by Dean Koontz
Approaching the last room on that side of the hall, he detected an unpleasant odor. By the time he reached the open door, the malodor had become a stench.
Central to the stink, Hazard recognized the smell of corrupted flesh, of which he’d had more than a little experience in his career with Robbery/Homicide. He suspected that here he would find at least one of Laputa’s mementos that would make him wish he had not stopped earlier for cheeseburgers and fries.
The glow from the hall sconces spilled only a short distance into the room. Hazard couldn’t see much.
When he stepped across the threshold and flipped up the wall switch, a nightstand lamp came on. For a moment he thought the man in the bed, less than half concealed by a sheet, must be a corpse.
Then the bloodshot eyes, which were fixed on him in pitiful appeal, blinked.
Hazard had never before seen firsthand a living human being in such wretched condition as this. Here was what the starved slave laborers in concentration camps looked like when, at last worked to death, they were tumbled into raw graves.
In spite of the IV rack and catheter-fed urine jar, Hazard knew at once that in this situation Professor Laputa was not a caregiver tending to a family member. The man in the bed had been afforded none of the tenderness due a patient but all the brutality that could be rained upon a prisoner by a demented jailer.
Both windows had been boarded over and sealed with caulking to keep out daylight and to hold in all sound.
On the floor in one corner were tumbled chains and handcuffs and ankle shackles. Surely these bonds were from the early days of the imprisonment, when the man in the bed had been strong enough to require restraints.
Hazard had been speaking aloud for a while before he quite heard himself. He had been reduced to the childhood prayers that Granny Rose had taught him long ago.
Here was evil as pure as he had ever seen it, forever beyond the understanding of a simple sinner like himself. This way a wicked thing had come and gone, and would come again, a demon on sabbatical from Hell.
The uncommon neatness and order elsewhere in the house didn’t represent Laputa’s need for a refuge from the disorder of the world outside. It was instead a desperate denial of just how apocalyptic was the chaos that churned within him.
By the time that Hazard reached the side of the bed, each breath he drew further sickened him. Weeks’ worth of dried sweats, rancid body oils, and festering bedsores raised a nauseating stench.
Nevertheless, Hazard gently took hold of the nearer of the stranger’s fragile hands. The man had insufficient strength to lift his arm, and he could barely squeeze his rescuer’s hand in return.
“It’s all right now. I’m a cop.”
The stranger regarded him as though he might be a mirage.
Although instinct had failed Hazard a minute ago in the hall, it served him well now. He was surprised, but then at once not, to hear himself say, “Professor Dalton? Maxwell Dalton?”
The widening of the withered man’s rheumy eyes confirmed his identification.
When the prisoner strove to speak, his voice proved to be so thin, so dry, so cracked and reedy, that Hazard had to bend close to puzzle meaning from the words: “Laputa…killed my wife…daughter.”
“Rachel? Emily?” Hazard asked.
Dalton squeezed his eyes shut in grief, bit his lower lip, and nodded shakily.
“I don’t know what he told you, but they’re not dead,” Hazard assured him.
Dalton’s eyes opened as snap-quick as camera shutters.
“I saw them only today, at your home,” Hazard continued. “Only a few hours ago. They’re sick with worry about you, but they’ve not been harmed.”
For a moment the prisoner appeared reluctant to believe this news, as though convinced that it must be yet another cruelty with which he would be tormented. Then he discerned truth in Hazard’s forthright stare. His bony hand tightened slightly on his rescuer’s, and from somewhere his desiccated body found the moisture to flood his eyes with tears.
As moved as he was nauseated, Hazard examined the dangling infusion bag, the drip line, the cannula inserted in Dalton’s vein. He wanted to strip all this away, for surely none of it was doing the man good. But he was afraid of inadvertently harming Dalton. This had best be left to the paramedics.
Originally, Hazard had entered the house with the intention of conducting an illegal and clandestine search, after which he would have closed up and gone away to ponder what evidence he found, having left said evidence behind with no slightest proof of his visit. That plan no longer worked. He had to make a 911 call, and quickly.
Judges existed, however, and not merely a few, who would set Vladimir Laputa free because Dalton had been found during an illegal search, made without warrant or due cause. Furthermore, with Blonde in the Pond still ahead of him, Hazard could afford no censures or disciplinary actions on his Ten Card.
“I’ll get you out of here,” he promised the prisoner. “But I need a couple minutes.”
Dalton nodded.
“I’ll be right back.”
Reluctantly the withered man let go of his hand.
At the threshold, about to leave the room, Hazard halted, retreated from the doorway, and drew his handgun. When he ventured into the upstairs hall, he went with caution.
He remained wary all the way down the stairs, through the ground floor, and into the kitchen. He closed the back door that earlier he had left open as an escape route. He locked it.
Adjacent to the kitchen was a small laundry room. The door at the end of the laundry opened into the garage.
No cars stood in the garage. A sodden pile of clothes lay on the concrete floor: the outfit that Laputa had been wearing when he had come home swaggering like a tough guy.
Here also were good tools in drawers and racked on a pegboard. They were as clean and as obsessively ordered as the Lalique-crystal collection in the living room.
