Velocity

“No, sir. It looks like one porch, but it’s two, all right. You know that’s true. I see it in you.”

“See what?”

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“I see the way you’re a little like me.”

Chilled, Billy said, “You can’t see anything. You won’t even look at me.”

Ralph Cottle met Billy’s eyes again. “Have you seen the woman’s face in the jar like a jellyfish?”

The conversation had suddenly switched from the main track to a strange spur line.

“What woman?” Billy asked.

Cottle knocked back another slug from the pint. “He says he’s had her in the jar three years.”

“Jar? Better stop pouring down that nose paint, Ralph. You’re not making much sense.”

Cottle closed his eyes and grimaced, as if he could see what he now described. “It’s a two-quart jar, maybe bigger, with a wide-mouth lid. He changes the formaldehyde regularly to keep it from clouding.”

Beyond the porch, the sky was crystalline. High in the clear light, a lone hawk circled, as clean as a shadow.

“The face tends to fold into itself,” Cottle continued, “so you don’t at first see a face. It’s like something from the sea, clenched yet billowy. So he gently shakes the jar, gently swirls the contents, and the face… it blossoms.”

The grass is sweet and green across the lawn, then taller and golden where nature alone tends to it. The two grasses produce distinct fragrances, each crisp and pleasant in its own way.

“You recognize an ear first,” said Ralph Cottle. “The ears are attached, and the cartilage gives them shape. There’s cartilage in the nose, too, but it hasn’t held its shape very well. The nose is just a lump.”

From the shining heights, the hawk descended in a narrowing gyre, describing silent and harmonious curves.

“The lips are full, but the mouth is just a hole, and the eyes are holes. There’s no hair, ‘cause he cut only from one ear to the other, from the top of the brow to the bottom of the chin. You can’t tell it’s a woman’s face, and not a man’s. He says she was beautiful, but there’s no beauty in the jar.”

Billy said, “It’s just a mask, latex, a trick.”

“Oh, it’s real. It’s as real as terminal cancer. He says it was the second act in one of his best performances.”

“Performances?”

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“He has four photos of her face. In the first, she’s alive. Then dead. In the third, the face is partly peeled back. In the fourth, her head is there, her hair, but the soft tissue of her face is gone, nothing but bone, the grinning skull.”

From graceful gyre to sudden plunge, the hawk knifed toward the tall grass.

The pint told Ralph Cottle that he needed fortification, and he drank a new foundation for his crumbling courage.

Following a fumy exhalation, he said, “The first photo, when she was alive, maybe she was pretty like he says. You can’t tell because… she’s all terror. She’s ugly with terror.”

The tall grass, previously motionless in the fixative heat, stirred briefly in a single place, where feathers thrashed the stalks.

“The face in that first picture,” Cottle said, “is worse than the one in the jar. It’s a lot worse.”

The hawk burst from the grass and soared. Its talons clutched something small, perhaps a field mouse, which struggled in terror, or didn’t. At this distance, you couldn’t be sure.

Cottle’s voice was a file rasping on ancient wood. “If I don’t do exactly what he wants me to, he promises to put my face in a jar. And while he harvests it, he’ll keep me alive, and conscious.”

In the bright pellucid sky, the rising hawk was as black and clean as a shadow once more. Its wings cleaved the shining air, and the high thermals were the pristine currents of a river through which it swam, and dwindled, and vanished, having killed only what it needed to survive.

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Chapter 21

Rockless in the rocking chair, Ralph Cottle said that he lived in a ramshackle cottage by the river. Two rooms and a porch with a view, the place had been hammered together in the 1930’s and had been falling apart ever since.

Long ago, unknown rugged individuals had used the cottage for fishing vacations. It had no electric service. An outhouse served as the toilet. The only running water was what passed in the river.

“I think mainly it was a place for them to get away from their wives,”

Cottle said. “A place to drink and get drunk. It still is.”

A fireplace provided heat and allowed simple cooking. What meals Cottle ate were spooned from hot cans.

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Once the property had been privately owned. Now it belonged to the county, perhaps seized for back taxes. Like much government land, it was poorly managed. No bureaucrats or game wardens had bothered Ralph Cottle since the day, eleven years ago, when he had cleaned out the cottage, put down his bedroll, and settled in as a squatter.

No neighbors lived within sight or within shouting distance. The cottage was a secluded outpost, which suited Cottle just fine.

Until 3:45 the previous morning, when he had been prodded awake by a visitor in a ski mask: Then what had seemed like cozy privacy had become a terrifying isolation.

Cottle had fallen asleep without extinguishing the oil lamp by which he read Western novels and drank himself to sleep. In spite of that light, he hadn’t absorbed any useful details about the killer’s appearance. He couldn’t estimate the man’s height or weight.

He claimed the madman’s voice had no memorable characteristics. Billy figured Cottle knew more but feared to tell. The anxiety that now simmered in his faded blue eyes was as pure and intense, if not as immediate, as the terror he described in the photograph of the unknown woman from whom the freak had “harvested” a face.

Judging by the length of his skeletal fingers and the formidable bones in his knobby wrists, Cottle had once been equipped to fight back. Now, by his own admission, he was weak, not just emotionally and morally, but physically. Nevertheless, Billy leaned forward in his chair and tried again to enlist him: “Back me up with the police. Help me—”

“I can’t even help myself, Mr. Wiles.”

“You must’ve once known how.”

“I don’t want to remember.”

“Remember what?”

“Anything. I told you—I’m weak.”

“Sounds like you want to be.”

Raising the pint to his lips, Cottle smiled thinly and, before taking a drink, said, “Haven’t you heard—the meek shall inherit the earth.”

“If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me.”

Licking his lips, which were badly chapped by the heat and by the dehydrating effect of the whiskey, Cottle said, “Why would I?”

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“The meek don’t stand by and watch another man destroyed. The meek aren’t the same as cowards. They’re two different breeds.”

“You can’t insult me into cooperation. I don’t insult. I don’t care. I know I’m nothing, and that’s all right with me.”

“Just because you’ve come here to do what he wants, you won’t be safe out there in your cottage.”

Screwing the cap on the bottle, Cottle said, “Safer than you.”

“Not at all. You’re a loose end. Listen, the police will give you protection.”

A dry laugh escaped the stewbum. “Is that why you’ve been so quick to run to them—for their protection?”

Billy said nothing.

Emboldened by Billy’s silence, Cottle found a sharper voice that was less mean than smug: “Just like me, you’re nothing, but you don’t know it yet. You’re nothing, I’m nothing, we’re all nothing, and as far as I care, if he leaves me alone, that psycho shithead can do what he wants to anybody because he’s nothing, too.”

Watching Cottle screw open the pint-bottle cap that he had just screwed shut, Billy said, “What if I throw your ass down those stairs and kick you off my land? He calls me sometimes just to wear on my nerves. What if when he calls I tell him you were drunk, incoherent, I couldn’t understand a thing you said?”

Cottle’s sunburned and blood-fused face could not turn pale, but his small purse of a mouth, snugged tight with self-satisfaction after his rant, now loosened and poured forth the dull coins of a counterfeit apology. “Mr. Wiles, sir, please don’t take offense at my bad mouth. I can’t control what comes out of it any more than I can control what I pour into it.”

“He wanted to be sure you told me about the face in the jar, didn’t he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t consult with me, sir. He just put words in my mouth to bring to you, and here I am because I want to live.”

“Why?”

“Sir?”

“Look at me, Ralph.”

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Cottle met his eyes.

Billy said, “Why do you want to live?”

As though Cottle had never considered it before, the question seemed to pin down some fluttering thing in his mind, like a rare moth to a specimen board, some ever-restless and ever-contentious and ever-bitter aspect of himself that for a moment he seemed at last disposed to consider. Then his eyes became evasive, and he clasped both hands, not just one, around the pint of whiskey.

“Why do you want to live?” Billy persisted.

“What else is there?” Avoiding Billy’s eyes, Cottle raised the bottle in both hands, as if it were a chalice. “I could use just a taste,” he said, as though asking for permission.

“Go ahead.”

He took a small sip, but then at once took another.

“The freak made you tell me about the face in the jar because he wants that image in my head.”

“If you say so.”

“It’s about intimidation, about keeping me off balance.”

“Are you?”

Instead of answering the question, Billy said, “What else did he send you here to tell me?”

As if getting down to business, Cottle screwed the cap on the bottle again and this time returned the pint to his coat pocket. “You’ll have five minutes to make a decision.”

“What decision?”

“Take off your wristwatch and prop it on the porch railing.”

“Why?”

“To count off the five minutes.”

“I can count them with the watch on my wrist.”

“Putting it on the railing is a signal to him that the countdown has started.”

Woods to the north, shadowy and cool in the hot day. Green lawn, then tall golden grass, then a few well-crowned oaks, then a couple of houses downslope and to the east. To the west lay the county road, trees and fields beyond it.

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“He’s watching now?” Billy asked.

“He promised he would be, Mr. Wiles.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know, sir. Just please, please take off your watch and prop it on the railing.”

“And if I won’t?”

“Mr. Wiles, don’t talk that way.”

“But if I won’t?” Billy pressed.

His baritone rasp thinned to a higher register as Cottle said, “I told you, he’ll take my face, and me awake when he does. I told you.”

Billy got up, removed his Timex, and propped it on the railing so that the watch face could be seen from both of the rocking chairs.

As the sun approached the zenith of its arc, it penetrated the landscape and melted shadows everywhere but in the woods. The green-cloaked conspiratorial trees revealed no secrets.

“Mr. Wiles, you’ve got to sit down.”

Brightness fell from the air, and a chrome-yellow glare hazed the fields and furrows, forcing Billy to squint at numberless places where a man could lie in the open, effectively camouflaged by nothing more than spangled sunlight.

“You won’t spot him,” Cottle said, “and he won’t like it that you’re trying. Come back, sit down.”

Billy remained on his feet at the railing.

“You’ve wasted half a minute, Mr. Wiles, forty seconds.”

Billy didn’t move.

“You don’t know what a box you’re in,” Cottle said anxiously. “You’re gonna need every minute he’s given you to think.”

“So tell me about the box.”

“You have to be sitting down. For God’s sake, Mr. Wiles.” Cottle wrung his voice as a worried old woman might wring her hands. “He wants you sitting in the chair.”

Billy returned to the rocking chair.

“I just want to be done with this,” Cottle said. “I just want to do what he told me and get out of here.”

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“Now you’re the one wasting time.”

One of the five minutes had passed.

“All right, okay,” Cottle said. “This is him talking now. You understand?

This is him.”

“Get on with it.”

Cottle nervously licked his lips. He slipped the pint from his coat, not seeking a taste at the moment, instead clutching it with both hands, as if it were a talisman with the occult power to lift the fog of whiskey that blurred his memory, ensuring that he would deliver the message clearly enough to save his face from being pickled in a jar.

“ ‘I will kill someone you know. You will select the target for me from people in your life,’” Cottle quoted. “ ‘This is your chance to rid the world of some hopeless asshole.’”

“The twisted sonofabitch,” Billy said, and discovered that both of his hands were fisted, with nothing to punch.

“ ‘If you don’t select the target for me,’” Cottle continued quoting, “ ‘I will choose someone in your life to kill. You have five minutes to decide. The choice is yours, if you have the balls to make it.’”

Chapter 22

The effort to recall the precise wording of the message reduced Ralph Cottle to a hive of buzzing nerves. Countless anxieties swarmed through him and were glimpsed in his darting eyes, in his twitching face, in his trembling hands; Billy could almost hear the thrumming wings of dread. While Cottle had recited the freak’s challenge and conditions, with the penalty of death hanging over him if he got them wrong, the pint bottle had been a talisman with the power to inspire, but now he needed the contents. Staring at the wristwatch on the porch railing, Billy said, “I don’t need five minutes. Hell, I don’t even need the three that’re left.”

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Without intention, by not going to the police and getting them involved, he had already contributed to the death of one person in his life: Lanny Olsen. By his inaction, he had spared the mother of two, but he had doomed his friend. Lanny himself had been partly if not largely responsible for his own death. He had taken the killer’s notes and had destroyed them to save his job and his pension, at the cost of his life.

Nevertheless, some of the blame lay with Billy. He could feel the weight; and always would.

What the freak demanded of him now was something new and more terrible than anything heretofore. Not by inaction this time, not by inadvertence, but by conscious intent, Billy was expected to mark someone he knew for death.

“I won’t do it,” he said.

Having guzzled a dram or two, Cottle was sliding the wet mouth of the bottle back and forth across his lips, as if he might French kiss it instead of drinking any more. Through his nose, he noisily inhaled the rising fumes.

“If you won’t do it, he will,” said Cottle.

“Why would I choose? I’m screwed either way, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. It’s not my business.”

“The hell it’s not.”

“It’s not my business,” Cottle insisted. “I’ve got to sit here till you give me your decision, then I give it to him, and I’m not a part of it anymore. You’ve got just more than two minutes left.”

“I’m going to the cops.”

“It’s too late for that.”

“I’m in shit to my hips,” Billy admitted, “but I’ll only be deeper later.”

When Billy rose from his rocking chair, Cottle said sharply, “Sit down! If you try to leave this porch before I do, you’ll be shot in the head.”

