Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  jeopardizing the organization and everyone in it. He had no more pity

  for the dead man and woman than did Clocker, felt no responsibility for

  what had happened to them, and figured the world, in fact, was better

  off without two more nonproductive parasites sucking on the substance of

  society and hindering traffic in their lumbering home on wheels. He had

  no love for the masses. As he saw it, the basic problem with the

  average man and woman was precisely that they were so average and that

  there were so many of them, taking far more than they gave to the world,

  quite incapable of managing their own lives intelligently let alone

  society, government, the economy, and the environment.

  Nevertheless, he was alarmed by the way Clocker had phrased his contempt

  for the victims. The word

  "Klingons" made him uneasy because it was the

  name of the alien race that had been at war with humanity through so

  many television episodes and movies in the Star Trek series before

  events in that fictional far future had begun to reflect the improvement

  of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in the real

  world. Oslett found Star Trek tedious, insufferably boring. He never

  had understood why so many people had such a passion for it. But

  Clocker was an ardent fan of the series, unabashedly called himself a

  "Trekker," could reel off the plots of every movie and episode ever

  filmed, and knew the personal histories of every character as if they

  were all his dearest friends. Star Trek was the only topic about which

  he seemed willing or able to conduct a conversation, and as taciturn as

  he was most of the time, he was to the same degree garrulous when the

  subject of his favorite fantasy arose.

  Oslett tried to make sure that it never arose.

  Now, in his mind, the dreaded word

  "Klingons" clanged like a firehouse

  bell.

  With the entire organization at risk because Alfie's trail had been

  lost, with something new and exquisitely violent loose in the world, the

  return trip to Oklahoma City through so many miles of lightless and

  unpeopled land was going to be bleak and depressing. The last thing

  Oslett needed was to be assaulted by one of Clocker's exhaustingly

  enthusiastic monologues about Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Scotty, the rest

  of the crew, and their adventures in the far reaches of a universe that

  was, on film, stuffed with far more meaning and moments of sophomoric

  enlightenment than was the real universe of hard choices, ugly truths,

  and mindless cruelty.

  "Let's get out of here," Oslett said, pushing past Clocker and heading

  for the front of the Road King. He didn't believe in God, but he prayed

  nonetheless ardently that Karl Clocker would subside into his usual

  self-absorbed silence.

  Cyrus Lowbock excused himself temporarily to confer with some colleagues

  who wanted to talk to him elsewhere in the house.

  Marty was relieved by his departure.

  When the detective left the dining room, Paige returned from the window

  and sat once more in the chair beside Marty.

  Although the Pepsi was gone, some of the ice cubes had melted in the

  mug, and he drank the cold water. "All I want now is to put an end to

  this. We shouldn't be here, not with that guy out there somewhere,

  loose."

  "Do you think we should be worried about the kids?"

  . . . need . . . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .

  Marty said, "Yeah. I'm worried shitless."

  "But you shot the guy twice in the chest."

  "I thought I'd left him in the foyer with a broken back, too, but he got

  up and ran away. Or limped away. Or maybe even vanished into thin air.

  I don't know what the hell's going on here, Paige, but it's wilder than

  anything I've ever put in a novel. And it's not over, not by a long

  shot."

  "If it was just Vic and Kathy looking after them, but there's a cop over

  there too."

  "If this bastard knew where the girls were, he'd waste that cop, Vic,

  and Kathy in about a minute flat."

  "You handled him."

  - "I was lucky, Paige. Just damned lucky. He never imagined I had a

  gun in the desk drawer or that I'd use one if I had it. I took him by

  surprise. He won't let that happen again. He'll have all the surprise

  on his side."

  He tilted the mug to his lips, let a melting ice cube slide onto his

  tongue.

  "Marty, when did you take the guns out of the garage cabinet and load

  them?"

  Speaking around the ice cube, he said, "I saw how that jolted you. I

  did it this morning. Before I went to see Paul Guthridge."

  "Why?"

  As best he could, Marty described the curious feeling he'd had that

  something was bearing down on him and was going to destroy him before he

  even got a chance to identify it. He tried to convey how the feeling

  intensified into a panic attack, until he was certain he would need guns

  to defend himself and became almost incapacitated by fear.

  He would have been embarrassed to tell her, would have sounded

  unbalanced--if events had not proved the validity of his perceptions and

  precautions.

  "And something was coming," she said. "This dead-ringer. You sensed

  him coming."

  "Yeah. I guess so. Somehow."

