The woman tried to scream again but could not make a sound.
Eric rose from the corpse. He licked his blood-slicked lips.
The woman ran into the wind-driven rain. Her Stetson flew off, and her yellow hair streamed behind her, the only brightness in the storm-blackened day.
Eric pursued her. He found indescribable pleasure in the feel of his feet pounding on the hard concrete, then on waterlogged sand. He splashed across the flooded macadam parking lot, gaining on her by the second.
She was heading toward a dull red pickup truck. She glanced back and saw him drawing nearer. She must have realized that she would not reach the pickup in time to start it and drive away, so she turned toward the interstate, evidently hoping to get help from the driver of one of the infrequently passing cars or trucks.
The chase was short. He dragged her down before she had reached the end of the parking lot. They rolled through dirty ankle-deep water. She flailed at him, tried to claw him. He sank his razored talons into her arms, nailing them to her sides, and she let out a terrible cry of pain. Thrashing furiously, they rolled one last time, and then he had her pinned down in the storm runoff, which was chilly in spite of the warm air around them.
For a moment he was surprised to find his blood subsiding, replaced by carnal hunger as he looked down upon the helpless woman. But he merely surrendered to that need as he had surrendered to the urgent need for blood. Beneath him, sensing his intent, the woman tried desperately to throw him off. Her screams of pain gave way to shrill cries of pure terror. Ripping his talons loose of her arm, he shredded her blouse and put his dark, gnarled, inhuman hand upon her bare breasts.
Her screams faded. She stared up at him emptily — voiceless, shaking, paralyzed by dread.
A moment later, having torn open her pants, he eagerly withdrew his manhood from his own jeans. Even in his frenzy to couple with her, he realized that the erect organ in his hand was not human; it was large, strange, hideous. When the woman's gaze fell upon that monstrous staff, she began to weep and whimper. She must have thought that the gates of hell had opened and that demons had come forth. Her horror and abject fear further inflamed his lust.
The storm, which had been subsiding, grew worse for a while, as if in malevolent accompaniment to the brutal act that he was about to perpetrate.
He mounted her.
The rain beat upon them.
The water sloshed around them.
A few minutes later, he killed her.
Lightning blazed, and as its reflection played across the flooded parking lot, the woman's spreading blood looked like opalescent films of oil on the water.
After he had killed her, he fed.
When he was satiated, his primal urges grew less demanding, and the part of him that possessed an intellect gained dominance over the savage beast. Slowly he became aware of the danger of being seen. There was little traffic on the interstate, but if one of the passing cars or trucks pulled into the rest area, he would be spotted. He hurriedly dragged the dead woman across the macadam, around the side of the comfort station, and into the mesquite behind the building. He disposed of the dead man there as well.
He found the keys in the ignition of the pickup. The engine turned over on the second try.
He had taken the cowboy's hat. Now he jammed it on his head, pulling the brim down, hoping it would disguise the strangeness of his face. The pickup's fuel gauge indicated a full tank, so he would not need to stop between here and Vegas. But if a passing motorist glanced over and saw his face… He must remain alert, drive well, attract no notice — always resisting the retrograde evolution that steadily pulled him into the mindless perspective of the beast. He had to remember to avert his grotesque face from the vehicles he passed and from those that passed him. If he took those precautions, then the hat — in conjunction with the early dusk brought by the storm — might provide sufficient cover.
He looked into the rearview mirror and saw a pair of unmatched eyes. One was a luminous pale green with a vertical slit-shaped orange iris that gleamed like a hot coal. The other was larger, dark, and… multifaceted.
That jarred him as nothing had for a while, and he looked quickly away from the mirror. Multifaceted? That was far too alien to bear consideration. Nothing like that had featured in any stage of human evolution, not even in ancient eras when the first gasping amphibians had crawled out of the sea onto the shore. Here was proof that he was not merely devolving, that his body was not merely struggling to express all the potential in the genetic heritage of humankind; here was proof that his genetic structure had run amok and that it was conveying him toward a form and consciousness that had nothing to do with the human race. He was becoming something else, something beyond reptile or ape or Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon man or modern European man, something so strange that he did not have the courage or the curiosity to confront it.