The stewbum stowed bottles in his pockets, not weapons. Even if Cottle had a gun, Billy was confident about taking it from him.

“Not me,” Cottle said. “Him. How he’s watching us right now is through the scope of a high-powered rifle.”

The gloom of the woods to the north, the dazzle of sun on the slope to the east, the rock formations and swales of the fields on the south side of the county road…

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“He can just about read our lips,” Cottle said. “It’s the finest marksman’s gun, and he’s qualified for it. He can nail you at a thousand yards.”

“Maybe that’s what I want.”

“He’s willing to oblige. But he doesn’t think you’re ready. He says you will be eventually. In the end, he says, you’ll ask him to kill you. But not yet.”

Even with his weight of guilt, Billy Wiles suddenly felt like a feather, and he feared a sudden wind. He settled into the rocking chair.

“Why it’s too late to go to the cops,” Cottle said, “is because he planted evidence in her place, on her body.”

The day remained still, but here came the wind. “What evidence?”

“For one thing, some of your hairs in her fist and under her fingernails.”

Billy’s mouth felt numb. “How would he get my hairs?”

“From your shower drain.”

Before the nightmare had begun, when Giselle Winslow had still been alive, the freak had already been in this house.

The shade on the porch no longer held the summer heat at bay. Billy might as well have been standing on blacktop in the sun. “What else besides hairs?”

“He didn’t say. But it’s nothing the police will tie to you… unless for some reason you come under suspicion.”

“Which he can make happen.”

“If the cops start thinking maybe they should ask you for a DNA sample, you’re finished.”

Cottle glanced at the wristwatch.

So did Billy.

“One minute left,” Cottle advised.

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Chapter 23

One minute. Billy Wiles stared at his wristwatch as if it were a bomb clock counting down to detonation.

He wasn’t thinking about the fleeting seconds or the evidence planted at the scene of Giselle Winslow’s murder, or about being in the sights of a highpowered rifle. Instead, he was composing a mental directory of people in his life. Faces flickered rapidly through his mind. Those he liked. Those toward whom he was indifferent. Those he disliked.

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These were dark shoals. He could founder on them. Yet turning his mind away from such thoughts proved as difficult as ignoring a knife held to his throat.

A knife of another kind, a knife of guilt cut him loose from these considerations at last. Realizing how seriously he had been calculating the comparative value of the people in his life, assessing which of them had a lesser right to life than others, he could not repress a shudder of disgust.

“No,” he said, seconds before his time ran out. “No, I’ll never choose. He can go to Hell.”

“Then he’ll choose for you,” Cottle reminded Billy.

“He can go to Hell.”

“All right. It’s your call. It’s on your shoulders, Mr. Wiles. It’s none of my business.”

“Now what?”

“You stay in the chair, sir, right where you are. I’m supposed to go inside to the kitchen phone, wait for his call, and tell him your decision.”

“I’ll go inside,” Billy said. “I’ll take the call.”

“You’re making me crazy,” Cottle said, “you’re gonna get us both killed.”

“It’s my house.”

When he raised the bottle to his mouth, Cottle’s hands shook so badly that the glass rattled against his teeth. Whiskey dribbled down his chin. Without wiping the spill off his face, he said, “He wants you in that chair. You try to go inside, he’ll blow your brains out before you reach the door.”

“What sense does that make?”

“Then he’ll blow my brains out, too, because I couldn’t make you listen to me.”

“He won’t,” Billy disagreed, beginning to intuit something of the freak’s perspective. “He’s not ready to end it, not this way.”

“What do you know? You don’t know. You don’t know squat.”

“He’s got a plan, a purpose, something that might not make sense to you or me, but it makes sense to him.”

“I’m just a useless damn drunk, but even I know you’re full of crap.”

“He wants to work it all out the way he conceived it,” Billy said more to himself than to Cottle, “not just end it in the middle with two head shots.”

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Anxiously surveying the sun-dazzled day beyond the front porch, spraying spittle as he spoke, Ralph Cottle said, “You bullheaded sonofabitch, will you listen to me! You don’t listen!”

“I’m listening.”

“More than anything, he wants things done his way. He doesn’t want to talk to you. Get it? Maybe he doesn’t want you to hear his voice.”

That made sense if the freak was someone whom Billy knew.

Cottle said, “Or maybe he just doesn’t want to listen to your bullshit any more than I do. I don’t know. If you want to answer the phone to show him who’s boss, just to piss him off, and he blows your brains out, I don’t give a rat’s ass. But then he’ll kill me, too, and you can’t choose for me. You can’t choose for me!”

Billy knew that his instincts were right: The freak wouldn’t shoot them.

“Your five minutes are up,” Cottle said worriedly, gesturing toward the watch on the railing. “Six minutes. You’re past six minutes. He won’t like this.”

In truth, Billy didn’t know the freak would hold his fire. He suspected that would be the case, intuited it, but he didn’t know.

“Your time is up. Going on seven minutes. Seven minutes. He expects me to leave the porch, go inside.”

Cottle’s faded blue eyes were boiled in fear. He had so little to live for, yet he was desperate to live. What else is there? he had said.

“Go,” Billy told him.

“What?”

“Go inside. Go to the phone.”

Bolting up from his rocking chair, Cottle dropped the open pint. Several ounces of whiskey spilled from the uncapped mouth.

Cottle didn’t stoop to retrieve his treasure. In fact, in his haste to get to the front door, he kicked the bottle and sent it spinning across the porch floor. At the threshold to the house, he looked back and said, “I’m not sure how quick he’ll call.”

“You just remember every word he says,” Billy instructed. “You remember every word exactly.”

“All right, sir. I will.”

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“And every inflection. You remember every word and how he says it, and you come tell me.”

“I will, Mr. Wiles. Every word,” Cottle promised, and he went into the house.

Billy remained alone on the porch. Perhaps still in the crosshairs of a telescopic sight.

Chapter 24

Three butterflies, aerial geishas, danced out of the sunshine, into the porch shadows. Their silken kimonos flaring and folding and flaring in graceful swirls of color, as bashful as faces hidden behind the pleats of hand-painted fans, they fled, quick, into the brightness from which they had come. Performance.

Perhaps this was the word that defined the killer, that would lead to an explanation of his actions, and that if understood would reveal his Achilles’

heel.

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According to Ralph Cottle, the freak had referred to the murder of a woman and to the peeling away of her face as “the second act” in one of his

“best performances.”

In assuming that the psychopath considered murder to be largely a thrilling game, Billy had been wrong. Sport might be part of it, but this man wasn’t entirely or even primarily motivated by a perverse sense of fun. Billy didn’t quite know what to make of the word performance. Maybe to his nemesis, the world was a stage, reality was a fraud, and all was artifice. How that view could explain this homicidal behavior—or predict it—Billy didn’t know, couldn’t guess. Nemesis represented wrong thinking. A nemesis was an enemy who could not be defeated. The better word was adversary. Billy had not given up hope.

With the front door standing open, the ring of the telephone would carry to the front porch. He had not heard it yet.

Lazily rocking the chair, not to make a harder target of himself, but to disguise his anxiety and thus rob the killer of the chance to take any satisfaction from it, Billy studied the nearest California live oak and then the next to the nearest.

They were huge old trees with broad canopies. Their trunks and branches looked black in the bright sun.

In those shadowy arbors, a sniper might find a crook of branches to serve as a platform to accommodate him and a tripod for his rifle. The two nearest houses down-slope, one on this side of the road, one on the farther side, were well within the thousand-yard range. If nobody had been home, the freak could have broken into one of those places; he might now be at an upstairs window. Performance.

Billy was not able to think of any person in his life to whom that word had greater relevance than it did to Steve Zillis. The tavern was a stage to Steve. Was it logical, however, that the freak, a vicious serial killer with a taste for mutilation, would have a sense of humor so simple and a concept of theater so puerile that he got a kick out of nose-shot peanuts, tongue-tied cherry stems, and jokes about dumb blondes?

Repeatedly Billy glanced at the wristwatch on the porch railing. Three minutes was a reasonable wait, even four. But when five passed, that seemed to be too many.

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He started to get up from the chair, but he heard Cottle’s voice in memory—You can’t choose for me!—and a weight of responsibility pressed him back into the rocker.

Because Billy had kept Cottle on the porch past the five-minute deadline, the freak might be playing payback, making them wait so their nerves would fray a little, to teach them not to screw with the big dog. That thought comforted Billy for a minute. Then a more ominous possibility occurred to him.

When Cottle hadn’t gone into the house promptly at the five-minute mark, when Billy had delayed two or three minutes, maybe the killer had taken the lack of punctuality to mean that Billy refused to choose a victim, which was indeed the case.

Having made that assumption, the freak might have decided that he had no reason to call Ralph Cottle. At that moment he could have picked up his rifle and walked out of the woods or away from one of the houses down-slope. If he’d selected a victim in advance of hearing Billy’s answer, which surely he had done, he might be eager to get on with his plans. One of the people in Billy’s life, the most important person, was of course Barbara, helpless in Whispering Pines.

Independent of any experience or knowledge that would justify his confidence, Billy sensed that this bizarre drama was still in the first act of three. His wretched antagonist was far from ready to conclude this performance; therefore, Barbara was not in imminent jeopardy. If the freak knew anything about the subject of his torment—and he seemed to know a lot—he would realize that Barbara’s death would instantly take all the fight out of Billy. Resistance was essential to drama. Conflict. Without Billy, there would be no act two.

He must take steps to protect Barbara. But he needed to think hard about how, and he had time to do so.

If he was wrong about that, if Barbara was next, then this world was about to become a brief and bitter purgatory before he quickly moved on to a room in Hell.

Seven minutes had passed since Cottle had gone inside, seven and counting.

Billy got up from the rocker. His legs felt weak. He pulled the revolver from the box of Ritz crackers. He didn’t care if the drunkard saw it.

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At the threshold of the open door, he called out, “Cottle?” and received no reply, and said, “Cottle, damn it.”

He went into the house, crossed the living room, and stepped into the kitchen.

Ralph Cottle wasn’t there. The back door stood open, and Billy knew that he had left it closed, locked.

He went out onto the back porch. Cottle wasn’t there, either, nor was he in the yard. He had gone.

The phone hadn’t rung, yet Cottle had gone. Maybe when the call hadn’t come in, Cottle had taken the silence to be a sign that the killer judged him a failure. He could have panicked and fled.

Returning to the house, closing the door behind himself, Billy swept the kitchen with his gaze, looking for something amiss. He had no idea what that might be.

Everything seemed to be as it had been, as it should be. Uncertainty gave way to misgiving, however, and misgiving became suspicion. Cottle must have taken something, brought something, done something.

From the kitchen to the living room, to the study, Billy found nothing out of the ordinary, but in the bathroom he discovered Ralph Cottle. Dead.

Chapter 25

Hard fluorescent light painted a film of faux frost on Cottle’s open eyes. Having passed on rather than out, the drunk sat on the lidded seat of the toilet, leaning against the tank, head tipped back, mouth slack. Yellow rotten teeth framed a tongue that appeared milky pink and vaguely fissured from the dehydration of perpetual inebriation.

Billy stood breathless, stunned stupid, then backed out of the bathroom into the hall, staring at the corpse through the doorway.

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He didn’t retreat because of any stench. Cottle had not voided bowels or bladder in his death throes. He remained unkempt but not filthy—the only thing about which he had seemed to have any pride.

Billy just couldn’t breathe in the bathroom, as though all the air had been sucked out of that space, as though the dead man had been killed by a sudden vacuum that now threatened to suffocate Billy himself.

In the hallway, he could draw breath again. He could begin to think. For the first time, he noticed the handle of the knife, which pinned Cottle’s rumpled suit coat to him. A bright-yellow handle.

The blade had been thrust at an upward angle between the ribs on the left side, buried to the hilt. The heart had been pierced, and stopped. Billy knew that the embedded blade measured six inches. The yellow knife belonged to him. He kept it in his angler’s kit in the garage. It was a fishing knife, honed sharp to gut bass and fillet trout.

The killer had not been in the woods or in a meadow swale, or in a neighbor’s house watching them through a telescopic rifle sight. That was a lie, and the drunkard had believed it.

As Cottle had approached the front porch, the freak must have entered by the back door. While Billy and his visitor had sat in the rockers, their adversary had been in the house, a few feet from them.

Billy had refused to choose someone in his life to be the next victim. As promised, the killer then made the choice with startling swiftness. Although Cottle had been the next thing to a stranger, he was undeniably in Billy’s life. And now in his house. Dead.

In less than a day and a half, in just forty-one hours, three people had been murdered. Yet this still felt to Billy like act one; perhaps it was the end of act one, but his gut instinct told him that significant developments lay ahead. At every turn of events, he had done what seemed to be the most sensible and cautious thing, especially given his personal history. His common sense and caution, however, played into the killer’s hands. Hour by hour, Billy Wiles was drifting farther from any safe shore. Down in Napa, evidence that might incriminate him had been planted in the house where Giselle Winslow had been murdered. Hairs from his shower drain. He didn’t know what else.

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No doubt evidence had been salted in Lanny Olsen’s house, as well. For one thing, the place marker in the book under Lanny’s dead hand was all but certainly a photo of Winslow, linking the crimes.

