by Dean Koontz
Lionel said, “Were you really in the Lucas house unofficially?”
“Yes.”
“What the hell? Why?”
John glanced at the hall beyond the open study door. He didn’t want to be overheard. “Let’s go outside.”
The air was cool, but the day chilled only in the shadows. They sat in the sun, on wrought-iron chairs, at a table on the terrace.
As succinctly as he had laid out his case for Nelson Burchard, John told Lionel about the Blackwood murders twenty years earlier, about the loss of his family.
Lionel did not respond with the cloying earnestness of Burchard. He knew that pity could be an insult. He said only “Shit,” and in that one vulgarity, he expressed genuine sympathy and a touching depth of friendship.
As John listed the uncanny similarities between the recent Lucas murders and the Valdane-family massacre two decades earlier, Lionel listened with interest. But when the discussion turned to the fact that three of the Sollenburgs had been shot, that twenty years later three of the Woburns were shot as well, and when John noted that in each instance the daughter was murdered last, Lionel blinked in confusion until he blinked himself into a frown.
“You think there’s some link between these cases?”
“They were thirty-three days apart, like back then. I warned Burchard—thirty-three days.”
“Thirty-three days could be coincidence.”
“It isn’t.”
The sky was pale, the sun a white instead of a yolk, as if a high, finely diffused pollution muted the natural colors.
Leaning forward, arms on the table, Lionel said, “What’re you trying to tell me? I don’t get it. Help me make the leap.”
Although he risked sounding like a man seeking a psychiatric-disability pension, John was desperate for an ally. “Thirty-three more days will put us at November seventh. Blackwood’s third family was the Paxtons. Mother, father, two sons, two daughters.”
“You mean this is somehow copycat stuff? Alton Blackwood’s crimes redone?”
A faint breeze quivered the scarlet leaves on the half-sered autumn grass, but neither the cascading boughs of the deodar cedar nor the rose brambles on the arbor stirred whatsoever.
“If a third family is murdered on November seventh, then the fourth will be on December tenth.”
Lionel shook his head. “There were two different killers. Billy Lucas, Andy Tane. They’re both dead.”
The glass top on the wrought-iron table reflected the faded sky, a hawk gliding in a narrowing gyre.
“And in the Sollenburg case,” Lionel continued, “in all those cases back then, a girl was raped and tortured.”
“Billy Lucas raped and tortured his sister, Celine.”
“But Davinia Woburn wasn’t.”
“Reese Salsetto was going to do the Woburn family. If Brenda hadn’t shot him, he would have shot her and the son. Then he would have done to the girl precisely what Alton Blackwood did to Sharon Sollenburg.”
“I’m still lost. You can’t seriously be saying Billy, Reese, and Andy conspired to re-create the Blackwood crimes?”
“No. They didn’t have to know one another if each of them had a secret partner and if that partner was the same in each instance.”
“But there’s no evidence of any perp but Billy in the Lucas house. And for sure, nobody but Andy Tane went out the window with that poor girl.”
“Nobody we could see,” John said.
Exasperated, Lionel leaned back in his chair. “Who are you, man, and what’ve you done with my plain-talking partner?”
Watching the circling hawk reflected in the table, John said, “I went up to the state hospital twice to see Billy Lucas.”
“Well, that’ll put a bee up Ken Sharp’s ass.”
“He knows. The first visit, Billy called me Johnny, though he’d been told only my last name.”
“We don’t need Sherlock to figure out that one.”
“That night he called me on an unlisted number he hadn’t been given. Using a phone they say he didn’t possess. He said something to me that was word for word something Blackwood said right before I killed him. Something I’ve never told anyone. Something only Alton Blackwood could know.”
For a long moment, Lionel was as silent as the pale sky and the white sun and the gliding hawk in the glass.
At last he said, “I don’t do X-Files cases, and neither do you. Come in from the Twilight Zone—okay?”
John looked up, met his eyes. “How do you explain something as weird as what Andy Tane did?”
“I don’t know yet, but I will eventually. I found a connection between Reese Salsetto and Andy. The answer is there. I just have to work it out.”
