by Dean Koontz
large pale-faced rat, twitched its pink nose.
Mitch clicked off the light and proceeded to his garage. The gate at the corner of the building was never locked. He passed through it into the backyard.
His house keys, with his wallet and other personal items, had been confiscated in Campbell’s library.
He kept a spare key in a small key safe that was padlocked to a ringbolt low on the garage wall, concealed behind a row of azaleas.
Risking the flashlight but hooding it with his fingers, Mitch parted the azaleas. He dialed in the combination, disengaged the lock, plucked the key from the safe, and switched off the light.
Making not a sound, he let himself into the garage, which was keyed to match the house.
The moon had traveled westward; and trees let little of that light through the windows. He stood in the dark, listening.
Either the silence convinced him that he was alone or the darkness reminded him too much of the car trunk that he had twice escaped, and he switched on the garage lights.
His truck was where he had left it. The Honda’s space was empty.
He climbed the stairs to the loft. The boxes were still stacked to disguise the gap in the railing.
At the front of the loft, he discovered that the recorder and electronic surveillance gear were gone.
One of the kidnappers must have come to collect the equipment.
He wondered what they thought had happened to John Knox. He worried that Knox’s disappearance had already had consequences for Holly.
When a fit of tremors shook him, he forced his mind away from that dark speculation.
He was not a machine, and neither was she. Their lives had meaning, they had been brought together by destiny for a purpose, and they would fulfill their purpose.
He had to believe that was true. Without it, he had nothing.
Leaving the garage dark, he entered the house through the back door, confident that the place was no longer watched.
The staged murder scene in the kitchen remained as he had last seen it. The spattered blood, dry now. Hand prints on the cabinetry.
In the adjacent laundry room, he took off his shoes and examined them in the fluorescent light. He was surprised to find no blood.
His socks were not stained, either. He stripped them off anyway and threw them in the washing machine.
He found small smears on his shirt and jeans. In the shirt pocket, he found Detective Taggart’s card. He saved the card, tossed the clothes in the machine, added soap, and started the wash cycle.
Standing at the laundry sink, he scrubbed his hands and forearms with soap and a soft-bristle brush. He wasn’t washing away evidence. Perhaps certain memories were what he hoped to flush down the drain.
With a wet rag, he wiped his face, his neck.
His weariness was profound. He needed rest, but he had no time for sleep. Anyway, if he tried to sleep, his mind would be ridden by dreads both known and nameless, would be ridden hard in circles, howling, to wide-eyed exhaustion.
In shoes and underwear, carrying the pistol, he returned to the kitchen. From the refrigerator, he got a can of Red Bull, a high-caffeine drink, and chugged it.
Finishing the Red Bull, he saw Holly’s purse open on a nearby counter. It had been there earlier in the day.
Earlier, however, he had not taken time to notice the debris scattered on the counter beside the purse. A wadded cellophane wrapper. A small box, the top torn open. A pamphlet of instructions.
Holly had bought a home pregnancy-test kit. She had opened it and evidently had used it, sometime between when he had left for work and when the kidnappers had taken her.
Sometimes as a child in the learning room, when you have spoken to no one for a long time, nor heard a voice other than your muffled own, and when you have been denied food—though never water—for as much as three days, when for a week or two you have seen no light except for the brief daily interruption when your urine bottles and waste bucket are traded for fresh containers, you reach a point where the silence and the darkness seem not like conditions any longer but like objects with real mass, objects that share the room with you and, growing by the hour, demand more space, until they press on you from all sides, the silence and the darkness, and weigh on you from above, squeezing you into a cubic minim that your body can occupy only if it is condensed like an automobile compressed by a junkyard ram. In the horror of that extreme claustrophobia, you tell yourself that you cannot endure another minute, but you do, you endure another minute, another, another, an hour, a day, you endure, and then the door opens, the banishment ends, and there is light, there is always eventually light.
Holly had not revealed that her period was overdue. False hopes had been raised twice before. She had wanted to be sure this time before telling him.
Mitch had not believed in destiny; now he did. And if a man believes in destiny, after all, he must believe in one that is golden, one that shines. He will not wait to see what he is served, damn if he will. He’ll butter his bread thick with fate and eat the whole loaf.
