by Dean Koontz
“And for God’s sake, don’t give the girls to anyone, cops or anyone, unless Paige is with them. Don’t even give them to me unless Paige is with me.”
Vic Delorio looked away from the police activity and blinked in surprise.
In memory, Marty could hear the look-alike’s angry voice, see the flecks of spittle flying from his mouth as he raged: I want my life, my Paige . . . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .
“You understand, Vic?”
“Not to you?”
“Only if Paige is with me. Only then.”
“What—”
“I’ll explain later,” Marty interrupted. “Everybody’s waiting for me.” He turned and hurried along the front walk toward the street, looking back once to say, “Only Paige.”
... my Paige . . . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .
At home, in the kitchen, while recounting the assault to the officer who had caught the call and been first on the scene, Marty allowed a police technician to ink his fingers and roll them on a record sheet. They needed to be able to differentiate between his prints and those of the intruder. He wondered if he and The Other would prove to be as identical in that regard as they seemed in every other.
Paige also submitted to the process. It was the first time in their lives that either of them had been fingerprinted. Though Marty understood the need for it, the whole process seemed invasive.
After he got what he required, the technician moistened a paper towel with a glycerol cleanser and said that it would remove all the ink. It didn’t. No matter how hard he rubbed, dark stains remained in the whorls of his skin.
Before sitting down to make a more complete statement to the officer in charge, Marty went upstairs to change into dry clothes. He also took four Anacin.
He turned up the thermostat, and the house quickly overheated. But periodic shivers still plagued him—largely because of the unnerving presence of so many police officers.
They were everywhere in the house. Some were in uniforms, others were not, and all of them were strangers whose presence made Marty feel further violated.
He hadn’t anticipated how utterly a victim’s privacy was peeled away beginning the moment he reported a serious crime. Policemen and technicians were in his office to photograph the room where the violent confrontation had begun, dig a couple of bullets out of the wall, dust for fingerprints, and take blood samples from the carpet. They were also photographing the upstairs hall, stairs, and foyer. In their search for evidence that the intruder might have left behind, they assumed they had an invitation to poke into any room or closet.
Of course they were in his house to help him, and Marty was grateful for their efforts. Yet it was embarrassing to think that strangers might be noting the admittedly obsessive way he organized the clothes in his closet according to color—he and Emily both—the fact that he collected pennies and nickels in a half-gallon jar as might a boy saving for his first bicycle, and other unimportant yet highly personal details of his life.
And he was more unsettled by the plainclothes detective in charge than by the rest of them combined. The guy’s name was Cyrus Lowbock, and he elicited a complex response that went beyond mere embarrassment.
The detective could have made a good living as a male model posing for magazine advertisements for Rolls-Royce, tuxedoes, caviar, and stock-brokerage services. He was about fifty, trim, with salt-and-pepper hair, a tan even in November, an aquiline nose, fine cheekbones, and extraordinary gray eyes. In black loafers, gray cords, dark-blue cable-knit sweater, and white shirt—he had taken off a windbreaker—Lowbock managed to appear both distinguished and athletic, although the sports one would associate with him were not football and baseball but tennis, sailing, powerboat racing, and other pursuits of the upper classes. He looked less like any popular image of a cop than like a man who had been born to wealth and knew how to manage and preserve it.
Lowbock sat across the dining-room table from Marty, listening intently to his account of the assault, asking questions largely to clarify the details, and writing in a spiral-bound notebook with an expensive black-and-gold Montblanc pen. Paige sat beside Marty, offering emotional support. They were the only three people in the room, although uniformed officers interrupted periodically to confer with Lowbock, and twice the detective excused himself to examine evidence that had been deemed relevant to the case.
Sipping Pepsi from a ceramic mug, soothing his throat while recounting the life-and-death struggle with the intruder, Marty also experienced a resurgence of the inexplicable guilt that had first troubled him when he’d lain on the wet street with his hands cuffed. The feeling was no less irrational than before, considering that the biggest crime of which he could justifiably be accused was routine contempt for the speed limits on certain roads. But this time he understood that part of his uneasiness resulted from the perception that Lieutenant Cyrus Lowbock regarded him with quiet suspicion.
Lowbock was polite, but he did not say much. His silences were vaguely accusatory. When he wasn’t taking notes, his zinc-gray eyes focused unwaveringly, challengingly, on Marty.
Why the detective should suspect him of being less than entirely truthful was not clear. However, Marty supposed that after years of police work, dealing with the worst elements of society day in and day out, the understandable tendency was toward cynicism. Regardless of what the Constitution of the United States promised, a long-time cop probably felt justified in the conviction that all men—and women—were guilty until proven innocent.
Marty finished his story and took another long sip of cola. Cold fluids had done all they could for his sore throat; the greater discomfort was now in the tissues of his neck, where throttling hands had left the skin reddened and where extensive bruising would surely appear by morning. Though the four Anacin were beginning to kick in, a pain akin to whiplash made him wince when he turned his head more than a few degrees in either direction, so he adopted a stiff-necked posture and movement.
