by Dean Koontz
A message appeared on the display: ACCESS TO MAMA IS GRANTED.
Mama was the name of the home-office computer. Three thousand miles away on the East Coast, all her programs were now available for Roy’s use, through his cellular phone. A long menu appeared on the screen before him. He scrolled through, found a program titled LOCATE, and selected it.
He typed in a telephone number and requested the street address at which it was located.
While he waited for Mama to access phone company records and trace the listing, Roy studied the storm-lashed street. At that moment, no pedestrians or moving cars were in sight. Some houses were dark, and the lights of the others were dimmed by the seemingly eternal torrents of rain. He could almost believe that a strange, silent apocalypse had transpired, eliminating all human life on earth while leaving the works of civilization untouched.
A real apocalypse was coming, he supposed. Sooner than later, a great war: nation against nation or race against race, religions clashing violently or ideology battling ideology. Humanity was drawn to turmoil and self-destruction as inevitably as the earth was drawn to complete its annual revolution of the sun.
His sadness deepened.
Under the telephone number on the video display, the correct name appeared. The address, however, was listed as unpublished by request of the customer.
Roy instructed the home-office computer to access and search the phone company’s electronically stored installation and billing records to find the address. Such an invasion of private-sector data was illegal, of course, without a court order, but Mama was exceedingly discreet. Because all the computer systems in the national telephone network were already in Mama’s directory of previously violated entities, she was able to enter any of them virtually instantaneously, explore at will, retrieve whatever was requested, and disengage without leaving the slightest trace that she had been there; Mama was a ghost in their machines.
In seconds, a Beverly Hills address appeared on the screen.
He cleared the screen and then asked Mama for a street map of Beverly Hills. She supplied it after a brief hesitation. Seen in its entirety, it was too compressed to be read.
Roy typed in the address that he’d been given. The computer filled the screen with the quadrant that was of interest to him, and then with a quarter of that quadrant. The house was only a couple of blocks south of Wilshire Boulevard, in the less prestigious “flats” of Beverly Hills, and easy to find.
He typed POOH OUT, which disengaged his portable terminal from Mama in her cool, dry bunker in Virginia.
The large brick house—which was painted white, with hunter-green shutters—stood behind a white picket fence. The front lawn featured two enormous bare-limbed sycamores.
Lights were on inside, but only at the back of the house and only on the first floor.
Standing at the front door, sheltered from the rain by a deep portico supported on tall white columns, Roy could hear music inside: a Beatles number, “When I’m Sixty-four.” He was thirty-three; the Beatles were before his time, but he liked their music because much of it embodied an endearing compassion.
Softly humming along with the lads from Liverpool, Roy slipped a credit card between the door and the jamb. He worked it upward until it forced open the first—and least formidable—of the two locks. He wedged the card in place to hold the simple spring latch out of the niche in the striker plate.
To open the heavy-duty deadbolt, he needed a more sophisticated tool than a credit card: a Lockaid lock-release gun, sold only to law-enforcement agencies. He slipped the thin pick of the gun into the key channel, under the pin tumblers, and pulled the trigger. The flat steel spring in the Lockaid caused the pick to jump upward and to lodge some of the pins at the shear line. He had to pull the trigger half a dozen times to fully disengage the lock.
The snapping of hammer against spring and the clicking of pick against pin tumblers were not thunderous sounds, by any measure, but he was grateful for the cover provided by the music. “When I’m Sixty-four” ended as he opened the door. Before his credit card could fall, he caught it, froze, and waited for the next song. To the opening bars of “Lovely Rita,” he stepped across the threshold.
He put the lock-release gun on the floor, to the right of the entrance. Quietly, he closed the door behind him.
The foyer welcomed him with gloom. He stood with his back against the door, letting his eyes adjust to the shadows.
When he was confident that he would not blindly knock over any furniture, he proceeded from room to room, toward the light at the back of the house.
