it would be utterly tasteless for an artist to let himself be killed in a cheap, dismal place like this."
Doyle smiled grimly. "No chance." Then he went outside, making sure the door had locked behind him.
Earlier in the evening and fifteen hundred miles to the east, Detective Ernie Hoval opened the front door of a thirty-thousand dollar three-bedroom ranch house in a pleasant middle-class development between Cambridge and Cadiz, Ohio, just off Route 22, and stepped into an entrance foyer which was liberally splashed with blood. Long red stains smeared the walls on both sides where desperate hands had slid down the plaster. Thick droplets of blood spotted the beige carpet and the yellow-brocade loveseat by the coat closet.
Hoval closed the door and walked into the living room, where a dead woman lay half on the sofa and half on the floor. She had been in her late forties, rather handsome if not pretty, tall and dark. She had taken a shotgun blast in the stomach.
Newspaper reporters and lab photographers circled her like wolves.
Four lab technicians, as silent as a quartet of deaf-mutes, crawled all over the big room on their hands and knees, measuring and charting the spray patterns of the blood, which seemed to have reached into every nook and cranny. They were most likely fighting to keep from being sick.
"Christ," Hoval said.
He went through the living room and down the narrow hall to the first bathroom, where there was an extremely pretty teenage girl sprawled at the foot of a bloodstained commode. She was wearing skimpy blue panties, nothing else, and had been shot once in the back of the head. The bathroom was even bloodier than the foyer and the living room combined.
In the smallest bedroom, a good-looking, long-haired bearded boy in his early twenties was lying on his back in bed, covers drawn up to his chin, his hands folded peacefully on his chest. The pastel blanket was soaked with blood and shredded in the center by .
. I shotgun pellets. The poster of the Rolling Stones stapled to the wall above the bed was streaked with red and curled damply at the edges.
"I thought you were only working on the Pulham case."
Hoval turned to see who had spoken and confronted the ineffectual-looking lab man who had lifted the killer's fingerprints from Rich Pulham's squad car. "I heard the report of the initial find and thought maybe this was tied in. It is kind of similar."
"It was a family thing," the lab man said.
"They already have a suspect?"
"They already have a confession," the technician said, glancing uninterestedly at the dead boy on the bed.
"Who? "
"Husband and father."
"He killed his own family?" This was not the first time Hoval had encountered a thing like that, but it never failed to shock him. His own wife and kids meant too much to him, were too intricate a part of his life for him to ever understand how another man could bring himself to slaughter his own flesh and blood.
"He was waiting for the arresting officers," the technician said.
"He was the one who telephoned for them."
Hoval felt ill.
"Anything on the Pulham situation?"
Hoval leaned against the wall, remembered the blood, pulled away and checked for stains. But the wall here was clean. He leaned back again, uneasy, a chill coursing along his spine. "We think we have something," he told the technician. "It might have started at Breen's Cafe back at the interchange." He summarized what they had learned from Janet Kinder, the waitress who had served an unnamed oddball his lunch Monday afternoon. "If Pulham went after the man-and it looks more and more like he did-then our killer is driving a rented van on his way to California."
"Hardly enough data for you to put out an APB, is there?"
Hoval nodded glumly. "Must be a thousand Automovers going west on I-70. It'll take weeks to go through them all, trace the drivers, winnow it down to the bastard that did it."
"This waitress give a description?" the lab man asked.
"Yeah. She's man-crazy, so she remembers these things well." He repeated the description they had gotten from the waitress.
"He doesn't sound like a left-wing revolutionary to me," the lab man said. "More like an ex-marine."
"There's no way to tell these days," Ernie Hoval said. "The SDS and some of these other crazies are cutting their hair, shaving, bathing, blending right in with your decent average citizens." He was impatient with the sallow man and did not want to pursue the subject; quite obviously, they were not on the same wavelength. He leaned away from the wall and looked once more into the bloody bedroom. "Why?"
"Why this? Why'd he kill his own family?
"Yes."
"He's very religious," the technician said, smiling again.
Hoval didn't get it. He said so.
"He's a lay preacher. Very dedicated to Christ, you know.
Spreads the Good Word as much as he can, reads the Bible for an hour every night . . . Then he sees his boy going off the deep end with drugs-or at least pot. He thinks his daughter's got loose morals or maybe no morals at all, because she won't tell him who she's dating or why she stays out so late. And the mother took up for both the kids a little too much. She was encouraging them to sin, as it were."
"And what finally set him off?" Hoval asked.
"Nothing much. He says that all the little day-to-day things mounted up until he couldn't stand it any longer."
"And the solution was murder."
"For him, anyway."
Hoval shook his head sadly, thinking of the pretty girl lying on the bathroom floor. "What's the world coming to these days?"
"Not the world," the slim man said. "Not the whole world."
Eleven It was a hard rain, a downpour, a seemingly perpetual cloudburst. The wind from the east pushed it across high Denver in vicious, eroding sheets. It streamed off the peaked black-slate roofs of the four motel wings, chuckled rather pleasantly along the horizontal sections of spouting, roared down the wide vertical spouts, and gushed noisily into the drainage gratings in the ground.