Surprised, John said, “What connection?”
“Salsetto was a comer, a pusher and booster and grifter and paper-hanger. You name a scam, he was working it. And he had a fixer list as long as King Kong’s dick—cops, all kinds of city officials. I found a ledger under the false bottom in his nightstand drawer. He recorded every bribe he paid—amount, date, time, place, to whom. In half the cases, when the payoff was made in a parking lot or a park or anywhere outside, Salsetto had someone on his team get a photo of the envelope being passed. If he ever needed to turn state’s evidence to save himself, he figured to have so much crap on so many people that a prosecutor wouldn’t just cut him a deal for no prison time, he’d adopt him and call him son. Andy Tane is on that list a lot, and so is his former partner, Vin Wasco. I think maybe somehow Salsetto’s sister Brenda and her husband were involved in something with Reese, and with Tane.”
“They weren’t like that.”
“Maybe they were. Maybe they were in something with Reese and Andy, and it went wrong in a big way. Reese lost his cool, which he had a habit of. Reese dead, Andy Tane sees his world falling apart, too, and he goes for revenge and a quick exit, something like that.”
John looked at the sky, and the hawk was gone. He had only seen it reflected in the table. He wondered if there had been a real hawk or only the reflection of one.
“I know it sounds good to you now,” John said, “but it won’t come together that way. The hinges aren’t where you think they are.”
“I’d rather spend my time looking for hinges than for a ghost or whatever it is you’re talking about.”
“If another family’s murdered on November seventh, what’ll we do then?”
“Keep looking for hinges. If your explanation is right, what could we do anyway?”
“Maybe nothing,” John acknowledged.
Lionel surveyed the big yard, lingered on the deodar cedar. He looked tired, not merely weary but worn down and prematurely aged by a life in Homicide.
When he looked at John again, he said, “Listen, man, that’s a hell of a thing you’ve been carrying with you all these years, your whole family killed. You shared it with anybody till now?”
“Nicky knows. She always has. Not the kids. Only Nicky until Burchard and you. But I didn’t go as far with Burchard as suggesting … that it’s Blackwood himself again. Do you have to tell him?”
Lionel shook his head. “No. But how much longer are you on leave?”
“About ten days.”
“Maybe you should extend it till you work this out for yourself. Till you get your head straight about it. You know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah. Maybe I’ll ask for another thirty days.”
Lionel started to slide his chair back from the table, but then he pulled it in again and leaned once more with his arms on the thick glass top. “I feel like I let you down.”
“You never have. You didn’t now.”
“Couldn’t be easy for you to say what you’re really thinking when you’re thinking something as far out as this.”
“I had to take a deep breath and swallow hard,” John admitted.
“See, the problem is, I remember all those old movies, they were old even when I was a kid, where something goes bump in the night, and it’s
not even something supernatural, but the black guy always says ‘Feets don’t fail me now,’ and does a fast shuffle for someplace safe. Used to embarrass the hell out of me when I saw that.”
“Me too.”
“So I won’t be what I can’t be.”
“Tell your mom I think she did an amazing job.”
“You mean, considering what she had to work with.”
John smiled. “It’s a flat-out miracle.”
As they rose from their chairs, a breeze sprang up. All across the yard, fallen leaves slid and tumbled over one another, adding to drifts of leaves against the rose arbor and against the fence between the yard and the wooded ravine. It was just a breeze.
41
AFTER THE MORNING LESSONS WITH THE KIDS, NICOLETTE retreated to her third-floor studio, intending to make significant progress on the painting in which Zach, Naomi, and Minette were prominently featured. She’d had an excellent night of dreamless sleep. She felt rested and buoyant. Yet when she returned to the unfinished canvas, she was as disturbed by it as she had been the previous evening. It still struck her as being about loss, despair, which was far from her intention.
She decided not to address the troubling canvas for a few days and instead to do some preliminary composition sketches for another picture. She moved the vase of yellow humility roses and the thermos of fortifying tea from the tall table by her easel to another tall table by the draftsman’s board.
