Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder
Page 46
he said, "I can leave everything behind."
"The house, everything in it, my career, yours--"
"None of that's what really matters."
"A new life, new names . . . What future will the girls have?"
"The best we can give them. There were never any guarantees.
There never are in this life."
She raised her head from his shoulder and looked into his eyes.
"Can I really handle it when he shows up here?"
"Of course you can."
"I'm just a family counselor specializing in the behavioral problems of
children, parent-child relations. I'm not the heroine of an adventure
story."
"And I'm just a mystery novelist. But we can do it."
"I'm scared."
"So am I."
"But if I'm so scared now, where am I going to find the courage to pick
up a shotgun and defend my kids from something . . .
something like this?"
"Imagine you are the heroine of an adventure story."
"If only it were that easy."
"In some ways . . . maybe it is," he said. "You know I'm not much for
Freudian explanations. More often than not, I think we decide to be
what we are. You're a living example, after what you went through as a
kid."
She closed her eyes. "Somehow, it's easier to imagine myself as a
family counselor than as Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone."
"When we first met," he said, "you couldn't imagine yourself as a wife
and mother, either. A family was nothing but a prison to you, prison
and torture chamber. You never wanted to be part of a family again."
She opened her eyes. "You taught me how."
"I didn't teach you anything. I only showed you how to imagine a good
family, a healthy family. Once you were able to imagine it, you could
learn to believe in the possibility. From there on, you taught
yourself."
She said, "So life's a form of fiction, huh?"
"Every life's a story. We make it up as we go along."
"Okay. I'll try to be Kathleen Turner."
"Even better."
"What?"
"Sigourney Weaver."
She smiled. "Wish I had one of those big damned futuristic guns like
she got to use when she played Ripley."
"Come on, we better go see if our sentries are still at their post."
In the living room, he relieved the girls of their duty at the only
undraped window and suggested they heat some water to make mugs of hot
chocolate. The cabin was always stocked with basic canned goods,
including a tin of cocoa-flavored milk powder. The electric heaters
still hadn't taken the chill off the air, so they could all use a little
internal warming. Besides, making hot chocolate was such a normal task
that it might defuse some of the tension and calm their nerves.
He looked through the window, across the screened porch, past the back
end of the BMW. So many trees stood between the cabin and the county
road that the hundred-yard-long driveway was pooled with deep shadows,
but he could still see that no one was approaching either in a vehicle
or on foot.
Marty was reasonably confident that The Other would come at them
directly rather than from behind the cabin. For one thing, their
property backed up to the hundred acres of church land downhill and to a
larger parcel uphill, which made an indirect approach relatively arduous
and time-consuming.
Judging by his past behavior, The Other always favored head long action
and blunt approaches. He seemed to lack the knack or patience for
strategy. He was a doer more than a thinker, which almost ensured a
furious--rather than sneak--attack.
That trait might be the enemy's fatal weakness. It was a hope worth
nurturing, anyway.
Snow fell. The shadows deepened.
From the motel room, Spicer called the surveillance van for an update.
He let the phone ring a dozen times, hung up, and tried again, but still
the call went unanswered.
"Something's happened," he said. "They wouldn't have left the van."
"Maybe something's wrong with their phone," Oslett suggested.
"It's ringing."
"Maybe not on their end."
Spicer tried again with no different result. "Come on," he said,
grabbing his leather flight jacket and heading for the door.
"You're not going over there?" Oslett said. "Aren't you still worried
about blowing their cover?"
"It's already been blown. Something's wrong.
Clocker had pulled on his tweed coat over his clashing orange cashmere
sweater. He didn't bother to put on his hat because he had never
bothered to take it off. Tucking the Star Trek paperback in a pocket,
he also headed for the door.
Following them with the black briefcase, Oslett said, "But what could've
gone wrong? Everything was moving along so smoothly again."
Already, the storm had put down half an inch of snow. The flakes were
fine and comparatively dry now, and the streets white.
Evergreen boughs had begun to acquire Christmasy trimmings.
Spicer drove the Explorer, and in a few minutes they reached the street
where Stillwater's parents lived. He pointed out the house when they
were still half a block from it.
