Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dean Koontz

  How many women had ever affected a man so strongly that he had, after one evening of conversation, given up a comfortable existence and put his life in extreme jeopardy to be with her? She was more than merely mystified and flattered by Spencer’s commitment. She felt special, foolish, girlish, reckless. She was reluctantly enchanted.

  Frowning, she studied Steven Ackblom’s photograph again.

  She knew that Spencer’s commitment to her—and all that he had done to find her—might be seen as less the result of love than of obsession. In the son of a savage serial killer, any sign of obsession might reasonably be viewed as a cause for alarm, as a reflection of the father’s madness.

  Ellie returned all four photographs to the envelope. She closed it with its small metal clasp.

  She believed Spencer was, in all ways that mattered, not his father’s son. He was no more dangerous to her than was Mr. Rocky Dog. For three nights in the desert, as she had listened to him murmuring in delirium, between his periodic ascensions to a shaky state of consciousness, she had heard nothing to make her suspect that he was the bad seed of a bad seed.

  In reality, even if Spencer was a danger to her, he was no match for the agency when it came to being a threat. The agency was still out there, hunting for them.

  What Ellie really needed to worry about was whether she could avoid the agency’s goons long enough to discover and enjoy whatever emotional connections might evolve between her and this complex and enigmatic man. By Spencer’s own admission, he had secrets that were still unrevealed. More for his sake than hers, those secrets would have to be aired before any future they might have together could be discussed or even discerned; because until he settled his debts with the past, he would never know the peace of mind or the self-respect needed for love to flourish.

  She looked out at the sky again.

  They flew across Utah in their sleek black machine, strangers in their own land, putting the sun behind them, heading eastward toward the horizon from which, several hours hence, the night would come.

  Harris Descoteaux showered in the gray and maroon guest bathroom of his brother’s Westwood home, but the scent of the jailhouse, which he believed he could detect on himself, was ineradicable. Jessica had packed three changes of clothes for him on Saturday, prior to being evicted from their house in Burbank. From that meager wardrobe, he selected Nikes, gray cords, and a long-sleeve, dark-green knit shirt.

  When he told his wife that he was going for a walk, she wanted him to wait until the pies could be taken from the oven, so she could go with him. Darius, busy on the telephone in his study, suggested that he delay leaving for half an hour, so they could walk together. Harris sensed that they were concerned about his despondency. They felt he should not be alone.

  He reassured them that he had no intention of throwing himself in front of a truck, that he needed to exercise after a weekend in a cell, and that he wanted to be alone to think. He borrowed one of Darius’s leather jackets from the foyer closet and went into the cool February morning.

  The residential streets of Westwood were hilly. Within a few blocks, he realized that a weekend spent sitting in a cell actually had left his muscles cramped and in need of stretching.

  He hadn’t been telling the truth when he had said that he wanted to be alone to think. Actually, he wanted to stop thinking. Ever since the assault on his house on Friday night, his mind had been spinning ceaselessly. And thinking had gotten him nowhere but into bleaker places within himself.

  Even what little sleep he had gotten had been no surcease from worry, for he had dreamed about faceless men in black uniforms and shiny black jackboots. In the nightmares, they buckled Ondine, Willa, and Jessica into collars and leashes, as if dealing with dogs instead of with people, and led them away, leaving Harris alone.

  As there was no escape from worry in his sleep, there was none in the company of Jessica or Darius. His brother was ceaselessly working on the case or brooding aloud about offensive and defensive legal strategies. And Jessica was—as Ondine and Willa would be, when they returned from the mall—a constant reminder that he had failed his family. None of them would say anything of that kind, of course, and he knew that the thought would never actually cross their minds. He had done nothing to earn the catastrophe that had befallen them. Yet, though he was blameless, he blamed himself. Somewhere, sometime, someplace, he’d made an enemy whose retribution was psychotically in excess of whatever offense Harris unwittingly had committed. If only he had done one thing differently, avoided one offending statement or act, perhaps none of this would have happened. Every time he thought of Jessica or his daughters, his inadvertent and unavoidable culpability seemed to be a greater sin.

  The men in jackboots, though only creatures from his dream, had in a very real sense begun to deny him the comfort of his family without the need to buckle them in leashes and lead them away. His anger and frustration at his powerlessness and his self-inflicted guilt, as surely as bricks and mortar, had become the components of a wall between him and those he loved; and this barrier was likely to become wider and higher with time.

  Alone, therefore, he walked the winding streets and the hills of Westwood. Many palms, ficuses, and pines kept the neighborhood California-green in February, but there were also numerous sycamores and maples and birches that were bare-limbed in winter. Harris focused largely on the interesting patterns of sunlight and tree shadows that alternately swagged and filigreed the sidewalk ahead. He tried to use them to induce a state of self-imposed hypnosis, in which all thought was banished except for an awareness of the need to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  He had some success at that game. In a half trance, he was only peripherally aware of the sapphire-blue Toyota that passed him and, abruptly chugging and stalling out, pulled to the curb and stopped nearly a block ahead. A man got out of the car and opened the hood, but Harris remained focused on the tapestry of sun and shade on which he trod.