Now in his bathroom slumped a corpse from which bristled a knife that belonged to him.

Here in summer, Billy felt as if he were on an icy slope, the bottom invisible beyond a cold mist, still on his feet in a wild glissade, but gaining speed that, second by second, threatened his balance.

Initially the discovery of Cottle’s corpse had shocked Billy into mental and physical immobility. Now several courses of action occurred to him, and he stood hobbled by indecision.

The worst thing he could do was act precipitately. He needed to think this through, attempt to foresee the consequences of each of his options. He could afford no more mistakes. His freedom depended on his wits and courage. So did his survival.

Stepping into the bathroom again, he noticed no gore. Maybe this meant Cottle hadn’t been killed in the bath.

Billy hadn’t seen evidence of violence elsewhere in the house, either. This realization focused him on the handle of the knife. Around the point of penetration, dark blood soaked the lightweight summer suit jacket, but the stain wasn’t as large as he would have expected.

The killer had finished Cottle with a single thrust. He’d known precisely where and how to slip the thin blade between the ribs. The heart had stopped within a beat or two of being punctured, which minimized the bleeding. Cottle’s hands lay in his lap, one upturned and the other cupped against it, as if he’d died while applauding his killer. Mostly concealed, something was captured between the hands. When Billy pinched a corner of the object and pulled it free of the dead man’s grasp, he discovered a computer diskette: red, high density, the same brand that he had used in the days when he had worked at his computer. He studied the body from different angles. He turned slowly in a full circle, surveying the bathroom for any clues the killer might have left either intentionally or inadvertently. Sooner than later, he should probably go through Cottle’s coat and pants pockets. The diskette gave him an excuse to postpone that unpleasant task. In the study, after putting the revolver and the diskette on the desk, he removed the vinyl cover from his shrouded computer. He had not used the machine in almost four years. Curiously, he had never unplugged it. He supposed this might be an unconscious expression of his

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stubborn—if fragile—hope that Barbara Mandel might one day recover. In his second year of college, when he realized that not much of what he learned there would help him become the writer he wanted to be, he had dropped out. He had done manual labor of various kinds, writing diligently in his spare time. At twenty-one, he had taken his first bartending job. The work had seemed ideal for a writer. He saw story material in every barfly. Patiently developing his talent, he sold more than a score of well-received short stories to a variety of magazines. When he was twenty-five, a major publisher had wanted to collect them in a book. The book sold modestly but earned critical praise, suggesting that bartending would not forever be his primary occupation. When Barbara came into Billy’s life, she provided not merely encouragement but also inspiration. Just by knowing her, by loving her, he found a truer and clearer voice in his prose.

He wrote his first novel, and his publisher responded to it with excitement. The revisions suggested by the editor were minor, a month’s work. Then he lost Barbara to the coma.

The truer and clearer voice in his prose had not been lost with her. He could still write.

The desire to write, however, slipped away from him, and the will to write, and all interest in storytelling. He no longer wanted to explore the human condition in fiction, for he had too much hard experience of it in reality. For two years, his publisher and editor were patient. But the month’s work on his manuscript had become to him more than a lifetime of labor. He could not do it. He repaid the advance and canceled the contract. Switching on this computer, even just to review what the killer had left in Ralph Cottle’s hands, felt like a betrayal of Barbara, although she would have disapproved of—even mocked—such thinking.

He was a little surprised when the machine, so long unused, at once came to life. The screen brightened, and the operating-system logo appeared as the simulated harp strings of the signature music issued from the speakers. The computer might have been used more recently than he thought. The fact that the diskette was the same brand as the unused diskettes in one of his desk drawers suggested that it was in fact one of his and that the freak had composed his latest message at this keyboard.

Oddly enough, he was creeped out by this realization even more than he had been when he’d found the corpse in his bathroom.

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Long unseen yet familiar, the software menu appeared. Because he had written his fiction in Microsoft Word, he tried it first.

That choice proved correct. The killer had written his message in Word, as well; and it loaded at once.

The diskette contained three documents. Before Billy could review the text, the telephone rang.

He figured it must be the freak.

Chapter 26

Billy picked up the phone. “Hello?”

Not the freak. A woman said, “To whom am I speaking?”

“To whom am I speaking? You called me.”

“Billy, that sounds like you. This is Rosalyn Chan.”

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Rosalyn was a friend of Lanny Olsen. She worked for the Napa County Sheriff’s Department. She came into the tavern now and then. Before Billy had been able to decide what to do about Lanny’s body, it must have been found.

The instant that he realized he hadn’t responded to her, Rosalyn said probingly, “Are you all right?”

“Me? I’m fine. Doin’ okay. This heat’s making me crazy, though.”

“Is something wrong there?”

He flashed on a mental image of Cottle’s corpse in the bathroom, and guilt rolled his mind into angles of disorientation. “Wrong? No. Why would there be?”

“Did you just call here and hang up without saying anything?” Clouds of mystification thickened for a moment, then abruptly evaporated. For a moment he had forgotten what Rosalyn did in the sheriff’s department. She was a 911

operator.

The name and address of every 911 caller appeared on her monitor as soon as she picked up the phone at her end.

“That was just—what?—was that even a minute ago?” he asked, thinking fast, or trying to.

“A minute ten now,” Rosalyn said. “Did you—”

“What I did,” he said, “is I keyed in 911 when I meant to call information.”

“You meant to call 411?”

“I meant to call 411, but I pressed 911. I realized right away what I’d done, so I hung up.”

The freak was still in the house. The freak had called 911. Why he had done this, what he hoped to achieve, Billy couldn’t figure, at least not under this pressure.

“Why didn’t you stay on the line,” Rosalyn Chan asked, “and tell me the call was made in error?”

“I realized my mistake right away, I hung up so fast, I didn’t think a connection had been made yet. That was stupid. I’m sorry, Rosalyn. I was calling 411.”

“So you’re all right?”

“I’m all right. It’s just this crazy heat.”

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“Don’t you have air conditioning?”

“I have it, but it conked out.”

“That sucks.”

“Totally.”

The revolver lay on the desk. Billy picked it up. The freak was in the house.

“Hey, maybe I’ll stop in the tavern around five,” she said.

“Well, I won’t be there. I’m feeling sort of punky, so I called in sick.”

“I thought you said you were fine.”

So easy to trip himself up. He needed to look for the intruder, but he needed to sound right to Rosalyn.

“I am fine. I’m okay. Nothing serious. Just a little stomach thing. Maybe it’s a summer cold. I’m taking that nasal gel stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“You know, that zinc gel, you squeeze it up your nose, it knocks the cold right out of you.”

She said, “I think I heard about that.”

“It’s good. It works. Jackie O’Hara put me on to it. You should keep some on hand.”

“So everything’s okay there?” she asked.

“Except for the heat and me feeling punky, but you can’t do much about that. Nine-one-one can’t fix a cold or an air conditioner. I’m sorry, Rosalyn. I feel like an idiot.”

“It’s no big deal. Half the calls we get aren’t emergencies.”

“They aren’t?”

“People call, their cat’s in a tree, the neighbors are having a noisy party, things like that.”

“That makes me feel better. At least I’m not the biggest idiot on the block.”

“Just take care of yourself, Billy.”

“I will. You too. You take care of yourself.”

“Bye,” she said.

He put down the phone and rose from his chair.

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While Billy had been in the bathroom with the corpse, the freak had come back into the house. Or maybe he had already been inside, hiding in a closet or somewhere that Billy hadn’t checked.

The guy had balls. Big brass ones. He knew about the .38, but he came back into the house and he called 911 while Billy was taking the vinyl cover off the computer.

The freak might still be here. Doing what? Doing something. Billy crossed the study to the door, which he had left open. He went through fast, two hands on the revolver, sweeping it left, then right. The freak wasn’t in the hall. He was somewhere.

Chapter 27

Although Billy Wiles wasn’t wearing his wristwatch, he knew that time was running out as fast as water through a sieve.

In the bedroom, he slid aside one of the closet doors. No one. The space under the bed was too tight. No one would choose to hide under there because squirming out quickly wasn’t possible; that hiding place would be a trap. Besides, no overhanging spread curtained that low space.

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Looking under the bed would be a waste of time. Billy started toward the door. He returned to the bed, dropped to one knee. A waste. The freak was gone. He was crazy, but he wasn’t crazy enough to stay here after calling 911 and hanging up on them.

In the hallway again, Billy hurried to the threshold of the bathroom. Cottle sat alone in there.

The shower curtain was drawn open. If it had been drawn shut, it would have been a prime place to look.

A large hall closet housed the oil-fired furnace. It offered no options. The living room. An open space, easy to search with a sweep of the eyes. The kitchen cabinetry featured a tall, narrow broom closet. No good. He tore open the door to the walk-in pantry. Canned goods, boxes of pasta, bottles of hot sauce, household supplies. Nowhere to hide a grown man. In the living room again, he shoved the revolver deep under a sofa cushion. It didn’t leave a visible lump, but anyone who sat on the gun would feel it.

He had left the front door standing open. An invitation. Before hastening once more to the bathroom, he closed the door.

Cottle with his head tipped back and his mouth open, with his hands together in his lap as if clapping, might have been singing Western swing and keeping time.

The knife sawed against bone as Billy pulled it out of the wound. Blood smeared the blade.

With a few Kleenex plucked from a box beside the sink, he wiped the knife clean. He balled up the tissues and put them on top of the toilet tank. He folded the blade into the yellow handle and put the knife beside the sink.

When Billy shifted the corpse sideways on the toilet, the head fell forward, and a gaseous sputter escaped the lips, as if Cottle had died on an inhalation, as if his last breath, until now, had been trapped in his throat. He hooked his arms under the dead man’s arms. Trying to avoid the bloodsoaked part of the suit coat, Billy hauled him off the toilet. Worn thin by a diet of spirits, Cottle weighed hardly more than an adolescent. Carrying him would be too difficult, however, because he was gangly, spindle-legged.

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Fortunately, rigor mortis had not begun to set in. Cottle was limp, flexible. Shuffling backward, Billy dragged the body out of the bathroom. The heels of the dead man’s sneakers squeaked and stuttered along the ceramic-tile floor.

They protested against the polished Santos-mahogany floors of the hall and study, too, all the way around behind the desk, where he lowered the corpse to the hardwood.

Billy heard himself breathing hard, not so much from exertion as from high anxiety.

Time rushed away, rushed like a river over a falls.

After rolling the office chair aside, he shoved the corpse into the knee space. He had to bend the legs to make the dead man fit.

He swung the chair in front of the computer again. He pushed it as far into the knee space as possible.

The desk was deep and had a privacy panel on the front. Anyone who came into the room would have to walk all the way behind the work station and peer purposefully into the kneehole to see the cadaver.

Even then, because of the chair and depending on the angle of view, a casual look might not reveal this grisly secret.

Shadows would be helpful. Billy switched off the overhead light. He left only the desk lamp aglow.

In the bathroom once more, he saw a smear of blood on the floor. None had been there before he’d moved Cottle.

His heart was a kicking horse battering the board walls of his chest. One mistake. If he made one mistake here, it would finish him. His time perception was whacked. He knew that only a few minutes had passed since he’d set out to search the house, but he felt as if ten minutes had fled, fifteen.

He wished that he had his wristwatch. He didn’t dare take the time to retrieve it from the front-porch railing.

With a wad of toilet paper, he wiped the blood off the floor. The tiles came clean, but a faint discoloration remained in a section of grout. It looked like rust, not like blood. That’s what he wanted to believe.

Into the toilet he dropped the wad of paper as well as the Kleenex with which he had swabbed the blade of the knife. He flushed them away.

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The murder weapon lay on the counter beside the sink. He buried it at the back of a vanity drawer, behind bottles of shaving lotion and suntan oil. When he slammed the drawer shut so hastily, so hard, that it banged like a gunshot, he knew he needed to get a tighter grip on himself. Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.

He would remain calmer if he remembered his true purpose. His true purpose was not the endless cycle of idea and action, was not the preservation of his freedom or even his life. He must live that she could live, helpless but safe, helpless and sleeping and dreaming but subjected to no indignity, no evil. He was a shallow man. He had often proved that truth to himself. In the face of suffering, he had not possessed the strength of will to pursue his gift for the written word. He rejected the gift not just once but a damning number of times, for gifts conferred by the power that had conferred this one are perpetually offered and can come to nothing only if they are perpetually rejected.

In his suffering, he had been humbled by the limitations of language, which he should have been. He had also been defeated by the limitations of language, which he should not have been.

He was a shallow man. He did not have within him the capacity to care deeply about multitudes, to accept every neighbor into his heart without qualification. The power of compassion was in him merely an ability, and its potentiality seemed to be fulfilled by caring for one woman. Because of this shallowness, he believed himself to be a weak man, perhaps not as weak as Ralph Cottle, but not strong. He had been chilled but never surprised when the stewbum had said I see the way you’re a little like me.

The sleeper, safe and dreaming, was his true purpose and also his only hope of redemption. For that, he must care and not care; he must be still. Calmer than when he had slammed the drawer, Billy reviewed the bathroom one more time. He saw no evidence of the crime.

Time was still a river rushing, a spinning wheel.

