Mr. Murder

One

1

“I need . . .”

Leaning back in his comfortable leather office chair, rocking gently, holding a compact cassette recorder in his right hand and dictating a letter to his editor in New York, Martin Stillwater suddenly realized he was repeating the same two words in a dreamy whisper.

“. . . I need . . . I need . . . I need . . .”

Frowning, Marty clicked off the recorder.

His train of thought had clattered down a siding and chugged to a stop. He could not recall what he had been about to say.

Needed what?

The big house was not merely quiet but eerily still. Paige had taken the kids to lunch and a Saturday matinee movie.

But this childless silence was more than just a condition. It had substance. The air felt heavy with it.

He put one hand to the nape of his neck. His palm was cool and moist. He shivered.

Outside, the autumn day was as hushed as the house, as if all of southern California had been vacated. At the only window of his second-floor study, the wide louvers of the plantation shutters were ajar. Sunlight slanted between angled slats, imprinting the sofa and carpet with narrow red-gold stripes as lustrous as fox fur; the nearest luminous ribbon wrapped one corner of the U-shaped desk.

I need . . .

Instinct told him that something important had happened only a moment ago, just out of his sight, perceived subliminally.

He swiveled his chair and surveyed the room behind him. Other than the fasciae of coppery sunshine interleaved with louver shadows, the only light came from a small desk lamp with a stained-glass shade. Even in that gloom, however, he could see he was alone with his books, research files, and computer.

Perhaps the silence seemed unnaturally deep only because the house had been filled with noise and bustle since Wednesday, when the schools had closed for the Thanksgiving holiday. He missed the kids. He should have gone to the movie with them.

I need . . .

The words had been spoken with peculiar tension—and longing.

Now an ominous feeling overcame him, a keen sense of impending danger. It was the premonitory dread which characters sometimes felt in his novels, and which he always struggled to describe without resorting to clichés.

He had not actually experienced anything like it in years, not since Charlotte had been seriously ill when she was four and the doctor had prepared them for the possibility of cancer. All day in the hospital, as his little girl had been wheeled from one lab to another for tests, all that sleepless night, and during the long days that followed before the physicians ventured a diagnosis, Marty felt haunted by a malevolent spirit whose presence thickened the air, making it difficult to breathe, to move, to hope. As it turned out, his daughter had been threatened neither by supernatural malevolence nor malignancy. The problem was a treatable blood disorder. Within three months Charlotte recovered.

But he remembered that oppressive dread too well.

He was in its icy grip again, though for no discernible reason. Charlotte and Emily were healthy, well-adjusted kids. He and Paige were happy together—absurdly happy, considering how many thirty-something couples of their acquaintance were divorced, separated, or cheating on each other. Financially, they were more secure than they had ever expected to be.

Nevertheless, Marty knew something was wrong.

He put down the tape recorder, went to the window, and opened the shutters all the way. A leafless sycamore cast stark, elongated shadows across the small side yard. Beyond those gnarled branches, the pale-yellow stucco walls of the house next door appeared to have soaked up the sunshine; gold and russet reflections painted the windows; the place was silent, seemingly serene.

To the right, he could see a section of the street. The houses on the other side of the block were also Mediterranean in style, stucco with clay-tile roofs, gilded by late-afternoon sun, filigreed by overhanging queen-palm fronds. Quiet, well landscaped, planned to the square inch, their neighborhood—and indeed the entire town of Mission Viejo—seemed to be a haven from the chaos that ruled so much of the rest of the world these days.

He closed the shutters, entirely blocking the sun. Apparently the only danger was in his mind, a figment of the same active imagination that had made him, at last, a reasonably successful mystery novelist.

Yet his heart was beating faster than ever.

Marty walked out of his office into the second-floor hall, as far as the head of the stairs. He stood as still as the newel post on which he rested one hand.

He wasn’t certain what he expected to hear. The soft creak of a door, stealthy footsteps? The furtive rustles and clicks and muffled thumps of an intruder slowly making his way through the house?

Gradually, as he heard nothing suspicious and as his racing heart grew calmer, his sense of impending disaster faded. Anxiety became mere uneasiness.

“Who’s there?” he asked, just to break the silence.

The sound of his voice, full of puzzlement, dispelled the portentous mood. Now the hush was only that of an empty house, devoid of menace.

He returned to his office at the end of the hall and settled in the leather chair behind his desk. With the shutters tightly closed and no lamps on except the one with the stained-glass shade, the corners of the room seemed to recede farther than the dimensions of the walls allowed, as if it were a place in a dream.

Because the motif of the lamp shade was fruit, the protective glass on the desk top reflected luminous ovals and circles of cherry-red, plum-purple, grape-green, lemon-yellow, and berry-blue. In its polished metal and Plexiglas surfaces, the cassette recorder, which lay on the glass, also reflected the bright mosaic, glimmering as if encrusted with jewels. When he reached for the recorder, Marty saw that his hand appeared to be sheathed in the pebbly, iridescent rainbow skin of an exotic lizard.

He hesitated, studying the faux scales on the back of his hand and the phantom jewels on the recorder. Real life was as layered with illusion as any piece of fiction.

He picked up the recorder and pressed the rewind button for a second or two, seeking the last few words of the unfinished letter to his editor. The thin, high-speed whistle-shriek of his voice in reverse issued like an alien language from the small, tinny speaker.

When he thumbed the play button, he found that he had not reversed far enough: “. . . I need . . . I need . . . I need . . .”

Frowning, he switched the machine to rewind, taking the tape back twice as far as before.

But still: “. . . I need . . . I need . . .”

Rewind. Two seconds. Five. Ten. Stop. Play.

“. . . I need . . . I need . . . I need . . .”

After two more attempts, he found the letter: "... so I should be able to have the final draft of the new book in your hands in about a month. I think this one is . . . this one is . . . uh . . . this one . . .”

The dictation stopped. Silence unreeled from the tape—and the sound of his breathing.

By the time the two-word chant finally began to issue from the speaker, Marty had leaned forward tensely on the edge of the chair, frowning at the recorder in his hand.

“. . . I need . . . I need . . .”

He checked his watch. Not quite six minutes past four o’clock.

Initially the dreamy murmur was the same as when he’d first come to his senses and heard soft chanting like the responses to an interminable, unimaginative religious litany. After about half a minute, however, his voice on the tape changed, became sharp with urgency, swelled with anguish, then with anger.

“. . . I NEED . . . I NEED . . . I NEED . . .”

Frustration seethed through those two words.

The Marty Stillwater on the tape—who might as well have been a total stranger to the listening Marty Stillwater—sounded in acute emotional pain for want of something that he could neither describe nor imagine.

Mesmerized, he scowled at the notched white spools of the cassette player turning relentlessly behind the plastic view window.

Finally the voice fell silent, the recording ended, and Marty consulted his watch again. More than twelve minutes past four.

He had assumed that he’d lost his concentration for only a few seconds, slipped into a brief daydream. Instead, he’d sat with the recorder gripped in his hand, the letter to his editor forgotten, repeating those two words for seven minutes or longer.

Seven minutes, for God’s sake.

And he had remembered none of it. As if in a trance.

Now he stopped the tape. His hand was trembling, and when he put the cassette recorder on the desk, it rattled against the glass.

He looked around the office, where he had passed so many solitary hours in the concoction and solution of so many mysteries, where he had put uncounted characters through enormous travail and challenged them to find their way out of mortal danger. The room was so familiar: the overflowing bookshelves, a dozen original paintings that had been featured on the dust jackets of his novels, the couch that he had bought in anticipation of lazy plotting sessions but on which he had never had the time or inclination to lie, the computer with its oversize monitor.

But that familiarity was not comforting anymore, because now it was tainted by the strangeness of what had happened minutes ago.

He blotted his damp palms on his jeans.

Having briefly lifted from him, dread settled again in the manner of Poe’s mysterious raven perching above a chamber door.

Waking from the trance, perceiving danger, he had expected to find the threat outside in the street or in the form of a burglar roaming through the rooms below. But it was worse than that. The threat was not external. Somehow, the wrongness was within him.

2

The night is deep and free of turbulence.

Below, the clotted clouds are silver with reflected moonlight, and for a while the shadow of the plane undulates across that vaporous sea.

The killer’s flight from Boston arrives on time in Kansas City, Missouri. He goes directly to the baggage-claim area. Thanksgiving-holiday travelers will not head home until tomorrow, so the airport is quiet. His two pieces of luggage—one of which contains a Heckler & Koch P7 pistol, detachable silencer, and expanded magazines loaded with 9mm ammunition—are first and second to drop onto the carrousel.

At the rental-agency counter he discovers that his reservation has not been misplaced or misrecorded, as often happens. He will receive the large Ford sedan that he requested, instead of being stuck with a subcompact.

The credit card in the name of John Larrington is accepted by the clerk and by the American Express verifying machine with no problem, although his name is not John Larrington.

When he receives the car, it runs well and smells clean. The heater actually works.

Everything seems to be going his way.

Within a few miles of the airport he checks into a pleasant if anonymous four-story motor hotel, where the red-haired clerk at the reception counter tells him that he may have a complimentary breakfast—pastries, juice, and coffee—delivered in the morning simply by requesting it. His Visa card in the name of Thomas E. Jukovic is accepted, although Thomas E. Jukovic is not his name.

His room has burnt-orange carpet and striped blue wallpaper. However, the mattress is firm, and the towels are fluffy.

The suitcase containing the automatic pistol and ammunition remains locked in the trunk of the car, where it will offer no temptation to snooping motel employees.

After sitting in a chair by the window for a while, staring at Kansas City by starlight, he goes down to the coffee shop to have dinner. He is six feet tall, weighs a hundred and eighty pounds, but eats as heartily as a much larger man. A bowl of vegetable soup with garlic toast. Two cheeseburgers, french fries. A slice of apple pie with vanilla ice cream. Half a dozen cups of coffee.

He always has a big appetite. Often he is ravenous; at times his hunger seems almost insatiable.

While he eats, the waitress stops by twice to ask if the food is prepared well and if he needs anything else. She is not merely attentive but flirting with him.

Although he is reasonably attractive, his looks don’t rival those of any movie star. Yet women flirt with him more frequently than with other men who are handsomer and better dressed than he. Consisting of Rockport walking shoes, khaki slacks, a dark-green crew-neck sweater, no jewelry, and an inexpensive wristwatch, his wardrobe is unremarkable, unmemorable. Which is the idea. The waitress has no reason to mistake him for a man of means. Yet here she is again, smiling coquettishly.

Once, in a Miami cocktail lounge where he had picked her up, a blonde with whiskey-colored eyes had assured him that an intriguing aura surrounded him. A compelling magnetism arose, she said, from his preference for silence and from the stony expression that usually occupied his face. “You are,” she’d insisted playfully, “the epitome of the strong silent type. Hell, if you were in a movie with Clint Eastwood and Stallone, there wouldn’t be any dialogue at all!”

Later he had beaten her to death.

He had not been angered by anything she’d said or done. In fact, sex with her had been satisfying.

But he had been in Florida to blow the brains out of a man named Parker Abbotson, and he’d been concerned that the woman might somehow later connect him with the assassination. He hadn’t wanted her to be able to give the police a description of him.

After wasting her, he had gone to see the latest Spielberg picture, and then a Steve Martin flick.

He likes movies. Aside from his work, movies are the only life he has. Sometimes it seems his real home is a succession of movie theaters in different cities yet so alike in their shopping-center multiplexity that they might as well be the same dark auditorium.

Now he pretends to be unaware that the coffee-shop waitress is interested in him. She is pretty enough, but he wouldn’t dare kill an employee of the restaurant in the very motel where he’s staying. He needs to find a woman in a place to which he has no connections.

He tips precisely fifteen percent because either stinginess or extravagance is a sure way to be remembered.

After returning briefly to his room for a wool-lined leather jacket suitable to the late-November night, he gets in the rental Ford and drives in steadily widening circles through the surrounding commercial district. He is searching for the kind of establishment in which he will have a chance to find the right woman.

3

Daddy wasn’t Daddy.

He had Daddy’s blue eyes, Daddy’s dark brown hair, Daddy’s too-big ears, Daddy’s freckled nose; he was a dead-ringer for the Martin Stillwater pictured on the dust jackets of his books. He sounded just like Daddy when Charlotte and Emily and their mother came home and found him in the kitchen, drinking coffee, because he said, “There’s no use pretending you went shopping at the mall after the movie. I had you followed by a private detective. I know you were at a poker parlor in Gardena, gambling and smoking cigars.” He stood, sat, and moved like Daddy.

Later, when they went out to Islands for dinner, he even drove like Daddy. Which was too fast, according to Mom. Or simply “the confident, skillful technique of a master motorman” if you saw things Daddy’s way.

But Charlotte knew something was wrong, and she fretted.

Oh, he hadn’t been taken over by an alien who crawled out of a big seed pod from outer space or anything so extreme. He wasn’t that different from the Daddy she knew and loved.

Mostly, the differences were minor. Though usually relaxed and easy-going, he was slightly tense. He held himself stiffly, as if balancing eggs on his head . . . or as if maybe he expected to be hit at any moment by someone, something. He didn’t smile as quickly or as often as usual, and when he did smile, he seemed to be pretending.

Before he backed the car out of the driveway, he turned and checked on Charlotte and Emily to be sure they were using seatbelts, but he didn’t say “the Stillwater rocket to Mars is about to blast off” or “if I take the turns too fast and you have to puke, please throw up neatly in your jacket pockets, not on my nice upholstery” or “if we build up enough speed to go back in time, don’t shout insults at the dinosaurs” or any of the other silly things he usually said.

Charlotte noticed and was troubled.

The restaurant, Islands, had good burgers, great fries—which could be ordered well-done—salads, and soft tacos. Sandwiches and french fries were served in baskets, and the ambiance was Caribbean.

“Ambiance” was a new word for Charlotte. She liked the sound of it so much, she used it every chance she got—though Emily, hopeless child, was always confused and said “what ambulance, I don’t see an ambulance” every time Charlotte used it. Seven-year-olds could be such a tribulation. Charlotte was ten—or would be in six weeks—and Emily had just turned seven in October. Em was a good sister, but of course seven-year-olds were so ... so sevenish.

Anyway, the ambiance was tropical: bright colors, bamboo on the ceiling, wooden blinds, and lots of potted palms. Both the boy and girl waitresses wore shorts and bright Hawaiian-type shirts.