  As Harris passed the front of the Toyota, the stranger turned from his examination of the engine and said, “Sir, may I give you something to think about?”

  Harris continued a couple of steps before he realized that the man was speaking to him. Halting, turning, rising from his self-induced hypnosis, he said, “Excuse me?”

  The stranger was a tall black man in his late twenties. He was as skinny as a fourteen-year-old, with the somber and intense manner of an elderly man who had seen too much and carried too great a grief all his life. Dressed in black slacks, a black turtleneck sweater, and a black jacket, he seemed to want to project an ominous image. But if that was his intention, it was defeated by his large, bottle-thick glasses, his thinness, and a voice which, while deep, was as velvety and appealing as that of Mel Torme.

  “May I give you something to think about?” he asked again, and then he continued without waiting for a response. “What’s happened to you couldn’t happen to a United States Representative or Senator.”

  The street was uncannily quiet for being in such a metropolitan area. The sunlight seemed different from what it had been a moment ago. The glimmer that it laid along the curved surfaces of the blue Toyota struck Harris as unnatural.

  “Most people are unaware of it,” said the stranger, “but for decades, politicians have exempted current and future members of the U.S. Congress from most of the laws they pass. Asset forfeiture, for one. If cops nail a senator peddling cocaine out of his Cadillac by a schoolyard, his car can’t be seized the way your house was.”

  Harris had the peculiar feeling that he had hypnotized himself so well that this tall man in black was an apparition in a trance-state dream.

  “You might be able to prosecute him for drug dealing and get a conviction—unless his fellow politicians just censor him or expel him from Congress and, at the same time, arrange his immunity from prosecution. But you couldn’t seize his assets for drug dealing or any of the other two hundred offenses for which they seize yours.”

  Harris said, �
��Who are you?”

  Ignoring the question, the stranger went on in that soft voice: “Politicians pay no Social Security taxes. They have their own retirement fund. And they don’t rob it to finance other programs, the way they drain Social Security. Their pensions are safe.”

  Harris looked anxiously around the street to see who might be watching, what other vehicles and men might have accompanied this man. Although the stranger wasn’t threatening, the situation itself suddenly seemed ominous. He felt that he was being set up, as if the point of the encounter was to tease from him some seditious statement for which he could be arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned.

  That was an absurd fear. Free speech was still well guaranteed. No citizens of the world were as openly and heatedly opinionated as his countrymen. Recent events obviously had inspired a paranoia over which he needed to gain control.

  Yet he remained afraid to speak.

  The stranger said, “They exempt themselves from healthcare plans they intend to force on you, so someday you’ll have to wait months for things like gallbladder surgery, but they’ll get the care they need on demand. Somehow we’ve allowed ourselves to be ruled by the greediest and most envious among us.”

  Harris found the nerve to speak again, but only to repeat the question he had already asked and to add another. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I only want to give you something to think about until the next time,” said the stranger. Then he turned and slammed shut the hood of the blue Toyota.

  Emboldened when the other’s back was to him, Harris stepped off the curb and grabbed the man by the arm. “Look here—”

  “I have to go,” the stranger said. “As far as I know, we’re not being watched. The chances are a thousand to one. But with today’s technology, you can’t be a hundred percent sure anymore. Until now, to anyone observing us, you just seem to’ve struck up a conversation with a guy who has car trouble, offered some assistance. But if we stand here talking any longer, and if someone is watching, they’ll come in for a closer look and turn on their directional microphones.”

  He went to the driver’s door of his Toyota.

  Bewildered, Harris said, “But what was this all about?”

  “Be patient, Mr. Descoteaux. Just go with the flow, just ride the wave, and you’ll find out.”

  “What wave?”

  Opening the driver’s door, the stranger cracked his first smile since he had spoken. “Well, I guess…the microwave, the light wave, the waves of the future.”

  He got in the car, started the engine, and drove away, leaving Harris more bewildered than ever.

  The microwave. The light wave. The waves of the future.

  What the hell had just happened?

  Harris Descoteaux turned in a circle, studying the neighborhood, and for the most part it seemed unremarkable. Sky and earth. Houses and trees. Lawns and sidewalks. Sunlight and shadows. But in the fabric of the day, glimmering darkly in the deep warp and woof, were threads of mystery that had not been there earlier.

  He walked on. Periodically, however, as he had not done before, he glanced over his shoulder.

  Roy Miro in the Empire of the Mormons. After dealing with the Cedar City Police and the county sheriff’s deputies for nearly two hours, Roy had experienced enough niceness to last him until at least the first of July. He understood the value of a smile, courtesy, and unfailing friendliness, because he used a disarming approach in his own work. But these Mormon cops carried it to extremes. He began to long for the cool indifference of Los Angeles, the hard selfishness of Las Vegas, even the surliness and insanity of New York.

  His mood was not enhanced by the news of Earthguard’s shutdown. He had been further rattled by subsequently learning that the stolen helicopter had descended to such a low altitude that two military facilities tracking it (in response to urgent agency requests that they believed had come from the Drug Enforcement Administration) had lost the craft. They hadn’t been able to reacquire it. The fugitives were gone, and only God and a couple of kidnapped pilots knew where.

