Shadowfires

by Dean Koontz

  Reese got out of bed and took a very hot shower. He wished that he could unhinge the top of his head and sluice out the hideous images that lingered from the nightmares.

  Agnes, his sister, had taped a note on the refrigerator in the kitchen. She had taken Esther to the dentist for a scheduled checkup.

  Standing by the sink, looking out the window at the big coral tree in the rear yard, Reese drank hot black coffee and ate a slightly stale doughnut. If Agnes could see the breakfast he made for himself, she would be upset. But his dreams had left him queasy, and he had no appetite for anything heavier. Even the doughnut was hard to swallow.

  “Black coffee and greasy doughnuts,” Agnes would say if she knew. “One’ll give you ulcers, other’ll clog your arteries with cholesterol. Two slow methods of suicide. You want to commit suicide, I can tell you a hundred quicker and less painful ways to go about it.”

  He thanked God for Agnes, in spite of her tendency, as his big sister, to nag him about everything from his eating habits to his taste in neckties. Without her, he might not have held himself together after Janet’s death.

  Agnes was unfortunately big-boned, stocky, plain-looking, with a deformed left hand, destined for spinsterhood, but she had a kind heart and a mothering instinct second to none. After Janet died, Agnes arrived with a suitcase and her favorite cookbook, announcing that she would take care of Reese and little Esther “just for the summer,” until they were able to cope on their own. As a fifth-grade teacher in Anaheim, she had the summer off and could devote long hours to the patient rebuilding of the shattered Hagerstrom household. She had been with them five years now, and without her, they’d be lost.

  Reese even liked her good-natured nagging. When she encouraged him to eat well-balanced meals, he felt cared for and loved.

  As he poured another cup of black coffee, he decided to bring Agnes a dozen roses and a box of chocolates when he came home today. He was not, by nature, given to frequent expressions of his feelings, so he tried to compensate now and then by surprising those he cared for with gifts. The smallest surprises thrilled Agnes, even coming from a brother. Big-boned, stocky, plain-faced women were not used to getting gifts when there was no occasion requiring them.

  Life was not only unfair but sometimes decidedly cruel. That was not a new thought to Reese. It was not even inspired by Janet’s untimely and brutal death—or by the fact that Agnes’s warm, loving, generous nature was trapped forever inside a body that most men, too focused on appearances, could never love. As a policeman, frequently confronted by the worst in humankind, he had learned a long time ago that cruelty was the way of the world—and that the only defense against it was the love of one’s family and a few close friends.

  His closest friend, Julio Verdad, arrived as Reese was pouring a third cup of black coffee. Reese got another cup from the cabinet and filled it for Julio, and they sat at the kitchen table.

  Julio looked as if he’d had little sleep, and in fact Reese was probably the only person capable of detecting the subtle signs of overwork in the lieutenant. As usual, Julio was well dressed: smartly tailored dark blue suit, crisp white shirt, perfectly knotted maroon-and-blue tie with gold chain, maroon pocket handkerchief, and oxblood Bally loafers. He was as neat and precise and alert as always, but vague sooty smudges were visible under his eyes, and his soft voice was surely if immeasurably softer than usual.

  “Up all night?” Reese asked.

  “I slept.”

  “How long? An hour or two? That’s what I thought. You worry me,” Reese said. “You’ll wear yourself down to bone someday.”

  “This is a special case.”

  “They’re all special cases to you.”

  “I feel a special obligation to the victim, Ernestina.”

  “This is the thousandth victim you’ve felt a special obligation toward,” Reese noted.

  Julio shrugged and sipped his coffee. “Sharp wasn’t bluffing.”

  “About what?”

  “About pulling this out of our hands. The names of the victims—Ernestina Hernandez and Rebecca Klienstad—are still in the files, but only the names. Plus a memorandum indicating that federal authorities requested the case be remanded to their jurisdiction for ‘reasons of national security.’ This morning, when I pushed Folbeck about letting you and me assist the feds, he came down hard. Said, ‘Holy fuckin’ Christ, Julio, stay out of it. That’s an order.’ His very words.”