Everywhere, trees dripped, shrubs dripped, and flat surfaces glistened darkly. Dirty water collected in depressions in the courtyard lawn.
The hard-driven droplets shattered the crystalline tranquillity of the swimming pool, danced on the flagstones laid around the pool, flattened the tough grass that encircled the flagstones.
The gusting wind brought the rain under the awning and into the second-level promenade outside of Doyle's room. The moment he closed the door, locking Colin inside, a whirlwind of cold water raced along the walkway and spun over him, soaking his right side. His blue work shirt and one leg of his well-worn jeans clung uncomfortably to his skin.
Shivering, he looked southward, down the longest stretch of the walkway, to the courtyard steps at the far end. The shadows were deep.
None of the rooms had light in them; and the weak night lights on the promenade were spaced fifty or sixty feet apart. The night mist complicated the picture, curling around the iron awning supports and eddying in the recessed entrances to the rooms. Nevertheless, Doyle was fairly sure that there was no one prowling about in that direction.
Thirty feet to the north, two rooms beyond their own, another wing of the motel grid intersected this one, forming the northeast corner of the courtyard overlook. Whoever had been at their door might have run up there in a second, might have ducked quickly out of sight Alex tucked his head down to keep the rain out of his face, ' hurried up that way and peered cautiously around the corner.
There was nothing down the short arm of that corridor except more red doors, the night mist, darkness, and wet concrete. A blue safety bulb burning behind a protective wire cage marked another set of open steps that led down to the first level, this time to the parking lot which completely ringed the complex.
The last segment of his own walkway, running off to the north, was equally deserted, as was the remainder of the secondlevel east-west wing.
He walked back to the wrought-iron railing and looked do
wn into the courtyard at the pool and the landscaped grounds around it. The only things that moved down there were those stirred by the wind and the rain.
Suddenly Alex had the eerie notion that he was not merely alone out here-but that he was the only living soul in the entire motel. He felt as if all the rooms were empty, the lobby empty, the manager's quarters empty, all of it abandoned in the wake-or perhaps the approach-of some great cataclysm. The overbearing silence, except for the rain, and the bleak concrete hallways generated and fed this odd fantasy until it became disturbingly real and a bit upsetting.
Don't let the frightened little kid come to the surface again, Doyle warned himself. You've done well so far.
Don't lose your cool now.
After a few minutes of observation, during which he leaned with both hands on the fancy iron safety railing, Doyle was convinced that the miniature pine trees and the neatly trimmed shrubbery in the courtyard below did not conceal anyone; their shadows were entirely their own.
The crisscrossing promenades remained quiet, deserted.
The windows were all dark.
Underneath the steadily drumming rain and the occasional banshee cries of the storm wind, the sepulcher silence continued undisturbed.
Standing by the rail, Alex had been without protection, and now he was thoroughly drenched. His shirt and trousers were sodden. Water had even gotten into his boots and had made his socks all cold and squishy. His arms were decorated with rank on rank of goose pimples, and he was shivering uncontrollably. His nose was running, and his eyes were teary from squinting out at the rain and fog.
Nevertheless, Doyle felt better than he had for some time.
Although he had not found the stranger who was harassing them, he had at least tried to confront the man.
Finally, he had done something more than run away from the situation. He could have remained in the room despite Colin's accusing look, could have made it through the night without taking this risk. But he had taken the risk, after all, and now he felt somewhat better, pleased with himself.
Of course, there was nothing more to be done. Whoever the stranger was, and whatever the hell he had intended to do once he had picked their lock, the man had obviously lost interest in his game when he realized that they were awake and onto him. He would not be back tonight. Perhaps they would never see him again at all, here or anywhere.
When he turned and started back toward their room, all of his good humor was abruptly forgotten . . .
Two hundred feet along the same walkway which he had first examined on coming out of the room, along a corridor that had appeared to be absolutely empty and safe, a man stepped out of a recess in front of a door and hurried to the courtyard steps in the southeast corner of the overlook, thumped down them two at a time. He was very nearly invisible, thanks to the mist and the rain and the darkness. Doyle saw him only as a shapeless figure, a shadowy phantom . . .
However, the hollow sound of his footsteps on the open stairs was proof that he was no imagined spirit.
Doyle went to the railing and looked down.
A big man dressed in dark clothes, made otherwise featureless by the night and the storm, loped across the lawn and the flagstones by the pool. He ducked under the floor of the second-level walkway which served as the roof over the first-level promenade.
Before he quite realized what he was doing, Alex started after the man. He ran to the head of the courtyard steps and went down fast, came out on the lawn where the rain and wind rolled openly.
The stranger was no longer over there on the ground-floor walkway where he had been when Doyle had last seen him. Indeed, he seemed to have vanished into thin air.
Doyle looked at the pines and shrubs from this new prospective, and he realized that the stranger might have doubled back to wait for him. The feathery shadows were menacing, far too deep and too dangerous . . .
