Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dark Rivers Of The Heart(Lit)

  "Journaliscs," Roy said scornfully. "You know what they're like. Cold bastards. Only the story matters. They have no compassion."

  "The kid had been through a similar hell, unwanted notoriety, when he'd been eight years old, after his mother's body was found in that ditch. This time it was tearing him apart. The grandparents were retired, could live anywhere, so after almost two years they decided to get Michael out of Colorado altogether. A new city, new state, new start. That's what they told neighbors—but they wouldn't tell anyone where they were going. They uprooted themselves and left their friends for the sake of the boy. They must've figured that was the only way he'd have a chance to make a normal life for himself."

  "New city, new state, new start—and even a new name," Roy said. "They legally changed it, didn't they?"

  "Right here in Denver, before they moved away. Given the circumstances, the court record of the change is sealed, of course."

  "Of course."

  "But I've reviewed it. Michael Steven Ackblom became Spencer Grant, no middle name or even initial. An odd choice. It seems to have been a name the boy came up with himself, but I don't know where he got it."

  "From old movies he liked."

  "Huh?"

  "Good work. Thanks, Gary."

  Roy disconnected with the touch of a button, but he didn't take off the telephone headset.

  He stared at the photograph of Steven Ackblom. The man in the shadows.

  Engines, rotors, powerful desires, and sympathy for the devil vibrated in Roy's bones. He shivered with a not unpleasant chill.

  They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died.

  * * *

  Here and there in the gloom beneath the trees, where shadows held back the sun through most or all of the day, patches of white snow shone like bone in the carcass of the earth.

  The true desert was behind them. Winter had come to this area, had been driven back by an early thaw, and would no doubt come again before true spring. But now the sky was blue, on a day when Spencer would have welcomed bitterly cold wind and dense swirls of snow to blind all eyes above.

  "Danny was a brilliant software designer," Ellie said. "He'd been a computer nerd since junior high. Me too. Since the eighth grade, I've lived and breathed computers. We met in college. My being a hacker, deep into that world, which is mostly guys—that's what drew Danny to me."

  Spencer remembered how Ellie had looked as she'd sat on desert sand; at the edge of the morning sun, bent over a computer, up-linking to satellites, dazzling in her expertise, her limpid eyes alight with the pleasure that she got from being so skillful at the task, with a curve of hair like a raven's wing against her cheek.

  Whatever she might believe, her status as a hacker had not been the only thing that had drawn Danny to her. She was compelling for many reasons, but most of all because she seemed, at all times, more alive than most other people.

  Her attention was on the highway, but she was clearly having difficulty treating the past with detachment and was struggling not to become lost in it. "After graduate school, Danny had job offers, but his father was relentless about him coming to work at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Back then, years before he went to the Department of Justice, Tom Summerton was Director of the ATF."

  "But that was in a different administration."

  "Oh, in Tom's case, it doesn't matter much who's in power in Washington, either party, left or right. He's always appointed to an important position in what they laughingly call 'public service.' Twenty years ago, he inhericed over one billion dollars, which is now probably two, and he gives huge amounts to both parties. He's clever enough to position himself as nonpartisan, a statesman rather than a politician, a man who knows how to get things done, no ideological axe to grind, only wants to make a better world."

  "That's a hard act to pull off," Spencer said.

  "Easy for him. Because he believes in nothing. Except himself. And power. Power is his food, drink, love, sex. Using power is the thrill, not forwarding the ideals it serves. In Washington, a lust for power keeps the devil busy buying souls, but Tom is so ambitious he must have collected a record price for his."

  Responding to the simmering fury in the undertone of her voice, Spencer said, "Did you always hate him?"

  "Yes," Ellie said forthrightly. "Quietly despised the stinking sonofabitch. I didn't want Danny to work at ATF, because he was too innocent, naive, too easily taken in by his old man."

  "What did he do there?"

  "Developed Mama. The computer system, the software to run it—which they later called Mama. It was supposed to be the biggest, baddest anticrime data resource in the world, a system that could process billions of bytes at record speeds, link together federal and state and local law enforcement with ease, eliminate duplication of effort, and finally give the good guys an edge."

