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Watch for the next thriller By America’s most popular suspense novelist”*
Available in hardcover from Bantam Books December 24,2002
And don’t miss these bestsellers by DEAN KOONTZ ONE DOOR AWAY FROM HEAVEN FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE FALSE MEMORY FEAR NOTHING SEIZE THE NIGHT SOLE SURVIVOR ICEBOUND INTENSITY TICKTOCK WINTER MOON Available wherever Bantam Books are sold
*Rolling Stone
Praise for
DARK RIVERS Of THE HEART
“A humdinger of a chase novel [that] explodes with all the giddy excitement of a half-dozen James Cameron pictures. Dark Rivers of the Heart deserves to go #1 on the bestseller list.” —Entertainment Weekly
“A fresh surprise on virtually every page . . . and a pyrotechnic denouement full of marvelous mayhem.” —The Washington Post
“Mr. Koontz has succeeded where many genre writers have failed: He has switched gears . . . and written a believable high-tech thriller.” —The New York Times
“As usual, Koontz’s writing is flawless: clean, clear exposition, colorful description, precise narration, and realistic dialogue. Dark Rivers of the Heart is exciting, entertaining, and thoughtful.” —The Denver Post
“It is difficult to imagine a reader who won’t be hooked by this thriller about government power run amok and a man and woman on the run from a madman who wields that power. Unrelenting excitement, truly memorable characters, and ample food for thought.” —Kirkus Reviews
Please turn the page for more reviews. . . .
“Terrifying. A heart-pounding thriller.” —Cosmopolitan
“As it appears, George Orwell was ten years late, and it is left to Dean Koontz to add the finishing touches to an Orwellian future that is here and now. One of his best novels.” —The Orlando Sentinel
“Turbulent, unsettling, and the pace is unrelenting. Despite its chilling overtones, the novel ultimately affirms the endurance of the human spirit.” —Boston magazine
“This is Koontz’s darkest, most suspenseful story yet. Fiercely entertaining . . . Even more thought-provoking than usual.” —The Flint Journal
“Dark Rivers of the Heart is Koontz’s most chilling book—and his most thought-provoking.” —Detroit News-Free Press
“An engrossing thriller . . . An awesome climax, a heart-wrenching story.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Wild, teeth-clenching terror.” —Associated Press
“An exciting cat-and-mouse game . . . a thought-provoking chiller.” —Kansas City Star
“Gritty, realistic, packed with action . . . Heart-stopping thrills along with heart-wrenching revelations. Dark Rivers of the Heart promises much . . and delivers.” —Mystery Scene
“An involved and engrossing thriller . . . Peppered with dry humor that is black and clever.” —Boston Sunday Herald
“Taut suspense, deep characterization, black humor, and moral outrage . . . Unmistakably the product of Dean Koontz’s singular imagination. When [he] opens the floodgates and pours on the suspense, the novel makes for a hell of a white-water ride.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Once I started reading, I didn’t come up for air for three hundred pages. Dark Rivers of the Heart is a paranoid’s delight. . . . Layer upon layer of dread.” —Arizona Tribune
Please turn the page for more reviews. . . .
“Dark Rivers of the Heart is Dean Koontz’s finest novel since Watchers” —Rocky Mountain News
“Continuous action, ghastly [and] humorous, with a surprise around every corner.” —Milwaukee Journal
“Truly terrifying . . . Ranks with Watchers and Strangers as one of his best novels.” —Athens Daily News
“Fascinating characters … A relentless cat-and-mouse chase, never letting up on the intensity for one minute.” —Fort Pierce Tribune
“His most serious, fully realized thriller. The intensity and suspense of the chase make putting the book down impossible. This is Koontz at the top of his form.” —The Indianapolis Star
“The best book he has ever written . . . A can’t-put-down tale [with] plenty of surprises. Enormously entertaining.” —Locus
“This superb novel of suspense will surely delight the author’s many fans.” —Library Journal
“Thrills, romance, a lovable but cowardly dog, high-tech wizardry . . . Koontz keeps the action going at a breakneck pace to a shattering climax. The picture that Koontz paints of a government that has gone too far in its pursuit of what it considers unlawful or aberrant behavior is the most frightening thing he has written.” —The Orange County Register
“Vastly entertaining . . . Absolutely unforgettable.” —Romantic Times
“Another Koontz winner.” —Orange Coast
By Dean Koontz
FALSE MEMORY NIGHT CHILLS SEIZE THE NIGHT SHATTERED FEAR NOTHING THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT MR. MURDER THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT DRAGON TEARS THE HOUSE OF THUNDER HIDEAWAY THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT COLD FIRE THE EYES OF DARKNESS THE BAD PLACE SHADOWFIRES MIDNIGHT WINTER MOON LIGHTNING THE DOOR TO DECEMBER WATCHERS DARK RIVERS OF THE HEART STRANGERS ICEBOUND TWILIGHT EYES STRANGE HIGHWAYS DARKFALL INTENSITY PHANTOMS SOLE SURVIVOR WHISPERS TICKTOCK THE MASK THE FUNHOUSE THE VISION DEMON SEED THE FACE OF FEAR
DEAN KONTZ DARK RIVERS of THE HEART
BANTAM BOOKS
new york toronto london Sydney auckland
Correspondence to the author should be addressed to:
Dean Koontz P. O. Box 9529 Newport Beach, CA 92658
DARK RIVERS OF THE HEART
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY Ballantine mass market edition / 1995 Bantam mass market edition / August 2000
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
ISBN 0-553-58289-5
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
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To Gary and Zov Karamardian for their valued friendship, for being the kind of people who make life a joy for others, and for giving us a home away from home. We’ve decided to move in permanently next week!
PART ONE
On a Strange Sea
All of us are travelers lost, our tickets arranged at a cost unknown but beyond our means. This odd itinerary of scenes —enigmatic, strange, unreal— leaves us unsure how to feel. No postmortem journey is rife with more mystery than life. —The Book of Counted Sorrows
Tremulous skeins of destiny flutter so ethereally around me—but then I feel its embrace is that of steel. —The Book of Counted Sorrows
ONE
* * *
With the woman on his mind and a deep uneasiness in his heart, Spencer Grant drove through the glistening night, searching for the red door. The vigilant dog sat silently beside him. Rain ticked on the roof of the truck. Without thunder or lightning, without wind, the storm had come in from the Pacific at the end of a somber February twilight. More than a drizzle but less than a downpour, it sluiced all the energy out of the city. Los Angeles and environs became a metropolis without sharp edges, urgency, or spirit. Buildings blurred into one another, traffic flowed sluggishly, and streets deliquesced into gray mists. In Santa Monica, with the beaches and the black ocean to his right, Spencer stopped at a traffic light. Rocky, a mixed breed not quite as large as a Labrador, studied the road ahead with interest. When they were in the truck—a Ford Explorer—Rocky sometimes peered out the side windows at the passing scene, though he was more interested in what lay before them. Even when he was riding in the cargo area behind the front seats, the mutt rarely glanced out the rear window. He was skittish about watching the scenery recede. Maybe the motion made him dizzy in a way that oncoming scenery did not. Or perhaps Rocky associated the dwindling highway behind them with the past. He had good reason not to dwell on the past. So did Spencer. Waiting for the traffic signal, he raised one hand to his face. He had a habit of meditatively stroking his scar when troubled, as another man might finger a strand of worry beads. The feel of it soothed him, perhaps because it was a reminder that he’d survived the worst terror he would ever know, that life could have no more surprises dark enough to destroy him. The scar defined Spencer. He was a damaged man. Pale, slightly glossy, extending from his right ear to his chin, the mark varied between one quarter and one half an inch in width. Extremes of cold and heat bleached it whiter than usual. In wintry air, though the thin ribbon of connective tissue contained no nerve endings, it felt like a hot wire laid on his face. In summer sun, the scar was cold. The traffic signal changed from red to green. The dog stretched his furry head forward in anticipation. Spencer drove slowly southward along the dark coast, both hands on the wheel again. He nervously searched for the red door on the eastern side of the street, among the many shops and restaurants. Though no longer touching the fault line in his face, he remained conscious of it. He was never unaware that he was branded. If he smiled or frowned, he would feel the scar cinching one half of his countenance. If he laughed, his amusement would be tempered by the tension in that inelastic tissue. The metronomic windshield wipers timed the rhythm of the rain. Spencer’s mouth was dry, but the palms of his hands were damp. The tightness in his chest arose as much from anxiety as from the pleasant anticipation of seeing Valerie again. He was of half a mind to go home. The new hope he harbored was surely the emotional equivalent of fool’s gold. He was alone, and he was always going to be alone, except for Rocky. He was ashamed of this fresh glimmer of optimism, of the naivete it revealed, the secret need, the quiet desperation. But he kept driving. Rocky couldn’t know what they were searching for, but he chuffed softly when the red landmark appeared. No doubt he was responding to a subtle change in Spencer’s mood at the sight of the door. The cocktail lounge was between a Thai restaurant with steam-streaked windows and an empty storefront that had once been an art gallery. The windows of the gallery were boarded over, and squares of travertine were missing from the once elegant facade, as if the enterprise had not merely failed but been bombed out of business. Through the silver rain, a downfall of light at the lounge entrance revealed the red door that he remembered from the previous night. Spencer hadn’t been able to recall the name of the place. That lapse of memory now seemed willful, considering the scarlet neon above the entrance: THE RED DOOR. A humorless laugh escaped him. After haunting so many barrooms over the years, he had ceased to notice enough differences, one from another, to be able to attach names to them. In scores of towns, those countless taverns were, in their essence, the same church confessional; sitting on a barstool instead of kneeling on a prie-dieu, he murmured the same admissions to strangers who were not priests and could not give him absolution. His confessors were drunkards, spiritual guides as lost as he was. They could never tell him the appropriate penance he must do to find peace. Discussing the meaning of life, they were incoherent. Unlike those strangers to whom he often quietly revealed his soul, Spencer had never been drunk. Inebriation was as dreadful for him to contemplate as was suicide. To be drunk was to relinquish control. Intolerable. Control was the only thing he had. At the end of the block, Spencer turned left and parked on the secondary street. He went to bars not to drink but to avoid being alone— and to tell his story to someone who would not remember it in the morning. He often nursed a beer or two through a long evening. Later, in his bedroom, after staring toward the hidden heavens, he would finally close his eyes only when the patterns of shadows on the ceiling inevitably reminded him of things he preferred to forget. When he switched off the engine, the rain drummed louder than before—a cold sound, as chilling as the voices of dead children that sometimes called to him with wordless urgency in his worst dreams. The yellowish glow of a nearby streetlamp bathed the interior of the truck, so Rocky was clearly visible. His large and expressive eyes solemnly regarded Spencer. “Maybe this is a bad idea,” Spencer said. The dog craned his head forward to lick his master’s right hand, which was still clenched around the wheel. He seemed to be saying that Spencer should relax and just do what he had come there to do. As Spencer moved his hand to pet the mutt, Rocky bowed his head, not to make the backs of his ears or his neck more accessible to stroking fingers, but to indicate that he was subservient and harmless. “How long have we been together?” Spencer asked the dog. Rocky kept his head down, huddling warily but not actually trembling under his master’s gentle hand. “Almost two years,” Spencer said, answering his own question. “Two years of kindness, long walks, chasing Frisbees on the beach, regular meals . . . and still sometimes you think I’m going to hit you.” Rocky remained in a humble posture on the passenger seat. Spencer slipped one hand under the dog’s chin, forced his head up. After briefly trying to pull away, Rocky ceased all resistance. When they were eye-to-eye, Spencer said, “Do you trust me?” The dog self-consciously looked away, down and to the left. Spencer shook the mutt gently by the muzzle, commanding his attention again. “We keep our heads up, okay? Always proud, okay? Confident. Keep our heads up, look people in the eye. You got that?” Rocky slipped his tongue between his half-clenched teeth and licked the fingers with which Spencer was gripping his muzzle. “I’ll interpret that as ‘yes.’ ” He let go of the dog. “This cocktail lounge isn’t a place I can take you. No offense.” In certain taverns, though Rocky was not a guide dog, he could lie at Spencer’s feet, even sit on a stool, and no one would object to the violation of health laws. Usually a dog was the least of the infractions for which the joint would be cited if a city inspector happened to visit. The Red Door, however, still had pretensions to class, and Rocky wouldn’t be welcome. Spencer got out of the truck, slammed the door. He engaged the locks and security system with the remote control on his key chain. He could not count on Rocky to protect the Explorer. This was one dog who would never scare off a determined car thief—unless the would-be thief suffered an extreme phobic aversion to having his hand licked. After sprinting through the cold rain to the shelter of an awning that skirted the corner building, Spencer paused to look back. Having moved onto the driver’s seat, the dog stared out, nose pressed to the side window, one ear pricked, one ear drooping. His breath was fogging the glass, but he wasn’t barking. Rocky never barked. He just stared, waited. He was seventy pounds of pure love and patience. Spencer turned away from the truck and the side street, rounded the corner, and hunched his shoulders against the chilly air. Judging by the liquid sounds of the night, the coast and all the works of civilization that stood upon it might have been merely ramparts of ice melting into the black Pacific maw. Rain drizzled off the awning, gurgled in gutters, and splashed beneath the tires of passing cars. At the threshold of audibility, more sensed than heard, the ceaseless rumble of surf announced the steady erosion of beaches and bluffs. As Spencer was passing the boarded-up art gallery, someone spoke from the shadows in the deeply recessed entrance. The voice was as dry as the night was damp, hoarse and grating: “I know what you are.” Halting, Spencer squinted into the gloom. A man sat in the entryway, legs splayed, back against the gallery door. Unwashed and unbarbered, he seemed less a man than a heap of black rags saturated with so much organic filth that malignant life had arisen in it by spontaneous generation. “I know what you are,” the vagrant repeated softly but clearly. A miasma of body odor and urine and the fumes of cheap wine rose out of the doorway. The number of shambling, drug-addicted, psychotic denizens of the streets had increased steadily since the late seventies, when most of the mentally ill had been freed from sanitariums in the name of civil liberties and compassion. They roamed America’s cities, championed by politicians but untended, an army of the living dead. The penetrating whisper was as desiccated and eerie as the voice of a reanimated mummy. “I know what you are.” The prudent response was to keep moving. The paleness of the vagrant’s face, above the beard and below the tangled hair, became dimly visible in the gloom. His sunken eyes were as bottomless as abandoned wells. “I know what you are.” “Nobody knows,” Spencer said. Sliding the fingertips of his right hand along his scar, he walked past the shuttered gallery and the ruined man. “Nobody knows,” whispered the vagrant. Perhaps his commentary on passersby, which at first had seemed eerily perceptive, even portentous, was nothing more than mindless repetition of the last thing he had heard from the most recent scornful citizen to reply to him. “Nobody knows.” Spencer stopped in front of the cocktail lounge. Was he making a dreadful mistake? He hesitated with his hand on the red door. Once more the hobo spoke from the shadows. Through the sizzle of the rain, his admonition now had the haunting quality of a static-shredded voice on the radio, speaking from a distant station in some far corner of the world. “Nobody knows. . . .” Spencer opened the red door and went inside. On a Wednesday night, no host was at the reservations podium in the vestibule. Maybe there wasn’t a front man on Fridays and Saturdays, either. The joint wasn’t exactly jumping. The warm air was stale and filigreed with blue cigarette smoke. In the far left corner of the rectangular main room, a piano player under a spotlight worked through a spiritless rendition of ‘Tangerine.” Decorated in black and gray and polished steel, with mirrored walls, with Art Deco fixtures that cast overlapping rings of moody sapphire-blue light on the ceiling, the lounge once had recaptured a lost age with style. Now the upholstery was scuffed, the mirrors streaked. The steel was dull under a residue of old smoke. Most tables were empty. A few older couples sat near the piano. Spencer went to the bar, which was to the right, and settled on the stool at the end, as far from the musician as he could get. The bartender had thinning hair, a sallow complexion, and watery gray eyes. His practiced politeness and pale smile couldn’t conceal his boredom. He functioned with robotic efficiency and detachment, discouraging conversation by never making eye contact. Two fiftyish men in suits sat farther along the bar, each alone, each frowning at his drink. Their shirt collars were unbuttoned, ties askew. They looked dazed, glum, as if they were advertising-agency executives who had been pink-slipped ten years ago but still got up every morning and dressed for success because they didn’t know what else to do; maybe they came to The Red Door because it had been where they’d unwound after work, in the days when they’d still had hope. The only waitress serving the tables was strikingly beautiful, half Vietnamese and half black. She wore the costume that she—and Valerie—had worn the previous evening: black heels, short black skirt, short-sleeved black sweater. Valerie had called her Rosie. After fifteen minutes, Spencer stopped Rosie when she passed nearby with a tray of drinks. “Is Valerie working tonight?” “Supposed to be,” she said. He was relieved. Valerie hadn’t lied. He had thought perhaps she’d misled him, as a gentle way of brushing him off. “I’m kinda worried about her,” Rosie said. “Why’s that?” “Well, the shift started an hour ago.” Her gaze kept straying to his scar. “She hasn’t called in.” “She’s not often late?” “Val? Not her. She’s organized.” “How long has she worked here?” “About two months. She . . .” The woman shifted her gaze from the scar to his eyes. “Are you a friend of hers or something?” “I was here last night. This same stool. Things were slow, so Valerie and I talked awhile.” “Yeah, I remember you,” Rosie said, and it was obvious that she couldn’t understand why Valerie had spent time with him. He didn’t look like any woman’s dream man. He wore running shoes, jeans, a work shirt, and a denim jacket purchased at Kmart—essentially the same outfit that he’d worn on his first visit. No jewelry. His watch was a Timex. And the scar, of course. Always the scar. “Called her place,” Rosie said. “No answer. I’m worried.” “An hour late, that’s not so much. Could’ve had a flat tire.” “In this city,” Rosie said, her face hardening with anger that aged her ten years in an instant, “she could’ve been gang-raped, stabbed by some twelve-year-old punk wrecked on crack, maybe even shot dead by a carjacker in her own driveway.” “You’re a real optimist, huh?” “I watch the news.” She carried the drinks to a table at which sat two older couples whose expressions were more sour than celebratory. Having missed the new Puritanism that had captured many Californians, they were puffing furiously on cigarettes. They appeared to be afraid that the recent total ban on smoking in restaurants might be extended tonight to barrooms and homes, and that each cigarette might be their last. While the piano player clinked through “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” Spencer took two small sips of beer. Judging by the palpable melancholy of the patrons in the bar, it might actually have been June 1940, with German tanks rolling down the Champs-Élysées, and with omens of doom blazing in the night sky. A few minutes later, the waitress approached Spencer again. “I guess I sounded a little paranoid,” she said. “Not at all. I watch the news too.” “It’s just that Valerie is so . . .” “Special,” Spencer said, finishing her thought so accurately that she stared at him with a mixture of surprise and vague alarm, as if she suspected that he had actually read her mind. “Yeah. Special. You can know her only a week, and . . . well, you want her to be happy. You want good things to happen to her.” It doesn’t take a week, Spencer thought. One evening. Rosie said, “Maybe because there’s this hurt in her. She’s been hurt a lot.” “How?” he asked. “Who?” She shrugged. “It’s nothing I know, nothing she ever said. You just feel it about her.” He also had sensed a vulnerability in Valerie. “But she’s tough too,” Rosie said. “Gee, I don’t know why I’m so jumpy about this. It’s not like I’m her big sister. Anyway, everyone’s got a right to be late now and then.” The waitress turned away, and Spencer sipped his warm beer. The piano player launched into “It Was a Very Good Year,” which Spencer disliked even when Sinatra sang it, though he was a Sinatra fan. He knew the song was intended to be reflective in tone, even mildly pensive; however, it seemed terribly sad to him, not the sweet wistfulness of an older man reminiscing about the women he had loved, but the grim ballad of someone at the bitter end of his days, looking back on a barren life devoid of deep relationships. He supposed that his interpretation of the lyrics was an expression of his fear that decades hence, when his own life burned out, he would fade away in loneliness and remorse. He checked his watch. Valerie was now an hour and a half late. The waitress’s uneasiness had infected him. An insistent image rose in his mind’s eye: Valerie’s face, half concealed by a spill of dark hair and a delicate scrollwork of blood, one cheek pressed against the floor, eyes wide and unblinking. He knew his concern was irrational. She was merely late for work. There was nothing ominous about that. Yet, minute by minute, his apprehension deepened. He put his unfinished beer on the bar, got off the stool, and walked through the blue light to the red door and into the chilly night, where the sound of marching armies was only the rain beating on the canvas awnings. As he passed the art gallery doorway, he heard the shadow-wrapped vagrant weeping softly. He paused, affected. Between strangled sounds of grief, the half-seen stranger whispered the last thing Spencer had said to him earlier: “Nobody knows . . . nobody knows. . . .” That short declaration evidently had acquired a personal and profound meaning for him, because he spoke the two words not in the tone in which Spencer had spoken but with quiet, intense anguish. “Nobody knows.” Though Spencer knew that he was a fool for funding the wretch’s further self-destruction, he fished a crisp ten-dollar bill from his wallet. He leaned into the gloomy entryway, into the fetid stink that the hobo exuded, and held out the money. “Here, take this.” The hand that rose to the offering was either clad in a dark glove or exceedingly filthy; it was barely discernible in the shadows. As the bill was plucked out of Spencer’s fingers, the vagrant keened thinly: “Nobody . . . nobody. . . .” “You’ll be all right,” Spencer said sympathetically. “It’s only life. We all get through it.” “It’s only life, we all get through it,” the vagrant whispered. Plagued once more by the mental image of Valerie’s dead face, Spencer hurried to the corner, into the rain, to the Explorer. Through the side window, Rocky watched him approaching. As Spencer opened the door, the dog retreated to the passenger seat. Spencer got in the truck and pulled the door shut, bringing with him the smell of damp denim and the ozone odor of the storm. “You miss me, killer?” Rocky shifted his weight from side to side a couple of times, and he tried to wag his tail even while sitting on it. As he started the engine, Spencer said, “You’ll be pleased to hear that I didn’t make an ass of myself in there.” The dog sneezed. “But only because she didn’t show up.” The dog cocked his head curiously. Putting the car in gear, popping the hand brake, Spencer said, “So instead of quitting and going home while I’m ahead of the game, what do you think I’m going to do now? Hmmm?” Apparently the dog didn’t have a clue. “I’m going to poke in where it’s none of my business, give myself a second chance to screw up. Tell me straight, pal, do you think I’ve lost my mind?” Rocky merely panted. Pulling the truck away from the curb, Spencer said, “Yeah, you’re right. I’m a basket case.” He headed directly for Valerie’s house. She lived ten minutes from the bar. The previous night, he had waited with Rocky in the Explorer, outside The Red Door, until two o’clock in the morning, and had followed Valerie when she drove home shortly after closing time. Because of his surveillance training, he knew how to tail a subject discreetly. He was confident that she hadn’t spotted him. He was not equally confident, however, about his ability to explain to her—or to himself—why he had followed her. After one evening of conversation with her, periodically interrupted by her attention to the few customers in the nearly deserted lounge, Spencer was overcome by the desire to know everything about her. Everything. In fact, it was more than a desire. It was a need, and he was compelled to satisfy it. Although his intentions were innocent, he was mildly ashamed of his budding obsession. The night before, he had sat in the Explorer, across the street from her house, staring at her lighted windows; all were covered with translucent drapes, and on one occasion her shadow played briefly across the folds of cloth, like a spirit glimpsed in candlelight at a seance. Shortly before three-thirty in the morning, the last light went out. While Rocky lay curled in sleep on the backseat, Spencer had remained on watch another hour, gazing at the dark house, wondering what books Valerie read, what she enjoyed doing on her days off, what her parents were like, where she had lived as a child, what she dreamed about when she was contented, and what shape her nightmares took when she was disturbed. Now, less than twenty-four hours later, he headed to her place again, with a fine-grain anxiety abrading his nerves. She was late for work. Just late. His excessive concern told him more than he cared to know about the inappropriate intensity of his interest in this woman. Traffic thinned as he drove farther from Ocean Avenue into residential neighborhoods. The languorous, liquid glimmer of wet blacktop fostered a false impression of movement, as if every street might be a lazy river easing toward its own far delta.
