Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  Conscious avoidance—facing the window, keeping the detective out of sight—was a proven technique for maintaining self-control. Counselor, counsel thyself. Reducing the level of interaction was supposed to reduce anger as well.

  She hoped it worked better for her clients than it worked for her, because she was still seething.

  At the table with the detective, Marty seemed determined to be reasonable and cooperative. Being Marty, he would cling as long as possible to the hope that Lowbock’s mysterious antagonism could be assuaged. Angry as he might be himself—and he was angrier than she had ever seen him—he still had tremendous faith in the power of good intentions and words, especially words, to restore and maintain harmony under any circumstances.

  To Lowbock, Marty said, “It had to be him drank the beers.”

  “Him?” Lowbock asked.

  “The look-alike. He must’ve been in the house a couple of hours while I was out.”

  “So the intruder drank the three Coronas?”

  “I emptied the trash last night, Sunday night, so I know they aren’t empties left from the weekend.”

  “This guy, he broke into your house because . . . how did he say it exactly?”

  “He said he needed his life.”

  “Needed his life?”

  “Yes. He asked me why I’d stolen his life, who was I.”

  “So he breaks in here,” Lowbock said, “agitated, talking crazy, well-armed . . . but while he’s waiting for you to come home, he decides to kick back and have three bottles of Corona.”

  Without turning away from the window, Paige said, “My husband didn’t have those beers, Lieutenant. He’s not a drunk.”

  Marty said, “I’d certainly be willing to take a Breathalyzer test, if you’d like. If I drank that many beers, one after another, my blood-alcohol level would show it.”

  “Well,” Lowbock said, “if we were going to do that, we should have tested you first thing. But it’s not necessary, Mr. Stillwater. I’m certainly not saying you were intoxicated, that you imagined the whole thing under the influence.”

  “Then what are you saying?” Paige demanded.

  “Sometimes,” Lowbock observed, “people drink to give themselves the courage to face a difficult task.”

  Marty sighed. “Maybe I’m dense, Lieutenant. I know there’s an unpleasant implication in what you just said, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what I’m supposed to infer from it.”

  “Did I say I meant for you to infer anything?”

  “Would you just please stop being cryptic and tell us why you’re treating me like this, like a suspect instead of a victim?”

  Lowbock was silent.

  Marty pressed the issue: “I know this situation is incredible, this dead-ringer business, but if you’d just bluntly tell me the reasons you’re so skeptical, I’m sure I could eliminate your doubts. At least I could try.”

  Lowbock was unresponsive for so long that Paige almost turned from the window to have a look at him, wondering if his expression would reveal something about the meaning of his silence.

  Finally he said, “We live in a litigious world, Mr. Stillwater. If a cop makes the slightest mistake handling a delicate situation, the department gets sued and sometimes the officer’s career gets flushed away. It happens to good men.”

  “What’ve lawsuits got to do with this? I’m not going to sue anyone, Lieutenant.”

  “Say a guy catches a call about an armed robbery in progress, so he answers it, does his duty, finds himself in real jeopardy, getting shot at, blows away the perp in self-defense. And what happens next?”

  “I guess you’ll tell me.”

  “Next thing you know, the perp’s family and the ACLU are after the department about excessive violence, want a financial settlement. They want the officer dismissed, even put the poor sucker on trial, accuse him of being a fascist.”

  Marty said, “It stinks. I agree with you. These days it seems like the world’s been turned upside-down but—”

  “If the same cop doesn’t respond with force, and some bystander gets hurt ’cause the perp wasn’t blown away at the first opportunity, the department gets sued for negligence by the victim’s family, and the same activists come down on our necks like a ton of bricks, but for different reasons. People say the cop didn’t pull the trigger fast enough because he’s insensitive to the minority group the victim was a part of, would’ve been quicker if the victim was white, or they say he’s incompetent, or he’s a coward.”

  “I wouldn’t want your job. I know how difficult it is,” Marty commiserated. “But no cop has shot or failed to shoot anyone here, and I don’t see what this has to do with our situation.”

  “A cop can get in as much trouble making accusations as he can shooting perps,” Lowbock said.

  “So your point is, you’re skeptical of my story, but you won’t say why until you’ve got absolute proof it’s bullshit.”

  “He won’t even admit to being skeptical,” Paige said sourly. “He won’t take any position, one way or the other, because taking a position means taking a risk.”

  Marty said, “But, Lieutenant, how are we going to get done with this, how am I going to be able to convince you all of this happened just as I said it did, if you won’t tell me why you doubt it?”

  “Mr. Stillwater, I haven’t said that I doubt you.”

  “Jesus,” Paige said.

  “All I ask,” Lowbock said, “is that you do your best to answer my questions.”

  “And all we ask,” Paige said, still keeping her back to the man, “is that you find the lunatic who tried to kill Marty.”

  “This look-alike.” Lowbock spoke the word flatly, without any inflection whatsoever, which seemed more sarcastic than if he had said it with a heavy sneer.

  “Yes,” Paige hissed, “this look-alike.”

