Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  With Mrs. Higgens, the teller returned to the window. She had loose cash and banded packets of both hundred- and twenty-dollar bills. It amounted to two stacks of approximately three inches each.

  The teller started to count out the seventy thousand.

  “That’s all right,” Marty said. “Just put it in a couple of manila envelopes.”

  Surprised, Mrs. Higgens said, “Oh, but Mr. Stillwater, you’ve signed the withdrawal order, we ought to count it in front of you.”

  “No, I’m sure you’ve already counted correctly.”

  “But bank procedure—”

  “I trust you, Mrs. Higgens.”

  “Well, thank you, but I really think—”

  “Please.”

  6

  Merely by remaining seated at the room-service table while Drew Oslett stood impatiently beside it, Waxhill exerted control. Oslett disliked him and grudgingly admired him simultaneously.

  “It’s almost certain,” Waxhill said, “that the wife and children saw Alfie in that second incident last night. They know very little about what’s going on, but if they know Stillwater was telling the truth when he talked about a look-alike, then they know too much.”

  “I said, no problem,” Oslett reminded him impatiently.

  Waxhill nodded. “Yes, all right, but the home office wants it done in a certain way.”

  Sighing, Oslett gave up and sat down. “Which is?”

  “Make it look as if Stillwater went off the deep end.”

  “Murder-suicide?”

  “Yes, but not just any murder-suicide. The home office would be pleased if it could be made to appear as if Stillwater was acting out a particular psychopathic delusion. ”

  “Whatever.”

  “The wife must be shot in each breast and in the mouth.”

  “And the daughters?”

  “First, make them undress. Tie their wrists behind them. Tie their ankles together. Nice and tight. There’s a particular brand of braided wire we’d like you to use. It’ll be provided. Then shoot each girl twice. Once in her ... private parts, then between the eyes. Stillwater must appear to have shot himself once through the roof of his mouth. Will you remember all of that?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s important that you do everything precisely that way, no deviations from the script.”

  “What’s the story we’re trying to tell?” Oslett asked.

  “Didn’t you read the article in People?”

  “Not all the way through,” Oslett admitted. “Stillwater seemed like such a jerk—and a boring jerk, at that.”

  Waxhill said, “A few years ago, in Maryland, a man killed his wife and two daughters in exactly this fashion. He was a pillar of the community, so it shocked everybody. Tragic story. Everyone was left wondering why. It seemed so meaningless, so out of character. Stillwater was intrigued by the crime and considered writing a novel based on it, to explore the possible motivation behind it. But after he’d done a lot of research, he dropped the project. In People, he says it just depressed him too much. Says that fiction, his kind of fiction, needs to make sense of things, bring order to chaos, but he just couldn’t find any meaning in what happened in Maryland.”

  Oslett sat in silence for a moment, trying to hate Waxhill but finding that his dislike for the man was fading rapidly. “I must say . . . this is very nice.”

  Waxhill smiled almost shyly and shrugged.

  “This was your idea?” Oslett asked.

  “Mine, yes. I proposed it to the home office, and they went for it right away.”

  “It’s ingenious,” Oslett said with genuine admiration.

  “Thank you.”

  “Very neat. Martin Stillwater kills his family the same way the guy did in Maryland, and it looks as if the real reason he couldn’t write a novel about the original case was because it struck too close to home, because it was what he secretly wanted to do to his family.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And it’s been preying on his mind ever since.”

  “Haunts his dreams.”

  “This psychotic urge to symbolically rape—”

  “—and literally kill—”

  “—his daughters—”

  “—kill his wife, too, the woman who—”

  “—nurtured them,” Oslett finished.

  They were smiling at each other again, as they had smiled when discussing that lovely café off the Champs Elysées.

  Waxhill said, “No one will ever be able to figure out what killing his family had to do with his crazy report of a look-alike intruder, but they’ll figure the look-alike was somehow part of his delusion, too.”