  Folbeck was chief of detectives, a devout Mormon who could hold his own with the most foulmouthed men in the department but who never took the Lord’s name in vain. That was where he drew the line. In spite of his vivid and frequent use of four-letter words, Nicholas Folbeck was capable of angrily lecturing any detective heard to mutter a blasphemy. In fact, he’d once told Reese, “Hagerstrom, please don’t say ‘goddamn’ or ‘holy Christ’ or anything like that in my presence ever again. I purely hate that shit, and I won’t fuckin’ tolerate it.” If Nick Folbeck’s warning to Julio had included blasphemy as well as mere trash talk, the pressure on the department to stay out of this case had come from higher authorities than Anson Sharp.

  Reese said, “What about the file on the body-snatching case, Eric Leben’s corpse?”

  “Same thing,” Julio said. “Removed from our jurisdiction.”

  Business talk had taken Reese’s mind off last night’s bloody dreams of Janet, and his appetite had returned a little. He got another doughnut from the breadbox. He offered one to Julio, but Julio declined. Reese said, “What else have you been up to?”

  “For one thing … I went to the library when it opened and read everything I could find on Dr. Eric Leben.”

  “Rich, a scientific genius, a business genius, ruthless, cold, too stupid to know he had a great wife—we already know about him.”

  “He was also obsessed,” Julio said.

  “I guess geniuses usually are, with one thing or another.”

  “What obsessed him was immortality.”

  Reese frowned. “Say what?”

  “As a graduate student, and in the years immediately following his acquisition of a doctorate, when he was one of the brightest young geneticists doing recombinant DNA research anywhere in the world, he wrote articles for a lot of journals and published research papers dealing with various aspects of the extension of the human life span. A flood of articles; the man is driven.”

  “Was driven. Remember that garbage truck,” Reese said.

  “Even the driest, most technical of those pieces have a … well, a fire in them, a passion that grips you,” Julio said. He pulled a sheet of paper from one of his inside jacket pockets, unfolded it. “This is a line from an article that appeared in a popular science magazine, more colorful than the technical journal stuff: ‘It may be possible, ultimately, for man to reshape himself genetically and thereby deny the claim of the grave, to live longer than Methuselah—and even to be both Jesus and Lazarus in one, raising himself up from the mortuary slab even as death lays him down upon it.”

  Reese blinked. “Funny, huh? His body’s stolen from the morgue, which is sort of being ‘raised up,’ though not the way he meant it.”

  Julio’s eyes were strange. “Maybe not funny. Maybe not stolen.”

  Reese felt a strangeness coming into his own eyes. He said, “You don’t mean … no, of course not.”

  “He was a genius with unlimited resources, perhaps the brightest man ever to work in recombinant DNA research, and he was obsessed with staying young and avoiding death. So when he just seems to get up and walk away from a mortuary … is it so impossible to imagine that he did, in fact, get up and walk away?”

  Reese felt his chest tightening, and he was surprised to feel a thrill of fear pass through him. “But is such a thing possible, after the injuries he suffered?”

  “A few years ago, definitely impossible. But we’re living in an age of miracles, or at least in an age of infinite possibilities.”

  “But how?”

  “T
hat’s part of what we’ll have to find out. I called UCI and got in touch with Dr. Easton Solberg, whose work on aging is mentioned in Leben’s articles. Turns out Leben knew Solberg, looked up to him as a mentor, and for a while they were fairly close. Solberg has great praise for Leben, says he isn’t the least surprised that Leben made a fortune out of DNA research, but Solberg also says there was a dark side to Eric Leben. And he’s willing to talk about it.”

  “What dark side?”

  “He wouldn’t say on the phone. But we have an appointment with him at UCI at one o’clock.”

  As Julio pushed his chair back and got up, Reese said, “How can we keep digging into this and stay out of trouble with Nick Folbeck?”

