Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dean Koontz

  “Thanks for the candy.”

  “It would’ve been filet mignon if I could’ve swung it.”

  He unfolded the map. They held it between their seats, studying the territory around Grand Junction, Colorado.

  Twice she dared to look at him, and each glimpse made her heart race with fear. She could too clearly see the skull beneath the skin, the promise of the grave that was usually so well concealed by the mask of life.

  She felt ignorant, silly, superstitious, like a foolish child. There were other explanations besides omens and portents and psychic images of tragedy to come. Perhaps, after the Thanksgiving night when Danny and her parents had been snatched away forever, this fear would plague her every time that she crossed the line between caring for people and loving them.

  Roy landed at Stapleton International Airport in Denver, aboard the Learjet, after twenty-five minutes in a holding pattern. The local office of the agency had assigned two operatives to work with him, as he had requested on the scrambler phone while in flight. Both men—Burt Rink and Oliver Fordyce—were waiting in the parking bay as the Lear taxied into it. They were in their early thirties, tall, clean-shaven. They wore black topcoats, dark-blue suits, dark ties, white shirts, and black Oxfords with rubber rather than leather soles. All that was also as Roy had requested.

  Rink and Fordyce had new clothes for Roy that were virtually identical to their own outfits. Having shaved and showered aboard the jet during the trip from Cedar City, Roy needed only to change clothes before they could switch from the plane to the black Chrysler super-stretch limousine that was waiting at the foot of the portable stairs.

  The day was bone-freezing. The sky was as clear as an arctic sea and deeper than time. Icicles hung along the eaves of building roofs, and banks of snow marked the far limits of runways.

  Stapleton was on the northeastern edge of the city, and their appointment with Dr. Sabrina Palma was beyond the southwest suburbs. Roy would have insisted on a police escort, under one pretense or another, except that he didn’t want to call any more attention to themselves than absolutely necessary.

  “It’s a four-thirty appointment,” Fordyce said as he and Rink settled into the back of the limousine, facing to the rear, where Roy sat facing forward. “We’ll make it with a few minutes to spare.”

  The driver had been instructed not to dawdle. They accelerated away from the Learjet as if they did have a police escort.

  Rink passed a nine-by-twelve white envelope to Roy. “These are all the documents you required.”

  “You have your Secret Service credentials?” Roy asked.

  From suit-coat pockets, Rink and Fordyce withdrew their ID wallets and flipped them open to reveal holographic identification cards with their photographs and authentic SS badges. Rink’s name for the upcoming meeting was Sidney Eugene Tarkenton. Fordyce was Lawrence Albert Olmeyer.

  Roy extracted his own ID wallet from among the documents in the white envelope. He was J. Robert Cotter.

  “Let’s all remember who we are. Be sure to call one another by these names,” Roy said. “I don’t expect you’ll need to say much—or even anything at all. I’ll do the talking. You’re there primarily to lend the whole thing an air of realism. You’ll enter Dr. Palma’s office behind me and post yourselves to the left and the right of the door. Stand with your feet about eighteen inches apart, arms down in front of you, one hand clasped over the other. When I introduce you to her, you’ll say ‘Doctor’ and nod or ‘Pleased to meet you’ and nod. Stoic at all times. About as expressionless as a Buckingham Palace guard. Eyes straight ahead. No fidgeting. If you’re asked to sit down, you’ll politely say ‘No, thank you, Doctor.’ Yes, I know, it’s ridiculous, but this is how people are used to seeing Secret Service agents in the movies, so any indication that you’re a real human being will ring false to her. Is that understood, Sidney?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is that understood, Lawrence?”

  “I prefer Larry,” said Oliver Fordyce.

  “Is that understood, Larry?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.”

  Roy withdrew the other documents from the envelope, examined them, and was satisfied.