* * *
Valerie Keene lived in a quiet neighborhood of stucco and clapboard bungalows built in the late forties. Those two- and three-bedroom homes offered more charm than space: trellised front porches, from which hung great capes of bougainvillea; decorative shutters flanking windows; interestingly scalloped or molded or carved fascia boards under the eaves; fanciful rooflines; deeply recessed dormers. Because Spencer didn’t want to draw attention to himself, he drove past the woman’s place without slowing. He glanced casually to the right, toward her dark bungalow on the south side of the block. Rocky mimicked him, but the dog seemed to find nothing more alarming about the house than did his master. At the end of the block, Spencer turned right and drove south. The next few streets to the right were cul-de-sacs. He passed them by. He didn’t want to park on a dead-end street. That was a trap. At the next main avenue, he hung a right again and parked at the curb in a neighborhood similar to the one in which Valerie lived. He turned off the thumping windshield wipers but not the engine. He still hoped that he might regain his senses, put the truck in gear, and go home. Rocky looked at him expectantly. One ear up. One ear down. “I’m not in control,” Spencer said, as much to himself as to the curious dog. “And I don’t know why.” Rain sluiced down the windshield. Through the film of rippling water, the streetlights shimmered. He sighed and switched off the engine. When he’d left home, he’d forgotten an umbrella. The short dash to and from The Red Door had left him slightly damp, but the longer walk back to Valerie’s house would leave him soaked. He was not sure why he hadn’t parked in front of her place. Training, perhaps. Instinct. Paranoia. Maybe all three. Leaning past Rocky and enduring a warm, affectionate tongue in his ear, Spencer retrieved a flashlight from the glove compartment and tucked it in a pocket of his jacket. “Anybody messes with the truck,” he said to the dog, “you rip the bastard’s guts out.” As Rocky yawned, Spencer got out of the Explorer. He locked it with the remote control as he walked away and turned north at the corner. He didn’t bother running. Regardless of his pace, he would be soaked before he reached the bungalow. The north-south street was lined with jacarandas. They would have provided little cover even when fully dressed with leaves and cascades of purple blossoms. Now, in winter, the branches were bare. Spencer was sodden by the time he reached Valerie’s street, where the jacarandas gave way to huge Indian laurels. The aggressive roots of the trees had cracked and canted the sidewalk; however, the canopy of branches and generous foliage held back the cold rain. The big trees also prevented most of the yellowish light of the sodium-vapor streetlamps from reaching even the front lawns of the properties along that cloistered avenue. The trees and shrubs around the houses also were mature; some were overgrown. If any residents were looking out windows, they would most likely be unable to see him through the screen of greenery, on the deeply shadowed sidewalk. As he walked, he scanned the vehicles parked along the street. As far as he could tell, no one was sitting in any of them. A Mayflower moving van was parked across the street from Valerie’s bungalow. That was convenient for Spencer, because the large truck blocked those neighbors’ view. No men were working at the van; the move-in or move-out must be scheduled for the morning. Spencer followed the front walkway and climbed three Steps to the porch. The trellises at both ends supported not bougainvillea but night-blooming jasmine. Though it wasn’t at its seasonal peak, the jasmine sweetened the air with its singular fragrance. The shadows on the porch were deep. He doubted that he could even be seen from the street. In the gloom, he had to feel along the door frame to find the button. He could hear the doorbell ringing softly inside the house. He waited. No lights came on. The flesh creped on the back of his neck, and he sensed that he was being watched. Two windows flanked the front door and looked onto the porch. As far as he could discern, the dimly visible folds of the draperies on the other side of the glass were without any gaps through which an observer could have been studying him. He looked back at the street. Sodium-yellow light transformed the downpour into glittering skeins of molten gold. At the far curb, the moving van stood half in shadows, half in the glow of the streetlamps. A late-model Honda and an older Pontiac were parked at the nearer curb. No pedestrians. No passing traffic. The night was silent except for the incessant rataplan of the rain. He rang the bell once more. The crawling feeling on the nape of his neck didn’t subside. He put a hand back there, half convinced that he would find a spider negotiating his rain-slick skin. No spider. As he turned to the street again, he thought that he saw furtive movement from the corner of his eye, near the back of the Mayflower van. He stared for half a minute, but nothing moved in the windless night except torrents of golden rain falling to the pavement as straight as if they were, in fact, heavy droplets of precious metal. He knew why he was jumpy. He didn’t belong here. Guilt was twisting his nerves. Facing the door again, he slipped his wallet out of his right hip pocket and removed his MasterCard. Though he could not have admitted it to himself until now, he would have been disappointed if he had found lights on and Valerie at home. He was concerned about her, but he doubted that she was lying, either injured or dead, in her darkened house. He was not psychic: The image of her bloodstained face, which he’d conjured in his mind’s eye, was only an excuse to make the trip here from The Red Door. His need to know everything about Valerie was perilously close to an adolescent longing. At the moment, his judgment was not sound. He frightened himself. But he couldn’t turn back. By inserting the MasterCard between the door and jamb, he could pop the spring latch. He assumed there would be a deadbolt as well, because Santa Monica was as crime-ridden as any town in or around Los Angeles, but maybe he would get lucky. He was luckier than he hoped: The front door was unlocked. Even the spring latch wasn’t fully engaged. When he twisted the knob, the door clicked open. Surprised, stricken by another tremor of guilt, he glanced back at the street again. The Indian laurels. The moving van. The cars. The rain, rain, rain. He went inside. He closed the door and stood with his back against it, dripping on the carpet, shivering. At first the room in front of him was unrelievedly black. After a while, his vision adjusted enough for him to make out a drapery-covered window—and then a second and a third—illuminated only by the faint gray ambient light of the night beyond. For all that he could see, the blackness before him might have harbored a crowd, but he knew that he was alone. The house felt not merely unoccupied but deserted, abandoned. Spencer took the flashlight from his jacket pocket. He hooded the beam with his left hand to ensure, as much as possible, that it would not be noticed by anyone outside. The beam revealed an unfurnished living room, barren from wall to wall. The carpet was milk-chocolate brown. The unlined draperies were beige. The two-bulb light fixture in the ceiling could probably be operated by one of the three switches beside the front door, but he didn’t try them. His soaked athletic shoes and socks squished as he crossed the living room. He stepped through an archway into a small and equally empty dining room. Spencer thought of the Mayflower van across the street, but he didn’t believe that Valerie’s belongings were in it or that she had moved out of the bungalow since four-thirty the previous morning, when he’d left his watch post in front of her house and returned to his own bed. Instead, he suspected that she had never actually moved in. The carpet was not marked by the pressure lines and foot indentations of furniture; no tables, chairs, cabinets, credenzas, or floor lamps had stood on it recently. If Valerie had lived in the bungalow during the two months that she had worked at The Red Door, she evidently hadn’t furnished it and hadn’t intended to call it home for any great length of time. To the left of the dining room, through an archway half the size of the first, he found a small kitchen with knotty pine cabinets and red Formica countertops. Unavoidably, he left wet shoe prints on the gray tile floor. Stacked beside the two-basin sink were a single dinner plate, a bread plate, a soup bowl, a saucer, and a cup—all clean and ready for use. One drinking glass stood with the dinnerware. Next to the glass lay a dinner fork, a knife, and a spoon, which were also clean. He shifted the flashlight in his right hand, splaying a couple of fingers across the lens to partly suppress the beam, thus freeing his left hand to touch the drinking glass. He traced the rim with his fingertips. Even if the glass had been washed since Valerie had taken a drink from it, her lips had once touched the rim. He had never kissed her. Perhaps he never would. That thought embarrassed him, made him feel foolish, and forced him to consider, yet again, the impropriety of his obsession with this woman. He didn’t belong here. He was trespassing not merely in her home but in her life. Until now, he had lived an honest life, if not always with undeviating respect for the law. Upon entering her house, however, he had crossed a sharp line that had scaled away his innocence, and what he had lost couldn’t be regained. Nevertheless, he did not leave the bungalow. When he opened kitchen drawers and cabinets, he found them empty except for a combination bottle-and-can opener. The woman owned no plates or utensils other than those stacked beside the sink. Most of the shelves in the narrow pantry were bare. Her stock of food was limited to three cans of peaches, two cans of pears, two cans of pineapple rings, one box of a sugar substitute in small blue packets, two boxes of cereal, and a jar of instant coffee. The refrigerator was nearly empty, but the freezer compartment was well stocked with gourmet microwave dinners. By the refrigerator was a door with a mullioned window. The four panes were covered by a yellow curtain, which he pushed aside far enough to see a side porch and a dark yard hammered by rain. He allowed the curtain to fall back into place. He wasn’t interested in the outside world, only in the interior spaces where Valerie had breathed the air, taken her meals, and slept. As Spencer left the kitchen, the rubber soles of his shoes squeaked on the wet tiles. Shadows retreated before him and huddled in the corners while darkness crowded his back again. He could not stop shivering. The damp chill in the house was as penetrating as that of the February air outside. The heat must have been off all day, which meant that Valerie had left early. On his cold face, the scar burned. A closed door was centered in the back wall of the dining room. He opened it and discovered a narrow hallway that led about fifteen feet to the left and fifteen to the right. Directly across the hall, another door stood half open; beyond, he glimpsed a white tile floor and a bathroom sink. As he was about to enter the hall, he heard sounds other than the monotonous and hollow drumming of the rain on the roof. A thump and a soft scrape. He immediately switched off the flashlight. The darkness was as perfect as that in any carnival fun house just before flickering strobe lights revealed a leering, mechanical corpse. At first the sounds had seemed stealthy, as if a prowler outside had slipped on the wet grass and bumped against the house. However, the longer Spencer listened, the more he became convinced that the source of noise might have been distant rather than nearby, and that he might have heard nothing more than a car door slamming shut, out on the street or in a neighbor’s driveway. He switched on the flashlight and continued his search in the bathroom. A bath towel, a hand towel, and a washcloth hung on the rack. A half-used bar of Ivory lay in the plastic soap dish, but the medicine cabinet was empty. To the right of the bathroom was a small bedroom, as unfurnished as the rest of the house. The closet was empty. The second bedroom, to the left of the bath, was larger than the first, and it was obviously where she had slept. An inflated air mattress lay on the floor. Atop the mattress were a tangle of sheets, a single wool blanket, and a pillow. The bifold closet doors stood open, revealing wire hangers dangling from an unpainted wooden pole. Although the rest of the bungalow was unadorned by artwork or decoration, something was fixed to the center of the longest wall in that bedroom. Spencer approached it, directed the light at it, and saw a full-color, closeup photograph of a cockroach. It seemed to be a page from a book, perhaps an entomology text, because the caption under the photograph was in dry academic English. In closeup, the roach was about six inches long. It had been fixed to the wall with a single large nail that had been driven through the center of the beetle’s carapace. On the floor, directly below the photograph, lay the hammer with which the spike had been pounded into the plaster. The photograph had not been decoration. Surely, no one would hang a picture of a cockroach with the intention of beautifying a bedroom. Furthermore, the use of a nail—rather than pushpins or staples or Scotch tape—implied that the person wielding the hammer had done so in considerable anger. Clearly, the roach was meant to be a symbol for something else. Spencer wondered uneasily if Valerie had nailed it there. That seemed unlikely. The woman with whom he’d talked the previous evening at The Red Door had seemed uncommonly gentle, kind, and all but incapable of serious anger. If not Valerie—who? As Spencer moved the flashlight beam across the glossy paper, the roach’s carapace glistened as if wet. The shadows of his fingers, which half blocked the lens, created the illusion that the beetle’s spindly legs and antennae jittered briefly. Sometimes, serial killers left behind signatures at the scenes of their crimes to identify their work. In Spencer’s experience, that could be anything from a specific playing card, to a Satanic symbol carved in some part of the victim’s anatomy, to a single word or a line of poetry scrawled in blood upon a wall. The nailed photo had the feeling of such a signature, although it was stranger than anything he had seen or about which he had read in the hundreds of case studies with which he was familiar. A faint nausea rippled through him. He had encountered no signs of violence in the house, but he had not yet looked in the attached single-car garage. Perhaps he would find Valerie on that cold slab of concrete, as he had seen her earlier in his mind’s eye: lying with one side of her face pressed to the floor, unblinking eyes open wide, a scrollwork of blood obscuring some of her features. He knew that he was jumping to conclusions. These days, the average American routinely lived in anticipation of sudden, mindless violence, but Spencer was more sensitized to the dark possibilities of modern life than were most people. He had endured pain and terror that had marked him in many ways, and his tendency now was to expect savagery as surely as sunrises and sunsets. As he turned away from the photograph of the roach, wondering if he dared to investigate the garage, the bedroom window shattered inward, and a small black object hurtled through the draperies. At a glimpse, tumbling and airborne, it resembled a grenade. Reflexively, he switched off the flashlight even as broken glass was still falling. In the gloom, the grenade thumped softly against the carpet. Before Spencer could turn away, he was hit by the explosion. No flash of light accompanied it, only ear-shattering sound—and hard shrapnel snapping into him from his shins to his forehead. He cried out. Fell. Twisted. Writhed. Pain in his legs, hands, face. His torso was protected by his denim jacket. But his hands, God, his hands. He wrung his burning hands. Hot pain. Pure torment. How many fingers lost, bones shattered? Jesus, Jesus, his hands were spastic with pain yet half numb, so he couldn’t assess the damage. The worst of it was the fiery agony in his forehead, cheeks, the left corner of his mouth. Excruciating. Desperate to quell the pain, he pressed his hands to his face. He was afraid of what he would find, of the damage he would feel, but his hands throbbed so fiercely that his sense of touch wasn’t trustworthy. How many new scars if he survived—how many pale and puckered cicatricial welts or red keloid monstrosities from hairline to chin? Get out, get away, find help. He kicked-crawled-clawed-twitched like a wounded crab through the darkness. Disoriented and terrified, he nevertheless scrambled in the right direction, across a floor now littered with what seemed to be small marbles, into the bedroom doorway. He clambered to his feet. He figured he was caught in a gang war over disputed turf. Los Angeles in the nineties was more violent than Chicago during Prohibition. Modern youth gangs were more savage and better armed than the Mafia, pumped up with drugs and their own brand of racism, as cold-blooded and merciless as snakes. Gasping for breath, feeling blindly with aching hands, he stumbled into the hall. Pain coruscated through his legs, weakening him and testing his balance. Staying on his feet was as difficult as it would have been in a revolving fun-house barrel. Windows shattered in other rooms, followed by a few muffled explosions. The hallway was windowless, so he wasn’t hit again. In spite of his confusion and fear, Spencer realized he didn’t smell blood. Didn’t taste it. In fact, he wasn’t bleeding. Suddenly he understood what was happening. Not a gang war. The shrapnel hadn’t cut him, so it wasn’t actually shrapnel. Not marbles, either, littering the floor. Hard rubber pellets. From a sting grenade. Only law-enforcement agencies had sting grenades. He had used them himself. Seconds ago a SWAT team of some kind must have initiated an assault on the bungalow, launching the grenades to disable any occupants. The moving van had no doubt been covert transport for the assault force. The movement he had seen at the back of it, out of the corner of his eye, hadn’t been imaginary after