Last year, with much patience and cunning, he'd made a game of getting into all the major nationwide credit-reporting agencies—like TRW—which were among the most secure of all systems. Now, he wormed into the largest of those apples again, seeking Valerie Ann Keene.
Their files included forty-two women by that name, fifty-nine when the surname was spelled either "Keene" or "Keane," and sixty-four when a third spelling—"Keen"— was added. Spencer entered her Social Security number, expecting to winnow away sixty-three of the sixty-four, but none had the same number as that in the DMV records.
Frowning at the screen, he entered Valerie's birthday and asked the system to locate her with that. One of the sixty-four Valeries was born on the same day of the same month as the woman whom he was hunting—but twenty years earlier.
With the dog snoring beside him, he entered the driver's license number and waited while the system cross-checked the Valeries. Of those who were licensed drivers, five were in California, but none had a number that matched hers. Another dead end.
Convinced that mistakes must have been made in the data entries, Spencer examined the file for each of the five California Valeries, looking for a driver's license or date of birth that was one number different from the information he had gotten out of the DMV. He was sure he would discover that a data-entry clerk had typed a six when a nine was required or had transposed two numbers.
Nothing. No mistakes. And judging by the information in each file, none of those women could possibly be the right Valerie.
Incredibly, the Valerie Ann Keene who had recently worked at The Red Door was absent from credit-agency files, utterly without a credit history. That was possible only if she had never purchased anything on time payments, had never possessed a credit card of any kind, had never opened a checking or savings account, and had never been the subject of a background check by an employer or landlord.
To be twenty-nine years old without acquiring a credit history in modern America, she would have to have been a Gypsy or a jobless vagrant most of her life, at least since she'd been a teenager. Manifestly she had not been any such thing.
Okay. Think. The raid on her bungalow meant one kind of police agency or another was after her. So she must be a wanted felon with a criminal record.
Spencer returned along electronic freeways to the Los Angeles Police Department computer, through which he searched city, county, and state court records to see if anyone by the name of Valerie Ann Keene had ever been convicted of a crime or had an outstanding arrest warrant in those jurisdictions.
The city system flashed NEGATIVE on the video screen.
NO FILE, reported the county.
NOT FOUND, said the state.
Nothing, nada, zero, zip.
Using the LAPD's electronic information-sharing arrangement with the FBI, he accessed the Washington-based Justice Department files of people convicted of federal offenses. She wasn't included in those, either.
In addition to its famous ten-most-wanted list, the FBI was, at any given time, seeking hundreds of other people related to criminal investigations — either suspects or potential witnesses. Spencer inquired if her name appeared on any of those lists, but it did not.
She was a woman without a past.
Yet something that she'd done had made her a wanted woman. Desperately wanted.
* * *
Spencer did not get to bed until ten minutes past one o'clock in the morning.
Although he was exhausted, and although the rhythm of the rain should have served as a sedative, he couldn't sleep. He lay on his back, staring alternately at the shadowy ceiling and at the thrashing foliage of the trees beyond the window, listening to the meaningless monologue of the blustery wind.
At first he could think of nothing but the woman. The look of her. Those eyes. That voice. That smile. The mystery.
In time, however, his thoughts drifted to the past, as they did too often, too easily. For him, reminiscence was a highway with one destination: that certain summer night when he was fourteen, when a dark world became darker, when everything he knew was proved false, when hope died and a dread of destiny became his constant companion, when he awakened to the cry of a persistent owl whose single inquiry thereafter became the central question of his own life.
Rocky, who was usually so well attuned to his master's moods, was still restlessly pacing; he seemed to be unaware that Spencer was sinking into the quiet anguish of stubborn memory and that he needed company. The dog didn't respond to his name when called.
In the gloom, Rocky padded restlessly back and forth between the open bedroom door (where he stood on the threshold and listened to the storm that huffed in the fireplace chimney) and the bedroom window (where he put his forepaws upon the sill and stared out at the rampage of the wind through the eucalyptus grove). Although he neither whined nor grumbled, he had about him an air of anxiety, as if the bad weather had blown an unwanted memory out of his own past, leaving him bedeviled and unable to regain the peace he had known while dozing on the chair in the living room.
"Here, boy," Spencer said softly. "Come here."
Unheeding, the dog padded to the door, a shadow among shadows.
Tuesday evening, Spencer had gone to The Red Door to talk about a night in July, sixteen years past. Instead, he met Valerie Keene and, to his surprise, talked of other things. That distant July, however, still haunted him.
"Rocky, come here." Spencer patted the mattress.
A minute or so of further encouragement finally brought the dog onto the bed. Rocky lay with his head on Spencer's chest, shivering at first but quickly soothed by his master's hand. One ear up, one ear down, he was attentive to the story that he'd heard on countless nights like this, when he was the entire audience, and on nights when he accompanied Spencer into barrooms, where drinks were bought for strangers who would listen in an alcoholic haze.
