Dean Koontz

by Your Heart Belongs to Me (v5)

Hesitating at the bottom of the steps, Ryan knew the crucifix above the altar would be of carved wood, that the crown of thorns on Christ’s head would be gilded, likewise the nails in His hands and feet. Behind the cross, a gilded oval. And radiating from the oval, carved and gilded rays of holy light.

  He climbed the steps.

  At the door, he almost turned away.

  Shadows gathered in the narthex, fewer in the nave, where daylight pressed colorfully through the stained-glass windows and where some altar lights remained aglow.

  In every detail, the impressive crucifix proved to be as he had foreseen it.

  Alone in the church, he stood in the center aisle, transfixed, trembling like the quaking aspens in the park.

  Ryan remained certain that he had never been here before, and he was not a Catholic. Yet he was overcome by the sense of comfort that one feels in well-loved places.

  This comfort did not warm him, however, and did not calm him, but compelled him to retreat.

  Outside, on the steps, he needed a minute to regain control of his ragged breathing.

  In the park once more, on a bench to which his wobbly legs had barely carried him, he used his cell phone to call Wilson Mott’s most private number.

  After speaking with Mott, he expected to sit there for a while, because he was not yet calm or fit to drive. But the brilliance of the aspens, the black iron lampposts with crackle-glass panes, the wrought-iron bench painted glossy black, and the herringbone brick walkway filled him with yearning for a past he could not recall, indeed for a past that he had never lived.

  The weirdness of it all became too much for him, and he left the park at something less than a run but more than a walk.

  After Ryan entered the name of his hotel in the Escalade’s navigator, the mellifluous voice of a patient young woman guided him successfully through Denver in spite of a few missed turns.

  TWENTY-ONE

  In the library of the presidential suite, high above Denver, Ryan Perry worked obsessively on the digitized photo of dead Teresa.

  The photographic-analysis package provided numerous tools with which he could enhance the cadaver’s eyes, enlarging and clarifying the scene reflected in those glassy surfaces. Some of the techniques could be used in combination. And when the zone of interest was so enlarged that it lost resolution, the computer was able to clone the pixels until density and definition had been restored to the image.

  Nevertheless, by 7:05 Sunday evening, when Wilson Mott’s agent arrived, Ryan had not been able to make anything of the patterns of light and shadow in those optic reflections.

  Earlier, just before leaving the park, when he had called Mott to request the services of a trusted and discreet phlebotomist, he had been told that the nearest such medical technician that could be tapped for the job was George Zane, who had not yet returned from Las Vegas to the security company’s offices in Los Angeles. Before signing on with Mott, Zane had been a U.S. Army Medical Corpsman, administering first aid on the battlefields of Iraq.

  Now, Ryan stretched out on a bed in the master bedroom, with a towel under his arm, while Zane performed a venesection and drew 40 milliliters of blood into eight 5-milliliter vials.

  “I want to be tested for every known poison,” Ryan said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not just those that are known to cause cardiac hypertrophy.”

  “We’ve located a cooperative lab right here in Denver and two blood specialists who’ll work through the night on it. You don’t want to know their fee.”

  “I don’t care about their fee,” Ryan assured Zane.

  One of the best things about having serious wealth was that if you knew the right service providers—like Wilson Mott—you could get what you wanted, when you wanted it. And no matter how eccentric the request, no one raised an eyebrow, and everyone treated you with the utmost respect, at least to your face.

  “I want to be tested for drugs, too. Including—no, especially—for hallucinogenics and for drugs that might cause hallucinations or delusions as a side effect.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Zane, setting aside the fourth vial, “Mr. Mott has informed me of all that.”

  With the knots of scar tissue on his bald head, with his intense purple-black eyes, with his wide nostrils flaring wider as though the scent of blood excited him, George Zane should have been a disturbing figure. Instead, he was a calming presence.

  “You’re very good with the needle, George.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Didn’t sting at all. And you have a good bedside manner.”

  “Because of the army.”

  “I didn’t realize they taught bedside manner in the army.”

  “The battlefield teaches it. The suffering you see. You want to be gentle.”

  “I never served in the military.”

  “Well, in the military or not, we all go to war every day. Two more syringes, sir.”

  As Zane removed the blood-filled barrel from the cannula and attached an empty one, Ryan said, “You probably think I’m some kind of paranoid.”

  “No, sir. There’s evil in the world, all right. Being aware of it makes you a realist, not a paranoid.”

  “The idea that someone’s poisoning me or drugging me…”

  “You wouldn’t be the first. The enemy isn’t always on the other end of a gun or a bomb. Sometimes he’s very close. Sometimes he looks like us, which makes him almost invisible, and that’s when he’s most dangerous.”

  Ryan had also instructed Wilson Mott to obtain a prescription sleeping drug and send it along with Zane. He wanted a medication of sufficient strength not merely to prevent the wide-eyed, twitchy-legged, mind-racing, fully-wired insomnia that made him manic enough to try to ride a shark, but one also potent enough to submerge him so deep in sleep that he would not dream.

  After Zane left with the blood, Ryan ordered a room-service dinner so heavy that the consumption of it should have sedated him as effectively as a cocktail of barbiturates.

