by Dean Koontz
“What was that shaking?” she wondered.
“You don’t know? I figured you’d know.”
“I don’t think it was an earthquake.”
He said, “Maybe something blew up in the basement.”
“No. That would have set off an alarm.”
“It happened before.”
“When?”
“Earlier but not as bad. Maybe someone’s blasting somewhere. Some construction guys or someone.”
His bedroom had a twelve-foot-high coffered ceiling with an ornate gilded-plaster medallion in each coffer and exquisite panels of wainscoting with a gilded ground overpainted with a Japanese-style scene of dragonflies and bamboo, original to the Pendleton.
This almost daunting elegance was balanced by Winny’s toys and books, but Twyla wondered—and not for the first time—if she had made a mistake when she bought the apartment, if this was a suitable environment for a child. This was a safe building in a safe city, a privileged ambiance in which to grow up. But there weren’t many kids in the Pendleton, therefore few opportunities to have playmates. Winny had no interest in playmates; he always seemed to keep himself entertained. If he were to overcome his shyness, however, he needed to be around other kids his age, not just at school, but also playing and having fun.
Sitting on the footstool in front of her son’s armchair, Twyla said, “Honey, do you like it here in the Pendleton?”
“I don’t want to live in Nashville or L.A.,” he said at once.
“No, no,” she said. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t want to live in those places, either. I mean, maybe we could get a house in a regular neighborhood, not so fancy as this, a house with a yard, maybe near a park or something, where there’s lots of other kids. We could get a dog.”
“We could get a dog right here,” Winny said.
“Yes, we could, but it’s not as easy to take care of in the city as it would be in a suburb. Dogs like to have room to run.”
He frowned. “Anyway, you can’t just go and live in a regular neighborhood ’cause of who you are.”
“Who I am? I’m just me, just someone who writes songs. I’m nobody special.”
“You’ve been on TV sometimes. You even sang on TV that time. You sang really good.”
“I grew up in a regular neighborhood, you know. In fact it was a kind of shabby regular neighborhood.”
“Anyway, I don’t much like parks. I always get some itchy rash or something. You know how I get that rash. Or I can’t stop sneezing ’cause of the flowers and trees and all. Maybe it’s fun to go to a park in winter, you know, when everything’s all dead and frozen and covered in snow, but it’s not so great most of the year.”
She smiled. “So a park—that’s like a little piece of Hell right here on earth, huh?”
“I don’t know what Hell’s like, except probably hot. It must be worse than the park, since it’s the worst place ever. Let’s stay where we are.”
She loved Winny so much that she wanted to shout it out. She could hardly contain so much love. “I want you to be happy, kiddo.”
“I’m happy. Are you happy?”
“I’m happy with you,” she said. He was in his stocking feet. She took hold of his right foot by the toes and shook it affectionately. “Wherever I am, I’m happy if you’re there.”
He averted his eyes, embarrassed by her declaration of love. “I like it here okay. This place is cool. It’s different.”
“Anytime you want,” she said, “you could have kids from school for a sleepover or a Saturday afternoon.”
Frowning, he said, “What kids?”
“Any kids you want. Your friends. One or two, or a whole bunch, whoever.”
After a hesitation, alarmed by the thought of inviting kids home with him, Winny said, “Or you and me, maybe we could go to the park and stuff if that’s what you want.”
Rising from the footstool, she said, “You’re a gentleman. You really are.” She leaned over, kissed his forehead. “Dinner at six.”
“I’ll just sit here and read till then.”
“You have homework?”
“Did it in the car, coming back from school with Mrs. Dorfman.”
Mrs. Dorfman, the housekeeper, doubled as Winny’s chauffeur.
“Doesn’t sound like much homework for a Grace Lyman student.”
“It was a ton, but it was stuff that’s all easy for me. There wasn’t any awful math or anything.”
Twyla once told the boy that she had done well in math because it was a kind of music. Ever since, to support his determination to avoid being pushed into becoming a musician, Winny had pretended to find math difficult.