More often than not, she worked in a silent studio. Art was not just images but also a kind of music in her mind, and sometimes real music could be a distraction from the inner melody.
That morning, however, she had watched the news while dressing for the day, had seen the terrible story about the rampaging cop and the murdered family, and had been unable to stop thinking about it. In the silent studio, the photo of Davinia Woburn, shown on TV, kept coalescing in Nicky’s mind like the visage of a ghost materializing from a cloud of ectoplasm. She programmed a few hours of Connie Dover CDs, haunting Celtic music to distract her mind from the haunting face of that tragic child.
In spite of the news and the disturbing painting of the kids, the mood of the house remained felicitous. As inexplicable as it had been persistent, the oppressive pall of recent days, which lifted the previous afternoon, was gone—until ten minutes past two o’clock.
As Nicky refined a third iteration of the preliminary sketch, the atmosphere in the house changed so distinctly and suddenly that she glanced at her watch as she might have done to mark the exact moment of a car crash in the street or the first note of a doomed airliner’s shrieking descent.
She started to get up from the draftsman’s table, as though some urgent situation demanded her attention, but then she hesitated and sat down again. She’d heard no alarming noise. No screams. No anxious shouts. The house sailed on as calmly now as it had at 2:09.
On reconsideration, she acknowledged that the mood shift surely must be hers, internal. A house couldn’t change moods any more than it could change its mind.
Nevertheless, the suddenness of the transformation seemed strange. Nicky wasn’t a manic-depressive. She didn’t abruptly drop off cliffs of emotion or feel her heart soar like a helium balloon.
Instead of picking up her pencil, she sat listening to Connie Dover sing “The Holly and the Ivy,” which charmed her bar by bar. When she began to draw again, however, she couldn’t entirely shake the feeling that somewhere in the house, something wasn’t right.
After Lionel Timmins left, John thought he wouldn’t be able to nap anymore. When he sat with the Daily Post in the armchair in his study, however, he soon put the paper aside.
In sleep, he walked vast subterranean chambers and endless corridors of cold stone, climbed and descended chiseled staircases that curved like Mobius strips: an exitless architecture that said, Your quest is hopeless, your strength inadequate, your escape plan useless. He trudged alone except for one moment when a cruel voice spoke to him out of the labyrinth: “Ruin.” It was as intimate as Lionel’s voice when he had leaned over the armchair to shake John’s shoulder, and it woke him, but only briefly, long enough to blink at the clock on the desk. He had been asleep less than an hour. It was 2:10 in the afternoon. He dropped once more into the maze that was carved from a mountain of tombstone granite.
Because that afternoon there would be neither a math session with old Sinyavski nor an out-of-house art class with Laura Leigh Highsmith and her radically perfect mouth, Zach went down to the small gym on the garage level to work out with free weights. Although more buff than most thirteen-year-olds, he would be fourteen in two months, signing up for the marines in maybe three and a half years, so he couldn’t slack off. He needed to jam the freaking weights like a starving monkey in an experiment pumping a handle for treats.
Weights were stupid, but lots of things were stupid that you had to do to get where you wanted. He shifted his brain to Neanderthal, where he could concentrate narrowly on dumbbells, on barbells, and on trying to avoid torsion of the testicles during certain exercises. He recently read about torsion of the testicles, and it sounded like about as much fun as being circumcised with hedge clippers.
For about forty minutes, he rocked great, pumped like a starving but careful monkey, until he was soaked with a godawful lather of reeking sweat, his motion smooth and rhythmic, his form correct. The humiliating and fully weird Rubber Boy moment came when he was lying on the bench, pressing the weights high, arms extended straight up and locked in the eighth repetition in a set of ten. He began to bring the bar down toward his chest, and suddenly it seemed to weigh three times what it should. His arms quivered, he couldn’t control the barbell, he strained harder, his arms seemed to turn to rubber, and the bar came down on his freaking throat instead of on his chest, right on his Adam’s apple. Wimp.