  He was taking one of the greatest risks of his career, but he was remarkably calm. He was not even assigning agents to seek the fugitives in Salt Lake City or anywhere else directly north of Cedar City, because he was confident that their flight in that direction had been a ruse. They had altered course immediately after dropping under the radar floor. He doubted that they would go west, back into Nevada, because that state’s empty vastness provided too little cover. Which left south and east. After the two enchiladas of information from Gary Duvall, Roy had reviewed everything he knew about Spencer Grant and had decided that he could accurately predict in which direction the man—and, with luck, the woman—would proceed. East-northeast. Moreover, he had divined exactly where Grant would impact at the end of that east-northeast trajectory, even more confidently than he could have plotted the line of a bullet from the barrel of a rifle. Roy was calm not solely because he trusted in his well-exercised powers of deductive reasoning but also because, in this special instance, destiny walked with him as surely as blood flowed in his veins.

  “Can I assume that the team I asked for earlier today is on its way to Vail?” he asked.

  “Twelve men,” said Fordyce.

  Glancing at his watch, Rink said, “They should be meeting Duvall there just about now.”

  For sixteen years, Michael Ackblom—aka “Spencer Grant”—had been denying the deep desire to return to that place, repressing the need, resisting the powerful magnet of the past. Nevertheless, either consciously or unconsciously, he had always known that he must pay a visit to those old haunts sooner or later. Otherwise, he would have sold the property to be rid of that tangible reminder of a time he wanted to forget, just as he had sloughed off his old name for a new one. He retained ownership for the same reason that he’d never sought surgery to have his facial scar minimized. He’s punishing himself with the scar, Dr. Nero Mondello had said, in his white-on-white office in Beverly Hills. Reminding himself of something he would like to forget but feels obligated to remember. As long as Grant had lived in California and had followed a pressure-free daily routine, perhaps he could have indefinitely resisted the call of that killing ground in Colorado. But now he was running for his life and under tremendous pressure, and he had come near enough to his old home to ensure that the siren song of the past would be irresistible. Roy was betting everything that the son of the serial killer would return to the marrow of the nightmare, from which all the blood had sprung.

  Spencer Grant had unfinished business at the ranch outside Vail. And only two people in the world knew what it was.

  Beyond the heavily tinted windows of the speeding limousine, in the rapidly dwindling winter afternoon, the modern city of Denver appeared to be smoky and as vaguely defined at the edges as piles of ancient ruins entwined with ivy and shrouded with moss.

  West of Grand Junction, inside the Colorado National Monument, the JetRanger landed in an eroded basin between one parenthesis of red rock formations and another of low hills mantled with junipers and pinyon pines. A skin of dry snow, less than half an inch thick, was flayed into crystalline clouds by the downdraft.

  A hundred feet away, a green-black screen of trees served as backdrop to the bright silhouette of a white Ford Bronco. A man in a green ski suit stood at the open tailgate, watching the helicopter.

  Spencer stayed with the crew while Ellie went outside to have a word with the man at the truck. With the JetRanger engine off and the rotor blades dead, the rock-and tree-rimmed basin was as silent as a deserted cathedral. She could hear nothing but the squeak and crunch of her own footsteps on the snow-filmed, frozen earth.

  As she drew close to the Bronco, she saw a tripod with a camera on it. Related gear was spread across the lowered tailgate.

  The photographer, bearded and
furious, was spouting steam from his nostrils as if about to explode. “You ruined my shot. That pristine swath of snow curving up to that thrusting, fiery rock. Such contrast, such drama. And now ruined.”

  She glanced back at the rock formations beyond the helicopter. They were still fiery, a luminous stained-glass red in the beams of the westering sun, and they were still thrusting. But he was right about the snow: It wasn’t pristine any longer.

  “Sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it,” he said sharply.

  She studied the snow in the vicinity of the Bronco. As far as she could tell, his were the only footprints in it. He was alone.

  “What the hell are you doing out here anyway?” the photographer demanded. “There are sound restrictions here, nothing as noisy as that allowed. This is a wildlife preserve.”

  “Then cooperate and preserve your own,” she said, drawing the SIG 9mm from under her leather jacket.

