She rarely spoke of her lost twin. But that was understandable and in no way suspicious. Surely the loss still hurt.
She had revealed the length of Teresa’s ordeal only a few nights earlier, under the strawberry trees. Previously she had allowed Ryan to think that her sister died either in the accident or shortly thereafter.
Again, Sam’s reticence was proof of nothing more than the pain that Teresa’s death still caused her.
In the photo, the dead woman’s head rested on a pillow. With care that suggested tenderness, her golden hair had been brushed and arranged flatteringly around her face.
In contrast to the hair, the tape holding open the sightless eyes was an affront, even a violation.
As loud and irregular as Ryan’s heart had been recently, so now it was to a similar degree quiet and steady, and the house was also quiet, and the night beyond the house, as if every soul in Las Vegas in the same instant fell into a deep sleep or turned to dust, as if every wheel stopped rotating and every noisy machine lost power, as if nocturnal birds could not use their wings or find their songs, as if all crawling things were seized by paralysis between creep and slither, and an absolute stillness befell the air, allowing no breeze or draft or eddy. Time froze in tickless clocks.
Whether the hush was real or imagined, so extraordinary was the moment that Ryan had the urge to shout and shatter the silence before the world permanently petrified.
He did not cry out, however, because he sensed meaning in this unmitigated muffle, a truth insisting on discovery.
The silence seemed to well from the photo in front of Ryan, to pool up from it and flood the world, as though dead Teresa’s face had the power to still Creation and to compel Ryan’s attention. His subconscious commanded: Observe, see, discover. In this image was something of terrible importance to him, a shocking revelation that he had thus far overlooked and that might save him.
He studied her dead stare, wondering if the twists of light and shadow reflected on her eyes would reveal the room in which she had died and the people in attendance at her passing, or something else that would explain his current, mortal circumstances.
Those reflections were too small. No amount of squinting could force them to resolve into intelligible images.
His gaze traveled down her lovely cheeks, along the exquisite slopes and curves of her nose, to her generous and perfectly formed mouth.
Her parted lips issued no breath, only silence, but he half expected to hear, with his mind’s ear, a few words that would explain his hypertrophic heart and reveal his future.
At the periphery of Ryan’s vision, movement startled him.
He looked up, expecting that one of the glazed cadavers had pulled free of its armature and had come for him.
The nameless brunette stepped into the study from the hallway, and her voice broke the spell of silence. “I don’t get creeped-out easily, but this place is getting to me.”
“Me too,” he said.
He slipped Teresa’s photo out of the plastic sleeve, set it aside, and closed the ring binder.
“He’ll miss it,” the brunette warned.
“Maybe he will. I don’t care. Let him wonder.”
Ryan returned both ring binders to the bookshelf where he had found them.
In the doorway, leaning against the jamb, arms folded across her breasts, she said, “We have a tail on them. They finished dinner. Now they’re back at her apartment.”
She must have been between thirty and thirty-five, but she had the air of someone older. She radiated a self-confidence that seemed to be wisdom more than pride.
“Would you let him?” Ryan wondered.
“Let him what?”
“Touch you.”
Her eyes were not gravestone granite, after all, but castle ramparts, and only a fool would try to storm her.
She said, “I’d shoot off his pecker.”
“I believe you would.”
“It’d be a service to humanity.”
Ryan wondered, “Why does Rebecca let him?”
“Something’s wrong with her.”
“What?”
“And not just her. Half the world is in love with death.”
“Not me.”
As if in quiet accusation, the brunette glanced at the photo of Teresa on the desk.
Ryan said, “That’s just evidence.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Earlier, he had searched the desk. He returned to the drawer that contained stationery and selected a nine-by-twelve envelope, into which he slipped the photograph.
“I’m done here,” he said.
They walked the house together, turning off lights, pretending not to listen for the footfalls of corpses in their wake.
In the foyer, at the security-system panel, she said, “The alarm was engaged when I got here. I have to reset it.”
As she keyed in a code that she had somehow learned, Ryan asked, “How did you disarm it without setting it off?”
“A few small tools and years of practice.”
The tools were evidently sufficiently compact to fit in her purse, for she carried no other bag.
Outside, she said, “Stay with me,” and after passing under the weeping boughs of the melaleucas, she headed south on the public sidewalk. “I’m parked a block and a half away.”
He knew that she didn’t need him at her side for protection any more than did the hulking George Zane.
In the absence of streetlamps and in the weakness of the moon, they cast no shadows.
Here, miles from the flash of the casinos, the sky offered a desolation of stars.
Like all Mojave settlements, regardless of size and history, this one seemed to have a tenuous existence. An ancient ocean had withdrawn millennia ago, leaving a vast sea of sand, but the desert was no more eternal than the waters before it, and the city markedly more ephemeral than the desert.
“Whatever’s wrong in your life,” she said, “it’s none of my business.”
Ryan did not disagree.
“The way Wilson Mott runs his operation, I’d be fired for saying one word more than I’ve just said.”