He regretted that his clothes were so saturated and his galoshes so dirty. He was probably making a mess of the carpet.
She was in the kitchen, at the sink, washing a head of lettuce, her back to the swinging door through which he entered. Judging by the vegetables on the cutting board, she was preparing a salad.
Easing the door shut behind him, hoping to avoid startling her, he debated whether or not to announce himself. He wanted her to know that it was a concerned friend who had come to comfort her, not a stranger with sick motives.
She turned off the running water and placed the lettuce in a plastic colander to drain. Wiping her hands on a dish towel, turning away from the sink, she finally discovered him as “Lovely Rita” drew to an end.
Mrs. Bettonfield looked surprised but not, in the first instant, afraid—which was, he knew, a tribute to his appealing, soft-featured face. He was slightly pudgy, with dimples, and had skin so beardless that it was almost as smooth as a boy’s. With his twinkling blue eyes and warm smile, he would make a convincing Santa Claus in another thirty years. He believed that his kindheartedness and his genuine love of people were also apparent, because strangers usually warmed to him more quickly than a merry face alone could explain.
While Roy still was able to believe that her wide-eyed surprise would fade into a smile of welcome rather than a grimace of fear, he raised the Beretta 93-R and shot her twice in the chest. A silencer was screwed to the barrel; both rounds made only soft popping sounds.
Penelope Bettonfield dropped to the floor and lay motionless on her side, with her hands still entangled in the dish towel. Her eyes were open, staring across the floor at his wet, dirty galoshes.
The Beatles began “Good Morning, Good Morning.” It must be the Sgt. Pepper album.
He crossed the kitchen, put the pistol on the counter, and crouched beside Mrs. Bettonfield. He pulled off one of his supple leather gloves and placed his fingertips to her throat, searching for a pulse in her carotid artery. She was dead.
One of the two rounds was so perfectly placed that it must have pierced her heart. Consequently, with circulation halted in an instant, she had not bled much.
Her death had been a graceful escape: quick and clean, painless and without fear.
He pulled on his right glove again, then rubbed gently at her neck where he had touched it. Gloved, he had no concern that his fingerprints might be lifted off the body by laser technology.
Precautions must be taken. Not every judge and juror would be able to grasp the purity of his motives.
He closed the lid over her left eye and held it in place for a minute or so, to be sure that it would stay shut.
“Sleep, dear lady,” he said with a mixture of affection and regret, as he also closed the lid over her right eye. “No more worrying about finances, no more working late, no more stress and strife. You were too good for this world.”
It was both a sad and a joyous moment. Sad, because her beauty and elegance no longer brightened the world; nevermore would her smile lift anyone’s spirits; her courtesy and consideration would no longer counter the tides of barbarity washing over this troubled society. Joyous, because she would never again be afraid, spill tears, know grief, feel pain.
“Good Morning, Good Morning” gave way to the marvelously bouncy, syncopated reprise of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which was better than the first rendition
of the song at the start of the album and which seemed a suitably upbeat celebration of Mrs. Bettonfield’s passage to a better world.
Roy pulled out one of the chairs from the kitchen table, sat, and removed his galoshes. He rolled up the damp and muddy legs of his trousers as well, determined to cause no more mess.
The reprise of the album theme song was short, and by the time he got to his feet again, “A Day in the Life” had begun. That was a singularly melancholy piece, too somber to be in sync with the moment. He had to shut it off before it depressed him. He was a sensitive man, more vulnerable than most to the emotional effects of music, poetry, fine paintings, fiction, and the other arts.
He found the central music system in a long wall of beautifully crafted mahogany cabinets in the study. He stopped the music and searched two drawers that were filled with compact discs. Still in the mood for the Beatles, he selected A Hard Day’s Night because none of the songs on that album were downbeat.