Carrying the pistol, he hurried to the bedroom. The switch by the door turned on one of two bedside lamps.
With single-minded purpose, he went to the closet. The door stood open.
His clothes were disarranged. Two pair of jeans had slipped from their hangers and lay on the closet floor.
He didn’t remember having left the closet in this condition, but he snatched a pair of jeans from the floor and pulled them on.
Shrugging into a dark-blue long-sleeved cotton shirt, he turned from the closet and for the first time saw the clothes strewn on the bed. A pair of khakis, a yellow shirt, white athletic socks, white briefs and T-shirt.
They were his clothes. He recognized them.
They were mottled with dark blood.
By now he knew the look of planted evidence. Some new outrage was to be hung around his neck.
He retrieved the pistol from the closet shelf where he had put it while dressing.
The door stood open to the dark bathroom.
Like a dowser’s divining rod, the pistol guided him to that darkness. Crossing the threshold, he flipped the light switch and with bated breath stepped into the bathroom brightness.
He expected to find something grotesque in the shower or a severed something in the sink. But all was normal.
His face in the mirror was clenched with dread, as tight as a fist, but his eyes were as wide as they had ever been and were no longer blind to anything.
Returning to the bedroom, he noticed something out of place on the nightstand with the extinguished lamp. He clicked the switch.
Two colorful polished spheres of dinosaur dung stood there on small bronze stands.
Although they were opaque, they made him think of crystal balls and sinister fortunetellers in old movies, predicting dire fates.
“Anson,” Mitch whispered, and then a word uncommon to him, “My God. Oh, God.”
37
The hard winds that came out of the eastern mountains were usually born with the rising or setting of the sun. Now, many hours after sunset, and hours before sunrise, a strong spring wind suddenly blew down upon the lowlands as if it had burst through a great door.
Along the alleyway where wind whistled, to the Chrysler, Mitch hurried but with the hesitant heart of a man making the short journey from his cell on death row to the execution chamber.
He didn’t take time to roll down the windows. As he drove, he opened only the one in the driver’s door.
A gruff wind huffed at him, pawed his hair, its breath warm and insistent.
Insane men lack self-control. They see conspiracies all around them and reveal their lunacy in irrational anger, in ludicrous fears. Genuinely insane men don’t know they are deranged, and therefore they see no need to wear a mask.
Mitch wanted to believe that his brother was insane. If Anson was instead acting with cold-blooded calculation, he was a monster. If you had admired and loved a m
onster, your gullibility should shame you. Worse, it seemed that by your willingness to be deceived, you empowered the monster. You shared at least some small portion of the responsibility for his crimes.
Anson did not lack self-control. He never spoke of conspiracies. He feared nothing. As for masks, he had an aptitude for misdirection, a talent for disguise, a genius for deception. He was not insane.
Along the night streets, queen palms thrashed, like madwomen in frenzies tossing their hair, and bottlebrush trees shed millions of scarlet needles that were the petals of their exotic flowers.
The land rose, and low hills rolled into higher hills, and in the wind were scraps of paper, leaves, kiting pages from newspapers, a large transparent plastic bag billowing along like a jellyfish.
His parents’ house was the only one on the block with lights in the windows.
Perhaps he should have been discreet, but he parked in the driveway. He put up the window, left the pistol in the car, brought the flashlight.
Filled with voices of chaos, rich with the smell of eucalyptus, the wind lashed the walkway with tree shadows.
He did not ring the doorbell. He had no false hope, only an awful need to know.
As he had thought it might be, the house was unlocked. He stepped into the foyer and closed the door behind him.
To his left, to his right, an uncountable number of Mitches receded from him in a mirror world, all of them with a ghastly expression, all of them lost.
The house was not silent, for the wind gibbered at windows, groaned in the eaves, and eucalyptus trailers scourged the walls.
In Daniel’s study, a spectacle of shattered glass display shelves glittered on the floor, and scattered everywhere were the colorful polished spheres, as if a poltergeist had played billiards with them.
Room by room, Mitch searched the first floor, turning on lights where they were off. In truth, he expected to find nothing more on this level of the big house, and he did not. He told himself that he was just being thorough. But he knew that he was delaying his ascent to the second floor.
