by Noel Hynd
Fact: Two crimes had occurred within days of each other within a few hundred yards of each other. Didn’t this put a charley horse in the long arm of coincidence?
Van Allen analyzed and tried to draw parallels. Parallels, he knew, solved crimes. Parallels always betrayed a perpetrator’s way of accomplishing things. Find the methods then match the perpetrator to the methods.
So what were the parallels? Better, what was the most jarring parallel?
Both incidents, he concluded, revolved around impossibility. A grave just didn’t blow open. And children just didn’t disappear into thin air. There was something else going on in each case, something unseen that Van Allen had not yet grasped.
He wrestled with it. He asked aloud a key question. “Why would Rebecca Moore kill her own children? Or consent to having them killed?” Were they in the way of her career? Or her relationship with her husband? Or compromising a relationship with a lover? He agonized over it. A full hour passed. Then a second hour. On the corner of Van Allen’s desk was a Timex digital watch. It chirped twice to tell him that it was eleven o’clock. But Van Allen kept digging. Yes, there was new material coming tomorrow from both Connecticut and Quantico. But he scoured the material he already had, trying to see what he had missed, if anything.
A few minutes before midnight, he was jarred by a sound from the next room. His head shot upright from his reading. The front door to his apartment had opened! His son and daughter had keys. So did the building superintendent. But it was almost midnight! Who would walk in at such an hour, except in an emergency?
“Hello?” he called.
No answer.
His instincts took charge. His hand went to the automatic pistol that was on his belt. His palm stayed upon it, waiting to draw it if necessary. Van Allen stood from his desk and spoke again. “Hello? Who’s there?”
Again no answer.
He moved to the door of his den and looked. He took one step forward.
The front door was half open, as if knocked loose by the wind. Yet there wasn’t any wind, and he had securely latched the door. He had even put a drop bolt in place.
He could see the entire room. There was no visitor that he could see. But he had a creepy feeling. His scalp tightened, and he waited.
Then an event occurred that he would remember for his entire life. Before him, there were slow footsteps. Like a man walking in heavy boots on the wooden floor of Van Allen’s living room. At first Van Allen thought he was imagining the sound. Then to his shock, he knew he wasn’t.
The footsteps were approaching him. Footsteps of an invisible intruder.
Van Allen held his ground. A good soldier: he didn’t retreat. But broke a sweat all over his body. His heart was ricocheting. He felt as if his chest would burst.
The footsteps continued toward him while, very faintly, he caught an echo of that piano music, like a distant roll on an old upright player.
Then the footsteps were within ten feet of him. Then five. Then they stopped. Van Allen cringed. He felt something strange, as if something like a warm blast of air was trying to press past him. He inclined against the invisible force. It didn’t hurt. And it almost soothed him as it pushed past.
Again, he held his ground. He was sweating profusely, but he managed to stand perfectly still. A moment passed. Then he was jarred by a tremendous crashing sound that had come from the room behind him, his den, from which he had just exited.
He turned toward the sound. Initially, he wondered what had suddenly fallen over. He went back to the door and stared into the room. He felt a rush of fear within him as he stared at something that could not possibly have happened.
The entire top of his desk had been swept completely clean. Everything on it —telephone, papers, books, framed portraits of his son and daughter, coffee cup and lamp — had been propelled from the top of the desk by some abrupt violent force. The various items had flown around the room and were in disarray. The lamp and one of the picture frames were broken on the floor. The wood beneath them was scarred from the impact.
The items from the desk had been knocked away with a force almost exceeding anything a strong man could do.
Instinctively, Van Allen’s hand started to raise his service weapon. But then he released it. Deep down he knew it would be useless to even draw it.
He scanned the room. There was no other human there, and he knew it. But something had hit that desktop like an invisible meteorite, or an angry superhuman arm, sweeping everything away. And Van Allen knew that, too. He recoiled from the room, stepping aside from the door. He hoped his deference would allow whatever presence was there to be on its way.
“You’ve made your point,” he whispered softly. “You’ve made your point.”
He felt like a madman mouthing those words. But he had no choice, because to see was to believe. So for several seconds he stood there, barely moving, hand upon his weapon. Nothing else in the room moved. He lost track of time. The longest minute of his life came and went.
Van Allen then felt a deep, gripping chill, something akin to particles of ice flowing through his veins. It nearly paralyzed him to have to come to the conclusions that were forced upon him. But he bravely stood his ground.
Then something invisible and powerful, cold as an iceberg and strong as the devil, rushed into him, through him, and past him. Van Allen had the sense of standing firm against a strong wind. Several random images tore through him at the same time, and for an instant, he thought he was sure that he had been transported to the Cemetery of Angels.
In his mind, he could see Carlton’s tomb, set right again. But then the invisible thing was gone. And Van Allen felt as if a great burden had been lifted.
His gaze found the cluttered floor of his den again. He decided which he would pick up first. The words formed. My son and my daughter, he thought, looking at the shattered picture frames.
Then to his considerable relief, he heard a pair of footsteps behind him. Then there was a comforting sound from the next room.