Singing along to the title track, Roy returned to the kitchen, where he lifted Mrs. Bettonfield off the floor. She was more petite than she had seemed when he’d been talking with her through the car window. She weighed no more than a hundred and five pounds, with slender wrists, a swan neck, and delicate features. Roy was deeply touched by the woman’s fragility, and he bore her in his arms with more than mere care and respect, almost with reverence.
Nudging light switches with his shoulder, he carried Penelope Bettonfield to the front of the house, upstairs, along the hallway, checking door by door until he found the master bedroom. There, he placed her gently on a chaise lounge.
He folded back the quilted bedspread and then the bedclothes, revealing the bottom sheet. He plumped the pillows, which were in Egyptian-cotton shams trimmed with cut-work lace as lovely as any he had ever seen.
He took off Mrs. Bettonfield’s shoes and put them in her closet. Her feet were as small as those of a girl.
Leaving her fully dressed, he carried Penelope to the bed and put her down on her back, with her head elevated on two pillows. He left the spread folded at the bottom of the bed, but he drew the blanket cover, blanket, and top sheet over her breasts. Her arms remained free.
With a brush that he found in the master bathroom, he smoothed her hair. The Beatles were singing “If I Fell” when he began to groom her, but they were well into “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You” by the time her lustrous auburn locks were perfectly arranged around her lovely face.
After switching on the bronze floor lamp that stood beside the chaise lounge, he turned off the harsher ceiling light. Soft shadows fell across the recumbent woman, like the enfolding wings of angels who had come to carry her away from this vale of tears and into a higher land of eternal peace.
He went to the Louis XVI vanity, removed its matching chair, and put it beside the bed. He sat next to Mrs. Bettonfield, stripped off his gloves, and took one of her hands in both of his. Her flesh was cooling but still somewhat warm.
He couldn’t linger for long. There was much yet to do and not a lot of time in which to do it. Nevertheless, he wanted to spend a few minutes of quality time with Mrs. Bettonfield.
While the Beatles sang “And I Love Her” and “Tell Me Why,” Roy Miro tenderly held his late friend’s hand and took a moment to appreciate the exquisite furniture, the paintings, the art objects, the warm color scheme, and the array of fabrics in different but wonderfully complementary patterns and textures.
“It’s so very unfair that you had to close your shop,” he told Penelope. “You were a fine interior designer. You really were, dear lady. You really were.”
The Beatles sang.
Rain beat upon the windows.
Roy’s heart swelled with emotion.
THREE
Rocky recognized the route home. Periodically, as they passed one landmark or another, he chuffed softly with pleasure.
Spencer lived in a part of Malibu that was without glamour but that had its own wild beauty.
All the forty-room Mediterranean and French mansions, the ultra-modern cliff-side dwellings of tinted glass and redwood and steel, the Cape Cod cottages as large as ocean liners, the twenty-thousand-square-foot Southwest adobes with authentic lodgepole ceilings and authentic twenty-seat personal screening rooms with THX sound, were on the beaches, on the bluffs above the beaches—and inland of the Pacific Coast Highway, on hills with a view of the sea.
Spencer’s place was east of any home that Architectural Digest would choose to photograph, halfway up an unfashionable and sparsely populated canyon. The two-lane blacktop was textured by patches atop patches and by numerous cracks courtesy of the earthquakes that regularly quivered through the entire coast. A pipe-and-chain-link gate, between a pair of mammoth eucalyptuses, marked the entrance to his two-hundred-yard-long gravel driveway.
Wired to the gate was a rusted sign with fading red letters: DANGER / ATTACK DOG. He had fixed it there when he first purchased the place, long before Rocky had come to live with him. There had been no dog then, let alone one trained to kill. The sign was an empty threat, but effective. No one ever bothered him in his retreat.
The gate was not electrically operated. He had to get out in the rain to unlock it and to relock it after he’d driven through.