  “Sick leave,” Julio said. “As long as I’m on sick leave, I’m not officially investigating anything. Call it personal curiosity.”

  “That won’t hold up if we’re caught at it. Cops aren’t supposed to have personal curiosity in a situation like this.”

  “No, but if I’m on sick leave, Folbeck’s not going to be worrying about what I’m doing. It’s less likely that anyone’ll be looking over my shoulder. In fact, I sort of implied that I wanted nothing to do with anything this hot. Told Folbeck that, given the heat on this, it might be best for me to get away for a few days, in case the media pick up on it and want me to answer questions. He agreed.”

  Reese got to his feet. “I better call in sick, too.”

  “I already did it for you,” Julio said.

  “Oh. Okay, then, let’s go.”

  “I mean, I thought it would be all right. But if you don’t want to get involved in this—”

  “Julio, I’m in.”

  “Only if you’re sure.”

  “I’m in,” Reese said exasperatedly.

  And he thought but did not say: You saved my Esther, my little girl, went right after those guys in the Chevy van and got her out of there alive, you were like a man possessed, they must’ve thought it was a demon on their tail, you put your own life on the line and saved Esther, and I loved you before that because you were my partner and a good one, but after that I loved you, you crazy little bastard, and as long as I live I’m going to be there when you need me, no matter what.

  In spite of his natural difficulty expressing his most profound feelings, Reese wanted to say all of that to Julio, but he kept silent because Julio did not want effusive gratitude and would be embarrassed by it. All Julio wanted was the commitment of a friend and partner. Undying gratitude would, if openly expressed, impose a barrier between them by obviously placing Julio in a superior position, and ever afterward they would be awkward with each other.

  In their daily working relationship, Julio always had been in the superior position, of course, deciding how to proceed at nearly every step of a homicide investigation, but his control was never blatant or obvious, which made all the difference. Reese would not have cared if Julio’s dominance had been obvious; he did not mind deferring to Julio because in some ways Julio was the quicker and smarter of the two.

  But Julio, having been born and raised in Mexico, having come to the States and made good, had a reverence and a passion for democracy, not only for democracy in the political arena but for democracy in all things, even in one-to-one relationships. He could assume the mantle of leadership and dominance if it were conveyed by mutual unspoken consent; but if his role were made overt, he would not be able to fulfill it, and the partnership would suffer.

  “I’m in,” Reese repeated, rinsing their coffee cups in the sink. “We’re just two cops on sick leave. So let’s go recuperate together.”

  21

  ARROWHEAD

  The sporting-goods store was near the lake. It was built in the form of a large log cabin, and a rustic wooden sign advertised BAIT, TACKLE, BOAT RENTALS, SPORTING GOODS. A Coors sign was in one window, a Miller Lite sign in another. Three cars, two pickup trucks, and one Jeep stood in the sunny part of the parking lot, the early-afternoon sun glinting off their chrome and silvering their windows.

  “Guns,” Ben said when he saw the place. “They might sell guns.”

  “We have guns,” Rachael said.

  Ben drove to the back of the lot, off the macadamed area, onto gravel that crunched under the tires, then through a thick carpet of pine needles, finally parking in the concealing shade of one of the massive evergreens that encircled the property. He saw a slice of the lake beyond the trees, a few boats on the sun-dappled water, and a far shore rising up into steep wooded slopes.

  “Your thirty-two isn’t exactly a peashooter, but it’s not particularly formidable, either,” Ben told her as he switched off the engine. “The .357 I took off Baresco is better, next thing to a cannon, in fact, but a shotgun would be perfect.”

  “Shotgun? Sounds like overkill.”

  “I always prefer to go for overkill when I’m tracking down a walking dead man,” Ben said, trying to make a joke of it but failing. Rachael’s already haunted eyes were touched by a new bleak tint, and she shivered.

  “Hey,” he said, “it’ll be all right.”

