Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  “Good for her,” Oslett said, though he didn’t care whether the Stillwater girl had lived or died.

  “Yes, it was,” Waxhill said, “but at her lowest point, when the doctors were edging toward a more terminal diagnosis, her father and mother underwent bone-marrow aspiration. Extraction of bone marrow with a special aspirating needle.”

  “Sounds painful.”

  “No doubt. Doctors required samples to determine which parent would be the best donor in case a marrow transplant was required. Charlotte’s marrow was producing little new blood, and indications were that malignancy was inhibiting blood-cell formation.”

  Oslett took a bite of the eggs. There was basil in them, and they were marvelous. “I fail to see where Charlotte’s illness could have any relationship to our current problem.”

  After pausing for effect, Waxhill said, “She was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.”

  Oslett froze with a second forkful of eggs halfway to his mouth.

  “Five years ago,” Waxhill repeated for emphasis.

  “What month?”

  “December.”

  “What day did Stillwater give the marrow sample?”

  “The sixteenth. December sixteenth.”

  “Damn. But we had a blood sample as well, a backup—”

  “Stillwater also gave blood samples. One of them would have been packaged with each marrow sample for lab work.”

  Oslett conveyed the forkful of eggs to his mouth. He chewed, swallowed, and said, “How could our people screw up like this?”

  “We’ll probably never know. Anyway, the ‘how’ doesn’t matter as much as the fact they did screw up, and we have to live with it.”

  “So we never started where we thought we did.”

  “Or with whom we thought we started,” Waxhill rephrased.

  Clocker was eating like a horse without a feed bag. Oslett wanted to throw a towel over the big man’s head to spare Waxhill the unpleasant sight of such vigorous mastication. At least the Trekker had not yet punctuated the conversation with inscrutable commentary.

  “Exceptional kippers,” Waxhill said.

  Oslett said, “I’ll have to try one.”

  After sipping orange juice and patting his mouth with his napkin, Waxhill said, “As to how your Alfie knew Stillwater existed and was able to find him . . . there are two theories at the moment.”

  Oslett noticed the “your Alfie” instead of “our Alfie,” which might mean nothing—or might indicate an effort was already under way to shift the blame to him in spite of the incontrovertible fact that the disaster was directly the result of sloppy scientific procedures and had nothing whatsoever to do with how the boy had been handled during his fourteen months of service.

  “First,” Waxhill said, “there’s a faction that thinks Alfie must have come across a book with Stillwater’s picture on the jacket.”

  “It can’t be anything that simple.”

  “I agree. Though, of course, the about-the-author paragraph on the flap of his last two books says he lives in Mission Viejo, which would have given Alfie a good lead.”

  Oslett said, “Anybody, seeing a picture of an identical twin he never knew he had, would be curious enough to look into it—except Alfie. Whereas an ordinary person has the freedom to pursue a thing like that, Alfie doesn’t. He’s tightly focused.”

  “Aimed like a bullet.”

  “Exactly. He broke training here, which required a monumental trauma. Hell, it’s more than training. That’s a euphemism. It’s indoctrination, brainwashing—”

  “He’s programmed.”

  “Yes. Programmed. He’s the next thing to a machine, and just seeing a photograph of Stillwater wouldn’t send him spinning out of control any more than the personal computer in your office would start producing sperm and grow hair on its back just because you scanned a photograph of Marilyn Monroe onto its hard disk.”

  Waxhill laughed softly. “I like the analogy. I think I’ll use it to change some minds, though of course I’ll credit it to you.”

  Oslett was pleased by Waxhill’s approval.

  “Excellent bacon,” said Waxhill.

  “Yes, isn’t it.”

  Clocker just kept eating.

  “The second and smaller faction,” Waxhill continued, “proposes a more exotic—but, at least to me, more credible—hypothesis to the effect that Alfie has a secret ability of which we’re not aware and which he may not fully understand or control himself.”

  “Secret ability?”