Hurriedly but thoroughly, he retraced the route along which he had dragged the dead man, searching for additional smears of blood like the one in the bathroom. He discovered none.

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Doubting himself, he quickly toured the bedroom, living room, and kitchen once more. He tried to see everything through the eyes of suspicious authority.

Only the situation on the front porch remained to be set right. He had left that task for last because it was less urgent than the need to conceal the corpse. In case he didn’t have time to address the porch, he took from a kitchen cabinet the bottle of bourbon with which he had spiked his Guinness stout on Monday night. He swigged directly from the bottle.

Instead of swallowing, he swished the whiskey between his teeth, around his mouth, as if it were mouthwash. The longer he held the alcohol, the more it burned his gums, tongue, cheeks.

He spat it in the sink before he remembered to gargle.

He rinsed his mouth with another swig but also let it churn in his throat for several seconds.

With a wheeze but not a choke, he spat this second mouthful in the sink just as the expected knock came at the front door, loud and protracted. Perhaps four minutes had passed since he’d hung up the phone after his conversation with Rosalyn Chan. Maybe five. It felt like an hour; it felt like ten seconds.

As the knock sounded, Billy turned on the cold water to wash the reek of booze out of the sink. He left it streaming.

In the quiet after the knock, he capped the bourbon and returned it to the cabinet.

At the sink once more, he cranked off the water as the knocking came again.

Answering at once on the first knock might have made him seem anxious. Waiting for a third might make it appear as though he had considered not answering at all.

Crossing the living room, he thought to examine his hands. He did not see any blood.

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Chapter 28

When Billy Wiles opened the front door, he found a sheriff’s deputy standing three cautious steps from the threshold and to one side. The cop’s right hand rested on the pistol in the swivel holster at his hip, rested there not as if he were prepared to draw it, but as casually as anyone might stand with a hand on his hip.

Billy had hoped that he would know him. He didn’t.

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The officer’s badge featured a nameplate: Sgt. V. Napolitino. At forty-six, Lanny Olsen had held the same rank—deputy—at which he had entered service as a younger man.

In his early twenties, V. Napolitino had already been promoted to sergeant. He had the well-scrubbed, clear-eyed, intelligent, and diligent look of a man who would make lieutenant by twenty-five, captain by thirty, commander by thirty-five, and chief before forty.

Billy’s preference would have been a fat, rumpled, weary, and cynical specimen. Maybe this was one of those days when you should stay away from roulette because every bet on black would ensure a red number.

“Mr. Wiles?”

“Yeah. That’s me.”

“William Wiles?”

“Billy, yes.”

Sergeant Napolitino shifted his attention back and forth between Billy and the living room behind him.

The sergeant’s face remained expressionless. His eyes revealed neither apprehension nor even disquiet, nor as much as wariness, but were only watchful.

“Mr. Wiles, would you mind stepping out to my car with me?”

The sheriffs-department cruiser stood in the driveway.

“You want to come in?” Billy asked.

“Not necessarily, sir. Just to the car for a minute or two, if you don’t mind.”

This almost sounded like a request, but it wasn’t.

“Sure,” Billy said. “All right.”

A second patrol car pulled off the county blacktop, into the driveway, and halted ten feet behind the first.

As Billy reached for the knob to pull the front door shut after him, Sergeant Napolitino said, “Why don’t you leave it open, sir.”

The deputy’s tone of voice did not signify either a question or a suggestion. Billy left the door open.

Napolitino clearly expected him to lead the way.

Billy stepped over the pint bottle, past the spilled Seagram’s.

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Although the puddle was at least fifteen minutes old, less than half of it had evaporated in the heat. In the still air, the porch stank of whiskey. Billy went down the steps and onto the lawn. He didn’t pretend to be unsteady. He wasn’t a good enough actor to play drunk, and any attempt to do so would call his sincerity into doubt.

He intended to rely on his potent breath to suggest functional inebriation and to give credence to the story that he intended to tell. As a deputy got out of the second patrol car, Billy recognized him. Sam Sobieski. He also was a sergeant, and perhaps five years older than Sergeant Napolitino.

Sobieski visited the tavern once in a while, usually with a date. He came for the bar food more than to drink, and two beers were his limit. Billy didn’t know him well. They weren’t friends, but knowing him at all was better than dealing with two strangers.

On the front lawn, Billy turned to look back at the house. Napolitino was still on the porch. He managed to cross to the steps and begin to descend without fully turning his back on either the open door or the windows, yet appearing unconcerned all the while.

Now he took the lead and brought Billy around the patrol car, putting it between them and the house.

Sergeant Sobieski joined them. “Hi, Billy.”

“Sergeant Sobieski. How’re you doin’?”

Everybody called a bartender by his first name. In some cases, you knew familiarity was expected in return; in this case not.

“Yesterday was chili day, and I forgot,” said Sobieski.

Billy said, “Ben makes the best chili.”

“Ben is a chili god,” Sobieski said.

The car was a lodestone to the sun, scorching the air around it and no doubt blistering to the touch.

First on the scene, Napolitino took charge: “Mr. Wiles, are you all right?”

“Sure. I’m okay. This is about my screw-up, I guess.”

“You called 911,” Napolitino said.

“I meant to call 411.1 told Rosalyn Chan.”

“You didn’t tell her until she called you back.”

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“I hung up so fast I didn’t realize a connection had been made.”

“Mr. Wiles, are you to any degree under duress?”

“Duress? Hey, no. You mean was somebody holding a gun to my head when I was on the phone with Rosalyn? Wow. That’s a pretty wild idea. No offense, I know that sort of thing happens, but not to me.”

Billy cautioned himself to give short answers. Longer ones could sound like nervous babbling.

“You called in sick to work?” Napolitino asked.

“Yeah.” Grimacing but not too dramatically, he put one hand on his abdomen. “I’ve got this stomach thing.”

He hoped they could smell his breath. He himself could smell it. If they could smell his breath, they would think his claim of illness was a lame attempt to conceal the fact that he was on a little bit of a bender.

“Mr. Wiles, who else lives here?”

“No one. Just me. I live alone.”

“Is anyone in the house right now?”

“No. No one.”

“No friend or member of the family?”

“No. Not even a dog. Sometimes I think about getting a dog, but I never do.”

Scalpels were not sharper than Sergeant Napolitino’s dark eyes. “Sir, if there’s a bad guy in there—”

“No bad guy,” Billy assured him.

“If someone you care about is being held in there under duress, the best thing you could do is tell me.”

“Of course. I know that. Who wouldn’t know that?”

The intense heat coming off the sun-hammered car made Billy half sick. His face felt seared. Neither of the sergeants appeared to be bothered by the broiling air.

“Under stress, intimidated,” Sobieski said, “people make bad decisions, Billy.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Billy said, “I really made an ass of myself this time, hanging up on 911, then what I said to Rosalyn.”

“What did you say to her?” Napolitino asked.

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Billy was certain they knew the essentials of what he had said, and he himself remembered every word with piercing clarity, but he hoped to convince them that he was too booze-confused to recall quite how he had gotten himself in this predicament.

“Whatever I said, it must have been stupid if I gave her the idea somebody might be giving me trouble. Duress. Man. This is way embarrassing.”

He shook his head at his foolishness, found a dry laugh, and shook his head again.

The sergeants just watched him.

“No one’s here but me. No one’s come around here in days. No one’s ever here but me. I pretty much keep to myself, it’s the way I am.”

That was enough. He was perilously close to babbling again. If they knew about Barbara, they knew how he was. If they didn’t know about her, Rosalyn would tell them.

He had taken a risk by saying that nobody had visited in days. Rightly or wrongly, he’d felt that he should make a point of his reclusive life. If someone in the nearest houses down-slope had seen Ralph Cottle walking up this driveway or had noticed him sitting on the porch, and if the sergeants decided to have a word with the neighbors, Billy would be caught in a lie.

“What happened to your forehead?” Napolitino asked.

Until that moment, Billy had forgotten about the hook wounds in his brow, but a low throbbing pain arose in them when the sergeant asked the question.

Chapter 29

“Isn’t that a bandage?” Sergeant Napolitino persisted.

Although Billy’s thick hair fell over his forehead, it did not entirely conceal the gauze pads and adhesive tape.

“I had a little table—saw accident,” Billy said, pleasantly surprised by the swiftness with which a suitable lie occurred to him.

“Sounds serious,” Sergeant Sobieski said.

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“It’s not. It’s nothing. I have a woodworking shop in the garage. I built all the cabinetry in the house. Last night, I was working on something, cutting a walnut one-by-six, and there was a knot in it. The blade cracked the knot, and a few splinters shot into my forehead.”

“You could lose an eye like that,” Sobieski said.

“I wear safety goggles. I always wear goggles.”

Napolitino said, “Did you go to a doctor?”

“Nah. No need. Just some splinters. I dug ‘em out with tweezers. Hell, the only reason I need a bandage is I did more damage with the tweezers, getting the splinters out, than they did going in.”

“Be careful about infection.”

“I soaked it with alcohol, hydrogen peroxide. Smeared Neosporin on it. I’ll be all right. This kind of thing, it happens.”

Billy felt that he had satisfied their concerns. To his ear, he didn’t sound like a man under duress, with a life-or-death problem.

The sun was a furnace, a forge, and the heat coming off the car cooked him more effectively than a microwave oven might have done, but he was cool. When the questioning took a negative and more aggressive turn, he didn’t at once recognize the change.

“Mr. Wiles,” said Napolitino, “did you then call information?”

“Did I what?”

“After you mistakenly dialed 911 and hung up, did you dial 411 as you had intended?”

“No, I just sat there for a minute thinking about what I’d done.”

“You sat there for a minute thinking how you had mistakenly dialed 911?”

“Well, not a whole minute. However long it was. I didn’t want to screw up again. I was feeling a little woozy. Like I said, my stomach. Then Rosalyn called me back.”

“Before you could dial 411 for information, she called back.”

“That’s right.”

“After your conversation with the 911 operator—”

“Rosalyn.”

“Yes. After your conversation with her, did you then call 411?”

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The telephone company imposed a 411 service charge for each call. If he had placed one, they would have a record of it.

“No,” Billy said. “I felt like such a bonehead. I needed a drink.”

The reference to a drink had come naturally, not as if he were trying to sell them on his supposed inebriation. He thought he had sounded smooth, convincing.

Napolitino said, “What number would you have asked for if you had called 411?”

Billy realized that these inquiries were no longer related to his welfare and safety. A veiled antagonism colored Napolitino’s questions, subtle but unmistakable.

Billy wondered if he should openly acknowledge this development and question their intent. He didn’t want to appear guilty.

“Steve,” he said. “I needed Steve Zillis’s number.”

“He is… ?”

“He’s a bartender at the tavern.”

“He covers your shift when you’re sick?” Napolitino asked.

“No. He works the shift after mine. Why’s it matter?”

“Why did you need to call him?”

“I just wanted to warn him that I was out, and when he came on he’d have a mess to clean up because Jackie would have been tending bar alone.”

“Jackie?” Napolitino asked.

“Jackie O’Hara. He’s the owner. He’s covering my shift. Jackie doesn’t continually tidy the work bar, the lower bar, like he should. The clutter and spills just build up till the guy following him needs like a frantic fifteen minutes to get the set-up workable again.”

Every time Billy had to give a longer, more explanatory answer, he heard a shakiness arise in his voice. He didn’t think that he was imagining it; he believed that the sergeants could hear it, too.

Maybe everyone sounded this way when talking to on-duty cops for any substantial length of time. Maybe uneasiness was natural.

A lot of gesturing was not natural, however, especially not for Billy. During his longer answers, he found himself using his hands too much, and he couldn’t control them. Defensively, but trying to appear casual, he slipped his hands into the pockets of his chinos. In each pocket, his fingers found three .38

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cartridges, spare ammunition. Napolitino said, “So you wanted to warn Steve Zillis he’d have a mess.”

“That’s right.”

“You don’t know Mr. Zillis’s phone number?”

“I don’t call him often.”

They were not engaged in an innocent Q and A anymore. They had not descended to the level of an interrogation yet, but they were on the down escalator. Billy did not quite understand why this should be the case—except that perhaps his answers and his demeanor had not been as exculpatory as he had thought. “Isn’t Mr. Zillis’s number in the directory?”

“I guess so. But sometimes it’s just easier to call 411.”

“Unless you mistakenly dial 911,” Napolitino said.

Billy decided that making no reply would be better than berating himself for idiocy, as he had done earlier. If the situation deteriorated to the point where they decided to search him, even just to pat him down, they would find the cartridges in his pockets. He wondered if he’d be able to explain the bullets with another facile and convincing lie. At the moment, he couldn’t think of one. But he couldn’t believe it would ever come to that. The deputies were here because they had been concerned that he might be in danger. He had only to convince them that he was safe, and they would leave. Something that he had said—or had not said—left them with lingering doubts. If he could only find the right words, the magic words, the sergeants would go away. Now, here, he chafed again at the limitations of language. As real as the change in Napolitino’s attitude seemed, a part of Billy argued that he was imagining it. The strain of disguising his anxiety had bent his perceptions, had made him a little paranoid.

He counseled himself to be still, to have patience.

“Mr. Wiles,” said Napolitino, “are you absolutely sure that you yourself dialed 911?”

