by Dean Koontz
No puncture marked his thumb.
He was as disturbed by his expectation of a wound as by the phantom nip. His revulsion at the cold squirming sensation lingered although he had touched nothing worse than a smooth glass surface. Intellectually, he understood that the foul sensation of squirming serpents must have been the consequence of some rare kind of static charge, but he still felt as though he had touched something alien and vile.
The shapes on the computer were amorphous once more. Lionel watched for five minutes, waiting for the handprint to appear again, assuming that it must be a programmed feature of the screen saver, but his vigil went unrewarded. Finally, he switched off the system in case there might be an electrical problem with it.
In the upstairs hall, he stood listening.
He still felt watched.
Lionel Timmins wondered if he had been working too hard lately.
33
ALTHOUGH HE COULD DO NOTHING TO IDENTIFY AND PROTECT the family at risk, indeed because of his helplessness, John Calvino knew sleep would elude him. He sat in a library armchair, trying to lose himself in the latest book by one of his favorite authors, but his mind would not relent from its obsession. He read page after page, turned from chapter to chapter, but the story failed to become as vivid to him as the memory of what Alton Blackwood had done to the Sollenburgs, the homicides that might this night be repeated.
At eleven-thirty, he put the book aside and phoned the Robbery-Homicide watch commander to learn if anyone had been called out on an unusual 187—murder—during the evening. He seldom checked in like this, but his call was not entirely out of character, either. Only anxiety, not intuition, compelled him to pick up the phone.
The thirty-third day did not begin for another half an hour, but Blackwood’s crimes two decades earlier twice bridged the midnight hour. For whatever reason he kept to a thirty-three-day schedule, the killer sometimes failed to wait for that magic day to arrive. His desire, his need, his hunger for violence could drive him to an early start, though he always finished his work according to his sacred calendar.
When John learned from the watch commander about the shootings at the Woburn house hours earlier, he knew this could be the one, must be the one, even if it seemed to have gone wrong for Blackwood. The Sollenburgs and the Woburns were both families of four; in each instance, the parents were shot; and the Woburns had one son and one daughter, just like the Sollenburgs.
He turned off the lights in the library and hurried upstairs to tell Nicky that he was going out on a case, which was not a lie even if it might not be strictly the truth. This case was not his, but it was Lionel’s case, according to the watch commander. And John had a legitimate—if personal—interest in it even if he had completed little more than half of his thirty-day leave, about which he had also managed to tell Nicky neither the truth nor a lie.
Her studio was dark, and in the master bedroom, John found her sound asleep in the soft light of her bedside lamp. On her nightstand stood an empty brandy snifter beside a copy of the complete poems of T. S. Eliot, which she had read often.
She failed to stir when he whispered her name. He wrote a note and placed it in the empty brandy glass.
Sleeping, Nicolette looked as innocent as a child, and if the only transgressions that counted were those done with the intent to transgress, then she was perhaps as blameless as the children she had brought into the world.
At half past midnight, when John arrived in the ICU visitors’ lounge at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Jack Woburn’s sister Lois was text-messaging a status report to relatives. The exhausted boy slept on a thinly padded three-seat couch.
The daughter stood at a window, gazing out at the night and the city. She turned to John, and he knew beyond doubt that the Woburns were meant to be the family with which the Sollenburg murders would be restaged. Blackwood was consecrated to the ritualistic destruction of what was both beautiful and innocent, two qualities of this girl, as they had been qualities also of John’s lost sisters, Marnie and Giselle.
As he introduced himself to Davinia, his voice trembled and broke, so that she must have wondered why the suffering of her family—strangers to him—should evoke such emotion. He could not tell her that he was thankful for her survival not only as anyone should be thankful that the life of another was spared, but also because her escape from their otherworldly enemy gave him hope that his family might likewise be saved.
When Lois completed her BlackBerry message, she shared with John the news she texted to relatives. Brenda Woburn had undergone a forty-five-minute surgery for her gunshot wound, had come through brilliantly, and had recovered from anesthesia. She was lying now in an ICU bed. They expected soon to be allowed to see her for a few minutes. Jack Woburn remained in surgery, his prognosis grave.