"I was fourteen," Spencer began. "It was the middle of July, and the night was warm, humid. I was asleep under just one sheet, with my bedroom window open so the air could circulate. I remember . . . I was dreaming about my mother, who'd been dead more than six years by then, but I can't remember anything that happened in the dream, only the warmth of it, the contentment, the comfort of being with her . . . and maybe the music of her laughter. She had a wonderful laugh. But it was another sound that woke me, not because it was loud but because it was recurring—so hollow and strange. I sat up in bed, confused, half drugged with sleep, but not frightened at all. I heard someone asking 'Who?' again and again. There would be a pause, silence, but then it would repeat as before: 'Who, who, who?' Of course, as I came all the way awake, I realized it was an owl perched on the roof, just above my open window."
Spencer was again drawn to that distant July night, like an asteroid captured by the greater gravity of the earth and doomed to a declining orbit that would end in impact.
. . . it's an owl perched on the roof, just above my open window, calling out in the night for whatever reason owls call out.
In the humid dark, I get up from my bed and go to the bathroom, expecting the hooting to stop when the hungry owl takes wing and goes hunting for mice again. But even after I return to bed, he seems to be content on the roof and pleased by his one-word, one-note song.
Finally, I go to the open window and quietly slide up the double-hung screen, trying not to startle him into flight. But when I lean outside, turning my 'head to look up, half expecting to see his talons hooked over the shingles and curled in toward the eaves, another and far different cry arises before I can say "Shoo" or the owl can ask "Who." This new sound is thin and bleak, a fragile wail of terror from a far place in the summer night. I look out toward the bam, which stands two hundred yards behind the house, toward the moonlit fields beyond the barn, toward the wooded hills beyond the fields. The cry comes again, shorter this time, but even more pathetic and therefore more piercing.
Having lived in the country since the day I was born, I know that nature is one
great killing ground, governed by the cruelest of all laws—the law of natural selection—and ruled by the ruthless. Many nights, I've heard the eerie, quavery yawling of coyote packs chasing prey and celebrating slaughter. The triumphant shriek of a mountain lion after it has torn the life out of a rabbit sometimes echoes out of the highlands, a sound which makes it easy to believe that Hell is real and that the damned have flung open the gates.
This cry that catches my attention as I lean out the window—and that silences the owl on the roof—comes not from a predator but from prey. It's the voice of something weak, vulnerable. The forests and fields are filled with timid and meek creatures, which live only to perish violently, which do so every hour of every day without surcease, whose terror may actually be noticed by a god who knows of every sparrow's fall but seems unmoved.
Suddenly the night is profoundly quiet, uncannily still, as if the distant bleat of fear was, in fact, the sound of creation's engines grinding to a halt. The stars are hard points of light that have stopped twinkling, and the moon might well be painted on canvas. The landscape—trees, shrubs, summer flowers, fields, hills, and far mountains—appears to be nothing but crystalized shadows in various dark hues, as brittle as ice. The air must still be warm, but I am nonetheless frigid.
I quietly close the window, turn away from it, and move toward the bed again. I feel heavy-eyed, wearier than I've ever been.
But then I realize that I'm in a strange state of denial, that my weariness is less physical than psychological, that I desire sleep more than I really need it Sleep is an escape. From fear. I'm shaking but not because I'm cold. The air is as warm as it was earlier. I'm shaking with fear.
Fear of what? I can't quite identify the source of my anxiety.
I know that the thing I heard was no ordinary wild cry. It reverberates in my mind, an icy sound that recalls something I've heard once before, although I can't remember what, when, where. The longer the forlorn wail echoes in my memory, the faster my heart beats.
I desperately want to lie down, forget the cry, the night, the owl and his question, but I know I can't sleep.
I'm wearing only briefs, so I quickly pull on a pair of jeans. Now that I'm committed to act, denial and sleep have no attraction for me. In fact, I'm in the grip of an urgency at least as strange as the previous denial. Bare-chested and barefoot, I'm drawn out of my bedroom by intense curiosity, by the sense of post-midnight adventure that all boys share— and by a terrible truth, which I don't yet know that I know.
Beyond my door, the house is cool, because my room is the only one not air-conditioned. For several summers, I've dosed the vents against that chill flow because I prefer the benefits of fresh air even on a humid July night . . . and because, for some years, I've been unable to sleep with the hiss and hum that the icy air makes as it rushes through the ductwork and seethes through the vanes in the vent grille. I've long been afraid that this incessant if subtle noise will mask some other sound in the night that I must hear in order to survive. I have no idea what that other sound would be. It's a groundless and childish fear, and I'm embarrassed by it. Yet it dictates my sleeping habits.
The upstairs hallway is silvered with moonlight, which streams through a pair of skylights. Here and there along both walls, the polished-pine floor glimmers softly. Down the middle of the hall is an intricately patterned Persian runner, in which the curved and curled and undulant shapes absorb the radiance of the full moon and glow dimly with it: Hundreds of pale, luminous coelenterate forms seem to be not immediately under my feet but well below me, as if I am not on a carpet but am walking Christlike on the surface of a tidepool while gazing down at the mysterious denizens at the bottom.
I pass my father's room. The door is closed.
I reach the head of the stairs, where I hesitate.
The house is silent.
