"That we loathe Walter Havalow."
"Yes, but what have we learned that's germane to the case. Is it just a
coincidence that Frank's been using George Farris name and Farris's
family was slaughtered?"
"I don't believe in coincidence."
"Neither do I. But I still don't think Frank is a killer."
"Neither do I, though anything's possible. But what I said to Havalow
was true-surely Frank wouldn't kill are Farris and everyone else in the
house, then carry around false ID that links him to them."
Rain began to fall harder than before, drumming noisily on the Toyota.
The heavy curtain of water blurred the super market.
Bobby said, "You want to know what I think? I think Frank was using
Farris's name, and whoever's after him found out about it."
"Mr. Blue Light, you mean. The guy who supposedly can make a car fall
apart around you and magically induce street lights to blow out."
"Yeah, him," Bobby said.
"If he exists."
"Mr. Blue Light discovered Frank was using the Farris name, and went to
that address, hoping to find him. But Frank had never been there. It
was just a name and address his document forger picked at random. So
when Mr. Blue didn't find Frank, he killed everyone in the house, maybe
because he thought they were lying to him and hiding Frank, or maybe
just because he was in a rage."
"He'd have known how to deal with Havalow."
"So you think I'm right, I'm on to something?" She thought about it.
"Could be." He grinned at her.
"Isn't it fun being a detective?"
"Fun?" she said incredulously.
"Well, I meant 'interesting."'
"We're either representing a man who killed four people, or we're
representing a man who's been targeted by a brutal murderer, and that
strikes you as fun?"
"Not as much fun as sex, but more fun than bowling."
"Bobby, sometimes you make me nuts. But I love you."
He took her literally.
"If we're going to pursue the investigation, I'm damned well going to
enjoy it was much as I can. But I'll drop the case in a minute if you
want."
"Why? Because of your dream? Because of the Bad Thing?" She shook her
head.
"No. We start letting a weird dream spook us, pretty soon anything will
spook us. We'll lose our confidence, and you can't do this kind of work
without confidence."
Even in the dim backsplash from the dashboard lights, she could see the
anxiety in his eyes.
Finally he said, "Yeah, that's what I knew you'd say. So let's get to
the bottom of it was fast as we can. According to his other driver's
license, he's James Roman, and he lives in El Toro."
"It's almost eight-thirty."
"We can be there, find the house... maybe forty-five minutes. That's
not too late."
"All right." Instead of putting the car in gear, he slid his seat back
and stripped out of his down-lined, nylon jacket.
"Unlock the glove box and give me my gun. From now on I'm wearing it
everywhere."
Each of them had a license to carry a concealed weapon. Julie struggled
out of her own jacket, then retrieved two shoulder holsters from under
her seat. She took both revolvers from the glove box: two snub-nosed
Smith & Wesson.38 Chief Specials, reliable and compact guns that could
be carried inconspicuously beneath ordinary clothing with little or no
help from a tailor.
THE HOUSE was gone. If anyone named James Roman h lived there, he had
new lodgings now. A bare concrete slab in the middle of the lot,
surrounded by grass, shrubbery, and several trees, as if the structure
had been snared from above by intergalactic moving men and neatly
spirited away.
Bobby parked in the driveway, and they got out of the Toyota to have a
closer look at the property. Even in the slashing rain, a nearby street
lamp cast enough light to reveal that the lawn was trampled, gouged by
tires, and bare in spots; it was also littered with splinters of wood,
pale bits of Sheet rock crumbled stucco, and a few fragments of glass
that sparkled darkly.
The strongest clue to the fate of the house was to be found in the
condition of the shrubbery and trees. Those bushes closest to the slab
were all either dead or badly damaged, and closer inspection appeared to
be scorched. The nearest tree was leafless, and its stark black limbs
lent an anachronistic feeling of Halloween to the drizzly January night.
"Fire," Julie said.
"Then they tore down what was left."
"Let's talk to a neighbor."
The empty lot was flanked by houses. But lights glowed on at the house
on the north side.
The man who answered the doorbell was about fifty-five, six feet two,
solidly built, with gray hair and a neatly trimmed grey mustache. His
name was Park Hampstead, and he had the air of a retired military man.
He invited them in, with the proviso that they leave their sodden shoes
on the front porch. In the socks, they followed him to a breakfast nook
off the kitchen, where the yellow vinyl dinette upholstery was safe from
their damp clothing; even so, Hampstead made them wait while he draped
thick peach-colored beach towels over two of the chairs.
