by Dean Koontz
Beside the back door, a small red light burns on the security-system keypad. In the readout window are three words in radiant green letters: ARMED AND SECURE. I key in the code to disarm the system. The red light turns green. The words change: READY TO ARM.
This is no ordinary farmhouse. It isn’t the home of folks who earn their living from the bounty of the land and who have simple tastes. There are treasures within—fine furnishings and art—and even in rural Colorado, precautions must be taken.
I disengage both deadbolts, open the door, and step onto the back porch, out of the frigid house, into the sultry July night. I walk barefoot across the boards to the steps, down to the flagstone patio that surrounds the swimming pool, past the darkly glimmering water in the pool, into the yard, almost like a boy sleepwalking while in a dream, drawn through the silence by the remembered cry.
The ghostly silver face of the full moon behind me casts its reflection on every blade of grass, so the lawn appears to be filmed by a frost far out of season. Strangely, I am suddenly afraid not merely for myself but for my mother, although she has been dead for more than six years and is far beyond the reach of any danger. My fear becomes so intense that I am halted by it. Halfway across the backyard, I stand alert and still in the uncertain silence. My moonshadow is a blot on the faux frost before me.
Ahead of me looms the barn, where no animals or hay or tractors have been kept for at least fifteen years, since before I was born. To anyone driving past on the county road, the property looks like a farm, but it isn’t what it appears to be. Nothing is what it appears to be.
The night is hot, and sweat beads on my face and bare chest. Nevertheless, the stubborn chill is beneath my skin and in my blood and in the deepest hollows of my boyish bones, and the July heat can’t dispel it.
It occurs to me that I’m chilled because, for some reason, I’m remembering too clearly the late-winter coldness of the bleak day in March, six years ago, when they found my mother after she had been missing for three days. Rather, they had found her brutalized body, crumpled in a ditch along a back road, eighty miles from home, where she had been dumped by the sonofabitch who kidnapped and killed her. Only eight years old, I’d been too young to understand the full meaning of death. And no one dared tell me, that day, how savagely she’d been treated, how terribly she had suffered; those were horrors still to be revealed to me by a few of my schoolmates—who had the capacity for cruelty that is possessed only by certain children and by those adults who, on some primitive level, have never matured. Yet, even in my youth and innocence, I had understood enough of death to realize at once that I would never see my mother again, and the chill of that March day had been the most penetrating cold that I’d ever known.
Now I stand on the moonlit lawn, wondering why my thoughts leap repeatedly to my lost mother, why the eerie cry that I heard when I leaned out my bedroom window strikes me as both infinitely strange and familiar, why I fear for my mother even though she’s dead, and why I fear so intensely for my own life when the summer night holds no immediate threat that I can see.
I begin to move again, toward the barn, which has become the focus of my attention, though initially I had thought that the cry had come from some animal out in the fields or in the lower hills. My shadow floats ahead of me, so that no step I take is on the carpet of moonlight but, instead, into a darkness of my own making.
Instead of going directly to the huge main doors in the south wall of the barn, in which a smaller, man-size door is inset, I obey instinct and head toward the southeast corner, crossing the macadam driveway that leads past the house and garage. In grass again, I round the corner of the barn and follow the east wall, stealthy in my bare feet, treading on the cushion of my moonshadow all the way to the northeast corner.
There I halt, because a vehicle I’ve never seen before is parked behind the barn: a customized Chevy van that no doubt isn’t charcoal, as it appears to be, for the moonlight alchemizes every color into silver or gray. Painted on the side is a rainbow, which also seems to be in shades of gray. The rear door stands open.
The silence is deep.
No one is in sight.
Even at the impressionable age of fourteen, with a childhood of Halloweens and nightmares behind me, I’ve never known strangeness and terror to be more seductive, and I can’t resist their perverse allure. I take one step toward the van, and—
—something slices the air close overhead with a whoosh and a flutter, startling me. I stumble, fall, roll, and look up in time to see enormous white wings spread above me. A shadow sweeps over the moonlit grass, and I have the crazy notion that my mother, in some angelic form, has swooped down from Heaven to warn me away from the van. Then the celestial presence arcs higher into the darkness, and I see that it’s only a great white owl, with a wingspan of five feet, sailing the summer night in search of field mice or other prey.
The owl vanishes.
The night remains.
I rise to my feet.
I creep toward the van, powerfully drawn by the mystery of it, by the promise of adventure. And by a terrible truth, which I don’t yet know that I know.
The sound of the owl’s wings, though so recent and frightening, doesn’t remain with me. But that pitiful cry, heard at the open window, echoes unrelentingly in my memory. Perhaps I’m beginning to acknowledge that it wasn’t the plaint of any wild animal meeting its end in the fields and forests, but the wretched and desperate plea of a human being in the grip of extreme terror….
In the Explorer, speeding across the moonlit Mojave, wingless but now as wise as any owl, Spencer followed insistent memory all the way into the heart of darkness, to the flash of steel from out of shadows, to the sudden pain and the scent of hot blood, to the wound that would become his scar, forcing himself toward the ultimate revelation that always eluded him.
