Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dark Rivers Of The Heart(Lit)

  "She did talk to you quite a while Tuesday night," Rosie said.

  He said nothing, letting her make up her mind about him.

  "And I saw . . . a couple of times . . . you made her laugh."

  He waited.

  "Okay," Rosie said, "since Mr. Lee called, I've been trying to remember anything Val said that might help you find her. But there's not much. We liked each other right off, we got close pretty quickly. But mostly we just talked about work, about movies and books, about stuff in the news and things now, not about things in the past."

  "Where'd she live before she moved to Santa Monica?"

  "She never said."

  "You didn't ask? You think it might've been somewhere around Los Angeles?"

  "No. She wasn't familiar with the city."

  "She ever mention where she was born, where she grew up?"

  "I don't know why, but I think it was back east somewhere."

  "She ever tell you anything about her mom and dad, about having any brothers or sisters?"

  "No. But when anyone was talking about family, she'd get this sadness in her eyes. I think maybe . . . her folks are all dead."

  He looked at Rosie. "You didn't ask her about them?"

  "No. It's just a feeling."

  "Was she ever married?"

  "Maybe. I didn't ask."

  "For a friend, there's a lot you didn't ask."

  Rosie nodded. "Because I knew she couldn't tell me the truth. I don't have that many close friends, Mr. Grant, so I didn't want to spoil our relationship by putting her in a position where she'd have to lie to me."

  Spencer put his right hand to his face. In the warm air, the scar felt icy under his fingertips.

  The bearded man slowly reeled in the kite. That big red diamond blazed against the sky. Its tail of ribbons fluttered like flames.

  "So," Spencer said, "you sensed she was running from something?"

  "I figured it might be a bad husband, you know, who beat her."

  "Do wives regularly run away, start their lives over from scratch, because of a bad husband, instead of just divorcing him?"

  "They do in the movies," she said. "If he's violent enough."

  Rocky had slipped out from under the table. He appeared at Spencer's side, having fully circled them. His tail was no longer between his legs, but he wasn't wagging it, either. He watched Rosie intently as he continued to slink around to the front of the table.

  Pretending to be unaware of the dog, Rosie said, "I don't know if it helps . . . but from little things she said, I think she knows Las Vegas. She's been there more than once, maybe a lot of times."

  "Could she have lived there?"

  Rosie shrugged. "She liked games. She's good at games. Scrabble, checkers, Monopoly . . . And sometimes we played cards—five-hundred rummy or two-hand pinochle. You should see her shuffle and deal out cards. She can really make them fly through her hands."

  "You think she picked that up in Vegas?"

  She shrugged again.

  Rocky sat on the grass in front of Rosie and stared at her with obvious yearning, but he remained ten feet away, safely out of reach.

  "He's decided he can't trust me," she said.

  "Nothing personal," Spencer assured her, getting to his feet.

  "Maybe he knows."

  "Knows what?"

  "Animals know things," she said solemnly. "They can see into a person. They see the stains."

  "All Rocky sees is a beautiful lady who wants to cuddle him, and he's going crazy because there's nothing to fear but fear itself."

  As if he understood his master, Rocky whined pathetically.

  "He sees the stains," she said softly. "He knows."

  "All I see," Spencer said, "is a lovely woman on a sunny day."

  "A person does terrible things to survive."

  "That's true of everyone," he said, though he sensed that she was talking to herself more than to him. "Old stains, long faded."

  "Never entirely." She seemed no longer to be staring at the dog but at something on the far side of an invisible bridge of time.

  Though he was reluctant to leave her in that suddenly strange mood, Spencer could think of nothing more to say.

  Where the white sand met the grass, the bearded man cranked the reel in his hands and appeared to be fishing the heavens. The blood-red kite gradually descended, its tail snapping like a whip of fire.

  Finally Spencer thanked Rosie for talking with him. She wished him luck, and he walked away with Rocky.