Henceforth, when he glanced in the mirror, he would be certain that it provided a view only of the roadway behind and revealed no slightest aspect of his own altered countenance.
He switched on the headlights and drove away from the rest area onto the highway.
The steering wheel felt odd in his malformed, monstrous hands. Driving, which should have been as familiar to him as walking, seemed like a singularly exotic act — and difficult, too, almost beyond his capabilities. He clutched the wheel and concentrated on the rainy highway ahead.
The whispering tires and metronomic thump of the windshield wipers seemed to pull him on through the storm and the gathering darkness, toward a special destiny. Once, when his full intellect returned to him for a brief moment, he thought of William Butler Yeats and remembered a fitting scrap of the great man's poetry:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
32
FLAMINGO PINK
Tuesday afternoon, after their meeting with Dr. Easton Solberg at UCI, Detectives Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom, still on sick leave, had driven to Tustin, where the main offices of Shadway Realty were located in a suite on the ground floor of a three-story Spanish-style building with a blue tile roof. Julio had spotted the stakeout car on the first pass. It was an unmarked muck-green Ford, sitting at the curb half a block from Shadway Realty, where the occupants had a good view of those offices and of the driveway that serviced the parking lot alongside the building. Two men in blue suits were in the Ford: One was reading a newspaper and the other was keeping watch.
“Feds,” Julio said as he cruised by the stakeout.
“Sharp's men? DSA?” Reese wondered.
“Must be.”
“A little obvious, aren't they?”
“I guess they don't really expect Shadway to turn up here,” Julio said. “But they have to go through the motions.”
Julio parked half a block behind the stakeout, putting several cars between him and the DSA's Ford, so it was possible to watch the watchers without being seen.
Reese had participated in scores of stakeouts with Julio, and surveillance duty had never been the ordeal it might have been with another partner. Julio was a complex man whose conversation was interesting hour after hour. But when one or both of them did not feel up to conversation, they could sit through long silences in comfort, without awkwardness — one of the surest tests of friendship.
Tuesday afternoon, while they watched the watchers and also watched the offices of Shadway Realty, they talked about Eric Leben, genetic engineering, and the dream of immortality. That dream was by no means Leben's private obsession. A deep longing for immortality, for commutation of the death sentence, had surely filled humankind since the first members of the species had acquired self-awareness and a crude intelligence. The subject had a special poignancy for Reese and Julio because both had witnessed the deaths of much-loved wives and had never fully recovered from their losses.
Reese could sympathize with Leben's dream and even understand the scientist's reasons for subjecting himself to a da
ngerous genetic experiment. It had gone wrong, yes: the two murders and the hideous crucifixion of the one dead girl were proof that Leben had come back from the grave as something less than human, and he must be stopped. But the deadly result of his experiments — and the folly of them — did not entirely foreclose sympathy. Against the rapacious hunger of the grave, all men and women were united, brothers and sisters.
As the sunny summer day grew dreary under an incoming marine layer of ash-gray clouds, Reese felt a cloak of melancholy settle upon him. He might have been overwhelmed by it if he had not been on the job, but he was on the job in spite of also being on sick leave.
They — like the DSA stakeout team — were not expecting Shadway to arrive at his headquarters, but they were hoping to identify one of the real-estate agents operating out of the office. As the afternoon wore on they saw several people entering and leaving the premises, but one tall, thin woman with a Betty Boop cap of black hair was the most noticeable, her angular storklike frame emphasized by a clinging flamingo-pink dress. Not pale pink, not frilly pink, but bold flame-hot pink. She came and went twice, both times chauffeuring middle-aged couples who had arrived at the office in their own cars — evidently clients for whom she was tracking down suitable houses. Her own car, with its personalized license plate — requeen, which most likely stood for Real Estate Queen — was a new canary-yellow Cadillac Seville with wire wheels, as memorable as the woman herself.
