by Dean Koontz
When a policewoman answered, Roy said, “It’s very sad here. It’s very sad. Someone should come right away.”
He did not return the handset to the cradle, but put it down on the desk, leaving the line open. The Bettonfields’ address should have appeared on a computer screen in front of the policewoman who had answered the call, but Roy didn’t want to take a chance that Sam and Penelope might be there for hours or even days before they were found. They were good people and did not deserve the indignity of being discovered stiff, gray, and reeking of decomposition.
He carried his galoshes and shoes to the front door, where he quickly put them on again. He remembered to pick up the lock-release gun from the foyer floor.
He walked through the rain to his car and drove away from there.
According to his watch, the time was twenty minutes past ten. Although it was three hours later on the East Coast, Roy was sure that his contact in Virginia would be waiting.
At the first red traffic light, he popped open the attaché case on the passenger seat. He plugged in the computer, which was still married to the cellular phone; he didn’t separate the devices because he needed both. With a few quick keystrokes, he set up the cellular unit to respond to preprogrammed vocal instructions and to function as a speakerphone, which freed both his hands for driving.
As the traffic light turned green, he crossed the intersection and made the long-distance call by saying, “Please connect,” and then reciting the number in Virginia.
After the second ring, the familiar voice of Thomas Summerton came down the line, recognizable by a single word, as smooth and as southern as pecan butter. “Hello?”
Roy said, “May I speak to Jerry, please?”
“Sorry, wrong number.” Summerton hung up.
Roy terminated the resultant dial tone by saying: “Please disconnect now.”
In ten minutes, Summerton would call back from a secure phone, and they could speak freely without fear of being recorded.
Roy drove past the glitzy shops on Rodeo Drive to Santa Monica Boulevard, and then west into residential streets. Large, expensive houses stood among huge trees, palaces of privilege that he found offensive.
When the phone rang, he didn’t reach for the keypad but said, “Please accept call.”
The connection was made with an audible click.
“Please scramble now,” Roy said.
The computer beeped to indicate that everything he said would be rendered unintelligible to anyone between him and Summerton. As it was transmitted, their speech would be broken into small pieces of sound and rearranged by a randomlike control factor. Both phones were synchronized with the same control factor, so the meaningless streams of transmitted sound would be reassembled into intelligible speech when received.
“I’ve seen the early report on Santa Monica,” Summerton said.
“According to neighbors, she was there this morning. But she must’ve skipped by the time we set up surveillance this afternoon.”
“What tipped her off?”
“I swear she has a sixth sense about us.” Roy turned west on Sunset Boulevard, joining the heavy flow of traffic that gilded the wet pavement with headlight beams. “You heard about the man who showed up?”
“And got away.”
“We weren’t sloppy.”
“So he was just lucky?”
“No. Worse than that. He knew what he was doing.”
“You saying he’s somebody with a history?”
“Yeah.”
“Local, state, or federal history?”
“He took out a team member, neat as you please.”
“So he’s had a few lessons beyond the local level.”
Roy turned right off Sunset Boulevard onto a less traveled street, where mansions were hidden behind walls, high hedges, and wind-tossed trees. “If we’re able to chase him down, what’s our priority with him?”
Summerton considered for a moment before he spoke. “Find out who he is, who he’s working for.”
“Then detain him?”
“No. Too much is at stake. Make him disappear.”
The serpentine streets wound through the wooded hills, among secluded estates, overhung by dripping branches, through blind turn after blind turn.
Roy said, “Does this change our priority with the woman?”
“No. Whack her on sight. Anything else happening at your end?”
Roy thought of Mr. and Mrs. Bettonfield, but he didn’t mention them. The extreme kindness he had extended to them had nothing to do with his job, and Summerton would not understand.
Instead, Roy said, “She left something for us.”
Summerton said nothing, perhaps because he intuited what the woman had left.
Roy said, “A photo of a cockroach, nailed to the wall.”
“Whack her hard,” Summerton said, and he hung up.
As Roy followed a long curve under drooping magnolia boughs, past a wrought-iron fence beyond which a replica of Tara stood spotlighted in the rain-swept darkness, he said, “Cease scrambling.”
The computer beeped to indicate compliance.
“Please connect,” he said, and recited the telephone number that would bring him into Mama’s arms.
The video display flickered. When Roy glanced at the screen, he saw the opening question: WHO GOES THERE?
Though the phone would react to vocal commands, Mama would not; therefore, Roy pulled off the narrow road and stopped in a driveway, before a pair of nine-foot-high wrought-iron gates, to type in his responses to the security interrogation. After the transmission of his thumbprint, he was granted access to Mama in Virginia.
From her basic menu, he chose FIELD OFFICES. From that submenu, he chose LOS ANGELES, and he was thereby connected to the largest of Mama’s babies on the West Coast.
He went through a few menus in the Los Angeles computer until he arrived at the files of the photo-analysis department. The file that interested him was currently in play, as he knew it would be, and he tapped in to observe.