Curious about where this might be leading, Ryan assured her, “I’ve no reason to tell him anything you say.”
After a silence, she said, “You’re a haunted man.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“I’m not surprised by that.”
Across the street, Zane sat behind the wheel of the Mercedes. They passed him and kept going.
She said, “Not ghosts. You’re haunted by your own death.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, you’re waiting for the ax to fall.”
“If I were paranoid,” he said, “I’d wonder if Wilson Mott has been investigating me.”
“I’m just good at reading people.”
With a thrum, a presence passed overhead. Looking up at broad pale wings, Ryan thought it might have been an owl.
“The way I read you,” she continued, “you can’t figure out who.”
“Who what?”
“Who’s going to kill you.”
Across the night, the monotonous song of cicadas sounded like razor blades stropping razor blades.
As they walked, she said, “When you’re trying to figure out who…you’ve got to keep in mind the roots of violence.”
He wondered if she had been a cop before she had gone to work for Mott.
“There are only five,” she said. “Lust, envy, anger, avarice, and vengeance.”
“Motives, you mean.”
Arriving at her car, she said, “It’s best to think of them as failings, not motives.”
Parking lights and the lazy engine noise of a coasting car rose behind them.
“More important than the roots,” she said, “is the taproot.”
She opened the driver’s door of the Honda and turned to stare solemnly at him.
“The taproot,” she said, “is
always the killer’s ultimate and truest motivation.”
Among the numerous strange moments of the past four days, this conversation had begun to seem the strangest.
“And what is the taproot of violence?” Ryan asked.
“The hatred of truth.”
The coasting car behind them proved to be the Mercedes sedan. George Zane brought it to a stop in the street, parallel to but slightly forward of the Honda, leaving Ryan and the woman in moon haze and shadows.
She said, “In case you ever need to talk, I’m…Cathy Sienna.” She spelled the surname.
“Just this morning, you said you’d never tell me your true name.”
“I was wrong. One more thing, Mr. Perry…”
He waited.
“The hatred of truth is a vice,” she said. “From it comes pride and an enthusiasm for disorder.”
The moonlight made silver coins of her gray eyes.
She said, “Moments ago, we were in the house of a man who has a fierce enthusiasm for disorder. Be careful. It can be contagious.”
Although Cathy reached for his hand, she did not shake it, but pressed it in both of her hands, more the affectionate gesture of a friend than the good-bye of a business associate.
Before he could think of anything to say, she got into her car, closed the door, and started the engine.
Ryan stood in the street, watching her drive away. Then he got into the backseat of the Mercedes.
“Return to the hotel, sir?” Zane asked.
“Yes, please.”
In Ryan’s hands was the manila envelope that contained the photo of Teresa Reach, which he suspected might hold a clue that would save him.
To further study the photo, he needed to have it scanned at high resolution and examine it with the best image-enhancement software. He could do nothing more with it this night.
During the ride, Ryan’s thoughts repeatedly returned to Cathy Sienna, to the question of whether her concern was genuine.
In light of recent events, he wondered if her advice and further counsel would have been offered if he had not been a wealthy man.
NINETEEN
In the Mercedes, Ryan made a few phone calls. By the time he reached his hotel, he felt comfortable about trusting the manila envelope to George Zane.
Although Wilson Mott’s primary offices were in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle, he had relationships with security firms in other cities, including Las Vegas. He had been able to arrange for the digital processing of Teresa’s photograph by reliable locals and for the acquisition of the software and hardware that would allow Ryan to study it better.
By 6:30 in the morning, when the corporate Learjet flew Ryan out of Vegas, Mott’s people would have delivered the Teresa package to his hotel suite in Denver.
Having told Samantha that he had been called to Denver on business, he now intended to go there. He did not know why.
This trip would not atone for the lie that he had told her or even make it less of a lie. And at this point, he had no intention of revealing his investigation of her mother and of Spencer Barghest, which was an omission—a calculated concealment—that counted as a far greater betrayal than the lie about his destination.
Returning to his home in Newport Coast well in advance of his appointment with Dr. Samar Gupta on Tuesday was not an option. Following Lee and Kay Ting’s whispering in the kitchen, he had felt—and still would feel—under surveillance in his own house.
Las Vegas offered him nothing more than games of chance. Already he was in a game with the highest possible stakes, and neither craps nor blackjack, nor baccarat, could distract him from the knowledge that his life was on the line.
So Denver in the early morning.
As he had taken lunch in his hotel room, so he took dinner. He had no appetite, but he ate.
Not surprisingly, that night he dreamed. He might have expected cadavers, preserved or not, in his dreams, but they did not appear.
His nightmares were not of people or other bogeymen, but of landscapes and architecture, including but not limited to that city in the sea.
He walked a valley road toward a palace on a slope. The valley had once been green. Now seared grass, withered flowers, and blighted trees flanked a river in which flowed a turgid mass of black water, ashes, and debris. Palace windows once filled with golden light were strangely red, alive with capering shadows, and the closer he drew to the open door, the more terrified he became of what hideous throng might rush out of it and fall upon him.
