by Dean Koontz
Thunder came and went, thunder with lightning and without. A few cars and trucks seemed to float past as if awash in a flood.
The state hospital was an hour’s drive from the city, where John lived and where he had an appointment to keep before he went home. He powered the driver’s seat forward, switched on the windshield wipers, released the hand brake, and put the Ford in gear.
He didn’t want to think what he was thinking, but the thought was a sentinel voice that would not be silenced. His wife and his children were in grave danger from someone, something.
His family and two others before it were at risk, and he did not know if he could save any of them.
5
USING TWO SPOONS, MARION DUNNAWAY SCOOPED DOUGH from the steel mixing bowl, deftly shaped it into a ball, and deposited it on the baking sheet, where eight others were arranged in rows.
“If I’d ever had children and now had grandchildren, I’d never let them near the Internet unless I was sitting beside them.”
She kept a tidy kitchen. Yellow-and-white curtains framed a view of the storm and seemed to bring order even to the chaotic weather.
“There’s too much sick stuff too easily accessed. If they see it when they’re young, the seed of an obsession might be planted.”
She scooped up more dough, spoon clicked against spoon, and a tenth cookie-to-be appeared almost magically on the Teflon sheet.
Marion had retired from the army after serving thirty-six years as a surgical nurse. Short, compact, sturdy, she radiated competence. Her strong hands attended to every task with brisk efficiency.
“Say a boy is just twelve when he comes across such trash. The mind of a twelve-year-old is highly fertile soil, Detective Calvino.”
“Highly,” John agreed from his chair at the dinette table.
“Any seed planted in it is likely to thrive, which is why you have to guard against an ill wind that might blow in a weed pip.”
Under a helmet of thick white hair, Marion’s face was that of a fifty-year-old, though she was sixty-eight. Her smile was sweet, and John suspected her laugh would be hearty, though he doubted that he would ever hear it.
Warming his hands around his coffee mug, he said, “You think that’s what happened to Billy—some weed pip from the Internet?”
Having pressed an eleventh ball of dough to the baking sheet, she said nothing as she shaped the final cookie in the batch.
Then she raised her face to the window, staring toward the house next door. John assumed she was seeing beyond that place, imagining the house two doors away—the Lucas residence, the house of death.
“Damned if I know. They were a solid family. Good people. Billy was always polite. The nicest boy. So very considerate of his mother after the accident that put her in the wheelchair.”
She opened the oven. With a quilted mitt, she took out a tray of finished cookies and put it on the sinkside cutting board to cool.
A flood of hot air poured the aromas of chocolate and coconut and pecans through the kitchen. Curiously, instead of making John’s mouth water, the smell briefly nauseated him.
Marion said, “I served in field hospitals, battle zones. Front-line emergency surgeries. Saw a lot of violence, too much death.”
She slid the tray of neatly arranged dough balls into the oven, closed the door, and took off the quilted mitt.
“I got so I could tell at first sight which ones would survive their wounds, which wouldn’t. I could see death in their faces.”
From a drawer near the refrigerator, she extracted a key and brought it to the table.
“I never saw death in Billy. Not a glimpse of it. The Internet theory is just twiddle-twaddle, Detective Calvino. Just the jabber of an old woman who’s afraid to admit some evil can’t be explained.”
She gave him the key, which dangled from a beaded chain with a plastic cat charm. The cat was a grinning golden tabby.
Billy’s parents loved cats. They’d had two spayed British spotted shorthairs, green-eyed and frisky, named Posh and Fluff.
When the killing started, Posh and Fluff fled through a cat flap in the kitchen door. A neighbor, at the house across the street from the Lucases, found them shivering and crying under his back porch.
Pocketing the key, John rose. “Thank you for the coffee, ma’am.”
“I should have thought to turn the key in the day it happened.”
“No harm done,” he assured her.
Wondering if the Lucases might have traded house keys with a trusted neighbor, John had that morning made four cold calls before hearing what he hoped to hear from Marion Dunnaway.
“Let me give you some cookies for those kids you mentioned,” she said. “The earlier batches are cool.”
He sensed that he would disappoint her if he declined.
She put six cookies in a OneZip bag and escorted John to the front door. “I think of going up there to see Billy one day, if he’s allowed visitors. But what would I say?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing to say. You’re better off remembering him as he was. He’s very different now. You can do nothing for him.”
He had left his raincoat on the front-porch swing. He shrugged into it, put up the hood, went to his car at the curb, and drove two doors east to the Lucas house, where he parked in the driveway.
Perhaps an hour of daylight remained before the rain washed darkness down the day.
Fat snails, with eye stalks questing, crossed the wet front walkway, venturing from one grassy realm to another. John avoided crushing them underfoot.
To accommodate Sandra Lucas in her wheelchair, the porch offered both steps and a ramp.
He took off his raincoat, shook it, and folded it over his left arm because the only other place to put it was a glider with stained yellow cushions. After Billy finished with his sister and called 911, he had come to the front porch and had sat on the glider, naked and drenched in blood.