Hazard selected a claw hammer and raced back upstairs, glad that he had turned on so many lights when he’d first come into the house.
He was relieved to see that the prisoner was still alive. Dalton appeared to be on the trembling edge of expiration, as if he might slip away at any moment.
Hazard put his gun on the floor and used the claw hammer to pry nails from one of the thick sheets of particle board with which Laputa had sealed off the windows. They were three-inch spikes and pulled loose reluctantly, with bark and screech. He tore the board away from the window and stood it aside, against the wall.
The pleated drape had been captured between board and window. Although wrinkled and dusty, it was just the thing with which to wipe his fingerprints off the hammer before he dropped it on the floor.
This was a back bedroom only in the sense that it was farthest from the stairs. Like the master bedroom, it faced the front of the house. Through the window, he could see his sedan parked across the street.
Returning to the bed, Hazard said, “I came in here on a hunch, without a warrant, and now I’ve got to clean up the situation to save my ass and to be sure we nail Laputa. You understand?”
“Yes,” Dalton rasped.
“So what you’re gonna say happened is, he was so sure of your total disability, of your inability to even make a sound anyone could hear outside, that the bastard took that board off this evening just to torment you with the sight of freedom. Can you sell that?”
On an arid whisper of breath, brittle words scraped and grated from Dalton’s throat. “Laputa said…he’ll kill me…tonight.”
“All right. Okay. Then it makes a little sense that he might do this.”
From the nightstand, Hazard snatched up an aerosol can of pine-scented disinfectant. The container felt half full, heavy enough.
“Next,” he told Dalton, “you have to tell them that you reached way down inside yourself, to your deepest reserves of strength, and somehow you found the will, the energy, the anger necessary to pull this can off the nightstand and to pitc
h it at that window.”
“Can do,” Dalton promised shakily, though he looked as if he could do nothing more than blink his eyes.
“The can smashed through the window and rolled down the porch roof as I was coming up the front walk. I heard you feebly calling for help, so I forced entry.”
The story sucked. The first officers on the scene would know that it was bogus, but in light of Dalton’s ordeal, this would be a flavor of bogus that they could swallow.
By the time Laputa found himself in a courtroom, Dalton would have largely recovered, and the jury would not know just how horribly weak he had been on the night of his rescue. Time could give this shabby story enough luster to make it look attractive.
Shifting his eyes from the open doorway to Hazard, Dalton said anxiously, “Hurry,” as if he feared Laputa’s imminent return.
Hazard threw the can of disinfectant at the window. The glass shattered with a satisfying crash.
CHAPTER 90
HAVING FURTHER SEARED THE ROOTS OF THE potted palm with his mighty Manheim urine, which he could probably have bottled and sold to his father’s craziest fans, Fric shopped the library shelves for a book, mindful that Mr. Truman had said not to dawdle.
In case they didn’t make s’mores and sit on the floor telling scary stories, he took the trouble of finding a book that he might actually enjoy reading. He figured that he would be awake most of this long night, and not because he was excited about Christmas Eve coming in just two days. If he didn’t have a book to pass the time, he would go as crazy as Barbra Streisand’s two-headed cat.
He had just found a novel that looked good when he heard noise overhead: a shimmering, bright music much like the soft ringing of a hundred tiny wind chimes all agitated at once.
When he looked up at the stained-glass dome, he saw hundreds of pieces of glass break out of the leading and fall toward him.
No. Not glass. The stained-glass mosaic remained in place across the entire arc of the thirty-foot dome. Shards of color and shadow fell out of the glass without breaking it, fell through it from the night above or maybe from somewhere immeasurably stranger than the night.
The shards fell slowly, not to the demand of gravity, and as they drifted down they changed color. As they changed color, they tumbled upon one another and fused together. As they fused together, they acquired greater dimension and a form.
The gathered shards became Mysterious Caller, whom Fric had most recently seen pictured in the Los Angeles Times in the rose room this afternoon, whom he had last encountered life-size in the memorabilia maze the previous night. As the guardian angel had on that occasion glided without benefit of wings from rafters to attic floor, so now he descended with soundless grace to the carpet only a few feet from Fric.
“You have this knack for entrances,” Fric said, but his shaky voice belied his cocky Hollywood-kid attitude.
“Moloch is here,” the guardian declared in a tone of voice so dire that it would have made Fric’s heart clench and then punch his ribs even if the message had been a fraction as terrifying as this. “Run to your deep and special place, Fric. Run now.”
Pointing to the stained-glass dome, Fric said, “Why don’t you just take me up there, out of here, where you came from, where I’ll be safe?”
“I told you, boy, you must make your own choices, exercise your free will, and save yourself.”
“But I—”
“Besides, you can’t go to the places I go or travel by the means I do, not until you’re dead.” The guardian stepped closer, leaned forward, thrusting his pallid face within an inch of Fric’s. “Do you want to die horribly just to be able to travel more conveniently?”
Fric’s hammering heart knocked all the words out of his throat before he could speak them, and as he struggled to sputter through his silence, he was lifted off his feet and held high by his weird guardian.
“Moloch is in the house. Hide, boy, for God’s sake, hide.”