It was the front door to his apartment. This time, the door was closing.
Van Allen went back to his desk and slumped in his chair. He looked at the mess around the room and felt his mouth, dry and parched. He wondered if he had imagined everything that had transpired and if he had blacked out and caused the disarray himself.
But he knew to the contrary.
He knew, because he trusted his own senses. He thought back to the recent nights of bad dreams, of imagined intrusions in his apartment, and of the time he felt that the covers had been ripped off his bed as he had slept. He spent the night there in his chair, not even rising to gather the two scattered files. Instead, he tried to put this new reality in place until sleep overtook him.
At dawn, dopey, shattered with fatigue, his eyes burning, he thought he had it. He thought he had the philosophical twine that would bind the Moore case and the Carlton case together.
An invisible assailant, as he had witnessed it, had been the perp in both jobs. Consoled by this notion, he then leaned forward onto his desktop, folded his aching arms, and slept.
He awoke four hours later to a nasty jangling telephone. Alice Aldrich’s worried voice was on the other end of the line. He assured her that he was fine and would be on his way to the office shortly.
Shortly: which meant as soon as he could unscramble his brain. His frontal lobe felt like an egg sizzling in a frying pan.
And his eyes still roared with tiredness and his brain now refused to assimilate the impulses of the previous evening. Instead, he told himself, the two cases had driven him to the edge of a nervous breakdown, and he must have imagined the footsteps and the phantom visitor of the night before.
The mess on the floor, he further told himself, was the result of one clear swipe of his own arm, not one from another dimension.
He told these lies to himself again as he shaved, washed, and changed clothes. He looked in the mirror and was convinced that there were entire streaks of grayi
ng hair in his head that hadn’t existed twenty-four hours earlier. And a whole new road map of lines surrounded his eyes, as well.
Age, age, age, he told himself. Age and dementia were creeping in on little crow’s feet. When he got to work Double A asked him what was new. He lied again. “Nothing,” Ed Van Allen said.
Then she left him alone. And he played with his own thoughts as he waited for yet two more visitors, the professional couriers who would bring him police reports from Connecticut and Virginia, reports which would anchor him back in reality and —he hoped to God! — offer him a more prosaic explanation of what was transpiring.
A haunting, for a rational man, was a tough concept to swallow.
Chapter 36
The muscular, starkly featured man in the dark brown suit and open collar who stepped from US AIR 324 from Las Vegas at Los Angeles International that Sunday afternoon was a man with a mission. And this time, he would need to complete it. Having just blown in excess of twenty thousand dollars in the Nevada gambling halls within the last forty-eight hours, he needed to get back to his work.
At the airport, he took a shuttle bus to one of the better car rental bureaus. He produced a credit card in the name of Peter O’Neill and obtained a perfectly anonymous white Chevrolet for three days. There was a young Vietnamese woman behind the counter. She found the man so unattractive that she was frightened of him.
But he spoke to her courteously, accepted the car she assigned him, and thanked her. Then he drove into Los Angeles.
At one of the anonymous large hotels that catered to conventions, the man kept the identity of O’Neill tucked away in his wallet. Then, he produced a second set of licenses and credit cards and registered under the name of Harold McDuffie. He engaged the registration clerk for a few moments in conversation about the insurance business, a topic that assured that the clerk’s attention would glaze over. Then he placed five hundred dollars in cash on deposit, enough to guarantee two nights’ stay.
“I wonder if you would check if there’s mail for me,” the new arrival said after signing the guest slip. The clerk disappeared for a moment and returned with one piece of mail for a Mr. McDuffie. It was a small four-by-six manila envelope, sealed tightly with heavy tape. Had anyone bothered to notice, the envelope bore a local postmark. It had arrived three days earlier.
The man accepted his key and went to his room. He had only one suitcase. He carried it himself. He was pleased with the room. He unpacked within a few minutes. He had two extra shirts and one extra sports jacket. There were a few extra pairs of underwear and a heavy pair of black sneakers, best for moving around at night. There was also a heavy wool shirt of a dark navy color, a black turtleneck, and dark indigo jeans. The man had left his other clothing at an airport locker in Las Vegas. He would pick up his things on his way back East.
There was a small knapsack in the suitcase. It contained the man’s working equipment. He donned a pair of gloves and sat down on the edge of the bed in his hotel room. He opened the knapsack and removed the contents, making a final check over his professional equipment.
There wasn’t much. A screwdriver. An up to date California license plate, recently stolen from a parking lot in Northridge. And a six-foot strand of rope, recently removed from a home not far from the Hollywood Bowl. There was also a local street map of Los Angeles. The map had some markings on it in ink.
The man set the map aside for a moment and picked up the rope. He tested it. Very strong. He pulled it hard. It had no give to it. It would make a dandy garrote.
He took the rope into the bathroom. He worked with it for a moment and made a noose out of it. He was more than adept at constructing a perfect hangman’s knot.