At the stairs, he gazed up, and heard himself say, “Daniel,” but not loud, and “Kathy,” no louder.
For what awaited Mitch, he should have had to descend. Climbing to it seemed all wrong. Sepulchers are not constructed at the tops of towers.
As he climbed, nature’s long exhale grew more fierce. Windows thrummed. Roof beams creaked.
In the upstairs hall, a black object lay on the polished wood floor: the shape of an electric razor but a bit larger. The business end featured a four-inch-wide gap between two gleaming metal pegs.
He hesitated, then picked it up. On the side of the thing was a seesaw switch. When he pressed it, a jagged white arc of electricity snapped between the metal pegs, the poles.
This was a Taser, a self-defense weapon. Chances were that Daniel and Kathy had not used it to defend themselves.
More likely, Anson had brought it with him and had assaulted them with it. A jolt from a Taser can disable a man for minutes, leave him helpless, muscles spasming as his nerves misfire.
Although Mitch knew where he must go, he delayed the terrible moment and went instead to the master bedroom.
The lights were on except for a nightstand lamp that had been knocked to the floor in a struggle, the bulb broken. The sheets were tangled. Pillows had slid off the bed.
The sleepers had been literally shocked awake.
Daniel owned a large collection of neckties, and perhaps a score were scattered across the carpet. Bright serpents of silk.
Glancing through other doors but not taking the time to inspect fully the spaces beyond, Mitch moved more purposefully to the room at the end of the shorter of the two upstairs halls.
Here the door was like all the others, but when he opened it, another door faced him. This one was heavily padded and covered with a black fabric.
Shaking badly, he hesitated. He had expected never to return here, never to cross this threshold again.
The inner door could be opened only from the hall, not from the chamber beyond. He turned the latch release. The well-fitted channels of an interlocking rubber seal parted with a sucking sound as he pushed the door inward.
Inside, there were no lamps, no ceiling fixture. He switched on the flashlight.
After Daniel himself had layered floor, walls, and ceiling with eighteen inches of various soundproofing materials, the room had been reduced to a windowless nine-foot square. The ceiling was six feet.
The black material that upholstered every surface, densely woven and without sheen, soaked up the beam of the flashlight.
Modified sensory deprivation. They had said it was a tool for discipline, not a punishment, a method to focus the mind inward toward self-discovery—a technique, not a torture. Numerous studies had been published about the wonders of one degree or another of sensory deprivation.
Daniel and Kathy lay side by side: she in her pajamas, he in his underwear. Their hands and ankles had been bound with neckties. The knots were cruelly tight, biting the flesh.
The bindings between the wrists and those between the ankles had been connected with another necktie, drawn taut, to further limit each victim’s movement.
They had not been gagged. Perhaps Anson had wanted to have a conversation with them.
And screams could not escape the learning room.
Although Mitch stooped just inside the door, the aggressive silence pulled at him, as quicksand pulls what it snares, as gravity the falling object. His rapid, ragged breathing was muffled to a whispery wheeze.
He could not hear the windstorm anymore, but he was sure that the wind abided.
Looking at Kathy was harder than looking at Daniel, though not as difficult as Mitch had expected. If he could have prevented this, he would have stood between them and his brother. But now that it was done…it was done. And the heart sank rather than recoiled, and the mind fell into despondency but not into despair.
Daniel’s face, eyes open, was wrenched by terror, but there was clearly puzzlement in it as well. At the penultimate moment, he must have wondered how this could be—how Anson, his one success, could be the death of him.
Systems of child-rearing and education were numberless, and no one ever died because of them, or at least not the men and women who dedicated themselves to conceiving and refining the theories.
Tasered, tied, and perhaps following a conversation, Daniel and Kathy had been stabbed. Mitch did not dwell upon the wounds.
The weapons were a pair of gardening shears and a hand trowel.
Mitch recognized them as having come from the rack of tools in his garage.
38
Mitch closed the bodies in the learning room, and he sat at the top of the stairs to think. Fear and shock and one Red Bull weren’t sufficient to clear his thoughts as fully as four hours of sleep would have done.