With that, Mysterious Caller threw Fric as though he were only a bundle of rags, but threw him with a magical knack that prevented him from crashing hard into furniture. Instead, he tumbled in slow motion across the library, over the club chairs and tables, past the islands of bookshelves.
As he rotated on a curious axis, head over heels, Fric saw the photograph of the pretty lady, his make-believe mom, which had slipped out of his pocket and now drifted lazily beside him through the air, in his sphere of influence. Like an astronaut reaching for a floating tube of food in the gravity-free environment of a space shuttle high in orbit, he grasped for the picture but could not quite close his hand on it.
Abruptly he hit the floor on both feet, near the Christmas tree that was hung with angels, hit the floor running, whether he wanted to run or not, as if his legs were spellcast to churn him out of here.
Past the tree, at the open door to the library, he turned to look back.
The guardian had vanished.
The photograph was nowhere to be seen.
Moloch is in the house.
Fric fled the library, sprinting for the conservatory by the shortest route.
CHAPTER 91
AT ONE OF THE BRONZE-AND-BEVELED-GLASS French doors that looked out on the half-acre of patio, the fountains, and the swimming pool, Corky Laputa used the security guard’s keys to let himself into the grand drawing room.
With the fine brocade drapes, he toweled himself as dry as he could. When he began moving through the house along limestone-floored hallways, he must not leave a betraying trail that Truman might find before he found Truman.
He switched on the lights.
He had no fear of being noticed. Only three of them were afoot in a house larger than some shopping centers. They were not likely to blunder into one another by accident.
A magnificently decorated Christmas tree graced the room. He was tempted to poke around until he found the string-light switch, to see this spruce beauty in its full twinkling glory. But chaos could at times be a tough taskmaster, and he had to remain focused on the plot that had brought him here by blimp and bluster.
Crossing the enormous room, he squinched his feet back and forth in the antique Persian carpets with each step, thoroughly drying his boots.
Two widely separated sets of double doors led to the north hall. Beside one of these exits, a Crestron touch-control unit was mounted flush in the wall.
He touched the dead gray screen. The panel at once came to life, presenting him with three columns of icons.
Mick Sachatone had given Corky basic instructions in its use. Mick hadn’t made him an absolute master of the system, but he knew enough to get by.
He fingered the icon for the interior motion detectors, and a list of ninety-six locations appeared. Per Ned Hokenberry, no motion detectors had been installed in bedrooms and bathrooms, or in any rooms of Charming Manheim’s third-floor suite.
At the bottom of the list was the word SCAN, which he pressed. This gave him the option of scanning for movement on the third floor, the second floor, the ground floor, the first subterranean level, and the second subterranean level.
Later he would use this feature to search for the boy. First, he needed to locate Ethan Truman and kill him.
He might have been able to snare the boy and spirit him out of the house under the security chief’s nose. He’d feel more comfortable dealing with Aelfric, however, if he knew the ex-cop was dead meat.
Any floor of the mansion was too large to fit entirely on the Crestron screen in a scale easy to read. Consequently, the eastern half of the ground level appeared first.
A single blip of light blinked, indicating Corky’s position in the grand drawing room. He wasn’t moving, but the motion detectors were in fact motion and heat detectors. Even in his insulated storm suit, he produced a sufficient heat signature to register with the sensitive sensors.
He took two sideways steps to his right.
On the screen, the Corky blip moved a tiny bit to the right, in synch with h
im.
When he stepped back in front of the touch-control panel, his blip moved, as well.
The complex floor plan of the western half of the ground level appeared on the screen, also with only a single lonely blip blinking in all those chambers and hallways: Ethan Truman, no doubt, in the living room of his apartment.
This was where Corky had hoped and expected to find the man.
He exited the motion-detector display, went to the nearest set of double doors, and stepped quietly into the north hall.
Ahead of him lay the entrance rotunda and another spectacular Christmas tree. The residents and staff were rich with the Christmas spirit in Palazzo Rospo.
Corky wondered what exquisite holiday cookies people of this wealth enjoyed. Once he had killed Truman and secured the boy, maybe he would dare to take a few minutes to investigate the stock of baked goods in the kitchen. He might pack a tin of homemade treats to enjoy later at home.
He turned right and followed the north hall past the tea room, the intimate dining room, the grand dining room, toward the kitchen and ultimately toward the west hall where Truman waited to be killed in his apartment.
CHAPTER 92
ON THE DESK IN ETHAN’S STUDY, THE TELEPHONE produced no dial tone, and when he tried to use his cell phone, he discovered that he had no service.
Land lines might on rare occasion experience disruption after a two-day downpour. Not cell phones.
In the bedroom, when he tried the telephone on his nightstand, he heard only a dead line. No surprise.
From the nightstand drawer, he extracted a second magazine of ammunition for his pistol.
He had prepared this spare on the evening of his first day in Palazzo Rospo, ten months ago. At the time, he’d seemed to be taking an unnecessary precaution. An extended shootout requiring more than ten rounds, within these well-protected walls, had been a possibility so slim as to be beyond calculation.
Dropping the magazine in a pants pocket, Ethan hurried back into his study.