Lightning flashed, much softer than previously, but instead of glancing at the windows, the boy turned to regard the dark TV in the wall of cabinetry and bookshelves opposite his bed. Brow furrowed, his face settled into a look of wary expectation.
As thunder rolled instead of crashing like before, Twyla was overcome by intuitive motherly concern. “Is anything wrong, Winny?”
He met her eyes. “Anything like what?”
“Anything at all.”
After a hesitation, he said, “No. I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m good. I feel good.”
“Love you, my little man.”
“Me too.” He blushed and opened one of the books in his lap.
His mom was great, the best, probably pretty much like a real angel would be, except that she said things like “my little man,” which an angel never would because an angel would know that it was an embarrassing thing for anyone to say to Winny. He was little, all right, but he wasn’t a man. He was just a skinny kid that the wind could blow over. He kept waiting to get biceps bigger than pimples, but it wasn’t happening even though he was almost nine years old. He was probably going to be a skinny kid all his life until suddenly he turned into a skinny old geezer, with nothing in between.
But his mom always meant well. She was never mean or phony. And she listened really well. He could tell her things, and she cared.
When she asked if anything was wrong, maybe he should have shared his recent weird experiences even if she would tell his dad. At dinner, maybe he would tell her about the voice that spoke to him from the weird channel on the TV.
Witness stepped to the piano in Twyla Trahern’s study as she exited the room, her back to him, unaware that he was behind her. He followed the woman to the doorway and stood on the threshold just long enough to ascertain that she was headed to the kitchen, most likely to make dinner for herself and her son.
Whatever she intended to prepare, they would not be here to eat it. Time was running out, the moment looming.
Witness wandered back toward the piano, pausing at the display shelves containing Twyla’s awards for songwriting. She had achieved remarkable success before the age of thirty. He remembered her songs because he forgot nothing. Nothing. He had owned the CD she made, on which she sang her own compositions, her voice warm and throaty.
Where he came from now, there were no songwriters, no songs, no singers, no musicians, no audiences. The morning dawned unsung, and through the day and night, the air was not once brightened by a note of Nature’s music. Among the last people whom he had killed were a man who could play the guitar with great finesse and a young girl, perhaps twelve, whose voice had been clear, sweet, angelic.
He had not been himself in those days. He had loved the law and music at one time. But then he had changed, been changed, in some ways by his intention, in other ways not. He had enjoyed music once. Now that he lived without music, he revered it.
Reverence could not keep him in Twyla Trahern’s study. It all shimmered away.
10
The Basement Security Room
When Devon Murphy went off duty at 7:00 A.M. Thursday, Logan Spangler came on for the next eight hours. Of the five guards that covered the twenty-one weekly shifts at the Pendleton, Logan was the most senior, the chief of s
ecurity.
He had been a beat cop and then a homicide detective, and he had busted more punks than the combined series heroes of a hundred thriller writers, which maybe wasn’t saying much because, in Logan’s estimation, ninety percent of the guys who pounded out those books were sissies who knew less about real evil than did your average librarian and who were no tougher than a Twinkie. He was eligible for retirement at fifty-two, and he only turned in his badge at sixty-two because that was the mandatory retirement age. Now at sixty-eight, he could still whup the ass of any forty-year-old on the force.
Logan gave himself totally to his security-guard position. If he failed to take it as seriously as he had once approached his work with the police department, he would be disrespecting not only his employers but also himself. Consequently, he was not inclined to shrug off the failure of video surveillance during the previous night, even though it had been down just briefly.
Devon thought the cameras were out of commission about half a minute. After the kid left for the day, Logan reviewed the time-stamped recordings—images from the cameras were stored for thirty days—and found that in fact the system malfunctioned for only twenty-three seconds.