all. He should have been relieved. The assault was an action of the local police, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, or another law-enforcement organization. Apparently he had stumbled into one of their operations. He knew the drill. If he dropped to the floor, facedown, arms extended over his head, hands spread to prove they were empty, he would be fine; he wouldn’t be shot; they would handcuff him, question him, but they wouldn’t harm him further. Except that he had a big problem: He didn’t belong in that bungalow. He was a trespasser. From their point of view, he might even be a burglar. To them, his explanation for being there would seem lame at best. Hell, they would think it was crazy. He didn’t really understand it himself—why he was so stricken with Valerie, why he had needed to know about her, why he had been bold enough and stupid enough to enter her house. He didn’t drop to the floor. On wobbly legs, he staggered through the tunnel-black hall, sliding one hand along the wall. The woman was mixed up in something illegal, and at first the authorities would think that he was involved as well. He would be taken into custody, detained for questioning, maybe even booked on suspicion of aiding and abetting Valerie in whatever she had done. They would find out who he was. The news media would dredge up his past. His face would be on television, in newspapers and magazines. He had lived many years in blessed anonymity, his new name unknown, his appearance altered by time, no longer recognizable. But his privacy was about to be stolen. He would be center ring at the circus again, harassed by reporters, whispered about every time he went out in public. No. Intolerable. He couldn’t go through that again. He would rather die. They were cops of some kind, and he was innocent of any serious offense; but they were not on his side right now. Without meaning to destroy him, they would do so simply by exposing him to the press. More shattering glass. Two explosions. The officers on the SWAT team were taking no chances, as if they thought they were up against people crazed on PCP or something worse. Spencer had reached the midpoint of the hall, where he stood between two doorways. A dim grayness beyond the right-hand door: the dining room. On his left: the bathroom. He stepped into the bathroom, closed the door, hoping to buy time to think. The stinging in his face, hands, and legs was slowly subsiding. Rapidly, repeatedly, he clenched his hands, then relaxed them, trying to improve the circulation and work off the numbness. From the far end of the house came a wood-splintering crash, hard enough to make the walls shudder. It was probably the front door slamming open or going down. Another crash. The kitchen door. They were in the house. They were coming. No time to think. He had to move, relying on instinct and on military training that was, he hoped, at least as extensive as that of the men who were hunting him. In the back wall of the cramped room, above the bathtub, the blackness was broken by a rectangle of faint gray light. He stepped into the tub and, with both hands, quickly explored the frame of that small window. He wasn’t convinced that it was big enough to provide a way out, but it was the only possible route of escape. If it had been fixed or jalousied, he would have been trapped. Fortunately, it was a single pane that opened inward from the top on a heavy-duty piano hinge. Collapsible elbow braces on both sides clicked softly when fully extended, locking the window open. He expected the faint squeak of the hinge and the click of the braces to elicit a shout from someone outside. But the unrelenting drone of the rain screened what sounds he made. No alarm was raised. Spencer gripped the window ledge and levered himself into the opening. Cold rain spattered his face. The humid air was heavy with the fecund smells of saturated earth, jasmine, and grass. The backyard was a tapestry of gloom, woven exclusively from shades of black and graveyard grays, washed by rain that blurred its details. At least one man—more likely two— from the SWAT team had to be covering the rear of the house. However, though Spencer’s vision was keen, he could not force any of the interwoven shadows to resolve into a human form. For a moment his upper body seemed wider than the frame, but he hunched his shoulders, twisted, wriggled, and scraped through the opening. The ground was a short drop from the window. He rolled once on the wet grass and then lay flat on his stomach, head raised, surveying the night, still unable to spot any adversaries. In the planting beds and along the property line, the shrubbery was overgrown. Several old fig trees, long untrimmed, were mighty towers of foliage. Glimpsed between the branches of those mammoth ficuses, the heavens were not black. The lights of the sprawling metropolis reflected off the bellies of the eastbound storm clouds, painting the vault of the night with deep and sour yellows that, toward the oceanic west, faded into charcoal gray. Though familiar to Spencer, the unnatural color of the city sky filled him with a surprising and superstitious dread, for it seemed to be a malevolent firmament under which men were meant to die—and to the sight of which they might wake in Hell. It was a mystery how the yard could remain unlit under that sulfurous glow, yet he could have sworn that it grew blacker the longer he squinted at it. The stinging in his legs subsided. His hands still ached but not disablingly, and the burning in his face was less intense than it had been. Inside the dark house, an automatic weapon stuttered briefly, spitting out several rounds. One of the cops must be trigger-happy, shooting at shadows or ghosts. Curious. Hair-trigger nerves were uncommon among special-forces officers. Spencer scuttled across the sodden grass to the shelter of a nearby triple-trunk ficus. Rising to his feet, with his back against the bark, he surveyed the lawn, the shrubs, and the line of trees along the rear property wall, half convinced he should make a break for it, but also half convinced that he would be spotted and brought down if he stepped into the open. Flexing his hands to work off the pain, he considered climbing into the web of wood above him and hiding in the higher bowers. Useless, of course. They would find him in the tree, because they would not admit to his escape until they had searched every shadow and cloak of greenery, both high and low. In the bungalow: voices, a door slamming, not even a pretense of stealth and caution any longer, not after the precipitous gunfire. Still no lights. Time was running out. Arrest, revelation, the glare of videocam lights, reporters shouting questions. Intolerable. He silently cursed himself for being so indecisive. Rain rattled the leaves above. Newspaper stories, magazine spreads, the hateful past alive again, the gaping stares of thoughtless strangers to whom he would be the walking, breathing equivalent of a spectacular train wreck. His booming heart counted cadence for the ever quickening march of his fear. He could not move. Paralyzed. Paralysis served him well, however, when a man dressed in black crept past the tree, holding a weapon that resembled an Uzi. Though he was no more than two strides from Spencer, the guy was focused on the house, ready if his quarry crashed through a window into the night, unaware that the very fugitive he sought was within reach. Then the man saw the open window at the bathroom, and he froze. Spencer was moving before his target began to turn. Anyone with SWAT-team training—whether local cop or federal agent—would not go down easily. The only chance of taking the guy quickly and quietly was to hit him hard while he was in the grip of surprise. Spencer rammed his right knee into the cop’s crotch, putting everything he had behind it, trying to lift the guy off the ground. Some special-forces officers wore jockstraps with aluminum cups on every enter-and-subdue operation, as surely as they wore bullet-resistant Kevlar body jackets or vests. This one was unprotected. He exhaled explosively, a sound that wouldn’t have carried ten feet in the rainy night. Even as Spencer was driving his knee upward, he seized the automatic weapon with both hands, wrenching it violently clockwise. It twisted out of the other man’s grasp before he could convulsively squeeze off a burst of warning fire. The gunman fell backward on the wet grass. Spencer dropped atop him, carried forward by momentum. Though the cop tried to cry out, the agony of that intimate blow had robbed him of his voice. He couldn’t even inhale. Spencer could have slammed the weapon—a compact submachine gun, judging by the feel of it—into his adversary’s throat, crushing his windpipe, asphyxiating him on his own blood. A blow to the face would have shattered the nose and driven splinters of bone into the brain. But he didn’t want to kill or seriously injure anyone. He just needed time to get the hell out of there. He hammered the gun against the cop’s temple, half checking the blow but knocking the poor bastard unconscious. The guy was wearing night-vision goggles. The SWAT team was conducting a night stalk with full technological assistance, which was why no lights had come on in the house. They had the vision of cats, and Spencer was the mouse. He rolled onto the grass, rose into a crouch, clutching the submachine gun in both hands. It was an Uzi: He recognized the shape and heft of it. He swept the muzzle left and right, anticipating the charge of another adversary. No one came at him. Perhaps five seconds had passed since the man in black had crept past the ficus tree. Spencer sprinted across the lawn, away from the bungalow, into flowers and shrubs. Greenery lashed his legs. Woody azaleas poked his calves, snagged his jeans. He dropped the Uzi. He wasn’t going to shoot at anyone. Even if it meant being taken into custody and exposed to the news media, he would surrender rather than use the gun. He waded through the shrubs, between two trees, past a eugenia with phosphorescent white blossoms, and reached the property wall. He was as good as gone. If they spotted him now, they wouldn’t shoot him in the back. They’d shout a warning, identify themselves, order him to freeze, and come after him, but they wouldn’t shoot. The stucco-sheathed, concrete-block wall was six feet high, capped with bull-nose bricks that were slippery with rain. He got a grip, pulled himself up, scrabbling at the stucco with the toes of his athletic shoes. As he slid onto the top of the wall, belly against the cold bricks, and drew up his legs, gunfire erupted behind him. Bullets smacked into the concrete blocks, so close that chips of stucco sprayed his face. Nobody shouted a goddamned warning. He rolled off the wall into the neighboring property, and automatic weapons chattered again—a longer burst than before. Submachine guns in a residential neighborhood. Craziness. What the hell kind of cops were these? He fell into a tangle of rosebushes. It was winter; the roses had been pruned; even in the colder months, however, the California climate was sufficiently mild to encourage some growth, and thorny trailers snared his clothes, pricked his skin. Voices, flat and strange, muffled by the static of the rain, came from beyond the wall: “This way, back here, come on!” Spencer sprang to his feet and flailed through the rose brambles. A spiny trailer scraped the unscarred side of his face and curled around his head as if intent on fitting him with a crown, and he broke free only at the cost of punctured hands. He was in the backyard of another house. Lights in some of the ground-floor rooms. A face at a rain-jeweled window. A young girl. Spencer had the terrible feeling that he’d be putting her in mortal jeopardy if he didn’t get out of there before his pursuers arrived.
* * *
After negotiating a maze of yards, block walls, wrought iron fences, cul-de-sacs, and service alleys, never sure if he had lost his pursuers or if they were, in fact, at his heels, Spencer found the street on which he had parked the Explorer. He ran to it and jerked on the door. Locked, of course. He fumbled in his pockets for the keys. Couldn’t find them. He hoped to God he hadn’t lost them along the way. Rocky was watching him through the driver’s window. Apparently he found Spencer’s frantic search amusing. He was grinning. Spencer glanced back along the rain-swept street. Deserted. One more pocket. Yes. He pressed the deactivating button on the key chain. The security system issued an electronic bleat, the locks popped open, and he clambered into the truck. As he tried to start the engine, the keys slipped through his wet fingers and fell to the floor. “Damn!” Reacting to his master’s fear, no longer amused, Rocky huddled timidly in the corner formed by the passenger seat and the door. He made a thin, interrogatory sound of concern. Though Spencer’s hands tingled from the rubber pellets that had stung them, they were no longer numb. Yet he fumbled after the keys for what seemed an age. Maybe it was best to lie on the seats, out of sight, and keep Rocky below window level. Wait for the cops to come . . . and go. If they arrived just as he was pulling away from the curb, they would suspect he was the one who had been in Valerie’s house, and they would stop him one way or another. On the other hand, he had stumbled into a major operation with a lot of manpower. They weren’t going to give up easily. While he was hiding in the truck, they might cordon off the area and initiate a house-to-house search. They would also inspect parked cars as best they could, peering in windows; he would be pinned by a flashlight beam, trapped in his own vehicle. The engine started with a roar. He popped the hand brake, shifted gears, and pulled away from the curb, switching on windshield wipers and headlights as he went. He had parked near the corner, so he hung a U-turn. He glanced at the rearview mirror, the side mirror. No armed men in black uniforms. A couple of cars sped through the intersection, heading south on the other avenue. Plumes of spray fanned behind them. Without even pausing at the stop sign, Spencer turned right and entered the southbound flow of traffic, away from Valerie’s neighborhood. He resisted the urge to tramp the accelerator into the floorboards. He couldn’t risk being stopped for speeding. “What the hell?” he asked shakily. The dog replied with a soft whine. “What’s she done, why’re they after her?” Water trickled down his brow into his eyes. He was soaked. He shook his head, and a spray of cold water flew from his hair, spattering the dashboard, the upholstery, and the dog. Rocky flinched. Spencer turned up the heater. He drove five blocks and made two changes of direction before he began to feel safe. “Who is she? What the hell has she done?” Rocky had adopted his master’s change of mood. He no longer huddled in the corner. Having resumed his vigilant posture in the center of his seat, he was wary but not fearful. He divided his attention between the storm-drenched city ahead and Spencer, favoring the former with guarded anticipation and the latter with a cocked-head expression of puzzlement. “Jesus, what was I doing there anyway?” Spencer wondered aloud. Though bathed in hot air from the dashboard vents, he continued to shiver. Part of his chill had nothing to do with being rain-soaked, and no quantity of heat could dispel it. “Didn’t belong there, shouldn’t have gone. Do you have a clue what I was doing in that place, pal? Hmmmm? Because I sure as hell don’t. That was stupid.” He reduced speed to negotiate a flooded intersection, where an armada of trash was adrift on the dirty water. His face felt hot. He glanced at Rocky. He had just lied to the dog. Long ago he had sworn never to lie to himself. He kept that oath only somewhat more faithfully than the average drunkard kept his New Year’s Eve resolution never to allow demon rum to touch his lips again. In fact, he probably indulged in less self-delusion and self-deception than most people did, but he could not claim, with a straight face, that he invariably told himself the truth. Or even that he invariably wanted to hear it. What it came down to was that he tried always to be truthful with himself, but he often accepted a half-truth and a wink instead of the real thing—and he could live comfortably with whatever omission the wink implied. But he never lied to the dog. Never. Theirs was the only entirely honest relationship that Spencer had ever known; therefore, it was special to him. No. More than merely special. Sacred. Rocky, with his hugely expressive eyes and guileless heart, with his body language and his soul-revealing tail, was incapable of deceit. If he’d been able to talk, he would have been perfectly ingenuous because he was a perfect innocent. Lying to the dog was worse than lying to a small child. Hell, he wouldn’t have felt as bad if he had lied to God, because God unquestionably expected less of him than did poor Rocky. Never lie to the dog. “Okay,” he said, braking for a red traffic light, “so I know why I went to her house. I know what I was looking for.” Rocky regarded him with interest. “You want me to say it, huh?” The dog waited. “That’s important to you, is it—for me to say it?” The dog chuffed, licked his chops, cocked his head. “All right. I went to her house because—” The dog stared. “—because she’s a very nice-looking woman.” The rain drummed. The windshield wipers thumped. “Okay, she’s pretty but she’s not gorgeous. It isn’t her looks. There’s just . . . something about her. She’s special.” The idling engine rumbled. Spencer sighed and said, “Okay, I’ll be straight this time. Right to the heart of it, huh? No more dancing around the edges. I went to her house because—” Rocky stared. “—because I wanted to find a life.” The dog looked away from him, toward the street ahead, evidently satisfied with that final explanation. Spencer thought about what he had revealed to himself by being honest with Rocky. I wanted to find a life. He didn’t know whether to laugh at himself or weep. In the end, he did neither. He just moved on, which was what he’d been doing for at least the past sixteen years. The traffic light turned green. With Rocky looking ahead, only ahead, Spencer drove home through the streaming night, through the loneliness of the vast city, under a strangely mottled sky that was as yellow as a rancid egg yolk, as gray as crematorium ashes, and fearfully black along one far horizon.
