by Dean Koontz
He swaggered under the streetlamps, not like genuine tough guys sometimes swaggered, but as movie stars swaggered when they thought they were getting the tough-guy thing just right. His gray pants, black turtleneck, and black leather coat were soaked, but he seemed to defy the rain.
Theatrical. In this weather no other pedestrians were in sight, and at the moment no traffic moved on this quiet residential street, yet the guy appeared to be performing without an audience, for his own amusement.
Tired of listening to Laputa’s phone ring, Hazard pressed END on his cell keypad.
The pedestrian appeared to be talking to himself, although from across the street Hazard could not be certain of this.
When he rolled down his window and cocked his head to listen, he was defeated by the drumming of the rain. He caught a few snatches of the voice and thought the guy might be singing, though he couldn’t recognize either tune or lyrics.
To Hazard’s surprise, the swaggering man left the sidewalk and followed the driveway at the Laputa house. He must have been carrying a remote control, because the segmented garage door rolled up to admit him, and then at once closed.
Hazard put up the car window. He watched the house.
After two minutes, a single soft light appeared toward the back of the residence, in what might have been the kitchen. Perhaps half a minute later, another light came on upstairs.
Whether or not the lover of rain was Vladimir Laputa, he knew his way around the professor’s house.
CHAPTER 71
FROM THE ENTRANCE ROTUNDA, AT A WINDOW beside the front door, Ethan watched as Mr. Hachette’s car dwindled along the driveway, into the tintack rain and the riddled darkness. The chef had been the last member of the day staff to leave.
Set flush in one wall of the rotunda, tucked discretely near a corner, a dark display screen brightened when Ethan lightly pressed one finger to it. This was a Crestron touch-control unit by which he could access all the computerized features of the house: the heating and air-conditioning, the music system, the gas heating for swimming pools and spas, both the in-house and landscape lighting, the phone system, and much more.
Crestron panels were positioned throughout the mansion, but the same features could also be controlled from any computer work station, such as the one in Ethan’s study.
After Ethan activated the screen with a touch, three columns of icons were presented for his consideration. He tapped the one that represented the exterior surveillance cameras.
Because eighty-six outdoor cameras were positioned across the estate, he was next presented with eighty-six designating numbers. For the most part, to obtain quickly a view of any specific portion of the grounds, you had to have memorized the numbers—at least those that, in your particular staff position, you were most likely to use frequently.
He touched 03, and the Crestron screen at once filled with a view of the main gate as seen from outside the estate wall. This was the same camera that had captured Rolf Reynerd delivering the package that contained the doll’s eye in the apple.
The gate rolled open. Mr. Hachette’s car drove off the grounds, onto the public street, turned right, and disappeared from the frame.
As the front gate rolled shut, Ethan touched the screen and exited the exterior-camera menu. He pressed the icon for the house alarm system.
Not all staff members were authorized to activate and deactivate the alarm; consequently, the screen requested Ethan’s password. He entered it, was granted access, and set the house-perimeter alarm.
All public areas of the mansion—virtually everything except bedrooms, bathrooms, and staff quarters—featured motion detectors that would register the passage of anyone moving along a hallway or through a room. They were activated 24/7, but were actually linked to the alarm only when it was in the “nobody-home mode,” when the house was entirely deserted, a rare occurrence.
With Fric and Ethan in residence, if the motion detectors had been linked to the alarm, the breach siren would have gone off every time that they passed through a monitored space or so much as made a gesture with one hand.
All he needed was the assurance that the siren would sound if a door or window were opened. This precaution, along with the team of guards monitoring the additional layers of detection on the grounds beyond the house, ensured that no one could set upon him or Fric by surprise.
Nevertheless, he didn’t want Fric to sleep alone on the third floor. Not tonight, not tomorrow night, not anytime soon.
Either they would make arrangements for the kid to camp out on the ground floor or Ethan would spend the night in the living room of Fric’s third-floor suite. He intended to discuss the matter with the boy after dinner.