John sat with them, hopeful that after the children had been allowed to see their mother, he would be permitted a couple of minutes with her, as well.
The four uniformed officers, who are dealing with onlookers, return to the house one at a time to check on the progress of the techs or to use the half bath off the ground-floor hall. Patrolmen, technicians, crime-lab photographer, morgue-wagon jockeys all touch doorknobs, doors, and door casings not directly related to the crime scene. They touch the flush on the half-bath toilet, faucet handles, light switches. By these contacts, they are known and assessed.
All are more accessible than Lionel Timmins, two offer easy mounts, and the easier of these is Andy Tane, a uniformed patrolman. Andy sometimes uses the threat of arrest to receive free services from prostitutes, scouts teenage runaways for pimps, and takes a finder’s fee for each girl he conveys to them. When he was little, his mother called him Andy Candy. He likes the hookers to call him that, as well, when he uses them. He also accepts bribes from other criminal entrepreneurs either for pretending to be unaware of their activities or for actively assisting them.
Andy Candy Tane is known in full when he enters the house by the front door to use the half bath. When he flushes the toilet, he is taken, which in his case is by far the most appropriate moment. Andy is tall and strong, thirty-six, a worthy horse for the ride ahead.
After the morgue wagon departs with the body of Reese Salsetto, only one pair of uniforms is needed until the criminalists leave and Lionel Timmins locks the house. Andy Tane and his partner, Mickey Scriver, are the first unit released from the scene.
Andy and Mickey are on a four-day-a-week, forty-hour schedule—cruising the streets, on the lookout for bad guys, catching calls as they come—from 6:00 P.M. until 4:00 A.M. They usually take a dinner break at eight if they’re not in the middle of a collar or responding to a priority code.
They have been together only two weeks; and though Mickey is still trying to figure out if the partnership will work, Andy already prefers a change, a partner more flexible, more nuanced. Mickey is ex-army, his head full of self-limiting words like honor and duty. He’s ambitious, intending to make a rep in this rolling-blue work and then move up to plainclothes, possibly the narcotics bureau, not because the big bribes are there, which is why Andy might consider it if he were ambitious, but because that is where the action is. Mickey Scriver likes action. He wants to do work that “makes a difference in the community.” Andy loathes action as much as he loathes the community; and he would by now loathe Mickey if not for his sense of humor.
Andy’s previous partner, Vin Wasco, had been on the take, too, which made it a lot easier for Andy to conduct his own business. But Vin has gone under the knife for a benign brain tumor. Although doctors say he will make a complete recovery, Andy will be amazed and disappointed if Vin doesn’t fake himself into a full, lifetime disability pension.
At half past midnight, there are fewer places to catch dinner than at eight o’clock. Mickey suggests takeout from an Italian place that does good sandwiches, because if they eat in the car, they’re ready to take a priority-code call if they get one. Mickey of course is always happier swinging the hammer than polishing i
t. Mickey goes into the joint alone to place their orders because Andy doesn’t want any restaurant owner in his precinct to see him paying for a meal. He and Vin never paid. But Mickey acts like there’s no alternative to paying, as if the tight-assed sonofabitch not only has his lily-white heart set on promotion to plainclothes in Narcotics but also on sainthood.
When Mickey returns with two bags of takeout—a meatball-and-cheese sub with Sicilian slaw, a steak-and-cheese sub with regular slaw, two bags of potato chips, two large Cokes—Andy doesn’t want to be seen eating in the damn parking lot. Carpenters, plumbers, gardeners, and the like eat in their vehicles, and Andy strongly believes that it brings disrespect to the uniform when people see their law-enforcement officers chowing down in cars like common laborers.
Three blocks from the restaurant, at Lake Park, Andy pulls around the chain and stanchions that close the entry road until morning, drives on the grass far enough to reconnect with the pavement, parks on the sward near the shore, and leaves the engine running but kills the headlights. The lake isn’t so big that it’s a great blackness. Shore lights shimmer on dark water, and there’s a view if you’re into that kind of thing.