  She didn’t doubt Marty’s story, as wild as it was, and she knew that somehow the existence of the dead-ringer was tied to—and would ultimately explain—her husband’s fugue, bizarre nightmare, and other recent problems.

  Now her fury at the detective faded as she began to accept that the police, for whatever reason, were not going to help them. Anger gave way to fear because she realized they were up against something exceedingly strange and were going to have to deal with it entirely on their own.

  5

  Clocker returned from the front of the Road King to report that the keys were in the ignition in the ON position, but the fuel tank was evidently empty and the battery dead. The cabin lights could not be turned on.

  Worried that the flashlight beam, seen from outside, would look suspicious to anyone pulling into the rest area, Drew Oslett quickly examined the two cadavers in the cramped dining nook. Because the spilled blood was thoroughly dry and caked hard, he knew the man and woman had been dead more than just a few hours. However, although rigor mortis was still present in both bodies, they were no longer entirely stiff; the rigor evidently had peaked and had begun to fade, as it usually did between eighteen and thirty-six hours after death.

  The bodies had not begun to decompose noticeably as yet. The only bad smell came from their open mouths—the sour gases produced by the rotting food in their stomachs.

  “Best guesstimate—they’ve been dead since sometime yesterday afternoon,” he told Clocker.

  The Road King had been sitting in the rest area for more than twenty-four hours, so at least one Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer must have seen it on two separate shifts. State law surely forbade using rest areas as campsites. No electrical connections, water supplies, or sewage-tank pump-outs were provided, which created a potential for health problems. Sometimes cops might be lenient with retirees afraid of driving in weather as inclement as the storm that had assaulted Oklahoma yesterday; the American Association of Retired People bumper sticker on the back of the motorhome might have gained these people some dispensation. But not even a sympathetic cop would let them park two nights. At any moment, a patrol car
might pull into the rest area and a knock might come at the door.

  Averse to complicating their already serious problems by killing a highway patrolman, Oslett turned away from the dead couple and hastily proceeded with the search of the motorhome. He was no longer cautious out of fear that Alfie, dysfunctional and disobedient, would put a bullet in his head. Alfie was long gone from here.

  He found the discarded shoes on the kitchen counter. With a large serrated knife, Alfie had sawed at one of the heels until he had exposed the electronic circuitry and the attendant chain of tiny batteries.

  Staring at the Rockports and the pile of rubber shavings, Oslett was chilled by a premonition of disaster. “He never knew about the shoes. Why would he get it in his head to cut them open?”

  “Well, he knows what he knows,” Clocker said.

  Oslett interpreted Clocker’s statement to mean that part of Alfie’s training included state-of-the-art electronic surveillance equipment and techniques. Consequently, though he was not told that he was “tagged,” he knew that a microminiature transponder could be made small enough to fit in the heel of a shoe and, upon receipt of a remote microwave activating signal, could draw sufficient power from a series of watch batteries to transmit a trackable signal for at least seventy-two hours. Although he was unable to recall what he was or who controlled him, Alfie was intelligent enough to apply his knowledge of surveillance to his own situation and reach the logical conclusion that his controllers had made prudent provisions for locating and following him in the event he went renegade, even if they had been thoroughly convinced rebellion was not possible.

  Oslett dreaded reporting the bad news to the home office in New York. The organization didn’t kill the bearer of bad tidings, especially not if his surname happened to be Oslett. However, as Alfie’s primary handler, he knew that some of the blame would stick to him even though the operative’s rebellion was not his fault to any degree whatsoever. The error must be in Alfie’s fundamental conditioning, damn it, not in his handling.

  Leaving Clocker in the kitchen to keep a lookout for unwanted visitors, Oslett quickly inspected the rest of the motorhome.

  He found nothing else of interest except a pile of discarded clothes on the floor of the main bedroom at the back of the vehicle. In the beam of the flashlight, he needed to disturb the garments only slightly with the toe of his shoe to see that they were what Alfie had been wearing when he had boarded the plane for Kansas City on Saturday morning.

  Oslett returned to the kitchen, where Clocker waited in the dark. He turned the flashlight on the dead pensioners one last time. “What a mess. Damn it, this didn’t have to happen.”

  Referring disdainfully to the murdered couple, Clocker said, “Who cares, for God’s sake? They were nothing but a couple of fucking Klingons anyway.”

  Oslett had been referring not to the victims but to the fact that Alfie was more than merely a renegade now, was an untraceable renegade, thus jeopardizing the organization and everyone in it. He had no more pity for the dead man and woman than did Clocker, felt no responsibility for what had happened to them, and figured the world, in fact, was better off without two more non-productive parasites sucking on the substance of society and hindering traffic in their lumbering home on wheels. He had no love for the masses. As he saw it, the basic problem with the average man and woman was precisely that they were so average and that there were so many of them, taking far more than they gave to the world, quite incapable of managing their own lives intelligently let alone society, government, the economy, and the environment.