The place reminded her of Jimmy Buffet music, which was one of those things her parents loved but which Charlotte didn’t get at all. At least the ambiance was cool, and the french fries were the best.

They sat in a booth in the non-smoking section, where the ambiance was even nicer. Her parents ordered Corona, which came in frosted mugs. Charlotte had a Coke, and Emily ordered root beer.

“Root beer is a grown-up drink,” Em said. She pointed to Charlotte’s Coke. “When are you going to stop drinking kid stuff?”

Em was convinced that root beer could be as intoxicating as real beer. Sometimes she pretended to be smashed after two glasses, which was stupid and embarrassing. When Em was doing her weaving-burping-drunk routine and strangers turned to stare, Charlotte explained that Em was seven. Everyone was understanding—from a seven-year-old, what else could be expected?—but it was embarrassing nonetheless.

By the time the waitress brought dinner, Mom and Daddy were talking about some people they knew who were getting a divorce—boring adult talk that could ruin an ambiance fast if you paid any attention. And Em was stacking french fries in peculiar piles, like miniature versions of modern sculptures they’d seen in a museum last summer; she was absorbed by the project.

With everyone distracted, Charlotte unzipped the deepest pocket on her denim jacket, withdrew Fred, and put him on the table.

He sat motionless under his shell, stumpy legs tucked in, headless, as big around as a man’s wristwatch. Finally his beaky little nose appeared. He sniffed the air cautiously, and then he stretched his head out of the fortress that he carried on his back. His dark shiny turtle eyes regarded his new surroundings with great interest, and Charlotte figured he must be amazed by the ambiance.

“Stick with me, Fred, and I’ll show you places no turtle has ever before seen,” she whispered.

She glanced at her parents. They were still so involved with each other that they had not noticed when she’d slipped Fred out of her pocket. Now he was hidden from them by a basket of french fries.

In addition to fries, Charlotte was eating soft tacos stuffed with chicken, from which she extracted a ribbon of lettuce. The turtle sniffed it, turned his head away in disgust. She tried chopped tomato. Are you serious? he seemed to say, refusing the tidbit.

Occasionally, Fred could be moody and difficult. That was her fault, she supposed, because she had spoiled him.

She didn’t think chicken or cheese would be good for him, and she was not going to offer him any tortilla crumbs until he ate his vegetables, so she nibbled on the crisp french fries and gazed around the restaurant as if fascinated by the other customers, ignoring the rude little reptile. He had rejected the lettuce and tomato merely to annoy her. If he thought she didn’t give a hoot whether he ate or not, then he would probably eat. In turtle years, Fred was seven.

She actually became interested in a heavy-metal couple with leather clothes and strange hair. They distracted her for a few minutes, and she was startled by her mother’s soft squeak of alarm.

“Oh,” said her mother after she squeaked, “it’s only Fred.”

The ungrateful turtle—after all, Charlotte could have left him at home—was not beside her plate where he’d been left. He had crawled around the basket of fries to the other side of the table.

“I only got him out to feed him,” Charlotte said defensively.

Lifting the basket so Charlotte could see the turtle, Mom said, “Honey, it’s not good for him to be in your pocket all day.”

“Not all day.” Charlotte took possession of Fred and returned him to her pocket. “Just since we left the house for dinner.”

Mom frowned. “What other livestock do you have with you?”

“Just Fred.”

“What about Bob?” Mom asked.

“Oh, yuch,” Emily said, making a face at Charlotte. “You got Bob in your pocket? I hate Bob.”

Bob was a bug, a slow-moving black beetle as large as the last joint of Daddy’s thumb, with faint blue markings on his carapace. She kept him in a big jar at home, but sometimes she liked to take him out and watch him crawl in his laborious way across a countertop or even over the back of her hand.

“I’d never bring Bob to a restaurant,” Charlotte assured them.

“You also know better than to bring Fred,” her mother said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Charlotte said, genuinely embarrassed.

“Dumb,” Emily advised her.

To Emily, Mom said, “No dumber than using french fries as if they’re Lego blocks.”

“I’m making art.” Emily was always making art. She was weird sometimes even for a seven-year-old. Picasso reincarnate, Daddy called her.

“Art, huh?” Mom said. “You’re making art out of your food, so then what are you going to eat? A painting?”

“Maybe,” Em said. “A painting of a chocolate cake.”

Charlotte zipped shut her jacket pocket, imprisoning Fred.

“Wash your hands before you go on eating,” Daddy said.

Charlotte said, “Why?”

“What were you just handling?”

“You mean Fred? But Fred’s clean.”

“I said, wash your hands.”

Her father’s snappishness reminded Charlotte that he was not himself. He rarely spoke harshly to her or Em. She behaved not out of fear that he’d spank her or shout at her, but because it was important not to disappoint him or Mom. It was the best feeling in the world when she got a good grade in school or performed well at a piano recital and made them proud of her. And absolutely nothing was worse than messing up—and seeing a sad look of disappointment in their eyes, even when they didn’t punish her or say anything.

The sharpness of her father’s voice sent her directly to the ladies’ room, blinking back tears every step of the way.

Later, on the way home from Islands, when Daddy got a lead foot, Mom said, “Marty, this isn’t the Indianapolis Five Hundred.”

“You think this is fast?” Daddy asked, as if astonished. “This isn’t fast.”

“Even the caped crusader himself can’t get the Batmobile up to speeds like this.”

“I’m thirty-three, never had an accident. Spotless record. No tickets. Never been stopped by a cop.”

“Because they can’t catch you,” Mom said.

“Exactly.”

In the back seat, Charlotte and Emily grinned at each other.

For as long as Charlotte could remember, her parents had been having jokey conversations about his driving, though her mother was serious about wanting him to go slower.

“I’ve never even had a parking ticket,” Daddy said.

“Well, of course, it’s not easy to get a parking ticket when the speedometer needle is always pegged out.”

In the past their back-and-forth had always been good-humored. But now, he suddenly spoke sharply to Mom: “For God’s sake, Paige, I’m a good driver, this is a safe car, I spent more money on it than I should have precisely because it’s one of the safest cars on the road, so will you just give this a rest?”

“Sure. Sorry,” Mom said.

Charlotte looked at her sister. Em was wide-eyed with disbelief.

Daddy was not Daddy. Something was wrong. Big-time wrong.

They had gone only a block before he slowed down and glanced at Mom and said, “Sorry.”

“No, you were right, I’m too much of a worrier about some things,” Mom told him.

They smiled at each other. It was all right. They weren’t going to get divorced like those people they’d been talking about at dinner. Charlotte couldn’t recall them ever being angry with each other for longer than a few minutes.

However, she was still worried. Maybe she should check around the house and outside behind the garage to see if she could find a giant empty seed pod from outer space.

4

Like a shark cruising cold currents in a night sea, the killer drives.

This is his first time in Kansas City, but he knows the streets. Total mastery of the layout is part of his preparation for every assignment, in case he becomes the subject of a police pursuit and needs to make a hasty escape under pressure.

Curiously, he has no recollection of having seen—let alone studied—a map, and he can’t imagine from where this highly detailed information was acquired. But he doesn’t like to consider the holes in his memory because thinking about them opens the door on a black abyss that terrifies him.

So he just drives.

Usually he likes to drive. Having a powerful and responsive machine at his command gives him a sense of control and purpose.

But once in a while, as happens now, the motion of the car and the sights of a strange city—regardless of how familiar he may be with the layout of its streets—make him feel small, alone, adrift. His heart begins to beat fast. His palms are suddenly so damp, the steering wheel slips through them.

Then, as he brakes at a traffic light, he looks at the car in the lane beside him and sees a family revealed by the street lamps. The father is driving. The mother sits in the passenger seat, an attractive woman. A boy of about ten and a girl of six or seven are in the back seat. On their way home from a night out. Maybe a movie. Talking, laughing, parents and children together, sharing.

In his deteriorating condition, that sight is a merciless hammer blow, and he makes a thin wordless sound of anguish.

He pulls off the street, into the parking lot of an Italian restaurant. Slumps in his seat. Breathes in quick shallow gasps.

The emptiness. He dreads the emptiness.

And now it is upon him.

He feels as if he is a hollow man, made of the thinnest blown glass, fragile, only slightly more substantial than a ghost.

At times like this, he desperately needs a mirror. His reflection is one of the few things that can confirm his existence.

The restaurant’s elaborate red and green neon sign illuminates the interior of the Ford. When he tilts the rearview mirror to look at himself, his skin has a cadaverous cast, and his eyes are alight with changing crimson shapes, as if fires burn within him.

Tonight, his reflection is not enough to diminish his agitation. He feels less substantial by the moment. Perhaps he will breathe out one last time, expelling the final thin substance of himself in that exhalation.

Tears blur his vision. He is overwhelmed by his loneliness, and tortured by the meaninglessness of his life.

He folds his arms across his chest, hugs himself, leans forward, and rests his forehead against the steering wheel. He sobs as if he is a small child.

He doesn’t know his name, only the names he will use while in Kansas City. He wants so much to have a name of his own that is not as counterfeit as the credit cards on which it appears. He has no family, no friends, no home. He cannot recall who gave him this assignment—or any of the jobs before it—and he doesn’t know why his targets must die. Incredibly, he has no idea who pays him, does not remember where he got the money in his wallet or where he bought the clothes he wears.

On a more profound level, he does not know who he is. He has no memory of a time when his profession was anything other than murder. He has no politics, no religion, no personal philosophy whatsoever. Whenever he tries to take an interest in current affairs, he finds himself unable to retain what he reads in the newspapers; he can’t even focus his attention on television news. He is intelligent, yet he permits himself—or is permitted—only satisfactions of a physical nature: food, sex, the savage exhilaration of homicide. Vast regions of his mind remain uncharted.

A few minutes pass in green and red neon.

His tears dry. Gradually he stops trembling.

He will be all right. Back on the rails. Steady, controlled.

In fact he ascends with remarkable speed from the depths of despair. Surprising, how readily he is willing to continue with his latest assignment—and with the mere shadow of a life that he leads. Sometimes it seems to him that he operates as if programmed in the manner of a dumb and obedient machine.

On the other hand, if he were not to continue, what else would he do? This shadow of a life is the only life he has.

5

While the girls were upstairs, brushing their teeth and preparing for bed, Marty methodically went from room to room on the first floor, making sure all of the doors and windows were locked.

He had circled half the downstairs—and was testing the latch on the window above the kitchen sink—before he realized what a peculiar task he had set for himself. Prior to turning in every night, he checked the front and back doors, of course, plus the sliding doors between the family room and patio, but he did not ordinarily verify that any particular window was secure unless he knew that it had been open for ventilation during the day. Nevertheless, he was confirming the integrity of the house perimeter as conscientiously as a sentry might certify the outer defenses of a fortress besieged by enemies.

As he was finishing in the kitchen, he heard Paige enter, and a moment later she slid both arms around his waist, embracing him from behind. “You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, well . . .”

“Bad day?”

“Not really. Just one bad moment.”

Marty turned in her arms to embrace her. She felt wonderful, so warm and strong, so alive.

That he loved her more now than when they had met in college was no surprise. The triumphs and failures they had shared, the years of daily struggle to make a place in the world and to seek the meaning of it, was rich soil in which love could grow.

However, in an age when ideal beauty was supposedly embodied in nineteen-year-old professional cheerleaders for major-league football teams, Marty knew a lot of guys who would be surprised to hear he’d found his wife increasingly attractive as she had aged from nineteen to thirty-three. Her eyes were no bluer than they had been when he’d first met her, her hair was not a richer shade of gold, and her skin was neither smoother nor more supple. Nevertheless, experience had given her character, depth. Corny as it sounded in this era of knee-jerk cynicism, she sometimes seemed to shine with an inner light, as radiant as the venerated subject of a painting by Raphael.

So, yeah, maybe he had a heart as soft as butter, maybe he was a sucker for romance, but he found her smile and the challenge of her eyes infinitely more exciting than a six-pack of naked cheerleaders.

He kissed her brow.

She said, “One bad moment? What happened?”

He hadn’t decided how much he should tell her about those seven lost minutes. For now it might be best to minimize the deep weirdness of the experience, see the doctor Monday morning, and even have some tests done. If he was in good health, what had happened in the office this afternoon might prove to be an inexplicable singularity. He didn’t want to alarm Paige unnecessarily.

“Well?” she persisted.

With the inflection she gave that single word, she reminded him that twelve years of marriage forbade serious secrets, no matter what good intentions motivated his reticence.

He said, “You remember Audrey Aimes?”

“Who? Oh, you mean in One Dead Bishop?”

One Dead Bishop was a novel he had written. Audrey Aimes was the lead character.

“Remember what her problem was?” he asked.

“She found a dead priest hanging on a hook in her foyer closet.”

“Aside from that.”

“She had another problem? Seems like a dead priest is enough. Are you sure you’re not over-complicating your plots?”

“I’m serious,” he said, though aware of how odd it was that he should choose to inform his wife of a personal crisis by comparing it to the experiences of a mystery-novel heroine whom he had created.

Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it sometimes was for a writer? And if so—was there a book in that idea?

Frowning, Paige said, “Audrey Aimes . . . Oh, yeah, you’re talking about her blackouts.”

“Fugues,” he said.

A fugue was a serious personality dissociation. The victim went places, talked to people, and engaged in varied activities while appearing normal—yet later could not recall where he had been or what he had done during the blackout, as if the time had passed in deepest sleep. A fugue could last minutes, hours, or even days.

Audrey Aimes had suddenly begun to suffer from fugues when she was thirty, because repressed memories of childhood abuse had begun to surface after more than two decades, and she had retreated from them psychologically. She’d been certain she’d killed the priest while in a fugue state, although of course someone else had murdered him and stuffed him in her closet, and the entire bizarre homicide was connected to what had happened to her when she was a little girl.

In spite of being able to earn a living by spinning elaborate fantasies out of thin air, Marty had a reputation for being as emotionally stable as the Rock of Gibraltar and as easy-going as a golden retriever on Valium, which was probably why Paige still smiled at him and appeared reluctant to take him seriously.

She stood on her toes, kissed his nose, and said, “So you forgot to take out the garbage, and now you’re going to claim it’s because you’re suffering a personality breakdown due to long-forgotten, hideous abuses when you were six years old. Really, Marty. Shame on you. Your mom and dad are the sweetest people I’ve ever met.”