Battalions of wind threw themselves against the house, and the walls shuddered but withstood the siege.
Mitch could have wept if he had dared to allow himself tears, but he would not have known for whom he was crying.
He had never seen Daniel or Kathy cry. They believed in applied reason and “mutual supportive analysis” in place of easy emotion.
How could you cry for those who never cried for themselves, who talked and talked themselves through their disappointments, their misadventures, and even their bereavements?
No one who knew the truth of this family would fault him if he cried for himself, but he had not cried for himself since he was five because he had not wanted them to have the satisfaction of his tears.
He would not cry for his brother.
The wretched kind of pity that he had felt for Anson earlier was vapor now. It had not boiled away here in the learning room, but in the trunk of the vintage Chrysler.
During his drive north from Rancho Santa Fe, with four windows open to ventilate the car, he let the draft blow from him all delusion and self-deception. The brother whom he had
thought he knew, had thought he loved, in fact had never existed. Mitch had loved not a real person but instead a sociopath’s performance, a phantom.
Now Anson had seized the moment to take vengeance on Daniel and Kathy, pinning the crimes on his brother, whom he thought would never be found.
If Holly was not ransomed, her kidnappers would kill her and perhaps dispose of her body at sea. Mitch would take the fall for her murder—and, somehow, for the shooting of Jason Osteen.
Such a killing spree would thrill the cable-channel true-crime shows. If he was missing—in fact dead in a desert grave—the search for him would be their leading story for weeks if not for months.
In time he might become a legend like D. B. Cooper, the airline hijacker who, decades earlier, had parachuted out of a plane with a fortune in cash, never to be heard from again.
Mitch considered returning to the learning room to collect the gardening shears and the hand trowel. The thought of wrenching the blades from the bodies repulsed him. He had done worse in recent hours; but he could not do this.
Besides, clever Anson had probably salted other evidence in addition to the gardening tools. Finding it would take time, and Mitch had no time to spare.
His wristwatch read six minutes past three in the morning. In less than nine hours, the kidnappers would call Anson with further instructions.
Forty-five of the original sixty hours remained until the midnight-Wednesday deadline.
This would be over long before then. New developments required new rules, and Mitch was going to set them.
With an imitation of wolves, the wind called him into the night.
After turning off the upstairs lights, he went down to the kitchen. In the past, Daniel had always kept a box of Hershey’s bars in the refrigerator. Daniel liked his chocolate cold.
The box waited on the bottom shelf, only one bar missing. These had always been Daniel’s treats, off limits to everyone else.
Mitch took the entire box. He was too exhausted and too tightly knotted with anxiety to be hungry, but he hoped that sugar might substitute for sleep.
He turned out the first-floor lights and left the house by the front door.
Brooms of fallen palm fronds swept the street, and in their wake came a rolling trash can spewing its contents. Impatiens withered and shredded themselves, shrubs shook as if trying to pull themselves up by their roots, a ripped window awning—actually green, but black in this light—flapped madly like the flag of some demonic nation, the eucalyptuses gave the wind a thousand hissing voices, and it seemed as if the moon would be blown down and the stars snuffed out like candles.
In the haunted Chrysler, Mitch set out in search of Anson.
39
Holly works at the nail even though she makes no progress with it, because if she doesn’t work at the nail, she will have nothing to do, and with nothing to do, she will go mad.
For some reason, she remembers Glenn Close playing a madwoman in Fatal Attraction. Even if she were to go crazy, Holly is not capable of boiling anyone’s pet bunny in a soup pot, unless of course her family is starving and has nothing to eat or the bunny is possessed by a demon. Then all bets are off.
Suddenly the nail begins to wiggle, and that’s exciting. She is so excited that she almost needs the bedpan that her kidnappers left with her.
Her excitement wanes as, during the next half-hour, she manages to extract only about a quarter of an inch of the nail from the floor plank. Then it binds and won’t budge farther.
Nevertheless, a quarter of an inch is better than nothing. The spike might be—what?—three inches long. Cumulatively—discounting the breaks she took for the pizza they allowed her to have, and to rest her fingers—she has spent perhaps seven hours on the nail. If she can tease it out just a little faster, at the