  Following dinner, he consulted the dosage instructions on the pill bottle, took two capsules instead of the one recommended, and washed them down with a glass of milk.

  In bed, he used the remote to surf the ocean of entertainment options offered by the satellite-TV service to which the hotel subscribed. On a classic-movie channel, he found a women-in-prison movie so magnificently tedious that perhaps he would not have needed the prescription sedative.

  He slept.

  A silent dark, a vague awareness of a tangled sheet, and then a quiet dark, only the rhythmic interior sounds of heart contractions and arterial rush, as black as a moonless lake, as a raven’s wings, darkness there and nothing more, merely this and nothing more…

  And then a flickering dream framed in a rectangle, surrounded by blackness.

  A man and woman spoke, the male voice familiar, and there was music and a sense of urgency, and gunfire.

  The dream flickered because Ryan blinked his eyes, and it was framed in a rectangle because it was not a dream, not the women-in-prison movie, either, but whatever the classic-movie channel deemed classic at this hour.

  Glowing numerals on the bedside clock read 2:36. He had been asleep four hours, maybe five.

  He wanted more, needed more, fumbled for the remote, found it, extinguished the rectangle of colorful images, silenced the guns, silenced the music, silenced the woman, silenced William Holden.

  As the remote slipped out of his slackening hand, as he sank into the solace of oblivion, he realized that the movie he had just switched off was the same one to which he had regained consciousness on Thursday morning, after the terrible attack Wednesday night that had driven him to his internist, Forry Stafford.

  Waking Thursday morning on his bedroom floor, curled in the fetal position, eyes crusted shut, mouth dry and sour, he had become convinced that the unknown William Holden film on the TV had special meaning for him, that in it was a message to be deciphered, a warning about his future.


  That feeling had passed as he came fully awake and recalled the seizures and the spike-sharp pain that had racked him in the night.

  But now, almost four days later, the sense of pending revelation swelled once more, and Ryan thought he should struggle against the gravity that pulled him down into sleep, should rise, switch on the TV, identify the film and wring its scenes to squeeze from the story any bitter omen that it might contain.

  A heavy dinner, a powerful drug, a weight of exhaustion, and a kind of cowardice influenced him, instead, to let the remaining sand grains of consciousness sift through his grasp.

  He slept over ten hours and woke Monday morning with a headache that a drunk might have earned after a three-day bender.

  In the shower, water pelted his skull as if every drop were a hailstone. Even low light stung his eyes, and every odor offended.

  He fought this hangover with pots of coffee. He drank the first pot black, the second with cream but without sugar.

  Later he ordered dry toast. Later still, a buttered English muffin. In the afternoon, he wanted a dish of vanilla ice cream.

  Room service brought him one thing at a time, as he asked for it, as though he were an ill child making requests of a doting mother.

  Without surcease, he worked on the computer, striving to enhance the reflections on Teresa Reach’s dead eyes and discover the meaning that he thought he would find in them. Hours after he knew that no meaning existed to be identified, he labored on those twin images.

  Without this task to occupy him, he might have called the valet to have the Escalade brought from the hotel garage, and he might have driven again to the park with the aspens, if he could find it. Once in the park, he would not be able to resist St. Gemma’s, and he worried that a second visit to the church might contribute not to any resolution of this mystery, not even to any degree of clarification, but only to greater disorientation.

  The many strangenesses of the past few days had initially led to bewilderment that stoked his curiosity. Bewilderment had given way to a muddy confusion that, in its persistence, was mentally and emotionally debilitating.

  Monday afternoon, he finally acknowledged that nothing in Teresa’s eyes would enlighten him either as to the identity of the people who might be conspiring against him or as to their motives.

  Nevertheless, he continued to feel that something about this last photograph of her was important. Spencer Barghest had no doubt held the camera; therefore, Barghest had assisted Rebecca Reach in ending Teresa’s life.

  Samantha claimed to be estranged from her mother.

  She is dead. To me. Rebecca’s buried in an apartment in Las Vegas. She walks and talks and breathes, but she’s dead all right.

  Yet on Friday night, hardly more than forty-eight hours after making that angry declaration, she had slipped out of her apartment while Ryan napped, to meet with Barghest under the moonlit pepper tree.

  Spencer Barghest was part of this, and because he seemed to be at best disturbed and at worst depraved, he was not involved because he was concerned for Ryan’s welfare. Barghest terminated Teresa, and he might be part of a scheme to terminate Ryan, which argued that Ryan’s intuitive reaction to the photograph—that it contained a key to unlocking this mystery—should not be lightly dismissed.

  If the answer was not in her eyes, it might be found in another part of the photo.

  His attention turned next to her mouth, which hung open. Her full lips were parted, as if the breath of life had pressed them apart to escape her.

  The darkness past her lips, within her mouth, was not uniform in shade and texture, as it appeared upon a cursory look. He saw now that Teresa seemed to have something lodged in her mouth, an object just beyond her teeth, a subtle shadowy shape too geometric to be her tongue.

  He enlarged her lips to fill the screen. He cloned pixels to restore definition at the greater scale.

