by Dean Koontz
Rosie slipped off the bench onto the grass, and pulled Rocky into her arms. Her sweet, clean laughter trilled across the park.
“Good dog,” Spencer said quietly.
The muscular volleyball players took a break from their game to get a couple of cans of Pepsi out of a Styrofoam cooler.
Having reeled his kite all the way to the earth, the bearded man headed for the parking lot by a route that brought him past Spencer. He looked like a mad prophet: untrimmed; unwashed; with deeply set, wild blue eyes; a beaky nose; pale lips; broken, yellow teeth. On his black T-shirt, in red letters, were five words: ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL DAY IN HELL. He cast a fierce glance at Spencer, clutched his kite as if he thought every blackguard in creation wanted nothing more than to steal it, and stalked out of the park.
Spencer realized he had put a hand over his scar when the man had glanced at him. He lowered it.
Rosie was standing a few steps in front of the picnic table now, shooing Rocky away, apparently admonishing him not to keep his master waiting. She was beyond the reach of the palm shadows, in sunlight.
As the dog reluctantly left his new friend and trotted toward his master, Spencer was once again aware of the woman’s exceptional beauty, which was far greater than Valerie’s. And if it was the role of savior and healer that he yearned to fill, this woman most likely needed him more than the one he sought. Yet he was drawn to Valerie, not to Rosie, for reasons he could not explain—except to accuse himself of obsession, of being swept away by the fathomless currents of his subconscious, regardless of where they might take him.
The dog reached him, panting and grinning.
Rosie raised one hand over her head and waved good-bye.
Spencer waved too.
Maybe his search for Valerie Keene wasn’t merely an obsession. He had the uncanny feeling that he was the kite and that she was the reel. Some strange power—call it destiny—turned the crank, wound the line around the spool, drawing him inexorably toward her, and he had no choice in the matter whatsoever.
While the sea rolled in from faraway China and lapped at the beach, while the sunshine traveled ninety-three million miles through airless space to caress the golden bodies of the young women in their bikinis, Spencer and Rocky walked back to the truck.
With Roy Miro trailing after him at a more sedate pace, David Davis rushed into the main data processing room with the photographs of the two best prints on the bathroom window. He took them to Nella Shire, at one of the workstations. “One is clearly a thumb, clearly, no question,” Davis told her. “The other might be an index finger.”
Shire was about forty-five, with a face as sharp as that of a fox, frizzy orange hair, and green fingernail polish. Her half-walled cubicle was decorated with three photographs clipped from bodybuilding magazines: hugely pumped-up men in bikini briefs.
Noticing the musclemen, Davis frowned and said, “Ms. Shire, I’ve told you this is unacceptable. You must remove these pinups.”
“The human body is art.”
Davis was red-faced. “You know this can be construed as sexual harassment in the workplace.”
“Yeah?” She took the fingerprint photos from him. “By who?”
“By any male worker in this room, that’s by whom.”
“None of the men working here looks like these hunks. Until one of them does, nobody has anything to worry about from me.”
Davis tore one of the clippings from the cubicle wall, then another. “The last thing I need is a notation on my management record, saying I allowed harassment in my division.”
Although Roy believed in the law of which Nella Shire was in violation, he was aware of the irony of Davis worrying about his management record being soiled by a tolerance-of-harassment entry. After all, the nameless agency for which they worked was an illegal organization, answering to no elected official; therefore, every act of Davis’s working day was in violation of one law or another.
Of course, like nearly all of the agency’s personnel, Davis didn’t know that he was an instrument of a conspiracy. He received his paycheck from the Department of Justice and thought he was on their records as an employee. He had signed a secrecy oath, but he believed that he was part of a legal—if potentially controversial—offensive against organized crime and international terrorism.
As Davis tore the third pinup off the cubicle walls and wadded it in his fist, Nella Shire said, “Maybe you hate those pictures so much because they turn you on, which is something you can’t accept about yourself. Did you ever think of that?” She glanced at the fingerprint photos. “So what do you want me to do with these?”
