by Dean Koontz
23
WILLIS BRUCKSTER STUDIED HIS KENO TICKET, carefully comparing it to the winning numbers beginning to flash onto the electronic board that hung from the casino ceiling. He tried to appear intently interested in the outcome of this game, but in fact he didn’t care. The marked ticket in his hand was worthless; he hadn’t taken it to the betting window, hadn’t wagered any money on it. He was using keno as a cover.
He didn’t want to attract the attention of the omnipresent casino security men, and the easiest way to escape their notice was to appear to be the least threatening hick in the huge room. With that in mind, Bruckster wore a cheap green polyester leisure suit, black loafers, and white socks. He was carrying two books of the discount coupons that casinos use to pull slot-machine players into the house, and he wore a camera on a strap around his neck. Furthermore, keno was a game that didn’t have any appeal for either smart gamblers or cheaters, the two types of customers who most interested the security men. Willis Bruckster was so sure he appeared dull and ordinary that he wouldn’t have been surprised if a guard had looked at him and yawned.
He was determined not to fail on this assignment. It was a career maker—or breaker. The Network badly wanted to eliminate everyone who might press for the exhumation of Danny Evans’s body, and the agents targeted against Elliot Stryker and Christina Evans had thus far failed to carry out their orders to terminate the pair. Their ineptitude gave Willis Bruckster a chance to shine. If he made a clean hit here, in the crowded casino, he would be assured of a promotion.
Bruckster stood at the head of the escalator that led from the lower shopping arcade to the casino level of Bally’s Hotel. During their periodic breaks from the gaming tables, nursing stiff necks and sore shoulders and leaden arms, the weary dealers retired to a combination lounge and locker room at the bottom—and to the right—of the escalator. A group had gone down a while ago and would be returning for their last stand at the tables before a whole new staff came on duty with the shift change. Bruckster was waiting for one of those dealers: Michael Evans.
He hadn’t expected to find the man at work. He had thought Evans might be keeping a vigil at the demolished house, while the firemen sifted through the stillsmoldering debris, searching for the remains of the woman they thought might be buried there. But when Bruckster had come into the hotel thirty minutes ago, Evans had been chatting with the players at his blackjack table, cracking jokes, and grinning as if nothing of any importance had happened in his life lately.
Perhaps Evans didn’t know about the explosion at his former house. Or maybe he did know and just didn’t give a damn about his ex-wife. It might have been a bitter divorce.
Bruckster hadn’t been able to get close to Evans when the dealer left the blackjack pit at the beginning of the break. Consequently, he’d stationed himself here, at the head of the escalator, and had pretended to be interested in the keno board. He was confident that he would nail Evans when the man returned from the dealer’s lounge in the next few minutes.
The last of the keno numbers flashed onto the board. Willis Bruckster stared at them, then crumpled his game card with obvious disappointment and disgust, as if he had lost a few hard-earned dollars.
He glanced down the escalator. Dealers in black trousers, white shirts, and string ties were ascending.
Bruckster sidled away from the escalator and unfolded his keno card. He compared it once more with the numbers on the electronic board, as if he were praying that he had made a mistake the first time.
Michael Evans was the seventh dealer off the escalator. He was a handsome, easygoing guy who ambled rather than walked. He stopped to have a word with a strikingly pretty cocktail waitress, and she smiled at him. The other dealers streamed by, and when Evans finally turned away from the waitress, he was the last in the procession as it moved toward the blackjack pits.
Bruckster fell in beside and slightly behind his target as they pressed through the teeming mob that jammed the enormous casino. He reached into a pocket of his leisure suit and took out a tiny aerosol can that was only slightly larger than one of those spray-style breath fresheners, small enough to be concealed in Bruckster’s hand.
They came to a standstill at a cluster of laughing people. No one in the jolly group seemed to realize that he was obstructing the main aisle. Bruckster took advantage of the pause to tap his quarry on the shoulder.
