Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  “The first voice you hear is the caller,” Spicer said, “because the man who picks up the receiver in the Stillwater house doesn’t initially say anything.”

  “Hello? Mom? Dad?”

  “How did you win them over?”

  Stopping the tape, Spicer said, “That second voice is the receiving phone—and it’s Alfie.”

  “They both sound like Alfie.”

  “The other one’s Stillwater. Alfie also speaks next.”

  “Why would they love you more than me?”

  “Don’t touch them, you son of a bitch. Don’t you lay one finger on them.”

  “They betrayed me.”

  “I want to talk to my mother and father.”

  “MY mother and father.”

  “Put them on the phone.”

  “So you can tell them more lies?”

  They listened to the entire conversation. It was over-the -top creepy because it sounded as if one man was talking to himself, a radically split personality. Worse, their bad boy was obviously not just a renegade but flat-out psychotic.

  When the tape ended, Oslett said, “So Stillwater never stopped at his parents’ house.”

  “Evidently not.”

  “Then how did Alfie find it? And why did he go there? Why was he interested in Stillwater’s parents, not just Stillwater himself?”

  Spicer shrugged. “Maybe you’ll get a chance to ask the boy if you manage to recover him.”

  Oslett didn’t like having so many unanswered questions. It made him feel as if he wasn’t in control.

  He glanced out the window at the house and at the tire tracks in the snow-covered driveway. “Alfie’s probably not over there any more.”

  “Went after Stillwater,” Spicer agreed.

  “Where was that call placed?”

  “Cellular phone.”

  Oslett said, “We can still trace that, can’t we?”

  Pointing to three lines of numbers on a display terminal, Spicer said, “We’ve got a satellite triangulation.”

  “That’s meaningless to me, just numbers.”

  “This computer can plot it on a map. To within a hundred feet of the signal source.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Five minutes tops,” Spicer said.

  “Good. You work on it. We’ll check the house.”

  Oslett stepped out of the red van with Clocker close behind.

  As they crossed the street through the snow, Oslett didn’t care if a dozen nosy neighbors were at their windows. The situation was already blown wide open and couldn’t be salvaged. He, Clocker, and Spicer would clear out, with their dead, in less than ten minutes, and after that no one would ever be able to prove they’d been there.

  They walked boldly onto the elder Stillwaters’ porch. Oslett rang the bell. No one answered. He rang it again and tried the door, which proved to be unlocked. From across the street it would appear as if Jim or Alice Stillwater had opened up and invited them inside.

  In the foyer, Clocker closed the front door behind them and drew his Colt .357 Magnum from his shoulder holster. They stood for a few seconds, listening to the silent house.

  “Be at peace, Alfie,” Oslett said, even though he doubted that their bad boy was still hanging around the premises. When there was no ritual response to that command, he repeated the four words louder than before.

  Silence prevailed.

  Cautiously they moved deeper into the house—and found the dead couple in the first room they checked. Stillwater’s parents. Each of them somewhat resembled the writer—and Alfie, too, of course.

  During a swift search of the house, repeating the command phrase before they went through each new doorway, the only thing of interest they found was in the laundry. The small room reeked of gasoline. What Alfie had been up to was made apparent by the scraps of cloth, funnel, and partly empty box of detergent that littered the counter beside the sink.

  “He’s taking no chances this time,” Oslett said. “Going after Stillwater as if it’s war.”

  They had to stop the boy—and fast. If he killed the Stillwater family or even just the writer himself, he would make it impossible to implement the murder-suicide scenario which would so neatly tie up so many loose ends. And depending on what insane, fiery spectacle he had in mind, he might draw so much attention to himself that keeping his existence a secret and returning him to the fold would become impossible.

  “Damn,” Oslett said, shaking his head.

  “Sociopathic clones,” Clocker said, almost as if trying to be irritating, “are always big trouble.”

  4

  Sipping hot chocolate, Paige took her turn at guard duty by the front window.

  Marty was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with Charlotte and Emily, playing with a deck of cards they’d gotten from the game chest. It was the least animated game of Go Fish that Paige had ever seen, conducted without comment or argument. Their faces were grim, as if they weren’t playing Go Fish at all but consulting a Tarot deck that had nothing but bad news for them.

  Studying the snowswept day outside, Paige suddenly knew that both she and Marty shouldn’t be waiting in the cabin. Turning away from the window, she said, “This is wrong.”

  “What?” he asked, looking up from the cards.

  “I’m going outside.”

  “For what?”

  “That rock formation over there, under the trees, halfway out toward the county road. I can lie down in there and still see the driveway.”

  Marty dropped his hand of cards. “What sense does that make?”

  “Perfect sense. If he comes in the front way, like we both think he will—like he has to—he’ll go right past me, straight to the cabin. I’ll be behind him. I can pump a couple of rounds into the back of the bastard’s head before he knows what’s happening.”

  Getting to his feet, shaking his head, Marty said, “No, it’s too risky.”

  “If we both stay inside here, it’ll be like trying to defend a fort.”

  “A fort sounds good to me.”

  “Don’t you remember all those movies about the cavalry in the Old West, defending the fort? Sooner or later, no matter how strong the place was, the Indians overran it and got inside.”