Across the street from the Stillwater place, two vehicles were parked at
the curb. Oslett pegged the red recreational van as the surveillance
post because of the mirrored side windows in its rear section.
"What's that florist's van doing here?" Spicer wondered.
"Delivering flowers," Oslett guessed.
"Fat chance."
Spicer pulled past the van and parked the Explorer in front of it.
"Is this really smart?" Oslett wondered.
Using the cellular phone, Spicer called the surveillance team one more
time. They didn't answer.
"We don't have a choice," Spicer said as he opened his door and got out
into the snow.
The three of them walked to the back of the red van.
On the blacktop between that vehicle and the delivery van, a large
floral arrangement lay in ruins. The ceramic container was shattered.
The stems of the flowers and ferns were still embedded in the spongy
green material that florists used to fix arrangements, so the mild wind
had not blown any of them away, though they looked as if they had been
stepped on more than once. The colors of some flowers were masked by
snow, which meant they hadn't been disturbed in the past thirty to
forty-five minutes.
The ruined blossoms and frost-paled ferns had a curious beauty.
Snap a photo, hang it in an art gallery, title it something like
"Romance" or
"Loss," and people would probably stand before it for long
minutes, musing.
As Spicer rapped on the back door of the surveillance vehicle, Clocker
said, "I'll check the delivery van."
No one answered the knock, so Spicer boldly opened the door and climbed
inside.
As he followed, Oslett heard Spicer say softly, "Oh, shit."
The interior of the van was dark. Little light penetrated the two way
mirrors that served as windows. Only the scopes and screens of the
electronic equipment illuminated the sp
ace.
Oslett took off his sunglasses, saw the dead men, and pulled the rear
door shut.
Spicer had taken off his sunglasses too. His eyes were an odd, baleful
yellow. Or maybe that was just a color they reflected from the scopes
and gauges.
"Alfie must've been coming to the Stillwater place, spotted the van,
recognized it for what it was," Spicer said. "Before he went over
there, he stopped here, took care of business, so he wouldn't be
interrupted across the street."
The electronic gear operated off banks of solar batteries wired to flat
solar cells on the roof. When surveillance was conducted at night, the
batteries could be charged in the conventional fashion, if necessary, by
starting the van's engine for short periods. Even on overcast days,
however, the cells collected enough sunlight to keep the system
operative.
Without the engine running, the interior temperature of the van was
nonetheless comfortable, if slightly cool. The vehicle was unusually
well insulated, and the solar cells also operated a small heater.
Stepping over the corpse on the floor, looking through one of the view
windows, Oslett said, "If Alfie was drawn to that house, it had to be
because Martin Stillwater was already there."
"I guess."
"Yet this team never saw him go in or out."
"Evidently not," Spicer agreed.
"Wouldn't they have let us know if they'd seen Stillwater, his wife, or
kids?"
"Absolutely."
"So . . . is he over there now? Maybe they're all over there, the
whole family and Alfie."
Peering through the other window, Spicer added, "And maybe not.
Somebody left there not long ago. See the tracks in the drive way?"
A vehicle with wide tires had backed out of the garage that was attached
to the white clapboard house. It had reversed to the left as it entered
the street, then had shifted into forward and had driven away to the
right. The snow had barely begun to fill in the multiple arcs of the
tracks.
Clocker opened the rear door, startling them. He climbed inside and
pulled the door shut after him, with no comment about the bloody ice axe
on the floor or the two murdered operatives. "Looks like Alfie must've
stolen the florist's van for cover. The deliveryman's in the back with
the flowers, dead as the moon."
In spite of the extended wheelbase that added extra room to the interior
of the van, the space unoccupied by surveillance equipment and corpses
was not large enough to accommodate the three of them comfortably.
Oslett felt claustrophobic.
Spicer pulled the seated dead man out of the swivel chair in which he'd
died. The corpse tumbled to the floor. Spicer checked the chair for
blood before sitting down and turning to the array of monitors and
switches, with which he appeared to be familiar.