  “I just realized, samples of Alfie’s blood taken from the house in Mission Viejo are going to appear to be Stillwater’s blood.”

  “Yes. Was he periodically exsanguinating himself, saving his own blood for the hoax? And why? A great many theories are sure to be put forth, and in the end it’ll be a mystery of less interest than what he did to his family. No one will ever untangle the truth from all that.”

  Oslett was beginning to hope they might recover Alfie, salvage the Network, and keep their reputations intact after all.

  Turning to Clocker, Waxhill said, “What about you, Karl? Do you have a problem with any of this?”

  Though he was sitting at the table, Clocker appeared distant in spirit. He pulled his attention back to them as if his thoughts had been with the Enterprise crew on a hostile planet in the Crab nebula. “There are five billion people on earth,” he said, “so we think it’s crowded, but for every one of us, the universe contains countless thousands of stars, an infinity of stars for each of us.”

  Waxhill stared at Clocker, waiting for elucidation. When he realized that Clocker had nothing more to say, he turned to Oslett.

  “I believe what Karl means,” Oslett said, “is that . . . Well, in the vast scheme of things, what does it matter if a few people die a little sooner than they would have in the natural course of events?”

  7

  The sun is high over the distant mountains, where the loftiest peaks are capped with snow. It seems odd to have a view of winter from this springlike December morning full of palm trees and flowers.

  He drives south and east into Mission Viejo. He is vengeance on wheels. Justice on wheels. Rolling, rolling.

  He considers locating a gun shop and buying a shotgun or hunting rifle, some weapon for which there is no waiting period prior to the right of purchase. His adversary is armed, but he is not.

  However, he doesn’t want to delay his pursuit of the kidnapper who has stolen his family. If the enemy is kept off balance and on the move, he is more likely to make mistakes. Unrelenting pressure is a better weapon than any gun.

  Besides, he is vengeance, justice, and virtue. He is the hero of this movie, and heroes do not die. They can be shot, clubbed, run off the road in high-speed car chases, slashed with a knife, pushed from a cliff, locked in a dungeon filled with poisonous snakes, and endure an endlessly imaginative series of abuses without perishing. With Harrison Ford, Sylvester Stallone, Steven Seagal, Bruce Willis, Wesley Snipes, and so many other heroes, he shares the invincibility of virtue and high noble purpose.

  He realizes why his initial assault on the false father, in his house yesterday, was doomed to fail in spite of his being a hero. He’d been drawn westward by the powerful attraction between him and his double; to the same degree that he had been aware of something pulling him, the double had been aware of something approaching all day Sunday and Monday. By the time they encountered each other in the upstairs study, the false father had been alerted and had prepared for battle.

  Now he understands that he can initiate and terminate the connection between them at will. Like the electrical current in any household circuit, it can be controlled by an ON-OFF switch. Instead of leaving the switch in the ON position all the time, he can open the pathway for brief moments, just long enough to feel the pull of the false father and ta
ke a fix on him.

  Logic suggests he also can modify the power flowing along the psychic wire. By imagining the psychic control is a dimmer switch—a rheostat—he should be able to adjust downward the amperage of the current in the circuit, making the contact more subtle than it has been to date. After all, by using a rheostatic switch, the light of a chandelier can be reduced smoothly by degrees until there is barely a visible glow. Likewise, imagining the psychic switch as another rheostat, he might be able to open the connection at such a low amperage that he can track the false father without that adversary being alerted to the fact he’s being sought.

  Stopping at a red traffic light in the heart of Mission Viejo, he imagines a dial-type dimmer switch with a three-hundred-sixty-degree brightness range. He turns it only ninety degrees, and at once feels the pull of the false father, slightly farther east and now somewhat to the north.

  Outside of the bank, halfway to the BMW, Marty suddenly felt another wave of pressure—and behind it, the crushing Juggernaut of his dreams. The sensation was not as strong as the experiences in the bank, but it caught him in mid-step and threw him off balance. He staggered, stumbled, and fell. The two manila envelopes full of cash flew out of his hands and slid across the blacktop.