He let go of her, closed his eyes, and pressed one hand against his forehead. He was developing a fierce headache.

“I’m serious, Paige. This afternoon, in the office . . . for seven minutes . . . well, I only know what the hell I was doing during that time because I’ve got it on a tape recorder. I don’t remember any of it. And it’s creepy. Seven creepy minutes.”

He felt her body tense against his, as she realized that he was not engaged in some complex joke. And when he opened his eyes, he saw that her playful smile was gone.

“Maybe there’s a simple explanation,” he said. “Maybe there’s no reason to be concerned. But I’m scared, Paige. I feel stupid, like I should just shrug and forget about it, but I’m scared.”

6

In Kansas City, a chill wind polishes the night until the sky seems to be an infinite slab of clear crystal in which stars are suspended and behind which is pent a vast reservoir of darkness.

Beneath that enormous weight of space and blackness, the Blue Life Lounge huddles like a research station on the floor of an ocean trench, pressurized to resist implosion. The facade is covered in a shiny aluminum skin reminiscent of Airstream travel trailers and roadside diners from the 1950s. Blue and green neon spells the name in lazy script and outlines the structure, glimmering in the aluminum and beckoning with as much allure as the lamps of Neptune.

Inside, where an amplified combo blasts out rock-’n’-roll from the past two decades, the killer moves toward the huge horseshoe bar in the center of the room. The air is thick with cigarette smoke, beer fumes, and body heat; it almost resists him, as if it’s water.

The crowd offers radically different images from the traditional Thanksgiving scenes flooding television screens during this holiday weekend. At the tables the customers are mostly raucous young men in groups with too much energy and testosterone for their own good. They shout to be heard above the thundering music, grab at waitresses to get their attention, whoop in approval when the guitarist gets off a good riff.

Their determination to enjoy themselves has the frantic quality of insectile frenzy.

A third of the men at the tables are accompanied by young wives or girlfriends of the big-hair and heavy-makeup persuasion. They are as rowdy as the men—and would be as out of place at a hearthside family gathering as screeching bright-plumed parrots would be out of place at the bedside of a dying nun.

The horseshoe-shaped bar encircles an oval stage, bathed in red and white spotlights, where two young women with exceptionally firm bodies thrash to the music and call it dancing. They wear cowgirl costumes designed to tease, all fringe and spangles, and one of them elicits whistles and hoots when she removes her halter top.

The men on the bar stools are all ages and, unlike the customers at the tables, each appears to be alone. They sit in silence, staring up at the two smooth-skinned dancers. Many sway slightly on their stools or move their heads dreamily from side to side in time to some other music far less driving than the tunes the band is actually playing; they are like a colony of sea anemones, stirred by slow deep currents, waiting dumbly for a morsel of pleasure to drift to them.

He sits on one of only two empty stools and orders a bottle of Beck’s dark from a bartender who could crack walnuts in the crooks of his arms. All three bartenders are tall and muscular, no doubt hired for their ability to double as bouncers if the need arises.

The dancer at the far end of the stage, the one whose breasts bounce unfettered, is a striking brunette with a thousand-watt smile. She is into the music and genuinely seems to enjoy performing.

Although the nearest dancer, a leggy blonde, is even more attractive than the brunette, her routine is mechanical, and she seems to be numbed either by drugs or disgust. She neither smiles nor looks at anyone, but gazes at some far place only she can see.

She seems haughty, disdainful of the men who stare at her, the killer included. He would derive a lot of pleasure from drawing his pistol and pumping several rounds into her exquisite body—one for good measure in the center of her pouting face.

An intense thrill shakes him at the mere contemplation of taking her beauty from her. The theft of her beauty appeals to him more than taking her life. He places little value on life but a great deal on beauty because his own life is often unbearably bleak.

Fortunately, the pistol is in the trunk of the rented Ford. He has left the gun in the car precisely to avoid a temptation like this, when he feels compelled toward violence.

As often as two or three times a day, he is gripped by a desire to destroy anyone who happens to be near him—men, women, children, it makes no difference. In the thrall of these dark seizures, he hates every last human being on the face of the earth—whether they are beautiful or ugly, rich or poor, smart or stupid, young or old.

Perhaps, in part, his hatred arises from the knowledge that he is different from them. He must always live as an outsider.

But simple alienation is not the primary reason he frequently contemplates random slaughter. He needs something from other people which they are unwilling to provide, and, because they withhold it, he hates them with such passion that he is capable of any atrocity—even though he has no idea what he expects to receive from them.

This mysterious need is sometimes so intense that it becomes painful. It is a hunger akin to starvation—but not a hunger for food. Often he finds himself on the trembling edge of a revelation; he realizes that the answer is astonishingly simple if only he can open himself to it, but enlightenment always eludes him.

The killer takes a long pull on the bottle of Beck’s. He wants the beer, but he does not need it. Want is not need.

On the elevated stage, the blonde slips off her halter, exposing pale upswept breasts.

If he retrieves the pistol and expanded magazines of ammo from the trunk of the car, he will have ninety rounds. When the arrogant blonde is dead, he can kill the other dancer. Then the three muscle-bound bartenders with three headshots. He is well trained in the use of firearms—though he has no recollection of who trained him. With those five dead, he can target the fleeing crowd. Many who don’t die from gunfire will perish when trampled in the panic to escape.

The prospect of slaughter excites him, and he knows that blood can make him forget, at least for a short while, the aching need that plagues him. He has experienced the pattern before. Need fosters frustration; frustration grows into anger; anger leads to hatred; hatred generates violence—and violence sometimes soothes.

He drinks more beer and wonders if he is insane.

He remembers a movie in which a psychiatrist assures the hero that only sane people question their sanity. Genuine madmen are always firmly convinced of their rationality. Therefore, he must be sane even to be able to doubt himself.

7

Marty leaned against the door frame and watched while the girls took turns sitting on their bedroom vanity bench to let Paige brush their hair. Fifty strokes each.

Perhaps it was the easy rhythmic motion of the hairbrush or the tranquilizing domesticity of the scene that soothed Marty’s headache. Whatever the reason, the pain faded.

Charlotte’s hair was golden, just like her mother’s, and Emily’s was so dark brown that it was almost black, like Marty’s. Charlotte chatted nonstop with Paige throughout her brushing; but Emily kept silent, arched her back, closed her eyes, and took an almost catlike pleasure in the grooming.

The contrasting halves of their shared room attested to other differences between the sisters. Charlotte liked posters full of motion: colorful hot-air balloons against a desert twilight; a ballet dancer in mid-entrechat; sprinting gazelles. Emily preferred posters of autumn leaves, evergreens hung with heavy snow, and moonlight-silvered surf breaking on a pale beach. Charlotte’s bedspread was green, red, and yellow; Emily’s was a beige chenille. Disorder ruled in Charlotte’s domain, while Emily prized neatness.

Then there was the matter of pets. On Charlotte’s side of the room, built-in bookshelves housed the terrarium that was home to Fred the Turtle, the wide-mouthed gallon jar where Bob the Bug made his home in dead leaves and grass, the cage that housed Wayne the Gerbil, another terrarium in which Sheldon the Snake was the tenant, a second cage in which Whiskers the Mouse spent a lot of time keeping an eye on Sheldon in spite of the glass and wire that separated them, and a final terrarium occupied by Loretta the Chameleon. Charlotte had rejected the suggestion that a kitten or puppy was a more appropriate pet. “Dogs and cats run around loose all the time, you can’t keep them in a nice safe little home and protect them,” she explained.

Emily had only one pet. Its name was Peepers. It was a stone the size of a small lemon, smoothed by decades of running water in the Sierra creek from which she had retrieved it during their summer vacation a year ago. She had painted two soulful eyes on it, and insisted, “Peepers is the best pet of all. I don’t have to feed him or clean up after him. He’s been around forever, so he’s real smart and real wise, and when I’m sad or maybe mad, I just tell him what I’m hurting about, and he takes it all in and worries about it so I don’t have to think about it any more and can be happy.”

Emily was capable of expressing ideas that were, on the surface, entirely childlike but, on reflection, seemed deeper and more mature than anything expected from a seven-year-old. Sometimes, when he looked into her dark eyes, Marty felt she was seven going on four hundred, and he could hardly wait to see just how interesting and complex she was going to be when she was all grown up.

After their hair was brushed, the girls climbed into the twin beds, and their mother tucked the covers around them, kissed them, and wished them sweet dreams. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she warned Emily because the line always elicited a giggle.

As Paige retreated to the doorway, Marty moved a straight-backed chair from its usual place against the wall and positioned it at the foot of—and exactly between—the two beds. Except for a miniature battery-powered reading lamp clipped to his open notebook and a low-wattage Mickey Mouse luminaria plugged into a wall socket near the floor, he switched off all the lights. He sat in the chair, held the notebook at reading distance, and waited until the silence had acquired that same quality of pleasurable expectation that filled a theater in the moment when the curtain started to rise.

The mood was set.

This was the happiest part of Marty’s day. Story time. No matter what else might happen after rising to meet the morning, he could always look forward to story time.

He wrote the tales himself in a notebook labeled Stories for Charlotte and Emily, which he might actually publish one day. Or might not. Every word was a gift to his daughters, so the decision to share the stories with anyone else would be entirely theirs.

Tonight marked the beginning of a special treat, a story in verse, which would continue through Christmas Day. Maybe it would go well enough to help him forget the unsettling events in his office.

“Well, now Thanksgiving is safely past, more turkey eaten this year than last—”

“It rhymes!” Charlotte said with delight.

“Sssshhhhh!” Emily admonished her sister.

The rules of story time were few but important, and one of them was that the two-girl audience could not interrupt mid-sentence or, in the case of a poem, mid-stanza. Their feedback was valued, their reactions cherished, but a storyteller must receive his due respect.

He began again:

“Well, now Thanksgiving is safely past, more turkey eaten this year than last, more stuffing stuffed, more yams jammed into our mouths, and using both hands, coleslaw in slews, biscuits by twos, all of us too fat to fit in our shoes.”

The girls were giggling just where he wanted them to giggle, and Marty could barely restrain himself from turning around in his chair to see how Paige liked it so far, as she had heard none of it until this moment. But no one would respond to a storyteller who couldn’t wait until the end for his plaudits; an unshakable air of confidence, whether faked or genuinely felt, was essential to success.

“So let’s look ahead to the big holiday that’s coming, coming, coming our way. I’m sure you know just what day I mean. It’s not Easter Sunday, not Halloween. It’s not a day to be sad and listless. I ask you, young ladies, what is it—?”

“It’s Christmas!” Charlotte and Emily answered in unison, and their immediate response confirmed that he had them in his spell.

“Someday soon, we’ll put up a tree. Why only one? Maybe two, maybe three! Deck it with tinsel and baubles bright. It’ll be an amazing and wonderful sight. String colored lights out on the roof— pray none are broken by anything’s hoof. Salt down the shingles to melt the ice. If Santa fell, it just wouldn’t be nice. He might fracture a leg or get a cut, perhaps even break his big jolly butt.”

He glanced at the girls. Their faces seemed to shine in the shadows. Without saying a word, they told him: Don’t stop, don’t stop!

God, he loved this. He loved them.

If heaven existed, it was exactly like this moment, this place.

“Oh, wait! I just heard terrible news. Hope it won’t give you Christmas blues. Santa was drugged, tied up, and gagged, blindfolded, ear-stoppled, and bagged. His sleigh is waiting out in the yard, and someone has stolen Santa’s bank card. Soon his accounts will be picked clean by the use of automatic-teller machines.”

“Uh-oh,” Charlotte said, snuggling deeper into her covers, “it’s going to be scary.”

“Well, of course it is,” Emily said. “Daddy wrote it.”

“Will it be too scary?” Charlotte asked, pulling the blankets up to her chin.

“Are you wearing socks?” Marty asked.

Charlotte usually wore socks to bed except in summer, because otherwise her feet got cold.

“Socks?” she said. “Yeah? So?”

Marty leaned forward in his chair and lowered his voice to a spooky whisper: “Because this story won’t end until Christmas Day, and by then it’s gonna scare your socks off maybe a dozen times.”

He made a wicked face.

Charlotte pulled the covers up to her nose.

Emily giggled and demanded: “Come on, Daddy, what’s next?”

“Hark, the sound of silver sleigh bells echoes over the hills and the dells. And look—reindeer high up in the sky! Some silly goose has taught them to fly. The driver giggles quite like a loon— madman, goofball, a thug, and a goon.

Something is wrong—any fool could tell. If this is Santa, then Santa’s not well. He hoots, gibbers, chortles, and spits, and seems to be having some sort of fits His mean little eyes spin just like tops. So somebody better quick call the cops. A closer look confirms his psychosis. And—oh, my dears—really bad halitosis!”

“Oh, jeez,” Charlotte said, pulling the covers up just below her eyes. She professed to dislike scary stories, but she was the quicker to complain if something frightening didn’t happen in a tale sooner or later.

“So who is it?” Emily asked. “Who tied Santa up and robbed him and ran off in his sleigh?”

“Beware when Christmas comes this year, because there’s something new to fear. Santa’s twin—who is evil and mean— stole the sleigh, will make the scene, pretending to be his good brother. Guard your beloved children, Mother! Down the chimney, into your home, here comes that vile psychotic gnome!”

“Eeep!” Charlotte cried, and pulled the covers over her head.

Emily said, “What made Santa’s twin so evil?”

“Maybe he had a bad childhood,” Marty said.

“Maybe he was born that way,” Charlotte said under her covers.

“Can people be born bad?” Emily wondered. Then she answered her own question before Marty could respond. “Well, sure, they can. ’Cause some people are born good, like you and Mommy, so then some people must be born bad.”

Marty was soaking up the girls’ reactions, loving it.

On one level, he was a writer, storing away their words, the rhythms of their speech, expressions, toward the day when he might need to use some of this for a scene in a book. He supposed it wasn’t admirable to be so constantly aware that even his own children were material; it might be morally repugnant, but he couldn’t change. He was what he was. He was also a father, however, and he reacted primarily on that level, mentally preserving the moment because one day memories were all he would have of their childhood, and he wanted to be able to recall everything, the good and the bad, simple moments and big events, in Technicolor and Dolby sound and with perfect clarity, because it was all too precious to him to be lost.

Emily said, “Does Santa’s evil twin have a name?”

“Yes,” Marty said, “he does, but you’ll have to wait until another night to hear it. We’ve reached our first stopping place.”