After the valley, he appeared on the shore of a wild lake bound with black rock and trees that towered all around. The grinning moon in the black sky was a snarling moon on the black water. Poisonous waves lapped at the stones on which he stood, and something rose in the center of the lake, some behemoth beyond measuring, from which sloughed the inky water and with it the wriggling moon.
In the morning, while he showered, while he breakfasted, while he flew to Denver in the corporate jet, images from the nightmares rose frequently in his mind. He felt as though these were places he had visited years before, not in sleep but when awake, for they were too real to be figments of a dream, too detailed, too evocative, too intimately felt.
He wondered again if not only his body was failing him but also his mind. Perhaps the inadequate function of his heart resulted in diminished circulation, with detrimental consequences to the brain.
TWENTY
The hotel rated five stars. The windows of the presidential suite—the only accommodations available on short notice—looked out across a serrated skyline of glass-and-steel towers.
In the west, great forested mountains thrust toward greater clouds: Andes of cumulus congestus, on which ascended Himalayas of cumulonimbus, so the weight of the celestial architecture, if it should collapse, appeared great enough to sunder the earth below.
Waiting for Ryan in the suite’s cozy library were a computer and sufficient linked equipment to allow him to conduct an exhaustive study of the photo of dead Teresa. Beside the keyboard stood a box of cookies from Denver’s best bakery. Wilson Mott always delivered.
The photographic-analysis software included a well-executed tutorial. Although Ryan had made a fortune from the Internet and had a gift for both software comprehension and design, he experimented most of the morning before he was comfortable with the program.
By noon, he needed a break. Having feasted on cookies, he wanted no lunch. But a pleasure drive appealed to him, and he wished he had his Ford Woodie Wagon or one of his other customized classics.
Perhaps his heart condition warranted a chauffeur, but he wanted to cruise alone. En route from Vegas, his pilot had called ahead to have the hotel book for Ryan a rental SUV to be available 24/7.
The black Cadillac Escalade had every comfort and convenience. He could cruise randomly through the city and not worry about getting hopelessly lost, because when he was ready to return to the hotel, the vehicle’s navigation system would tell him the way.
Although he had been to Denver twice before, he never ventured farther than the convention center and immediate environs. Now he wanted to see more of the city.
Sunday traffic was light. Within half an hour, he came upon a small park that occupied two or three acres at the most. It lay adjacent to an old brick church.
What inspired him to curb the Escalade and go exploring on foot were the aspens—or so he thought. In their autumn dress, the trees were a golden spectacle made more flamboyant by their contrast with the mantled sky.
The park offered no playground or war memorial, only winding brick paths strewn with fallen leaves and an occasional bench on which to sit and contemplate the glory of nature.
On this mild afternoon, the first snowfall seemed still weeks away.
While galleons of clouds sailed eastward at high altitude, the world was becalmed at ground level. Yet even in this stillness, the aspens trembled, as they always did.
Walking, he paused frequently to listen to the whisper of
the trees, a sound he had always loved. The aspens were so sensitive to air movement because their leafstalks were only narrow ribbons and were set at right angles to the hanging leaf-blades.
As he rested on a bench, he realized that he could not recall when he had ever before heard aspens whispering or how he knew the design of their leafstalks was what gave them an unceasing voice.
His initial sight of the park had strummed a sympathetic chord in him. Upon first walking among the trees, he had felt an affection for them that was entirely familiar.
Now, on this bench under a canopy of shiny yellow leaves, the affection ripened into a more intense sentiment, into a tender-hearted yearning that was nostalgic in character. Inexplicably, though he had never been here before, he felt that he had sat beneath these very trees many times, in all seasons and weather.
Wood warblers, soon to migrate south, sang in the whispering trees, sweet high clear notes: swee-swee-swee-ti-ti-ti-swee.
Ryan did not know where he had learned these birds were wood warblers, but suddenly their song moved him from a curious nostalgic yearning to full-blown deja vu. Today was not his first experience of this park.
The certainty that he had been here before, not just once but often, became so electrifying that it brought him off the bench, to his feet, so pierced by a sense of unnatural forces at work that his scalp prickled and the hairs quivered on the nape of his neck, and a chill traced the contours of his spinal column with the specificity of a diligent physiology professor using a laser pointer.
Although the church had interested him only as backdrop, Ryan turned toward it with the conviction that, on some occasion now forgotten, he had been inside of the place. Earlier, he had not been near enough to the church to see its name, but somehow he knew that the denomination was Roman Catholic.
The day remained mild, yet he grew steadily colder. He slipped his hands into his jacket pockets as he crossed the park to the church.
Because they had been swept clean for the morning services, the concrete steps of St. Gemma’s were brightened by only a few aspen leaves. The last Mass of the day had been offered, and the church stood quiet now.
Dean Koontz Page 8