For what seemed an excessive length of time, Lowbock paged through his notes, reviewing them in silence, quietly tapping the Montblanc pen against the pages.
The splash and tap of rain still enlivened the night, though the storm had abated somewhat.
Floorboards upstairs creaked now and then with the weight of the policemen still at their assigned tasks.
Under the table, Paige’s right hand sought Marty’s left, and he gave it a squeeze as if to say that everything was all right now.
But everything wasn’t all right. Nothing had been explained or resolved. As far as he knew, their trouble was just beginning.
... my Paige . . . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .
At last Lowbock looked at Marty. In a flat tone of voice that was damning precisely because of its complete lack of interpretable inflection, the detective said, “Quite a story.”
“I know it sounds crazy.” Marty stifled the urge to assure Lowbock that he had not exaggerated the degree of resemblance between himself and the look-alike or any other aspect of his account. He had told the truth. He was not required to apologize for the fact that the truth, in this instance, was as astounding as any fantasy.
“And you say you don’t have a twin brother?” Lowbock asked.
“No, sir.”
“No brother at all?”
“I’m an only child.”
“Half brother?”
“My parents were married when they were eighteen. Neither of them was ever married to anyone else. I assure you, Lieutenant, there’s no easy explanation for this guy.”
“Well, of course, no other marriages would’ve been necessary for you to have a half brother . . . or a full brother, for that matter,” Lowbock said, meeting Marty’s eyes so directly that to look away from him would have been an admission of something.
As Marty digested the detective’s statement, Paige squeezed his hand under the table, an admonition not to let Lowbock rattle him. He tried to tell himself that the detective was only stating a fact, which he was, bu
t it would have been decent to look at the notebook or at the window when making such implications.
Replying almost as stiffly as he was holding his head, Marty said, “Let me see . . . I guess I have three choices then. Either my father knocked up my mother before they were married, and they put this full brother—this bastard brother—up for adoption. Or after my folks were married, Dad screwed around with some other woman, and she gave birth to my half brother. Or my mother got pregnant by some other guy, either before or after she married my father, and that whole pregnancy is a deep, dark family secret.”
Maintaining eye contact, Lowbock said, “I’m sorry if I offended you, Mr. Stillwater.”
“I’m sorry you did, too.”
“Aren’t you being a little sensitive about this?”
“Am I?” Marty asked sharply, though he wondered if in fact he was over-reacting.
“Some couples do have a first child before they’re ready to make that commitment,” the detective said, “and they often put it up for adoption.”
“Not my folks.”
“Do you know that for a fact?”
“I know them.”
“Maybe you should ask them.”
“Maybe I will.”
“When?”
“I’ll think about it.”
A smile, as faint and brief as the passing shadow of a bird in flight, crossed Lowbock’s face.
Marty was sure he saw sarcasm in that smile. But, for the life of him, he couldn’t understand why the detective would regard him as anything less than an innocent victim.
Lowbock looked down at his notes, letting the silence build for a while.
Then he said, “If this look-alike isn’t related to you, brother or half brother, then do you have any idea how to explain such a remarkable resemblance?”
Marty started to shake his head, winced as pain shot through his neck. “No. No idea at all.”
Paige said, “You want some aspirin?”
“Had some Anacin,” Marty said. “I’ll be okay.”
Meeting Marty’s eyes again, Lowbock said, “I just thought you might have a theory.”
“No. Sorry.”
“You being a writer and all.”
Marty didn’t get the detective’s meaning. “Excuse me?”
“You use your imagination every day, you earn a living with it.”
“So?”
“So I thought maybe you’d figure out this little mystery if you put your mind to it.”
“I’m no detective. I’m clever enough at constructing mysteries, but I don’t unravel them.”
“On television,” Lowbock said, “the mystery writer—any amateur detective, for that matter—is always smarter than the cops.”
“It’s not that way in real life,” Marty said.
Lowbock let a few seconds of silence drift past, doodling on the bottom of a page of his notes, before he replied: “No, it’s not.”
“I don’t confuse fantasy and reality,” Marty said a little too harshly.
“I wouldn’t have thought you do,” Cyrus Lowbock assured him, concentrating on his doodle.
Marty turned his head cautiously to see if Paige showed any sign of perceiving hostility in the detective’s tone and manner. She was frowning thoughtfully at Lowbock, which made Marty feel better; maybe he was not over-reacting, after all, and didn’t need to add paranoia to the list of symptoms he had recounted to Paul Guthridge.
Emboldened by Paige’s frown, Marty faced Lowbock again and said, “Lieutenant, is something wrong here?”
Raising his eyebrows as if surprised by the question, Lowbock said archly, “It’s certainly my impression that something’s wrong, or otherwise you wouldn’t have called us.”
Restraining himself from making the caustic reply that Lowbock deserved, Marty said, “I mean, I sense hostility here, and I don’t understand the reason for it. What is the reason?”