  Charlotte and Emily scampered after the envelopes, and Paige helped Marty to his feet.

  As the wave passed and Marty stood shakily, he said, “Here, take my keys, you better drive. He’s hunting me. He’s coming.”

  She looked around the bank lot in panic.

  Marty said, “No, he’s not here yet. It’s like before. This sense of being in the path of something very powerful and fast.”

  Two blocks. Maybe not that far.

  Driving slowly. Scanning the street ahead, left and right. Looking for them.

  A car horn toots behind him. The driver is impatient.

  Slow, slow, squinting left and right, checking people on the sidewalks as well as in passing cars.

  The horn behind him. He gestures obscenely, which seems to spook the guy into silence.

  Slow, slow.

  No sight of them.

  Try the mental rheostat again. A sixty-degree turn this time. Still a strong contact, an urgent and irresistible pull.

  Ahead. On the left. Shopping center.

  As Marty got into the front passenger seat and shut the door, holding the envelopes of cash that the kids had retrieved for him, he was shaken again by contact with The Other. Although the impact of the probe was less disturbing than ever before, he took no solace from the diminishment of its power.

  “Get us the hell out of here,” he urged Paige, as he retrieved the loaded Beretta from under the seat.

  Paige started the engine, and Marty turned to the kids. They were buckling their seatbelts.

  As Paige slammed the BMW into reverse and backed out of the parking space, the girls met Marty’s eyes. They were scared.

  He had too much respect for their perceptiveness to lie to them. Rather than pretend everything was going to be all right, he said, “Hang on. Your Mom’s gonna try to drive like I do.”

  Popping the car out of reverse, Paige asked, “Where’s he coming from?”

  “I don’t know. Just don’t go out the same way we came in. I feel uneasy about that. Use the other street.”

  He is drawn to the bank rather than the shopping center itself, and he parks near the east entrance.

  As he switches the engine off, he hears a brief shriek of tires. From the corner of his eye, he is aware of a car driving away fast from the south end of the building. Turning, he sees a white BMW eighty to a hundred feet away. It streaks toward the shopping center, past him in a flash.

  He catches sight of only a portion of the driver’s face—one cheekbone, jaw line, curve of chin. And a shimmer of golden hair.

  Sometimes it’s possible to identify a favorite song by only three notes, because the melody has left an indelible impression on the mind. Likewise, from that partial profile, glimpsed in a flicker of shadow and light, in a blur of motion, he recognizes his precious wife. Unknown people have eradicated his memories of her, but the photograph he discovered yesterday is imprinted on his heart.

  He whispers, “Paige.”

  He starts the Camry, backs out of the parking space, and turns toward the shopping center.

  Acres of blacktop are empty at that early hour, for only the supermarket, a doughnut shop, and an office-supply store are open for business. The BMW races across the parking lot, swinging wide of the few clusters of cars, to the service road that fronts the stores. It turns left and heads toward the north end of the center.

  He follows but not aggressively. If he loses them, locating them again is an easy matter because of the mysterious but reliable link between him and the hateful man who has usurped his life.

  The BMW reaches the north exit and turns right into the street. By the time he arrives at that same intersection, the BMW is already two blocks away, stopped at a red traffic signal and barely in sight.

  For more than an hour, he follows them discreetly along surface streets, north on the Santa Ana and Costa Mesa freeways, then east on the Riverside Freeway, staying well back from them. Tucked in among the heavy morning commuter traffic, his small Camry is as good as invisible.

  On the Riverside Freeway, west of Corona, he imagines switching on the psychic current between himself and the false father. He pictures the rheostat and turns it five degrees out of a possible three hundred and sixty. That is sufficient for him to sense the presence of the false father ahead in traffic, although it gives him no precise fix. Six degrees, seven, eight. Eight is too much. Seven. Seven is ideal. With the switch open only seven degrees, the attraction is powerful enough to serve as a beacon to him without alerting the enemy that the link has been re-established. In the BMW, the imposter rides east toward Riverside, tense and watchful but unaware of being monitored.

