by Dean Koontz
According to Hands of Mercy legend, something had gone so wrong down here that Father wished always to keep the memory of it clear in his mind and, therefore, made no repairs and left the rubble instead of having it hauled away. Dozens of the New Race had perished here in an attempt to contain…something.
Because Father enters and exits Mercy every day on this level, he is regularly confronted with the evidence of the terrible crisis that apparently almost led to the destruction of his life’s work. Some even dare to speculate that Father nearly died here, though to repeat this claim seems like blasphemy.
Turning away from the rubble, Randal Six uses the last letter of toward to spell determination in a new direction.
By a series of side steps that spell small words, alternating with forward steps that spell long words, he comes to a door at the end of the hallway. This is not locked.
Beyond is a storage room with rows of cabinets in which are kept hard-copy backup files of the project’s computerized records.
Directly opposite the first door stands another. That one will be locked. Through it, Father comes and goes from Mercy.
Randal Six navigates the tile floor in this room by means of crosswords, at last settling in a hiding place between rows of file cabinets, near the second door but not within sight of it.
Now he must wait.
CHAPTER 57
FROM THE LUXE, Carson went to Homicide, settled at the computer on her desk, and launched her web browser.
There was no graveyard shift in Homicide. Detectives worked when the investigation required, night or day, but they tended to be in-office less as the day waned, on call but not sitting desks in the wee hours. At the moment, though the night was not yet that late, she sat alone in the corpse-chasers’ corner.
Reeling from what Deucalion had told her, Carson wasn’t sure what to believe. She found it surprisingly difficult to disbelieve any of his story regardless of the fact that it was fantastic to the point of insanity.
She needed to get background on Victor Helios. With the World Wide Web, she was able to unwrap a fictitious biography more easily than in the days when a data chase had to be done on foot or through cooperating officers in other jurisdictions.
She typed in her search string. In seconds, she had scores of hits. Helios, the visionary founder of Biovision. Helios, the local mover and shaker in New Orleans politics and society. Helios, the philanthropist.
At first she seemed to have a lot of material. Quickly, however, she found that for all his wealth and connections, Helios didn’t so much swim the waters of New Orleans society as skim across the surface.
In the city for almost twenty years, he made a difference in his community, but with a minimum of exposure. Scores of people in local society got more press time; they were omnipresent by comparison to Helios.
Furthermore, when Carson attempted to track the few facts about Helios’s past, prior to New Orleans, they trailed away like wisps of evaporating mist.
He had gone to university “in Europe,” but nothing more specific was said about his alma mater.
Though he inherited his fortune, the names of his parents were never mentioned.
He was said to have greatly enlarged that fortune with several financial coups during the dot-com boom. No details were provided.
References to “a New England childhood” never included the state where he had been born and raised.
One thing about the available photos intrigued Carson. In his first year in New Orleans, Victor had been handsome, almost dashing, and appeared to be in his late thirties. In his most recent photos, he looked hardly any older.
He had adopted a more flattering hairstyle—but he had no less hair than before. If he’d had plastic surgery, the surgeon had been particularly skilled.
Eight years ago, he had returned from an unspecified place in New England with a bride who appeared to be no older than twenty-five. Her name was Erika, but Carson could find no mention of her maiden name.
Erika would be perhaps thirty-three now. In her most recent photos, she looked not a day older than in those taken eight years previously.
Some women were fortunate enough to keep their twenty-something looks until they were forty. Erika might be one of those.
Nevertheless, the ability of both her and her husband to defy the withering hand of time seemed remarkable. If not uncanny.
“They got him, O’Connor.”
Startled, she looked up from the computer and saw Tom Bowmaine, the watch commander, at the open door to the hallway, on the farther side of the Homicide bullpen.
“They got the Surgeon,” Tom elaborated. “Dead. He took a header off a roof.”
CHAPTER 58
ONE BLOCK OF THE ALLEYWAY had been cordoned off to preserve as much evidence as possible for the CSI crew. Likewise the roof of the building and the freight elevator.
Carson climbed the stairs to Roy Pribeaux’s apartment. The jake outside the door knew her; he let her into the loft.
She half expected to find Harker or Frye, or both. Neither was present. Another detective, Emery Framboise, had been in the area and had caught the call.
Carson liked Emery. The sight of him didn’t raise a single hair on the back of her neck.
He was a young guy—thirty-four—who dressed the way certain older detectives had once dressed before they decided they looked like throwbacks to the lost South of the 1950s. Seersucker suits, white rayon shirts, string ties, a straw boater parked dead-flat on his head.
Somehow he made this retro look seem modern, perhaps because he himself was otherwise entirely of a modern sensibility.
Carson was surprised to see Kathy Burke, friend and shrink, with Emery in the kitchen. Primarily Kathy conducted mandatory counseling sessions with officers involved in shootings and in other traumatic situations, though she also wrote psychological profiles of elusive perpetrators like the Surgeon. She seldom visited crime scenes, at least not this early in the game.
Kathy and Emery were watching two CSI techs unload the contents of one of two freezers. Tupperware containers.