Meanwhile, for the first time since returning home, he went to his apartment, to his study, to the desk where he had left the three silvery bells. They were gone.
In the deepest garage at Our Lady of Angels, when he had found only a single set of bells missing from the ambulance, he’d suspected that the set currently in Hazard’s possession was the same one that he had found in his hand outside Forever Roses.
The phantom that he had seen in the bathroom mirror at Dunny’s apartment, the phantom that had vanished into a mirror in Hazard’s bedroom, had somehow come here during the night, as Ethan slept, had taken the bells, and had transferred them to Hazard, for reasons that were mysterious if not forever beyond understanding. And the phantom, more likely than not, was Dunny Whistler, dead but risen.
Ethan marveled that he could stand here, entertaining such bizarre thoughts, and still be sane. At least he believed himself to be sane. He might be wrong about that.
Although the bells were gone, the items from the black boxes remained on display. He sat at the desk and studied the six parts of the riddle, hoping for enlightenment.
Ladybugs, snails, a jar containing ten foreskins, the cookie jar full of Scrabble tiles—OWE, WOE—a book about guide dogs, the eye in the apple…
On better days, in a better mood, he’d been unable to make sense of these messages. He hoped that in his current state of wound-tight tension and mental exhaustion, his intellectual fences might fall away, allowing him suddenly to see everything from a new perspective and to understand what before had seemed indecipherable.
No luck.
He phoned the guards in the security office at the back of the estate, in the groundskeeper’s building. On duty from four until midnight, they were already aware that he had set the house-perimeter alarm earlier than usual, because that action had registered on their displays.
Without giving them a reason, he asked that they be especially alert this evening. “And pass that request along to the guys on the graveyard shift when they get here.”
He phoned Carl Shorter, the chief road warrior who managed the squad of bodyguards protecting the Face in Florida. Shorter had nothing disturbing to report.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Ethan said. “We’ll need to go over new arrangements I’m going to make for your L.A. arrival on Thursday. More security at the airport and all the way here to home base, new procedures, a new route, just in case anyone has tumbled to our usual routine.”
“Is your fan still clean?” Shorter asked.
“No shit’s hit it yet,” Ethan assured him.
“Then what’s up?”
“I told you about the weird gifts in the black boxes. We’ve got an issue related to those, that’s all. It’s containable.”
After signing off with Carl Shorter, Ethan went to the bathroom to shave and freshen up for dinner. He pulled off his sweater, put on a clean shirt.
A few minutes later, standing at the desk in the study, he took one more look at the enigmatic six items.
An indicator light on the phone caught his attention: Line 24, first fluttering and then burning steadily.
CHAPTER 72
OWNED BY KURTZ IVORY INTERNATIONAL, serving as the principal vehicle for Robin Goodfellow, the Land Rover must never be seen at Corky’s home
. It might too easily link him to criminal activities committed by his fascistic alter ego.
He parked around the corner and walked home in the rain, singing bits of Das Rheingold by Richard Wagner, admittedly not well but with feeling.
In the garage, he stripped naked and left his sodden clothes on the concrete floor. He took the wallet, National Security Agency ID fold, and the Glock into the house with him, because he was not yet done being Robin Goodfellow for the day.
He toweled dry in the master bedroom. He slipped into a pair of thermal underwear.
From the walk-in closet, he retrieved a black Hard Corps Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suit made for skiers. Waterproof, warm, allowing a full range of easy movement, this would be the perfect costume for the assault on Palazzo Rospo.
Hazard could have phoned Vladimir Laputa or whoever had recently entered the professor’s house through the garage, but after brooding for a minute about the wisest approach, he decided to appear at the doorstep unannounced. Something might be gained by the surprise—or lack of it—with which the swaggering man would react to the sight of Hazard and his badge.
He switched off the engine, got out of the car, and came face to face with Dunny Whistler.