Roy saw that David Davis had to struggle not to answer with the first thing that came to his mind.
Instead, Davis said, “We need to know whose prints these are. Go through Mama, get on-line with the FBI’s Automated Identification Division. Start with the Latent Descriptor Index.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation had one hundred ninety million fingerprints on file. Though its newest computer could make thousands of comparisons a minute, a lot of time could be expended if it had to shuffle through its entire vast storehouse of prints.
With the help of clever software called the Latent Descriptor Index, the field of search could be drastically reduced and results achieved quickly. If they had been seeking suspects in a series of killings, they would have listed the prime characteristics of the crimes—the sex and age of each victim, the methods of murder, any similarities in the conditions of the corpses, the locations at which the bodies had been found—and the index would have compared those facts to the modus operandi of known offenders, eventually producing a list of suspects and their fingerprints. Then a few hundred—or even just a few—comparisons might be necessary instead of millions.
Nella Shire turned to her computer and said, “So give me the telltales, and I’ll create a three-oh-two.”
“We aren’t seeking a known criminal,” Davis said.
Roy said, “We think our man was in special forces, or maybe he had special-weapons-and-tactics training.”
“Those guys are all hardbodies, for sure,” Shire said, eliciting a scowl from David Davis. “Army, navy, marines, or air force?”
“We don’t know,” Roy said. “Maybe he was never in the service. Could have been with a state or local police department. Could have been a Bureau agent, as far as we know, or DEA or ATF.”
“The way this works,” Shire said impatiently, “is, I need to put in telltales that limit the field.”
A hundred million of the prints in the Bureau’s system were in criminal-history files, which left ninety million that covered federal employees, military personnel, intelligence services, state and local law-enforcement officers, and registered aliens. If they knew that their mystery man was, say, an ex-marine, they wouldn’t have to search most of those ninety million files.
Roy opened the envelope that Melissa Wicklun had given him a short while ago, in Photo Analysis. He took out one of the computer-projected portraits of the man they were hunting. On the back of it was the data that the photo-analysis software had deduced from the rain-veiled profile of the man at the bungalow the previous night.
“Male, Caucasian, twenty-eight to thirty-two,” Roy said.
Nella Shire typed swiftly. A list appeared on the screen.
“Five feet eleven inches tall,” Roy continued. “One hundred and sixty-five pounds, give or take five. Brown hair, brown eyes.”
He turned the photo over to stare at the full-face portrait, and David Davis bent down to look as well. “Severe facial scarring,” Roy said. “Right side. Beginning at the ear, terminating near the chin.”
“Was that sustained on duty?” David wondered.
“Probably. So a conditional telltale might be an honorable early discharge or even a service disability.”
“Whether he was discharged or disabled,” Davis said excitedly, “you can bet he was required to undergo psychological counseling. A scar like this—it’s
a terrible blow to self-esteem. Terrible.”
Nella Shire swiveled in her chair, snatched the portrait out of Roy’s hand, and looked at it. “I don’t know…I think it makes him look sexy. Dangerous and sexy.”
Ignoring her, Davis said, “The government’s very concerned about self-esteem these days. A lack of self-esteem is the root of crime and social unrest. You can’t hold up a bank or mug an old lady unless you first think you’re nothing but a lowlife thief.”
“Yeah?” Nella Shire said, returning the portrait to Roy. “Well, I’ve known a thousand jerks who thought they were God’s best work.”
Davis said firmly, “Make psychological counseling a telltale.”
She added that item to her list. “Anything else?”
“That’s all,” Roy said. “How long is this going to take?”
Shire read through the list on the screen. “Hard to say. No more than eight or ten hours. Maybe less. Maybe a lot less. Could be, in an hour or two, I’ll have his name, address, phone number, and be able to tell you which side of his pants he hangs on.”