It eluded him again.
He could recall nothing of what happened in the final moments of that hellish, long-ago encounter, after he pulled the trigger of the revolver and returned to the slaughterhouse. The police had told him how it must have ended. He had read accounts of what he’d done, by writers who based their articles and books upon the evidence. But none of them had been there. They couldn’t know the truth beyond a doubt. Only he had been there. Up to a point, his memories were so vivid as to be profoundly tormenting, but memory ended at a black hole of amnesia; after sixteen years, he’d still not been able to focus even one beam of light into that darkness.
If he ever recalled the rest, he might earn lasting peace. Or remembrance might destroy him. In that black tunnel of amnesia, he might find a shame with which he could not live, and the memory might be less desirable than a self-administered bullet to the brain.
Nevertheless, by periodically unburdening himself of everything that he did remember, he always found temporary relief from anguish. He found it again in the Mojave Desert, at fifty-five miles an hour.
When Spencer glanced at Rocky, he saw that the dog was curled on the other seat, dozing. The mutt’s position seemed awkward, if not precarious, with his tail dangling down into the leg space under the dashboard, but he was evidently comfortable.
Spencer supposed that the rhythms of his speech and the tone of his voice, after countless repetitions of his story over the years, had become soporific whenever he turned to that subject. The poor dog couldn’t have stayed awake even if they’d been in a thunderstorm.
Or perhaps, for some time, he had not actually been talking aloud. Perhaps his soliloquy had early faded to a whisper and then into silence while he continued to speak only with an inner voice. The identity of his confessor didn’t matter—a dog was as acceptable as a stranger in a barroom—so it followed that it was not important to him if his confessor listened. Having a willing listener was merely an excuse to talk himself through it once more, in search of temporary absolution or—if he could shine a light into that final darkness—a permanent peace of one kind or another.
He was fifty mil
es from Vegas.
Windblown tumbleweeds as big as wheelbarrows rolled across the highway, through his headlight beams, from nowhere to nowhere.
The clear, dry desert air did little to inhibit his view of the universe. Millions of stars blazed from horizon to horizon, beautiful but cold, alluring but unreachable, shedding surprisingly little light on the alkaline plains that flanked the highway—and, for all their grandeur, revealing nothing.
When Roy Miro woke in his Westwood hotel room, the digital clock on the nightstand read 4:19. He had slept less than five hours, but he felt rested, so he switched on the lamp.
He threw back the covers, sat on the edge of the bed in his pajamas, squinted as his eyes adjusted to the brightness—then smiled at the Tupperware container that stood beside the clock. The plastic was translucent, so he could see only a vague shape within.
He put the container on his lap and removed the lid. Guinevere’s hand. He felt blessed to possess an object of such great beauty.
How sad, however, that its ravishing splendor wouldn’t last much longer. In twenty-four hours, if not sooner, the hand would have deteriorated visibly. Its comeliness would be but a memory.
Already it had undergone a color change. Fortunately, a certain chalkiness only emphasized the exquisite bone structure in the long, elegantly tapered fingers.
Reluctantly, Roy replaced the lid, made sure the seal was tight, and put the container aside.
He went into the living room of the two-room suite. His attaché case computer and cellular phone were already connected, plugged in, and arranged on a luncheon table by a large window.
Soon he was in touch with Mama. He requested the results of the investigation that he’d asked her to undertake the previous evening, when he and his men had discovered that the DMV address for Spencer Grant was an uninhabited oil field.
He had been so furious then.
He was calm now. Cool. In control.
Reading Mama’s report from the screen, tapping the PAGE DOWN key each time he wanted to continue, Roy quickly saw that the search for Spencer Grant’s true address hadn’t been easy.
During Grant’s months with the California Multi-Agency Task Force on Computer Crime, he’d learned a lot about the nationwide Infonet and the vulnerabilities of the thousands of computer systems it comprised. Evidently, he had acquired codes-and-procedures books and master programming atlases for the computer systems of various telephone companies, credit agencies, and government offices. Then he must have managed to carry or electronically transmit them from the task-force offices to his own computer.
After quitting his job, he had erased every reference to his whereabouts from public and private records. His name appeared only in his military, DMV, Social Security, and police department files, and in every case the given address was one of the two that had already proved to be false. The national file of the Internal Revenue Service contained other men with his name; however, none was his age, had his Social Security number, lived in California, or had paid withholding taxes as an employee of the LAPD. Grant was missing, as well, from the records of the State of California tax authorities.
If nothing else, he was apparently a tax evader. Roy hated tax evaders. They were the epitome of social irresponsibility.
According to Mama, no utility company currently billed Spencer Grant—yet no matter where he lived, he needed electricity, water, telephone, garbage pickup, and probably natural gas. Even if he had erased his name from billing lists to avoid paying for utilities, he couldn’t exit their service records without triggering disconnection of essential services. Yet he could not be found.