Zach had for totally damn sure not put too much weight on the stupid bar. He didn’t do bonehead things like that. He increased the weight only when his dad was there to spot him, to help if the new poundage overwhelmed. He felt as if some superfreak was pushing down on the bar, like a reverse spotter who wanted to crush his windpipe. He could half hear this crazy wicked laughter inside his head, not his laughter, a mean ugly laugh. The thing in the service mezzanine—I know you, boy, I know you now—would have a laugh like this.
Zach strained so hard he could feel his pulse hammering in his temples, eyes bugging out, throat swollen with his effort, so like in maybe two minutes he would die from a crushed airway or from a stupid artery popping in his idiot brain. Couldn’t take the stress longer than that. He checked the wall clock for his time of death—2:10 now. If he held out two minutes, he’d die at 2:12, because this wasn’t San Quentin, the freaking governor wouldn’t call the warden at the last minute like in those dumb-ass prison movies. Zach was crying, damn-damn-damn, not with fear or self-pity, really, but because he was straining so freaking hard that tears popped from his eyes like sweat popped from his pores.
When the clock of doom ticked from 2:10 to 2:11, the weight of the barbell abruptly returned to normal. Zach thrust it off his throat, racked it with a clang, and sat up on the edge of the bench, gasping, shaking. When he wiped his surprisingly cold hands across his face to slough off the sweat, he discovered he had strained so hard that his nose was bleeding.
Sometimes Naomi enjoyed reading in the queen’s eyrie. That was what she called the second-floor window seat in the guest bedroom. The space was about eight feet long and almost three feet deep, with plush cushions and piles of comfy decorative pillows, which allowed her to recline elegantly, regally, as if she were the queen of France in a chaise longue, taking a much-deserved respite from the rigors of being a benevolent ruler to adoring subjects. Three French windows looked into the massive oak and down on the south lawn, which the tree had recently begun to carpet with scarlet leaves. Très belle.
Only eighty pages remained in the novel about the cultivated dragon who was tasked with civilizing a savage young girl and turning h
er into a Joan of Arc who would save an imperiled kingdom. Naomi was eager to finish the tale and begin the sequel. The story was kind of like My Fair Lady but with sword fights and derring-do and wizards, and instead of Professor Higgins, you had a dragon named Drumblezorn, which made the whole thing just fabulously more interesting without sacrificing literary quality.
Immersed in the story, Naomi was rudely yanked back to reality by a sudden burst of wind that thrashed the oak and rattled a storm of leaves, like scarlet bats, against the windows. Startled, she peered out into the red chaos, half expecting to see a funnel cloud. The whirling leaves clicked and hissed and tap-tap-tapped across the glass for at least a minute, such a beautiful spectacle but also a bit disquieting. This was one of those moments that wise Drumblezorn called is-but-is-nots, when ordinary objects and forces—leaves and wind—created an effect that appeared to be entirely ordinary but was not, when the hidden reality beneath the apparent reality of our world rose almost into sight.
In front of the window seat stood a tea table and two chairs, creating a charming conversation area where Minnie Half-Pint always steadfastly refused to play ladies-at-tea and improvise worldly dialogues. The whirling wind died as suddenly as it arose, and when the leaves fell away from the windows, Naomi turned her attention once more to her book—and from the corner of her eye saw a woman sitting in one of the nearby chairs. Startled but not alarmed, Naomi gasped and leaned forward from the bank of decorative pillows.
The stranger wore what might have been antique clothing: a simple ankle-length tunic dress with bishop sleeves, a high round neckline, gray with blue piping. She was pretty, but she did nothing to accentuate her attributes. She wore no makeup, no lipstick, no nail polish, and her unstyled brown hair hung straight and drab, as though she might be some kind of Shaker or Amish person.
In a soft, gentle, and magically musical voice that mesmerized Naomi, the woman said, “I am embarrassed and greatly sorry if I startled you, m’lady.”
M’lady. Whoa! Naomi knew instantly, even more instanter than instantly, that this was beyond a mere is-but-is-not moment, that here was Something Big unfolding just when she thought she might never experience any adventure outside of what she found in books.