Andy claims he needs to take a leak, says he’ll be right back, and walks to the edge of the embankment. Dark grass slopes ten feet to a pale beach at which black water gently laps. The moon rocks in the cradle of the lake. At this hour and in this chill, the park is deserted. Andy pretends to start to piss, does a double take that maybe he oversells, takes two steps down the slope, and then hurries back to the patrol car, zipping up his fly as he goes, to Mickey’s window, which the saint is already cranking down.
“I think there’s a deader on the beach,” Andy says.
“Maybe it’s a drunk,” Mickey says around a mouthful of steak and cheese.
“You don’t see too many naked blondes sleeping off a bender on the beach. Gimme a flashlight.”
Mickey gets out of the car with two flashlights. Because he’s Mickey and hot to trade his shirt badge for a walleted one, he takes the lead, hurrying toward the spot where Andy had pretended to kill the grass with his bull stream.
Ridden as authoritatively as any horse in all of history before him, Andy Tane draws his pistol and squeezes off two rounds. Shot in the back, the dutiful and honorable Officer Scriver collapses facedown, his flashlight rolling on the close-cropped grass. Andy comes in fast behind him, the swivel holster on his utility belt slapping against his thigh, to pump a third round in the back of good Saint Mickey’s head, point-blank.
This will most likely be the last night of Andy Candy’s life; therefore, there’s no reason for him to dispose of the body or work out an alibi. He returns to the cruiser, throws the bags of takeout from the car, and drives out of the park.
Some horses require more effort to be ridden than do others. In horror, some buck and kick, metaphorically speaking, when they see themselves committing atrocities. Others, like Reese Salsetto, actually feel liberated by their new master, and respond less like ridden beasts than like conspirators. They are thrilled that they have been freed from the last constraints that hobbled them, from the fear of death, and may now be the fully revealed and ruthless apostles of chaos that they have longed to be.
Andy Tane is neither horrified nor exhilarated. His thousands of corrupt acts—bribe-taking, facilitating white slavery, rape by intimidation, running a protection racket with his badge—have been committed without the ardor and the glee that would have fermented his soul into a thick, dark, intoxicating devil’s brew. Instead he has done his evil in the unimaginative and plodding manner of a dull-minded bureaucrat, in the process poaching the leaves of his soul until they are nothing but a cup of weak tea. Incapable of either outrage or delight at the acts his rider forces him to commit, Andy Tane can react only as the coward he has for so long been, retreating into a kind of automatismic trance, allowing himself to be used while retreating from all awareness of what he has been forced to do.
He knows to which hospital the Woburns were taken, and there as well he will find the boy and girl, the unfinished business that his rider is determined to address.
After Brenda Woburn’s children and sister had been allowed, as a group, to spend ten minutes with her, the head nurse in the ICU was hesitant to admit John. His badge didn’t impress her. But his powers of gentle persuasion, long practiced with witnesses, and his earnest assurances convinced her to give him three minutes.
“But I’ll be timing you, and I mean just three,” she warned.
When John slid the curtain aside from Brenda Woburn’s bed bay and then pulled it closed behind him, she did not open her eyes. She seemed to be fast asleep.
Her heart, respiration, and blood pressure were being monitored, but she was not on a ventilator. An intravenous drip maintained her body fluids and sugar level. She received oxygen through nasal cannulas.
Tendrils of her short dark hair, damp and pasted flat, looked like the checks and X’s of some game played on her pallid brow with felt-tip markers. The deep hollows of her eyes seemed exaggerated, resembling those of luckless travelers in movies about survival on a desert trek along a route where every oasis was a mirage. Her lips were bloodless.
John spoke her name three times before she opened her eyes. Her gaze resolved on him as he identified himself. She was on painkillers, but the effect was more apparent in the slackness of her face and in her lethargy than in her eyes, which were clear, focused, and suggestive of alertness.