He tied one end of the rope to the crossbar that held the shower curtain. He braced the bar with a powerful arm and felt the strength of the noose on the other extremity of the rope.
He was pleased. This was an excellent instrument of execution.
The man returned to the sleeping area and placed the rope back in the knapsack. He sat down again on the edge of the bed and mentally went through his plan. He would need to complete his assignment within the next day. He would wait for a single telephone call that would give him the proper time. At that hour, he would switch license plates on the rental car so that no one would be able to place him in the area of his crime.
He opened the map and read the directions written on it, showing the easiest route to 2136 Topango Gardens. Attached to the map was a photograph of the recently refurbished Queen Anne house at that address.
He memorized the route. He had been in Los Angeles before, so the directions were not mysterious. He would have no trouble following them.
Why not take a quick drive by the area today? Case it. But don’t get too close. One never knew how the bungling police could inadvertently tangle up the best-laid plans of execution.
The man took the elevator down to the hotel garage. No one was there. Everything was going perfectly so far, as smooth as undisturbed ice in February. He stepped into his car and started it. Then he was out into the late afternoon.
The sun came out a few moments later as the man drove west on a busy Wilshire Boulevard. When he got to the intersection with La Cienega, the sun was intense. So he reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out his sunglasses. They were wraparound, and he liked to think that they gave him a particular air of menace.
Not that he needed it.
Chapter 37
Fewer than three miles away, Rebecca Moore sat in her bedroom and listened to the quiet of the house around her. No mysterious music creeping into her home or her heart from places unknown. No creaking of floorboards or inexplicable ticking in the walls. Nor was there the sound that she really longed to hear. The sound of her children’s voices. The sound of her family.
Outside the day was sunny, but still. She rose from where she sat on the bed and went to a window. She pushed aside the curtain and glanced out.
Two weeks had expired since Karen and Patrick had vanished. Nothing new had happened in the last ten days. Rebecca could see the results at the end of her driveway. For the first time, there was not a single reporter keeping a vigil outside 2136 Topango.
She felt lonely. She pulled out her cell phone and called Melissa. But the call jumped to voice mail. Melissa had caught on to some private tutoring gigs in American Civilization during the last week, and Rebecca had seen less of her. Not that she didn’t call in or come by at least once a day. She was that type of friend.
Rebecca pulled her hand away from the window. The curtain silently glided back into place. She turned and walked to the bedroom door. She stood in it for several seconds.
Then she raised her eyes and looked to the turret room. Where was Ronny now? Who was Ronny? She looked forward now to her session on Monday with Dr. Lim. Maybe that would yield some answers.
Meanwhile, further questions besieged her. Why did the ghost appear only when he desired? She wondered if the spirit could be summoned. Was there something she could do to provoke him into coming?
And who the devil was he, anyway?
It was nearly 5:00P.M. Kicking around this old house waiting for something to happen was driving her crazy. How could she hold on to her own sanity much longer? Why did Bill have to spend so much time at his office? And why was she starting to feel herself turning against her husband?
Resentment? Distrust? A different way of handling the tensions of Karen and Patrick’s disappearance? She didn’t know. There were so many things she didn’t know.
She must have been standing there for several minutes, she realized, when she became aware that her eyes hadn’t moved. They were set upon the half open door to the turret room.
She was aware of movement. A change in the lighting. A shadow crossing the floor. She couldn’t see into the room because the door was blocking her vision. But something had moved.
She walked across the hallway and approached the room. She arrived at the door and list
ened.
Music? That old time piano tinkling?
No.
A voice? A heartbeat? A child’s cry?
No. Not that, either.
In fact, nothing. Dire silence.
She pushed the door open. The hinges uttered a little tortured wail, but the door gave way easily. Rebecca braced herself, waiting to see at least one human figure standing before her. But again, there was none. And now she realized what she had seen affecting the light in the room. It was the sunlight through the wavering branches of the large tree outside the window. That or a cloud passing over the sun.
Or so it appeared.
She stepped into the room.
“Anyone here?” she asked softly. “Can anyone hear me?”
She would have given ten years of her life to have heard Karen or Patrick answer. She walked to the center of the room then turned in every direction. She knew exactly what she was doing. She was trying to lure the ghost into communicating.
“Come on,” she said aloud, her words echoing in the quiet house. “Someone? Talk to me. Make yourself known.”
Silence answered, a painful ironic silence because now silence was exactly what she did not want. There was too much silence in her life now. The silence from a husband who seemed to ignore her. The silence from the FBI and LAPD, who seemed to accuse her, but never resolved her case.
“I want to see you,” she said aloud. “Whatever spirit is in this room. Whatever soul haunts this house. Whoever you are, whoever you were… Please… Come forth. Make yourself known.”
A creak responded in the attic above her. A creak that made her heart soar but which led nowhere.
She stared upward, toward the ceiling. “Ronny?” she asked. “Come on. Please.”
She cocked her head. She listened more intently than ever.
Oh, how she wanted to hear that piano music now. Lord, how she would have liked to have felt that strange sense of something invisible sweeping by her.