  “Rudimentary psychic perception perhaps. Very primitive . . . but strong enough to make a connection between him and Stillwater, draw them together because of . . . well, because of all they share.”

  “Isn’t that a bit far out?”

  Waxhill smiled and nodded. “I’ll admit it sounds like something out of a Star Trek movie—”

  Oslett cringed and glanced at Clocker, but the big man’s eyes didn’t shift from the food heaped on his plate.

  “—though the whole project smacks of science fiction, doesn’t it?” Waxhill concluded.

  “I guess so,” Oslett conceded.

  “The fact is, the genetic engineers have given Alfie some truly exceptional abilities. Intentionally. So doesn’t it seem possible they’ve unintentionally, inadvertently given him other superhuman qualities?”

  “Even inhuman qualities,” Clocker said.

  “Well, now, you’ve just shown me a more unpleasant way to look at it,” Waxhill said, regarding Karl Clocker soberly, “and all too possibly a more accurate view.” Turning to Oslett: “Some psychic link, some strange mental connection, might have shattered Alfie’s conditioning, erased his program or caused him to override it.”

  “Our boy was in Kansas City, and Stillwater was in southern California, for God’s sake.”

  Waxhill shrugged. “A TV broadcast goes on forever, to the end of the universe. Beam a laser from Chicago toward the far end of the galaxy, and that light will get there someday, thousands of years from now, after Chicago is dust—and it’ll keep on going. So maybe distance is meaningless when you’re dealing with thought waves, too, or whatever it was that connected Alfie to this writer.”

  Oslett had lost his appetite.

  Clocker seemed to have found it and added it to his own.

  Pointing to the basket of croissants, Waxhill said, “These are excellent—and in case you didn’t realize, there are two kinds here, some plain and some with almond paste inside.”

  “Almond croissants are my favorite,” Oslett said, but didn’t reach for one.

  Waxhill said, “The best croissants in the world—”

  “—are in Paris,” Oslett interjected, “in a quaint café less than a block off—”

  “—the Champs Elysées,” Waxhill finished, surprising Oslett.

  “The proprietor, Alfonse—”

  “—and his wife, Mirielle—”

  “—are culinary geniuses and hosts without equal.”

  “Charming people,” Waxhill agreed.

  They smiled at each other.

  Clocker served himself more sausages, and Oslett wanted to knock that stupid hat off his head.

  “If there’s any chance that our boy has extraordinary powers, however feeble, which we never intended to give him,” Waxhill said, “then we must consider the possibility that some qualities we did intend to give him didn’t turn out quite as we thought they did.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow,” Oslett said.

  “Essentially, I’m talking about sex.”

  Oslett was surprised. “He has no interest in it.”

  “We’re sure of that, are we?”

  “He’s apparently male, of course, but he’s impotent.”

  Waxhill said nothing.

  “He was engineered to be impotent,” Oslett stressed.

  “A man can be impotent yet have a keen interest in sex. Indeed, one might make a good argument for the case that his very inability to attain an erec
tion frustrates him, and that his frustration leads him to be obsessed with sex, with what he cannot have.”

  Oslett had been shaking his head the entire time Waxhill had been speaking. “No. Again, it’s not that simple. He’s not only impotent. He’s received hundreds of hours of intense psychological conditioning to eliminate sexual interest, some of it when he’s been in deep hypnosis, some under the influence of drugs that make the subconscious susceptible to any suggestion, some through virtual-reality subliminal feeds during sedative-induced sleep. To this boy, the primary difference between men and women is the way they dress.”

  Unimpressed with Oslett’s argument, spreading orange marmalade on a slice of toast, Waxhill said, “Brainwashing, even at its most sophisticated, can fail. Would you agree with that?”

  “Yes, but with an ordinary subject, you have problems because you’ve got to counter a lifetime of experience to install a new attitude or false memory. But Alfie was different. He was a blank slate, a beautiful blank slate, so there wasn’t any resistance to whatever attitudes, memories, or feelings we wanted to stuff in his nice empty head. There was nothing in his brain to wash out first.”