“That one,” Julio said when she returned to the office with the second couple.
“Hard to lose in traffic,” Reese agreed.
At 4:50, she had again come out of the Shadway Realty door and had hurried like a scurrying bird for her car. Julio and Reese had decided that she was probably going home for the day. Leaving the DSA stakeout to its fruitless wait for Benjamin Shadway, they followed the yellow Cadillac down First Street to Newport Avenue and north to Cowan Heights. She lived in a two-story stucco house with a shake-shingle roof and lots of redwood balconies and decking on one of the steeper streets in the Heights.
Julio parked in front as the pink lady's Caddy disappeared behind the closing garage door. He got out of the car to check the contents of the mailbox — a federal crime — in hope of discovering the woman's name. A moment later he got back into the car and said, “Theodora Bertlesman. Apparently goes by the name Teddy, because that was on one of the letters.”
They waited a couple of minutes, then went to the house, where Reese rang the bell. Summer wind, warm in spite of the winter-gray sky from which it flowed, breathed through surrounding bougainvillea, red-flowered hibiscus, and fragrant star jasmine. The street was still, peaceful, the sounds of the outside world eliminated by the most effective filter known to man — money.
“Should've gotten into real estate, I think,” Reese said. “Why on earth did I ever want to be a cop?”
“You were probably a cop in a previous life,” Julio said dryly, “in another century when being a cop was a better scam than selling real estate. You just fell into the same pattern this time around, without realizing things had changed.”
“Caught in a karma loop, huh?”
A moment later, the door opened. The stork-tall woman in the flamingo-pink dress looked down at Julio, then only slightly up at Reese, and she was less birdlike and more impressive close up than she had been from a distance. Earlier, watching her from the car, Reese had not been able to see the porcelain clarity of her skin, her startling gray eyes, or the sculpted refinement of her features. Her Betty Boop hair, which had looked lacquered — even ceramic — from fifty yards, now proved to be thick and soft. She was no less tall, no less thin, and no less flamboyant than she had seemed before, but her chest was certainly not flat, and her legs were lovely.
“May I help you?” Teddy Bertlesman asked. Her voice was low and silken. She radiated such an air of quiet self-assurance that if Julio and Reese had been two dangerous men instead of two cops, they might not have dared try anything with her.
Presenting his ID and badge, Julio introduced himself and said, “This is my partner, Detective Hagerstrom,” and explained that they wanted to question her about Ben Shadway. “Maybe my information is out of date, but I believe you work as a sales agent in his firm.”
“Of course, you know perfectly well that I do,” she said without scorn, even with some amusement. “Please come in.”
She led them into a living room as bold in its decor as she was in her dress but with undeniable style and taste. A massive white-marble coffee table. Contemporary sofas upholstered in a rich green fabric. Chairs in peach silk moiré, with elaborately carved arms and feet. Four-foot-tall emerald vases holding huge stalks of white-plumed pampas grass. Very large and dramatic modern art filled the high walls of the cathedral-ceilinged room, giving a comfortable human scale to what could have been a forbidding chamber. A wall of glass presented a panorama of Orange County. Teddy Bertlesman sat on a green sofa, the windows behind her, a pale nimbus of light around her head, and Reese and Julio sat on moiré chairs, separated from her by the enormous marble table that seemed like an altar.
Julio said, “Ms. Bertlesman—”
“No, please,” she said, slipping off her shoes and drawing her long legs up under herself. “Either call me Teddy or, if you insist on remaining formal, it's Miss Bertlesman. I despise that ridiculous Miz business; it makes me think of the South before the Civil War — dainty ladies in crinolines, sipping mint juleps under magnolia trees while black mammies tend to them.”