  Nevertheless, he was alarmed by the way Clocker had phrased his contempt for the victims. The word “Klingons” made him uneasy because it was the name of the alien race that had been at war with humanity through so many television episodes and movies in the Star Trek series before events in that fictional far future had begun to reflect the improvement of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in the real world. Oslett found Star Trek tedious, insufferably boring. He never had understood why so many people had such a passion for it. But Clocker was an ardent fan of the series, unabashedly called himself a “Trekker,” could reel off the plots of every movie and episode ever filmed, and knew the personal histories of every character as if they were all his dearest friends. Star Trek was the only topic about which he seemed willing or able to conduct a conversation; and as taciturn as he was most of the time, he was to the same degree garrulous when the subject of his favorite fantasy arose.

  Oslett tried to make sure that it never arose.

  Now, in his mind, the dreaded word “Klingons” clanged like a firehouse bell.

  With the entire organization at risk because Alfie’s trail had been lost, with something new and exquisitely violent loose in the world, the return trip to Oklahoma City through so many miles of lightless and unpeopled land was going to be bleak and depressing. The last thing Oslett needed was to be assaulted by one of Clocker’s exhaustingly enthusiastic monologues about Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Scotty, the rest of the crew, and their adventures in the far reaches of a universe that was, on film, stuffed with far more meaning and moments of sophomoric enlightenment than was the real universe of hard choices, ugly truths, and mindless cruelty.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Oslett said, pushing past Clocker and heading for the front of the Road King. He didn’t believe in God, but he prayed nonetheless ardently that Karl Clocker would subside into his usual self-absorbed silence.

  6

  Cyrus Lowbock excused himself temporarily to confer with some colleagues who wanted to talk to him elsewhere in the house.

  Marty was relieved by his departure.

  When the detective left the dining room, Paige returned from the window and sat once more in the chair beside Marty.

  Although the Pepsi was gone, some of the ice cubes had melted in the mug, and he drank the cold water. “All I want now is to put an end to this. We shouldn’t be here, not with that guy out there somewhere, loose.”

  “Do you think we should be worried about the kids?”

  ... need . . . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .

  Marty said, “Yeah. I’m worried shitless.”

  “But you shot the guy twice in the chest.”

  “I thought I’d left him in the foyer with a broken back, too, but he got up and ran away. Or limped away. Or maybe even vanished into thin air. I don’t know what the hell’s going on here, Paige, but it’s wilder than anything I’ve ever put in a novel. And it’s not over, not by a long shot.”

  “If it was just Vic and Kathy looking after them, but there’s a cop over there too.”

  “If this bastard knew where the girls were, he’d waste that cop, Vic, and Kathy in about a minute flat.”

  “You handled him.”

  “I was lucky, Paige. Just damned lucky. He never imagined I had a gun in the desk drawer or that I’d use one if I had it. I took him by surprise. He won’t let that happen again. He’ll have all the surprise on his side.”

  He tilted the mug to his lips, let a melting ice cube slide onto his tongue.

  “Marty, when did you take the guns out of the garage cabinet and load them?”

  Speaking around the ice cube, he said, “I saw how that jolted you. I did it this morning. Before I went to see Paul Guthridge.”

  “Why?”

  As best he could, Marty described the curious feeling he’d had that something was bearing down on him and was going to destroy him before he even got a chance to identify it. He tried to convey how the feeling intensified into a panic attack, until he was certain he would need guns to defend himself and became almost incapacitated by fear.

  He would have been embarrassed to tell her, would have sounded unbalanced—if events had not proved the validity of his perceptions and precautions.

  “And something was coming,” she said. “This dead-ringer. You sensed him coming.”

  “Yeah. I guess so. Somehow.”

  “Psychic.”

>   He shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t call it that. Not if you mean a psychic vision. There wasn’t any vision. I didn’t see what was coming, didn’t have a clear premonition. Just this . . . this awful sense of pressure, gravity . . . like on one of those whip rides at an amusement park, when it swings you around real fast and you’re pinned to the seat, feel a weight on your chest. You know, you’ve been on rides like that, Charlotte always loves them.”

  “Yeah. I understand . . . I guess.”

  “This started out like that . . . and got a hundred times worse, until I could hardly breathe. Then suddenly it just stopped as I was leaving for the doctor’s office. And later, when I came home, the sonofabitch was here, but I didn’t feel anything when I walked into the house.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  Wind flung pellets of rain against the window.

  Paige said, “How could he look exactly like you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why would he say you stole his life?”

  “I don’t know, I just don’t know.”

  “I’m scared, Marty. I mean, it’s all so weird. What’re we going to do?”

  “Past tonight, I don’t know. But tonight, at least, we’re not staying here. We’ll go to a hotel.”

  “But if the police don’t find him dead somewhere, then there’s tomorrow . . . and the day after tomorrow.”

  “I’m battered and tired and not thinking straight. For now I can only concentrate on tonight, Paige. I’ll just have to worry about tomorrow when tomorrow gets here.”

  Her lovely face was lined with anxiety. He had not seen her even half this distraught since Charlotte’s illness five years ago.

  “I love you,” he said, laying his hand gently against the side of her head.