“Hostility? Do you?” Without looking up from his doodle, Lowbock frowned. “Well, I wouldn’t want the victim of a crime to be as intimidated by us as by the creep who assaulted him. That wouldn’t be good public relations, would it?” With that, he neatly avoided a direct answer to Marty’s question.
The doodle was finished. It was a drawing of a pistol.
“Mr. Stillwater, the gun with which you shot this intruder—was that the same weapon taken from you out in the street?”
“It wasn’t taken from me. I voluntarily dropped it when told to do so. And, yes, it was the same gun.”
“A Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter pistol?”
“Yes.”
“Did you purchase that weapon from a licensed gun dealer?”
“Yes, of course.” Marty told him the name of the shop.
“Do you have a receipt from the store and proof of pre-purchase review by the proper law-enforcement agency?”
“What does this have to do with what happened here today?”
“Routine,” Lowbock said. “I have to fill out all the little lines on the crime report later. Just routine.”
Marty didn’t like the way the interview increasingly seemed to be turning into an interrogation, but he didn’t know what to do about it. Frustrated, he looked to Paige for the answer to Lowbock’s inquiry because she kept their financial records for the accountant.
She said, “All the paperwork from the gun shop would be stapled together and filed with all of our canceled checks for that year.”
“We bought it maybe three years ago,” Marty said.
“That stuff’s packed away in the garage attic,” Paige added.
“But you can get it for me?” Lowbock asked.
“Well . . . yes, with a little digging around,” Paige said, and she started to get up from her chair.
“Oh, don’t trouble yourself right this minute,” Lowbock said. “It’s not that urgent.” He turned to Marty again: “What about the Korth thirty-eight in the glovebox of your Taurus? Did you buy that at the same gun shop?”
Surprised, Marty said, “What were you doing in the Taurus?”
Lowbock feigned surprise at Marty’s surprise, but it seemed calculated to look false, to needle Marty by mimicking him. “In the Taurus? Investigating the case. That is what we’ve been asked to do? I mean, there aren’t any places, any subjects, you’d rather we didn’t look into? Because, of course, we’d respect your wishes in that regard.”
The detective was so subtle in his mockery and so vague in his insinuations that any strong response on Marty’s part would appear to be the reaction of a man with something to hide. Clearly, Lowbock thought he did have something to hide and was toying with him, trying to rattle him into an inadvertent admission.
Marty almost wished he did have an admission to make. As they were currently playing this game, it was enormously frustrating.
“Did you buy the thirty-eight at the same gun shop where you purchased the Smith and Wesson?” Lowbock persisted.
“Yes.” Marty sipped his Pepsi.
“Do you have the paperwork on that?”
“Yes, I’m sure we do.”
“Do you always carry that gun in your car?”
“No.”
“It was in your car today.”
Marty was aware that Paige was looking at him with some degree of surprise. He couldn’t explain about his panic attack now or tell her about the strange awareness of an onrushing Juggernaut which had preceded it, and which had driven him to take extraordinary precautions. Considering the unexpected and less-than-benign turn the questioning had taken, this was not information he wanted to share with the detective, for fear he’d sound unbalanced and would find himself involuntarily committed for psychiatric evaluation.
Marty sipped some Pepsi, not to soothe his throat but to gain a little time to think before responding to Lowbock. “I didn’t know it was there,” he said at last.
Lowbock said, “You didn’t know the gun was in your glovebox?”
“No.”
“Are you awa
re that it’s illegal to carry a loaded weapon in your car?”
And just what the hell were you people doing, poking around in my car?
“Like I said, I didn’t know it was there, so of course I didn’t know it was loaded, either.”
“You didn’t load it yourself?”
“Well, I probably did.”
“You mean, you don’t remember if you loaded it or how it got in the Taurus?”
“What probably happened . . . the last time I went to the shooting range, maybe I loaded it for one more round of target practice and then forgot.”
“And brought it home from the shooting range in your glovebox?”
“That’s right.”
“When was the last time you were at the shooting range?”
“I don’t know . . . three, four weeks ago.”
“Then you’ve been carrying a loaded gun around in your car for a month?”
“But I’d forgotten it was in there.”
One lie, told to avoid a misdemeanor gun-possession charge, had led to a string of lies. All were minor falsehoods, but Marty had enough grudging respect for Cyrus Lowbock’s abilities to know that he perceived them as untruthful. Because the detective already seemed unreasonably convinced that the apparent victim should be regarded instead as a suspect, he would assume that each mendacity was further proof that dark secrets were being concealed from him.
Tilting his head back slightly, staring cooly yet accusingly at Marty, using his patrician looks to intimidate but keeping his voice soft and without inflection, Lowbock said, “Mr. Stillwater, are you always so careless with guns?”
“I don’t believe I’ve been careless.”
The raised eyebrow again. “Don’t you?”
“No.”
The detective picked up his pen and made a cryptic note in his spiral-bound notebook. Then he began to doodle again. “Tell me, Mr. Stillwater, do you have a permit to carry a concealed weapon?”