  "Psychic."

  He shook his head. "No, I wouldn't call it that. Not if you mean a

  psychic vision. There wasn't any vision. I didn't see what was coming,

  didn't have a clear premonition. Just this . . . this awful sense of

  pressure, gravity . . . like on one of those whip rides at an amusement

  park, when it swings you around real fast and you're pinned to the seat,

  feel a weight on your chest. You know, you've been on rides like that,

  Charlotte always loves them."

  "Yeah. I understand . . . I guess."

  "This started out like that . . . and got a hundred times worse, until

  I could hardly breathe. Then suddenly it just stopped as I was leaving

  for the doctor's office. And later, when I came home, the sonofabitch

  was here, but I didn't feel anything when I walked into the house."

  They were silent for a moment.

  Wind flung pellets of rain against the window.

  Paige said, "How could he look exactly like you?"

  "I don't know."

  "Why would he say you stole his life?"

  "I don't know, I just don't know."

  "I'm scared, Marty. I mean, it's all so weird. What're we going to

  "Past tonight, I don't know. But tonight, at least, we're not staying

  here. We'll go to a hotel."

  "But if the police don't find him dead somewhere, then there's tomorrow

  . . . and the day after tomorrow."

  "I'm battered and tired and not thinking straight. For now I can only

  concentrate on tonight, Paige. I'll just have to worry about tomorrow

  when tomorrow gets here."

  Her lovely face was lined with anxiety. He had not seen her even half

  this distraught since Charlotte's illness five years ago.

  "I love you," he said, laying his hand gently against the side of her

  head.

  Putting her hand over his, she said, "Oh, God, I love yo
u, too, Marty,

  you and the girls, more than anything, more than life itself. We can't

  let anything happen to us, to what we all have together. We just

  can't."

  "We won't," he said, but his words sounded as hollow and false as a

  young boy's braggadocio.

  He was aware that neither of them had expressed the slightest hope that

  the police would protect them. He could not repress his anger over the

  fact they were not accorded anything resembling the service, courtesy,

  and consideration that the characters in his novels always received from

  the authorities.

  At the core, mystery novels were about good and evil, about the triumph

  of the former over the latter, and about the reliability of the justice

  system in a modern democracy. They were popular because they reassured

  the reader that the system worked far more often than not, even if the

  evidence of daily life sometimes pointed toward a more troubling

  conclusion. Marty had been able to work in the genre with conviction

  and tremendous pleasure because he liked to believe that law-enforcement

  agencies and the courts delivered justice most of the time and thwarted

  it only inadvertently. But now, the first time in his life that he'd

  turned to the system for help, it was in the process of failing him. Its

  failure not only jeopardized his life as well as the lives of his wife

  and children--but seemed to call into doubt the value of everything that

  he had written and the worthiness of the purpose to which he had

  committed so many years of hard work and struggle.

  Lieutenant Lowbock returned through the living room, looking and moving

  as if in the middle of an Esquire magazine fashion photography session.

  He was carrying a clear plastic evidence bag, which contained a black

  zippered case about half the size of a shaving kit. He put the bag on

  the dining-room table as he sat down.

  "Mr. Stillwater, was the house securely locked when you left it this

  morning?"

  "Locked?" Marty asked, wondering where they were headed now, trying not

  to let his anger show. "Yes, locked up tight. I'm careful about that

  sort of thing."

  "Have you given any thought as to how this intruder might have gained

  entry?"

  "Broke a window, I guess. Or forced a lock."

  "Do you know what's in this?" he asked, tapping the black leather case

  through the plastic bag.

  "I'm afraid I don't have X-ray vision," Marty said.

  "I thought you might recognize it."

  "No."

  "We found it in your master bedroom."

  "I've never seen it before."

  "On the dresser."

  Paige said, "Get it over with, Lieutenant."

  Lowbock's faint shadow of a smile passed across his face again, like a

  visiting spirit shimmering briefly in the air above a seance table.

  "It's a complete set of lock picks."

  "That's how he got in?" Marty asked.

  Lowbock shrugged. "I suppose that's what I'm expected to deduce from

  it."

  "This is tiresome, Lieutenant. We have children we're worried about.

  I agree with my wife--just get it over with."

  Leaning over the table and regarding him once more with his patented

  intense gaze, the detective said, "I've been a cop for twenty-seven

  years, Mr. Stillwater, and this is the first time I've ever encountered

  professional lock picks."

  "So?"