  They got out of the rental car and stood for a moment, breathing in the clean, sweet mountain air. The day was warm and undisturbed by even the mildest breeze. The trees stood motionless and silent, as if their boughs had turned to stone. No cars passed on the road, and no other people were in sight. No birds flew or sang. The stillness was deep, perfect, preternatural.

  Ben sensed something ominous in the stillness. It almost seemed to be an omen, a warning to turn back from the high vastness of the mountains and retreat to more civilized places, where there was noise and movement and other people to turn to for help in an emergency.

  Apparently stricken by the same uneasy feeling that gripped Ben, Rachael said, “Maybe this is nuts. Maybe we should just get out of here, go away somewhere.”

  “And wait for Eric to recover from his injuries?”

  “Maybe he won’t recover enough to function well.”

  “But if he does, he’ll come looking for you.”

  She sighed, nodded.

  They crossed the parking lot and went into the store, hoping to buy a shotgun and some ammunition.

  Something strange was happening to Eric, stranger even than his return from the dead. It started as another headache, one of the many intense migraines that had come and gone since his resurrection, and he did not immediately realize there was a difference about this one, a weirdness. He just squinted his eyes to block out some of the light that irritated him, and refused to succumb to the unrelenting and debilitating throbbing that filled his skull.

  He pulled an armchair in front of the living-room window and took up a vigil, looking down through the sloping forest, along the dirt road that led up from the more heavily populated foothills nearer the lake. If enemies came for him, they would follow the lane at least part of the way up the slope before sneaking into the woods. As soon as he saw where they left the road, he would slip out of the cabin by the back door, move around through the trees, creep in behind the intruders, and take them by surprise.

  He had hoped that the pounding in his head would subside a bit when he sat down and leaned back in the big comfortable chair. But it was getting much worse than anything he had experienced previously. He felt almost as if his skull were … soft as clay … and as if it were being hammered into a new shape by every fierce throb. He clenched his jaws tighter, determined to weather this new adversity.

  Perhaps the headache was made worse by the concentration required to study the tree-shadowed road for advancing enemies. If it became unbearable, he would have to lie down, though he was loath to leave his post. He sensed danger approaching.

  He kept the ax and the two knives on the floor beside the chair. Each time he glanced down at those sharp blades, he felt not only reassured but strangely exultant. When he put his fingertips to the handle of the ax, a dark and almost erotic thrill coursed through him.

  Let them come, he thought. I’ll show them Eric Leben i
s still a man to be reckoned with. Let them come.

  Though he still had difficulty understanding who might be seeking him, he somehow knew that his fear was not unreasonable. Then names popped into his mind: Baresco, Seitz, Geffels, Knowls, Lewis. Yes, of course, his partners in Geneplan. They would know what he’d done. They would decide that he had to be found quickly and terminated in order to protect the secret of Wildcard. But they were not the only men he had to fear. There were others … shadowy figures he could not recall, men with more power than the partners in Geneplan.

  For a moment he felt that he was about to break through a wall of mist into a clear place. He was on the verge of achieving a clarity of thought and a fullness of memory that he had not known since rising from the gurney in the morgue. He held his breath and leaned forward in his chair with tremulous anticipation. He almost had it, all of it: the identity of the other pursuers, the meaning of the mice, the meaning of the hideous image of the crucified woman that kept recurring to him …

  Then the unremitting pain in his head knocked him back from the brink of enlightenment, into the mist again. Muddy currents invaded the clearing stream of his thoughts, and in a moment all was clouded as before. He let out a thin cry of frustration.

  Outside, in the forest, movement caught his attention. Squinting his hot watery eyes, Eric slid forward to the chair’s edge, leaned toward the large window, peered intently at the tree-covered slope and the shadow-dappled dirt lane. No one there. The movement was simply the work of a sudden breeze that had finally broken the summer stillness. Bushes stirred, and the evergreen boughs lifted slightly, drooped, lifted, drooped, as if the trees were fanning themselves.