As pale as a sun-bleached skull, features drawn from his days in deathlike coma, Dunny stood in the rain yet remained untouched by it, drier than bone, than moon sand, than salt. “Don’t go in there.”
Hazard startled and embarrassed himself by doing the next best thing to a feets-don’t-fail-me-now routine. He tried to back up but had nowhere to go because the car was immediately behind him, yet he couldn’t stop his shoes from slipping against the wet pavement, as his feet tried to propel him backward through the sedan.
“If you die,” Dunny said, “I can’t bring you back. I’m not your guardian.”
As solid as flesh one instant, liquid the next, Dunny collapsed without a splash into the puddle in which he stood, as though he had been an apparition formed of water, shimmering to the wet pavement in vertical rillets, vanishing in an instant, even more fluidly than he had slipped away into a mirror.
The waterproof storm suit featured a foldaway hood, anatomically shaped knees, and more pockets than a kleptomaniac’s custom-tailored overcoat, all with zippers. Two layers of socks, black ski boots, and leather-and-nylon gloves—almost as flexible as surgical gloves but less likely to arouse suspicion—completed the ensemble.
Pleased by his reflection in a full-length mirror, Corky went down the hall to the back guest room, to learn if Stinky Cheese Man was dead and to give him a scare if he wasn’t.
He took with him the 9-mm pistol and a fresh sound suppressor.
At the door to the dark room, the stench of the incapacitated captive could be detected even in the hallway. Past the threshold, what had been a mere stink became a miasma that even Corky, an ardent suitor of chaos, found less than charming.
He switched on the lamp and went to the bed.
As stubborn as he was stinky, the cheese man still held on to life, although he believed his wife and daughter had been tortured, raped, and murdered.
“What kind of selfish bastard are you?” Corky asked, his voice thick with contempt.
Weak, having for so long received all liquid by intravenous drip, kept perilously close to mortal dehydration, Maxwell Dalton could not have replied except in a fragile voice so full of rasp and squeak as to be comical. He answered, therefore, only with his hate-filled stare.
Corky pressed the muzzle of the weapon against Dalton’s cracked lips.
Instead of turning his head away, the lover of Dickens and Twain and Dickinson boldly opened his mouth and bit the barrel, though this act had the flair of Hemingway. His eyes were fiery with defiance.
Behind the wheel of the sedan, parked across the street from the Laputa house, trying to get a grip on himself, Hazard thought of his Granny Rose, his dad’s mother, who believed in mojo though she didn’t practice it, believed in poltergeists though none had ever dared to trash her well-kept home, believed in ghosts though she’d never seen one, who could recite the details of a thousand famous hauntings that had involved spirits benign, malign, and Elvis. Now eighty years old, Granny Rose—Hoodoo Rose, as Hazard’s mom called her with affection—was respected and much loved, but she remained a figure of amusement in the family because of her conviction that the world was not merely what science and the five senses said it was.
In spite of what he had just seen in the street, Hazard couldn’t get his mind entirely around the idea that Granny Rose might have a better grasp of reality than anyone he knew.
He had never been a man who harbored much doubt about what to do next, either in daily life or in a moment of high peril, but sitting in the car, in the rain, in the dark, shivering, he needed time just to realize that he should turn on the engine, the heater. Whether or not he should ring the bell at the Laputa house, however, seemed to be the most difficult decision of his life.
If you die, I can’t bring you back, Dunny had said, with the emphasis on you.
A cop couldn’t back off just because he feared dying. Might as well turn in the badge, get a job in phone sales, learn a craft to fill up the empty hours.
I’m not your guardian, Dunny had said, with the emphasis on your, which was a warning, of course, but which also had implications that made Hazard dizzy.
He wanted to pay a visit to Granny Rose and lie with his head on her lap, let her soothe his brow with cool compresses. Maybe she had homemade lemondrop cookies. She could brew hot chocolate for him.