“You must’ve had handgun training,” he said. “Three mortal hits. Not a round wasted. That’s more than luck. Even if they never make an issue of it, they won’t believe you accidentally shot yourself.”
She stared at him. Her voice was parched: “What do you want?”
Mindful of his three-minute limit, he went to the heart of it: “Twenty years ago, four families were murdered in my hometown. The fourth was my family—both my parents, two younger sisters.”
Unblinking, she stared at him.
“I killed the killer. Now I have a family of my own.… ”
The light from overhead did not paint a flat sheen on her eyes but fell away into them.
“A family of my own now, and I’m afraid it’s happening again. You must’ve seen the news … the Lucases.”
Brenda Woburn blinked, blinked.
“They were killed exactly the way that first family was killed twenty years ago. The second family back then, the Sollenburgs—the father, mother, and son were shot to death. In that order. Daughter was raped. Tortured. For hours.”
The soft beep and the spiking light pulse of the ECG monitor tracked an increase in her heartbeat.
“I don’t want to distress you,” John said. “But I need to know something. I’m not here as a cop. I’m here as a husband and father.”
The automatic sphygmomanometer showed a rise in Brenda’s blood pressure.
“Why did you shoot yourself?”
She licked her lips. Her gaze slid to her left, to the hanging IV bags, past them to the heart monitor.
“Billy Lucas didn’t kill his family,” John said. “Your brother, Reese, didn’t kill your husband.”
Her stare returned to him.
“You can tell me. Please. Tell me. Why did you shoot yourself?”
“Suicide.”
“You meant to kill yourself? Why?”
“To stop it.”
“Stop what?”
She hesitated. Then: “Stop whatever it was. Stop it from taking me. Control of me.”
And here was the revelation. Mere truth and yet extraordinary. Confirmation.
“Cold and crawling, slithering. Not just in my head. Everywhere in my body. Skin to bones.”
“You reacted so fast.”
“No time. It knew me, all of me. In an instant. But I knew some of it, too, how it wanted Lenny dead, Davinia not dead … not right away.”
John thought of his sisters, stripped and brutalized, and his legs felt weak. He leaned with bo
th hands on the bed railing.
Brenda shuddered as though recalling the cold slithery invader fingering the marrow in her bones. “What was it?”
“The killer I killed twenty years ago.”
They stared at each other. He suspected that she might wish, as he almost did, that they were insane, delusional, rather than to know that such a thing as this could be true.
“Is it over?” she asked.
“For you. Maybe not for me. Unless by casting him out, you broke the spell, stopped the cycle, something. Then maybe it could be over for me, too.”
She reached out to him with her left hand. He took it, held it.
34
RIDDEN LESS LIKE A HORSE THAN LIKE A MACHINE, WITHDRAWN to a coward’s perch in a back room of his brain, Andy Tane parks the patrol car near the entrance of St. Joseph’s Hospital. In the main lobby, half the fluorescent lights are doused. The information desk is not staffed at this hour. The gift shop is closed. No one is in sight.
Maybe he should have parked at the ER entrance. But he knows how to find his way to the emergency room by an interior route.
At this late hour, even the ER is deserted, except for three patients. A heavyset woman sits at the only open registration window. A middle-aged couple, she in a blue-and-white exercise suit, he in tan jeans and a white T-shirt, sit watching the blood-soaked towel wrapped around his left hand, waiting to be taken seriously by someone.
Politely because politeness will more quickly get him what he wants, but with official solemnity, Andy apologizes to the heavyset woman and interrupts the registration clerk—ELAINE DIGGS, according to her breast-pocket badge—to inquire as to the whereabouts of two gunshot victims, Brenda and Jack Woburn. Elaine Diggs consults her computer, makes a quick phone call, and reports, “Ms. Woburn is in the ICU. Mr. Woburn recently came out of surgery and is in post-op recovery.”
As an officer of the law, Andy Tane is familiar with the layout of the hospital. The ICU is on the tenth floor. The operating rooms are all on the second floor, as is the recovery room, where patients are taken after surgery until the anesthesia has worn off and their vital signs are stable.
