by Dean Koontz
Jack said, “The cadaver, the tissue samples, the autopsy video—all gone.”
“What about the autopsy report and photos?” Michael asked. “Did you file them under ‘Munster, Herman’ like I suggested?”
“Yeah. They found them, took them.”
“They thought to look under ‘Munster, Herman’?” Michael asked in disbelief. “Since when do grave robbers double as trivia mavens?”
“Judging by the mess in the file room,” Jack said, “I think they just tore through all the drawers till they got what they wanted. We could have filed it under ‘Bell, Tinker,’ and they would have found it. Anyway, they weren’t grave robbers. They didn’t dig Allwine out of the ground. They took him from a morgue drawer.”
“So they’re bodysnatchers,” Michael said. “Getting the term right doesn’t change the fact that your ass is in a sling, Jack.”
“It feels like a barbed-wire thong,” Jack said. “Losing evidence in a capital case? Man, there goes the pension.”
Trying to make sense of the situation, Carson said, “Did the city cut your security budget or what?”
Jack shook his head. “We’re as tight as a prison here. It has to be an inside job.”
Simultaneously, Carson and Michael looked at Luke, who sat on a stool in a corner.
“Hey,” he said, “I never stole a dime in my life, let alone a dead guy.”
“Not Luke,” Jack Rogers assured them. “He couldn’t have pulled it off. He’d have screwed up.”
Luke winced. “Thanks, I guess.”
“Luke and I were here for a while after you two left, but not all night. We hit a wall, needed sleep. Because I’d sent home the night staff to keep the lid on this, the place was deserted.”
“You forget to lock up?” Carson asked.
Jack glowered at her. “No way.”
“Signs of forced entry?”
“None. They must’ve had keys.”
“Somebody knew what you’d find in Allwine,” she said, “because maybe he’s not unique. Maybe there’re others like him.”
“Don’t go off in the Twilight Zone again,” Michael half warned, half pleaded.
“At least one other,” she said. “The friend he went to funerals with. Mr. Average Everything.”
Almost simultaneous with a knock, the door opened, and Frye, Jonathan Harker’s partner, entered. He looked surprised to see them.
“Why so glum?” he asked. “Did somebody die?”
Weariness and caffeine sharpened Carson’s edge. “What don’t you understand about ‘buzz off’?”
“Hey, I’m not here about your case. We’re on that liquor-store shooting.”
“Yeah? Is that right? Is that what you were doing yesterday at Allwine’s apartment—looking for clues in the liquor-store shooting?”
Frye pretended innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. O’Connor, you’re wound as tight as a golf ball’s guts. Get a man, relieve some tension.”
She wanted to shoot him accidentally.
As if reading her mind, Michael said, “A gun can always go off accidentally, but you’d have to explain why you drew it in the first place.”
CHAPTER 45
COMFORTABLE IN HER ROBE, ensconced in a wingback chair, Erika spent the night and the morning with no company but books, and even took her breakfast in the library.
Reading for pleasure, lingering over the prose, she nevertheless covered a hundred pages an hour. She was, after all, an Alpha-class member of the New Race, with superb language skills.
She read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and when she finished it, she did something that she had not done before in her weeks of life. She wept.
The story was about the power of love, the nobility of self-sacrifice, and the horrors of revolution in the name of political ideology, among other things.
Erika understood the concept of love and found it appealing, but she didn’t know if she would ever feel it. The New Race was supposed to value reason, to eschew emotion, to reject superstition.
She had heard Victor say that love was superstition. One of the Old Race, he’d made himself New. He claimed that perfect clarity of mind was a pleasure greater than any mere sentiment.
Nevertheless, Erika found herself intrigued by the concept of love and longed to experience it.
She found hope in the fact that she was capable of tears. Her built-in disposition toward reason at the expense of emotion had not prevented her from identifying with the tragic lawyer who, at the end of Dickens’s novel, went to the guillotine in place of another man.
The lawyer had sacrificed himself to ensure that the woman he loved would have happiness with the man she loved. That man was the one whose name the lawyer had assumed and in whose place he had been executed.
Even if Erika was capable of love, she would not be capable of self-sacrifice, for it violated the proscription against suicide that had been embedded in every member of the New Race. Therefore, she was in awe of this capacity in ordinary human beings.
As for revolution…A day would come when Victor would give the command, and the New Race living secretly among the Old would pour down upon humanity a storm of terror unprecedented in history.
She’d not been created to serve in the front lines of that war, only to be a wife to Victor. When the time came, she supposed that she would be as ruthless as her maker had created her to be.
If they knew what she was, ordinary humans would consider her a monster. Members of the Old Race weren’t her brothers and sisters.
Yet she admired much about them and, in truth, envied some of their gifts.
She suspected that it would be a mistake to let Victor know that her interest in the arts of the Old Race had evolved into admiration. In his view, they deserved only contempt. If she could not sustain that contempt, Erika Five could always be activated.
As noon drew near, when she was certain that the household staff had cleaned the master suite and made the bed, she went upstairs.