Across the street, through the screen of rain, the Laputa house didn’t look the same as it had when he’d first seen it. Then it had been a handsome Victorian on a large lot, warm and welcoming, the kind of home that protected families in which all the kids became doctors and lawyers and astronauts, and everyone loved one another forever. Now he looked at it and figured that in one of the bedrooms there had to be a young girl strapped to a levitating bed, vomiting violently, cursing Jesus, and speaking in the voices of demons.
As a cop, he must never allow fear to inhibit him, but also as a friend, he couldn’t walk away from this and leave Ethan with no one to guard his back.
Information. In Hazard’s experience, doubt came from having too little information to make an intelligent decision. He needed someone to chase down the answers to a couple questions.
The problem was that officially he had no reason to be pursuing these leads. If this cheese-eater were related to any active case, it was Mina Reynerd’s murder, which was on Kesselman’s desk, not on Hazard’s. He couldn’t seek information through the usual department channels.
He phoned Laura Moonves in the Detective Support Division. She had dated Ethan, she still cared for him, and she had helped him track down Rolf Reynerd from the plates on the Honda that had been filmed by one of the estate’s video cameras.
Hazard worried that she would have left for the day, but she took his call, and with relief he said, “You’re still there.”
“Am I? I thought I’d left. I thought I was halfway home, already stopped for a bucket of takeout fried chicken, double slaw. No, son of a bitch, here I still am, but what does it matter, since I don’t have a social life.”
“I tell him he’s an idiot for letting you slip away.”
“I tell him he’s an idiot, too,” she said.
“Everyone tells him he’s an idiot.”
“Yeah? So maybe we all ought to get together and come up with a new strategy, because this telling-him-he’s-an-idiot thing isn’t working. I like him so much, Hazard.”
“He’s still getting over Hannah.”
“Five years, man.”
“When he lost her, he lost more than her. He lost his sense of purpose. He couldn’t anymore see a bigger meaning to things. He needs to see it again, ’cause that’s him.”
“The world’s full of sexy, smart, successful guys who wouldn’t recognize a bigger meaning to life if God punched them in the face wearing a
ring that left His initials in their foreheads.”
“That would be your pissed-off Old Testament version of God.”
“Why do I have to fall for a guy who needs meaning?”
“Maybe because you need it, too.” That thought silenced Laura, and into the silence, Hazard said, “Remember that guy you helped him track down yesterday morning—Rolf Reynerd?”
“Famous wolf,” she said. “Rolf means ‘famous wolf.’”
“Rolf means dead. Don’t you watch the news?”
“I’m not a masochist, am I?”
“So check the homicide overnights. But not now. Right now I need you to do something for me, for Ethan, but off the record.”
“What do you need?”
Hazard glanced at the house. The place still radiated that dual atmosphere: as if the Brady Bunch had built their home over the gate to Hell.
“Vladimir Laputa,” Hazard said. He spelled it for Laura. “Let me know as quick as you can, does anyone with that name have a rap sheet, even just a DUI, failure to pay parking tickets, anything.”
Instead of pulling the trigger, Corky withdrew the barrel from Dalton’s mouth, bearing down to scrape the steel across the teeth, which were loose from malnutrition.
“One shot would be too easy for you,” Corky said. “When I’m ready to finish you, it’ll be slow…and memorable.”
He put the pistol aside, told Dalton some delicious lies about disposing of the bodies of Rachel and Emily, and eventually selected a fresh infusion bag from the nearby refrigerator.
“I’ll be bringing someone back with me this evening,” Corky said as he worked. “An audience for your final suffering.”
In the wasted face, surrounded by a raccoon mask of livid skin, glistening in sunken sockets, the eyes rolled to follow Corky during his caregiving, no longer radiant jellies spiced with hatred, but once more flavored with fear, the haunted eyes of a man who at last believed in the power of chaos and understood its majesty.
