by Dean Koontz
She got to her feet.
He held the knife on her.
They went into the bedroom.
Hilary was not much of a drinker, but she was glad that she had a glass of good whiskey as she sat on the couch in Joshua Rhinehart’s office and listened to the attorney’s story. He told her and Tony about the missing funds in San Francisco, about the dead ringer who had left the bizarre letter in the safe-deposit box—and about his own growing uncertainty as to the identity of the dead man in Bruno Frye’s grave.
“Are you going to exhume the body?” Tony asked.
“Not yet,” Joshua said. “There are a couple of things I’ve got to look into first. If they check out, I might get enough answers so that it’s not really necessary to open the grave.”
He told them about Rita Yancy in Hollister and about Dr. Nicholas Rudge in San Francisco, and he reconstructed his recent conversation with Latham Hawthorne.
In spite of the warm room and the heat of the whiskey, Hilary was chilled to the bone. “This Hawthorne sounds as if he belongs in an institution himself.”
Joshua sighed. “Sometimes I think if we put all the crazies into institutions, there’d hardly be anyone left on the outside.”
Tony leaned forward on the couch. “Do you believe that Hawthorne really didn’t know about the look-alike?”
“Yes,” Joshua said. “Curiously enough, I do believe him. He may be something of a nut about Satanism, and he may not be particularly moral in some areas, and he might even be somewhat dangerous, but he didn’t strike me as a dissembler. Strange as it might seem, I think he’s probably a generally truthful man in most matters, and I can’t see that there’s anything more to be learned from him. Perhaps Dr. Rudge or Rita Yancy will know something of more value. But enough of that. Now let me hear from the two of you. What’s happened? What’s brought you all the way to St. Helena?”
Hilary and Tony took turns recounting the events of the past few days.
When they finished, Joshua stared at Hilary for a moment, then shook his head and said, “You’ve got a hell of a lot of courage, young lady.”
“Not me,” she said. “I’m a coward. I’m scared to death. I’ve been scared to death for days.”
“Being scared doesn’t mean you’re a coward,” Joshua said. “All bravery is based on fear. Both the coward and the hero act out of terror and necessity. The only difference between them is simply that the coward succumbs to his fear while the person with courage triumphs in spite of it. If you were a coward, you would have run away for a month-long holiday in Europe or Hawaii or some such place, and you’d have counted on time to solve the Frye riddle. But you’ve come here, to Bruno’s hometown, where you might well expect to be in even more danger than you were in Los Angeles. I don’t admire much in this world, but I do admire your spunk.”
Hilary was blushing. She looked at Tony, then down at her glass of whiskey. “If I was brave,” she said, “I’d stay in the city and set up a trap for him, using myself for bait. I’m not really in much danger here. After all, he’s busy looking for me down in L.A. And there’s no way that he can find out where I’ve gone.”
The bedroom.
From the bed Sally watched him with alert and fear-filled eyes.
He walked around the room, looking in drawers. Then he came back to her.
Her throat was slender and taut. The bead of blood had dribbled down the graceful arc of flesh to her collarbone.
She saw him looking at the blood, and she reached up with one hand, touched it, stared at her stained fingers.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s only a scratch.”
Sally’s bedroom, at the rear of the neat little bungalow, was decorated entirely in earth tones. Three walls were painted beige; the fourth was covered with burlap wallpaper. The carpet was chocolate brown. The bedspread and the matching drapes were a coffee and cream abstract pattern, restful swirls of natural shades that soothed the eye. The highly polished mahogany furniture gleamed where it was touched by the soft, shaded, amber glow that came from one of the two copper-plated bedside lamps that stood on the nightstands.
She lay on the bed, on her back, legs together, arms at her sides, hands fisted. She was still wearing her white uniform; it was pulled down demurely to her knees. Her long chestnut-brown hair was spread out like a fan around her head. She was quite pretty.
Bruno sat on the edge of the bed beside her. “Where is Katherine?”