  In the JetRanger again, while Ellie held the pistol and the Micro Uzi, Spencer cut strips out of the upholstery. He used those lengths of leather to bind the wrists of each of the three men to the arms of the passenger seats in which he’d made them sit.

  “I won’t gag you,” he told them. “Nobody’s likely to hear you shouting anyway.”

  “We’ll freeze to death,” the pilot fretted.

  “You’ll work your arms loose in half an hour at most. Another half an hour or forty-five minutes to walk out to the highway we crossed over when we flew in. Not nearly enough time to freeze.”

  “Just to be safe,” Ellie assured them, “as soon as we get to a town, we’ll call the police and tell them where you are.”

  Twilight had arrived. Stars were beginning to appear in the deep purple of the eastern sky as it curved down to the horizon.

  While Spencer drove the Bronco, Rocky panted in Ellie’s ear from the cargo area behind her seat. They found the way overland toward the highway with no difficulty. The route was clearly marked by the tire tracks in the snow that the truck had made on its trip into the picturesque basin.

  “Why’d you tell them we’d call the police?” Spencer wondered.

  “You want them to freeze?”

  “I don’t think there’s much chance of that.”

  “I won’t risk it.”

  “Yeah, but these days, it’s possible—maybe not likely, but possible—that any call you make to a police department is going to be received on a caller-ID line, not just if you punch nine-one-one. Fact is, a smaller city like Grand Junction, with not so much street crime or so many demands on resources, is a lot more likely to have money to spend on fancy communications systems with all the bells and whistles. You call them, then they know right away the address you’re phoning from. It comes up on the screen in front of the police operator. And then they’ll know what direction we went, what road we left Grand Junction on.”

  “I know. But we’re not going to make it that simple for them,” she said, and explained what she had in mind.

  “I like it,” he said.

  The Rocky Mountain Prison for the Criminally Insane had been constructed in the Great Depression, under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration, and it looked as solid and formidable as the Rockies themselves. It was a squat, rambling building with small, deep-set, barred windows even in the administration wing. The walls were faced with iron-gray granite. An even darker granite had been used for lintels, window stools, door and window surrounds, coins, and carved cornices. The whole pile slumped under a gabled attic and a black slate roof.

  The general effect, Roy Miro felt, was as depressing as it was ominous. Without hyperbole, the structure could be said to brood high upon its hillside, as if it were a living creature. In the late-afternoon shadows of the steep slopes that rose behind the prison, its windows were filled with a sour-yellow light that might have been reflected through connecting corridors from the dungeons of some mountain demon who lived deeper in the Rockies.

  Approaching the prison in the limousine, standing before it, and walking its public corridors to Dr. Palma’s office, Roy was overcome with compassion for the poor souls locked away in that heap of stone. He grieved as well for the equally suffering warders who, in looking after the deranged, were forced to spend so much of their lives in such circumstances. If it had been within his authority to do so, he would have sealed up every last window and vent, with all the inmates and attendants inside, and put them out of their misery with a gentle-acting but lethal gas.

  Dr. Sabrina Palma’s reception lounge and office were so warmly and luxuriously furnished that, by contrast with the building that surrounded them, they seemed to belong not only in another and more exalted place—a New York penthouse, a Palm Beach bayside mansion—but in another age than the 1930s, a time warp in which the rest of the prison seemed still to exist. Sofas and chairs were recognizably by J. Robert Scott, upholstered in platinum and gold silks. Tables and mirror frames and side chairs were also by J. Robert Scott, done in a variety of exotic woods with bold grains, all either bleached or whitewashed. The deeply sculpted, beige-on-beige carpet might have been from Edward Fields. At the center of the inner office was a massive Monteverde & Young desk, in a crescent-moon shape, that must have cost forty thousand dollars.

  Roy had never seen an office of any public official to equal those two rooms, not even in the highest circles of official Washington. He knew at once what to make of it, and he knew that he had a sword to hold over Dr. Palma if she gave him any resistance.