Although Billy could parse that sentence, he couldn’t quite make sense out of it. He couldn’t grasp the intention behind the question, and considering everything that he had told them thus far, he didn’t know what answer they expected from him.

“Is there any possibility whatsoever that someone else in your house placed that call to 911?” Napolitino pressed.

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For an instant Billy thought somehow they knew about the freak, but then he understood. He understood.

Sergeant Napolitino’s question was phrased with an eye toward eventual legal challenges to police procedure. What he wanted to ask Billy was more direct: Mr. Wiles, are you holding someone in your house under duress, and did she get free long enough to dial 911, and did you tear the phone out of her hand and hang up, hoping a connection had not been made?

To ask the question more bluntly than he had done, Napolitino would first have had to inform Billy of his constitutional right to remain silent and to have an attorney present during questioning.

Billy Wiles had become a suspect.

They were on the brink. A precipice.

Never had Billy’s mind calculated options and consequences so feverishly, aware that every second of hesitation made him appear guiltier. Fortunately, he did not have to counterfeit a flabbergasted expression. His jaw must have looked unhinged.

Not trusting his ability to fake anger or even indignation with any conviction whatsoever, Billy instead played his genuine surprise: “Good Lord, you don’t think… You do think I… Good Lord. I’m the last guy I’d expect to be mistaken for Hannibal Lecter.”

Napolitino said nothing.

Neither did Sobieski.

Their eyes were as steady as the axis of a spinning gyroscope.

“Of course you’d have to consider the possibility,” Billy said. “I understand. I do. It’s all right. Go inside if you want. Have a look around.”

“Mr. Wiles, are you inviting us to search your house for an intruder or others?”

His fingertips resting on the cartridges in his pockets, his mind’s eye resting on the shadowy form of Cottle in the knee space of the desk…

“Search it for anything,” he said affably, as if relieved to understand at last what was wanted of him. “Go ahead.”

“Mr. Wiles, I am not asking to search your residence. You do see the situation?”

“Sure. I know. It’s okay. Go to it.”

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If they were invited to enter, any evidence they found could be used in court. If instead they entered uninvited, without a warrant or without adequate reason to believe that someone inside might be in jeopardy, the court would throw out the same evidence.

The sergeants would regard Billy’s cooperation, happily given, as highly suggestive of innocence.

He felt relaxed enough to take his hands out of his pockets. If he was open, relaxed, sufficiently encouraging, they might decide that he had nothing to hide. They might go away without bothering to search the place.

Napolitino glanced at Sobieski, and Sobieski nodded.

“Mr. Wiles, since you would feel better if I did so, I’ll take a quick look through the house.”

Sergeant Napolitino rounded the front of the patrol car and headed toward the porch steps, leaving Billy with Sobieski.

Chapter 30

Guilt spills itself in fear of being spilt, someone had said, perhaps Shakespeare, perhaps O.I. Simpson. Billy couldn’t remember who had nailed that thought so well in words, but he realized the truth in the aphorism and felt it keenly now.

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At the house, Sergeant Napolitino climbed the front steps and crossed the porch, stepping over the pint bottle and whatever spilled whiskey had not yet evaporated.

“Too Joe Friday,” Sobieski said.

“Excuse me?”

“Vince. He’s too deadpan. He gives you those flat eyes, that cast-concrete face, but he’s not really the hardass you think.”

By sharing Napolitino’s first name, Sobieski seemed to be taking Billy into his confidence.

Astutely alert for deception and manipulation, Billy suspected that the sergeant was no more taking him into his confidence than a trapdoor spider would greet an in-falling beetle with gentleness and brotherhood. At the house, Vince Napolitino disappeared through the open front door.

“Vince has still got too much of the academy in him,” Sobieski continued.

“When he’s seasoned a little more, he won’t come on so strong.”

“He’s just doing his job,” Billy said. “I understand that. No big deal.”

Sobieski remained in the driveway because he still at least half suspected Billy of some crime. Otherwise the two deputies would have searched the house together. Sergeant Sobieski was here to grab Billy if he tried to run.

“How’re you feeling?”

“I’m all right,” Billy said. “I just feel stupid putting you to all this trouble.”

“I meant your stomach,” Sobieski said.

“I don’t know. Maybe I ate something that was off.”

“Couldn’t have been Ben Vernon’s chili,” Sobieski said. “That stuff is so hot it cures just about any sickness known to science.”

Realizing that an innocent man, with nothing to fear, would not stare anxiously at the house, waiting for Napolitino to finish the search, Billy turned away from it and gazed out across the valley, at vineyards dwindling in a golden glare, toward mountains rising in blue haze.

“Crab will do it,” Sobieski said.

“What?”

“Crab, shrimp, lobster—if it’s a little off, it’ll cause true mayhem.”

“I had lasagna last night.”

“That sounds pretty safe.”

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“Maybe not my lasagna,” Billy said, trying to match Sobieski’s apparent nonchalance.

“Come on, Vince,” the sergeant said with a trace of impatience. “I know you’re thorough, copadre. You don’t have to prove anything to me.” Then of Billy he asked, “You have an attic?”

“Yeah.”

The sergeant sighed. “He’ll want to check the attic.”

Out of the west came a flock of small birds, swooping low and then soaring, swooping low again. They were flickers, unusually active for this heat.

“Are you hunting for one of these?” Sobieski asked.

The deputy offered the open end of a roll of breath mints. For an instant Billy was bewildered, until he realized that his hands were in his pockets again, fingering the bullets.

He took his hands out of his chinos. “I’m afraid it’s a little late for this,” he said, but accepted the mint.

“Occupational hazard, I guess,” said Sobieski. “A bartender, you’re around the stuff all day.”

Sucking on the mint, Billy said, “Actually, I don’t drink that much. I woke up at three in the morning, couldn’t turn my mind off, worrying about things I can’t control anyway, thought a shot or two would knock me out.”

“We all have nights like that. I call it the blue willies. You can’t drink them away, though. A mug of hot chocolate will cure just about any insomnia, but not even that works with the blue willies.”

“When the hooch didn’t do the job, it still seemed like a way to pass the night. Then the morning.”

“You hold it well.”

“Do I?”

“You don’t seem blotto.”

“I’m not. I’ve been tapering off the last few hours, trying to ease out of it to avoid a hangover.”

“Is that the trick?”

“It’s one of them.”

Sergeant Sobieski was easy to talk to: far too easy.

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The flickers swooped low in their direction again, abruptly banked and soared and banked again, thirty or forty individuals flying as if with a single mind.

“They’re a real nuisance,” Sobieski said of the birds.

With pointed bills, flickers sought preferred houses and stables and churches of Napa County to drill elaborate lacelike patterns in wooden cornices, architraves, eaves, bargeboards, and corner boards.

“They never bother my place,” Billy said. “It’s cedar.”

Many people found the flickers’ destructive work so beautiful that damaged wood trim was not always replaced until time and weather brought it down.

“They don’t like cedar?” Sobieski asked.

“I don’t know. But they don’t like mine.”

Having drilled its lacework, the flicker plants acorns in many of the holes, high on the building where the sun can warm them. After a few days, the bird returns to listen to the acorns. Hearing noise in some, not in others, it pecks open the noisy acorns to eat the larvae that are living inside. So much for the sanctity of the home.

Flickers and sergeants will do their work.

Slowly, relentlessly, they will do it.

“It’s not such a big place,” Billy said, allowing himself to sound slightly impatient, as he imagined that an innocent man would.

When Sergeant Napolitino returned, he did not come out of the front door. He appeared along the south side of the house, from the direction of the detached garage.

He did not approach with one hand resting casually on his gun. Maybe that was a good sign.

As if by the sight of Napolitino, the birds were chased to a far corner of the sky.

“That’s a nice wood shop you’ve got,” he told Billy. “You could do just about anything in there.”

Somehow the young sergeant made it sound as if Billy might have used the power tools to dismember a body.

Looking out across the valley, Napolitino said, “You’ve got a pretty terrific view here.”

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“It’s nice,” Billy said.

“It’s paradise.”

“It is,” Billy agreed.

“I’m surprised you keep all your window shades down.”

Billy had relaxed too soon. He said only half coherently, “When it’s this hot, I do, the sun.”

“Even on the sides of the house where the sun doesn’t hit.”

“On a day this bright,” Billy said, “dodging a whiskey headache, you want soothing gloom.”

“He’s been tapering off the booze all morning,” Sobieski told Napolitino,

“trying to ease his way sober and avoid a hangover.”

“Is that the trick?” Napolitino asked.

Billy said, “It’s one of them.”

“It’s nice and cool in there.”

“Cool helps, too,” Billy said.

“Rosalyn said you lost your air conditioning.”

Billy had forgotten that little lie, such a small filament in his enormous patchwork web of deceit.

He said, “It conks out for a few hours, then it comes on, then it conks out again. I don’t know if maybe it’s a compressor problem.”

“Tomorrow’s supposed to be a scorcher,” Napolitino said, still gazing out across the valley. “Better get a repairman if they aren’t already booked till Christmas.”

“I’m going to have a look at it myself a little later,” Billy said. “I’m pretty handy with things.”

“Don’t go poking around in machinery until you’re full sober.”

“I won’t. I’ll wait.”

“Especially not electrical equipment.”

“I’m going to make something to eat. That’ll help. Maybe it’ll even help my stomach.” Napolitino finally looked at Billy. “I’m sorry to have kept you out here in the sun, with your headache and all.” The sergeant sounded sincere, conciliatory for the first time, but his eyes were as cold and dark and humbling as the muzzles of a pair of pistols.

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“The whole thing’s my fault,” Billy said. “You guys were just doing your job. I’ve already said six ways I’m an idiot. There’s no other way to say it. I’m really sorry to have wasted your time.”

“We’re here ‘to serve and protect.’” Napolitino smiled thinly. “It even says so on the door of the car.”

“I liked it better when it said ‘the best deputies money can buy,’” said Sergeant Sobieski, surprising a laugh from Billy but drawing only a vaguely annoyed look from Napolitino. “Billy, maybe it’s time to stop the tapering off and switch to food.”

Billy nodded. “You’re right.”

As he walked to the house, he felt they were watching him. He didn’t look back. His heart had been relatively calm. Now it pounded again. He couldn’t believe his luck. He feared that it wouldn’t hold. On the porch, he took his watch off the railing, put it on his wrist. He bent down to pick up the pint bottle. He didn’t see the cap. It must have rolled off the porch or under a rocker.

At the table beside his chair, he dropped the three crackers into the empty Ritz box, which for a while had held the .38 revolver. He picked up the glass of cola.

He expected to hear the engines of the patrol cars start up. They didn’t. Without glancing back, he carried the glass and the box and the bottle inside. He closed the door and leaned against it.

Outside, the day remained still, the engines silent.

Chapter 31

Sudden superstition warned Billy that as long as he waited with his back against the door, Sergeants Napolitino and Sobieski would not leave. Listening, he went into the kitchen. He dropped the Ritz box in the trash can.

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Listening, he poured the last ounce of whiskey from the bottle into the sink, and then chased it with the cola in the glass. He put the bottle in the trash, the glass in the dishwasher.

When by this time Billy had still heard no engines starting up, curiosity gnawed at him with ratty persistence.

The blinded house grew increasingly claustrophobic. Perhaps because he knew that it contained a corpse, it seemed to be shrinking to the dimensions of a casket.

He went into the living room, sorely tempted to put up one of the pleated shades, all of them. But he didn’t want the sergeants to think that he raised the shades to watch them and that their continued presence worried him. Cautiously, he bent the edge of one of the shades back from the window frame. He was not at an angle to see the driveway.

Billy moved to another window, tried again, and saw the two men standing at Napolitino’s car, where he’d left them. Neither deputy directly faced the house.

They appeared to be deep in conversation. They weren’t likely to be discussing baseball.

He wondered if Napolitino had thought to search the woodworking shop for the half-cut, one-by-six walnut plank with the knothole. The sergeant would not have found that length of lumber, of course, because it did not exist. When Sobieski turned his head toward the house, Billy at once let go of the shade. He hoped that he had been quick enough.

Until they were gone, Billy could do nothing other than worry. With everything he had to fret about, however, it was odd that his all-enveloping fog of anxiety quickly condensed upon the bizarre idea that Ralph Cottle’s body no longer lay under the desk in the study, where he had left it. To have moved the cadaver, the killer would have had to return to the house while both of the deputies had been speaking with Billy in the driveway, before he himself had returned to the house. The freak had proved his boldness; but this would have been recklessness if not the worst temerity. If the corpse had been moved, however, he would have to find it. He couldn’t afford to wait until it turned up by surprise in an inconvenient and incriminating moment.

Billy withdrew the .38 revolver from under the sofa cushion. When he broke out the cylinder and checked to be certain all six rounds were whole and

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loaded, he assured himself that this was an act of healthy suspicion, not a sign of creeping paranoia.

He followed the hallway as the disquiet that rang softly along his nerves quickened and, by the time he crossed the threshold into the study, swelled into clamorous alarm.

He shoved the office chair out of the way.

Embraced on three sides by the knee space, in the soft folds of his baggy and rumpled suit, Ralph Cottle looked like the meat of a walnut snugged inside its shell.