Charlotte poked her head out from beneath the covers, and both girls insisted that he read the first part of the poem again, as he had known they would. Even the second time through, they would be too involved to be ready to sleep. They would demand a third reading, and he would oblige, for then they would be familiar enough with the words to settle down. Later, by the end of the third reading, they finally would be either deep in sleep or on the drowsy edge of it.

As he started with the first line again, Marty heard Paige turn out of the doorway and walk toward the stairs. She would be waiting for him in the family room, perhaps with flames crackling in the fireplace, perhaps with red wine and a snack of some kind, and they would curl up together and tell each other about their day.

Any five minutes of the evening, now or later, would be more interesting to him than a trip around the world. He was a hopeless homebody. The charms of hearth and family had more allure than the enigmatic sands of Egypt, the glamour of Paris, and the mystery of the Far East combined.

Winking at each of his daughters, reciting again, “Well, now Thanksgiving is safely past,” he had for the moment forgotten that something disturbing had happened earlier in his office and that the sanctity of his home had been violated.

8

In the Blue Life Lounge, a woman brushes against the killer and slides onto the bar stool beside him. She is not as beautiful as the dancers, but she is attractive enough for his purposes. Wearing tan jeans and a tight red T-shirt, she could be just another customer, but she is not. He knows her type—a discount Venus with the skills of a natural-born accountant.

They conduct a conversation by leaning close to each other to be heard above the band, and soon their heads are almost touching. Her name is Heather, or so she says. She has wintermint breath.

By the time the dancers retreat and the band takes a break, Heather has decided he isn’t a vice cop on stakeout, so she grows bolder. She knows what he wants, she has what he wants, and she lets him know that he is a buyer in a seller’s market.

Heather tells him that across the highway from the Blue Life Lounge is a motel where, if a girl is known to the management, rooms can be rented by the hour. This is no surprise to him, for there are laws of lust and economics as immutable as the laws of nature.

She pulls on her lambskin-lined jacket, and together they go out into the chilly night, where her wintermint breath turns to steam in the crisp air. They cross the parking lot and then the highway, hand-in-hand as if they are high school sweethearts.

Though she knows what he wants, she does not know what he needs any more than he does. When he gets what he wants, and when it does not quench the hot need in him, Heather will learn the pattern of emotion that is now so familiar to him: need fosters frustration; frustration grows into anger; anger leads to hatred; hatred generates violence—and violence sometimes soothes.

The sky is a massive slab of crystal-clear ice. The trees stand leafless and sere at the end of barren November. The wind makes a cold, mournful sound as it sweeps off the vast surrounding prairie, through the city. And violence sometimes soothes.

Later, having spent himself in Heather more than once, no longer in the urgent grip of lust, he finds the shabbiness of the motel room to be an intolerable reminder of the shallow, grubby nature of his existence. His immediate desire is sated, but his desire for more of a life, for direction and meaning, is undiminished.

The naked young woman, on top of whom he still lies, seems ugly now, even disgusting. The memory of intimacy with her repels him. She can’t or won’t give him what he needs. Living on the edge of society, selling her body, she is an outcast herself, and therefore an infuriating symbol of his own alienation.

She is taken by surprise when he punches her in the face. The blow is hard enough to stun her. As Heather goes limp, nearly unconscious, he slips both hands around her throat and chokes her with all the force of which he is capable.

The struggle is quiet. The blow, followed by extreme pressure on her windpipe and diminishment of the blood supply to her brain through the carotid arteries, renders her incapable of resistance.

He is concerned about drawing the unwanted attention of other motel guests. But a minimum of noise is also important because quiet murder is more personal, more intimate, more deeply satisfying.

So quietly does she succumb that he is reminded of nature films in which certain spiders and mantises kill their mates subsequent to a first and final act of intercourse, always without a sound from either assailant or victim. Heather’s death is marked by a cold and solemn ritual equal to the stylized savagery of those insects.

Minutes later, after showering and dressing, he crosses the highway from the motel to the Blue Life Lounge and gets in his rental car. He has business to conduct. He was not sent to Kansas City to murder a whore named Heather. She was merely a diversion. Other victims await him, and now he is sufficiently relaxed and focused to deal with them.

9

In Marty’s office, by the party-colored light of the stained-glass lamp, Paige stood beside the desk, staring at the small tape recorder, listening to her husband chant two unsettling words in a voice that ranged from a melancholy whisper to a low snarl of rage.

After less than two minutes, she couldn’t tolerate it any longer. His voice was simultaneously familiar and strange, which made it far worse than if she’d been unable to recognize it at all.

She switched off the recorder.

Realizing she was still holding the glass of red wine in her right hand, she took too large a swallow. It was a good California cabernet that merited leisurely sipping, but suddenly she was more interested in its effect than its taste.

Standing across the desk from her, Marty said, “There’s at least five more minutes of the same thing. Seven minutes in all. After it happened, before you and the girls came home, I did some research.” He gestured toward the bookshelves that lined one wall. “In my medical references. ”

Paige did not want to hear what he was going to tell her. The possibility of serious illness was unthinkable. If anything happened to Marty, the world would be a far darker and less interesting place.

She was not sure that she could deal with the loss of him. She realized her attitude was peculiar, considering that she was a child psychologist who, in her private practice and during the hours she donated to child-welfare groups, had counseled dozens of children about how to conquer grief and go on after the death of a loved one.

Coming around the desk toward her, his own wine glass already empty, Marty said, “A fugue can be symptomatic of several things. Early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, but I believe we can rule that out. If I’ve got Alzheimer’s at thirty-three, I’d probably be the youngest case on record by about a decade.”

He put his glass on the desk and went to the window to stare out at the night between the slats of the plantation shutters.

Paige was struck by how vulnerable he suddenly appeared. Six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds, with his easy-going manner and limitless enthusiasm for life, Marty had always before struck her as being more solid and permanent than anything in the world, oceans and mountains included. Now he seemed as fragile as a pane of glass.

With his back toward her, still studying the night, he said, “Or it might have been an indication of a small stroke.”

“No.”

“Though according to the references I checked, the most likely cause is a brain tumor.”

She raised her glass. It was empty. She could not remember having finished the wine. A little fugue of her own.

She set the glass on the desk. Beside the hateful cassette recorder. Then she went to Marty and put a hand on his shoulder.

When he turned to her, she kissed him lightly, quickly. She laid her head against his chest and hugged him, and he put his arms around her. Because of Marty, she had learned that hugs were as essential to a healthy life as were food, water, sleep.

Earlier, when she had caught him systematically checking window locks, she’d insisted, with only a scowl and a single word—“Well?”—that he not hide anything. Now she wished she hadn’t insisted on hearing about his one bad moment in an otherwise fine day.

She looked up and met his eyes at last, still embracing him, and said, “It might be nothing.”

“It’s something.”

“But I mean, nothing physical.”

He smiled ruefully. “It’s so comforting to have a psychologist in the house.”

“Well, it could be psychological.”

“Somehow, it doesn’t help that maybe I’m just crazy.”

“Not crazy. Stressed.”

“Ah, yes, stress. The twentieth-century excuse, the favorite of goldbrickers filing fake disability claims, politicians trying to explain why they were drunk in a motel with naked teenage girls—”

She let go of him, turned away, angry. She wasn’t upset with Marty, exactly, but with God or fate or whatever force had suddenly brought turbulent currents into their smoothly flowing lives.

She started toward the desk to get her glass of wine before she remembered she had already drunk it. She turned to Marty again.

“All right . . . except when Charlotte was so sick that time, you’ve always been about as stressed out as a clam. But maybe you’re just a secret worrier. And lately, you’ve had a lot of pressures.”

“I have?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“The deadline on this book is tighter than usual.”

“But I’ve still got three months, and I think I’ll need one.”

“All the new career expectations—your publisher and agent and everyone in the business watching you in a different way now.”

The paperback reprints of his two most recent novels had placed on the New York Times bestseller list, each for eight weeks. He had not yet enjoyed a hardcover bestseller, but that new level of success seemed imminent with the release of his new novel in January.

The sudden sales growth was exciting but also daunting. Though Marty wanted a larger audience, he also was determined not to tailor his writing to have wider appeal and thereby lose what made his books fresh. He knew he was in danger of unconsciously modifying his work, so lately he was being unusually hard on himself, even though he had always been his own toughest critic and had always revised each page of a story as many as twenty and thirty times.

“Then there’s People magazine,” she said.

“That’s not stressful. It’s over and done with.”

A writer for People had come to the house a few weeks ago, and a photographer followed two days later for a ten-hour shoot. Marty being Marty, he liked them and they liked him, although first he had desperately resisted his publisher’s entreaties to do the piece.

Given his friendly relationship with the People people, he had no reason to think the article would be negative, but even favorable publicity usually made him feel cheap and grasping. To him, the books were what mattered, not the person who wrote them, and he did not want to be, as he put it, “the Madonna of the mystery novel, posing nude in a library with a snake in my teeth to hype sales.”

“It’s not over and done with,” Paige disagreed. The issue with the article about Marty would not hit the news-stands until Monday. “I know you’re dreading it.”

He sighed. “I don’t want to be—”

“Madonna with a snake in your teeth. I know, baby. What I’m saying is, you’re more stressed about the magazine than you realize.”

“Stressed enough to black out for seven minutes?”

“Sure. Why not? I’ll bet that’s what the doctor will say.”

Marty looked skeptical.

Paige moved into his arms again. “Everything’s been going so well for us lately, almost too well. There’s a tendency to get a little superstitious about it. But we worked hard, we earned all of this. Nothing’s going to go wrong. You hear me?”

“I hear you,” he said, holding her close.

“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” she repeated. “Nothing. ”

10

After midnight.

The neighborhood boasts big lots, and the large houses are set far back from the front property lines. Huge trees, so ancient they seem almost to have acquired nascent intelligence, stand sentinel along the streets, watching over the prosperous residents, autumn-stripped black limbs bristling like high-tech antennae, gathering information about potential threats to the well-being of those who sleep beyond the brick and stone walls.

The killer parks around the corner from the house in which his work awaits. He walks the rest of the way, softly humming a cheery tune of his own creation, acting as if he has trod these sidewalks ten thousand times before.

Furtive behavior is always noticed and, when noticed, inevitably raises an alarm. On the other hand, a man acting boldly and directly is viewed as honest and harmless, is not remarked upon, and is later forgotten altogether.

A cold northwest breeze.

A moonless sky.

A suspicious owl monotonously repeats his single question.

The house is Georgian, brick with white columns. The property is encircled by a spear-point iron fence.

The driveway gate stands open and appears to have been left in that position for many years. The pace and peaceful quality of life in Kansas City cannot long sustain paranoia.

As if he owns the place, he follows the circular driveway to the portico at the main entrance, climbs the steps, and pauses at the front door to unzip a small breast pocket in his leather jacket. From the pocket he extracts a key.

Until this moment, he was not aware that he was carrying it. He doesn’t know who gave it to him, but at once he knows its purpose. This has happened to him before.

The key fits the dead-bolt lock.

He opens the door on a dark foyer, steps across the threshold into the warm house, and withdraws the key from the lock. He closes the door softly behind him.

After putting the key away, he turns to a lighted alarm-system programming board next to the door. He has sixty seconds from the moment he opened the door to punch in the correct code to disarm the system; otherwise, police will be summoned. He remembers the six-digit disarming sequence just when it’s required, punches it in.

He withdraws another item from his jacket, this time from a deep inside pocket: a pair of extremely compact night-vision goggles of a type manufactured for the military and unavailable for purchase by private citizens. They amplify even the meager available light so efficiently, by a factor of ten thousand, that he is able to move through dark rooms as confidently as if all of the lamps were lit.

Ascending the stairs, he removes the Heckler & Koch P7 from the oversize shoulder holster under his jacket. The extended magazine contains eighteen cartridges.

A silencer is tucked into a smaller sleeve of the holster. He frees it, and then quietly screws it onto the muzzle of the pistol. It will guarantee eight to twelve relatively quiet shots, but it will deteriorate too fast to allow him to expend the entire magazine without waking others in the house and neighborhood.

Eight shots should be more than he needs.

The house is large, and ten rooms open off the T-shaped second-floor hall, but he does not have to search for his targets. He is as familiar with this floor plan as with the street layout of the city.

Through the goggles, everything has a greenish cast, and white objects seem to glow with a ghostly inner light. He feels as if he is in a science-fiction movie, an intrepid hero exploring another dimension or an alternate earth that is identical to ours in all but a few crucial respects.

He eases open the master-bedroom door, enters. He approaches the king-size bed with its elaborate Georgian headboard.

Two people are asleep under the glowing greenish blankets, a man and woman in their forties. The husband lies on his back, snoring. His face is easily identifiable as that of the primary target. The wife is on her side, face half buried in her pillow, but the killer can see enough to ascertain that she is the secondary target.

He puts the muzzle of the P7 against the husband’s throat.

The cold steel wakes the man, and his eyes pop open as if they have the counterbalanced lids of a doll’s eyes.

The killer pulls the trigger, blowing out the man’s throat, raises the muzzle, and fires two rounds point-blank in his face. The gunfire sounds like the soft spitting of a cobra.

He walks around the bed, making no sound on the plush carpet.

Two bullets in the wife’s exposed left temple complete his assignment, and she never wakes at all.

For a while he stands by the bed, enjoying the incomparable tenderness of the moment. Being present at a death is to share one of the most intimate experiences anyone will ever know in this world. After all, no one except treasured family members and beloved friends are welcome at a deathbed, to witness a dying person’s final breath. Therefore, the killer is able to rise above his gray and miserable existence only in the act of execution, for then he has the honor of sharing that most profound of all experiences, more solemn and significant than birth. In those precious magic moments when his targets perish, he establishes relationships, meaningful bonds with other human beings, connections that briefly banish his alienation and make him feel included, needed, loved.

Although these victims are always strangers to him—and in this case, he does not even know their names—the experience can be so poignant that tears fill his eyes. Tonight he manages to remain in complete control of himself.

Reluctant to let the brief connection end, he places one hand tenderly against the woman’s left cheek, which is unsoiled by blood and still pleasantly warm. He walks around the bed again and gives the dead man’s shoulder a gentle squeeze, as if to say, Goodbye, old friend, goodbye.

He wonders who they were. And why they had to die.

Goodbye.