David Davis, still clutching a fistful of crumpled musclemen and worried about his management record, appeared offended by her remark.
Roy was merely intrigued. “Really? Maybe only an hour or two?”
“Why would I be jerking your chain?” she asked impatiently.
“Then I’ll hang around. We need this guy real bad.”
“He’s almost yours,” Nella Shire promised as she set to work.
At three o’clock they had a late lunch on the back porch while the long shadows of eucalyptuses crept up the canyon in the yellowing light of the westering sun. Sitting in a rocking chair, Spencer ate a ham-and-cheese sandwich and drank a bottle of beer. After polishing off a bowl of Purina, Rocky used his grin, his best sad-eyed look, his most pathetic whine, his wagging tail, and a master thespian’s store of tricks to cadge bits of the sandwich.
“Laurence Olivier had nothing on you,” Spencer told him.
When the sandwich was gone, Rocky padded down the porch steps and started across the backyard toward the nearest cluster of wild brush, characteristically seeking privacy for his toilet.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Spencer said, and the dog stopped to look at him. “You’ll come back with your coat full of burrs, and it’ll take me an hour to comb them all out. I don’t have time for that.”
He got up from the rocking chair, turned his back to the dog, and stared at the cabin wall while he finished the last of the beer.
When Rocky returned, they went inside, leaving the tree shadows to grow unwatched.
While the dog napped on the sofa, Spencer sat at the computer and began his search for Valerie Keene. From that bungalow in Santa Monica, she could have gone anywhere in the world, and he would have been as well advised to start looking in far Borneo as in nearby Ventura. Therefore, he could only go backward, into the past.
He had a single clue: Vegas. Cards. She can really make them fly through her hands.
Her familiarity with Vegas and her facility with cards might mean that she had lived there and earned her living as a dealer.
By his usual route, Spencer hacked into the main LAPD computer. From there he springboarded into an interstate police data-sharing network, which he had often used before, and bounced across borders into the computer of the Clark County Sheriff’s Department in Nevada, which had jurisdiction over the city of Las Vegas.
On the sofa, the snoring dog pumped his legs, chasing rabbits in his sleep. In Rocky’s case, the rabbits were probably chasing him.
After exploring the sheriff’s computer for a while and finding his way into—among other things—the department’s personnel records, Spencer finally discovered a file labeled NEV CODES. He was pretty sure he knew what it was, and he wanted in.
NEV CODES was specially protected. To use it, he required an access number. Incredibly, in many police agencies, that would be either an officer’s badge number or, in the case of office workers, an employee ID number—all obtainable from personnel records, which were not well guarded. He had already collected a few badge numbers in case he needed them. Now he used one, and NEV CODES opened to him.
It was a list of numerical codes with which he could access the computer-stored data of any government agency in the state of Nevada. In a wink he followed the cyberspace highway from Las Vegas to the Nevada Gaming Commission in Carson City, the capital.
The commission licensed all casinos in the state and enforced the laws and regulations that governed them. Anyone who wished to invest—or serve as an executive—in the gaming industry was required to submit to a background investigation and to be proved free of ties to known criminals. In the 1970s, a strengthened commission squeezed out most of the mobsters and Mafia front men who had founded Nevada’s biggest industry, in favor of companies like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Hilton Hotels.
It was logical to suppose that other casino employees below management level—from pit bosses to cocktail waitresses—underwent similar although less exhaustive background checks and were issued ID cards. Spencer explored menus and directories, and in another twenty minutes, he found the records that he needed.
The data related to casino-employee work permits was divided into three primary files: Expired, Current, Pending. Because Valerie had been working at The Red Door in Santa Monica for two months, Spencer accessed the Expired list first.
In his rambles through cyberspace, he had seen few files so extensively cross-referenced as this one—and those others had been related to grave national defense matters. The system allowed him to search for a subject in the Expired category by means of twenty-two indices ranging from eye color to most recent place of employment.
He typed VALERIE ANN KEENE.