  Roy dreaded having to make his report to Tom Summerton.

  The replacement JetRanger was due from Las Vegas in less than twenty minutes, but he didn’t know what he was going to do with it. Park it in the shopping-center lot and sit in it, waiting for someone to sight the fugitives? He might still be there when the time rolled around to do Christmas shopping again. Besides, these Mormon cops would undoubtedly keep bringing him coffee and doughnuts, and they would hang around to help him pass the time.

  He was spared all the horrors of continued niceness when Gary Duvall telephoned again from Colorado and put the investigation back on track. The call came through on the scrambler-equipped security phone in the disabled chopper.

  Roy sat in the back of the cabin and put on the headset.

  “You’re not easy to track down,” Duvall told him.

  “Complications here,” Roy said succinctly. “You’re still in Colorado? I thought you’d be on your way back to San Francisco by this time.”

  “I got interested in this Ackblom angle. Always been fascinated by these serial killers. Dahmer, Bundy, that Ed Gein fellow a lot of years ago. Weird stuff. Got me to wondering what in hell the son of a serial killer is doing mixed up with this woman.”

  “We’re all wondering,” Roy assured him.

  As before, Duvall was going to pay out whatever he had learned in small installments.

  “While I was so close, I decide to hop over from Denver to Vail, have a look at the ranch where it happened. It’s a quick flight. Almost took longer to board and disembark than it took to get there.”

  “You’re there now?”

  “At the ranch? No. I just got back from there. But I’m still in Vail. And wait’ll you hear what I discovered.”

  “I guess I’ll have to.”

  “Huh?”

  “Wait,” Roy said.

  Either missing the sarcasm or ignoring it, Duvall said, “I’ve got two tasty enchiladas of information to feed you. Enchilada number one—what do you think happened to the ranch after they took all of the bodies out of there and Ackblom went to prison for life?”

  “It became a retreat for Carmelite nuns,” Roy said.

  “Where’d you hear that?” Duvall asked, unaware that Roy’s answer had been intended to be humorous. “Aren’t any nuns anywhere around the place. There’s this couple lives on the ranch, Paul and Anita Dresmund. Been there for years. Fifteen years. Everyone around Vail thinks they own the place, and they don’t let on any different. They’re only about fifty-five now, but they have the look and style of people who might’ve been able to retire at forty—which is what they claimed—or never worked at all, lived on inheritance. They’re perfect for the job.”

  “What job?”

  “Caretakers.”

  “Who does own it?”

  “That’s the creepy part.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “Part of the Dresmunds’ job is to pretend ownership and not reveal they’re paid caretakers. They like to ski, live the easy life, and it doesn’t bother them to be living in a place with that reputation, so keeping their mouths shut has been easy.”

  “But they opened up to you?”

  “Well, you know, people take FBI credentials and a few threats of criminal charges a lot more seriously than they should,” Duvall said. “Anyway, until about a year and a half ago, they were paid by an attorney in Denver.”

  “You’ve got his name?”

  “Bentley Lingerhold. But I don’t think we’ll need to bother with him. Until a year and a half ago, the Dresmunds’ checks were issued from a trust fund, the Vail Memorial Trust, overseen by this attorney. I had my field computer with me, got on-line with Mama, had her track it down. It’s a defunct entity, but there’s still a record of it. Actually, it was managed by another trust that still exists—the Spencer Grant Living Trust.”

  “Good God,” Roy said.

  “Stunning,
huh?”

  “The son still owns that property?”

  “Yeah, through other entities he controls. A year and a half ago, ownership was transferred from the Vail Memorial Trust, which was essentially owned by the son, to an offshore corporation on Grand Cayman Island. That’s a tax-shelter haven in the Caribbean that—”

  “Yes, I know. Go on.”

  “Since then, the Dresmunds have been getting their checks from something called Vanishment International. Through Mama, I got into the Grand Cayman bank where the account is located. I wasn’t able to learn its value or call up any transaction records, but I was able to find out that Vanishment is controlled by a Swiss-based holding company: Amelia Earhart Enterprises.”

  Roy fidgeted in his seat, wishing that he’d brought a pen and notebook to keep all these details straight.

  Duvall said, “The grandparents, George and Ethel Porth, formed the Vail Memorial Trust well over fifteen years ago, about six months after the Ackblom story exploded. They used it to manage the property at a one-step remove, to keep their names disassociated from it.”

  “Why didn’t they sell the place?”

  “Haven’t a clue. Anyway, a year later they set up the Spencer Grant Living Trust for the boy, here in Denver, through this Bentley Lingerhold, just after the kid had his name legally changed. At the same time they put that trust in charge of the Vail Memorial Trust. But Vanishment International came into existence just a year and a half ago, long after both grandparents were dead, so you’ve got to figure that Grant himself set it up and that he’s moved most of his assets out of the United States.”

  “Starting at about the same time he began to eliminate his name from most public records,” Roy mused. “Okay, tell me something…when you’re talking trusts and offshore corporations, you’re talking about big money, aren’t you?”