In most jurisdictions, after attaining the age of fourteen, children are presumed to have sufficient capacity to form criminal intent. Neither moral nor emotional insanity—as distinguished from mental—exempts the perpetrator from responsibility for his crimes.
To the first two police officers on the scene, Billy offered his sister for ten dollars each and told them where she could be found. “Just leave twenty bucks on the nightstand,” he said. “And don’t have a cigarette after. This house is a no-smoking zone.”
Now the police-department seal had been peeled off the front door. Two days previously, long after the criminalists collected trace evidence and prints, after a review of that evidence supported Billy’s confession in every detail, after the boy was evaluated by psychiatrists, and after he was remanded to the state hospital under a preliminary finding of insanity to be reaffirmed or reconsidered in sixty days, the house ceased to be an active crime scene.
No one from the department would have come by merely to remove the seals from the exterior doors. Because the Lucases had no family nearby, perhaps an attorney, serving as executor, had been here to review the condition of the house.
John used the key with the dangling cat charm. He went inside, closed the door, and stood in the foyer, listening to this home that had become a slaughterhouse.
He possessed no authority to enter these premises. Technically, the case file remained open until Billy could be evaluated in sixty days, but the investigation was inactive. Anyway, this had never been John’s assignment.
If he’d been unable to discover a neighbor with a key, his only alternative would have been to force entry. He would have done it.
With his back against the front door, he sensed that someone waited for him in one of the surrounding rooms, but this was a false perception. In other murder houses, after the bodies were removed and the evidence collected, when he returned alone to consider the scene in solitude, he usually experienced this disturbing impression of a presence looming, but it always proved to be unfounded.
6
THUND
ER NO LONGER ROARED, AND THE RAIN SUBSIDED FROM drumming torrents to a drizzle too soft to press a whisper through the walls.
According to the real-estate records at the county assessor’s office, the residence had six main rooms on the ground floor, five on the upper level. As John stood in the dusky foyer, the house felt larger than described. The hollow silence had a quality of vastness, as of caverns coiling countless miles through deep strata of stone.
Eight-pane sidelights flanked the front door, but the mummified sun, enwrapped by sodden clouds, would soon be setting.
He waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. He intended to turn on as few lights as possible.
Sometimes the visible aftermath of violence so disturbed him that he couldn’t properly work the scene. One gang thug capping another in a territorial dispute never fazed him. An investigation involving a murdered family brought him to the brink.
He wasn’t here in an official capacity. This was personal. Therefore, shadows wouldn’t hamper him. Shadows soothed.
Compassion and pity were desirable in a homicide detective. In some cases, however, a capacity for intense empathy tended to depress and to discourage rather than to motivate.
In spite of his sometimes anguished identification with victims, John could have been nothing but what he was. He became a detective not because he thought the job glamorous or because the benefits were generous. He felt compelled to follow that path. His career became a necessity; no alternative existed either in thought or in fact.
Ahead, on the left, a gray glow might have defined an archway to a living room. Above, a window on the stairwell landing admitted just enough daylight to suggest a handrail, balusters.
Soon his dark-adapted eyes identified the newel post at the foot of the stairs. He draped his raincoat over it.
From an inner sport-coat pocket, he produced a compact LED flashlight, but he did not at once switch it on.
He wasn’t seeking nuances of crime-scene conditions critical to a prosecution. The premises had been well-tramped; what evidence once existed had been gathered or contaminated, or obliterated.
What he sought was more ephemeral this time, more elusive: a keener intuition than the one on which he currently operated, some insight, some revelation, an enlightenment that would either confirm or put to rest his hunch that the Lucas family would be only the first of four to be massacred.
John followed the dark hall to the kitchen, where the door and casing had been removed to accommodate a wheelchair. The windows were curtained with translucent fabric that filtered the dismal light.
A rancid smell halted him one step past the threshold.
The flashlight fanned a wheelchair near the breakfast bar, the chair in which Billy’s mother died when he slammed the knife through her throat.
Now on the floor in front of the fridge, the LED beam revealed the source of the odor. A quart of spilled milk marbled with the mother’s blood had congealed into a yellow-and-purple scum peppered with patches of mold. The mess glistened, still not entirely dry.
According to Billy’s confession, his mother tried to scream but couldn’t raise more than a rasp-and-rattle, a whistling wheeze. She could not summon the help of other family members—or warn them.
As if those sounds had been recorded on the walls, John heard them, imagined in his mind’s ear but as real to him as the thunder earlier and as his wife’s voice would be when he went home to her.
Sandra Lucas had been disabled in a traffic accident. She coped elegantly with her new circumstances but also volunteered to counsel others in her condition. She gave motivational speeches stressing the importance of family, the strength a spouse could provide, and the reward of being an example of grace and courage for your children.
She bled to death, but drowned, too, from aspirated blood.
The radiant green numerals in the digital clock on the oven had displayed the correct time. Now, inexplicably, the numerals began to flash midnight or noon.
Maybe the electrical service failed for a moment, requiring that the clock be reset. Because he had not switched on any house lights, he wouldn’t have been aware of a brief power outage.