  The woman’s shapely mouth seemed to cry out to him, but the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token of the final words she may have spoken as Barghest had finished her by whatever means.

  Ryan bent to this new work as obsessively as he had studied the reflections in her eyes.

  At 8:40 Monday evening, as Ryan ate a Stilton-cheese sandwich with cornichons and worked at the computer, George Zane called with the results of the blood tests.

  In an exhaustive analysis, the two blood specialists and their lab assistants had discovered no traces of poisons, drugs, or other problematic chemicals in the 40 milliliters that Zane had drawn from Ryan.

  “They could have missed it,” Ryan said. “No one’s so good, they don’t screw up now and then.”

  “Do you want me to take additional samples,” Zane asked, “and find someone new to analyze them?”

  “No. Whatever it is, it’s too subtle to be detected by the standard tests. You could drain me of every drop, employ a thousand hematologists, and I’d learn nothing more than I know now.”

  Ryan flushed the sedatives down the toilet and ordered a pot of coffee from room service.

  He felt that time was running out for him, and not primarily because his appointment with Dr. Samar Gupta, to receive the results of the myocardial biopsy, was little more than eighteen hours away.

  As the evening waned and then on past midnight, the contours of Teresa Reach’s lips and teeth and oral cavity became his universe, so seductive and all-consuming that he never went to bed, but fell asleep in the office chair, in front of the computer, sometime after three o’clock in the morning, his search for truth still unrewarded.

  From Denver to John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, cosseted in the corporate Learjet, Ryan from time to time studied the photograph without benefit of computer enhancement, wondering if the clue that he sought might be hidden in Teresa’s hair, in the delicate shell of her one revealed ear, or even in the folds of the pillow that was visible to one side of her face….

  The plane touched down and taxied to the terminal less than an hour before Ryan’s appointment with the cardiologist.

  Rather than compromise his secrets by having Lee Ting meet him at the airport with a car, Ryan had arranged for a limousine company to provide transport. They sent a superstretch white Cadillac and a courteous driver who did not feel that conversation was part of his job description.

  In the limo, all the way to Dr. Gupta’s office, Ryan stared at Teresa’s dead face.

  He had slid into a state of mind that was not characteristic of him. The confusion that had overcome him in Denver had thickened to such a degree that he was no longer merely confused but confounded, his mental faculties overwhelmed by what he had learned, by what he had experienced, and by his failure to make sense of any of it.

  Being confounded for the first time in his life would have been sufficient to sap his spirit, but he felt as well a quiet resignation building in him, which was worse because he had not thought himself capable of any form or degree of surrender.

  His parents’ selfishness and their indifference to him had only inspired him to achieve, not only later in life but also as a child, when he had determined never to be like them.

  In business, he had seen every setback as an opportunity, had viewed every triumph as a challenge to achieve even more. He never surrendered, never capitulated, never so much as yielded except when he ceded his position on one issue in order to gain a much greater advantage on another.

  He would have liked to believe that this growing resignation harbored in it an element of fortitude that would stave off despair. But fortitude was endurance animated by courage, and with every turn of the limousine’s wheels, he felt more isolated from his previous sources of strength and less able to summon courage.

  He began to wonder if his every act these past five days—the entire investigation into Rebecca Reach and Barghest, all of it—had been only a desperate attempt to distract himself from considering the news that he was likely to receive at the appointment with the cardiologist this afternoon. Loath to acc
ept a mortal diagnosis about which he could do nothing, perhaps he had busied himself seeking a bogeyman whom he could more readily engage in battle.

  When they arrived at the medical building in which Dr. Gupta had his offices, the limo curbed in a no-parking zone.

  Ryan slid Teresa’s photograph into the manila envelope.

  The chauffeur got out from behind the wheel and stepped to the rear of the car to open Ryan’s door.

  In the grip of unreason, Ryan took the dead woman’s photograph with him, not to show it to the cardiologist, merely to be able to hold it, as if it were a talisman, the power of which might prevent him from descending the final steep step between resignation and despair.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Cardiomyopathy,” said Dr. Gupta.

  He sat with Ryan not in an examination room but in his private office, as though he felt the need to deliver this news in a less clinical, more reassuring environment.

  On a shelf behind the desk, in silver frames, were photos of the physician’s family. His wife was lovely. They had two daughters and a son, all good-looking kids, and a golden retriever.

  Also on the shelf stood a model of a sailboat, and two photos of the Gupta family—dog included—taken aboard the real vessel.

  Listening to his diagnosis, Ryan Perry envied the cardiologist for his family and for the evident richness of his life, which was a blessing quite different from—and superior to—riches.

  “A disease of the heart muscle,” said Samar Gupta. “It causes a reduction in the force of contractions, a decrease in the efficiency of circulation.”

  Ryan wanted to ask about cause, the possibility of poisoning that Forry Stafford had mentioned, but he waited.

  Dr. Gupta’s diction was as precise as ever, but the musicality of his voice was tempered now by a compassion that imposed on him a measured solemnity: “Cardiomyopathies fall into three main groups—restrictive cardiomyopathy, dilated, and hypertrophic.”