“Miss Bertlesman,” Julio continued, “we are most eager to speak to Mr. Shadway, and we hope you might have an idea where he is. For instance, it occurs to us that, being a real-estate developer and investor as well as broker, he might own rental properties that are currently vacant, one of which he might now be using—”
“Excuse me, but I don't see how this falls in your jurisdiction. According to your ID, you're Santa Ana policemen. Ben has offices in Justin, Costa Mesa, Orange, Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, and Laguna Niguel, but none in Santa Ana. And he lives in Orange Park Acres.”
Julio assured her that part of the Shadway-Leben case fell into the jurisdiction of the Santa Ana Police Department, and he explained that cross-jurisdictional cooperation was not uncommon, but Teddy Bertlesman was politely skeptical and subtly uncooperative. Reese admired the diplomacy, finesse, and aplomb with which she fielded probing questions and answered without saying anything useful. Her respect for her boss and her determination to protect him became increasingly evident, yet she said nothing that made it possible to accuse her of lying or harboring a wanted man.
At last, recognizing the futility of the authoritarian approach, apparently hoping revelation of his true motives and a blatant bid for sympathy would work where authority had failed, Julio sighed, leaned back in his chair, and said, “Listen, Miss Bertlesman, we've lied to you. We aren't here in any official capacity. Not strictly speaking. In fact, we're both supposed to be on sick leave. Our captain would be furious if he knew we were still on this case, because federal agencies have taken charge and have told us to back off. But for a lot of reasons, we can't do that, not and keep our self-respect.”
Teddy Bertlesman frowned — quite prettily, Reese thought — and said, “I don't understand—”
Julio held up one slim hand. “Wait. Just listen for a moment.”
In a soft, sincere, and intimate voice far different from his official tone, he told her how Ernestina Hernandez and Becky Klienstad had been brutally murdered — one thrown in a dumpster, the other nailed to a wall. He told her about his own baby brother, Ernesto, who had been killed by rats a long time ago in a faraway place. He explained how that tragedy had contributed to his obsession with unjust death and how the similarity between the names Ernesto and Ernestina was one of the several things that had made the Hernandez girl's murder a special and very personal crusade for him.
“Though I'll admit,” Julio said, “if the names weren't similar and if other factors weren't th
e same, then I'd simply have found different reasons to make a crusade of this. Because I almost always make a crusade of a case. It's a bad habit of mine.”
“A wonderful habit,” Reese said.
Julio shrugged.
Reese was surprised that Julio was so thoroughly aware of his own motivations. Listening to his partner, contemplating the degree of insight and self-awareness at which these statements hinted, Reese acquired an even greater respect for the man.
“The point is,” Julio told Teddy Bertlesman, “I believe your boss and Rachael Leben are guilty of nothing, that they may be just pawns in a game they don't even fully understand. I think they're being used, that they might be killed as scapegoats to further the interests of others, perhaps even the interests of the government. They need help, and I guess what I'm trying to tell you is that they've sort of become another crusade of mine. Help me to help them, Teddy.”
Julio's performance was astonishing, and from anyone else it might have looked like exactly that — a mere performance. But there was no mistaking his sincerity or the depth of his concern. Though his dark eyes were watchful, and though there was a shrewdness in his face, his commitment to justice and his great warmth were unmistakably genuine.
Teddy Bertlesman was smart enough to see that Julio was not shucking and jiving her, and she was won over. She swung her long legs off the sofa and slid forward to the edge of it in a whispery rustle of pink silk, a sound that seemed to pass like a breeze over Reese, raising the small hairs on the backs of his hands and sending a pleasant shiver through him. “I knew darn well Ben Shadway was no threat to national security,” Teddy said. “Those federal agents came sniffing around with that line, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing in their faces. No, in fact, it was all I could do to keep from spitting in their faces.”
“Where might Ben Shadway have gone, he and Rachael Leben?” Julio asked. “Sooner or later, the feds are going to find them, and I think that for their sake Reese and I had better find them first. Do you have any idea where we should look?”
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