  The dog repeatedly stopped to glance back at the woman on the bench, then scurried to catch up with Spencer. When they had covered fifty yards and were halfway to the parking lot, Rocky issued a short yelp of decision and bolted back to the picnic table.

  Spencer turned to watch.

  In the last few feet, the mutt lost courage. He skidded nearly to a halt and approached her with his head lowered timidly, with much shivering and tail wagging.

  Rosie slipped off the bench onto the grass, and pulled Rocky into her arms. Her sweet, clean laughter trilled across the park.

  "Good dog," Spencer said quietly.

  The muscular volleyball players took a break from their game to get a couple of cans of Pepsi out of a Styrofoam cooler.

  Having reeled his kite all the way to the earth, the bearded man headed for the parking lot by a route that brought him past Spencer. He looked like a mad prophet: untrimmed; unwashed; with deeply set, wild blue eyes; a beaky nose; pale lips; broken, yellow teeth. On his black T-shirt, in red letters, were five words: ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL DAY IN HELL. He cast a fierce glance at Spencer, clutched his kite as if he thought every blackguard in creation wanted nothing more than to steal it, and stalked out of the park.

  Spencer realized he had put a hand over his scar when the man had glanced at him. He lowered it.

  Rosie was standing a few steps in front of the picnic table now, shooing Rocky away, apparently admonishing him not to keep his master waiting. She was beyond the reach of the palm shadows, in sunlight.

  As the dog reluctantly left his new friend and trotted toward his master, Spencer was once again aware of the woman's exceptional beauty, which was far greater than Valerie's. And if it was the role of savior and healer that he yearned to fill, this woman most likely needed him more than the one he sought. Yet he was drawn to Valerie, not to Rosie, for reasons he could not explain—except to accuse himself of obsession, of being swept away by the fathomless currents of his subconscious, regardless of where they might take him.

  The dog reached him, panting and grinning.

  Rosie raised one hand over her head and waved good-bye.

  Spencer waved too.

  Maybe his search for Valerie Keene wasn't merely an obsession. He had the uncanny feeling that he was the kite and that she was the reel. Some strange power—call it destiny— turned the crank, wound the line around the spool, drawing him inexorably toward her, and he had no choice in the matter whatsoever.

  While the sea rolled in from faraway China and lapped at the beach, while the sunshine traveled ninety-three million miles through airless space to caress the golden bodies of the young women in their bikinis, Spencer and Rocky walked back to the truck.

  * * *

  With Roy Miro trailing after him at a more sedate pace, David Davis rushed into the main data processing room with the photographs of the two best prints on the bathroom window. He took them to Nella Shire, at one of the workstations. "One is clearly a thumb, clearly, no question," Davis told her. "The other might be an index finger."

  Shire was about forty-five, with a face as sharp as that of a fox, frizzy orange hair, and green fingernail polish. Her half-walled cubicle was decorated with three photographs clipped from bodybuilding magazines: hugely pumped-up men in bikini briefs.

  Noticing the musclemen, Davis frowned and said, "Ms. Shire, I've told you this is unacceptable. You must remove these pinups."

  "The human body is art."

  Davis was red-faced.
"You know this can be construed as sexual harassment in the workplace."

  "Yeah?" She took the fingerprint photos from him. "By who?"

  "By any male worker in this room, that's by whom."

  "None of the men working here looks like these hunks. Until one of them does, nobody has anything to worry about from me."

  Davis tore one of the clippings from the cubicle wall, then another. "The last thing I need is a notation on my management record, saying I allowed harassment in my division."

  Although Roy believed in the law of which Nella Shire was in violation, he was aware of the irony of Davis worrying about his management record being soiled by a tolerance-of-harassment entry. After all, the nameless agency for which they worked was an illegal organization, answering to no elected official; therefore, every act of Davis's working day was in violation of one law or another.

  Of course, like nearly all of the agency's personnel, Davis didn't know that he was an instrument of a conspiracy. He received his paycheck from the Department of Justice and thought he was on their records as an employee. He had signed a secrecy oath, but he believed that he was part of a legal—if potentially controversial—offensive against organized crime and international terrorism.