During the morning and early afternoon, as his duties permitted, Logan ran the security-system diagnostic program, hoping to discover the cause of the interruption in surveillance, but he could find no explanation. He also reviewed the stop-motion recordings from key basement and ground-floor cameras during the two hours that led up to the failure, which had occurred between 2:16:14 A.M. and 2:16:37 A.M. He half expected to see a previously undetected intruder who might have tried to sabotage the surveillance equipment, but everyone on those DVRs was a resident or an employee of the Pendleton, engaged in legitimate business.
A few minutes before his shift began at 3:00 Thursday afternoon, Vernon Klick arrived, his owlish green eyes clouded behind heavily smudged eyeglasses that hadn’t been cleaned since maybe Thanksgiving. He carried a lunch pail and the usual large briefcase, as if he were an attorney burdened with case files. His shoes were not polished, his khaki pants poorly pressed. He had shaved, but there was just enough grime under a few of his fingernails to make Logan want to scrub his subordinate’s hands with a bristle brush. For whatever reason, Klick had gone into a decline since being hired. He didn’t know it, but he would not be in his job the following day’s shift.
Logan mentioned the rumpled pants and scuffed shoes, but he refrained from commenting on the fingernails. If Klick realized the disgust that he engendered in his boss, he might be alerted to the fact that his days were numbered. Logan preferred to surprise an employee with his termination notice only minutes before he was escorted from the building.
Relinquishing the main command post, Logan moved to the spare chair. He again ran the diagnostic program, fruitlessly seeking the cause of the brief video outage.
“What’s the story?” Klick asked.
“Story?” Logan asked.
“What’re you looking for?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve got to be looking for something.”
Logan sighed. “There was a brief failure of cameras last night.”
“That’s big.”
“It’s not big,” Logan said. “It was twenty-three seconds.”
“Somebody maybe pulled a heist.”
“Nobody pulled a heist.”
“Somebody pulled something,” Klick said.
“Nobody pulled anything.”
“Somebody did,” Klick insisted. He’d never been a policeman, only a security guard; but he believed that he possessed a cop’s intuition. “Maybe somebody killed somebody.”
“Nobody was killed.”
“Just because you haven’t found the body yet doesn’t mean it isn’t somewhere in the building for someone to find sometime.”
Logan refused to keep the idiotic conversation alive. He closely and repeatedly reviewed the video of Senator Earl Blandon’s return to the Pendleton the previous night, his time in the elevator, and the third-floor corridors immediately following the dissipation of the blue static.
He was aware of Vernon Klick’s barely repressed frustration at having to share the room with his boss for more than a minute or two. No doubt the freak had a pornographic magazine in his briefcase or a pint of Irish whiskey, or both, and was eager to pleasure himself one way or another.
What kept Logan at his task was a problem with the timing of Earl Blandon’s return to his apartment. The elevator required twenty-one seconds to go from a full stop on the ground floor to a full stop on the third. According to the time-stamped video, camera coverage had been lost four seconds into the elevator’s ascent. Subtract the next seventeen seconds of ascent from the twenty-three seconds of outage. That left only six seconds of blue static during which the man could have stepped out of the elevator, walked the length of the short west-wing corridor on the third floor, turned right into the north corridor, unlocked his door, and entered his apartment.
Like Devon Murphy, Logan knew the telltales of the senator’s drunkenness: the careful posture, the exaggerated poise. The footage of Blandon crossing the lobby left no doubt that he came home in a state of extreme inebriation.
Perhaps a sober man could have walked briskly from the elevator to the door of 3-D and let himself into the apartment in a mere six seconds. In an advanced state of drunkenness, Earl Blandon moved not briskly but at a stately pace, almost with the measured progress of a bride matching her steps to the processional music on her way to the altar. Surely he had needed at least six seconds just to fumble the key from his pocket and insert it successfully into the lock.
“Before I leave for the day,” Logan said, “I’m going to check on one of the third-floor residents.”