Taking advantage of the yellow and green lights that surrounded the swimming pool and avoiding the shadows, Doyle crossed the courtyard without incident. However, he had no sooner gotten out of the worst of the wind and rain than he heard footsteps again. This time they were at the back of the complex, to the north, going up to the second level on this wing. He followed the hauntingly hollow thump-thump-thump which was barely audible above the rain sounds.
The stairwell was deserted when he got to it, a straight flight of wet and mottled graybrown risers.
He stood at the bottom for a minute, looking up, thinking. He was quite aware of the easy target that he would make when he came out at the top, all too vulnerable to a gun or knife or even to a quick shove that would carry him back down the way he had come.
Nevertheless, he started up, more than a little bit exhilarated and surprised at his own daring in having come even this far. Tonight he had begun to discover a new Alex Doyle inside the old one. There was a Doyle who could overcome the cowardliness when faced with a responsibility for the well-being of those he loved, when more than his own pride was affected.
He was not set upon when he came off the last step and into the northwest corner of the courtyard overlook. There was no one waiting for him. He was greeted by lightless windows, concrete, and red doors.
Again he experienced the strange feeling that he was the last man alive in the motel indeed, that he was the last man in the world. He did not know if the fantasy was based on megalomania or paranoia, but the sense of isolation was complete.
Then Alex saw the stranger again. Shapeless, shadow-swathed, mist-draped, the man stood at the extreme north end of the promenade, at the head of the stairs which went down to the parking lot behind the motel Complex. Another blue safety bulb behind ,another wire cage did nothing to illuminate the phantom. He took the first step, seemed to turn and look back at Doyle, took the second step, then the third, disappeared once ,pore.
it's almost as if he wants me to follow him, Alex thought.
He went north along the promenade and down the rain-washed steps.
Twelve Four mercury-vapor arc lamps towered over the parking area behind the Rockies Motor Hotel, making the night above them twice as dark as it was elsewhere, but somewhat illuminating the rows of cars beneath. The irritating, fuzzy purple light glinted dully in the falling raindrops and in the water that flushed across the black macadam. It made stark shadows. it leeched the color out of everything it touched, transforming the once-bright cars into depressing, greenbrown look-alikes.
Doyle, tinted a light purple himself, stood on the walk at the bottom of the stairwell and looked left and right along the lot.
The stranger was nowhere in sight.
Of course, the man might be hidden between two of the cars, crouched expectantly . . . But if the chase were to degenerate into a game of hide-and-seek in a playground of two or three hundred automobiles, they could waste all night darting around the silent machines and in and out of the shadows between them.
He supposed he had come to the end of it now; there was nothing to be gained by this expedition, after all. He was not going to get a look at the man or at the rented Automover. He would have no description or license number to work with or to give to the police-if it came to that. Therefore, he might as well go back to the room, get out of these wet clothes, towel off, and . . .
But he could not walk away from the challenge quite as easily as that. if he were not exactly drunk with courage, he was at least somewhat inebriated with his own appreciation for his new-found bravery. This brand-new Alex Doyle, this suddenly responsible Doyle, this Doyle who was capable of coping with and perhaps even overcoming his long-held fear, fascinated and pleased him immensely. He wanted to see just how far this previously unknown, even unsuspected, but certainly welcome strength iso would carry him, how deep this vein which he had tapped.
He went looking for the stranger.
The vending-machine room at the back of the motel complex did not have any doors on its two entrances. Cold white light fanned out in twin semicircles from both narrow archways, dispe
lling the sickly purple glow of the mercury-vapor lamps overhead.
Doyle went to the doorway and peered inside.
The room was well lighted and appeared untenanted. However, there were a number of blind spots formed by the bulky machines, a dozen places where a man could hide.
He stepped across the raised threshold. The room was about twenty feet by ten feet. It contained twelve machines, which stood against the two longest walls and faced one another like teams of futuristic heavyweight prize fighters waiting for the bell to ring and the match to begin: three humming soda machines that could dispense six different flavors of bottled and canned refreshment; two squat cigarette machines; one cracker and cookie vendor full of stale and half-stale goods; two candy machines with an especially twenty-first-century look about them; a coffee and hot chocolate dispenser with stylized cups of steaming brown liquid painted on the mirrored front along with the bold legend Sugar Cream Marshmallow; a vendor of peanuts, potato chips, pretzels, and cheese popcorn; and an ice machine which rattled noisily, continually, spitting newly made cubes into a shiny steel storage bin.
He walked slowly down the room, flanked by the murmuring dispensers, looking into the niche between each pair of them, expecting someone to jump out at him any second now. His tension and fear were qualitatively different from what he had known in the past; they were almost beneficial, clean, purgative. He felt a great deal like a small boy prowling through a most forbidden -, decaying graveyard on Halloween night, a rag bag of conflicting emotions.
But the stranger was not in the room.
Doyle went outside again into the wind and rain, no longer much concerned with the bad weather, a man caught up in his own changes.
He walked along the parked cars, hoping to find the stranger kneeling between two of them. But he crossed from the end of one north-south wing to the end of the other north-south wing without noticing any movement or unlikely shadows.
He was just about to call it quits when he saw the weak light spilling out of the half opened maintenance-room door.
Dean Koontz - (1973) Page 9