Evans turned, and Bruckster said, “I think maybe you dropped this back there.”
“Huh?”
Bruckster held his hand eighteen inches below Michael Evans’s eyes, so that the dealer was forced to glance down to see what was being shown to him.
The fine spray, propelled with tremendous pressure, caught him squarely in the face, across the nose and lips, penetrating swiftly and deeply into the nostrils. Perfect.
Evans reacted as anyone would. He gasped in surprise as he realized he was being squirted.
The gasp drew the deadly mist up his nose, where the active poison—a particularly fast-acting neurotoxin—was instantaneously absorbed through the sinus membranes. In two seconds it was in his bloodstream, and the first seizure hit his heart.
Evans’s surprised expression turned to shock. Then a wild, twisted expression of agony wrenched his face as brutal pain slammed through him. He gagged, and a ribbon of foamy saliva unraveled from the corner of his mouth, down his chin. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell.
As Bruckster pocketed the miniature aerosol device, he said, “We have a sick man here.”
Heads turned toward him.
“Give the man room,” Bruckster said. “For God’s sake, someone get a doctor!”
No one could have seen the murder. It had been committed in a sheltered space within the crowd, hidden by the killer’s and the victim’s bodies. Even if someone had been monitoring that area from an overhead camera, there would not have been much for him to see.
Willis Bruckster quickly knelt at Michael Evans’s side and took his pulse as if he expected to find one. There was no heartbeat whatsoever, not even a faint lub-dub.
A thin film of moisture covered the victim’s nose and lips and chin, but this was only the harmless medium in which the toxin had been suspended. The active poison itself had already penetrated the victim’s body, done its work, and begun to break down into a series of naturally occurring chemicals that would raise no alarms when the coroner later studied the results of the usual battery of forensic tests. In a few seconds the medium would evaporate too, leaving nothing unusual to arouse the initial attending physician’s suspicion.
A uniformed security guard shouldered through the mob of curious onlookers and stooped next to Bruckster. “Oh, damn, it’s Mike Evans. What happened here?”
“I’m no doctor,” Bruckster said, “but it sure looks like a heart attack to me, the way he dropped like a stone, same way my uncle Ned went down last Fourth of July right in the middle of the fireworks display.”
The guard tried to find a pulse but wasn’t able to do so. He began CPR, but then relented. “I think it’s hopeless.”
“How could it be a heart attack, him being so young?” Bruckster wondered. “Jesus, you just never know, do you?”
“You never know,” the guard agreed.
The hotel doctor would call it a heart attack after he had examined the body. So would the coroner. So would the death certificate.
A perfect murder.
Willis Bruckster suppressed a smile.
24
JUDGE HAROLD KENNEBECK BUILT EXQUISITELY detailed ships in bottles. The walls of his den were lined with examples of his hobby. A tiny model of a seventeenth-century Dutch pinnace was perpetually under sail in a small, pale-blue bottle. A large four-masted topsail schooner filled a five-gallon jug. Here was a four-masted barkentine with sails taut in a perpetual wind; and here was a mid-sixteenth-century Swedish kravel. A fifteenth-century Spanish caravel. A British merchantman. A Baltimore clipper. Every ship was created with remarkable care and
craftsmanship, and many were in uniquely shaped bottles that made their construction all the more difficult and admirable.
Kennebeck stood before one of the display cases, studying the minutely detailed rigging of a late-eighteenth-century French frigate. As he gazed at the model, he wasn’t transported back in time or lost in fantasies of high-seas adventure; rather, he was mulling over the recent developments in the Evans case. His ships, sealed in their glass worlds, relaxed him; he liked to spend time with them when he had a problem to work out or when he was on edge, for they made him feel serene, and that security allowed his mind to function at peak performance.
The longer he thought about it, the less Kennebeck was able to believe that the Evans woman knew the truth about her son. Surely, if someone from Project Pandora had told her what had happened to that busload of scouts, she wouldn’t have reacted to the news with equanimity. She would have been frightened, terrified . . . and damned angry. She would have gone straight to the police, the newspapers—or both.