  As Davis tore the third pinup off the cubicle walls and wadded it in his fist, Nella Shire said, "Maybe you hate those pictures so much because they turn you on, which is something you can't accept about yourself. Did you ever think of that?" She glanced at the fingerprint photos. "So what do you want me to do with these?"

  Roy saw that David Davis had to struggle not to answer with the first thing that came to his mind.

  Instead, Davis said, "We need to know whose prints these are. Go through Mama, get on-line with the FBI's Automated Identification Division. Start with the Latent Descriptor Index."

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation had one hundred ninety million fingerprints on file. Though its newest computer could make thousands of comparisons a minute, a lot of time could be expended if it had to shuffle through its entire vast storehouse of prints.

  With the help of clever software called the Latent Descriptor Index, the field of search could be drastically reduced and results achieved quickly. If they had been seeking suspects in a series of killings, they would have listed the prime characteristics of the crimes—the sex and age of each victim, the methods of murder, any similarities in the conditions of the corpses, the locations at which the bodies had been found— and the index would have compared those facts to the modus operandi of known offenders, eventually producing a list of suspects and their fingerprints. Then a few hundred—or even just a few—comparisons might be necessary instead of millions.

  Nella Shire turned to her computer and said, "So give me the telltales, and I'll create a three-oh-two."

  "We aren't seeking a known criminal," Davis said.

  Roy said, "We think our man was in special forces, or maybe he had special-weapons-and-tactics training."

  "Those guys are all hardbodies, for sure," Shire said, eliciting a scowl from David Davis. "Army, navy, marines, or air force?"

  "We don't know," Roy said. "Maybe he was never in the service. Could have been with a state or local police department. Could have been a Bureau agent, as far as we know, or DEA or ATF."

  "The way this works," Shire said impatiently, "is, I need to put in telltales that limit the field."

  A hundred million of the prints in the Bureau's system were in criminal-history files, which left ninety million that covered federal employees, military personnel, intelligence services, state and local law-enforcement officers, and registered aliens. If they knew that their mystery man was, say, an ex-marine, they wouldn't have to search most of those ninety million files.

  Roy opened the envelope that Melissa Wicklun had given him a short while ago, in Photo Analysis. He took out one of the computer-projected portraits of the man they were hunting. On the back of it was the data that the photo-analysis software had deduced from the rain-veiled profile of the man at the bungalow the previous night.

  "Male, Caucasian, twenty-eight to thirty-two," Roy said.

  Nella Shire typed swiftly. A list appeared on the screen.

  "Five feet eleven inches tall," Roy continued. "One hundred and sixty-five pounds, give or take five. Brown hair, brown eyes."

  He turned the photo over to stare at the full-face portrait, and David Davis bent down to look as well. "Severe facial scarring," Roy said. "Right side. Beginning at the ear, terminating near the chin."

  "Was that sustained on duty?" David wondered.

  "Probably. So a conditional telltale might be an honorable early discharge or even a service disability."

  "Whether he was discharged or disabled," Davis said excitedly, "you can bet he was required to undergo psychological counseling. A scar like this—it's a terrible blow to self-esteem. Terrible."

  Nella Shire swiveled in her chair, snatched the portrait out of Roy's hand, and looked at it. "I don't know . . . I think it makes him look sexy. Dangerous and sexy."

  Ignoring her, Davis said, "The government's very concerned about self-esteem these days. A lack of self-esteem is the root of crime and social unrest. You can't hold up a bank or mug an old lady unless you first think you're nothing but a lowlife thief."

  "Yeah?" Nella Shire said, returning the portrait to Roy. "Well, I've known a thousand jerks who thought they were God's best work."

  Davis said firmly, "Make psychological counseling a telltale."

  She added that item to her list. "Anything else?"

  "That's all," Roy said. "How long is this going to take?"