TWO
At nine o’clock, after the fiasco in Santa Monica, east-bound on the freeway, returning to his hotel in Westwood, Roy Miro noticed a Cadillac stopped on the shoulder of the highway. Serpents of red light from its emergency flashers wriggled across his rain-streaked windshield. The rear tire on the driver’s side was flat. A woman sat behind the steering wheel, evidently waiting for help. She appeared to be the only person in the car. The thought of a woman alone in such circumstances, in any part of greater Los Angeles, worried Roy. These days, the City of Angels wasn’t the easygoing place it had once been—and the hope of actually finding anyone living even an approximation of an angelic existence was slim indeed. Devils, yes: Those were relatively easy to locate. He stopped on the shoulder ahead of the Cadillac. The downpour was heavier than it had been earlier. A wind had sailed in from the ocean. Silvery sheets of rain, billowing like the transparent canvases of a ghost ship, flapped through the darkness. He plucked his floppy-brimmed vinyl hat off the passenger seat and squashed it down on his head. As always in bad weather, he was wearing a raincoat and galoshes. In spite of his precautionary dress, he was going to get soaked, but he couldn’t in good conscience drive on as if he’d never seen the stranded motorist. As Roy walked back to the Cadillac, the passing traffic cast an all but continuous spray of filthy water across his legs, pasting his pants to his skin. Well, the suit needed to be dry-cleaned anyway. When he reached the car, the woman did not put down her window. Staring warily at him through the glass, she reflexively checked the door locks to be sure they were engaged. He wasn’t offended by her suspicion. She was merely wise to the ways of the city and understandably skeptical of his intentions. He raised his voice to be heard through the closed window: “You need some help?” She held up a cellular phone. “Called a service station. They said they’ll send somebody.” Roy glanced toward the oncoming traffic in the eastbound lanes. “How long have they kept you waiting?” After a hesitation, she said exasperatedly, “Forever.” “I’ll change the tire. You don’t have to get out or give me your keys. This car—I’ve driven one like it. There’s a trunk-release knob. Just pop it, so I can get the jack and the spare.” “You could get hurt,” she said. The narrow shoulder offered little safety margin, and the fast-moving traffic was unnervingly close. “I’ve got flares,” he said. Turning away before she could object, Roy hurried to his own car and retrieved all six flares from the roadside-emergency kit in the trunk. He strung them out along the freeway for fifty yards behind the Cadillac, closing off most of the nearest traffic lane. If a drunk driver barreled out of the night, of course, no precautions would be sufficient. And these days it seemed that sober motorists were outnumbered by those who were high on booze or drugs. It was an age plagued by social irresponsibility—which was why Roy tried to be a good Samaritan whenever an opportunity arose. If everyone lit just one little candle, what a bright world it would be: He really believed in that. The woman had released the trunk lock. The lid was ajar. Roy Miro was happier than he had been all day. Battered by wind and rain, splashed by the passing traffic, he labored with a smile. The more hardship involved, the more rewarding the good deed. As he struggled with a tight lug nut, the wrench slipped and he skinned one knuckle; instead of cursing, he began to whistle while he worked. When the job was done, the woman lowered the window two inches, so he didn’t have to shout. “You’re all set,” he said. Sheepishly, she began to apologize for having been so wary of him, but he interrupted to assure her that he understood. She reminded Roy of his mother, which made him feel even better about helping her. She was attractive, in her early fifties, perhaps twenty years older than Roy, with auburn hair and blue eyes. His mother had been a brunette with hazel eyes, but this woman and his mother had in common an aura of gentleness and refinement. “This is my husband’s business card,” she said, passing it through the gap in the window. “He’s an accountant. If you need any advice along those lines, no charge.” “I haven’t done all that much,” Roy said, accepting the card. “These days, running into someone like you, it’s a miracle. I’d have called Sam instead of that damn service station, but he’s working late at a client’s. Seems we work around the clock these days.” “This recession,” Roy sympathized. “Isn’t it ever going to end?” she wondered, rummaging in her purse for something more. He cupped the business card in his hand to protect it from the rain, turning it so the red glow of the nearest flare illuminated the print. The husband had an office in Century City, where rents were high; no wonder the poor guy was working late to remain afloat. “And here’s my card,” the woman said, extracting it from her purse and passing it to him. Penelope Bettonfield. Interior Designer. 213-555-6868. She said, “I work out of my home. Used to have an office, but this dreadful recession . . .” She sighed and smiled up at him through the partly open window. “Anyway, if I can ever be of help . . .” He fished one of his own cards from his wallet and passed it in to her. She thanked him again, closed her window, and drove away. Roy walked back along the highway, clearing the flares off the pavement so they would not continue to obstruct traffic. In his car once more, heading for his hotel in Westwood, he was exhilarated to have lit his one little candle for the day. Sometimes he wondered if there was any hope for modern society, if it was going to spiral down into a hell of hatred and crime and greed—but then he encountered someone like Penelope Bettonfield, with her sweet smile and her aura of gentleness and refinement, and he found it possible to be hopeful again. She was a caring person who would repay his kindness to her by being kind to someone else. In spite of Mrs. Bettonfield, Roy’s fine mood didn’t last. By the time he left the freeway for Wilshire Boulevard and drove into Westwood, a sadness had crept over him. He saw signs of social devolution everywhere. Spray-painted graffiti defaced the retaining walls of the freeway exit ramp and obscured the directions on a couple of traffic signs, in an area of the city previously spared such dreary vandalism. A homeless man, pushing a shopping cart full of pathetic possessions, trudged through the rain, his face expressionless, as if he were a zombie shuffling along the aisles of a Kmart in Hell. At a stoplight, in the lane beside Roy, a car full of fierce-looking young men—skinheads, each with one glittering earring—glared at him malevolently, perhaps trying to decide if he looked like a Jew. They mouthed obscenities with care, to be sure he could read their lips. He passed a movie theater where the films were all swill of one kind or another. Extravaganzas of violence. Seamy tales of raw sex. Films from big studios, with famous stars, but swill nonetheless. Gradually, his impression of his encounter with Mrs. Bettonfield changed. He remembered what she’d said about the recession, about the long hours that she and her husband were working, about the poor economy that had forced her to close her design office and run her faltering business from her home. She was such a nice lady. He was saddened to think that she had financial worries. Like all of them, she was a victim of the system, trapped in a society that was awash in drugs and guns but that was bereft of compassion and commitment to high ideals. She deserved better. By the time he reached his hotel, the Westwood Marquis, Roy was in no mood to go to his room, order a late dinner from room service, and turn in for the night—which was what he’d been planning to do. He drove past the place, kept going to Sunset Boulevard, turned left, and just cruised in circles for a while. Eventually he parked at the curb two blocks from UCLA, but he didn’t switch off the engine. He clambered across the gearshift into the passenger seat, where the steering wheel would not interfere with his work. His cellular phone was fully charged. He unplugged it from the cigarette lighter. From the backseat, he retrieved an attache case. He opened it on his lap, revealing a compact computer with a built-in modem. He plugged it into the cigarette lighter and switched it on. The display screen lit. The basic menu appeared, from which he made a selection. He married the cellular phone to the modem, and then called the direct-access number that would link his terminal with the dual Cray supercomputers in the home office. In seconds, the connection was made, and the familiar security litany began with three words that appeared on his screen: WHO GOES THERE? He typed his name: ROY MIRO. YOUR IDENTIFICATION NUMBER? ROY PROVIDED IT. YOUR PERSONAL CODE PHRASE? POOH, he typed, which he had chosen as his code because it was the name of his favorite fictional character of all time, the honey-seeking and unfailingly good-natured bear. RIGHT THUMBPRINT PLEASE. A two-inch-square white box appeared in the upper-right quadrant of the blue screen. He pressed his thumb in the indicated space and waited while sensors in the monitor modeled the whorls in his skin by directing microbursts of intense light at them and then contrasting the comparative shadowiness of the troughs to the marginally more reflective ridges. After a minute, a soft beep indicated that the scanning was completed. When he lifted his thumb, a detailed black-line image of his print filled the center of the white box. After an additional thirty seconds, the print vanished from the screen; it had been digitized, transmitted by phone to the home-office computer, electronically compared to his print on file, and approved. Roy had access to considerably more sophisticated technology than the average hacker with a few thousand dollars and the address of the nearest Computer City store. Neither the electronics in his attaché case nor the software that had been installed in the machine could be purchased by the general public. A message appeared on the display: ACCESS TO MAMA IS GRANTED. Mama was the name of the home-office computer. Three thousand miles away on the East Coast, all her programs were now available for Roy’s use, through his cellular phone. A long menu appeared on the screen before him. He scrolled through, found a program titled LOCATE, and selected it. He typed in a telephone number and requested the street address at which it was located. While he waited for Mama to access phone company records and trace the listing, Roy studied the storm-lashed street. At that moment, no pedestrians or moving cars were in sight. Some houses were dark, and the lights of the others were dimmed by the seemingly eternal torrents of rain. He could almost believe that a strange, silent apocalypse had transpired, eliminating all human life on earth while leaving the works of civilization untouched. A real apocalypse was coming, he supposed. Sooner than later, a great war: nation against nation or race against race, religions clashing violently or ideology battling ideology. Humanity was drawn to turmoil and self-destruction as inevitably as the earth was drawn to complete its annual revolution of the sun. His sadness deepened. Under the telephone number on the video display, the correct name appeared. The address, however, was listed as unpublished by request of the customer. Roy instructed the home-office computer to access and search the phone company’s electronically stored installation and billing records to find the address. Such an invasion of private-sector data was illegal, of course, without a court order, but Mama was exceedingly discreet. Because all the computer systems in the national telephone network were already in Mama’s directory of previously violated entities, she was able to enter any of them virtually instantaneously, explore at will, retrieve whatever was requested, and disengage without leaving the slightest trace that she had been there; Mama was a ghost in their machines. In seconds, a Beverly Hills address appeared on the screen. He cleared the screen and then asked Mama for a street map of Beverly Hills. She supplied it after a brief hesitation. Seen in its entirety, it was too compressed to be read. Roy typed in the address that he’d been given. The computer filled the screen with the quadrant that was of interest to him, and then with a quarter of that quadrant. The house was only a couple of blocks south of Wilshire Boulevard, in the less prestigious “flats” of Beverly Hills, and easy to find. He typed POOH OUT, which disengaged his portable terminal from Mama in her cool, dry bunker in Virginia.
* * *
The large brick house—which was painted white, with hunter-green shutters—stood behind a white picket fence. The front lawn featured two enormous bare-limbed sycamores. Lights were on inside, but only at the back of the house and only on the first floor. Standing at the front door, sheltered from the rain by a deep portico supported on tall white columns, Roy could hear music inside: a Beatles number, “When I’m Sixty-four.” He was thirty-three; the Beatles were before his time, but he liked their music because much of it embodied an endearing compassion. Softly humming along with the lads from Liverpool, Roy slipped a credit card between the door and the jamb. He worked it upward until it forced open the first—and least formidable—of the two locks. He wedged the card in place to hold the simple spring latch out of the niche hi the striker plate. To open the heavy-duty deadbolt, he needed a more sophisticated tool than a credit card: a Lockaid lock-release gun, sold only to law-enforcement agencies. He slipped the thin pick of the gun into the key channel, under the pin tumblers, and pulled the trigger. The flat steel spring in the Lockaid caused the pick to jump upward and to lodge some of the pins at the shear line. He had to pull the trigger half a dozen times to fully disengage the lock. The snapping of hammer against spring and the clicking of pick against pin tumblers were not thunderous sounds, by any measure, but he was grateful for the cover provided by the music. “When I’m Sixty-four” ended as he opened the door. Before his credit card could fall, he caught it, froze, and waited for the next song. To the opening bars of “Lovely Rita,” he stepped across the threshold. He put the lock-release gun on the floor, to the right of the entrance. Quietly, he closed the door behind him. The foyer welcomed him with gloom. He stood with his back against the door, letting his eyes adjust to the shadows. When he was confident that he would not blindly knock over any furniture, he proceeded from room to room, toward the light at the back of the house. He regretted that his clothes were so saturated and his galoshes so dirty. He was probably making a mess of the carpet. She was in the kitchen, at the sink, washing a head of lettuce, her back to the swinging door through which he entered. Judging by the vegetables on the cutting board, she was preparing a salad. Easing the door shut behind him, hoping to avoid startling her, he debated whether or not to announce himself. He wanted her to know that it was a concerned friend who had come to comfort her, not a stranger with sick motives. She turned off the running water and placed the lettuce in a plastic colander to drain. Wiping her hands on a dish towel, turning away from the sink, she finally discovered him as “Lovely Rita” drew to an end. Mrs. Bettonfield looked surprised but not, in the first instant, afraid—which was, he knew, a tribute to his appealing, soft-featured face. He was slightly pudgy, with dimples, and had skin so beardless that it was almost as smooth as a boy’s. With his twinkling blue eyes and warm smile, he would make a convincing Santa Claus in another thirty years. He believed that his kindheartedness and his genuine love of people were also apparent, because strangers usually warmed to him more quickly than a merry face alone could explain. While Roy still was able to believe that her wide-eyed surprise would fade into a smile of welcome rather than a grimace of fear, he raised the Beretta 93-R and shot her twice in the chest. A silencer was screwed to the barrel; both rounds made only soft popping sounds. Penelope Bettonfield dropped to the floor and lay motionless on her side, with her hands still entangled in the dish towel. Her eyes were open, staring across the floor at his wet, dirty galoshes. The Beatles began “Good Morning, Good Morning.” It must be the Sgt. Pepper album. He crossed the kitchen, put the pistol on the counter, and crouched beside Mrs. Bettonfield. He pulled off one of his supple leather gloves and placed his fingertips to her throat, searching for a pulse in her carotid artery. She was dead. One of the two rounds was so perfectly placed that it must have pierced her heart. Consequently, with circulation halted in an instant, she had not bled much. Her death had been a graceful escape: quick and clean, painless and without fear. He pulled on his right glove again, then rubbed gently at her neck where he had touched it. Gloved, he had no concern that his fingerprints might be lifted off the body by laser technology. Precautions must be taken. Not every judge and juror would be able to grasp the purity of his motives. He closed the lid over her left eye and held it in place for a minute or so, to be sure that it would stay shut. “Sleep, dear lady,” he said with a mixture of affection and regret, as he also closed the lid over her right eye. “No more worrying about finances, no more working late, no more stress and strife. You were too good for this world.” It was both a sad and a joyous moment. Sad, because her beauty and elegance no longer brightened the world; nevermore would her smile lift anyone’s spirits; her courtesy and consideration would no longer counter the tides of barbarity washing over this troubled society. Joyous, because she would never again be afraid, spill tears, know grief, feel pain. “Good Morning, Good Morning” gave way to the marvelously bouncy, syncopated reprise of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which was better than the first rendition of the song at the start of the album and which seemed a suitably upbeat celebration of Mrs. Bettonfield’s passage to a better world. Roy pulled out one of the chairs from the kitchen table, sat, and removed his galoshes. He rolled up the damp and muddy legs of his trousers as well, determined to cause no more mess. The reprise of the album theme song was short, and by the time he got to his feet again, “A Day in the Life” had begun. That was a singularly melancholy piece, too somber to be in sync with the moment. He had to shut it off before it depressed him. He was a sensitive man, more vulnerable than most to the emotional effects of music, poetry, fine paintings, fiction, and the other arts. He found the central music system in a long wall of beautifully crafted mahogany cabinets in the study. He stopped the music and searched two drawers that were filled with compact discs. Still in the mood for the Beatles, he selected A Hard Day’s Night because none of the songs on that album were downbeat. Singing along to the title track, Roy returned to the kitchen, where he lifted Mrs. Bettonfield off the floor. She was more petite than she had seemed when he’d been talking with her through the car window. She weighed no more than a hundred and five pounds, with slender wrists, a swan neck, and delicate features. Roy was deeply touched by the woman’s fragility, and he bore her in his arms with more than mere care and respect, almost with reverence. Nudging light switches with his shoulder, he carried Penelope Bettonfield to the front of the house, upstairs, along the hallway, checking door by door until he found the master bedroom. There, he placed her gently on a chaise lounge. He folded back the quilted bedspread and then the bedclothes, revealing the bottom sheet. He plumped the pillows, which were in Egyptian-cotton shams trimmed with cut-work lace as lovely as any he had ever seen. He took off Mrs. Bettonfield’s shoes and put them in her closet. Her feet were as small as those of a girl. Leaving her fully dressed, he carried Penelope to the bed and put her down on her back, with her head elevated on two pillows. He left the spread folded at the bottom of the bed, but he drew the blanket cover, blanket, and top sheet over her breasts. Her arms remained free. With a brush that he found in the master bathroom, he smoothed her hair. The Beatles were singing “If I Fell” when he began to groom her, but they were well into “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You” by the time her lustrous auburn locks were perfectly arranged around her lovely face. After switching on the bronze floor lamp that stood beside the chaise lounge, he turned off the harsher ceiling light. Soft shadows fell across the recumbent woman, like the enfolding wings of angels who had come to carry her away from this vale of tears and into a higher land of eternal peace. He went to the Louis XVI vanity, removed its matching chair, and put it beside the bed. He sat next to Mrs. .Bettonfield, stripped off his gloves, and took one of her hands in both of his. Her flesh was cooling but still somewhat warm. He couldn’t linger for long. There was much yet to do and not a lot of time in which to do it. Nevertheless, he wanted to spend a few minutes of quality time with Mrs. Bettonfield. While the Beatles sang “And I Love Her” and “Tell Me Why,” Roy Miro tenderly held his late friend’s hand and took a moment to appreciate the exquisite furniture, the paintings, the art objects, the warm color scheme, and the array of fabrics in different but wonderfully complementary patterns and textures. “It’s so very unfair that you had to close your shop,” he told Penelope. “You were a fine interior designer. You really were, dear lady. You really were.” The Beatles sang. Rain beat upon the windows. Roy’s heart swelled with emotion.