  Sabrina Palma was the director of the prison medical staff. By virtue of its being as much hospital as prison, she was also the equivalent of a warden in any ordinary correctional facility. And she was as striking as her office. Raven-black hair. Green eyes. Skin as pale and smooth as pooled milk. Early forties, tall, svelte but shapely. She wore a black knit suit with a white silk blouse.

  After identifying himself, Roy introduced her to Agent Olmeyer—

  “Pleased to meet you, Doctor.”

  —and Agent Tarkenton.

  “Doctor.”

  She invited them all to sit down.

  “No, thank you, Doctor,” said Olmeyer, and took up a position to the right of the door that connected the inner and outer offices.

  “No, thank you, Doctor,” said Tarkenton, and took up a position to the left of the same door.

  Roy proceeded to one of three exquisite chairs in front of Dr. Palma’s desk as she circled to the plush leather throne behind it. She sat in a cascade of indirect, amber light that made her pale skin glow as if with inner fire.

  “I’m here on a matter of the utmost importance,” Roy told her in as gracious a tone as he could command. “We believe—no, we are certain—that the son of one of your inmates is currently stalking the President of the United States and intends to assassinate him.”

  When she heard the name of the would-be assassin and knew the identity of his father, Sabrina Palma raised her eyebrows. After she examined the documents that Roy withdrew from the white envelope and after she learned what he expected of her, she excused herself and went to the outer office to make several urgent telephone calls.

  Roy waited in his chair.

  Beyond the three narrow windows, spread out across the night below the prison, the lights of Denver gleamed and glittered.

  He looked at his watch. By now, on the far side of the Rockies, Duvall and his twelve men ought to have settled inconspicuously into the creeping night. They wanted to be ready, in case the travelers arrived far earlier than anticipated.

  The hood of night had fully covered the face of twilight by the time they reached the outskirts of Grand Junction.

  With a population of over thirty-five thousand, the city was big enough to delay them. But Ellie had a penlight and the map that she had taken from the helicopter, and she found the simplest route.

  Two-thirds of the way around the city, at a multiplex cinema, they stopped to go shopping for a new vehicle. Apparently, none of the shows was either
letting out or about to begin, for no moviegoers were arriving or leaving. The sprawling parking lot was full of cars but devoid of people.

  “Get an Explorer or a Jeep if you can,” she said as he opened the door of the Bronco, letting in a frigid draft. “Something like that. It’s more convenient.”

  “Thieves can’t be choosers,” he said.

  “They have to be.” As he got out, she shifted over behind the steering wheel. “Hey, if you’re not choosy, then you’re not a thief, you’re a trash collector.”

  While Ellie drifted along one aisle, pacing him, Spencer moved boldly from vehicle to vehicle, trying the doors. Each time that he found one unlocked, he leaned inside long enough to check for keys in the ignition, behind the sun visor, and under the driver’s seat.

  Watching his master through the side windows of the Bronco, Rocky whined as though with concern.

  “Dangerous, yes,” Ellie said. “I can’t lie to the dog. But not half as dangerous as driving through the front of a supermarket with helicopters full of thugs on your tail. You’ve just got to keep this in perspective.”

  The fourteenth set of wheels that Spencer tried was a big black Chevy pickup with an extended cab that provided both front and back seats. He climbed into it, pulled the door shut, started the engine, and reversed out of the parking slot.

  Ellie parked the Bronco in the space that the Chevy had vacated. They needed only fifteen seconds to transfer the guns, the duffel bag, and the dog to the pickup. Then they were on their way again.

  On the east side of the city, they started looking for any motel that appeared to have been recently constructed. The rooms in most older establishments were not computer friendly.

  At a self-described “motor lodge” that looked new enough to have held its ribbon-cutting ceremony just hours ago, Ellie left Spencer and Rocky in the pickup while she went into the front office to ask the desk clerk if their accommodations would allow her to use her modem. “I have a report due at my office in Cleveland by morning.” In fact, all rooms were properly wired for her needs. Using her Bess Baer ID for the first time, she took a double with a queen-size bed and paid cash in advance.