Down he goes through the ghostly green house full of green shadows and radiant green forms. In the foyer he pauses to unscrew the silencer from the weapon and to holster both pieces.

He removes the goggles with dismay. Without the lenses, he is transported from that magical alternate earth, where for a brief while he felt a kinship with other human beings, to this world in which he strives so hard to belong but remains forever a man apart.

Exiting the house, he closes the door but doesn’t bother locking it. He doesn’t wipe off the brass knob, for he isn’t concerned about leaving fingerprints.

The cold breeze soughs and whistles through the portico.

With ratlike scraping and rustling, crisp dead leaves scurry in packs along the driveway.

The sentinel trees now seem to be asleep at their posts. The killer senses that no one watches him from any of the blank black windows along the street. And even the interrogatory voice of the owl is silenced.

Still moved by what he has shared, he does not hum his little nonsense tune on the return trip to the car.

By the time he drives to the motor hotel where he is staying, he feels once more the weight of the oppressive apartheid in which he exists. Separate. Shunned. A solitary man.

In his room he slips off the shoulder holster and puts it on the nightstand. The pistol is still in the clasp of that nylon-lined leather sleeve. He stares at the weapon for a while.

In the bathroom he takes a pair of scissors from his shaving kit, closes the lid on the toilet, sits in the harsh fluorescent glare, and meticulously destroys the two bogus credit cards that he has used thus far on the assignment. He will fly out of Kansas City in the morning, employing yet another name, and on the drive to the airport he will scatter the tiny fragments of the cards along a few miles of highway.

He returns to the nightstand.

Stares at the pistol.

After leaving the dead bodies at the job site, he should have broken the weapon down into as many pieces as possible. He should have disposed of its parts in widely separated locations: the barrel in a storm drain perhaps, half the frame in a creek, the other half in a Dumpster ... until nothing was left. That is standard procedure, and he is at a loss to understand why he disregarded it this time.

A low-grade guilt attends this deviation from routine, but he is not going to go out again and dispose of the weapon. In addition to the guilt, he feels . . . rebellious.

He undresses and lies down. He turns off the bedside lamp and stares at the layered shadows on the ceiling.

He is not sleepy. His mind is restless, and his thoughts jump from subject to subject with such unnerving rapidity that his hyperactive mental state soon translates into physical agitation. He fidgets, pulling at the sheets, readjusting blankets, pillows.

Out on the interstate highway, large trucks roll ceaselessly toward far destinations. The singing of their tires, the grumble of their engines, and the whoosh of the air displaced by their passage form a background white noise that is usually soothing. He has often been lulled to sleep by this Gypsy music of the open road.

Tonight, however, a strange thing happens. For reasons he can’t understand, this familiar mosaic of sound isn’t a lullaby but a siren song. He cannot resist it.

He gets out of bed and crosses the dark room to the only window. He has an obscure night view of a weedy hillside and above it a slab of sky—like the halves of an abstract painting. Atop the slope, separating sky and hill, the sturdy pickets of a highway guardrail are flickeringly illuminated by passing headlights.

He stares up, half in a trance, straining for glimpses of the westbound vehicles.

Usually melancholy, the highway cantata is now enticing, calling him, making a mysterious promise which he does not understand but which he feels compelled to explore.

He dresses, and packs his clothes.

Outside, the motor courtyard and walkways are deserted. Faced toward the rooms, cars wait for morning travel. In a nearby vending-machine alcove, a soft-drink dispenser clicks-clinks as if conducting repairs upon itself. The killer feels as if he is the only living creature in a world now run by—and for the benefit of—machines.

Moments later, he is on Interstate 70, heading toward Topeka, the pistol on the seat beside him but covered with a motel towel.

Something west of Kansas City calls him. He doesn’t know what it is, but he feels inexorably drawn westward in the way that iron is pulled toward a magnet.

Strange as it might be, none of this alarms him, and he accedes to this compulsion to drive west. After all, for as long as he can remember, he has gone places without knowing the purpose of his trip until he has reached his destination, and he has killed people with no clue as to why they have to die or for whom the killing is done.

He is certain, however, that this sudden departure from Kansas City is not expected of him. He is supposed to stay at the motel until morning and catch an early flight out to ... Seattle.

Perhaps in Seattle he would have received instructions from the bosses he cannot recall. But he will never know what might have happened because Seattle is now stricken from his itinerary.

He wonders how much time will pass before his superiors—whatever their names and identities—will realize that he has gone renegade. When will they start looking for him, and how will they ever find him if he is no longer operating within his program?

At two o’clock in the morning, traffic is light on Interstate 70, mostly trucks, and he speeds across Kansas in advance of some of the big rigs and in the blustery wakes of others, remembering a movie about Dorothy and her dog Toto and a tornado that plucked them out of that flat farmland and dropped them in a far stranger place.

With both Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas, behind him, the killer realizes he’s muttering to himself: “I need, I need.”

This time he feels close to a revelation that will identify the precise nature of his longing.

“I need . . . to be . . . I need to be . . . I need to be . . .”

As the suburbs and finally the dark prairie flash past on both sides, excitement builds steadily in him. He trembles on the brink of an insight that, he senses, will change his life.

“I need to be . . . to be . . . I need to be someone.”

At once, he understands the meaning of what he has said. By “to be someone,” he does not mean what another man might intend to say with those same three words; he does not mean that he needs to be someone famous or rich or important. Just someone. Someone with a real name. Just an ordinary Joe, as they used to say in the movies of the forties. Someone who has more substance than a ghost.

The pull of the unknown lodestar in the west grows stronger by the mile. He leans forward slightly, hunching over the steering wheel, peering intently into the night.

Beyond the horizon, in a town he can’t yet envision, a life awaits him, a place to call home. Family, friends. Somewhere there are shoes into which he can step, a past he can wear comfortably, purpose. And a future in which he can be like other people—accepted.

The car speeds westward, cleaving the night.

11

Half past midnight, on his way to bed, Marty Stillwater stopped by the girls’ room, eased open the door, and stepped silently across the threshold. In the butterscotch-yellow glow of the Mickey Mouse nightlight, he could see both of his daughters sleeping peacefully.

Now and then he liked to watch them for a few minutes while they slept, just to convince himself that they were real. He’d had more than his share of happiness and prosperity and love, so it followed that some of his blessings might prove transitory or even illusory; fate might intervene to balance the scales.

To the ancient Greeks, Fate was personified in the form of three sisters: Clotho, who spun the thread of life; Lachesis, who measured the length of the thread; and Atropos, smallest of the three but the most powerful, who snipped the thread at her whim.

Sometimes, to Marty, that seemed a logical way to look at things. He could imagine the faces of those white-robed women in more detail than he could recall his own Mission Viejo neighbors. Clotho had a kind face with merry eyes, reminiscent of the actress Angela Lansbury, and Lachesis was as cute as Goldie Hawn but with a saintly aura. Ridiculous, but that’s how he saw them. Atropos was a bitch, beautiful but cold—pinched mouth, anthracite-black eyes.

The trick was to remain in the good graces of the first two sisters without drawing the attention of the third.

Five years ago, in the guise of a blood disorder, Atropos had descended from her celestial home to take a whack at the thread of Charlotte’s life and, thankfully, had failed to cut it all the way through. But this goddess answered to many names besides Atropos: cancer, cerebral hemorrhage, coronary thrombosis, fire, earthquake, poison, homicide, and countless others. Now perhaps she was paying them a return visit under one of her many pseudonyms, with Marty as her target instead of Charlotte.

Frequently, the vivid imagination of a novelist was a curse.

A whirring-clicking noise suddenly arose from the shadows on Charlotte’s side of the room, startling Marty. As low and menacing as a rattlesnake’s warning. Then he realized what it was: one half of the gerbil’s big cage was occupied by an exercise wheel, and the restless rodent was running furiously in place.

“Go to sleep, Wayne,” he said softly.

He took one more look at his girls, then stepped out of the room and pulled the door shut quietly behind him.

12

He reaches Topeka at three o’clock in the morning.

He is still drawn toward the western horizon as a migrating creature might be pulled relentlessly southward with the approach of winter, answering a call that is soundless, a beacon that can’t be seen, as though it is the trace of iron in his very blood that responds to the unknown magnet.

Exiting the freeway on the outskirts of the city, he scouts for another car.

Somewhere there are people who know the name John Larrington, the identity under which he rented the Ford. When he does not show up in Seattle for whatever job awaits him, his strange and faceless superiors will no doubt come looking for him. He suspects they have substantial resources and influence; he must shed every connection with his past and leave the hunters with no means of tracking him.

He parks the rental Ford in a residential neighborhood and walks three blocks, trying the doors of the cars at the curb. Only half are locked. He is prepared to hot-wire a car if it comes to that, but in a blue Honda he finds the keys tucked behind the sun visor.

After driving back to the Ford and transferring his suitcases and the pistol to the Honda, he cruises in ever-widening circles, searching for a twenty-four-hour-a-day convenience store.

He has no map of Topeka in his head because no one expected him to go there. Unnerved to see street signs on which all of the names are unfamiliar, he has no knowledge of where any route will lead.

He feels more of an outcast than ever.

Within fifteen minutes he locates a convenience store and nearly empties the shelves of Slim Jims, cheese crackers, peanuts, miniature doughnuts, and other food that will be easy to eat while driving. He is already starved. If he is going to be on the road for as much as another two days—assuming he might be drawn all the way to the coast—he will need considerable supplies. He does not want to waste time in restaurants, yet his accelerated metabolism requires him to eat larger meals and more frequently than other people eat.

After adding three six-packs of Pepsi to his purchase, he goes to the checkout counter, where the sole clerk says, “You must be having an all-night party or something.”

“Yeah.”

When he pays the bill, he realizes the three hundred bucks in his wallet—the amount of cash he always has with him on a job—will not take him far. He can no longer use the phony credit cards, of which he still has two, because someone will surely be able to track him through his purchases. He will need to pay cash from now on.

He takes the three large bags of supplies to the Honda and returns to the store with the Heckler & Koch P7. He shoots the clerk once in the head and empties the register, but all he gets is his own money back plus fifty dollars. Better than nothing.

At an Arco service station, he fills the tank of the Honda with gasoline and buys a map of the United States.

Parked at the edge of the Arco lot, under a sodium-vapor light that colors everything sickly yellow, he eats Slim Jims. He’s ravenous.

By the time he switches from sausages to doughnuts, he begins to study the map. He could continue westward on Interstate 70—or instead head southwest on the Kansas Turnpike to Wichita, keep going to Oklahoma City, and then turn directly west again on Interstate 40.

He is not accustomed to having choices. He usually does what he is . . . programmed to do. Now, faced with alternatives, he finds decision-making unexpectedly difficult. He sits irresolute, increasingly nervous, in danger of being paralyzed by indecision.

At last he gets out of the Honda and stands in the cool night air, seeking guidance.

The wind vibrates the telephone wires overhead—a haunting sound, as thin and bleak as the frightened crying of dead children wandering in a dark Beyond.

He turns westward as inexorably as a compass needle seeks magnetic north. The attraction feels psychic, as if a presence out there calls to him, but the connection is less sophisticated than that, more biological, reverberating in his blood and marrow.

Behind the wheel of the car again, he finds the Kansas Turnpike and heads toward Wichita. He is still not sleepy. If he has to, he can go two or even three nights without sleep and lose none of his mental or physical edge, which is only one of his special strengths. He is so excited by the prospect of being someone that he might drive nonstop until he finds his destiny.

13

Paige knew that Marty half expected to be stricken by another blackout, this time in public, so she admired his ability to maintain a carefree facade. He seemed as lighthearted as the kids.

From the girls’ point of view, Sunday was a perfect day.

Late-morning, Paige and Marty took them to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Dana Point for the Thanksgiving-weekend brunch. It was a place they went only on special occasions.

As always, Emily and Charlotte were enchanted by the lushly landscaped grounds, beautiful public rooms, and impeccable staff in crisp uniforms. In their best dresses, with ribbons in their hair, the girls had great fun playing at being cultured young ladies—almost as much fun as raiding the dessert buffet twice each.

In the afternoon, because it was unseasonably warm, they changed clothes and visited Irvine Park. They walked the picturesque trails, fed the ducks in the pond, and toured the small zoo.

Charlotte loved the zoo because the animals were, like her menagerie at home, kept in enclosures where they were safe from harm. There were no exotic specimens—all the animals were indigenous to the region—but in her typical exuberance, Charlotte found each to be the most interesting and cutest creature she had ever seen.

Emily got into a staring contest with a wolf. Large, amber-eyed, with a lustrous silver-gray coat, the predator met and intensely held the girl’s gaze from his side of a chain-link fence.

“If you look away first,” Emily calmly and somberly informed them, “then a wolf will just eat you all up.”

The confrontation went on so long that Paige became uneasy in spite of the sturdy fence. Then the wolf lowered his head, sniffed the ground, yawned elaborately to show he had not been intimidated but had merely lost interest, and sauntered away.

“If he couldn’t get the three little pigs with all his huffing and puffing,” Emily said, “then I knew he couldn’t get me, ’cause I’m smarter than pigs.”

She was referring to the Disney cartoon, the only version of the fairy tale with which she was familiar.

Paige resolved never to let her read the Brothers Grimm version, which was about seven little goats instead of three pigs. The wolf swallowed six of them whole. They were saved from digestion at the last minute when their mother cut open the wolf’s belly to pull them from his steaming innards.

Paige glanced back at the wolf as they walked away. It was watching Emily again.

14

Sunday is a full day for the killer.

In Wichita, just before dawn, he gets off the turnpike. In another residential neighborhood rather like the one in Topeka, he swaps the license plates on the Honda for those on a Chevy, making his stolen vehicle more difficult to locate.

Shortly after nine Sunday morning he arrives in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where he stops long enough to fill the tank with gasoline.

A shopping mall is across the road from the service station. In one corner of the huge deserted parking lot stands an unmanned Goodwill Industries collection box, as large as a garden shed. After tanking up, he leaves his suitcases and their contents with Goodwill. He keeps only the clothes he’s wearing and the pistol.

During the night, on the highway, he had time to think about his peculiar existence—and to wonder if he might be carrying a compact transmitter that would help his superiors locate him. Perhaps they anticipated that one day he would go renegade on them.

He knows that a moderately powerful transmitter, operating off a tiny battery, can be hidden in an extremely small space. Such as the walls of a suitcase.