Instead, she had gone to Elliot Stryker.
And that was where the paradox jumped up like a jack-in-the-box. On the one hand, she behaved as if she did not know the truth. But on the other hand, she was working through Stryker to have her son’s grave reopened, which seemed to indicate that she knew something.
If Stryker could be believed, the woman’s motivations were innocent enough. According to the attorney, Mrs. Evans felt guilty about not having had the courage to view the boy’s mutilated body prior to the burial. She felt as if she had failed to pay her last respects to the deceased. Her guilt had grown gradually into a serious psychological problem. She was in great distress, and she suffered from horrible dreams that plagued her every night. That was Stryker’s story.
Kennebeck tended to believe Stryker. There was an element of coincidence involved, but not all coincidence was meaningful. That was something one tended to forget when he spent his life in the intelligence game. Christina Evans probably hadn’t entertained a single doubt about the official explanation of the Sierra accident; she probably hadn’t known a damned thing about Pandora when she had requested an exhumation, but her timing couldn’t have been worse.
If the woman actually hadn’t known anything of the cover-up, then the Network could have used her ex-husband and the legal system to delay the reopening of the grave. In the meantime, Network agents could have located a boy’s body in the same state of decay as Danny’s corpse would have been if it had been locked in that coffin for the past year. They would have opened the grave secretly, at night, when the cemetery was closed, switching the remains of the fake Danny for the rocks that were currently in the casket. Then the guilt-stricken mother could have been permitted one last, late, ghastly look at the remains of her son.
That would have been a complex operation, fraught with the peril of discovery. The risks would have been acceptable, however, and there wouldn’t have been any need to kill anyone.
Unfortunately, George Alexander, chief of the Nevada bureau of the Network, hadn’t possessed the patience or the skill to determine the woman’s true motives. He had assumed the worst and had acted on that assumption. When Kennebeck informed Alexander of Elliot Stryker’s request for an exhumation, the bureau chief responded immediately with extreme force. He planned a suicide for Stryker, an accidental death for the woman, and a heart attack for the woman’s husband. Two of those hurriedly organized assassination attempts had failed. Stryker and the woman had disappeared. Now the entire Network was in the soup, deep in it.
As Kennebeck turned away from the French frigate, beginning to wonder if he ought to get out from under the Network before it collapsed on him, George Alexander entered the study through the door that opened off the downstairs hallway. The bureau chief was a slim, elegant, distinguished-looking man. He was wearing Gucci loafers, an expensive suit, a handmade silk shirt, and a gold Rolex watch. His stylishly cut brown hair shaded to iron-gray at the temples. His eyes were green, clear, alert, and—if one took the time to study them—menacing. He had a well-formed face with high cheekbones, a narrow straight nose, and thin lips. When he smiled, his mouth turned up slightly at the left corner, giving him a vaguely haughty expression, although at the moment he wasn’t smiling.
Kennebeck had known Alexander for five years and had despised him from the day they met. He suspected that the feeling was mutual.
Part of this antagonism between them rose because they had been born into utterly different worlds and were equally proud of their origins—as well as disdainful of all others. Harry Kennebeck had come from a dirt-poor family and, by his own estimation at least, made quite a lot of himself. Alexander, on the other hand, was the scion of a Pennsylvania family that had been wealthy and powerful for a hundred and fifty years, perhaps longer. Kennebeck had lifted himself out of poverty through hard work and steely determination. Alexander knew nothing of hard work; he had ascended to the top of his field as if he were a prince with a divine right to rule.