Even minutes previously, Billy could not have imagined that he would ever be relieved to find a corpse in his house.

He suspected that several pieces of subtle but direct evidence tying him to Cottle had been planted on the man’s body. Even if he took the time for a meticulous inspection of the cadaver, he would surely miss one incriminating bit or another.

The body must be destroyed or buried where it would never be found. Billy had not yet decided how to dispose of it; but even as he coped with the mounting developments of the current crisis, dark corners of his mind were composing gruesome scenarios.

Finding the body as he left it, he also discovered the computer screen aglow and waiting. He had loaded the diskette that he’d found in Cottle’s dead hands, but before he had been able to review its contents, Rosalyn Chan had called to ask if he had just phoned 911.

He rolled the office chair in front of the desk once more. He sat before the computer, tucking his legs under the chair, away from the corpse. The diskette contained three documents. The first was labeled Why, without a question mark.

When he accessed the document, he found that it was short: Because I, too, am a fisher of men.

Billy read the line three times. He didn’t know what to make of it, but the hook wounds in his brow burned anew.

He recognized the religious reference. Christ had been called a fisher of men.

The easy inference was that the killer might be a religious fanatic who thought he heard divine voices urging him to kill, but easy inferences were

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usually wrong. Sound inductive reasoning required more than one particular from which to generalize.

Besides, the freak possessed a knack for duplicity, a faculty for obfuscation, a talent for deception, and a genius for carefully crafted enigma. He preferred the oblique to the straightforward, the circuitous to the direct. Why. Because I, too, am a fisher of men.

The true, full meaning of that statement could not be surmised let alone ascertained in a hundred readings, nor in the limited time that Billy currently could devote to its analysis.

The second document was labeled How. It proved to be no less mysterious than the first: Cruelty, violence, death. Movement, velocity, impact. Flesh, blood, bone.

Although without rhyme or meter, that triad seemed almost to be a stanza of verse. As with the most recondite poetry, the meaning was not on the surface.

Billy had the strange feeling that those three lines were three answers and that if only he knew the questions, he would also know the identity of the killer.

Whether that impression might be reliable intuition or delusion, he had no time just now to consider it. Lanny’s body still awaited final disposition, as did Cottle’s. Billy was half convinced that if he consulted his wristwatch, he would see the minute and hour hands spinning as if they were counting off mere seconds.

The third document on the diskette was labeled When, and as Billy accessed it, the dead man in the knee space seized his foot. If Billy could have breathed, he would have cried out. By the time the trapped exhalation exploded from his throat, however, he realized that the explanation was less supernatural than it had at first seemed. The dead man had not seized him; in Billy’s agitation, he had pressed his feet against the corpse. He tucked them under the chair once more. On the screen, the document labeled When offered a message that required less interpretation than Why and How. My last killing: midnight Thursday. Your suicide: soon thereafter.

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Chapter 32

My last killing: midnight Thursday. Your suicide: soon thereafter. Billy Wiles consulted his wristwatch. A few minutes past noon, Wednesday.

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If the freak meant what he said, this performance, or whatever it was, would conclude in thirty-six hours. Hell was eternal, but any hell on earth must be by definition finite.

The reference to a “last” killing did not necessarily mean that only one more murder lay ahead. In the past day and a half, the freak had killed three, and in the day and a half ahead, he might be no less murderous. Cruelty, violence, death. Movement, velocity, impact. Flesh, blood, bone. Of those nine words in the second document, one struck Billy as more pertinent than the others. Velocity.

The movement had begun when the first note had been left under the windshield wiper on the Explorer. The impact would come with the last killing, the one meant to make him consider suicide.

Meanwhile, at a steadily accelerating pace, new challenges were being thrown at Billy, keeping him off balance. The word velocity seemed to promise him that the longest plunges of this roller coaster were still ahead. He neither disbelieved the promise of increasing velocity nor dismissed the confident assertion that he would commit suicide.

Suicide was a mortal sin, but Billy knew himself to be a shallow man, weak in some ways, flawed. At this point, he wasn’t capable of selfdestruction; but hearts and minds can both be broken. He had little difficulty imagining what might drive him to such a brink. In fact, no difficulty at all.

Barbara Mandel’s death alone would not drive him to suicide. For almost four years, he had prepared himself for her passing. He had hardened himself to the idea of living without even the hope of her recovery. The manner of her murder, however, might cause a fatal stress crack in Billy’s mental architecture. In her coma, she might not be aware of much that the killer did to her. Nevertheless, assuming that she would be subjected to pain, to vile abuse, to gross indignities, Billy could imagine a weight of horror so great that he would break under it. This was a man who beat lovely young schoolteachers to death and peeled off women’s faces.

Furthermore, if the freak intended to engineer circumstances in which it would appear that Billy himself had killed not only Giselle Winslow, Lanny, and Ralph Cottle, but also Barbara, then Billy would not want to endure months of being a media sensation or the spotlight of the trial, or the abiding suspicion with which he’d be regarded even if found innocent in a court of law.

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The freak killed for pleasure, but also with a purpose and a plan. Whatever the purpose, the plan might be to convince police that Billy committed the homicides leading to Barbara’s murder in her bed at Whispering Pines, that his intent had been to establish that a brutal serial killer was at work in the county, thereby directing suspicion from himself to the nonexistent psychopath. If the freak was clever—and he would be—the authorities would swallow that theory as if it were a spoonful of vanilla ice cream. After all, in their eyes, Billy had a strong motive to do away with Barbara.

Her medical care was covered by the investment income earned by a seven-million-dollar trust fund established with a legal settlement from the corporation responsible for her coma. Billy was the primary of three trustees who managed the fund.

If Barbara died while in a coma, Billy was the sole heir to her estate. He did not want the money, none of it, and would not keep it if it came to him. In that sad event, he had always intended to give the millions away. No one, of course, would believe that was his intention.

Especially not after the freak was finished setting him up, if in fact that’s what the freak was doing.

The call to 911 certainly seemed to signify that intention. It had drawn Billy to the attention of the sheriff’s department in a context that they would remember… and wonder about.

Now Billy combined all three documents and printed them on a single sheet of paper: Because I, too, am a fisher of men. Cruelty, violence, death. Movement, velocity, impact. Flesh, blood, bone. My last killing: midnight Thursday. Your suicide: soon thereafter.

With scissors, Billy trimmed out the block of text, intending to fold it and put it in his wallet, where he would have it for easy review. As he finished, he realized that this paper appeared identical to that on which he had received the first four messages from the killer. If the diskette in Cottle’s hands had been prepared on this computer, perhaps the first four notes had been composed here as well.

He exited Microsoft Word, and then entered the software again. He called up the directory.

The list of documents was not long. He had used this program solely for writing fiction.

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He recognized the key words of the titles of his single novel and of the short stories that he had completed, as well as those of stories never finished. Only one document was unfamiliar to him: Death.

When he loaded that document, he discovered the text of the first four messages from the freak.

He hesitated, remembering procedures. Then he rattled the keys, summoning the date when the document had been first composed, which turned out to be 10:09 A.M. the previous Friday.

Billy had left for work fifteen minutes earlier than usual that day. He had swung by the post office to mail some bills.

The two notes left on his windshield, the one taped over the Explorer’s ignition, and even the one he’d found on his refrigerator this same morning had been prepared on this computer more than three days before the first had been delivered, before the nightmare had begun Monday evening.

If Lanny had not destroyed the first two notes to save his job, if Billy had offered them to the police as evidence, sooner or later the authorities would have checked this computer. They would have reached the inescapable conclusion that Billy himself had written the notes.

The freak had prepared for all contingencies. He was nothing if not thorough. And he had been confident his script would play out as he had intended.

Billy deleted the document titled Death, which might still be used as evidence against him, depending on how events unfolded from here on. He suspected that deleting it from the directory did not remove it from the hard disk. He would have to find a way to ask someone who was a computer maven.

When he shut down the computer, he realized that he had still not heard the patrol-car engines start up.

Chapter 33

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Peeling the shade aside at a study window, Billy discovered the driveway empty in the streaming sunshine. He had become so absorbed with the diskette that he had not heard the car engines start. The sergeants had gone. He had expected to discover another challenge on the diskette: a choice between two innocent victims, a short deadline for making a decision. No doubt another one would come soon, but for now he was free to deal with other urgent business. He had plenty of it.

He went to the garage and returned with a length of rope and one of the polyurethane drop cloths with which he covered furniture when he had repainted the interior of the house in the spring. He unfolded this tarp on the study floor in front of the desk.

After wrestling Cottle’s body out of the knee space and dragging it around the desk, he rolled it onto the drop cloth.

The prospect of turning out the dead man’s pockets disgusted him. He got on with it, anyway.

Billy wasn’t looking for planted evidence that would incriminate him. If the freak had salted the corpse, he had been subtle about it; Billy would not find everything.

Besides, he intended to dispose of the body in a place where it would never be found. For that reason, he was unconcerned about leaving fingerprints on the plastic sheeting.

The suit coat had two inner pockets. In the first, Cottle had kept the pint of whiskey that he had spilled. From the second, Billy extracted a pint of rum, and returned it.

In the two outer pockets of the coat were cigarettes, a cheap butane lighter, and a roll of butterscotch Life Savers. In the front pants pockets, he found sixty-seven cents in coins, a deck of playing cards, and a whistle in the form of a plastic canary.

Cottle’s wallet contained six one-dollar bills, a five, and fourteen tendollar bills. These last must have come from the freak. Ten dollars for each year of your innocence, Mr. Wiles.

Basically frugal, Billy didn’t want to bury the money with the body. He considered dropping it in the poor box at the church where he had parked—and been assaulted—the previous night.

Squeamishness trumped frugality. Billy left the money in the wallet. As dead pharaohs had been sent to the Other Side with salt, grain, wine, gold, and

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euthanized servants, so Ralph Cottle would travel across the Styx with spending money.

Among the few other items in the wallet were two of interest, the first a worn and creased snapshot of Cottle as a young man. He looked handsome, virile, radically different from the beaten man of his later years but recognizable. With him was a lovely young woman. They were smiling. They looked happy.

The second item was a 1983 membership card in the American Society of Skeptics. Ralph Thurman Cottle, member since 1978.

Billy kept the snapshot and the membership card and returned everything else to Cottle’s hip pocket.

He rolled the cadaver tightly in the tarp. He folded the ends down and secured the bundle with yards of strapping tape.

His expectation had been that, inside multiple layers of opaque polyurethane, the body might pass for a rug wrapped in protective plastic. It looked like a corpse in a tarp.

Using the rope, he fashioned a tightly knotted handle to one end of the packaged cadaver, by which it could be dragged.

He did not intend to dispose of Cottle until after dark. The cargo space in his Explorer was encircled by windows. SUV’s were useful vehicles, but if you were going to be transporting corpses in broad daylight, you better have a car with a roomy trunk.

Because he’d begun to feel that his house was being as freely traveled as a public bus terminal, Billy hauled the body out of the study, to the living room, where he left it behind the sofa. It could not be seen from the front door or from the doorway to the kitchen.

At the kitchen sink, he vigorously scrubbed his hands with multiple applications of liquid soap, in near-scalding water.

Then he made a ham sandwich. Ravenous, he wondered how he could have an appetite after the gruesome business he had just concluded. He would not have thought that his will to survive had remained this strong during his years of retreat. He wondered what other qualities, good and bad, he would rediscover or discover in himself during the thirty-six hours ahead. There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

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Chapter 34

As Billy finished the ham sandwich, the telephone rang.

He didn’t want to answer it. He didn’t receive a lot of calls from friends, and Lanny was dead. He knew who this must be. Enough was enough. On the twelfth ring, he pushed his chair back from the table. The freak had never said anything on the phone. He didn’t want to reveal his voice. He would do nothing but listen to Billy in mocking silence. On the sixteenth ring, Billy got up from the table.

These calls had no purpose but to intimidate. Taking them made no sense. Billy stood by the phone, staring at it. On the twenty-sixth ring, he lifted the handset.

The digital readout revealed ho caller ID.

Billy didn’t say hello. He listened.

After a few seconds of silence on the other end, a mechanical click was followed by a hiss. Pops and scratches punctuated the hiss: the sound of blank audio tape passing over a playback head.

When the words came, they were in a series of voices, some men, some women. No individual spoke more than three words, often just one. Judging by the inconstant volume levels and other tells, the freak had constructed the message by sampling existing audio, perhaps books on tape by different readers. “I will… kill a… pretty redhead. If you… say… waste the bitch… I will… kill… her… quickly. Otherwise… she will… suffer… much…

torture. You… have… one minute… to… say… waste the bitch. The choice…

is… yours.”

Again, the hiss and pop and scratch of blank tape…

The conundrum had been perfectly constructed. It allowed an evasive man no room for further evasion.

Previously, Billy had been morally co-opted only to the extent that the choice of the victims had been made because of his inaction, and in Cottle’s case because of the refusal to act.

In the choice between a lovely schoolteacher and a charitable old woman, the deaths seemed equally tragic unless you were biased toward the beautiful

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and against the aged. Making an active decision resulted in neither less nor greater tragedy than did inaction.