Uncomfortably aware of Clocker looming over him, Oslett said, "Is it
possible there was a phone call to the house that these guys never got a
chance to report to us before Alfie wasted them?"
Spicer said, "That's what I'm going to find out."
As Spicer's fingers flew over the programming keyboard, brightly colored
graphs and other displays popped onto the half dozen video monitors.
Contriving, in those tight quarters, to ram his elbow into Clocker's
gut, Oslett turned again to the first of the side-by-side view windows.
He watched the house across the street.
Clocker stooped to look out the other window. Oslett figured the
Trekker was pretending to be at a starship portal, squinting through
foot-thick glass at an alien world.
A couple of cars passed. A pickup truck. A black dog ran along $
the sidewalk, with snow on his paws, he looked as if he was wearing four
white socks. The Stillwater house stood silent, serene.
"Got it," Spicer said, taking off a set of headphones he had put on when
Oslett had been staring out the window.
What he had, as it turned out, was a telephone call monitored, traced,
and recorded by the automated equipment perhaps as long as thirty
minutes after Alfie killed the surveillance team. In fact, Alfie had
been in the Stillwater house when the call came through and had answered
it after seven rings. Spicer played it back on a speaker instead of
through headphones, so the three of them could listen at the same time.
"The first voice you hear is the caller," Spicer said, "because the man
who picks up the receiver in the Stillwater house doesn't initially say
anything."
"Hello? Mom? Dad?"
"How did you win them over?"
Stopping the tape, Spicer said, "That second voice is the receiving
phone and it's Alfie."
"They both sound like Alfie."
"The other one's Stillwater. Alfie also speaks next."
"Why would they love you more than me?"
"Don't touch them, you son of a bitch. Don't you lay one finger on
them. "They betrayed meN "I want to talk to my mother and father
"MY
mother and father
"Put them on the phone." "So you can tell them more
lies?"
They listened to the entire conversation. It was over-the-top creepy
because it sounded as if one man was talking to himself, a radically
split personality. Worse, their bad boy was obviously not just a
renegade but flat-out psychotic.
When the tape ended, Oslett said, "So Stillwater never stopped at his
parents' house."
"Evidently not."
"Then how did Alfie find it? And why did he go there? Why was he
interested in Stillwater's parents, not just Stillwater himself?"
Spicer shrugged. "Maybe you'll get a chance to ask the boy if you
manage to recover him."
Oslett didn't like having so many unanswered questions. It made him
feel as if he wasn't in control.
He glanced out the window at the house and at the tire tracks in the
snow-covered driveway. "Alfie's probably not over there any more."
"Went after Stillwater," Spicer agreed.
"Where was that call placed?"
"Cellular phone."
Oslett said, "We can still trace that, can't we?"
Pointing to three lines of numbers on a display terminal, Spicer said,
"We've got a satellite triangulation."
"That's meaningless to me, just numbers."
"This computer can plot it on a map. To within a hundred feet of the
signal source."
"How long will that take?"
"Five minutes tops," Spicer said.
"Good. You work on it. We'll check the house."
Oslett stepped out of the red van with Clocker close behind.
As they crossed the street through the snow, Oslett didn't care if a
dozen nosy neighbors were at their windows. The situation was already
blown wide open and couldn't be salvaged. He, Clocker, and Spicer would
clear out, with their dead, in less than ten minutes, and after that no
one would ever be able to prove they'd been there.
They walked boldly onto the elder Stillwaters' porch. Oslett rang the
bell. No one answered. He rang it again and tried the door, which
proved to be unl
ocked. From across the street it would appear as if Jim
or Alice Stillwater had opened up and invited them inside.
In the foyer, Clocker closed the front door behind them and drew his
Colt .357 Magnum from his shoulder holster. They stood for a few
seconds, listening to the silent house.
"Be at peace, Alfie," Oslett said, even though he doubted that their bad
boy was still hanging around the premises. When there was no ritual
response to that command, he repeated the four words louder than before.
Silence prevailed.
Cautiously they moved deeper into the house--and found the dead couple
in the first room they checked. Stillwater's parents.
Each of them somewhat resembled the writer--and Alfie, too, of course.