If the maids had found something extraordinary or just peculiar in the bedroom, if they had uncovered even a few rat droppings, she would have been told. Whatever had been in the bedroom the previous night must not be there now.
She prowled the suite anyway, listening for furtive sounds, looking behind furniture.
In the night, gripped by a surprising fear of the unknown, she had retreated. Fear, an important survival mechanism, had not been entirely denied to the New Race.
Superstition, on the other hand, was uncontestable proof of a weak mind. Victor had no tolerance for superstition. Those with weak minds would be recalled, terminated, replaced.
The most innocent-seeming superstition—such as a belief that ill fortune attended every Friday the thirteenth—could open a door in the mind to consideration of larger supernatural issues. The most essential purpose of Victor’s revolution was to complete the work of modernity and create a race of absolute materialists.
Erika searched the suite to quell the quasi-superstitious dread that had seized her the previous night and that still lingered. When she found nothing untoward, her confidence returned.
She enjoyed a long hot shower.
Members of the New Race, even Alphas like her, were encouraged to develop a keen appreciation for simple physical pleasures that could serve as an inoculation against emotions. Emotions themselves could be a form of pleasure, but also an antirevolutionary force.
Sex was among the approved pleasures, pure animal sex divorced from affection, from love. Sex between members of the New Race was also divorced from reproduction; they were engineered to be sterile.
Each new man and woman owed his or her existence to the direct action of Victor. The family was an antirevolutionary institution. Family fostered emotion.
Victor trusted no one but Victor to create life only for purely intellectual, solely rational reasons. Life from the lab will one day entirely replace life from the loins.
Shower completed,
Erika opened the door of the stall, fished a towel from the nearby rack, stepped onto the bath mat—and discovered that she’d had a visitor. The splash of water and the clouds of steam had masked the movements of the intruder.
On the mat lay a scalpel. Stainless steel. Sparkling.
The scalpel must be one of Victor’s. He owned collections of surgical instruments acquired at various times during his two-century crusade.
Victor, however, had not put this blade on her bath mat. Nor had any member of the household staff. Someone else had been here. Something else.
Steam swirled around her. Yet she shivered.
CHAPTER 46
FOLLOWING THEIR STOP at the morgue, Michael made a play for the car keys, but Carson as usual took the wheel.
“You drive too slow,” she told him.
“You drive too asleep.”
“I’m fine. I’m cool.”
“You’re both,” he agreed, “but you’re not fully awake.”
“Unconscious, I wouldn’t drive as slow as you.”
“Yeah, see, I don’t want to test that claim.”
“You sound like your father’s a safety engineer or something.”
“You know he’s a safety engineer,” Michael said.
“What’s a safety engineer do, anyway?”
“He engineers safety.”
“Life is inherently unsafe.”
“That’s why we need safety engineers.”
“You sound like probably your mother was obsessed with safe toys when you were growing up.”
“As you know perfectly well, she’s a product-safety analyst.”
“God, you must have had a boring childhood. No wonder you wanted to be a cop, get shot at, shoot back.”
Michael sighed. “None of this has anything to do with whether you’re fit to drive or not.”
“I am not only fit to drive,” Carson said, “I am God’s gift to Louisiana highways.”
“I hate it when you get like this.”
“I am what I am.”
“What you are, Popeye, is stubborn.”
“Look who’s talking—a guy who will never accept that a woman can drive better than he can.”
“This isn’t a gender thing, and you know it.”
“I’m female. You’re male. It’s a gender thing.”
“It’s a nut thing,” he said. “You’re nuts, I’m not, so I ought to drive. Carson, really, you need sleep.”
“I can sleep when I’m dead.”
The day’s agenda consisted of several interviews with friends of Elizabeth Lavenza, the floater without hands who had been found in the lagoon. After the second of these, in the bookstore where Lavenza had worked as a clerk, Carson had to admit that sleep deprivation interfered with her ability as an investigator.
Returning to the sedan, she said, “Okay, I gotta grab some sack time, but what’ll you do?”
“Go home, watch Die Hard.”
“You’ve watched it like fifty times.”
“It just gets better. Like Hamlet. Give me the car keys.”
She shook her head. “I’ll take you home.”
“You’ll drive me head-on into a bridge abutment.”
“If that’s what you want,” she said, getting behind the wheel.
In the passenger’s seat, he said, “You know what you are?”
“God’s gift to Louisiana highways.”
“Besides that. You’re a control freak.”
“That’s just a slacker’s term for someone who works hard and likes to do things right.”
“So I’m a slacker now?” he asked.
“I didn’t say that. All I’m saying, in a friendly way, is you’re using their vocabulary.”
“Don’t drive so fast.”
Carson accelerated. “How many times did your mother warn you not to run with scissors in your hand?”
“Like seven hundred thousand,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean you’re fit to drive.”
“God, you’re relentless.”
“You’re incorrigible.”
“Where’d you get that word? The dialogue in Die Hard isn’t that sophisticated.”