The screen of his portable computer went to black and white, and then it filled with a photograph of a man’s head from the neck up. His face was half turned away from the camera, dappled with shadows, blurred by a curtain of rain.
Roy was disappointed. He had hoped for a clearer picture.
This was dismayingly like an impressionist painting: in general, recognizable; in specific, mysterious.
Earlier in the evening, in Santa Monica, the surveillance team had taken photographs of the stranger who had gone into the bungalow minutes prior to the SWAT team assault. The night, the heavy rain, and the overgrown trees that prevented the streetlamps from casting much light on the sidewalk—all conspired to make it difficult to get a clear look at the man. Furthermore, they had not been expecting him, had thought that he was only an ordinary pedestrian who would pass by, and had been unpleasantly surprised when he’d turned in at the woman’s house. Consequently, they had gotten precious few shots, none of quality, and none that revealed the full face of the mystery man, though the camera had been equipped with a telephoto lens.
The best of the photographs already had been scanned into the local-office computer, where it was being processed by an enhancement program. The computer would attempt to identify rain distortion and eliminate it. Then it would gradually lighten all areas of the shot uniformly, until it was able to identify biological structures in the deepest shadows that fell across the face; employing its extensive knowledge of human skull formation—with an enormous catalogue of the variations that occurred between the sexes, among the races, and among age groups—the computer would interpret the structures it glimpsed and develop them on a best-guess basis.
The process was laborious even at the lightning speed with which the program operated. Any photograph could ultimately be broken down into tiny dots of light and shadow called pixels: puzzle pieces that were identically shaped but varied subtly in texture and shading. Every one of the hundreds
of thousands of pixels in this photograph had to be analyzed, to decipher not merely what it represented but what its undistorted relationship was to each of the many pixels surrounding it, which meant that the computer had to make hundreds of millions of comparisons and decisions in order to clarify the image.
Even then, there was no guarantee that the face finally rising from the murk would be an entirely accurate depiction of the man who had been photographed. Any analysis of this kind was as much an art—or guesswork—as it was a reliable technological process. Roy had seen instances in which a computer-enhanced portrait was as off the mark as any amateur artist’s paint-by-the-numbers canvas of the Arc de Triomphe or of Manhattan at twilight. However, the face that they eventually got from the computer most likely would be so close to the man’s true appearance as to be an exact likeness.
Now, as the computer made decisions and adjusted thousands of pixels, the image on the video display rippled from left to right. Still disappointing. Although changes had occurred, their effect was imperceptible. Roy was unable to see how the man’s face was any different from what it had been before the adjustment.
For the next several hours, the image on the screen would ripple every six to ten seconds. The cumulative effect could be appreciated only by checking it at widely spaced intervals.
Roy backed out of the driveway, leaving the computer plugged in and the VDT angled toward him.
For a while he chased his headlights up and down hills, around blind turns, searching for a way out of the folded darkness, where the tree-filtered lights of cloistered mansions hinted at mysterious lives of wealth and power beyond his understanding.
From time to time, he glanced at the computer screen. The rippling face. Half averted. Shadowy and strange.
When at last he found Sunset Boulevard again and then the lower streets of Westwood, not far from his hotel, he was relieved to be back among people who were more like himself than those who lived in the monied hills. In the lower lands, the citizens knew suffering and uncertainty; they were people whose lives he could affect for the better, people to whom he could bring a measure of justice and mercy—one way or another.
The face on the computer screen was still that of a phantom, amorphous and possibly malignant. The face of chaos.
The stranger was a man who, like the fugitive woman, stood in the way of order, stability, and justice. He might be evil or merely troubled and confused. In the end, it didn’t matter which.
“I’ll give you peace,” Roy Miro promised, glancing at the slowly mutating face on the video display terminal. “I’ll find you and give you peace.”
FIVE
While hooves of rain beat across the roof, while the troll-deep voice of the wind grumbled at the windows, and while the dog lay curled and dozing on the adjacent chair, Spencer used his computer expertise to try to build a file on Valerie Keene.
According to the records of the Department of Motor Vehicles, the driver’s license for which she’d applied had been her first, not a renewal, and to get it, she had supplied a Social Security card as proof of identity. The DMV had verified that her name and number were indeed paired in the Social Security Administration’s files.
That gave Spencer four indices with which to locate her in other databases where she was likely to appear: name, date of birth, driver’s license number, and Social Security number. Learning more about her should be a snap.
Last year, with much patience and cunning, he’d made a game of getting into all the major nationwide credit-reporting agencies—like TRW—which were among the most secure of all systems. Now, he wormed into the largest of those apples again, seeking Valerie Ann Keene.
Their files included forty-two women by that name, fifty-nine when the surname was spelled either “Keene” or “Keane,” and sixty-four when a third spelling—“Keen”—was added. Spencer entered her Social Security number, expecting to winnow away sixty-three of the sixty-four, but none had the same number as that in the DMV records.
Frowning at the screen, he entered Valerie’s birthday and asked the system to locate her with that. One of the sixty-four Valeries was born on the same day of the same month as the woman whom he was hunting—but twenty years earlier.