She blinked. Tears slid out of the corners of her eyes. She was weeping, but silently, afraid to shriek and wail and groan, afraid that the slightest sound would cause him to stab her.
He repeated the question: “Where is Katherine?”
“I told you, I don’t know anyone named Katherine,” she said. Her speech was halting, tremulous; each word required a separate struggle. Her sensual lower lip quivered as she spoke.
“You know who I mean,” he said sharply. “Don’t play games with me. She calls herself Hilary Thomas now.”
“Please. Please . . . let me go.”
He held the knife up to her right eye, the point directed at the widening pupil. “Where is Hilary Thomas?”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said shakily. “Look, mister, there’s some sort of mix-up. A mistake. You’re making a big mistake.”
“You want to lose your eye?”
Sweat popped out along her hairline.
“You want to be half blind?” he asked.
“I don’t know where she is,” Sally said miserably.
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying. I swear I’m not.”
He stared at her for a few seconds.
By now there was sweat on her upper lip, too, tiny dots of moisture.
He took the knife away from her eye.
She was visibly relieved.
He surprised her. He slapped her face with his other hand, hit her so hard that her teeth clacked together and her eyes rolled back in her head.
“Bitch.”
There were a lot of tears now. She made soft, mewling sounds and shrank back from him.
“You must know where she is,” he said. “She hired you.”
“We work for her regularly. She just called in and asked for a special clean-up. She didn’t say where she was.”
“Was she at the house when you got there?”
“No.”
“Was anyone at the house when you got there?”
“No.”
“Then how’d you get in?”
“Huh?”
“Who gave you the key?”
“Oh. Oh, yeah,” she said, brightening a bit as she saw a way out. “Her agent. A literary agent. We had to stop at his office first to get the key.”
“Where’s that?”
“Beverly Hills. You should go talk to her agent if you want to know where she is. That’s who you should see. He’ll know where you can find her.”
“What’s his name?”
She hesitated. “A funny name. I saw it written down . . . but I’m not sure I remember it exactly. . . .”
He held the knife up to her eye again.
“Topelis,” she said.
“Spell it for me.”
She did. “I don’t know where Miss Thomas is. But that Mr. Topelis will know. He’ll know for sure.”
He took the knife away from her eye.
She had been rigid. She sagged a bit.
He stared down at her. Something stirred in the back of his mind, a memory, then an awful realization.
“Your hair,” he said. “You’ve got dark hair. And your eyes. They’re so dark.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked worriedly, suddenly sensing that she was not safe yet.
“You’ve got the same hair and eyes, the same complexion that she had,” Frye said.
“I don’t understand, I don’t know what’s happening here. You’re scaring me.”
“Did you think you could trick me?” He was grinning at her, pleased with himself for n
ot being fooled by her clever ruse.
He knew. He knew.
“You figured I’d go off to see this Topelis,” Bruno said, “and then you would have a chance to slip away.”
“Topelis knows where she is. He knows. I don’t. I really don’t know anything.”
“I know where she is now,” Bruno said.
“If you know, then you can just let me go.”
He laughed. “You changed bodies, didn’t you?”
She stared at him. “What?”
“Somehow you got out of the Thomas woman and took control of this girl, didn’t you?”
She wasn’t crying any more. Her fear was burning so very brightly that it had seared away her tears.
The bitch.
The rotten bitch.
“Did you really think you could fool me?” he asked. He laughed again, delighted. “After everything you’ve done to me, how could you think I wouldn’t recognize you?”
Terror reverberated in her voice. “I haven’t done anything to you. You’re not making sense. Oh, Jesus. Oh, my God, my God. What do you want from me?”
Bruno leaned toward her, put his face close to hers. He peered into her eyes and said, “You’re in there, aren’t you? You’re in there, deep down in there, hiding from me, aren’t you? Aren’t you, Mother? I see you, Mother. I see you in there.”
A few fat droplets of rain splattered on the mullioned window in Joshua Rhinehart’s office.