As he turns directly west on Interstate 40, a coal-dark sludge of clouds seeps across the sky. Forty minutes later, when the rain comes, it is molten silver, and it instantly washes all of the color out of the vast empty land that flanks the highway. The world is twenty, forty, a hundred shades of gray, without even lightning to relieve the oppressive dreariness.

The monochromatic landscape provides no distraction, so he has time to worry further about the faceless hunters who might be close behind him. Is it paranoid to wonder if a transmitter could be woven into his clothing? He doubts it could be concealed in the material of his pants, shirt, sweater, underwear, or socks without being detectable by its very weight or upon casual inspection. Which leaves his shoes and leather jacket.

He rules out the pistol. They wouldn’t build anything into the P7 that might interfere with its function. Besides, he was expected to discard it soon after the murders for which it was provided.

Halfway between Oklahoma City and Amarillo, east of the Texas border, he pulls off the interstate into a rest area, where ten cars, two big trucks, and two motorhomes have taken refuge from the storm.

In a surrounding grove of evergreens, the boughs of the trees droop as if sodden with rain, and they appear charcoal gray instead of green. The large pinecones are tumorous and strange.

A squat block building houses restrooms. He hurries through the cold downpour to the men’s facilities.

While the killer is at the first of three urinals, rain drumming loudly on the metal roof and the humid air heavy with the limy smell of damp concrete, a man in his early sixties enters. At a glance: thick white hair, deeply seamed face, bulbous nose patterned with broken capillaries. He goes to the third of the urinals.

“Some storm, huh?” the stranger says.

“A real rat drowner,” the killer answers, having heard that phrase in a movie.

“Hope it blows over soon.”

The killer notices that the older man is about his height and build. As he zips up his pants, he says, “Where you headed?”

“Right now, Las Vegas, but then somewhere else and somewhere else after that. Me and the wife, we’re retired, we pretty much live in that motorhome. Always wanted to see the country, and we sure in blue blazes are seeing it now. Nothing like life on the road, new sights every day, pure freedom.”

“Sounds great.”

At the sink, washing his hands, the killer stalls, wondering if he dares take the jabbering old fool right now, jam the body in a toilet stall. But with all the people in the parking lot, somebody might walk in unexpectedly.

Closing his fly, the stranger says, “Only problem is, Frannie—that’s my wife—she hates for me to drive in the rain. Anything more than the tiniest drizzle, she wants to pull over and wait it out.” He sighs. “This won’t be a day we make a lot of miles.”

The killer dries his hands under a hot-air machine. “Well, Vegas isn’t going anywhere.”

“True. Even when the good Lord comes on Judgment Day, there’ll be blackjack tables open.”

“Hope you break the bank,” the killer says, and leaves as the older man goes to the sink.

In the Honda again, wet and shivering, he starts the engine and turns on the heater. But he doesn’t put the car in gear.

Three motorhomes are parked in the deep spaces along the curb.

A minute later, Frannie’s husband comes out of the men’s room. Through the rippling rain on the windshield, the killer watches the white-haired man sprint to a large silver-and-blue Road King, which he enters through the driver’s door at the front. Painted on the door is the outline of a heart, and in the heart are two names in fancy script: Jack and Frannie.

Luck is not with Jack, the Vegas-bound retiree. The Road King is only four spaces away from the Honda, and this proximity makes it easier for the killer to do what must be done.

The sky is purging itself of an entire ocean. The water falls straight down through the windless day, continuously shattering the mirrorlike puddles on the blacktop, gushing along the gutters in seemingly endless torrents.

Cars and trucks come in off the highway, park for a while, leave, and are replaced by new vehicles that pull in between the Honda and the Road King.

He is patient. Patience is part of his training.

The engine of the motorhome is idling. Crystallized exhaust plumes rise from the twin tail pipes. Warm amber light glows at the curtained windows along the side.

He envies their comfortable home on wheels, which looks cozier than any home he can yet hope to have. He also envies their long marriage. What would it be like to have a wife? How would it feel to be a beloved husband?

After forty minutes, the rain still isn’t easing off, but a flock of cars leaves. The Honda is the only vehicle parked on the driver’s side of the Road King.

Taking the pistol, he gets out of the car and walks quickly to the motorhome, watching the side windows in case Frannie or Jack parts the curtains and peers out at this most inopportune moment.

He glances toward the restrooms. No one in sight.

Perfect.

He grips the cold chrome door handle. The lock isn’t engaged. He scrambles inside, up the steps, and looks over the driver’s seat.

The kitchen is immediately behind the open cab, a dining nook beyond the kitchen, then the living room. Frannie and Jack are in the nook, eating, the woman with her back toward the killer.

Jack sees him first, starts simultaneously to rise and slide out of the narrow booth, and Frannie looks back over her shoulder, more curious than alarmed. The first two rounds take Jack in the chest and throat. He collapses over the table. Spattered with blood, Frannie opens her mouth to scream, but the third hollow-point round drastically reshapes her skull.

The silencer is attached to the muzzle, but it isn’t effective any more. The baffles have been compressed. The sound accompanying each shot is only slightly quieter than regular gunfire.

The killer pulls the driver’s door shut behind him. He looks out at the sidewalk, the rainswept picnic area, the restrooms. No one in sight.

He climbs over the gear-shift console, into the passenger’s seat, and peers out the front window on that side. Only four other vehicles share the parking lot. The nearest is a Mack truck, and the driver must be in the men’s room because no one is in the cab.

It’s unlikely that anyone could have heard the shots. The roar of the rain provides ideal cover.

He swivels the command chair around, gets up, and walks back through the motorhome. He stops at the dead couple, touches Jack’s back . . . then Frannie’s left hand, which lies on the table in a puddle of blood beside her lunch plate.

“Goodbye,” he says softly, wishing he could take more time to share this special moment with them.

Having come this far, however, he is nearly frantic to exchange his clothes for those of Frannie’s husband and get on the road again. He has convinced himself that a transmitter is, indeed, concealed in the rubber heels of his Rockport shoes, and that its signal is even now leading dangerous people to him.

Beyond the living room is a bathroom, a large closet crammed with Frannie’s clothes, and a bedroom with a smaller closet filled with Jack’s wardrobe. In less than three minutes he strips naked and dresses in new underwear, white athletic socks, jeans, a red-and-brown-checkered shirt, a pair of battered sneakers, and a brown leather jacket to replace his black one. The inseam of the pants is just right; the waist is two inches too big, but he cinches it in with a belt. The shoes are slightly loose though wearable, and the shirt and jacket fit perfectly.

He carries the Rockport shoes into the kitchen. To confirm his suspicion, he takes a serrated bread knife from a drawer and saws off several thin layers of the rubber heel on one shoe until he discovers a shallow cavity packed tightly with electronics. A miniaturized transmitter is connected to a series of watch batteries that seems to extend all the way around the heel and perhaps the sole as well.

Not paranoid after all.

They’re coming.

Abandoning the shoes in a litter of rubber shavings on the kitchen counter, he urgently searches Jack’s body and takes the money out of the old man’s wallet. Sixty-two bucks. He searches for Frannie’s purse, finds it in the bedroom. Forty-nine dollars.

When he leaves the motorhome, the mottled gray-black sky is convex, bent low with the weight of the thunder-heads. Rain by the megaton batters the earth.

Coils of fog serpentine among the trunks of the pine trees and seem to be reaching for him as he splashes to the Honda.

On the interstate again, speeding through the perpetual twilight beneath the storm, he turns the car heater to its highest setting and soon crosses the state line into Texas, where the flat land becomes impossibly flatter. Having shed the last of the meager belongings from his old life, he feels liberated. Soaked by the cold rain, he shivers uncontrollably, but he is also trembling with anticipation and excitement.

His destiny lies somewhere to the west.

He peels the plastic wrapper off a Slim Jim and eats while he drives. A subtle flavor, threaded through the primary taste of the cured meat, reminds him of the metallic odor of blood in the house in Kansas City, where he left the nameless dead couple in their enormous Georgian bed.

The killer pushes the Honda as fast as he dares on the rain-slick highway, prepared to kill any cop who pulls him over. Reaching Amarillo, Texas, just after dusk on Sunday evening, he discovers that the Honda is virtually running on empty. He pulls into a truckstop only long enough to tank up, use the bathroom, and buy more food to take with him.

After Amarillo, rocketing westward into the night, he passes Wildorado, with the New Mexico border ahead, and suddenly he realizes that he is crossing the badlands, in the heart of the Old West, where so many wonderful movies have been set. John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River, Walter Brennan stealing scenes left and right. Rio Bravo. And Shane was set back there in Kansas—wasn’t it?—Jack Palance blowing away Elisha Cook, Jr. decades before Dorothy took the tornado to Oz. Stagecoach, The Gunfighter, True Grit, Destry Rides Again, The Unforgiven, High Plains Drifter, Yellow Sky, so many great movies, not all of them set in Texas but at least in the spirit of Texas, with John Wayne and Gregory Peck and Jimmy Stewart and Clint Eastwood, legends, mythical places now made real and waiting out there beyond the highway, obscured by rain and mist and darkness. It was almost possible to believe that those stories were being played out right now, in the frontier towns he was passing, and that he was Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid or some other gunman of an earlier century, a killer but not really a bad guy, misunderstood by society, forced to kill because of what had been done to him, a posse on his trail . . .

Memories from theater screens and late-night movies on TV—which constitute by far the largest portion of the memories he possesses—flood his troubled mind, soothing him, and for a while he is lost so completely in those fantasies that he pays too little attention to his driving. Gradually he becomes aware that his speed has fallen to forty miles an hour. Trucks and cars explode past him, the wind of their passage buffeting the Honda, splashing dirty water across his windshield, their red taillights swiftly receding into the gloom.

Assuring himself that his mysterious destiny will prove to be as great as any that John Wayne pursued in films, he accelerates.

Empty and half-empty packages of food, crumpled and smeary and full of crumbs, are heaped on the passenger seat. They cascade onto the floor, under the dashboard, completely filling the leg space on that side of the car.

From the litter, he extracts a new box of doughnuts. To wash them down he opens a warmish Pepsi.

Westward. Steadily westward.

An identity awaits him. He is going to be someone.

15

Later Sunday, at home, after huge bowls of popcorn and two videos, Paige tucked the girls into bed, kissed them goodnight, and retreated to the open doorway to watch Marty as he settled down for that moment of the day he most cherished. Story time.

He continued with the poem about Santa’s evil twin, and the girls were instantly enraptured.

“Reindeer sweep down out of the night. See how each is brimming with fright? Tossing their heads, rolling their eyes, these gentle animals are so very wise— they know this Santa isn’t their friend, but an imposter and far ’round the bend. They would stampede for all they’re worth, dump this nut off the edge of the earth. But Santa’s bad brother carries a whip, a club, a harpoon, a gun at his hip, a blackjack, an Uzi—you better run!— and a terrible, horrible, wicked raygun.”

“Raygun?” Charlotte said. “Then he’s an alien!”

“Don’t be silly,” Emily admonished her. “He’s Santa’s twin, so if he’s an alien, Santa is an alien too, which he isn’t.”

With the smug condescension of a nine-year-old who had long ago discovered Santa Claus wasn’t real, Charlotte said, “Em, you have a lot to learn. Daddy, what’s the raygun do? Turn you to mush?”

“To stone,” Emily said. She withdrew one hand from under the covers and revealed the polished stone on which she had painted a pair of eyes. “That’s what happened to Peepers.”

“They land on the roof, quiet and sneaky. Oh, but this Santa is fearfully freaky. He whispers a warning to each reindeer, leaning close to make sure they hear: ‘You have relatives back at the Pole— antlered, gentle, quite innocent souls. So if you fly away while I’m inside, back to the Pole on a plane I will ride. I’ll have a picnic in the midnight sun: reindeer pie, pâté, reindeer in a bun, reindeer salad and hot reindeer soup, oh, all sorts of tasty reindeer goop.’ ”

“I hate this guy,” Charlotte announced emphatically. She pulled her covers up to her nose as she had done the previous evening, but she wasn’t genuinely frightened, just having a good time pretending to be spooked.

“This guy, he was just born bad,” Emily decided. “For sure, he couldn’t be this way just ’cause his mommy and daddy weren’t as nice to him as they should’ve been.”

Paige marveled at Marty’s ability to strike the perfect note to elicit the kids’ total involvement. If he’d given her the poem to review before he’d started reading it, Paige would have advised that it was a little too strong and dark to appeal to young girls.

So much for the question of which was superior—the insights of the psychologist or the instinct of the storyteller.

“At the chimney, he looks down the bricks, but that entrance is strictly for hicks. With all his tools, a way in can be found for a fat bearded burglar out on the town. From roof to yard to the kitchen door, he chuckles about what he has in store for the lovely family sleeping within. He grins one of his most nasty grins. Oh, what a creep, a scum, and a louse. He’s breaking into the Stillwater house.”

“Our place!” Charlotte squealed.

“I knew!” Emily said.

Charlotte said, “You did not.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did not.”

“Did too. That’s why I’m sleeping with Peepers, so he can protect me until after Christmas.”

They insisted that their father read the whole thing from the beginning, all verses from both nights. As Marty began to oblige, Paige faded out of the doorway and went downstairs to put away the leftover popcorn and straighten up the kitchen.

The day had been perfect as far as the kids were concerned, and it had been good for her as well. Marty had not suffered another episode, which allowed her to convince herself that the fugue had been a singularity—frightening, inexplicable, but not an indication of a serious degenerative condition or disease.

Surely no man could keep pace with two such energetic children, entertain them, and prevent them from getting cranky for an entire busy day unless he was in extraordinarily good health. Speaking as the other half of the Fabulous Stillwater Parenting Machine, Paige was exhausted.

Curiously, after putting away the popcorn, she found herself checking window and door locks.

Last night Marty had been unable to explain his own heightened sense of a need for security. His trouble, after all, was internal.

Paige figured it had been simple psychological transference. He had been reluctant to dwell on the possibility of brain tumors and cerebral hemorrhages because those things were utterly beyond his control, so he had turned outward to seek enemies against which he might be able to take concrete action.

On the other hand, perhaps he had been reacting on instinct to a real threat beyond conscious perception. As one who incorporated some Jungian theory into her personal and professional world view, Paige had room for such concepts as the collective unconscious, synchronicity, and intuition.

Standing at the French doors in the family room, staring across the patio to the dark yard, she wondered what threat Marty might have sensed out there in a world that, throughout her lifetime, had become increasingly fraught with danger.