  Shire read through the list on the screen. "Hard to say. No more than eight or ten hours. Maybe less. Maybe a lot less. Could be, in an hour or two, I'll have his name, address, phone number, and be able to tell you which side of his pants he hangs on."

  David Davis, still clutching a fistful of crumpled muscle-men and worried about his management record, appeared offended by her remark.

  Roy was merely intrigued. "Really? Maybe only an hour or two?"

  "Why would I be jerking your chain?" she asked impatiently.

  "Then I'll hang around. We need this guy real bad."

  "He's almost yours," Nella Shire promised as she set to work.

  * * *

  At three o'clock they had a late lunch on the back porch while the long shadows of eucalyptuses crept up the canyon in the yellowing light of the westering sun. Sitting in a rocking chair, Spencer ate a ham-and-cheese sandwich and drank a bottle of beer. After polishing off a bowl of Purina, Rocky used his grin, his best sad-eyed look, his most pathetic whine, his wagging tail, and a master thespian's store of tricks to cadge bits of the sandwich.

  "Laurence Olivier had nothing on you," Spencer told him.

  When the sandwich was gone, Rocky padded down the porch steps and started across the backyard toward the nearest cluster of wild brush, characteristically seeking privacy for his toilet.

  "Wait, wait, wait," Spencer said, and the dog stopped to look at him. "You'll come back with your coat full of burrs, and it'll take me an hour to comb them all out. I don't have time for that."

  He got up from the rocking chair, turned his back to the dog, and stared at the cabin wall while he finished the last of the beer.

  When Rocky returned, they went inside, leaving the tree shadows to grow unwatched.

  While the dog napped on the sofa, Spencer sat at the computer and began his search for Valerie Keene. From that bungalow in Santa Monica, she could have gone anywhere in the world, and he would have been as well advised to start looking in far Borneo as in nearby Ventura. Therefore, he could only go backward, into the past.

  He had a single clue: Vegas. Cards. She can really make them fly through her hands.

  Her familiarity with Vegas and her facility with cards might mean that she had lived there and earned her living as a dealer.

  By his usual route, Spencer hacked into the main LAPD computer. From there he s
pringboarded into an interstate police data-sharing network, which he had often used before, and bounced across borders into the computer of the Clark County Sheriff's Department in Nevada, which had jurisdiction over the city of Las Vegas.

  On the sofa, the snoring dog pumped his legs, chasing rabbits in his sleep. In Rocky's case, the rabbits were probably chasing him.

  After exploring the sheriff's computer for a while and finding his way into—among other things—the department's personnel records, Spencer finally discovered a file labeled NEV CODES. He was pretty sure he knew what it was, and he wanted in.

  NEV CODES was specially protected. To use it, he required an access number. Incredibly, in many police agencies, that would be either an officer's badge number or, in the case of office workers, an employee ID number—all obtainable from personnel records, which were not well guarded. He had already collected a few badge numbers in case he needed them. Now he used one, and NEV CODES opened to him.

  It was a list of numerical codes with which he could access the computer-stored data of any government agency in the state of Nevada. In a wink he followed the cyberspace highway from Las Vegas to the Nevada Gaming Commission in Carson City, the capital.

  The commission licensed all casinos in the state and enforced the laws and regulations that governed them. Anyone who wished to invest—or serve as an executive—in the gaming industry was required to submit to a background investigation and to be proved free of ties to known criminals. In the 1970s, a strengthened commission squeezed out most of the mobsters and Mafia front men who had founded Nevada's biggest industry, in favor of companies like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Hilton Hotels.

  It was logical to suppose that other casino employees below management level—from pit bosses to cocktail waitresses—underwent similar although less exhaustive background checks and were issued ID cards. Spencer explored menus and directories, and in another twenty minutes, he found the records that he needed.

  The data related to casino-employee work permits was divided into three primary files: Expired, Current, Pending. Because Valerie had been working at The Red Door in Santa Monica for two months, Spencer accessed the Expired list first.