  “That’s just in the movies.”

  “Yeah, but maybe he’s seen them too. Come here,” she insisted. When he joined her at the window, she pointed to the rocks, which were barely visible in the sable shadows under the pines. “It’s perfect.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “It’ll work.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You know it’s right.”

  “Okay, so maybe it’s right, but I still don’t have to like it,” he said sharply.

  “I’m going out.”

  He searched her eyes, perhaps looking for signs of fear that he could exploit to change her mind. “You think you’re an adventure-story heroine, don’t you?”

  “You got my imagination working.”

  “I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.” He stared for a long moment at the shadow-blanketed jumble of rocks, then sighed and said, “All right, but I’m the one who’ll go out there. You’ll stay in here with the girls.”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way, baby.”

  “Don’t pull a feminist number on me.”

  “I’m not. It’s just that . . . you’re the one he’s got a psychic bead on.”

  “So?”

  “He can sense where you are, and depending on how refined that talent is, he might sense you’re in the rocks. You have to stay in the cabin so he’ll feel you in here, come straight for you—and right past me.”

  “Maybe he can sense you too.”

  “Evidence so far indicates it’s only you.”

  He was in an agony of fear for her, his feelings carved in every hollow of his face. “I don’t like this.”

  “You already said. I’m going out.”

  5

&nbs
p; By the time Oslett and Clocker left the Stillwater house and crossed the street, Spicer was getting behind the wheel of the red surveillance van.

  The wind accelerated. Snow was driven out of the sky at a severe angle and harried along the street.

  Oslett walked to the driver’s door of the surveillance van.

  Spicer had his sunglasses on again even though the last hour or so of daylight was upon them. His eyes, yellow or otherwise, were hidden.

  He looked down at Oslett and said, “I’m going to drive this heap away from here, clear across the county line and out of local jurisdiction before I call the home office and get some help with body disposal.”

  “What about the delivery man in the florist’s van?”

  “Let them haul their own garbage,” Spicer said.

  He handed Oslett a standard-size sheet of typing paper on which the computer had printed a map, plotting the point from which Martin Stillwater had telephoned his parents’ house. Only a few roads were depicted on it. Oslett tucked it inside his ski jacket before either the wind could snatch it out of his hand or the paper could become damp from the snow.

  “He’s only a few miles away,” Spicer said. “You take the Explorer.” He started the engine, pulled the door shut, and drove off into the storm.

  Clocker was already behind the wheel of the Explorer. Clouds of exhaust billowed from its tailpipe.

  Oslett hurried to the passenger side, got in, slammed the door, and fished the computer map out of his jacket. “Let’s go. We’re running out of time.”

  “Only on the human scale,” Clocker said. Pulling away from the curb and switching on the wipers to deal with the wind-driven snow, he added, “From a cosmic point of view, time may be the one thing of which there’s an inexhaustible supply.”

  6

  Paige kissed the girls and made them promise to be brave and to do exactly what their father told them to do. Leaving them for the uncertainty of what lay ahead was one of the hardest things she had ever done. Pretending not to be afraid, in order to help them with their own quest for courage, was even harder.

  When Paige stepped out the front door, Marty went with her onto the porch. Blustery wind hissed through the screen walls and rattled the porch door at the head of the steps.

  “There’s one other way,” he said, leaning close to her to be heard above the storm without shouting. “If it’s me that he’s drawn to, maybe I should get the hell out of here, on my own, lead him as far away from you as I can.”

  “Forget it.”

  “But without you and the girls to worry about, maybe I can deal with him.”

  “And if he kills you instead?”

  “At least we wouldn’t all go down.”

  “You think he won’t come looking for us again? He wants your life, remember. Your life, your wife, your children.”

  “So if he finishes me off and comes after you, you’d still have a chance to blow his brains out.”

  “Oh, yeah? And when he shows up, during that little window of opportunity I’ll have before he gets close to me, how would I know whether it was him or you?”

  “You wouldn’t,” he admitted.

  “So we’ll play it this way.”

  “You’re so damned strong,” he said.

  He couldn’t know that her bowels were like jelly, her heart was knocking violently, and the faint metallic taste of terror filled her dry mouth.

  They hugged but briefly.

  Carrying the Mossberg, she went through the porch door, down the steps, across the shallow yard, past the BMW, and into the woods without looking back, worried that he would become aware of the depth of her fear and insist on dragging her back into the cabin.

  Under the Quonset curve of sheltering evergreen boughs, the wind sounded hollow and distant except when she passed beneath a couple of flue-like openings that soared all the way up to the blind sky. Pummeling drafts shrieked down those passages, as cold as ectoplasm and as shrill as banshees.

  Although the property sloped, the ground beneath the trees was easy to traverse. Underbrush was sparse due to a lack of direct sunlight. Many trees were so old that the lowest branches were above her head, and the view between the thick trunks was unobstructed all the way out to the county road.

  The soil was stony. Tables and formations of granite broke the surface here and there, all ancient and smooth.