"Sorry," he said, "but I'm something of a fuss-budget."
The house had bleached-oak floors and modern furniture, and Bobby
noticed that it was spotless in every corner.
"Thirty years in the Marine Corps left me with an abiding respect for
routine, order, and neatness," Hampstead explained.
"In fact, when Sharon died three years ago-she was my wife-I think maybe
I got a little crazy about neatness. The first six or eight months
after her funeral, I cleaned the place top to bottom at least twice a
week, because as long as I was cleaning, my heart didn't hurt so bad.
Spent a fortune on Windex, paper towels, Fantastic, and sweeper bags.
Let me tell you, no military pension can support the industrial habit I
developed! I got over that stage. I'm still a fuss-budget but not
obsessed with neatness."
He had just brewed a fresh pot of coffee, so he poured for them as well.
The cups, saucers, and spoons were all spotless.
Hampstead provided each of them with two crisply folded paper napkins,
then sat across the table from them.
"Sure," he said, after they raised the issue,
"I knew Jim Roman. Good neighbor. He was a chopper jockey out of the
El Toro Air Base. That was my last station before retirement. Jim was
a hell of a nice guy, the kind who'd give you the shirt off his back,
then ask if you needed money to buy a matching tie."
"Was?" Julie asked.
"He die in the fire?" Bobby asked, remembering the scorched shrubbery
and soot-blackened concrete slab next door.
Hampstead frowned.
"No. He died about six months after Sharon. Make it... two and a half
years ago. His chopper crashed on maneuvers. He was only forty-one,
eleven years younger than me. Left a wife, Maralee. A
fourteen-year-old daughter named Valerie. Twelve-year-old son, Mike.
Real
nice kids. Terrible thing. They were a close family, and Jim's
accident devastated them. They had some relatives back in Nebraska, but
no one they could really turn to." Hampstead stared past Bobby, at the
softly humming refrigerator, and eyes swam out of focus.
"So I tried to step in, help out, advise Maralee on finances, give a
shoulder to lean on and an ear to listen when the kids needed that. Took
''em to Disneyland and Knott's from time to time, you know, that sort of
thing.
Maralee told me lots of times what a godsend I was, but it was really me
who needed them more than the other way around because doing things for
them was what finally began to turn my mind off from losing Sharon."
Julie said, "So the fire happened more recently?"
Hampstead did not respond. He got up, went to the sink opened the
cupboard door below, returned with a spray bottle of Windex and a dish
towel, and began to wipe the refrigerator door, which already appeared
to be as clean as the antiseptic surfaces in a hospital surgery.
"Valerie and Mike were their kids. After a year or so it almost got to
seem like they were my kids, the ones me and Sharon never had. Maralee
cried for Jim a long time, almost two years, before she began to
remember she was a woman in her prime. Maybe what started to happen
between her and me would've upset Jim, but I don't think so; I think
he'd have been happy for us, even if I am eleven years older than her."
When he finished wiping the refrigerator, Hampstead inspected the door
from the side, at an angle to the light, apparently searching for a
fingerprint or smudge. As if he had just heard the question that Julie
had asked a minute ago, Hampsted said,
"The fire was two months ago. I woke up in the middle of the night,
heard sirens, saw an orange glow at the window, got up, looked out. -
-."
He turned away from the refrigerator, studied the kitchen for a moment,
then went to the nearest tile-topped counter began to spritz and wipe
that gleaming surface.
Julie looked at Bobby. He shook his head. Neither of them said
anything.
After a moment Hampstead continued:
"Got over to the house just ahead of the firemen. Went in through the
front door. Made it into the foyer, then to the foot of the steps,
couldn't get up to the bedroom, the heat was too intense, the smoke. I
called their names, nobody answered. If I'd heard an answer maybe I
would've found the strength to go up there somehow in spite of the
flames. I guess I must've blacked out for a few seconds and been
carried out by firemen, 'cause I woke up on the front lawn, coughing,
choking, a paramedic bent over me, giving me oxygen."
"All three of them died?" Bobby asked.
"Yeah," Hampstead said.
"What caused the fire?"
"I'm not sure they ever figured that out. I might've heard something
about a short in the wiring, but I'm not sure. I think they even
suspected arson for a while, but that never led anywhere. Doesn't much
matter, does it?"