With the dog snoring beside him, he entered the driver’s license number and waited while the system cross-checked the Valeries. Of those who were licensed drivers, five were in California, but none had a number that matched hers. Another dead end.
Convinced that mistakes must have been made in the data entries, Spencer examined the file for each of the five California Valeries, looking for a driver’s license or date of birth that was one number different from the information he had gotten out of the DMV. He was sure he would discover that a data-entry clerk had typed a six when a nine was required or had transposed two numbers.
Nothing. No mistakes. And judging by the information in each file, none of those women could possibly be the right Valerie.
Incredibly, the Valerie Ann Keene who had recently worked at The Red Door was absent from credit-agency files, utterly without a credit history. That was possible only if she had never purchased anything on time payments, had never possessed a credit card of any kind, had never opened a checking or savings account, and had never been the subject of a background check by an employer or landlord.
To be twenty-nine years old without acquiring a credit history in modem America, she would have to have been a Gypsy or a jobless vagrant most of her life, at least since she’d been a teenager. Manifestly she had not been any such thing.
Okay. Think. The raid on her bungalow meant one kind of police agency or another was after her. So she must be a wanted felon with a criminal record.
Spencer returned along electronic freeways to the Los Angeles Police Department computer, through which he searched city, county, and state court records to see if anyone by the name of Valerie Ann Keene had ever been convicted of a crime or had an outstanding arrest warrant in those jurisdictions.
The city system flashed NEGATIVE on the video screen.
NO FILE, reported the county.
NOT FOUND, said the state.
Nothing, nada, zero, zip.
Using the LAPD’s electronic information-sharing arrangement with the FBI, he accessed the Washington-based Justice Department files of people convicted of federal offenses. She wasn’t included in those, either.
In addition to its famous ten-most-wanted list, the FBI was, at any given time, seeking hundreds of other people related to criminal investigations—either suspects or potential witnesses. Spencer inquired if her name appeared on any of those lists, but it did not.
She was a woman without a past.
Yet something that she’d done had made her a wanted woman. Desperately wanted.
Spencer did not get to bed until ten minutes past one o’clock in the morning.
Although he was exhausted, and although the rhythm of the rain should have served as a sedative, he couldn’t sleep. He lay on his back, staring alternately at the shadowy ceiling and at the thrashing foliage of the trees beyond the window, listening to the meaningless monologue of the blustery wind.
At first he could think of nothing but the woman. The look of her. Those eyes. That voice. That smile. The mystery.
In time, however, his thoughts drifted to the past, as they did too often, too easily. For him, reminiscence was a highway with one destination: that certain summer night when he was fourteen, when a dark world became darker, when everything he knew was proved false, when hope died and a dread of destiny became his constant companion, when he awakened to the cry of a persistent owl whose single inquiry thereafter became the central question of his own life.
Rocky, who was usually so well attuned to his master’s moods, was still restlessly pacing; he seemed to be unaware that Spencer was sinking into the quiet anguish of stubborn memory and that he needed company. The dog didn’t respond to his name when called.
In the gloom, Rocky padded restlessly back a
nd forth between the open bedroom door (where he stood on the threshold and listened to the storm that huffed in the fireplace chimney) and the bedroom window (where he put his forepaws upon the sill and stared out at the rampage of the wind through the eucalyptus grove). Although he neither whined nor grumbled, he had about him an air of anxiety, as if the bad weather had blown an unwanted memory out of his own past, leaving him bedeviled and unable to regain the peace he had known while dozing on the chair in the living room.
“Here, boy,” Spencer said softly. “Come here.”
Unheeding, the dog padded to the door, a shadow among shadows.
Tuesday evening, Spencer had gone to The Red Door to talk about a night in July, sixteen years past. Instead, he met Valerie Keene and, to his surprise, talked of other things. That distant July, however, still haunted him.
“Rocky, come here.” Spencer patted the mattress.
A minute or so of further encouragement finally brought the dog onto the bed. Rocky lay with his head on Spencer’s chest, shivering at first but quickly soothed by his master’s hand. One ear up, one ear down, he was attentive to the story that he’d heard on countless nights like this, when he was the entire audience, and on nights when he accompanied Spencer into barrooms, where drinks were bought for strangers who would listen in an alcoholic haze.
“I was fourteen,” Spencer began. “It was the middle of July, and the night was warm, humid. I was asleep under just one sheet, with my bedroom window open so the air could circulate. I remember…I was dreaming about my mother, who’d been dead more than six years by then, but I can’t remember anything that happened in the dream, only the warmth of it, the contentment, the comfort of being with her…and maybe the music of her laughter. She had a wonderful laugh. But it was another sound that woke me, not because it was loud but because it was recurring—so hollow and strange. I sat up in bed, confused, half drugged with sleep, but not frightened at all. I heard someone asking ‘Who?’ again and again. There would be a pause, silence, but then it would repeat as before: ‘Who, who, who?’ Of course, as I came all the way awake, I realized it was an owl perched on the roof, just above my open window.”