When Carson stopped at the curb in front of Michael’s apartment house, he hesitated to get out. “I’m worried about you driving home.”
“I’m like an old dray horse. I know the route in my bones.”
“If you were pulling the car, I wouldn’t worry, but you’re gonna drive it at warp speed.”
“I’ve got a gun, but you aren’t worried about that.”
“All right, all right. Drive. Go. But if you get behind a slow motorist, don’t shoot him.”
As she drove away, she saw him in the rearview mirror, watching her with concern.
The question wasn’t whether she had fallen in love with Michael Maddison. The question was how deeply, how irretrievably?
Not that love was a sucking slough from which a person needed to be retrieved, like a drowner from the wild surf, like an addict from addiction. She was all for love. She just wasn’t ready for love.
She had her career. She had Arnie. She had questions about her parents’ deaths. Her life didn’t have room for passion right now.
Maybe she’d be ready for passion when she was thirty-five. Or forty. Or ninety-four. But not now.
Besides, if she and Michael went to bed together, departmental regulations would necessitate a new partner for each of them.
She didn’t like that many other homicide detectives. The chances were that she’d be paired with a fathead. Furthermore, right now she didn’t have the time or patience to break in a new partner.
Not that she always obeyed departmental regulations. She wasn’t a by-the-book i-dotter and t-crosser.
But the rule against cops copulating with cops and then sharing an assignment struck Carson as common sense.
Not that she always deferred to her common sense. Sometimes you had to take reckless chances if you trusted your instinct and if you were human.
Otherwise you might as well leave the force and become a safety engineer.
As for being human, there was the fright figure in Allwine’s apartment, who claimed not to be human, unless he believed that being cobbled together from pieces of criminals and being brought to life by lightning was not a sufficient deviation from the usual dad-makes-mom-pregnant routine to deny him human status.
Either the monster—that’s what he called himself; she was not being politically incorrect—had been a figment of her imagination, in which case she was crazy, or he had been real, in which case maybe the whole world had gone crazy.
In the midst of this gruesome and impossible case, she couldn’t just unzip Michael’s fly and say, I know you’ve been dreaming about this. Romance was a delicate thing. It needed tender care to grow and mature into something wonderful. Right now she didn’t have time for an orgasm, let alone for romance.
If she and Michael could have something meaningful together, she didn’t want to ruin it by rushing into bed, especially not at a time when the pressure of work was half crushing her.
And that indicated how deeply and irretrievably she loved him. She was in the water over her head.
She drove all the way home without killing herself or anyone else. If she had been as awake and clearheaded as she claimed to be, she wouldn’t have taken such goofy pride in this accomplishment.
Between the car and the house, the sunlight seemed bright enough to blind her. Even in her bedroom, daylight at the windows stung her bloodshot eyes and made her wince.
She shut the blinds. She closed the drapes. She considered painting the room black, but decided that would be going too far.
Fully clothed, she fell into bed and was asleep before the pillows finished compressing under her head.
CHAPTER 47
THE FOURTH TIME that Roy Pribeaux opened the freezer to see if Candace was still there, she was still there, so he decided to rule out the possibility that he might be delusional.
&nb
sp; He had not taken his car the previous night. He lived within strolling distance of the Quarter. They had walked everywhere.
Yet he could not have carried her all the way from the levee to his loft. Although he was a strong man and getting stronger by the day, she was a heavy person.
Besides, you couldn’t carry an eyeless corpse around the heart of New Orleans without drawing comment and suspicion. Not even New Orleans.
He didn’t own a wheelbarrow. Anyway, that wouldn’t have been a practical solution.
He poured another glass of apple juice to accompany what remained of the muffin.
The only credible explanation for Candace’s surprise appearance was that someone had brought her here from the levee and stowed her in his food freezer. The same person had put the three plastic containers, with organs, in the other freezer, the love locker.
This meant that someone knew Roy had killed Candace.
Indeed, that someone must have watched him kill her.
“Spooky,” he whispered.
He had not been aware of being followed. If someone had been dogging him, watching him romance Candace, the guy had been a master of surveillance, nearly as ephemeral as a ghost.
Not just someone. Not just anyone. Considering the human organs in the three tacky containers with ugly green lids, the perpetrator could be none other than the copycat killer.
Roy’s work had inspired an imitator. The imitator had by these actions said, Hi there. Can we be friends? Why don’t we combine our collections?
Although Roy was flattered, as any artist might be flattered by the admiration of another artist, he didn’t like this development. He didn’t like it at all.
For one thing, this organ-obsessed individual was a burrower whose fascination with internals was gross and unsophisticated. He wasn’t of Roy’s caliber.
Besides, Roy didn’t need or want the admiration of anyone. He was sufficient unto himself—until the perfect woman of his destiny entered his life.
He wondered when the copycat had visited. Candace had donated her eyes only a little more than twelve hours before he had found her in his freezer. The intruder would have had only two opportunities to bring her to the loft.