In a few seconds the system replied: UNKNOWN.
He shifted to the file labeled Current and typed in her name.
UNKNOWN.
Spencer tried the Pending file with the same result. Valerie Ann Keene was unknown to the Nevada gaming authorities.
For a moment he stared at the screen, despondent because his only clue had proved to be a dead end. Then he realized that a woman on the run was unlikely to use the same name everywhere she went and thereby make herself easy to track. If Valerie had lived and worked in Vegas, her name almost surely had been different then.
To find her in the file, Spencer would have to be clever.
While waiting for Nella Shire to find the scarred man, Roy Miro was in terrible danger of being dragooned into hours of sociable conversation with David Davis. He would almost rather have eaten a cyanide-laced muffin and washed it down with a big, frosty beaker of carbolic acid than spend any more time with the fingerprint maven.
Claiming not to have slept the night before, when in fact he had slept the innocent sleep of a saint after the priceless gift he had given to Penelope Bettonfield and her husband, Roy charmed Davis into offering the use of his office. “I insist, I really do, I will listen to no argument, none!” Davis said with considerable gesturing and bobbing of his head. “I’ve got a couch in there. You can stretch out on it, you won’t be inconveniencing me. I’ve got plenty of lab work to do. I don’t need to be at my desk today.”
Roy didn’t expect to sleep. In the cool dimness of the office, with the California sun banished by the tightly closed Levolors, he thought he would lie on his back, stare at the ceiling, visualize the nexus of his spiritual being—where his soul connected with the mysterious power that ruled the cosmos—and meditate on the meaning of existence. He pursued deeper self-awareness every day. He was a seeker, and the search for enlightenment was endlessly exciting to him. Strangely, however, he fell asleep.
He dreamed of a perfect world. There was no greed or envy or despair, because everyone was identical to everyone else. There was a single sex, and human beings reproduced by discreet parthenogenesis in the privacy of their bathrooms—though not often. The only skin color was a pale and slightly radiant blue. Everyone w
as beautiful in an androgynous way. No one was dumb, but no one was too smart, either. Everyone wore the same clothes and lived in houses that all looked alike. Every Friday evening, there was a planetwide bingo game, which everyone won, and on Saturdays—
Wertz woke him, and Roy was paralyzed by terror because he confused the dream and reality. Gazing up into the slug-pale, moon-round face of Davis’s assistant, which was revealed by a desk lamp, Roy thought that he himself, along with everyone else in the world, looked exactly like Wertz. He tried to scream but couldn’t find his voice.
Then Wertz spoke, bringing Roy fully awake: “Mrs. Shire’s found him. The scarred man. She’s found him.”
Alternately yawning and grimacing at the sour taste in his mouth, Roy followed Wertz to the data processing room. David Davis and Nella Shire were standing at her workstation, each with a sheaf of papers. In the fluorescent glare, Roy squinted with discomfort, then with interest, as Davis passed to him, page by page, computer printouts on which both he and Nella Shire commented excitedly.
“His name’s Spencer Grant,” Davis said. “No middle name. At eighteen, out of high school, he joined the army.”
“High IQ, equally high motivation,” Mrs. Shire said. “He applied for special-forces training. Army Rangers.”
“He left the army after six years,” Davis said, passing another printout to Roy, “used his service benefits to go to UCLA.”
Scanning the latest page, Roy said, “Majored in criminology.”
“Minored in criminal psychology,” said Davis. “Went to school year-round, kept a heavy class load, got a degree in three years.”
“Young man in a hurry,” Wertz said, apparently so they would remember that he was part of the team and would not, accidentally, step on him and crush him like a bug.
As Davis handed Roy another page, Nella Shire said, “Then he applied to the L.A. Police Academy. Graduated at the top of his class.”
“One day, after less than a year on the street,” Davis said, “he walked into the middle of a carjacking in progress. Two armed men. They saw him coming, tried to take the woman motorist hostage.”