Mama assumed two possibilities. First: Grant was honest enough to pay for utilities; however, he altered the companies’ billing and service records to transfer his accounts to a false name that he had created for himself. The sole purpose of those actions would be to further his apparent goal of disappearing from public record, making himself hard to find if any police agency or governmental body wanted to talk to him. Like now. Or, second: He was dishonest, eliminating himself from billing records, paying for nothing—while maintaining service under a false name. In either case, he and his address were somewhere in those companies’ files, under the name that was his secret identity; he could be located if his alias could be uncovered.
Roy froze Mama’s report and returned to the bedroom to get the envelope that contained the computer-projected portrait of Spencer Grant. This man was an unusually crafty adversary. Roy wanted to have the clever bastard’s face for reference while reading about him.
At the computer again, he paged forward in the report.
Mama had been unable to find an account for Spencer Grant at any bank or savings and loan association. Either he paid for everything with cash, or he maintained accounts under an alias. Probably the former. There was unmistakable paranoia in this man’s actions, so he wouldn’t trust his funds in a bank under any circumstances.
Roy glanced at the portrait beside the computer. Grant’s eyes did look strange. Feverish. No doubt about it. A trace of madness in his eyes. Maybe even more than a trace.
Because Grant might have formed an S-chapter corporation through which he did his banking and bill paying, Mama had searched the files of the California Secretary of the Treasury and various regulatory bodies, seeking his name as a registered corporate officer. Nothing.
Every bank account had to be tied to a Social Security number, so Mama looked for a savings or checking account with Grant’s number, regardless of the name under which the money was deposited. Nothing.
He might own the home in which he lived, so Mama had checked property tax records in the counties that Roy targeted. Nothing. If he did own a home, he held title under a false name.
Another hope: If Grant had ever taken a university class or been a hospital patient, he might not have remembered that he’d supplied his home address on applications and admissions forms, and he might not have deleted them. Most educational and medical institutions were regulated by federal laws; therefore, their records were accessible to numerous government agencies. Considering the number of such institutions even in a limited geographical area, Mama needed the patience of a saint or a machine, the latter of which she possessed. And for all her efforts, she found nothing.
Roy glanced at the portrait of Spencer Grant. He was beginning to think that this man was not merely mentally disturbed, but something far darker than that. An actively evil person. Anyone this obsessed with his privacy was surely an enemy of the people.
Chilled, Roy returned his attention to the computer.
When Mama undertook a search as extensive as the one that Roy had requested of her and when that search was fruitless, she didn’t give up. She was programmed to apply her spare logic circuits—during periods of lighter work and between assignments—to riffle through a large store of mailing lists that the agency had accumulated, looking for the name that couldn’t be found elsewhere. Name soup. That was what the lists were called. They were lifted from book and record clubs, national magazines, Publishers Clearing House, major political parties, catalogue-sales companies peddling everything from sexy lingerie to electronic gadgetry to meat by mail, interest groups like antique-car enthusiasts and stamp collectors, as well as from numerous other sources.
In the name soup, Mama had found a Spencer Grant different from the others in the Internal Revenue Service records.
Intrigued, Roy sat up straighter in his chair.
Almost two years ago, this Spencer Grant had ordered a dog toy from a mail-order catalogue aimed at pet owners: a hard-rubber, musical bone. The address on that list was in California. Malibu.
Mama had returned to the utility companies’ files, to see whether services were maintained at that address. They were.
The electrical connection was in the name of Stewart Peck.
The water service and trash collection account was in the name of Mr. Henry Holden.
Natural gas was billed to James Gable.
The telephone company provided service to one John Humphrey. They also billed a cellular phone to William Clark at that address.
AT&T provided long-distance service for Wayne Gregory.
Property tax records listed the owner as Robert Tracy.
Mama had found the scarred man.
In spite of his efforts to vanish behind an elaborate screen of multifarious identities, though he had diligently attempted to erase his past and to make his current existence as difficult to prove as that of the Loch Ness monster, and though he had nearly succeeded in being as elusive as a ghost, he had been tripped up by a musical rubber bone. A dog toy. Grant had seemed inhumanly clever, but the simple human desire to please a beloved pet had brought him down.
NINE
Roy Miro watched from the blue shadows of the eucalyptus grove, enjoying the medicinal but pleasant odor of the oil-rich leaves.
The rapidly assembled SWAT team hit the cabin an hour after dawn, when the canyon was quiet except for the faintest rustle of the trees in an offshore breeze. The stillness was broken by shattering glass, the whomp of stun grenades, and the crash of the front and back doors going down simultaneously.
The place was small, and the initial search required little more than a minute. Toting a Micro Uzi, wearing a Kevlar jacket so heavy that it appeared to be capable of stopping even Teflon-coated slugs, Alfonse Johnson stepped out onto the back porch to signal that the cabin was deserted.
Dismayed, Roy came out of the grove and followed Johnson through the rear entrance into the kitchen, where shards of glass crunched under his shoes.
“He’s taken a trip somewhere,” Johnson said.
“How do you figure?”
“In here.”
Roy followed Johnson into the only bedroom. It was almost as sparsely furnished as a monk’s cell. No art brightened the roughly plastered walls. Instead of drapes or curtains, white vinyl blinds hung at the windows.