  “Maybe mind-control failed with Alfie precisely because we were so confident that he was an easy mark.”

  “The mind is its own control,” Clocker said.

  Waxhill gave him an odd look.

  “I don’t think it failed,” Oslett insisted. “Anyway, there’s still the little matter of his engineered impotence to get around.”

  Waxhill took time to chew and swallow a bite of toast, and then washed it down with coffee. “Maybe his body got around it for him.”

  “Say again?”

  “His incredible body with its superhuman recuperative powers.”

  Oslett twitched as if the idea had pierced like a pin. “Wait a minute, now. His wounds heal exceptionally fast, yes. Punctures, gashes, broken bones. Once damaged, his body can restore itself to its original engineered condition in miraculously short order. But that’s the key. To its original engineered condition. It can’t start to remake itself on any fundamental level, can’t mutate, for God’s sake.”

  “We’re sure of that, are we?”

  “Yes!”

  “Why?”

  “Well . . . because . . . otherwise . . . it’s unthinkable. ”

  “Imagine,” Waxhill said, “if Alfie is potent. And interested in sex. The boy’s been engineered to have a tremendous potential for violence, a biological killing machine, without compunctions or remorse, capable of any savagery. Imagine that bestiality coupled with a sex drive, and consider how sexual compulsions and violent impulses can feed on each other and amplify each other when they’re not tempered by a civilized and moral spirit.”

  Oslett pushed his plate aside. The sight of food was beginning to sicken him. “It has been considered. That’s why so damned many precautions were taken.”

  “As with the Hindenburg.”

  As with the Titanic, Oslett thought grimly.

  Waxhill pushed his plate aside, too, and folded his hands around his coffee cup. “So now Alfie has found Stillwater, and he wants the writer’s family. He’s a complete man now, at least physically, and thoughts of sex lead eventually to thoughts of procreation. A wife. Children. God knows what strange, twisted understanding he has of the meaning and purpose of a family. But here’s a ready-made family. He wants it. Wants it badly. Evidently he feels it belongs to him.”

  3

  The bank offered extensive hours as part of its competitive edge. Marty and Paige intended to be at the doors, with Charlotte and Emily, when the manager unlocked for business at eight o’clock Tuesday morning.

  He disliked returning to Mission Viejo, but he felt they would be able to effect their transactions with the least difficulty at the particular branch where they maintained their accounts. It was only eight or nine blocks from their house. Many of the tellers would recognize him and Paige.

  The bank was in a free-standing brick building in the northwest corner of a shopping-center parking lot, nicely landscaped and shaded by pine trees, flanked on two sides by streets and on the other two sides by acres of blacktop. At the far end of the parking lot, to the south and east, was an L-shaped series of connected buildings that housed thirty to forty businesses, including a supermarket.

  Marty parked on the south side. The short walk from the BMW to the bank door, with the kids between him and Paige, was unnerving because they had to leave their guns in the car. He felt vulnerable.

  He could imagine no way in which they might secretly bring a shotgun inside with them, even a compact pistol-grip model like the Mossberg. He didn’t want to risk carrying the Beretta under his ski jacket because he wasn’t sure whether some bank-security systems included the ability to detect a hidden handgun on anyone who walked through the door. If a bank employee mistook him for a holdup man and the police were summoned by a silent alarm, the cops would never give him the benefit of the doubt—not considering the reputation he had with them after last night.

  While Marty went directly to one of the teller’s windows, Paige took Charlotte and Emily to an arrangement of two short sofas and two armchairs at one end of the long room, where patrons waited when they had appointments with loan officers. The bank was not a cavernous marble-lined monument to money with massive Doric columns and vaulted ceiling, but a comparatively small place with an acoustic-tile ceiling and all-weather green carpet. Though Paige and the kids were only sixty feet from him, clearly visible any time he chose to glance their way, he didn’t like being separated from them by even that much distance.