  Yet, in the hunter’s mind, the signal of the prey registers like a blinking red light on an electronic map.

  Having mastered control of this strange adducent power, he may be able to strike at the false father with some degree of surprise.

  Though the man in the BMW is expecting an attack and is on the run to avoid it, he’s also accustomed to being forewarned of assault. When enough time passes without a disturbance in the ether, when he feels no unnerving probes, he’ll regain confidence. With a return of confidence, his caution will diminish, and he’ll become vulnerable.

  The hunter needs only to stay on the trail, follow the spoor, bide his time, and wait for the ideal moment to strike.

  As they pass through Riverside, morning traffic thins out around them. He drops back farther, until the BMW is a distant, colorless dot that sometimes vanishes temporarily, miragelike, in a shimmer of sunlight or swirl of dust.

  Onward and north. Through San Bernardino. Onto Interstate 15. Into the northern end of the San Bernardino Mountains. Through the El Cajon Pass at forty-three hundred feet.

  Soon thereafter, south of the town of Hesperia, the BMW departs the interstate and heads directly north on U.S. Highway 395, into the westernmost reaches of the forbidding Mojave Desert. He follows, continuing to remain at such a distance that they can’t possibly realize the dark speck in their rearview mirror is the same car that has trailed them now through three counties.

  Within a couple of miles, he passes a road sign indicating the mileage to Ridgecrest, Lone Pine, Bishop, and Mammoth Lakes. Mammoth is the farthest—two hundred and eighty-two miles.

  The name of the town has an instant association for him. He has an eidetic memory. He can see the words on the dedication page of one of the mystery novels he has written and which he keeps on the shelves in his home office in Mission Viejo:

  This opus is for my mother and father, Jim and Alice Stillwater, who taught me to be an honest man—and who can’t be blamed if I am able to think like a criminal.

  He recalls, as well, the Rolodex card with their names and address. They live in
Mammoth Lakes.

  Again, he is poignantly aware of what he has lost. Even if he can reclaim his life from the imposter who wears his name, perhaps he will never regain the memories that have been stolen from him. His childhood. His adolescence. His first date. His high school experiences. He has no recollection of his mother’s or his father’s love, and it seems outrageous, monstrous, that he could be robbed of those most essential and enduringly supportive memories.

  For more than sixty miles, he alternates between despair at the estrangement which is the primary quality of his existence and joy at the prospect of reclaiming his destiny.

  He desperately longs to be with his father, his mother, to see their dear faces (which have been erased from the tablets of his memory), to embrace them and re-establish the profound bond between himself and the two people to whom he owes his existence. From the movies he has seen, he knows parents can be a curse—the maniacal mother who was dead before the opening scene of Psycho, the selfish mother and father who warped poor Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides—but he believes his parents to be of a finer variety, compassionate and true, like Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life.

  The highway is flanked by dry lakes as white as salt, sudden battlements of red rock, wind-sculpted oceans of sand, scrub, boron flats, distant escarpments of dark stone. Everywhere lies evidence of geological upheavals and lava flows from distant millennia.

  At the town of Red Mountain, the BMW leaves the highway. It stops at a service station to refuel.

  He follows until he is certain of their intention, but passes the service station without stopping. They have guns. He does not. A better moment will be found to kill the impersonator.

  Re-entering Highway 395, he drives north a short distance to Johannesburg, which sits west of the Lava Mountains. He exits again and tanks up the Camry at another service station. He buys crackers, candy bars, and peanuts from the vending machines to sustain him during the long drive ahead.

  Perhaps because Charlotte and Emily had to use the restrooms back at the Red Mountain stop, he is on the highway ahead of the BMW, but that doesn’t matter because he no longer needs to follow them. He knows where they are going.