  "Very stirring."

  "Isn't it? And Mama turned out awesome. But Tom never intended her to serve any legit branch of government. He used ATF resources to develop her, yeah, but his intention all along was to make Mama the core of this nameless agency."

  "So Danny realized it had gone sour?"

  "Maybe he knew but didn't want to admit. He stayed with it."

  "How long?"

  "Too long," she said sadly. "Until his dad had left the ATF and moved to the Department of Justice, a full year after Mama and the agency were in place. But eventually he accepted that Mama's entire purpose was to make it possible for the government to commit crimes and not be caught. He was eaten alive with anger, self-disgust."

  "And when he wanted out, they wouldn't let him go."

  "We didn't realize there was no leaving. I mean, Tom is a piece of walking shit, but he was still Danny's father. And Danny was his only child. Danny's mother died when he was young. Cancer. So it seemed like Danny was all Tom had."

  Following the violent death of his own mother, Spencer and his father also were drawn closer in the aftermath. Or so it had seemed. Until a certain night in July.

  Ellie said, "Then it became obvious—this work with the agency was mandatory lifetime employment."

  "Like being the personal attorney to a Mafia don."

  "The only way out was to go public, blow the whole dirty business wide open. Secretly Danny prepared his own file of Mama's software and a history of the cover-ups the agency was involved with."

  "You realized the danger?"

  "On one level. But deep down inside, I think both of us, to different degrees, had trouble believing Tom would have Danny killed. We were twenty-eight, for God's sake. Death was an abstract concept to us. At twenty-eight, who really believes he's ever going to die?"

  "And then the hit men showed up."

  "No SWAT team. More subtle. Three men on Thanksgiving evening. The year before last. My folks' place in Connecticut. My dad is ... was a doctor. A doctor's life, especially in a small town, isn't his own. Even on Thanksgiving. So ... near the end of dinner, I was in the kitchen . . . getting the pumpkin pie . . . when the doorbell rang. . . ."

  For once, Spencer didn't want to look at her lovely face. He closed his eyes.

  Ellie took a deep breath and went on: "The kitchen was at the end of the hall from the foyer. I pushed the swinging door aside to see who our visitor was, just as my mother opened . . . just as she opened the front door."

  Spencer waited for her to tell it at her own pace. If he had made the correct assumptions about the sequence of events since that door had been opened, fourteen months in the past, this was the first time that she had described those murders to anyone. Between then and now, she had been on the run, unable to fully trust another human being and unwilling to risk the lives of innocent people by involving them in her personal tragedy.

  'Two men at the front door. Nothing special about them. Could have been Dad's patients, for all I knew. First one was wearing a red-plaid hunting jacket. He said something to Mom, then came inside, pushing her back, a gun in his hand. N
ever heard a shot. Silencer. But I saw . . . a spray of blood . . . the back of her head blowing out."

  With his eyes closed against the sight of Ellie's face, Spencer could clearly visualize that Connecticut foyer and the horror that she described.

  "Dad and Danny were in the dining room. I screamed, 'Run, get away.' I knew it was the agency. I didn't go out the rear door. Instinct, maybe. I'd have been killed on the back porch. Ran into the laundry room off the kitchen, then into the garage and out the side garage door. The house is on two acres, lots of lawn, but I got to the fence between our place and the Doyle house. I was going over it, almost over it, when a bullet ricocheted off the wrought iron. Somebody shoocing from behind our house. Another silencer. No sound but the slug smacking iron. I was frantic, ran across the Doyles' yard. Nobody home, away at their kids' place for the holiday, windows dark. I ran through a gate, into St. George's Wood. Presbyterian church sits on six or eight acres, surrounded by woods—mostly pines, sycamores. Ran a ways. Stopped in the trees. Looked back. Thought one of them would be after me. But I was alone. I guess I'd been too fast or maybe they didn't want to chase me in public, waving guns. And just then snow started falling, just then, big fat flakes. . . ."