The night wind moaned.
“I still don’t understand why Frye chose me,” Hilary said. “When I came up here to do research for that screenplay, he was friendly. He answered all my questions about the wine industry. We spent two or three hours together, and I never had a hint that he was anything but an ordinary businessman. Then a few weeks later, he shows up at my house with a knife. And according to that letter in the safe-deposit box, he thinks I’m his mother in a new body. Why me?”
Joshua shifted in his chair. “I’ve been looking at you and thinking. . . .”
“What?”
“Maybe he chose you because . . . well, you look just a bit like Katherine.”
“You don’t mean we’ve got another look-alike on our hands,” Tony said.
“No,” Joshua said. “The resemblance is only slight.”
“Good,” Tony said. “Another dead ringer would be too much for me to deal with.”
Joshua got up, went to Hilary, put one hand under her chin, lifted her face, turned it left, then right. “The hair, the eyes, the dusty complexion,” he said thoughtfully. “Yes, all of that’s similar. And there are other things about your face that remind me vaguely of Katherine, little things, so minor that I can’t really put my finger on them. It’s only a passing resemblance. And she wasn’t as attractive as you are.”
As Joshua took his hand away from her chin, Hilary got up and walked to the attorney’s desk. Mulling over what she had learned in the past hour, she stared down at the neatly arranged items on the desk: blotter, stapler, letter opener, paperweight.
“Is something wrong?” Tony asked.
The wind worked up into a brief squall. Another burst of raindrops snapped against the window.
She turned around, faced the men. “Let me summarize the situation. Let me see if I’ve got this straight.”
“I don’t think any of us has it straight,” Joshua said, returning to his chair. “The whole damned tale is too twisted to be arranged in a nice straight line.”
“That’s what I’m leading up to,” she said. “I think maybe I just found another twist.”
“Go ahead,” Tony said.
“So far as we can tell,” Hilary said, “shortly after his mother’s death, Bruno got the idea that she had come back from the grave. For nearly five years, he has been buying books about the living dead from Latham Hawthorne. For five years, he’s been living in fear of Katherine. Finally, when he saw me, he decided I was the new body she was using. But why did it take him so long?”
“I’m not sure I follow,” Joshua said.
“Why did he take five years to fixate on someone, five long years to select a flesh and blood target for his fears?”
Joshua shrugged. “He’s a madman. We can’t expect his reasoning to be logical and decipherable.”
But Tony was sensitive to the implications of her question. He slid forward on the couch, frowning. “I think I know what you’re going to say,” he told her. “My God, it gives me goose pimples.”
Joshua looked from one to the other and said, “I must be getting slow-witted in my declining years. Will someone explain things to this old codger?”
“Maybe I’m not the first woman he’s thought was his mother,” Hilary said. “Maybe he killed the others before he came after me.”
Joshua gaped at her. “Impossible!”
“Why?”
“We’d have known if he’d been running around killing women for the past five years. He’d have been caught at it!”
“Not necessarily,” Tony said. “Homicidal maniacs are often very careful, very clever people. Some of them make meticulous plans—and yet have an uncanny ability to take the right risks when something unexpected throws the plans off the rails. They aren’t always easy to catch.”
Joshua pushed one hand through his mane of snow-white hair. “But if Bruno killed other women—where are their bodies?”
“Not in St. Helena,” Hilary said. “He may have been schizophrenic, but the respectable, Dr. Jekyll-half of his personality was firmly in control when he was around people who knew him. He almost certainly would have gone out of town to kill. Out of the valley.”
“San Francisco,” Tony said. “He apparently went there regularly.”
“Any town in the northern part of the state,” Hilary said. “Any place far enough away from the Napa Valley for him to be anonymous.”
“Now wait,” Joshua said. “Wait a minute. Even if he went somewhere else and found women who bore a vague resemblance to Katherine, even if he killed them in other towns—he’d still have to leave bodies behind. There would have been similarities in the way he murdered them, links that the authorities would have noticed. They’d be looking for a modern-day Jack the Ripper. We’d have heard all about it on the news.”