  "They break glass or force a lock, like you said. Sometimes they pry a

  sliding door or window out of its track. The average burglar has a

  hundred ways of getting in--all of which are a lot faster than picking a

  lock."

  "This wasn't an average burglar."

  "Oh, I can see that," Lowbock said. He leaned away from the table,

  settled back in his chair. "This guy is a lot more theatrical than the

  average perp. He contrives to look exactly like you, spouts a lot of

  strange stuff about wanting his life back, comes armed with an

  assassin's gun threaded for a silencer, uses burglary tools like a

  Hollywoodized professional heist artist in a caper movie, takes two

  bullets man but walks away. He's downright flamboyant, this guy, but

  he's also muy misterioso, the kind of character Andy Garcia could play

  in a movie or, a lot better yet, that Ray Liotta who was in Goodfellas."

  Marty suddenly saw where the detective was headed and understood why he

  was going there. The inevitable terminus of the interrogation should

  tumbled to it because it was too obvious. As a writer, he had been

  seeking some more exotic, complex reason for Lowbock's barely concealed

  disbelief and hostility, when all the while Cyrus Lowbock had been going

  for the cliche.

  Still, the detective had one more unpleasant surprise to reveal.

  He leaned forward again and made eye contact in what had ceased to be an

  effective confrontational manner and had become instead a personal tic

  as annoying and transparent as Peter Falk's disarmingly humble posture

  and relentless self-deprecation when he played Columbo, Nero Wolfe's

  thoughtful puckering of the mouth in moments of inspiration, James

  Bond's knowing smirk, or any of the slew of colorful traits by which

  Sherlock Holmes was characterized. "Do your daughters have pets, Mr.

  Stillwater?"

  "Charlotte does. Several."

  "An odd collection of pets."

  Paige said cooly, "Charlotte doesn't think they're odd."

  "Do you?"

  "No. What does it matter if they're odd or not?"

  "Has she had them long?" Lowbock inquired.

  "Some longer than others," Marty said, baffled by this new twist in the

  questioning even as he remained convinced that he understood the theory

  Lowbock was laboring to prove.

  "She loves them, her pets?"

  "Yes. Very much. Like any kid. Odd as you might think they are, she

  loves them."

  Nodding, leaning away from the table again, drumming his pen against his

  notebook, Lowbock said, "It's another flamboyant touch, but also

  convincing. I mean, if you were a detective and disposed to doubt the

  whole scenario, you'd have to think twice if the intruder killed all of

  the daughter's pets."

  Marty's heart began sinking in him like a dropped stone seeking the

  bottom of a pond.

  "Oh, no," Paige said miserably. "Not poor little Whiskers, Loretta,

  Fred . . . not all of them?"

  "The gerbil was crushed to death," Lowbock said, his gaze fixed on

  Marty. "The mouse had its neck broken, the turtle was smashed

  underfoot, and so was the beetle. I didn't examine the others that

  carefully."

  Marty's anger flared into barely contained fury, and he curled his hands

  into tight fists under the table, because he knew Lowbock was accusing

  him of having killed the pets merely to lend credibility to an elaborate

  lie. No one would believe a loving father would stomp his daughter's

  pet turtle and break the neck of her cute little mouse for the shabby

  purpose that Lowbock thought motivated Marty, therefore, perversely, the

  detective assumed that Marty had done it, after all, because it was so

  outrageous as to exonerate him, the p
erfect finishing touch.

  "Charlotte's going to be heartbroken," Paige said.

  Marty knew that he was flushed with rage. He could feel the heat in his

  face, as if he'd spent the past hour under a sunlamp, and his ears felt

  almost as if they were on fire. He also knew the cop would interpret

  his anger as a blush of shame that was a testament of guilt.

  When Lowbock revealed that fleeting smile again, Marty wanted to punch

  him in the mouth.

  "Mr. Stillwater, please correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't you

  recently had a book on the paperback bestseller list, the reprint of a

  hardcover that was first released last year?"

  Marty didn't answer him.

  Lowbock didn't require an answer. He was rolling now. "And a new book

  coming out in a month or so, which some people think might be your first

  hardcover bestseller? And you're probably working on yet another book

  even now. There's a portion of a manuscript on the desk in your office,

  anyway. And I guess, once you get a couple of good career breaks,

  you've got to keep your foot on the gas, so to speak, take full

  advantage of the momentum."

  Frowning, her whole body tense again, Paige seemed on the verge of