Kennebeck was also irritated by Alexander’s hypocrisy. The whole family was nothing but a bunch of hypocrites. The society-register Alexanders were proud of their history of public service. Many of them had been Presidential appointees, occupying high-level posts in the federal government; a few had served on the President’s cabinet, in half a dozen administrations, though none had ever deigned to run for an elective position. The famous Pennsylvania Alexanders had always been prominently associated with the struggle for minority civil rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, the crusade against capital punishment, and social idealisms of every variety. Yet numerous members of the family had secretly rendered service—some of it dirty—to the FBI, the CIA, and various other intelligence and police agencies, often the very same organizations that they publicly criticized and reviled. Now George Alexander was the Nevada bureau chief of the nation’s first truly secret police force—a fact that apparently did not weigh heavily on his liberal conscience.
Kennebeck’s politics were of the extreme right-wing variety. He was an unreconstructed fascist and not the least bit ashamed of it. When, as a young man, he had first embarked upon a career in the intelligence services, Harry had been surprised to discover that not all of the people in the espionage business shared his ultraconservative political views. He had expected his co-workers to be super-patriotic right-wingers. But all the snoop shops were staffed with leftists too. Eventually Harry realized that the extreme left and the extreme right shared the same two basic goals: They wanted to make society more orderly than it naturally was, and they wanted to centralize control of the population in a strong government. Left-wingers and right-wingers differed about certain details, of course, but their only major point of contention centered on the identity of those who would be permitted to be a part of the privileged ruling class, once the power had been sufficiently centralized.
At least I’m honest about my motives, Kennebeck thought as he watched Alexander cross the study. My public opinions are the same as those I express privately, and that’s a virtue he doesn’t possess. I’m not a hypocrite. I’m not at all like Alexander. Jesus, he’s such a smug, Janus-faced bastard!
“I just spoke with the men who’re watching Stryker’s house,” Alexander said. “He hasn’t shown up yet.”
“I told you he wouldn’t go back there.”
“Sooner or later he will.”
“No. Not until he’s absolutely certain the heat is off. Until then he’ll hide out.”
“He’s bound to go to the police at some point, and then we’ll have him.”
“If he thought he could get any help from the cops, he’d have been there already,” Kennebeck said. “But he hasn’t shown up. And he won’t.”
Alexander glanced at his watch. “Well, he still might pop up here. I’m sure he wants to ask you a lot of questions.”
“Oh, I’m damn sure he does. He wants my hide,” Kennebeck said. “But he won’t come. Not tonight. Eventually, yes, but not for a long time. He knows we�
��re waiting for him. He knows how the game is played. Don’t forget he used to play it himself.”
“That was a long time ago,” Alexander said impatiently. “He’s been a civilian for fifteen years. He’s out of practice. Even if he was a natural then, there’s no way he could still be as sharp as he once was.”
“But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Kennebeck said, pushing a lock of snow-white hair back from his forehead. “Elliot isn’t stupid. He was the best and brightest young officer who ever served under me. He was a natural. And that was when he was young and relatively inexperienced. If he’s aged as well as he seems to have done, then he might even be sharper these days.”
Alexander didn’t want to hear it. Although two of the hits he had ordered had gone totally awry, Alexander remained self-assured; he was convinced that he would eventually triumph.
He’s always so damned self-confident, Harry Kennebeck thought. And usually there’s no good reason why he should be. If he was aware of his own shortcomings, the son of a bitch would be crushed to death under his collapsing ego.
Alexander went to the huge maple desk and sat behind it, in Kennebeck’s wing chair.
The judge glared at him.
Alexander pretended not to notice Kennebeck’s displeasure. “We’ll find Stryker and the woman before morning. I’ve no doubt about that. We’re covering all the bases. We’ve got men checking every hotel and motel—”
“That’s a waste of time,” Kennebeck said. “Elliot is too smart to waltz into a hotel and leave his name on the register. Besides, there are more hotels and motels in Vegas than in any other city in the world.”
“I’m fully aware of the complexity of the task,” Alexander said. “But we might get lucky. Meanwhile, we’re checking out Stryker’s associates in his law firm, his friends, the woman’s friends, anyone with whom they might have taken refuge.”