As Carson joined Kathy and Emery, one of the techs read a label on the lid of a container. “Left hand.”
She would have understood the essence of the situation without hearing those two words, because the raised lid of the second freezer revealed the eyeless corpse of a young woman.
“Why aren’t you home reading about swashbuckling heroines and flying dragons?” Carson needled.
“There’s a different kind of dragon dead in the alleyway,” Kathy said. “I wanted to see his lair, see if my profile of him holds any water.”
“Right hand,” a tech said, taking a container from the freezer.
Emery Framboise said, “Carson, looks like you’ve just been saved a ton of casework.”
“I suppose it wasn’t an accident he went off the roof?”
“Suicide. He left a note. Probably heard you and Michael were on his trail, figured he was a dead man walking.”
“Do homicidal sociopaths commit suicide?” Carson wondered.
“Rarely,” Kathy said. “But it’s not unheard of.”
“Ears,” said one of the CSI techs, removing a small container from the freezer, and his partner read the label on another: “Lips.”
“I disappointed my mother,” Emery said. “She wanted me to be an airline pilot like my dad. At times like this, I think maybe I would be better off high in the night, up where the sky is clean, flying San Francisco to Tokyo.”
“Yeah,” Carson said, “but then what airline pilot is ever going to have stories like this to tell his grandkids when he tucks them into bed? Where’s the suicide note?”
Kathy said, “I’ll show you.”
In the living room, a computer stood on a corner desk. White letters on a field of blue offered a peculiar farewell:
Killed what I wanted. Took what I needed. Now
I leave when I want, how I want, and go where
I want—o
ne level below Hell.
“The taunting tone is typical for a sociopath,” Kathy said. “The suggestion that he’s earned a princely place in Hell isn’t unique, either, but usually if he’s playing out a satanic fantasy, you find occult literature, posters. We haven’t come across any of that yet.”
Only half listening, chilled by a sense of déjà vu, of having seen this message before, Carson stared at the screen, reading the words twice, three times, four.
As she read, she extracted a latex glove from a jacket pocket, pulled it on her right hand, and then keyed in a print request.
“There was a time,” Kathy said, “if a suicide note wasn’t handwritten, it was suspicious. But these days, they often use their computers. In some cases they e-mail suicide notes to friends and relatives just before offing themselves. Progress.”
Stripping off the glove, waiting impatiently for the printer to produce a hard copy, Carson said, “Down there in the alley, is there enough left of his face to get a good photograph?”
“No,” Kathy said. “But his bedroom’s full of them.”
Was it ever. On both nightstands and on the dresser were a dozen or more photos of Roy Pribeaux, mostly glamour shots by professional photographers, each in an expensive, ornamental silver frame.
“He doesn’t seem to have been lacking in self-esteem,” Kathy said drily.
CHAPTER 59
JENNA PARKER, TWENTY-FIVE, lived for parties. She seemed to be invited to one every night.
This evening, she obviously had taken a few pre-party toots of something, getting primed for a late-night bash, for she was buzzed when she came out of her apartment, singing tunelessly.
With or without drugs, Jenna was perpetually happy, walking on sunshine even when the day offered only rain.
On this rainless night, she seemed to float a quarter inch off the floor as she tried to lock her door. The proper relationship of a key to a keyhole seemed to elude her, and she giggled when, three times in a row, she failed the simple insertion test.
Maybe she wasn’t merely buzzed but fully stung. She succeeded on the fourth try, and the deadbolt snapped shut with a solid clack.
“Sheryl Crowe,” Jonathan Harker said from the doorway of his apartment, across the hall from hers.
She turned, saw him for the first time, and broke into a sunny grin. “Johnny!”
“You sound like Sheryl Crowe when you sing.”
“Do I really?”
“Would I lie?”
“Depends on what you want,” she said coyly.
“Now, Jen, have I ever come on to you?”
“No. But you will.”
“When will I?”
“Later. Sooner. Maybe now.”
She’d been to his apartment a couple times for pasta dinners, and he’d been to her place for takeout, since she didn’t cook even pasta. These had been strictly neighborly occasions.
He didn’t want sex from Jenna Parker. He wanted to learn from her the secret of happiness.
“I told you—it’s just you remind me of my sister.”
“Sister. Yeah, right.”
“Anyway, I’m almost old enough to be your father.”
“When has that ever mattered to a man?”
“We aren’t all swine,” he said.
“Oh. Sorry, Johnny. Jeez, I didn’t mean to sound…mean. I’m just floatin’ so high inside that I’m not always down there where the words come out.”
“I noticed. Why do you ever use drugs, anyway? You’re happy when you’re sober. You’re always happy.”
She grinned, came to him, and pinched his cheek affectionately. “You’re right. I love life. I’m always happy. But it’s no crime to want to be even happier now and then.”
“Actually,” he said, “if I were in Vice instead of Homicide, maybe I’d have to consider it a crime.”
“You’d never arrest me, Johnny. Probably not even if I killed someone.”
“Probably not,” he agreed, and squirted her in the mouth and nostrils with chloroform solution.