16

His attention deviates from the road ahead only for quick glances at the strange shapes that loom out of the darkness and the rain on both sides of the highway. Broken teeth of rock thrust from the sand and scree as if a behemoth just beneath the earth is opening its mouth to swallow whatever hapless animals happen to be on the surface. Widely spaced clusters of stunted trees struggle to stay alive in a stark land where storms are rare and drenching downpours rarer still; gnarled branches bristle out of the mist, as jagged and chitinous as the spiky limbs of insects, briefly illuminated by headlights, thrashing in the wind for an instant but then gone.

Although the Honda has a radio, the killer does not switch it on because he wants no distraction from the mysterious power which pulls him westward and with which he seeks communion. Mile by dreary mile, the magnetic attraction increases, and it is all that he cares about; he could no more turn away from it than the earth could reverse its rotation and bring tomorrow’s sunrise in the west.

He leaves the rain behind and eventually passes from under the ragged clouds into a clear night with stars beyond counting. Along part of the horizon, luminous peaks and ridges can be seen dimly, so distant they might define the edge of the world, like alabaster ramparts protecting a fairy-tale kingdom, the walls of Shangri-la in which the light of last month’s moon still glimmers.

Into the vastness of the Southwest he goes, past necklaces of light that are the desert towns of Tucumcari, Montoya, Cuervo, and then across the Pecos River.

Between Amarillo and Albuquerque, when he stops for oil and gasoline, he uses a service-station restroom reeking of insecticide, where two dead cockroaches lie in a corner. The yellow light and dirty mirror reveal a reflection recognizably his but somehow different. His blue eyes seem darker and more fierce than he has ever seen them, and the lines of his usually open and friendly face have hardened.

“I’m going to become someone,” he says to the mirror, and the man in the mirror mouths the words in concert with him.

At eleven-thirty Sunday night, when he reaches Albuquerque, he fuels the Honda at another truckstop and orders two cheeseburgers to go. Then he is off on the next leg of his journey—three hundred and twenty-five miles to Flagstaff, Arizona—eating the sandwiches out of the white paper bags in which they came and into which drips fragrant grease, onions, and mustard.

This will be his second night without rest, yet he isn’t sleepy. He is blessed with exceptional stamina. On other occasions he has gone seventy-two hours without sleep, yet has remained clear-headed.

From movies he has watched on lonely nights in strange towns, he knows that sleep is the one unconquerable enemy of soldiers desperate to win a tough battle. Of policemen on stakeout. Of those who must valiantly stand guard against vampires until dawn brings the sun and salvation.

His ability to call a truce with sleep whenever he wishes is so unusual that he shies away from thinking about it. He senses there are things about himself that he is better off not knowing, and this is one of them.

Another lesson he has learned from movies is that every man has secrets, even those he keeps from himself. Therefore, secrets merely make him like all other men. Which is precisely the condition he most desires. To be like other men.

In the dream, Marty stood in a cold and windswept place, in the grip of terror. He was aware that he was on a plain as featureless and flat as one of those vast valley floors out in the Mojave Desert on the drive to Las Vegas, but he couldn’t actually see the landscape because the darkness was as deep as death. He knew something was rushing toward him through the gloom, something inconceivably strange and hostile, immense and deadly yet utterly silent, knew in his bones that it was coming, dear God, yet had no idea of the direction of its approach. Left, right, in front, behind, from the ground beneath his feet or from out of the sable-black sky above, it was coming. He could feel it, an object of such colossal size and weight that the atmosphere was compressed in its path, the air thickening as the unknown danger drew nearer. Closing on him so rapidly, faster, faster, and nowhere to hide. Then he heard Emily pleading for help somewhere in the unrelenting blackness, calling for her daddy, and Charlotte calling, too, but he could not get a fix on them. He ran one way, then another, but their increasingly frantic voices always seemed to be behind him. The unknown threat was closer, closer, the girls frightened and crying, Paige shouting his name in a voice so freighted with terror that Marty began to weep with frustration at his inability to find them, oh dear Jesus, and it was almost on top of him, the thing, whatever it was, as unstoppable as a falling moon, worlds colliding, a weight beyond measure, a force as primal as the one that had created the universe, as destructive as the one that would someday end it, Emily and Charlotte screaming, screaming—

West of the Painted Desert, outside Flagstaff, Arizona, shortly before five o’clock Monday morning, flurries of snow swirl out of the predawn sky, and the cold air is a penetrating scalpel that scrapes his bones. The brown leather jacket that he took from the dead man’s closet in the motorhome less than sixteen hours ago in Oklahoma is not heavy enough to keep him warm in the early-morning bitterness. He shivers as he fills the tank of the Honda at a self-service pump.

On Interstate 40 again, he begins the three-hundred-fifty -mile trip to Barstow, California. His compulsion to keep moving westward is so irresistible that he is as helpless in its grip as an asteroid captured by the earth’s tremendous gravity and pulled inexorably toward a cataclysmic impact.

Terror propelled him out of the dream of darkness and unknown menace: Marty Stillwater sat straight up in bed. His first waking breath was so explosive, he was sure he had awakened Paige, but she slept on undisturbed. He was chilled yet sheathed in sweat.

Gradually his heart stopped pounding so fearfully. With the glowing green numerals on the digital clock, the red cable-box light on top of the television, and the ambient light at the windows, the bedroom was not nearly as black as the plain in his dream.

But he could not lie down. The nightmare had been more vivid and unnerving than any he’d ever known. Sleep was beyond his reach.

Slipping out from under the covers, he padded barefoot to the nearest window. He studied the sky above the rooftops of the houses across the street, as if something in that dark vault would calm him.

Instead, when he noticed the black sky was brightening to a deep gray-blue along the eastern horizon, the approach of dawn filled him with the same irrational dread he had felt in his office on Saturday afternoon. As color crept into the heavens, Marty began to tremble. He tried to control himself, but his shivering grew more violent. It was not daylight that he feared, but something the day was bringing with it, an unnameable threat. He could feel it reaching for him, seeking him—which was crazy, damn it—and he shuddered so violently that he had to put one hand against the windowsill to steady himself.

“What’s wrong with me?” he whispered desperately. “What’s happening, what’s wrong?”

Hour after hour, the speedometer needle quivers between 90 and 100 on the gauge. The steering wheel vibrates under his palms until his hands ache. The Honda shimmies, rattles. The engine issues a thin unwavering shriek, unaccustomed to being pushed so hard.

Rust-red, bone-white, sulfur-yellow, the purple of desiccated veins, as dry as ashes, as barren as Mars, pale sand with reptilian spines of mottled rock, speckled with withered clumps of mesquite: the cruel fastness of the Mojave Desert has a majestic barrenness.

Inevitably, the killer thinks of old movies about settlers moving west in wagon trains. He realizes for the first time how much courage was required to make their journey in those rickety vehicles, trusting their lives to the health and stamina of dray horses.

Movies. California. He is in California, home of the movies.

Move, move, move.

From time to time, an involuntary mewling escapes him. The sound is like that of an animal dying of dehydration but within sight of a watering hole, dragging itself toward the pool that offers salvation but afraid it will perish before it can slake its burning thirst.

Paige and Charlotte were already in the garage, getting in the car, when they both cried, “Emily, hurry up!”

As Emily turned away from the breakfast table and started toward the open door that connected the kitchen to the garage, Marty caught her by the shoulder and turned her to face him. “Wait, wait, wait.”

“Oh,” she said, “I forgot,” and puckered up for a smooch.

“That comes second,” he said.

“What’s first?”

“This.” He dropped to one knee, bringing himself to her level, and with a paper towel he blotted away her milk mustache.

“Oh, gross,” she said.

“It was cute.”

“More like Charlotte.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“She’s the messy one.”

“Don’t be unkind.”

“She knows it, Daddy.”

“Nevertheless.”

From the garage, Paige called again.

Emily kissed him, and he said, “Don’t give your teacher any trouble.”

“No more than she gives me,” Emily answered.

Impulsively he pulled her against him, hugged her fiercely, reluctant to let her go. The clean fragrance of Ivory soap and baby shampoo clung to her; milk and the oaty aroma of Cheerios were on her breath. He had never smelled anything sweeter, better. Her back was frightfully small under the flat of his hand. She was so delicate, he could feel the beat of her young heart both through her chest—which pressed against him—and through her scapula and spine, against which his hand lay. He was overcome with the feeling that something terrible was going to happen and that he would never see her again if he allowed her to leave the house.

He had to let her go, of course—or explain his reluctance, which he could not do.

Honey, see, the problem is, something’s wrong in Daddy’s head, and I keep getting these scary thoughts, like I’m going to lose you and Charlotte and Mommy. Now, I know nothing’s going to happen, not really, because the problem is all in my head, like a big tumor or something. Can you spell “tumor”? Do you know what it is? Well, I’m going to see a doctor and have it cut out, just cut out that bad old tumor, and then I won’t be so frightened for no reason. . . .

He dared say nothing of the sort. He would only scare her.

He kissed her soft, warm cheek and let her go.

At the door to the garage, she paused and looked back at him. “More poem tonight?”

“You bet.”

She said, “Reindeer salad . . .”

“. . . reindeer soup . . .”

"... all sorts of tasty ...”

“. . . reindeer goop,” Marty finished.

“You know what, Daddy?”

“What?”

“You’re soooo silly.”

Giggling, Emily went into the garage. The ca-chunk of the door closing behind her was the most final sound Marty had ever heard.

He stared at the door, willing himself not to rush to it and jerk it open and shout at them to get back into the house.

He heard the big garage door rolling up.

The car engine turned over, chugged, caught, raced a little as Paige pumped the accelerator before shifting into reverse.

Marty hurried out of the kitchen, through the dining room, into the living room. He went to one of the front windows from which he could see the driveway. The plantation shutters were folded away from the window, so he stayed a couple of steps from the glass.

The white BMW backed down the driveway, out of the shadow of the house and into the late-November sunshine. Emily was riding up front with her mother, and Charlotte was in the rear seat.

As the car receded along the tree-lined street, Marty stepped so close to the living-room window that his forehead pressed against the cool glass. He tried to keep his family in view as long as possible, as if they were certain to survive anything—even falling airplanes and nuclear blasts—if he just did not let them out of his sight.

His last glimpse of the BMW was through a sudden veil of hot tears that he barely managed to repress.

Disturbed by the intensity of his emotional reaction to his family’s departure, he turned away from the window and said savagely, “What the hell’s the matter with me?”

After all, the girls were merely going to school and Paige to her office, where they went more days than not. They were following a routine that had never been dangerous before, and he had no logical reason to believe it was going to be dangerous today—or ever.

He looked at his wristwatch. 7:48.

His appointment with Dr. Guthridge was only slightly more than five hours away, but that seemed an interminable length of time. Anything could happen in five hours.

Needles to Ludlow to Daggett.

Move, move, move.

9:04 Pacific Standard Time.

Barstow. Dry bleached town in a hard dry land. Stagecoaches stopped here long ago. Railroad yards. Waterless rivers. Cracked stucco, peeling paint. Green of trees faded by a perpetual layer of dust on the leaves. Motels, fast-food restaurants, more motels.

A service station. Gasoline. Men’s room. Candy bars. Two cans of cold Coke.

Attendant too friendly. Chatty. Slow to make change. Little pig eyes. Fat cheeks. Hate him. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

Should shoot him. Should blow his head off. Satisfying. Can’t risk it. Too many people around.

On the road again. Interstate 15. West. Candy bars and Coke at eighty miles an hour. Desolate plains. Hills of sand, shale. Volcanic rock. Many-armed Joshua trees standing sentinel.

As a pilgrim to a holy place, as a lemming to the sea, as a comet on its eternal course, westward, westward, trying to out-race the ocean-seeking sun.

Marty owned five guns.

He was not a hunter or collector. He didn’t shoot skeet or take target practice for the fun of it. Unlike several people he knew, he hadn’t armed himself out of fear of social collapse—though sometimes he saw signs of it everywhere. He could not even say that he liked guns, but he recognized the need for them in a troubled world.

He had purchased the weapons one by one for research purposes. As a mystery novelist, writing about cops and killers, he believed he had a responsibility to know whereof he wrote. Because he was not a gun hobbyist and had a finite amount of time to research all of the many backgrounds and subjects upon which each novel touched, minor mistakes were inevitable now and then, but he felt more comfortable writing about a weapon if he had fired it.

In his nightstand he kept an unloaded Korth .38 revolver and a box of cartridges. The Korth was a handmade weapon of the highest quality, produced in Germany. After learning to use it for a novel titled The Deadly Twilight, he had kept it for home defense.

Several times, he and Paige had taken the girls to an indoor shooting range to witness target practice, instilling in them a deep respect for the revolver. When Charlotte and Emily were old enough, he would teach them to use a gun, though one less powerful and with less recoil than the Korth. Firearm accidents virtually always resulted from ignorance. In Switzerland, where every male citizen was required to own a firearm to defend the country in times of trouble, gun instruction was universal and tragic accidents extremely rare.

He removed the .38 from the nightstand, loaded it, and took it to the garage, where he tucked it in the glove compartment of their second car, a green Ford Taurus. He wanted it for protection to and from his one-o’clock appointment with Dr. Guthridge.

A Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, a Colt M16 A2 rifle, and two pistols—a Beretta Model 92 and a Smith & Wesson 5904—were stored in their original boxes inside a locked metal cabinet in one corner of the garage. There were also boxes of ammunition in every caliber required. He unpacked each weapon, which had been cleaned and oiled before being put away, and loaded it.

He put the Beretta in the kitchen, in an upper cabinet beside the stove, in front of a pair of ceramic casserole dishes. The girls would not happen upon it there before he called a family conference to explain the reasons for his extraordinary precautions—if he could explain.

The M16 went on an upper shelf in the foyer closet just inside the front door. He put the Smith & Wesson in his office desk, in the second drawer of the right-hand drawer bank, and slipped the Mossberg under the bed in the master bedroom.

Throughout his preparations, he worried that he was deranged, arming himself against a threat that did not exist. Considering the seven-minute fugue he had experienced on Saturday, messing around with weapons was the last thing he should be doing.

He had no proof of impending danger. He was operating sheerly on instinct, a soldier ant mindlessly constructing fortifications. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. By nature he was a thinker, a planner, a brooder, and only last of all a man of action. But this was a flood of instinctual response, and he was swept away by it.

