands from his face. Sat up straight again. Tried to focus on the computer screen.
He was concerned that he would draw attention to himself. If an old acquaintance looked into this three-walled cubicle to see what was wrong, Joe might have to explain what he was doing here, might even have to summon the strength to be sociable.
He found the passenger manifest for which he had been searching. The Post had saved him time and effort by listing separately those among the dead who had lived in Southern California. He printed out all their names, each of which was followed by the name of the town in which the deceased resided.
I’m not ready to talk to you yet, the photographer of graves had said to him, from which he had inferred that she would have things to tell him later.
Don’t despair. You’ll see, like the others.
See what? He had no idea.
What could she possibly tell him that would alleviate his despair? Nothing. Nothing.
…like the others. You’ll see, like the others.
What others?
Only one answer satisfied him: other people who had lost loved ones on Flight 353, who had been as desolate as he was, people to whom she had already spoken.
He wasn’t going to wait for her to return to him. With Wallace Blick and associates after her, she might not live long enough to pay him a visit and quench his curiosity.