He watched the numbers flashing. He watched them and wondered.
The rancid odor seemed to intensify.
After backing away from the odor but not all the way out of the past into the present, John went next to the study. Here, Robert Lucas had been bludgeoned with a hammer while paying bills.
Robert’s desk was along the far wall, facing a window, so that he could look up from his work to enjoy a view of the three paper birches in the yard. This put his back to the study door.
Darkness shrank from the flashlight beam, and a collage appeared on top of the desk: an artful scattering of envelopes, invoices, and a sheet of postage stamps against a desk-blotter background, all of it unevenly glazed with a lacquer once bright red, now red-black and rust and purple.
In his audio imaginarium, John Calvino heard nothing of Robert’s death cries, perhaps because the first blow had rendered the man unconscious before a sound could escape him.
The flashlight found a spattered pen set on a white marble base, a sprayed windowsill, spotted draperies. The spatter, the spray, and the spotting comprised a kind of scream, a shrill shriek that seemed to arise in John’s bones, but this was not a sound that had been made by the victim; this was his own unvoiced cry of moral revulsion.
As he retreated from the study into the hallway, he thought he heard a jingling of tiny bells, a cold silvery sound lasting but an instant. He became as still as any living thing could be still.
The flashlight beam did not quiver on the mahogany floor.
In the sidelights that flanked the front door, the panes of glass were nearly as dark as the wooden muntins that separated them from one another. The sun had sunk far down the gullet of the storm.
John could not be sure that the sound had been real. He might have summoned it from memory, from twenty years in the past.
He went to the living room, from where the ringing might have come. The double doors—added to the archway after Sandra’s accident, to convert this space to a ground-floor bedroom—stood wide open. Bedclothes had been neatly turned down, but Sandra had died before retiring for the night. No one, with or without bells, waited there.
John had no interest in any remaining ground-floor rooms. No one had been murdered in them. The stairs did not creak. At the landing, he paused to gather his resolve.
The worst would be on the second floor. The mother and father had died quickly. But upstairs, the grandmother and the sister had struggled and suffered. Their cries would come to him.
On the landing wall, a print of John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was spectacular even in the cold LED beam. Two lovely little girls in white dresses were lighting Chinese lanterns under a bower of lilies, in a twilight English garden.
Perhaps the most charming painting of the entire nineteenth century, the scene had often elicited a smile from John when he came upon it in books of art. He didn’t smile this time.
As he turned from the picture, he had the impression that one of the girls was sprayed with blood. When he looked again, the blush on her face proved to be light from the Chinese lantern in her hands.
Upstairs, John went to the grandmother’s quarters at the front of the house, on the left side of the hall. The door stood open.
No dishwater daylight leaked through the heavy draperies. A combination night-light and air-freshener emitted a peach-colored glow and the fragrance of carnations.
Except for the punch that, to her grandson’s amusement, knocked out her false teeth, the assault on Ann Lucas had been bloodless. The aftermath John dreaded waited not here but in the sister’s room.
He flicked a switch, lighting a lamp. Half the grandmother’s room still lay in shadow. Tangled bedclothes trailed onto the floor.
On the dresser stood a collection of framed photographs. Six featured Billy alone or with o
thers of his family. His open face seemed untouched by deceit. His eyes revealed no hint of dementia.
Celine, the sister, had a face made for mirrors and a smile of such innocence that she looked as if she knew nothing of death and everything of eternity. In a swimsuit at the shore, surf breaking around her ankles, she seemed to be a sprite spun from spray and sunlight. John couldn’t bear to look at her.
A taped outline on the carpet marked the position in which the grandmother’s body was found. In his confession, Billy had described punching her out as she sat in bed watching TV, dragging her to the floor, and waiting for her to revive before killing her face-to-face.
Staring at the taped outline, John expected to hear desperate sounds of death by strangulation—but he heard instead the silvery tintinnabulation of tiny bells, clear and icy. The tinkling lasted longer than before, perhaps two or even three seconds, and he knew this time the bells were real, not imagined.
In the subsequent brittle silence, he stepped into the hallway and switched on the ceiling fixture. The beveled-glass bowl speared that space with blue-edged blades of light.
Directly across from the grandmother’s quarters, the door to the sister’s room stood ajar. Darkness beyond.
Again, the bells. Two seconds, three.
He pocketed the extinguished flashlight and drew the pistol from his shoulder rig.
7
CLEARING A DOORWAY UNDER THREAT WAS ALWAYS THE worst. He pushed through fast, found the switch, pistol in one hand but then in both as light bloomed in a pair of bedside lamps. Left to right, head and gun tracking as one, registering few details of the room, focusing instead on target identification and places where someone might be concealed.
A closet offered the only possibility. Two sliding mirrored doors. Approaching himself and the black bore of his weapon, gun in one hand again, reaching toward the door, toward his own reaching reflection, sliding his second self aside. He found only hanging clothes, shoes, boxes on a high shelf.
He still believed the silvery ringing had been real.