Then, just as he finished hiding the shotgun in the master bedroom, worries about his mental condition were abruptly outweighed by another consideration. The oppressive atmosphere of his recent dream was with him again, the feeling that some terrible weight was bearing down on him at a murderous speed. The air seemed to thicken. It was almost as bad as in the nightmare. And getting worse.

God help me, he thought—and was not sure if he was asking for protection from some unknown enemy or from dark impulses in himself.

“I need . . .”

Dust devils. Dancing on the high desert.

Sunlight sparkling in broken bottles along the highway.

Fastest thing on the road. Passing cars, trucks. The landscape a blur. Scattered towns, all blurs.

Faster. Faster. As if being sucked into a black hole.

Past Victorville.

Past Apple Valley.

Through the Cajon Pass at forty-two hundred feet above sea level.

Then descending. Past San Bernardino. Onto the Riverside Freeway.

Riverside. Carona.

Through the Santa Ana Mountains.

“I need to be . . .”

South. The Costa Mesa Freeway.

The City of Orange. Tustin. In the southern California suburban maze.

Such powerful magnetism, pulling, pulling ruthlessly.

More than magnetism. Gravity. Down into the vortex of the black hole.

Switch to the Santa Ana Freeway.

Mouth dry. A bitter metallic taste. Heart pounding fiercely, pulse throbbing in his temples.

“I need to be someone.”

Faster. As if tied to a massive anchor on an endless chain, plummeting into the lightless fathoms of a bottomless ocean trench.

Past Irvine, Laguna Hills, El Toro.

Into the dark heart of the mystery.

“. . . need . . . need . . . need . . . need . . . need . . .”

Mission Viejo. This exit. Yes.

Off the freeway.

Seeking the magnet. The enigmatic attractant.

All the way from Kansas City to find the unknown, to discover his strange and wondrous future. Home. Identity. Meaning.

Turn left here, two blocks, turn right. Unfamiliar streets. But to find the way, he needs only to give himself to the power that pulls him.

Mediterranean houses. Neatly trimmed lawns. Palm shadows on pale-yellow stucco walls.

Here.

That house.

To the curb. Stop. Half a block away.

Just a house like the others. Except. Something inside. Whatever he first sensed in faraway Kansas. Whatever draws him. Something.

The attractant.

Inside.

Waiting.

A wordless cry of triumph escapes him, and he shudders violently with relief. He no longer needs to seek his destiny. Although he does not yet know what it may be, he is certain that he’s found it, and he sags in his seat, his sweaty hands slipping off the steering wheel, pleased to be at the end of the long journey.

He is more excited than he has ever been, filled with curiosity; however, released at last from the iron grip of compulsion, he loses his sense of urgency. His trip-hammering heart decelerates to a more normal number of beats per minute. His ears stop ringing, and he is able to breathe more deeply and evenly than he has for at least fifty miles. In startlingly short order, he is as outwardly calm and self-contained as he was in the big house in Kansas City, where he gratefully shared the tender intimacies of death with the man and woman in the antique Georgian bed.

By the time Marty took the keys to the Taurus off the kitchen pegboard, stepped into the garage, locked the door to the house, and pushed the button to raise the automatic garage door, his awareness of impending danger was so acute and harrowing that he was on the edge of blind panic. In the feverish thrall of paranoia, he was convinced that he was being hunted by an uncanny enemy who employed not merely the usual five senses but paranormal means, a truly crazy notion, for God’s sake, straight out of the National Enquirer, crazy yet inescapable because he actually could feel a presence . . . a violent stalking presence that was conscious of him, pressing him, probing. He felt as if a viscous fluid was squirting into his skull under tremendous pressure, compressing his brain, squeezing consciousness out of him. A very real physical effect was part of it, too, because he was as weighed down as a deep-sea diver under a crushing tonnage of water, joints aching, muscles burning, lungs reluctant to expand and accept new breath. Extreme sensitivity to every stimulant nearly incapacitated him: the hard clatter of the rising garage door was ear-splitting; intruding sunlight seared his eyes; and a musty odor—ordinarily too faint to be detected—exploded like a poisonous cloud of spores out of a corner of the garage, so pungent that it made him nauseous.

In an instant, the seizure passed, and he was in full control of himself. Although it had seemed as if his skull would burst, the internal pressure relented as abruptly as it had grown, and he no longer teetered on the brink of unconsciousness. The pain in his joints and muscles was gone, and the sunlight didn’t sting his eyes. It was like snapping out of a nightmare—except he was awake on both sides of the snap.

Marty leaned against the Taurus. He was hesitant to believe that the worst was past, waiting tensely for another inexplicable wave of paranoid terror to batter him.

He looked out from the shadowy garage at the street, which was simultaneously familiar and strange, half expecting some monstrous phantasm to rise out of the pavement or descend through the sun-drenched air, a creature inhuman and merciless, ferocious and bent upon his destruction, the invisible specter of his nightmare now made flesh.

His confidence didn’t return, and he couldn’t stop shaking, but his apprehension gradually diminished to a tolerable level, until he was able to consider whether he dared to drive. What if a similarly disorienting spasm of fear hit him while he was behind the wheel? He would be virtually oblivious of stop signs, oncoming traffic, and hazards of all kinds.

More than ever, he needed to see Dr. Guthridge.

He wondered if he should go back into the house and call a taxi. But this wasn’t New York City, streets aswarm with cabs; in southern California, the words “taxi service” were, more often than not, an oxymoron. By the time he could reach Guthridge’s office by taxi, he might have missed his appointment.

He got in the car, started the engine. With wary concentration, he backed out of the garage and into the street, handling the wheel as stiffly as a ninety-year-old man acutely aware of the brittleness of his bones and the tenuous thread of his existence.

All the way to the doctor’s office in Irvine, Marty Stillwater thought about Paige and Charlotte and Emily. By the treachery of his own weak flesh, he could be denied the satisfaction of seeing the girls become women, the pleasure of growing old at his wife’s side. Although he believed in a world beyond death where eventually he might be reunited with those he loved, life was so precious that even the promise of a blissful eternity would not compensate for the loss of a few years on this side of the veil.

From half a block away, the killer watches the car slowly back out of the garage.

As the Ford turns away from him and gradually recedes through the vinegar-gold autumn sunshine, he realizes the magnet which drew him from Kansas is in that car. Perhaps it is the dimly seen man behind the steering wheel—though it might not be a person at all but a talisman hidden elsewhere in the vehicle, a magical object beyond his understanding and to which his destiny is linked for reasons yet unclear.

The killer almost starts the Honda to follow the attractant, but decides the stranger in the Ford will return sooner or later.

He puts on his shoulder holster, slips the pistol into it, and shrugs into the leather jacket.

From the glove compartment, he removes the zippered leather case that contains his set of burglary tools. It includes seven spring-steel picks, an L-shaped tension tool, and a miniature aerosol can of graphite lubricant.

He gets out of the car and proceeds boldly along the sidewalk toward the house.

At the end of the driveway stands a white mailbox on which is stenciled a single name—STILLWATER. Those ten black letters seem to possess symbolic power. Still water. Calm. Peace. He has found still water. He has come through much turbulence, violent rapids and whirlpools, and now he has found a place where he can rest, where his soul will be soothed.

Between the garage and the property-line fence, he opens the gravity latch on a wrought-iron gate. He follows a walkway flanked by the garage on his left and a head-high eugenia hedge on his right, all the way to the rear of the house.

The shallow backyard is lushly planted. It boasts mature ficus trees and a continuation of the sideyard eugenia hedge, which screen him from the prying eyes of neighbors.

The patio is sheltered by an open-beam redwood cover through which thorny trailers of bougainvillea are densely intertwined. Even on this last day of November, clusters of blood-red flowers fringe the patio roof. The concrete floor is spattered with fallen petals, as though a hard-fought battle was waged here.

A kitchen door and large sliding glass door provide two possible entrances from the patio. Both are locked.

The sliding door, beyond which he can see a deserted family room with comfortable furniture and a large television, is further secured by a wooden pole wedged into the interior track. If he gets through the lock, he nevertheless will need to break the glass to reach inside and remove the pole.

He knocks sharply on the other door, although the window beside it reveals that no one is in the kitchen. When there is no response, he knocks again with the same result.

From his compact kit of burglary tools, he withdraws the can of graphite. Crouching before the door, he sprays the lubricant into the lock. Dirt, rust, or other contamination can bind the pin tumblers.

He trades the graphite spray for the tension tool and that pick known as a “rake.” He inserts the L-shaped wrench first to maintain the necessary tension on the lock core. He pushes the rake into the key channel as deep as it will go, then brings it up until he feels it press against the pins. Squinting into the lock, he rapidly draws the rake out, but it does not raise all of the pin tumblers to their shear point, so he tries again, and again, and finally on the sixth try the channel seems to be clear.

He turns the knob.

The door opens.

He half expects an alarm to go off, but there is no siren. A quick scan of the header and jamb fails to reveal magnetic switches, so there must not be a silent alarm, either.

After he puts the tools away and zippers shut the leather case, he steps across the threshold and softly closes the door behind him.

He stands for a while in the cool, shadowy kitchen, absorbing the vibrations, which are good. This house welcomes him. Here, his future begins, and it will be immeasurably brighter than his confused and amnesia-riddled past.

As he moves out of the kitchen to explore the premises, he does not draw the P7 from his shoulder holster. He is sure that no one is at home. He senses no danger, only opportunity.

“I need to be someone,” he tells the house, as if it is a living entity with the power to grant his wishes.

The ground floor offers nothing of interest. The usual rooms are filled with comfortable but unremarkable furniture.

Upstairs, he stops only briefly at each room, getting an overall picture of the second-floor layout before taking time for a thorough investigation. There’s a master bedroom with attached bath, walk-in closet . . . a guest bedroom . . . kids’ room . . . another bath . . .

The final bedroom at the end of the hall—which puts him at the front of the house—is used as an office. It contains a big desk and computer system, but it’s more cozy than businesslike. A plump sofa stands under the shuttered windows, a stained-glass lamp on the desk.

One of the two longest walls is covered with paintings hung in a double row, frames almost touching. Although the pieces of the collection are obviously by more than one artist, the subject matter, without exception, is dark and violent, rendered with unimpeachable skill: twisted shadows, disembodied eyes wide with terror, a Ouija board on which stands a blood-spotted trivet, ink-black palm trees silhouetted against an ominous sunset, a face distorted by a funhouse mirror, the gleaming steel blades of sharp knives and scissors, a mean street where menacing figures lurk just beyond the sour-yellow glow of street lamps, leafless trees with coaly limbs, a hot-eyed raven perched upon a bleached skull, pistols, revolvers, shotguns, an ice pick, meat cleaver, hatchet, a queerly stained hammer lying obscenely on a silk negligee and lace-trimmed bedsheet . . .

He likes this artwork.

It speaks to him.

This is life as he knows it.

Turning from the gallery wall, he clicks on the stained-glass lamp and marvels at its multi-hued luminous beauty.

In the clear sheet of glass that protects the top of the desk, the mirror-image circles and ovals and teardrops of color are still lovely but darker than when viewed directly. In some indefinable way, they are also foreboding.

Leaning forward, he sees the twin ovals of his eyes staring back at him from the polished glass. Glimmering with their own tiny reflections of the mosaic lamplight, they seem to be not eyes, in fact, but the luminous sensors of a machine—or, if eyes, then the fevered eyes of something soulless—and he quickly looks away from them before too much self-examination leads him to fearful thoughts and intolerable conclusions.

“I need to be someone,” he says nervously.

His gaze falls upon a photograph in a silver frame, which also stands on the desk. A woman and two little girls. A pretty trio. Smiling.

He picks up the photograph to study it more closely. He presses one fingertip against the woman’s face and wishes he could touch her for real, feel her warm and pliant skin. He slides his finger across the glass, first touching the blond-haired child, and then the dark-haired pixie.

After a minute or two, when he moves away from the desk, he carries the photograph with him. The three faces in the portrait are so appealing that he needs to be able to look at them again whenever the desire arises.

As he investigates the titles on the spines of the volumes in the bookcases, he makes a discovery that gives him an understanding, however incomplete, of why he was drawn from the gray autumnal plains of the Midwest to the post-Thanksgiving sun of California.

On a few of the shelves, the books—mystery novels—are by the same author: Martin Stillwater. The surname is the one he saw on the mailbox outside.

He puts aside the silver-framed portrait and withdraws a few of these novels from the shelves, surprised to see that some of the dust-jacket illustrations are familiar because the original paintings are hanging on the gallery wall that so fascinated him. Each title appears in a variety of translations: French, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Japanese, and several other languages.

But nothing is as interesting as the author’s photo on the back of each jacket. He studies them for a long time, tracing Stillwater’s features with one finger.

Intrigued, he peruses the copy on the jacket flaps. Then he reads the first page of a book, the first page of another, and another.

He happens upon a dedication page in the front of one book and reads what is printed there: This opus is for my mother and father, Jim and Alice Stillwater, who taught me to be an honest man—and who can’t be blamed if I am able to think like a criminal.

His mother and father. He stares in astonishment at their names. He has no memory of them, cannot picture their faces or recall where they might live.

He returns to the desk to consult the Rolodex. He discovers Jim and Alice Stillwater in Mammoth Lakes, California. The street address means nothing to him, and he wonders if it is the house in which he grew up.

He must love his parents. He dedicated a book to them. Yet they are ciphers to him. So much has been lost.

He returns to the bookshelves. Opening the U.S. or British edition of every title in the collection to study the dedication, he eventually finds: To Paige, my perfect wife, on whom all of my best female characters are based—excluding, of course, the homicidal psychopaths.

And two volumes later: To my daughters, Charlotte and Emily, with the hope they will read this book one day when they are grown up and will know that the daddy in this story speaks my own heart when he talks with such conviction and emotion about his feelings for his own little girls.

Putting the books aside, he picks up the photograph once more and holds it in both hands with something like reverence.

The attractive blonde is surely Paige. A perfect wife. The two girls are Charlotte and Emily, although he has no way of knowing which is which. They look sweet and obedient.

Paige, Charlotte, Emily.

At last he has found his life. This is where he belongs. This is home. The future begins now.

Paige, Charlotte, Emily.

This is the family toward which destiny has led him.

“I need to be Marty Stillwater,” he says, and he is thrilled to have found, at last, his own warm place in this cold and lonely world.