THREE
Rocky recognized the route home. Periodically, as they passed one landmark or another, he chuffed softly with pleasure. Spencer lived in a part of Malibu that was without glamour but that had its own wild beauty. All the forty-room Mediterranean and French mansions, the ultra-modern cliff-side dwellings of tinted glass and redwood and steel, the Cape Cod cottages as large as ocean liners, the twenty-thousand-square-foot Southwest adobes with authentic lodgepole ceilings and authentic twenty-seat personal screening rooms with THX sound, were on the beaches, on the bluffs above the beaches—and inland of the Pacific Coast Highway, on hills with a view of the sea. Spencer’s place was east of any home that Architectural Digest would choose to photograph, halfway up an unfashionable and sparsely populated canyon. The two-lane blacktop was textured by patches atop patches and by numerous cracks courtesy of the earthquakes that regularly quivered through the entire coast. A pipe-and-chain-link gate, between a pair of mammoth eucalyptuses, marked the entrance to his two-hundred-yard-long gravel driveway. Wired to the gate was a rusted sign with fading red letters: DANGER / ATTACK DOG. He had fixed it there when he first purchased the place, long before Rocky had come to live with him. There had been no dog then, let alone one trained to kill. The sign was an empty threat, but effective. No one ever bothered him in his retreat. The gate was not electrically operated. He had to get out in the rain to unlock it and to relock it after he’d driven through. With only one bedroom, a living room, and a large kitchen, the structure at the end of the driveway was not a house, really, but a cabin. The cedar-clad exterior, perched on a stone foundation to foil termites, weathered to a lustrous silver gray, might have appeared shabby to an unappreciative eye; to Spencer it was beautiful and full of character in the wash of the Explorer’s headlights. The cabin was sheltered—surrounded, shrouded, encased—by a eucalyptus grove. The trees were red gums, safe from the Australian beetles that had been devouring California blue gums for more than a decade. They had not been topped since Spencer had bought the place. Beyond the grove, brush and scrub oak covered the canyon floor and the steep slopes to the ridges. Summer through autumn, leached of moisture by dry Santa Ana winds, the hills and the ravines became tinder. Twice in eight years, firefighters had ordered Spencer to evacuate, when blazes in neighboring canyons might have swept down on him as mercilessly as judgment day. Wind-driven flames could move at express-train speeds. One night they might overwhelm him in his sleep. But the beauty and privacy of the canyon justified the risk. At various times in his life, he had fought hard to stay alive, but he was not afraid to die. Sometimes he even embraced the thought of going to sleep and never waking. When fears of fire troubled him, he worried not about himself but about Rocky. That Wednesday night in February, the burning season was months away. Every tree and bush and blade of wild grass dripped rain and seemed as if it would be forever impervious to fire. The house was cold. It could be heated by a big river-rock fireplace in the living room, but each room also had its own in-wall electric heater. Spencer preferred the dancing light, the crackle, and the smell of a log fire, but he switched on the heaters because he was in a hurry. After changing from his damp clothes into a comfortable gray jogging suit and athletic socks, he brewed a pot of coffee. For Rocky, he set out a bowl of orange juice. The mutt had many peculiarities besides a taste for orange juice. For one thing, though he enjoyed going for walks during the day, he had none of a dog’s usual frisky interest in the nocturnal world, preferring to keep at least a window between himself and the night; if he had to go outside after sunset, he stayed close to Spencer and regarded the darkness with suspicion. Then there was Paul Simon. Rocky was indifferent to most music, but Simon’s voice enchanted him; if Spencer put on a Simon album, especially Graceland, Rocky would sit in front of the speakers, staring intently, or pace the floor in lazy, looping patterns—off the beat, lost in reverie—to “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” or “You Can Call Me Al.” Not a doggy thing to do. Less doggy still was his bashfulness about bodily functions, for he wouldn’t make his toilet if watched; Spencer had to turn his back before Rocky would get down to business. Sometimes Spencer thought that the dog, having suffered a hard life until two years ago and having had little reason to find joy in a canine’s place in the world, wanted to be a human being. That was a big mistake. People were more likely to live a dog’s life, in the negative sense of the phrase, than were most dogs. “Greater self-awareness,” he’d told Rocky on a night when sleep wouldn’t come, “doesn’t make a species any happier, pal. If it did, we’d have fewer psychiatrists and barrooms than you dogs have—and it’s not that way, is it?” Now, as Rocky lapped at the juice in the bowl on the kitchen floor, Spencer carried a mug of coffee to the expansive L-shaped desk in one corner of the living room. Two computers with large hard-disk capacities, a full-color laser printer, and other pieces of equipment were arrayed from one end of the work surface to the other. That corner of the living room was his office, though he had not held a real job in ten months. Since leaving the Los Angeles Police Department—where, during his last two years, he’d been on assignment to the California Multi-Agency Task Force on Computer Crime—he had spent several hours a day on-line with his own computers. Sometimes he researched subjects of interest to him, through Prodigy and GEnie. More often, however, he explored ways to gain unapproved access to private and government computers that were protected by sophisticated security programs. Once entry was achieved, he was engaged in illegal activity. He never destroyed any company’s or agency’s files, never inserted false data. Still, he was guilty of trespassing in private domains. He could live with that. He was not seeking material rewards. His compensation was knowledge—and the occasional satisfaction of righting a wrong. Like the Beckwatt case. The previous December, when a serial child molester— Henry Beckwatt—was to be released from prison after serving less than five years, the California State Parole Board had refused, in the interest of prisoners’ rights, to divulge the name of the community in which he would be residing during the term of his parole. Because Beckwatt had beaten some of his victims and expressed no remorse, his pending release raised anxiety levels in parents statewide. Taking great pains to cover his tracks, Spencer had first gained entry to the Los Angeles Police Department’s computers, stepped from there to the state attorney general’s system in Sacramento, and from there into the parole board’s computer, where he finessed the address to which Beckwatt would be paroled. Anonymous tips to a few reporters forced the parole board to delay action until a secret new placement could be worked out. During the following five weeks, Spencer exposed three more addresses for Beckwatt, shortly after each was arranged. Although officials had been in a frenzy to uncover an imagined snitch within the parole system, no one had wondered, at least not publicly, if the leak had been from their electronic-data files, sprung by a clever hacker. Finally admitting defeat, they paroled Beckwatt to an empty caretaker’s house on the grounds of San Quentin. In a couple of years, when his period of post-prison supervision ended, Beckwatt would be free to prowl again, and he would surely destroy more children psychologically if not physically. For the time being, however, he was unable to settle into a lair in the middle of a neighborhood of unsuspecting innocents. If Spencer could have discovered a way to access God’s computer, he would have tampered with Henry Beckwatt’s destiny by giving him an immediate and mortal stroke or by walking him into the path of a runaway truck. He wouldn’t have hesitated to ensure the justice that modern society, in its Freudian confusion and moral paralysis, found difficult to impose. He was not a hero, not a scarred and computer-wielding cousin of Batman, not out to save the world. Mostly, he sailed cyberspace—that eerie dimension of energy and information within computers and computer networks—simply because it fascinated him as much as Tahiti and far Tortuga fascinated some people, enticed him in the way that the moon and Mars enticed the men and women who became astronauts. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of that other dimension was the potential for exploration and discovery that it offered—without direct human interaction. When Spencer avoided computer bulletin boards and other user-to-user conversations, cyberspace was an uninhabited universe, created by human beings yet strangely devoid of them. He wandered through vast structures of data, which were infinitely more grand than the pyramids of Egypt, the ruins of ancient Rome, or the rococo hives of the world’s great cities—yet saw no human face, heard no human voice. He was Columbus without shipmates, Magellan walking alone across electronic highways and through metropolises of data as unpopulated as ghost towns in the Nevada wastelands. Now, he sat before one of his computers, switched it on, and sipped coffee while it went through its start-up procedures. These included the Norton AntiVirus program, to be sure that none of his files had been contaminated by a destructive bug during his previous venture into the national data webs. The machine was uninfected. The first telephone number that he entered was for a service offering twenty-four-hour-a-day stock market quotations. In seconds, the connection was made, and a greeting appeared on his computer screen: WELCOME TO WORLDWIDE STOCK MARKET INFORMATION, INC. Using his subscriber ID, Spencer requested information about Japanese stocks. Simultaneously he activated a parallel program that he had designed himself and that searched the open phone line for the subtle electronic signature of a listening device. Worldwide Stock Market Information was a legitimate data service, and no police agency had reason to eavesdrop on its lines; therefore, evidence of a tap would indicate that his own telephone was being monitored. Rocky padded in from the kitchen and rubbed his head against Spencer’s leg. The mutt couldn’t have finished his orange juice so quickly. He was evidently more lonely than thirsty. Keeping his attention on the video display, waiting for an alarm or an all-clear, Spencer reached down with one hand and gently scratched behind the dog’s ears. Nothing he had done as a hacker could have drawn the attention of the authorities, but caution was advisable. In recent years, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other organizations had established computer-crime divisions, all of which zealously prosecuted offenders. Sometimes they were almost criminally zealous. Like every overstaffed government agency, each computer-crime project was eager to justify its ever increasing budget. Every year a greater number of arrests and convictions was required to support the contention that electronic theft and vandalism were escalating at a frightening rate. Consequently, from time to time, hackers who had stolen nothing and who had wrought no destruction were brought to trial on flimsy charges. They weren’t prosecuted with any intention that, by their example, they would deter crime; their convictions were sought merely to create the statistics that ensured higher funding for the project. Some of them were sent to prison. Sacrifices on the altars of bureaucracy. Martyrs to the cyberspace underground. Spencer was determined never to become one of them. As the rain rattled against the cabin roof and the wind stirred a whispery chorus of lamenting ghosts from the eucalyptus grove, he waited, with his gaze fixed on the upper-right corner of the video screen. In red letters, a single word appeared: CLEAR. No taps were in operation. After logging off Worldwide Stock Market, he dialed the main computer of the California Multi-Agency Task Force on Computer Crime. He entered that system by a deeply concealed back door that he had inserted prior to resigning as second in command of the unit. Because he was accepted at the system-manager level (the highest security clearance), all functions were available to him. He could use the task force’s computer as long as he wanted, for whatever purpose he wished, and his presence wouldn’t be observed or recorded. He had no interest in their files. He used their computer only as a jumping-off point into the Los Angeles Police Department system, to which they had direct access. The irony of employing a computer-crime unit’s hardware and software to commit even a minor computer crime was appealing. It was also dangerous. Nearly everything that was fun, of course, was also a little dangerous: riding roller coasters, skydiving, gambling, sex. From the LAPD system, he entered the California Department of Motor Vehicles computer in Sacramento. He got such a kick from making those leaps that he felt almost as though he had traveled physically, teleporting from his canyon in Malibu to Los Angeles to Sacramento, in the manner of a character in a science fiction novel. Rocky jumped onto his hind legs, planted his forepaws on the edge of the desk, and peered at the computer screen. “You wouldn’t enjoy this,” Spencer said. Rocky looked at him and issued a short, soft whine. “I’m sure you’d get a lot more pleasure from chewing on that new rawhide bone I got you.” Peering at the screen again, Rocky inquisitively cocked his furry head. “Or I could put on some Paul Simon for you.” Another whine. Longer and louder than before. Sighing, Spencer pulled another chair next to his own. “All right. When a fella has a bad case of the lonelies, I guess chewing on a rawhide bone just isn’t as good as having a little company. Never works for me, anyway.” Rocky hopped into the chair, panting and grinning. Together, they went voyaging in cyberspace, plunging illegally into the galaxy of DMV records, searching for Valerie Keene. They found her in seconds. Spencer had hoped for an address different from the one he already knew, but he was disappointed. She was listed at the bungalow in Santa Monica, where he had discovered unfurnished rooms and the photo of a cockroach nailed to one wall. According to the data that scrolled up the screen, she had a Class C license, without restrictions. It would expire in a little less than four years. She had applied for the license and taken a written test in early December, two months ago. Her middle name was Ann. She was twenty-nine. Spencer had guessed twenty-five. Her driving record was free of violations. In the event that she was gravely injured and her own life could not be saved, she had authorized the donation of her vital organs. Otherwise, the DMV offered little information about her:
SEX: F HAIR: BRN EYES: BRN HT: 5-4 WT: 115