When the possible victims had been an unmarried man “who won’t much be missed by the world” or a young mother of two, the greater tragedy had seemed to be the death of the mother. In that case, the choice had been constructed so that Billy’s failure to go to the police ensured the mother’s survival, rewarding inaction and playing to his weakness.

Once again, he was being asked to choose between two evils, and thereby become the freak’s collaborator. But this time, inaction was not a viable option. By saying nothing, he would be sentencing the redhead to torture, to a protracted and hideous death. By responding, he would be granting her a degree of mercy.

He could not save her.

In either case, death.

But one death would be cleaner than the other.

The running audio tape produced two more words: “dis… thirty seconds…”

Billy felt as though he couldn’t breathe, but he could. He felt as though he would choke if he tried to swallow, but he didn’t choke. “… fifteen seconds…”

His mouth was dry. His tongue grew thick. He didn’t believe that he could speak, but he did: “Waste the bitch.”

The freak hung up. So did Billy.

Collaborators.

The masticated ham and the bread and the mayonnaise turned in his stomach.

If he had suspected that the freak might actually communicate by telephone, he could have been prepared to record the message. Too late. Such a recording of a recording wouldn’t be persuasive to the cops, anyway, unless the body of a redhead turned up. And if such a corpse was found, planted evidence would most likely tie it to Billy. The air conditioner worked well, yet the kitchen air seemed to be sweltering, stifling, and it cloyed in his throat, and lay heavy in his lungs. Waste the bitch.

Without any memory of having left the house, Billy found himself descending the back-porch steps. He didn’t know where he was going.

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He sat on the steps.

He stared at the sky, at the trees, at the backyard.

He looked at his hands. He didn’t recognize them.

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Chapter 35

He left town by a circuitous route and saw no one following. With no corpse burrito in the Explorer, Billy risked exceeding the speed limit most of the way to the southern end of the county. A hot wind quarreled at the brokenout window in the driver’s door as he crossed the Napa city limits at 1:52 P.M. Napa is a quaint, rather picturesque town, for the most part naturally so, not by dint of politicians and corporations conspiring to reconceive it as a theme park on the model of Disneyland, a fate of many places in California. Harry Avarkian, Billy’s attorney, had offices downtown, not far from the courthouse, on a street lined with ancient olive trees. He was expecting Billy and greeted him with a bear hug. Fiftyish, tall and solid, avuncular, with a rubbery face and quick smile, Harry looked like the spokesman for a miracle hair restorer. He had a head of wiry black hair so thick that it looked as though a barber might have to tend to it daily, a walrus mustache, and such a thatch of crisp black hairs on the backs of his big hands that he looked as if he might be prone to hibernate in winter.

He worked at an antique partner’s desk, so that when Billy sat opposite him, the relationship didn’t seem like that of attorney and client but like that of friends engaged in a business enterprise.

After the usual how-ya-beens and talk of the heat, Harry said, “So what’s so important that we couldn’t do it by phone?”

“It’s not that I didn’t want to talk on the phone,” Billy lied. The rest was true enough: “I had to come down here for a couple other things, so I figured I might as well sit down with you in person and ask about what’s troubling me.”

“So hit me with your questions, and let’s see if I know any damn thing about the law.”

“It’s about the trust fund that takes care of Barbara.” Harry Avarkian and Gi Minh “George” Nguyen, Billy’s accountant, were the other two trustees on the three-member board.

“Just two days ago, I reviewed the second quarter’s financial statement,”

Harry said. “Return was fourteen percent. Excellent in this market. Even after Barbara’s expenses, the principal is growing steadily.”

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“We’re smartly invested,” Billy agreed. “But I’m lying awake at night worrying is there a way anyone could get at the pot?”

“The pot? You mean Barbara’s money? If you’ve got to worry about something, worry about an asteroid hitting the earth.”

“I worry. I can’t help it.”

“Billy, I drew up those trust documents, and they’re tighter than a gnat’s ass. Besides, with you guarding the vault for her, nobody’s going to pinch a nickel.”

“I mean if something happens to me.”

“You’re only thirty-four. From my perspective, you’re barely past puberty.”

“Mozart died younger than thirty-four.”

“This isn’t the eighteenth century, and you don’t even play the piano,”

Harry said, “so the comparison makes no sense.” He frowned. “Are you sick or something?”

“I’ve felt better,” Billy admitted.

“What’s that patch on your forehead?”

Billy gave him the story about a knothole in a walnut plank. “It’s nothing serious.”

“You’re pale for summer.”

“I haven’t been fishing much. Look, Harry, I don’t have cancer or anything, but a truck could always hit me.”

“Have they been after you lately, these trucks? Have you had to dodge a few? Since when were you baptized a pessimist?”

“What about Dardre?”

Dardre was Barbara’s sister. They were twins, but fraternal, not identical. They looked nothing alike, and were radically different people, as well.

“The court not only pulled her plug,” Harry said, “they cut it off and took out her batteries.”

“I know, but—”

“She’s an Energizer Bunny of Evil, all right, but she’s as much history as the Lebne and string cheese I ate for lunch a week ago.”

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Barbara and Dardre’s mother, Cicily, had been a drug addict. She had never identified their father, and on their birth certificates, the twins had their mother’s maiden name.

Cicily wound up in a psychiatric ward when the girls were two, and they were removed from their mother’s custody and placed in a foster home. Cicily died eleven months later.

Until they were five, the sisters had been shuffled through the same series of foster homes. Thereafter they were separated.

Barbara had never seen Dardre again. In fact when, at the age of twentyone, she tracked down and tried to reestablish a relationship with her sister, she had been rebuffed.

While not as self-destructive as Cicily, Dardre had acquired her mother’s taste for illegal chemical compounds and the party life. She found her cleanand-sober sibling to be boring and uncool. Eight years later, after extensive media attention to the case, when the insurance company settled millions on Barbara to pay for her long-term care, Dardre developed a deep emotional attachment to her sister. As Barbara’s only known blood relative, she had brought legal action to be declared sole trustee. Fortunately, at good Harry’s urging, immediately following their engagement, Billy and Barbara had drawn and signed, in this office, simple wills naming each other as heirs and executors.

Dardre’s history, tactics, and unconcealed avarice had earned her the judge’s scorn. Her action had been dismissed with prejudice. She had tried to get another court to reinstate her case. She had not been successful. They hadn’t heard from her in two years.

Now Billy said, “But if I died—”

“You’ve selected contingent trustees to replace you. If you’re run down by a truck, one of them will.”

“I understand. Nevertheless—”

“If you and I and George Nguyen are run down by trucks,” Harry said, “in fact if each of us is run down by three trucks, willing candidates for trustees, acceptable to the court, are standing by and ready to take over. Until they could be installed, day-today trust affairs would be in the hands of a bonded trustmanagement firm.”

“You’ve thought of everything.”

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His massive mustache lifting with his smile, Harry said, “Of all my accomplishments, I’m proudest of never having yet been disbarred.”

“But if anything happened to me—”

“You’re making me nuts.”

“—is there anyone besides Dardre that we should worry about?”

“Like who?”

“Anyone.”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“No one who could take Barbara’s money?”

Leaning forward, arms on his desk, Harry said, “What’s this all about?”

Billy shrugged. “I don’t know. Lately I’ve just been… spooked.”

After a silence, Harry said, “Maybe it’s time for you to get a life again.”

“I’ve got a life,” Billy said, his voice too sharp considering that Harry was a friend and a decent guy.

“You can look after Barbara, be faithful to her memory, and still have a life.”

“She’s not just a memory. She’s alive. Harry, you’re the last person I want to have to punch in the mouth.”

Harry sighed. “You’re right. No one can tell you what your heart should feel.”

“Hell, Harry, I’d never punch you in the mouth.”

“Did I look scared?”

Laughing softly, Billy said, “You looked you. You looked like a Muppet.”

The graceful shadows of sunlit olive trees moved on the window glass, and in the room.

After a silence, Harry Avarkian said, “There are cases in which people have come out of a botulism coma with most of their faculties intact.”

“They’re rare,” Billy acknowledged.

“Rare isn’t the same as never.”

“I try to be realistic, but I don’t really want to be.”

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“I used to like vichyssoise,” Harry said. “Now if I even happen to see it on a shelf in a supermarket, I get sick to my stomach.”

While Billy had been working at the tavern one Saturday, Barbara had opened a can of soup for dinner. Vichyssoise. She made a grilled-cheese sandwich as well.

When she didn’t answer her phone Sunday morning, he went to her apartment, let himself in with his key. He found her unconscious on the bathroom floor.

At the hospital she had been treated with antitoxin promptly enough to spare her from death. And now she slept. And slept.

Until she woke, if she woke, the extent of brain damage could not accurately be determined.

The manufacturer of the soup, a reputable company, instantly pulled an entire run of vichyssoise off store shelves. Out of more than three thousand cans, only six were found to be contaminated.

None of the six showed telltale signs of swelling; therefore, in a way, Barbara’s suffering had spared at least six other people from a similar fate. Billy never managed to find any comfort in that fact.

“She’s a lovely woman,” Harry said.

“She’s pale and thin, but she’s still beautiful to me,” Billy said. “And inside somewhere, she’s alive. She says things. I’ve told you. She’s alive in there, and thinking.”

He watched the olive-tree shadows projected onto the desk by the lens of the window.

He did not look at Harry. He didn’t want to see the pity in the attorney’s eyes.

After a while, Harry talked about the weather some more, and then Billy said, “Did you hear, at Princeton—or maybe it’s Harvard—scientists are trying to make a pig with a human brain?”

“They’re doing crap like that everywhere,” Harry said. “They never learn. The smarter they are, the dumber they get.”

“The horror of it.”

“They don’t see the horror. Just the glory and the money.”

“I don’t see the glory.”

“What glory could anyone have seen in Auschwitz? But some did.”

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Following a mutual silence, Billy met Harry’s eyes. “Do I know how to cheer up a room, or what?”

“I haven’t laughed so hard since Abbott and Costello.”

Chapter 36

At an electronics store in Napa, Billy bought a compact video camera and recorder. The equipment could be used in the usual fashion or could be set instead to compile a continuous series of snapshots taken at intervals of a few seconds.

In its second mode, loaded with the proper custom disk, the system was able to provide week-long recorded surveillance similar to that in the average convenience store.

Considering that the Explorer’s broken window didn’t allow him to lock any valuables in the vehicle, he paid for his purchases and arranged to return for them in half an hour.

From the electronics store, he went in search of a newspaper-vending machine. He found one in front of a pharmacy.

The lead story concerned Giselle Winslow. The schoolteacher had been murdered in the early hours of Tuesday morning, but her body had not been found until late Tuesday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours previously. The picture of her in the newspaper was different from the one tucked in the book on Lanny Olsen’s lap, but they were photos of the same attractive woman.

Carrying the newspaper, Billy walked to the main branch of the county library. He had a computer at home but no longer had Internet access; the library offered both.

He was alone at the cluster of work stations. Other patrons were at reading tables and prowling the stacks. Maybe the embrace of “book alternatives”

wasn’t turning out to be the future of libraries, after all. When he’d been writing fiction, he had used the Worldwide Web for research. Later, it had provided distraction, escape. In the past two years, he hadn’t surfed the Web at all.

Meanwhile, things had changed. Access was faster. Searches were faster, too, and easier.

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Billy typed in a search string. When he got no hits, he modified the string, then modified it again.

Drinking-age laws varied state by state. In many jurisdictions, Steve Zillis hadn’t been old enough to tend bar until he was twenty-one, so Billy dropped bartender from the search string.

Steve had been working at the tavern only five months. He and Billy had never swapped biographies.

Billy vaguely recalled that Steve had gone to college. He could not remember where. He added student to the string.

Perhaps the word murder was too limiting. He replaced it with foul play. He got one hit. From the Denver Post.

The story dated back five years and eight months. Although Billy warned himself not to read into this discovery more than it actually contained, the information struck him as relevant.

That November, at the University of Colorado at Denver, a coed named Judith Sarah Kesselman, eighteen, had gone missing. Initially, at least, there were no signs of foul play.

In what appeared to be the first newspaper piece about the missing young woman, another UCD student, Steven Zillis, nineteen, was quoted as saying that Judith was “a wonderful girl, compassionate and concerned, a friend to everyone.” He worried because “Judi is too responsible to just go off for a couple days without telling anyone her plans.”

Another search string related to Judith Sarah Kesselman produced scores of hits. Billy steeled himself for the discovery that her dead body had been found without a face.

He went through the articles, reading closely at first. As the material became repetitive, he scanned.

Friends, relatives, and professors of Judith Kesselman were often quoted. Steven Zillis was not mentioned again.

Judging by the wealth of material available to Billy, no trace of Judith had ever been found. She vanished as completely as if she had stepped out of this universe into another.

The frequency of newspaper coverage declined steadily through Christmas of that year. It dropped sharply with the new year.

The media favors dead bodies over missing ones, blood over mystery. There is always new and exciting violence.

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The last piece was dated on the fifth anniversary of Judith’s disappearance. Her hometown was Laguna Beach, California, and the article appeared in the Orange County Register.

A columnist, sympathetic to the Kesselman family’s unresolved grief, wrote movingly about their enduring hope that Judith was still alive. Somehow. Somewhere. And one day coming home.