“If the murders were spread over five years and over a lot of towns in several counties, the police probably wouldn’t make any connections between them,” Tony said. “This is a large state. Hundreds of thousands of square miles. There are hundreds upon hundreds of police organizations, and there’s seldom as much information-sharing among them as there ought to be. In fact, there’s only one sure-fire way for them to recognize connections between several random killings—and that’s if at least two, and preferably three, of the murders take place in a relatively short span of time, within a single police jurisdiction, one county or one city.”
Hilary walked away from the desk, returned to the couch. “So it’s possible,” she said, feeling as cold as the October wind sounded. “It’s possible that he’s been slaughtering women—two, six, ten, fifteen, maybe more—during the past five years, and I’m the first one who ever gave him any trouble.”
“It’s not only possible, but probable,” Tony said. “I’d say we can count on it.” The Xerox of the letter that had been found in the safe-deposit box was on the coffee table in front of him; he picked it up and read the first sentence aloud.“‘My mother, Katherine Anne Frye, died five years ago, but she keeps coming back to life in new bodies.’”
“Bodies,” Hilary said.
“That’s the key word,” Tony said. “Not body, singular. Bodies, plural. From that, I think we can infer that he killed her several times and that he thought she came back from the grave more than once.”
Joshua’s face was ash-gray. “But if you’re right . . . I’ve been . . . all of us in St. Helena have been living beside the most evil, vicious sort of monster. And we weren’t even aware of it!”
Tony looked grim.“‘The Beast of Hell walks am
ong us in the clothes of a common man.’”
“What’s that from?” Joshua asked.
“I’ve got a dustbin mind,” Tony said. “Very little gets thrown away, whether I want to hold on to it or not. I remember the quotation from my Catholic catechism classes a long time ago. It’s from the writings of one of the saints, but I don’t recall which one. ‘The Beast of Hell walks among us in the clothes of a common man. If the demon should reveal its true face to you at a time when you have turned away from Christ, then you will be without protection, and it will gleefully devour your heart and rend you limb from limb and carry your immortal soul into the yawning pit.’ ”
“You sound like Latham Hawthorne,” Joshua said.
Outside, the wind shrieked.
Frye put the knife on the nightstand, well out of Sally’s reach. Then he grabbed the lapels of her uniform dress and tore the garment open. Buttons popped.
She was paralyzed by terror. She did not resist him; she could not.
He grinned at her and said, “Now. Now, Mother. Now, I get even.”
He ripped the dress all the way down the front and flung it open. She was revealed in bra and panties and pantyhose, a slim, pretty body. He clutched the cups of her bra and jerked them down. The straps bit into her skin and then broke. Fabric tore. Elastic snapped.
Her breasts were large for her size and bone structure, round and full, with very dark, pebbly nipples. He squeezed them roughly.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!” In his deep, gravelly voice, that one word acquired the eerie quality of a sinister chant, a Satanic litany.
He wrenched off her shoes, first the right, then the left, and threw them aside. One of them struck the mirror above the dresser and shattered it.
The sound of falling glass roused the woman from her shock-induced catatonic trance, and she tried to pull away from him, but fear sapped her strength; she writhed and fluttered ineffectually against him.
He held her without difficulty, slapped her twice with such force that her mouth sagged open and her eyes swam. A fine thread of blood unraveled from the corner of her mouth, ran down her chin.
“You rotten bitch!” he said, furious. “No sex, huh? I can’t have any sex, you said. No sex ever, you said. Can’t risk some woman finding out what I am, you said. Well, you already know what I am, Mother. You already know my secret, I don’t have to hide anything from you, Mother. You know I’m different from other men. You know my prick isn’t like theirs. You know who my father was. You know. You know that my prick is like his. I don’t have to hide it from you, Mother. I’m going to shove it into you, Mother. All the way up into you. You hear me? Do you?”