"Why not?"
"Whatever caused it, they're all three dead."
Park"I'm sorry," Bobby said softly.
"Their lot's been sold. Construction starts on a new house sometime
this spring. More coffee?"
"No, thank you," Julie said.
Hampstead surveyed the kitchen, then moved to the stainless-steel range
hood, which he began to clean in spite of the fact that it was spotless.
"I apologize for the mess. Don't know how the place gets like this when
it's just me living here. Sometimes I think there must be gremlins
sneaking behind my back, messing things up to torment me."
"No need for gremlins," Julie said.
"Life itself gives us all the torment we can handle."
Hampstead turned away from the range hood. For the first time since he
had gotten up from the table and begun his cleaning ritual, he made eye
contact with them.
"No gremlins," he agreed.
"Nothing as simple and easy to handle as gremlins."
He was a big man and obviously tough from years of military training and
discipline, but the shimmering, watery evidence of grief brimmed in his
eyes, and at the moment he seemed as lost and helpless as a child.
+ IN THE CAR again, staring through the rain-spattered windshield at the
vacant lot where the Roman house had once stood, Bobby said,
"Frank finds out that Mr. Blue Light knows about the Farris ID, so he
gets new ID in the name of James Roman. But Mr. Blue eventually learns
about that, too, and he goes looking for Frank at the Roman address,
where he discovers only the widow and the kids. He kills them, same as
he killed the Farris family, but this time he sets fire to the house to
cover the crime. that the way it looks to you?"
"Could be," Julie said.
"He burns the bodies because he bites them, like Park told us, and the
bite marks help the police to tie his crimes together, so he wants to
throw the cops off the trail." Julie said,
"Then why doesn't he burn them every time "Because that would be just as
much of a giveaway as bite marks. Sometimes he burns the bodies,
sometimes he doesn't, and maybe sometimes he disposes of them so they
are never even found." They were both silent for a moment. Then she
said, we're dealing with a mass murderer, a serial killer, who's a
raving psychotic."
"Or a vampire," Bobby said.
"Why's he after Frank?"
"I don't know. Maybe Frank once tried to drive a wooden stake through
his heart."
"Not funny."
"I agree," Bobby said.
"Right now, nothing seems funny."
FRom DYSON Manfred's house full of insect specimens in Irvine, Clint
Karaghiosis drove through the chilly rain to his own house in Placentia.
It was a homey two-bedroom bungalow with a rolled-shingle roof, a deep
front porch in the California Craftsman style, and French windows full
of warm amber light. By the time he got there, the car heater had
pretty much dried his rain-soaked clothes.
Felina was in the kitchen when Clint entered by way of the connecting
door from the garage. She hugged him, kissed him, held fast to him for
a moment, as if surprised to see him alive again.
She believed that his job was fraught with danger every day, though he
had often explained that he did mostly boring legwork. He chased facts
instead of culprits, pursued a trail of paper rather than blood.
He understood his wife's concern, however, because he worried
unreasonably about her too. For one thing, she was an attractive woman
with black hair, an olive complexion, and startlingly beautiful gray
eyes; in this age of lenient judges, with a surfeit of merciless
sociopaths on the streets, a good looking woman was regarded by some as
fair game. Furthermore, though the office where Felina worked as a data
processor was only three blocks from their house, an easy walk even in
bad weather, Clint nevertheless worried about the danger she faced at
the busiest of the intersections that she had to cross; in an emergency,
a wa
rning cry or blaring horn would not alert her to onrushing death.
He could not let her know how much he worried, for she was justly proud
that she was so independent in spite of her deafness. He did not want
to diminish her self-respect by indicating in any way that he was not
entirely confident of her ability to deal with every rotten tomato that
fate threw at her.
he daily reminded himself that she had lived twenty-nine years without
coming to serious harm, and he resisted the urge to be overly
protective.
While Clint washed his hands at the sink, Felina set the kitchen table
for a late dinner. An enormous pot of homemade vegetable soup was
heating on the stove, and together they ladled out two large bowls of
it. He got a shaker of Parmesan cheese from the refrigerator, and she
unwrapped a loaf of crusty Italian bread.
He was hungry, and the soup was excellent-thick with vegetables and
chunks of lean beef-but by the time Felina finished her first bowlful,
Clint had eaten less than half of it because he repeatedly paused to
talk to her. She could not read his lips well when he tried to converse
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 22