Her gasp of surprise did what a blow across the backs of her knees would have done: dropped her to the floor. She sputtered, wheezed, and passed out.
He had taken the squeeze bottle from Roy Pribeaux’s apartment. It was one of three he had found there.
Later he would leave it with her dead body. Her remains wouldn’t be found for months, so their condition wouldn’t enable CSI to date her death after Pribeaux’s. The bottle would be one of several pieces of evidence identifying her as his final victim.
Now Jonathan lifted her effortlessly, carried her into his apartment, and kicked the door shut behind them.
Of the four apartments here on the fourth floor, one stood vacant. Paul Miller, in 4-C, was away at a sales conference in Dallas. Only Jonathan and Jenna were in residence. No one could have witnessed the assault and abduction.
Jenna wouldn’t be missed for a day or two. By then, he would have opened her top to bottom, would have found the special something that she had and that he was missing, and would have disposed of her remains.
He was taking all these precautions not because he feared going to prison but because he feared that Father would identify him as the renegade.
In his bedroom, Jonathan had pushed the bed into a corner. He had stacked the other furniture atop it to create sufficient space for the makeshift autopsy table that he had prepared for her.
Plastic sheeting covered the floor. At the head and foot of the table stood lamps that were bright enough to reveal the source of her happiness whether it was nestled in a tangle of guts or embedded in the cerebellum.
Putting her on the table, he noticed that she was bleeding from one nostril. She’d cracked her nose against the floor when she had fallen. The bleeding wasn’t serious. The nose injury wasn’t what would kill her.
Jonathan checked her pulse. Steady.
He was relieved. He’d been concerned that she had inhaled too much chloroform, that maybe she’d suffered chemical suffocation or anaphylactic shock.
He wanted her to be alive through this procedure. For some of it, he needed her to be awake and responsive.
CHAPTER 60
IN THE BASEMENT of Mercy, hiding behind a row of file cabinets, Randal Six hears noise from beyond the walls of his world: first, the hollow sound of a door falling shut in another room.
According to what Randal has overheard while seeming to be lost in his autism, only Father enters and leaves through the outer door of this chamber. Now, after a late dinner, as he often does, Father must be returning with the intention of working through the night.
Crouched at the end of the cabinet row, Randal cocks his head and listens intently. After a moment, he hears the electronic tones of the numbers being entered in an electric-lock keypad on the far side of the outer file-room door.
The ten tones that represent numbers—zero through nine—on telephone, security-system, electric-lock, and other keypads are universal. They do not vary from one manufacturer to another.
He learned this from an educational web site maintained by one of the nation’s largest communications companies. Having downloaded these tones in preparation for this odyssey, he has replayed them hundreds of times until he can unfailingly identify any code by the tones that comprise it.
Because the file-room door intervenes, the tones are muffled. If he didn’t have the enhanced hearing of the New Race, Randal might not be able to identify the code: 368284.
A soft burrrrr indicates that the circuit engaging the lock has been broken.
Although the door is not in Randal’s line of sight, the creak of hinges suggests that Father has opened it. Footsteps on vinyl tile reveal that Father has entered the file room.
Out of view of the main aisle, Randal suddenly wonders to what degree, if any, Father’s senses might have been enhanced—and he holds his breath lest the faintest exhalation reveal his presence.
Without hesitation, Father’s footsteps cross the room.
>
The outer door falls shut behind him, and the burrrrr of the disengaged lock is cut short by the hard snap of the bolt.
The inner door opens, closes, and Father is now gone into the basement corridor where piles of rubble remind him of a bad day here at the bottom of Mercy.
Patience is a virtue that Randal has in spades. He does not move at once from hiding, but waits a few minutes until Father is almost certainly on another floor, far out of hearing.
Vinyl square by vinyl square, he spells himself to the outer door. Here, as on the other side, there is a keypad. He enters the code: 368284.
The electric lock releases. He puts his hand on the door but cannot find the courage to open it.
Beyond, there is no Mercy. All is new and full of bewildering choices.
He delays so long that the electric lock engages once more.
He enters the code in the keypad. The lock releases: burrrrr.
He tells himself to open the door. He cannot.
The lock engages once more.
Trembling, he stands before the door, terrified to go through it, but also terrified to remain on this side.
Into his tortured mind comes the memory of the newspaper photo: Arnie O’Connor, autistic but smiling. Arnie is clearly happier than Randal has ever been or ever will be.
A bitter, caustic sense of injustice floods through Randal. This emotion is so intense that he fears it will dissolve him from the inside out if he does not take action to secure for himself the happiness that Arnie O’Connor enjoys.
The little snot. The hateful little worm, selfishly keeping the secret of happiness. What right does he have to be happy when a child of Father, superior in every way, lives in misery more than Mercy?
Again he enters the code. Burrrrr.
He pushes on the door. It opens.
Randal Six spells himself across the threshold, out of Mercy, into the unknown.
CHAPTER 61
THROUGH THE DOOR, Carson heard scary-movie music. She rang the bell, rang it again before the first series of chimes quite finished echoing through the apartment beyond.