  The teller was a young woman—Lorraine Arakadian, according to the nameplate at her window—whose round tortoise-shell glasses gave her an owlish look. When Marty told her that he wanted to make a withdrawal of seventy thousand dollars from their savings account—which had a balance of more than seventy-four—she misunderstood, thinking he meant to transfer that amount to checking. When she put the applicable form in front of him to effect the transaction, he corrected her misapprehension and asked for the entire amount in hundred-dollar bills if possible.

  She said, “Oh. I see. Well . . . that’s a larger transaction than I can make on my own authority, sir. I’ll have to get permission from the head teller or assistant manager.”

  “Of course,” he said unconcernedly, as if he made large cash withdrawals every week. “I understand.”

  She went to the far end of the long teller’s cage to speak to an older woman who was examining documents in one drawer of a large bank of files. Marty recognized her—Elaine Higgens, assistant manager. Mrs. Higgens and Lorraine Arakadian glanced at Marty, then put their heads together to confer again.

  While he waited for them, Marty monitored both the south and east entrances to the lobby, trying to look nonchalant even though he expected The Other to walk through one door or another at any moment, this time armed with an Uzi.

  A writer’s imagination. Maybe it wasn’t a curse, after all. At least not entirely. Maybe sometimes it was a survival tool. One thing for sure: even the most fanciful writer’s imagination had trouble keeping up with reality these days.

  He needs more time than he expected to find plates to swap for those on the stolen Toyota Camry. He slept too late and took far too long to make himself presentable. Now the world is coming awake, and he hasn’t the advantage of the dead-of-night privacy that would make the switch easy. Large garden-apartment complexes, with shadowy carports and a plenitude of vehicles, offer the ideal shopping for what he requires, but as he tries one after another of these, he discovers too many residents out and about, on their way to work.

  Eventually his diligent search is rewarded in the parking lot behind a church. A morning service is in progress. He can hear organ music. Parishioners have left fourteen cars from which he can select, not a large turnout for the Lord but adequate for his own purposes.

  He leaves the engine of the Camry running while he looks for a car in which
the owner has left the keys. In the third one, a green Pontiac, a full set dangles from the ignition.

  He unlocks the trunk of the Pontiac, hoping it will contain at least an emergency tool kit with a screwdriver. Because he hot-wired the Camry, he doesn’t have keys to its trunk. Again, he is in luck: a complete road-emergency kit with flares, first-aid items, and a tool packet that includes four screwdrivers of different types.

  God is with him.

  In a few minutes he exchanges the Camry’s plates for those on the Pontiac. He returns the tool kit to the trunk of the Pontiac and the keys to the ignition.

  As he’s walking to the Camry, the church organ launches into a hymn with which he is not familiar. That he doesn’t know the name of the hymn is not surprising, since he has only been to church three times that he can recall. In two instances, he had gone to church to kill time until movie theaters opened. On the third occasion he had been following a woman he’d seen on the street and with whom he would have liked to share sex and the special intimacy of death.

  The music stirs him. He stands in the mild morning breeze, swaying dreamily, eyes closed. He is moved by the hymn. Perhaps he has musical talent. He should find out. Maybe playing an instrument of some kind and composing songs would be easier than writing novels.

  When the song ends, he gets in the Camry and leaves.

  Marty exchanged pleasantries with Mrs. Higgens when she returned with the teller. Evidently no one at the bank had seen the news about him, as neither woman mentioned the assault. His crew-neck sweater and button-down shirt concealed livid bruises around his neck. His voice was mildly hoarse but not sufficiently so to cause comment.

  Mrs. Higgens observed that the cash withdrawal he wished to make was unusually large, phrasing her comment to induce him to explain why he would risk carrying so much money around. He merely agreed it was, indeed, unusually large and expressed the hope that he wasn’t putting them to much trouble. Unflagging affability was probably essential to completing the transaction as swiftly as possible.