That bureaucratic thumbnail description wouldn’t be of much help when Spencer needed to describe her to someone. It was insufficient to conjure an image that included the things that truly distinguished her: the direct and clear-eyed stare, the slightly lopsided smile, the dimple in her right cheek, the delicate line of her jaw. Since last year, with federal funding from the National Crime and Terrorism Prevention Act, the California DMV had been digitizing and electronically storing photographs and thumbprints of new and renewing drivers. Eventually, there would be mug shots and prints on file for every resident with a driver’s license, though the vast majority had never been accused of a crime, let alone convicted. Spencer considered this the first step toward a national ID card, an internal passport of the type that had been required in the communist states before they had collapsed, and he was opposed to it on principle. In this instance, however, his principles didn’t prevent him from calling up the photo from Valerie’s license. The screen flickered, and she appeared. Smiling. The banshee eucalyptuses whisper-wailed complaints of eternity’s indifference, and the rain drummed, drummed. Spencer realized that he was holding his breath. He exhaled. Peripherally, he was aware of Rocky staring at him curiously, then at the screen, then at him again. He picked up the mug and sipped some black coffee. His hand was shaking. Valerie had known that authorities of one kind or another were hunting her, and she had known that they were getting close—because she had vacated her bungalow only hours before they’d come for her. If she was innocent, why would she settle for the unstable and fear-filled life of a fugitive? Putting the mug aside and his fingers to the keyboard, he asked for a hard copy of the photo on the screen. The laser printer hummed. A single sheet of white paper slid out of the machine. Valerie. Smiling. In Santa Monica, no one had called for surrender before the assault on the bungalow had begun. When the attackers burst inside, there had been no warning shouts of Police! Yet Spencer was certain that those men had been officers of one law-enforcement agency or another because of their uniformlike dress, night-vision goggles, weaponry, and military methodology. Valerie. Smiling. That soft-voiced woman with whom Spencer had talked last night at The Red Door had seemed gentle and honest, less capable of deceit than were most people. First thing, she had looked boldly at his scar and had asked about it, not with pity welling in her eyes, not with an edge of morbid curiosity in her voice, but in the same way that she might have asked where he’d bought the shirt he’d been wearing. Most people studied the scar surreptitiously and managed to speak of it, if at all, only when they realized that he was aware of their intense curiosity. Valerie’s frankness had been refreshing. When he’d told her only that he’d been in an accident when he was a child, Valerie had sensed that he either didn’t want or wasn’t able to talk about it, and she had dropped the subject as if it mattered no more than his hairstyle. Thereafter, he never caught her gaze straying to the pallid brand on his face; more important, he never had the feeling that she was struggling not to look. She found other things about him more interesting than that pale welt from ear to chin. Valerie. In black and white. He could not believe that this woman was capable of committing a major crime, and certainly not one so heinous that a SWAT team would come after her in utmost silence, with submachine guns and every high-tech advantage. She might be traveling with someone dangerous. Spencer doubted that. He reviewed the few clues: one set of dinnerware, one drinking glass, one set of stainless steel flatware, an air mattress adequate for one but too small for two. Yet the possibility remained: She might not be alone, and the person with her might rate the extreme caution of the SWAT team. The photo, printed from the computer screen, was too dark to do her justice. Spencer directed the laser printer to produce another, just a shade lighter than the first. That printout was better, and he asked for five more copies. Until he held her likeness in his hands, Spencer had not been consciously aware that he was going to follow Valerie Keene wherever she had gone, find her, and help her. Regardless of what she might have done, even if she was guilty of a crime, regardless of the cost to himself, whether or not she could ever care for him, Spencer was going to stand with this woman against whatever darkness she faced. As he realized the deeper implications of the commitment that he was making, a chill of wonder shivered him, for until that moment he had thought of himself as a thoroughly modern man who believed in no one and nothing, neither in God Almighty nor in himself. Softly, touched by awe and unable fully to understand his own motivations, he said, “I’ll be damned.” The dog sneezed.
FOUR
By the time the Beatles were singing “I’ll Cry Instead,” Roy Miro detected a cooling in the dead woman’s hand that began to seep into his own flesh. He let go of her and put on his gloves. He wiped her hands with one comer of the top sheet to smear any oils from his own skin that might have left the patterns of his fingertips. Filled with conflicting emotions—grief at the death of a good woman, joy at her release from a world of pain and disappointment—he went downstairs to the kitchen. He wanted to be in a position to hear the automatic garage door when Penelope’s husband came home. A few spots of blood had congealed on the tile floor. Roy used paper towels and a spray bottle of Fantastik, which he found in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, to clean away the mess. After he wiped up the dirty prints of his galoshes as well, he noticed that the stainless steel sink wasn’t as well kept as it could have been, and he scrubbed until it was spotless. The window in the microwave was smeared. It sparkled when he was done with it. By the time the Beatles were halfway through “I’ll Be Back” and Roy had wiped down the front of the Sub-Zero refrigerator, the garage door rumbled upward. He threw the used paper towels into the trash compactor, put away the Fantastik, and retrieved the Beretta that he had left on the counter after delivering Penelope from her suffering. The kitchen and garage were separated only by a small laundry room. He turned to that closed door. The rumble of the car engine echoed off the garage walls as Sam Bettonfield drove inside. The engine cut off. The big door clattered and creaked as it rolled down behind the car. Home from the accountant wars at last. Weary of working late, crunching numbers. Weary of paying high office rents in Century City, trying to stay afloat in a system that valued money more than people. In the garage, a car door slammed. Burned out from the stress of life in a city that was riddled with injustice and at war with itself, Sam would be looking forward to a drink, a kiss from Penelope, a late dinner, perhaps an hour of television. Those simple pleasures and eight hours of restful sleep constituted the poor man’s only respite from his greedy and demanding clients—and his sleep was likely to be tormented by bad dreams. Roy had something better to offer. Blessed escape. The sound of a key in the lock between the garage and the house, the clack of the deadbolt, a door opening: Sam entered the laundry. Roy raised the Beretta as the inner door opened. Wearing a raincoat, carrying a briefcase, Sam stepped into the kitchen. He was a balding man with quick dark eyes. He looked startled but sounded at ease. “You must have the wrong house.” Eyes misting with tears, Roy said, “I know what you’re going through,” and he squeezed off three quick shots. Sam was not a large man, perhaps fifty pounds heavier than his wife. Nevertheless, getting him upstairs to the bedroom, wrestling him out of his raincoat, pulling off his shoes, and hoisting him into bed was not easy. When the task had been accomplished, Roy felt good about himself because he knew that he had done the right thing by placing Sam and Penelope together and in dignified circumstances. He pulled the bedclothes over Sam’s chest. The top sheet was trimmed with cut-work lace to match the pillow shams, so the dead couple appeared to be dressed in fancy surplices of the sort that angels might wear. The Beatles had stopped singing a while ago. Outside, the soft and somber sound of the rain was as cold as the city that received it—as relentless as the passage of time and the fading of all light. Though he had done a caring thing, and though there was joy in the end of these people’s suffering, Roy was sad. It was a strangely sweet sadness, and the tears that it wrung from him were cleansing. Eventually he went downstairs to clean up the few drops of Sam’s blood that spotted the kitchen floor. He found the vacuum cleaner in the big closet under the stairs, and he swept away the dirt that he had tracked on the carpet when he’d first come into the house. In Penelope’s purse, he searched for the business card that he had given her. The name on it was phony, but he retrieved it anyway. Finally, using the telephone in the study, he dialed 911. When a policewoman answered, Roy said, “It’s very sad here. It’s very sad. Someone should come right away.” He did not return the handset to the cradle, but put it down on the desk, leaving the line open. The Bettonfields’ address should have appeared on a computer screen in front of the policewoman who had answered the call, but Roy didn’t want to take a chance that Sam and Penelope might be there for hours or even days before they were found. They were good people and did not deserve the indignity of being discovered stiff, gray, and reeking of decomposition. He carried his galoshes and shoes to the front door, where he quickly put them on again. He remembered to pick up the lock-release gun from the foyer floor. He walked through the rain to his car and drove away from there. According to his watch, the time was twenty minutes past ten. Although it was three hours later on the East Coast, Roy was sure that his contact in Virginia would be waiting. At the first red traffic light, he popped open the attaché case on the passenger seat. He plugged in the computer, which was still married to the cellular phone; he didn’t separate the devices because he needed both. With a few quick keystrokes, he set up the cellular unit to respond to preprogrammed vocal instructions and to function as a speakerphone, which freed both his hands for driving. As the traffic light turned green, he crossed the intersection and made the long-distance call by saying, “Please connect,” and then reciting the number in Virginia. After the second ring, the familiar voice of Thomas Summerton came down the line, recognizable by a single word, as smooth and as southern as pecan butter. “Hello?” Roy said, “May I speak to Jerry, please?” “Sorry, wrong number.” Summerton hung up. Roy terminated the resultant dial tone by saying: “Please disconnect now.” In ten minutes, Summerton would call back from a secure phone, and they could speak freely without fear of being recorded. Roy drove past the glitzy shops on Rodeo Drive to Santa Monica Boulevard, and then west into residential streets. Large, expensive houses stood among huge trees, palaces of privilege that he found offensive. When the phone rang, he didn’t reach for the keypad but said, “Please accept call.” The connection was made with an audible click. “Please scramble now,” Roy said. The computer beeped to indicate that everything he said would be rendered unintelligible to anyone between him and Summerton. As it was transmitted, their speech would be broken into small pieces of sound and rearranged by a randomlike control factor. Both phones were synchronized with the same control factor, so the meaningless streams of transmitted sound would be reassembled into intelligible speech when received. “I’ve seen the early report on Santa Monica,” Summerton said. “According to neighbors, she was there this morning. But she must’ve skipped by the time we set up surveillance this afternoon.” “What tipped her off?” “I swear she has a sixth sense about us.” Roy turned west on Sunset Boulevard, joining the heavy flow of traffic that gilded the wet pavement with headlight beams. “You heard about the man who showed up?” “And got away.” “We weren’t sloppy.” “So he was just lucky?” “No. Worse than that. He knew what he was doing.” “You saying he’s somebody with a history?” “Yeah.” “Local, state, or federal history?” “He took out a team member, neat as you please.” “So he’s had a few lessons beyond the local level.” Roy turned right off Sunset Boulevard onto a less traveled street, where mansions were hidden behind walls, high hedges, and wind-tossed trees. “If we’re able to chase him down, what’s our priority with him?” Summerton considered for a moment before he spoke. “Find out who he is, who he’s working for.” “Then detain him?” “No. Too much is at stake. Make him disappear.” The serpentine streets wound through the wooded hills, among secluded estates, overhung by dripping branches, through blind turn after blind turn. Roy said, “Does this change our priority with the woman?” “No. Whack her on sight. Anything else happening at your end?” Roy thought of Mr. and Mrs. Bettonfield, but he didn’t mention them. The extreme kindness he had extended to them had nothing to do with his job, and Summerton would not understand. Instead, Roy said, “She left something for us.” Summerton said nothing, perhaps because he intuited what the woman had left. Roy said, “A photo of a cockroach, nailed to the wall.” “Whack her hard,” Summerton said, and he hung up. As Roy followed a long curve under drooping magnolia boughs, past a wrought-iron fence beyond which a replica of Tara stood spotlighted in the rain-swept darkness, he said, “Cease scrambling.” The computer beeped to indicate compliance. “Please connect,” he said, and recited the telephone number that would bring him into Mama’s arms. The video display flickered. When Roy glanced at the screen, he saw the opening question: WHO GOES THERE? Though the phone would react to vocal commands, Mama would not; therefore, Roy pulled off the narrow road and stopped in a driveway, before a pair of nine-foot-high wrought-iron gates, to type in his responses to the security interrogation. After the transmission of his thumbprint, he was granted access to Mama in Virginia. From her basic menu, he chose FIELD OFFICES. From that submenu, he chose LOS ANGELES, and he was thereby connected to the largest of Mama’s babies on the West Coast. He went through a few menus in the Los Angeles computer until he arrived at the files of the photo-analysis department. The file that interested him was currently in play, as he knew it would be, and he tapped in to observe. The screen of his portable computer went to black and white, and then it filled with a photograph of a man’s head from the neck up. His face was half turned away from the camera, dappled with shadows, blurred by a curtain of rain. Roy was disappointed. He had hoped for a clearer picture. This was dismayingly like an impressionist painting: in general, recognizable; in specific, mysterious. Earlier in the evening, in Santa Monica, the surveillance team had taken photographs of the stranger who had gone into the bungalow minutes prior to the SWAT team assault. The night, the heavy rain, and the overgrown trees that prevented the streetlamps from casting much light on the sidewalk—all conspired to make it difficult to get a clear look at the man. Furthermore, they had not been expecting him, had thought that he was only an ordinary pedestrian who would pass by, and had been unpleasantly surprised when he’d turned in at the woman’s house. Consequently, they had gotten precious few shots, none of quality, and none that revealed the full face of the mystery man, though the camera had been equipped with a telephoto lens. The best of the photographs already had been scanned into the local-office computer, where it was being processed by an enhancement program. The computer would attempt to identify rain distortion and eliminate it. Then it would gradually lighten all areas of the shot uniformly, until it was able to identify biological structures in the deepest shadows that fell across the face; employing its extensive knowledge of human skull formation—with an enormous catalogue of the variations that occurred between the sexes, among the races, and among age groups—the computer would interpret the structures it glimpsed and develop them on a best-guess basis. The process was laborious even at the lightning speed with which the program operated. Any photograph could ultimately be broken down into tiny dots of light and shadow called pixels: puzzle pieces that were identically shaped but varied subtly in texture and shading. Every one of the hundreds of thousands of pixels in this photograph had to be analyzed, to decipher not merely what it represented but what its undistorted relationship was to each of the many pixels surrounding it, which meant that the computer had to make hundreds of millions of comparisons and decisions in order to clarify the image. Even then, there was no guarantee that the face finally rising from the murk would be an entirely accurate depiction of the man who had been photographed. Any analysis of this kind was as much an art—or guesswork—as it was a reliable technological process. Roy had seen instances in which a computer-enhanced portrait was as off the mark as any amateur artist’s paint-by-the-numbers canvas of the Arc de Triomphe or of Manhattan at twilight. However, the face that they eventually got from the computer most likely would be so close to the man’s true appearance as to be an exact likeness. Now, as the computer made decisions and adjusted thousands of pixels, the image on the video display rippled from left to right. Still disappointing. Although changes had occurred, their effect was imperceptible. Roy was unable to see how the man’s face was any different from what it had been before the adjustment. For the next several hours, the image on the screen would ripple every six to ten seconds. The cumulative effect could be appreciated only by checking it at widely spaced intervals. Roy backed out of the driveway, leaving the computer plugged in and the VDT angled toward him. For a while he chased his headlights up and down hills, around blind turns, searching for a way out of the folded darkness, where the tree-filtered lights of cloistered mansions hinted at mysterious lives of wealth and power beyond his understanding. From time to time, he glanced at the computer screen. The rippling face. Half averted. Shadowy and strange. When at last he found Sunset Boulevard again and then the lower streets of Westwood, not far from his hotel, he was relieved to be back among people who were more like himself than those who lived in the monied hills. In the lower lands, the citizens knew suffering and uncertainty; they were people whose lives he could affect for the better, people to whom he could bring a measure of justice and mercy—one way or another. The face on the computer screen was still that of a phantom, amorphous and possibly malignant. The face of chaos. The stranger was a man who, like the fugitive woman, stood in the way of order, stability, and justice. He might be evil or merely troubled and confused. In the end, it didn’t matter which. “I’ll give you peace,” Roy Miro promised, glancing at the slowly mutating face on the video display terminal. “I’ll find you and give you peace.”