I descend the stairs, quaking, rubbing my bare arms with my hands, wondering at my inexplicable fear. Perhaps even at that moment, I dimly realize that I am going down to a place from which I'll never again quite be able to ascend. . . .
With the dog as his confessor, Spencer spun his story all the way through that long-ago night, to the hidden door, to the secret place, to the beating heart of the nightmare. As he recounted the experience, step by barefoot step, his voice faded to a whisper.
When he finished, he was in a temporary state of grace that would burn away with the coming of the dawn, but it was even sweeter for being so tenuous and brief. Purged, he was at last able to close his eyes and know that dreamless sleep would come to him.
In the morning he would begin to search for the woman.
He had the uneasy feeling that he was walking into a living hell to rival the one that he had so often described to the patient dog. He could do nothing else. Only one acceptable road lay ahead of him, and he was compelled to follow it.
Now sleep.
Rain washed the world, and its susurration was the sound of absolution—though some stains could never be permanently removed.
SIX
In the morning, Spencer had a few tiny bruises and red marks on his face and hands, from the sting-grenade pellets. Compared with his scar, they would draw no comments.
For breakfast, he had English muffins and coffee at his desk in the living room while he hacked into the county tax collector's computer. He discovered that the bungalow in Santa Monica, where Valerie had been living until the previous day, was owned by the Louis and Mae Lee Family Trust. Property tax bills were mailed in care of something called China Dream, in West Hollywood.
Out of curiosity, he requested a list of other properties—if any—owned by that trust. There were fourteen: five more homes in Santa Monica; a pair of eight-unit apartment buildings in Westwood; three single-family homes in Bel Air; and four adjacent commercial buildings in West Hollywood, including the address for China Dream.
Louis and Mae Lee had done all right for themselves.
After switching off the computer, Spencer stared at the blank screen and finished his coffee. It was bitter. He drank it anyway.
By ten o'clock, he and Rocky were heading south on the Pacific Coast Highway. Traffic passed him at every opportunity, because he obeyed the speed limit.
The storm had moved east during the night, taking every cloud with it. The morning sun was white, and in its hard light, the westward-tilting shadows had edges as sharp as steel blades. The Pacific was bottle green and slate gray.
Spencer tuned the radio to an all-news station. He hoped to hear a story about the SWAT-team raid the night before and to learn who had been in charge of it and why Valerie was wanted.
The news reader informed him that taxes were going up again. The economy was slipping deeper into recession. The government was further restricting gun ownership and television violence. Robbery, rape, and homicide rates were at all-time highs. The Chinese were accusing us of possessing "orbiting laser death rays," and we were accusing them of the same. Some people believed that the world would end in fire; others said ice; both were testifying before Congress on behalf of competing legislative agendas designed to save the world.
When he found himself listening to a story about a dog show that was being picketed by protesters who were demanding an end to selective breeding and to the "exploitation of animal beauty in an exhibitionistic performance no less repugnant than the degrading of young women in topless bars," Spencer knew that there would be no report of the incident at the bungalow in Santa Monica. Surely a SWAT-team operation would rate higher on any reporter's agenda than unseemly displays of canine comeliness.
Either the media had found nothing newsworthy in an assault on a private home by cops with machine guns—or the agency conducting the operation had done a first-rate job of misdirecting the press. They had turned what should have been a public spectacle into what amounted to a covert action.
He switched off the radio and entered the Santa Monica Freeway. East by northeast, in the lower hills, the China Dream awaited them.
Rocky looked at him curiously.
"You're a dog, after all. You must have an opinion. These are your people being exploited."
Either he was a dog of extreme circumspection when it came to discussing current affairs or he was just a carefree, culturally disengaged mutt with no positions on the weightiest social issues of his time and species.
"I would hate to think," Spencer said, "that you are a dropout, resigned to the status of a lumpen mammal, unconcerned about being exploited, all fur and no fury."
Rocky peered forward at the highway again.
"Aren't you outraged that purebred females are forbidden to have sex with mongrels like you, forced to submit only to purebred males? Just to make puppies destined for the degradation of showrings?"
The mutt's tail thumped against the passenger door.
"Good dog." Spencer held the steering wheel with his left hand and petted Rocky with his right. The dog submitted with pleasure. Thump-thump went the tail. "A good, accepting dog. You don't even think it's strange that your master talks to himself."
They exited the freeway at Robertson Boulevard and drove toward the fabled hills.
After the night of rain and wind, the sprawling metropolis was as free of smog as the seacoast from which they had traveled. The palms, ficuses, magnolias, and early-blooming bottlebrush trees with red flowers were so green and gleaming that they appeared to have been hand-polished, leaf by leaf, frond by frond. The streets were washed clean, the glass walls of the tall buildings sparkled in the sunshine, birds wheeled across the piercingly blue sky, and it was easy to be deceived into believing that all was right with the world.
* * *
Thursday morning, while other agents used the assets of several law-enforcement organizations to search for the nine-year-old Pontiac that was registered to Valerie Keene, Roy Miro personally took charge of the effort to identify the man who had nearly been captured in the previous night's operation. From his Westwood hotel, he drove into the heart of Los Angeles, to the agency's California headquarters.
Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart Page 8