She had been a music major. She played piano well, and guitar. She liked gospel music. And dogs. And long walks on the beach.

The press had been provided two photos of her. In both she looked impish, amused, and gentle.

Although Billy had never known Judith Kesselman, he could not bear the promise of her fresh face. He avoided looking at her photos. He printed selected articles for review later. He folded them inside the newspaper that he’d gotten from the vending machine.

As he was leaving the library, passing the reading tables, a man said,

“Billy Wiles. Long time no see.”

In a chair at one of the tables, smiling broadly, sat Sheriff John Palmer.

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Chapter 37

Although he wore his uniform, without hat, the sheriff less resembled an officer of the law than he did a politician. Because his was an elected position, he was in fact both cop and pol.

Barbered to the point of affectation, shaved as smooth as a glass peach, teeth veneered to white perfection, features suitable for a Roman coin, he looked ten years younger than he was—and ready for the cameras. Although Palmer sat at a reading table, neither a magazine nor a newspaper, nor a book, lay in front of him. He looked like he knew everything already.

Palmer did not get up. Billy remained standing.

“How’re things up in Vineyard Hills?” Palmer asked.

“Lots of vineyards and hills,” Billy said.

“You still tending bar?”

“There’s always a need. It’s the third oldest profession.”

“What’s second, after whores?” Palmer asked.

“Politicians.”

The sheriff seemed to be amused. “Are you writing these days?”

“A little,” Billy lied.

One of his published short stories had featured a character who was a thinly veiled portrait of John Palmer.

“Doing some research for your writing?” Palmer asked.

From where the sheriff sat, he had a direct view of the computer at which Billy had been working, although not of its screen.

Maybe Palmer had a way of finding out what Billy had been doing at the work station. A public computer might keep a record of a user’s keystrokes. No. Probably not. Besides, there were privacy laws.

“Yeah,” Billy said. “Some research.”

“Deputy of mine saw you parking in front of Harry Avarkian’s office.”

Billy said nothing.

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“Three minutes after you left Harry’s, the time on your parking meter ran out.”

That might be true.

Palmer said, “I put two quarters in for you.”

“Thanks.”

“The window’s busted out of your driver’s door.”

“A little accident,” Billy said.

“It’s not a code violation, but you ought to get it fixed.”

“I’ve got an appointment on Friday,” Billy lied.

“This doesn’t bother you, does it?” the sheriff asked.

“What?”

“You and me talking like this.” Palmer surveyed the library. No one was close to them. “Just the two of us.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” Billy said.

He had every right and reason to walk away. Instead he stayed, determined not to give even the appearance of intimidation.

Twenty years ago, as a fourteen-year-old boy, Billy Wiles had endured interrogations conducted in such a way that they should have destroyed John Palmer’s law-enforcement career.

Instead, Palmer had been promoted from lieutenant to captain, later to chief. Eventually he had campaigned for the office of sheriff and had been elected. Twice.

Harry Avarkian had a succinct explanation for Palmer’s ascent and claimed that he had heard it from deputies in the department: Shit floats.

“How’s Miss Mandel these days?” Palmer asked.

“The same.”

He wondered if Palmer knew about the 911 call. Napolitino and Sobieski had no reason to file a report on it, especially since it had been a false alarm. Besides, the two sergeants worked out of the St. Helena substation. While Sheriff Palmer toured throughout his jurisdiction, his office was here in the county seat.

“What a sad thing that was,” Palmer said.

Billy did not reply.

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“At least for the rest of her life, she’ll get the best care, with all that money.”

“She’s going to get well. She’ll come out of it.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes.”

“All that money—I hope you’re right.”

“I am.”

“She ought to have a chance to enjoy all that money.”

Stone-faced, Billy gave no slightest sign that he understood Palmer’s pointed implication.

Yawning, stretching, so relaxed and casual in his chair, Palmer probably saw himself as a cat toying with a mouse. “Well, people are going to be happy to hear that you’re not burnt out, that you’re writing a little.”

“What people?”

“People who like your writing, of course.”

“Do you know any of them?”

Palmer shrugged. “I don’t move in those circles. But I’m pretty sure about one thing…”

Because the sheriff wanted to be asked What?, Billy didn’t ask. Off Billy’s silence, Palmer said, “I’m pretty sure your mom and dad would be so proud.”

Billy walked away from him and out of the library.

After the air conditioning, the summer heat assaulted him. He felt as though he were suffocating when he inhaled, as if strangling when he exhaled. Or maybe it wasn’t the heat, but the past.

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Chapter 38

Speeding north on Route 29, out of sun and into sun, with the famous and fertile valley narrowing imperceptibly at first and then perceptibly, Billy worried about protecting Barbara.

The trust fund could hire around-the-clock security for the duration, until Billy found the freak or until the freak finished him. Money was no issue. But this wasn’t a big city. The phone book didn’t contain page after page of ads for private-security firms.

Explaining to the guards why they were needed would be risky. The whole truth would tie Billy to three murders for which he was most likely being set up to take the fall.

If he withheld too much of the truth, the guards wouldn’t know what they were up against. He would be jeopardizing their lives.

Besides, most security guards around these parts were former police officers or current cops who were moonlighting on their off hours. Many of them had worked—or still did work—for or with John Palmer. Billy didn’t want Palmer hearing about Barbara being watched over by hired bodyguards. The sheriff would wonder. He would have questions. After a few years during which he had stayed under Palmer’s radar, he was now on the scope again. He dared not draw more attention to himself. He couldn’t ask friends to help him stand watch over Barbara. They would be at great risk.

Anyway, he didn’t have close friends whom he’d be comfortable approaching. The people in his life were largely acquaintances. He had managed things that way. There is no life that is not in community. He knew this. He knew. Yet he had done no proper sowing and now had no harvest.

The wind at the broken window spoke chaos to him.

In the hours of Barbara’s greatest danger, he alone would have to protect her. If he could.

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She deserved better than him. With his history, no one in need of a guardian would turn to him first, or second, or at all. My last killing: midnight Thursday.

If Billy read the freak correctly—and he was all but certain that he did—

Barbara’s murder would be the climax on which the curtain of this cruel

“performance” would be rung. Your suicide: soon thereafter. Tomorrow evening, long before midnight, he would station himself at her bedside.

This evening, he could not be with her. The urgent tasks on his agenda would probably keep him busy until dawn.

If he was wrong, if her murder was to be a second-act surprise, this sunny valley, for him, would become henceforth as dark as the vacant interstellar spaces.

Driving faster, borne forward by a longing for redemption, with sunlight slanting from his left and with the valley’s great monument, Mount St. Helena, ahead and seeming never to grow nearer, Billy used his cell phone to call Whispering Pines, pressing 1 and holding to speed dial.

Because Barbara had a private room with an attached half-bath, the usual visiting-hour rules did not apply. With advance approval, a family member might even stay overnight.

He hoped to stop at Whispering Pines on his way home and arrange to stay with Barbara from Thursday evening at least through Friday morning. He had conceived a cover story that might be accepted without suspicion. The receptionist who answered his call informed him that Mrs. Norlee, the manager, would be in meetings until five-thirty but would be able to see him then. He took the appointment.

Shortly before four o’clock, he arrived home, half expecting to see patrol cars, a coroner’s van, county deputies in number, and Sergeant Napolitino on the front porch, standing over a rocking chair in which Ralph Cottle’s corpse sat, unwrapped. But all was quiet.

Instead of using the garage, Billy parked in the driveway, toward the back of the house.

He went inside and searched every room. He found no indications of an intruder having been here during his absence.

The corpse still lay cocooned behind the sofa.

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Chapter 39

Above the microwave oven, behind a pair of cabinet doors, a deep space contained baking sheets, two perforated pizza pans, and other narrow items stored vertically. Billy took the pans out—and the removable rack in which they stood—and put them in the pantry.

At the back of the now empty space was an electric outlet with two receptacles. A plug filled the bottom receptacle, and the cord disappeared through a cut-out in the rear wall of the cabinet.

The plug powered the microwave. Billy pulled it.

Standing on a stepladder, using a power drill, he bored a hole in the floor of the upper cabinet, through the ceiling of the oven. This ruined the microwave. He didn’t care.

He used the drill bit as if it were a power file, simultaneously drawing it around the perimeter of the bore and pumping it up and down, widening the hole. The noise was horrendous.

A faint smell of scorched insulation arose, but he completed the job before the frictional heat grew to be a problem.

He cleaned the debris out of the microwave. He put the video-cam inside. After inserting the output jack of a video-transmission cable into the camera, he shoved the other end through the hole that he had drilled in the ceiling of the oven. He did the same with a pronged-at-both-ends power cord. In the cabinet that previously held baking pans, Billy placed the video-disk recorder. Following printed instructions, he jacked the free end of the transmission cable into the recorder.

He plugged the camera power cord into the upper receptacle in the outlet at the back of the cabinet. The recorder took the lower receptacle into which the microwave had been plugged.

He loaded a seven-day disk. He set the system per instructions and switched it on.

When he closed the door of the microwave oven, the inner surface of the view window pressed against the rubber rim of the camera’s lens hood. The videocam was aimed across the kitchen at the back door.

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With the oven light off, Billy could see the camera inside only if he put his face very close to the view window. The freak would not discover it unless he decided to make microwave popcorn.

Because the window contained a fine screen laminated between layers of glass, Billy didn’t know if the camera would have a clear view. He needed to test it.

The pleated shades were drawn over all the kitchen windows. He raised them, and he turned on the overhead lights.

He stood just inside the back door for a moment. Then he crossed the room at an unhurried pace.

The recorder featured a mini screen for quick review. When Billy climbed the stepladder and replayed the time-lapse recording, he saw a darkish figure. As it crossed the room, resolution improved, and he could recognize himself. He did not like watching himself, Ashen, sullen, and uncertain, full of determined action but with halting purpose.

In fairness to himself, the image was black-and-white, and a little grainy. His apparent lurch was merely the effect of time-lapse recording. Allowing for all of that, he still saw an unconvincing figure: shape and shading, but no more substance than an apparition. He appeared to be a stranger in his own home.

He reset the machine. He closed the cabinet doors and put away the stepladder.

In the bathroom, he changed the dressing on his brow. The hook wounds were angry red, but no worse than before.

He changed into a black T-shirt, black jeans, black Rockports. Sunset was less than four hours away, and when twilight passed, Billy would need to move as inconspicuously as possible in a hostile night.

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Chapter 40

Gretchen Norlee favored severe dark suits, wore no jewelry, combed her hair straight back from her forehead, regarded the world through steel-framed eyeglasses—and decorated her office with plush toys. A teddy bear, a toad, a duck, a Knuffle Bunny, and a midnight-blue kitten were arranged on shelves in a collection that consisted primarily of dogs that greeted visitors with a brightness of unfurled pink-and red-velvet tongues.

Gretchen managed the 102-2ed Whispering Pines Convalescent Home with military efficiency and maximum compassion. Her warm manner belied the gruffness of her hard-edged voice.

She embodied no greater contradictions than any person who found temporary balance in this most temporary world. Hers were just more immediately visible, and more endearing.

Leaving her desk to signal that she viewed this as a personal consideration rather than as a business matter, Gretchen sat in a wingback chair catercorner to the chair in which Billy sat.

She said, “Because Barbara occupies a private room, she may have company outside normal visiting hours without inconveniencing other patients. I see no problem, though family usually stay overnight only when a patient has just returned from a hospital transfer.”

Although Gretchen had too much class to express her curiosity directly, Billy felt obliged to satisfy it with an explanation, even though every word he told her was a lie.

“My Bible-study group has been discussing what scripture says about the power of prayer.”

“So you’re in a Bible-study group,” she said as if intrigued, as if he was not a man whom she could easily picture in such a pious pursuit.

“There was a major medical study that showed when friends and relatives actively pray for a sick loved one, the patient more often recovers, and recovers more quickly.”

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That controversial study had provided gas to inflate barroom debates when it had hit the newspapers. Recollection of all that boozy blather, not an earnest Bible-study group, had inspired Billy to concoct this cover story.

“I think I remember reading about it,” Gretchen Norlee said.

“Of course I pray for Barbara every day.”

“Of course.”

“But I’ve come to see that prayer is more meaningful when it involves some sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice,” she said thoughtfully.

He smiled. “I don’t mean to slaughter a lamb.”

“Ah. That will please the janitorial staff.”

“But a prayer before bed, however sincere, is no inconvenience.”

“I see your point.”

“Surely prayer will be more meaningful and effective if it comes at some personal cost—like at least the loss of a night’s sleep.”

“I’ve never thought of it that way,” she said.

“From time to time,” Billy said, “I’d like to sit with her all night in prayer. If it doesn’t help her, it’ll at least help me.”

Listening to himself, he thought that he sounded as phony as a TV

evangelist proclaiming the virtue of abstinence upon being caught naked with a hooker in the back of his limo.

Evidently, Gretchen Norlee heard him differently from how he heard himself. Behind her steel-rimmed spectacles, her eyes were moist with sympathy.

His newfound slickness dismayed Billy, and worried him. When a liar became too skilled at deception, he could lose the ability to discern truth, and could himself be more easily deceived.

He expected there might be a price for playing a nice woman like Gretchen Norlee for a fool, as there was a price for everything.

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