With only one bedroom, a living room, and a large kitchen, the structure at the end of the driveway was not a house, really, but a cabin. The cedar-clad exterior, perched on a stone foundation to foil termites, weathered to a lustrous silver gray, might have appeared shabby to an unappreciative eye; to Spencer it was beautiful and full of character in the wash of the Explorer’s headlights.
The cabin was sheltered—surrounded, shrouded, encased—by a eucalyptus grove. The trees were red gums, safe from the Australian beetles that had been devouring California blue gums for more than a decade. They had not been topped since Spencer had bought the place.
Beyond the grove, brush and scrub oak covered the canyon floor and the steep slopes to the ridges. Summer through autumn, leached of moisture by dry Santa Ana winds, the hills and the ravines became tinder. Twice in eight years, firefighters had ordered Spencer to evacuate, when blazes in neighboring canyons might have swept down on him as mercilessly as judgment day. Wind-driven flames could move at express-train speeds. One night they might overwhelm him in his sleep. But the beauty and privacy of the canyon justified the risk.
At various times in his life, he had fought hard to stay alive, but he was not afraid to die. Sometimes he even embraced the thought of going to sleep and never waking. When fears of fire troubled him, he worried not about himself but about Rocky.
That Wednesday night in February, the burning season was months away. Every tree and bush and blade of wild grass dripped rain and seemed as if it would be forever impervious to fire.
The house was cold. It could be heated by a big river-rock fireplace in the living room, but each room also had its own in-wall electric heater. Spencer preferred the dancing light, the crackle, and the smell of a log fire, but he switched on the heaters because he was in a hurry.
After changing from his damp clothes into a comfortable gray jogging suit and athletic socks, he brewed a pot of coffee. For Rocky, he set out a bowl of orange juice.
The mutt had many peculiarities besides a taste for orange juice. For one thing, though he enjoyed going for walks during the day, he had none of a dog’s usual frisky interest in the nocturnal world, preferring to keep at least a window between himself and the night; if he had to go outside after sunset, he stayed close to Spencer and regarded the darkness with suspicion. Then there was Paul Simon. Rocky was indifferent to most music, but Simon’s voice enchanted him; if Spencer put on a Simon album, especially Graceland, Rocky would sit in front of the speakers, staring intently, or pace the floor in lazy, looping patterns—off the beat, lost in reverie—to “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” or “You Can Call Me Al.” Not a doggy thing to do. Less doggy still was his bashfulness about bodily functions, for he wouldn’t m
ake his toilet if watched; Spencer had to turn his back before Rocky would get down to business.
Sometimes Spencer thought that the dog, having suffered a hard life until two years ago and having had little reason to find joy in a canine’s place in the world, wanted to be a human being.
That was a big mistake. People were more likely to live a dog’s life, in the negative sense of the phrase, than were most dogs.
“Greater self-awareness,” he’d told Rocky on a night when sleep wouldn’t come, “doesn’t make a species any happier, pal. If it did, we’d have fewer psychiatrists and barrooms than you dogs have—and it’s not that way, is it?”
Now, as Rocky lapped at the juice in the bowl on the kitchen floor, Spencer carried a mug of coffee to the expansive L-shaped desk in one corner of the living room. Two computers with large hard-disk capacities, a full-color laser printer, and other pieces of equipment were arrayed from one end of the work surface to the other.
That corner of the living room was his office, though he had not held a real job in ten months. Since leaving the Los Angeles Police Department—where, during his last two years, he’d been on assignment to the California Multi-Agency Task Force on Computer Crime—he had spent several hours a day on-line with his own computers.
Sometimes he researched subjects of interest to him, through Prodigy and GEnie. More often, however, he explored ways to gain unapproved access to private and government computers that were protected by sophisticated security programs.
Once entry was achieved, he was engaged in illegal activity. He never destroyed any company’s or agency’s files, never inserted false data. Still, he was guilty of trespassing in private domains.
He could live with that.
He was not seeking material rewards. His compensation was knowledge—and the occasional satisfaction of righting a wrong.