Indicating the screen that his boss had been studying, Klick said, “You mean the senator?” When Logan didn’t reply, Klick said, “You think he’s dead?”
“No, I don’t think he’s dead.”
“Then you think he killed somebody?”
“Nobody killed anybody.”
“Somebody killed somebody, I bet, or robbed somebody, or robbed and killed somebody.”
Getting up from his chair, Logan Spangler said, “Vernon, what’s your problem?”
“Me? I don’t have any problem.”
“You have some kind of problem.”
“My only problem is that missing twenty-three seconds.”
“That’s not your problem,” Logan said, “it’s my problem.”
“Well, then you shouldn’t have got me worried about it.”
“There’s nothing to worry about.”
“There is if someone killed or was killed.”
“Work your shift. Follow procedures. Don’t let your imagination run wild,” Logan advised, and left Klick alone to do whatever he did when he was supposed to be on duty.
As Logan pulled the security-room door shut behind him, a rumbling rose seemingly from underfoot, and the Pendleton shuddered. The same thing had happened earlier. Foundation work was under way for a high-rise on the eastern slope of Shadow Hill, which was no doubt the source of the disturbance. He decided to inquire with the city building department after checking on the senator.
11
Apartment 3-F
Mickey Dime left Jerry dead in an armchair in the study. In the kitchen, he washed his hands. He liked the water so hot it stung. The liquid soap made a soothing lather. It smelled like peaches. Peaches were his favorite fruit.
Beyond the window, the sky flashed, flashed. He wished he were outside to feel the air shiver, to enjoy the crisp scent of ozone that lightning left in its wake. Thunder crashed. He felt it in his bones.
He poured a glass of chocolate milk and plated a lemon muffin. The glass was by Baccarat, the plate by Limoges, the fork by Tiffany. He liked the look and feel of them. The muffin was heavily drizzled with icing. He sat at the breakfast table by a window overlooking the courtyard. He ate slowly, savoring the treat.
/> A lot of sugar made most people hyper, but it calmed Mickey. From the time he was a little kid, his mom said he was different from other people. She wasn’t just bragging. Mickey was different in many ways. For instance, his metabolism was a high-performance machine, like a Ferrari. He could chow down on anything, never gain an ounce.
After the muffin, he enjoyed three Oreos. He pulled the wafers apart and licked off the icing first. His mom had taught him to eat them that way. His mom had taught him so much. He owed everything to her.
Mickey was thirty-five. His mother had died six months earlier. He still missed her.
Even now he could recall the precise chill and the too-soft texture of her cheek when he leaned into the coffin to kiss her. He kissed each of her eyelids, too, and half expected them to flutter open against his lips. But they were stitched shut.
He finished his snack. He rinsed the plate, the glass, the fork. He left them on the drainboard to be washed by the housekeeper, who came twice a week.
For a while he stood at the sink, watching raindrops tap the window. He liked the patterns of rain on glass. He liked the sound.
One of his favorite things was to walk in warm summer rain, in the cold rain of autumn. He owned a getaway cottage in the country, on twelve acres. He liked to sit in the yard, in the fresh-smelling rain, in the nude. He liked to feel a storm washing him with its thousand tongues.
Mickey returned to the study, where Jerry was dead in the armchair. The silencer-equipped .32 pistol had been fired at close range. The bullet pierced the heart. Under the entrance wound, the bloodstain on the white shirt was in the shape of a teardrop, a graceful detail that Mickey appreciated.
Jerry’s suit was beautifully tailored. The pleats in his pants looked as sharp as knife blades. The tight weave of the wool was pleasing when Mickey rubbed a lapel between thumb and forefinger. The shirt and tie appeared to be silk. Mickey liked the smell of silk. But Jerry wore a crisp lime-scented cologne that overwhelmed the subtler fragrance of the fabric.
Since becoming a professional, Mickey never killed a man for free. It was unnatural. Like Picasso giving away a painting. An important part of the sensual experience of murder was counting the money afterward.