  Behind his closed eyes, Spencer could see her on that distant night, in that faraway place: alone in darkness, without a coat, shivering, breathless, terrified. Abruptly, torrents of white flakes spiraled through the bare limbs of the sycamores, and the timing made the snow seem more than merely a sudden change of weather, gave it the significance of an omen.

  "There was something uncanny about it ... sort of eerie . . . ," Ellie said, confirming what Spencer sensed that she had felt and what he himself might have felt under those circumstances. "I don't know . . . can't explain it ... the snow was like a curtain coming down, a stage curtain, the end of an act, end of something. I knew then they were all dead. Not just my mother. Dad and Danny too."

  Her voice trembled with grief. Talking for the first time about those killings, she had reopened the scabs that had formed over her raw pain, as he had known she would.

  Reluctantly he opened his eyes and looked at her.

  She was beyond pale now. Ashen. Tears shimmered in her eyes, but her cheeks were still dry.

  "Want me to drive?" he asked.

  "No. Better if I do. Keeps me focused here and now . . . instead of too much back then."

  A roadside sign indicated that they were eight miles from the town of Newcastle.

  Spencer stared out the side window at a landscape that seemed barren in spite of the many trees and murky in spite of the sunshine.

  Ellie said, "Then in the street, beyond the trees, a car roared by, really moving. It went under a streetlamp, and I was close enough to see the man in the front passenger seat. Red hunting jacket. The driver, one more in the backseat— three altogether. After they went past, I ran through the trees, toward the street, going to shout for help, for the police, but I stopped before I got there. I knew who'd done it ... the agency, Tom. But no proof."

  "What about Danny's files?"

  "Back in Washington. A set of diskettes hidden in our apartment, another set in a bank safe-deposit box. And I knew Tom must already have both sets, or he wouldn't have been so ... bold. If J went to the cops, if I surfaced anywhere, Tom would get me. Sooner or later. It would look like an accident or suicide. So I went back to the house. Back through St. George's Wood, the gate at the Doyle house, over the iron fence. At our house, I almost couldn't force myself through the kitchen . . . the hall . . . to Mom in the foyer. Even after all this time, when I try to picture my mother's face, I can't see it without the wound, the blood, the bone structure distorted by the bullets. Those bastards haven't even left me with a clean memory of my mother's face . . . just that awful, bloody thing."

  For a while she couldn't go on.

  Aware of Ellie's anguish, Rocky mewled softly. He was no longer bobbing and grinning. He huddled in his narrow space, head down, both ears limp. His love of speed was outweighed by his sensitivity to the woman's pain.

  Two miles from Newcastle, Ellie at last continued: "And in the dining room, Danny and Dad were dead, shot repeatedly in the head, not to be sure they were dead . . .just for the sheer savagery. I had to ... to touch the bodies, take the money out of their wallets. I was going to need every dollar I could get. Raided Mom's purse, jewelry box. Opened the safe in Dad's den, took his coin collection. Jesus, I felt like a thief, worse than a thief . . . a grave robber. I didn't pack my suitcase, just left with what I was wearing, partly because I started to get spooked that the killers would come back. But also because . . . it was so silent in that house, just me and the bodies and the snow falling past the windows, so quiet, as if not only Mom and Dad and Danny were dead, but as if the whole world had died, the end of everything, and I was the last one left, alone."

  Newcastle was a repeat of Modena. Small. Isolated. It offered no place to hide from people who could look down on the whole world as if they were gods.

  Ellie said, "I left the house in our Honda, Danny's and mine, but I knew I had to get rid of it in a few hours. When Tom realized I hadn't gone to the cops, the whole agency would be looking for me, and they'd have a description of the car, the plate number."

  He looked at her again. Her eyes were no longer watery. She had repressed her grief with a fierce weight of anger.

  He said, "What do the police think happened in that house, to Danny and your folks? Where do they think you are? Not Summerton's people. I mean the real police."

  "I suspect Tom intended to make it look as if a well-organized group of terroriscs wasted us as a way of punishing him. Oh, he could've milked that for sympathy! And used the sympathy to weasel more power for himself inside the Department of Justice."