  The formation she had pointed out to Marty was halfway between the cabin and the county road, only twenty feet upslope from the driveway. It resembled a crescent of teeth, blunt molars two to three feet high, like the fossilized dental structure of a gentle herbivorous dinosaur much larger than any ever before suspected or imagined.

  Approaching the granite outcropping, in which shadows as dark as condensed pine tar pooled behind the “molars,” Paige suddenly had the feeling that the look-alike was already there, watching the cabin from that hiding place. Ten feet from her destination, she halted, skidding slightly on the carpet of loose pine needles.

  If he was actually there, he would have seen her coming and could have killed her any time he wished. The fact that she was still alive argued against his presence. Nevertheless, as she tried to get moving again, she felt as if she had plunged to the bottom of a deep ocean trench and was struggling to make progress against the resisting mass of an entire sea.

  Heart pounding, she circled the crescent formation and slipped into its shadowed convexity from behind. The look-alike wasn’t waiting for her.

  She stretched out on her stomach. In her dark-blue ski jacket with the hood covering her blond hair, she knew that she was as good as invisible among the shadows and against the dark stone.

  Through gaps in the stone, she could monitor the entire length of the driveway without raising her head high enough to be seen.

  Beyond the shelter of the trees, the storm swiftly escalated into a full-scale blizzard. The volume of snow coming down into the driveway between flanking stands of trees was so great that it almost seemed as if she was looking into the foaming face of a waterfall.

  Her ski jacket kept her upper body warm, but her jeans couldn’t ward off the penetrating cold of the stone on which she lay. As body heat leached away, her hip and knee joints began to ache. She wished she were wearing insulated ski pants, and she realized she should have at least brought a blanket to put between herself and the granite.

  Under the influence of the building gale, the highest branches of the firs and pines creaked like scores of doors easing open on rusty hinges. Not even the muffling boughs of the evergreens could soften the rising voice of the wind.

  The gradually dimming light of the day’s last hour was the steely shade of ice on a winter pond.

  Every sight and sound was cold and seemed to exacerbate the chill that pressed into her from the granite. She began to worry about how long she could hold out before she would need to return to the cabin to get warm.

  Then a deep-blue Jeep station wagon came uphill on the county road and made a hard, sharp turn into the driveway. It looked like the Jeep that belonged to Marty’s parents.

  Rheostat at seven degrees. South from Mammoth Lakes, through billowing curtains of snow, through whirling snowdevils, through torrents and lashes and blasts and cataracts and airborne walls of snow, along a highway barely defined beneath the deepening mantle, passing slow-moving traffic at high speed, flashing his headlights to encourage obstructionists to pull over and let him go by, even passing a county snowplow and a cinder-spreading truck crowned with yellow and red emergency beacons that briefly transform the millions of white flakes into glowing embers. A left turn. Narrower road. Uphill. Into forested slopes. Long chain-link fence on the right, capped with spiral razor wire, broken down in places. Not there yet. A little farther. Close. Soon.

  The four gasoline bombs stand in a cardboard box on the floor in front of the passenger seat, wedged into the knee space. The gaps between them are packed with folded newspapers, so the bottles will not clatter against one another.
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  Pungent fumes arise from the saturated cloth wicks. The perfume of destruction.

  Guided by the magnetic attraction of the false father, he makes an abrupt right turn into a single-lane driveway already half hidden by snow. He brakes as little as possible, cornering in a slide, and moving his foot to the accelerator again even as the Jeep is still finding purchase and both rear tires are spinning-squealing fiercely.

  Directly ahead, at least a hundred yards into the woods, stands a cabin. Soft light at the windows. Roof capped with snow.

  Even if the BMW was not parked to the left of the place, he’d know he’d found his quarry. The imposter’s hateful magnetic presence pulls him forward.

  At first sight of the cabin, he decides to make a full frontal assault, regardless of the wisdom or consequences. His mother and father are dead, wife and children probably long dead, too, forms and faces mockingly imitated by the vicious alien species that has stolen his own name and memories. He seethes with rage, hatred so intense it’s physically painful, anguish like a fire in his heart, and only swift justice will bring desperately needed relief.

  The churning tires bite through the snow into dirt.

  He rams his foot down on the accelerator.

  The Jeep bolts forward.

  A cry of savage fury and vengeance escapes him, and the mental rheostat spins from seven degrees to three hundred and sixty.

  Marty was at the front window when headlight beams pierced the falling snow out on the county road, but at first he couldn’t see the source. Coming uphill, the vehicle was hidden by trees and roadside brush. Then it burst into sight—a Jeep—turning hard into the driveway at high speed, the back end fishtailing, plumes of snow and slush erupting behind its spinning rear tires.

  An instant later, as he was still reacting to the arrival of the Jeep, he was stricken by a brutal psychic tidal wave as strong as anything he had previously experienced but of a different quality. This was not merely the urgent, questing power that had hammered him on other occasions, but a blast of black and bitter emotion, raw and uncensored, which put him inside the mind of his enemy as no human being ever before could have been inside the mind of another. It was a surrealistic realm of psychotic rage, desperation, infantile self-absorption, terror, confusion, envy, lust, and urgent hungers so vile that a flood of sewage and rotting corpses could not have been as repulsive.