  "But with you gone, they couldn't plant their phony evidence, because you might show up to refute it."

  "Yeah. Later, the media decided that Danny and my folks . . . well, you know, it was one of those deplorable acts of senseless violence we see so often, blah-blah-blah. Terrible, sick, blah-blah-blah, but only a three-day story. As for me . . . obviously I'd been taken away, raped and murdered, my body left where it might never be found."

  "That was fourteen months ago?" he asked. "And the agency's still this hot to get you?"

  "I have some significant codes they don't know I have, things Danny and I memorized . . . a lot of knowledge. I don't have hard proof against them. But I know everything about them, which makes me dangerous enough. Tom will never stop looking, as long as he lives."

  * * *

  Like a great black wasp, the helicopter droned across the Nevada badlands.

  Roy was still wearing the telephone headset with the saucer-size earphones, blocking out the engine and rotor noise to concentrate on the photograph of Steven Ackblom. The loudest sound in his private realm was the slow, heavy thudding of his heart.

  When Ackblom's secret work had been exposed, Roy had been only sixteen years old and still confused about the meaning of life and about his own place in the world. He was drawn to beautiful things: the paintings of Childe Hassam and so many others, classical music, antique French furniture, Chinese porcelain, lyrical poetry. He was always a happy boy when alone in his room, with Beethoven or Bach on the stereo, gazing at the color photographs in a book about Faberge" eggs, Paul Storr silver, or Sung Dynasty porcelains. Likewise, he was happy when he was wandering alone through an art museum. He was seldom happy around people, however, although he wanted desperately to have friends and to be liked. In his expansive but guarded heart, young Roy was convinced that he had been born to make an important contribution to the world, and he knew that when he discovered what his contribution would be, he then would become widely admired and loved. Nevertheless, at sixteen and bedeviled by the impatience of youth, he was enormously frustrated by the need to wait for his purpose and his destiny to be revealed to him.

  He had been fascinated by the newspaper accounts of the Ackblom tragedy, because in
the mystery of the artist's double life, he had sensed a resolution to his own deep confusion. He acquired two books with color plates of Ackblom's art—and responded powerfully to the work. Though Ackblom's pictures were beautiful, even ennobling, Roy's enthusiasm wasn't aroused only by the paintings themselves. He was also affected by the artist's inner struggle, which he inferred from the paintings and which he believed to be similar to his own.

  Basically, Steven Ackblom was preoccupied with two subjects and produced two types of paintings.

  Although only in his mid-thirties, he had been obsessed enough to produce an enormous body of work, consisting half of exceptionally beautiful still lifes. Fruit, vegetables, stones, flowers, pebbles, the contents of a sewing box, buttons, tools, plates, a collection of old bottles, bottle caps—humble and exalted objects alike were rendered in remarkable detail, so realistic that they seemed three-dimensional, in fact, each item attained a hyperreality, appeared to be more real than the object that had served as the model for it, and possessed an eerie beauty. Ackblom never resorted to the forced beauty of sentimentality or unrestrained romanticism; his vision was always convincing, moving, and sometimes breathtaking.

  The subjects of the remainder of the paintings were people: portraits of individuals and of groups containing three to seven subjects. More frequently, they were faces rather than full figures, but when they were figures, they were invariably nudes. Sometimes Ackblom's men, women, and children were ethereally beautiful on the surface, though their comeliness was always tainted by a subtle but terrible pressure within them, as if some monstrous possessing spirit might explode from their fragile flesh at any moment. This pressure distorted a feature here and there, not dramatically but just enough to rob them of perfect beauty. And sometimes the artist portrayed ugly—even grotesque—individuals, within whom there was also fearful pressure, though its effect was to force a feature here and there to conform to an ideal of beauty. Their malformed countenances were all the more chilling for being, in some aspects, lightly touched by grace. As a consequence of the conflict between inner and outer realities, the people in both types of portraits were enormously expressive, although their expressions were more mysterious and haunting than any that enlivened the faces of real human beings.