FIVE
While hooves of rain beat across the roof, while the troll-deep voice of the wind grumbled at the windows, and while the dog lay curled and dozing on the adjacent chair, Spencer used his computer expertise to try to build a file on Valerie, Keene. According to the records of the Department of Motor Vehicles, the driver’s license for which she’d applied had been her first, not a renewal, and to get it, she had supplied a Social Security card as proof of identity. The DMV had verified that her name and number were indeed paired in the Social Security Administration’s files. That gave Spencer four indices with which to locate her in other databases where she was likely to appear: name, date of birth, driver’s license number, and Social Security number. Learning more about her should be a snap. Last year, with much patience and cunning, he’d made a game of getting into all the major nationwide credit-reporting agencies—like TRW—which were among the most secure of all systems. Now, he wormed into the largest of those apples again, seeking Valerie Ann Keene. Their files included forty-two women by that name, fifty-nine when the surname was spelled either “Keene” or “Keane,” and sixty-four when a third spelling—”Keen”— was added. Spencer entered her Social Security number, expecting to winnow away sixty-three of the sixty-four, but none had the same number as that in the DMV records. Frowning at the screen, he entered Valerie’s birthday and asked the system to locate her with that. One of the sixty-four Valeries was born on the same day of the same month as the woman whom he was hunting—but twenty years earlier. With the dog snoring beside him, he entered the driver’s license number and waited while the system cross-checked the Valeries. Of those who were licensed drivers, five were in California, but none had a number that matched hers. Another dead end. Convinced that mistakes must have been made in the data entries, Spencer examined the file for each of the five California Valeries, looking for a driver’s license or date of birth that was one number different from the information he had gotten out of the DMV. He was sure he would discover that a data-entry clerk had typed a six when a nine was required or had transposed two numbers. Nothing. No mistakes. And judging by the information in each file, none of those women could possibly be the right Valerie. Incredibly, the Valerie Ann Keene who had recently worked at The Red Door was absent from credit-agency files, utterly without a credit history. That was possible only if she had never purchased anything on time payments, had never possessed a credit card of any kind, had never opened a checking or savings account, and had never been the subject of a background check by an employer or landlord. To be twenty-nine years old without acquiring a credit history in modern America, she would have to have been a Gypsy or a jobless vagrant most of her life, at least since she’d been a teenager. Manifestly she had not been any such thing. Okay. Think. The raid on her bungalow meant one kind of police agency or another was after her. So she must be a wanted felon with a criminal record. Spencer returned along electronic freeways to the Los Angeles Police Department computer, through which he searched city, county, and state court records to see if anyone by the name of Valerie Ann Keene had ever been convicted of a crime or had an outstanding arrest warrant in those jurisdictions. The city system flashed NEGATIVE on the video screen. NO FILE, reported the county. NOT FOUND, said the state. Nothing, nada, zero, zip. Using the LAPD’s electronic information-sharing arrangement with the FBI, he accessed the Washington-based Justice Department files of people convicted of federal offenses. She wasn’t included in those, either. In addition to its famous ten-most-wanted list, the FBI was, at any given time, seeking hundreds of other people related to criminal investigations — either suspects or potential witnesses. Spencer inquired if her name appeared on any of those lists, but it did not. She was a woman without a past. Yet something that she’d done had made her a wanted woman. Desperately wanted.
* * *
Spencer did not get to bed until ten minutes past one o’clock in the morning. Although he was exhausted, and although the rhythm of the rain should have served as a sedative, he couldn’t sleep. He lay on his back, staring alternately at the shadowy ceiling and at the thrashing foliage of the trees beyond the window, listening to the meaningless monologue of the blustery wind. At first he could think of nothing but the woman. The look of her. Those eyes. That voice. That smile. The mystery. In time, however, his thoughts drifted to the past, as they did too often, too easily. For him, reminiscence was a highway with one destination: that certain summer night when he was fourteen, when a dark world became darker, when everything he knew was proved false, when hope died and a dread of destiny became his constant companion, when he awakened to the cry of a persistent owl whose single inquiry thereafter became the central question of his own life. Rocky, who was usually so well attuned to his master’s moods, was still restlessly pacing; he seemed to be unaware that Spencer was sinking into the quiet anguish of stubborn memory and that he needed company. The dog didn’t respond to his name when called. In the gloom, Rocky padded restlessly back and forth between the open bedroom door (where he stood on the threshold and listened to the storm that huffed in the fireplace chimney) and the bedroom window (where he put his forepaws upon the sill and stared out at the rampage of the wind through the eucalyptus grove). Although he neither whined nor grumbled, he had about him an air of anxiety, as if the bad weather had blown an unwanted memory out of his own past, leaving him bedeviled and unable to regain the peace he had known while dozing on the chair in the living room. “Here, boy,” Spencer said softly. “Come here.” Unheeding, the dog padded to the door, a shadow among shadows. Tuesday evening, Spencer had gone to The Red Door to talk about a night in July, sixteen years past. Instead, he met Valerie Keene and, to his surprise, talked of other things. That distant July, however, still haunted him. “Rocky, come here.” Spencer patted the mattress. A minute or so of further encouragement finally brought the dog onto the bed. Rocky lay with his head on Spencer’s chest, shivering at first but quickly soothed by his master’s hand. One ear up, one ear down, he was attentive to the story that he’d heard on countless nights like this, when he was the entire audience, and on nights when he accompanied Spencer into barrooms, where drinks were bought for strangers who would listen in an alcoholic haze. “I was fourteen,” Spencer began. “It was the middle of July, and the night was warm, humid. I was asleep under just one sheet, with my bedroom window open so the air could circulate. I remember . . . I was dreaming about my mother, who’d been dead more than six years by then, but I can’t remember anything that happened in the dream, only the warmth of it, the contentment, the comfort of being with her . . . and maybe the music of her laughter. She had a wonderful laugh. But it was another sound that woke me, not because it was loud but because it was recurring—so hollow and strange. I sat up in bed, confused, half drugged with sleep, but not frightened at all. I heard someone asking ‘Who?’ again and again. There would be a pause, silence, but then it would repeat as before: ‘Who, who, who?’ Of course, as I came all the way awake, I realized it was an owl perched on the roof, just above my open window.” Spencer was again drawn to that distant July night, like an asteroid captured by the greater gravity of the earth and doomed to a declining orbit that would end in impact.
. . . it’s an owl perched on the roof, just above my open window, calling out in the night for whatever reason owls call out. In the humid dark, I get up from my bed and go to the bathroom, expecting the hooting to stop when the hungry owl takes wing and goes hunting for mice again. But even after I return to bed, he seems to be content on the roof and pleased by his one-word, one-note song. Finally, I go to the open window and quietly slide up the double-hung screen, trying not to startle him into flight. But when I lean outside, turning my ‘head to look up, half expecting to see his talons hooked over the shingles and curled in toward the eaves, another and far different cry arises before I can say “Shoo” or the owl can ask “Who.” This new sound is thin and bleak, a fragile wail of terror from a far place in the summer night. I look out toward the bam, which stands two hundred yards behind the house, toward the moonlit fields beyond the barn, toward the wooded hills beyond the fields. The cry comes again, shorter this time, but even more pathetic and therefore more piercing. Having lived in the country since the day I was born, I know that nature is one great killing ground, governed by the cruelest of all laws—the law of natural selection—and ruled by the ruthless. Many nights, I’ve heard the eerie, quavery yawling of coyote packs chasing prey and celebrating slaughter. The triumphant shriek of a mountain lion after it has torn the life out of a rabbit sometimes echoes out of the highlands, a sound which makes it easy to believe that Hell is real and that the damned have flung open the gates. This cry that catches my attention as I lean out the window—and that silences the owl on the roof—comes not from a predator but from prey. It’s the voice of something weak, vulnerable. The forests and fields are filled with timid and meek creatures, which live only to perish violently, which do so every hour of every day without surcease, whose terror may actually be noticed by a god who knows of every sparrow’s fall but seems unmoved. Suddenly the night is profoundly quiet, uncannily still, as if the distant bleat of fear was, in fact, the sound of creation’s engines grinding to a halt. The stars are hard points of light that have stopped twinkling, and the moon might well be painted on canvas. The landscape—trees, shrubs, summer flowers, fields, hills, and far mountains—appears to be nothing but crystalized shadows in various dark hues, as brittle as ice. The air must still be warm, but I am nonetheless frigid. I quietly close the window, turn away from it, and move toward the bed again. I feel heavy-eyed, wearier than I’ve ever been. But then I realize that I’m in a strange state of denial, that my weariness is less physical than psychological, that I desire sleep more than I really need it Sleep is an escape. From fear. I’m shaking but not because I’m cold. The air is as warm as it was earlier. I’m shaking with fear. Fear of what? I can’t quite identify the source of my anxiety. I know that the thing I heard was no ordinary wild cry. It reverberates in my mind, an icy sound that recalls something I’ve heard once before, although I can’t remember what, when, where. The longer the forlorn wail echoes in my memory, the faster my heart beats. I desperately want to lie down, forget the cry, the night, the owl and his question, but I know I can’t sleep. I’m wearing only briefs, so I quickly pull on a pair of jeans. Now that I’m committed to act, denial and sleep have no attraction for me. In fact, I’m in the grip of an urgency at least as strange as the previous denial. Bare-chested and barefoot, I’m drawn out of my bedroom by intense curiosity, by the sense of post-midnight adventure that all boys share— and by a terrible truth, which I don’t yet know that I know. Beyond my door, the house is cool, because my room is the only one not air-conditioned. For several summers, I’ve dosed the vents against that chill flow because I prefer the benefits of fresh air even on a humid July night . . . and because, for some years, I’ve been unable to sleep with the hiss and hum that the icy air makes as it rushes through the ductwork and seethes through the vanes in the vent grille. I’ve long been afraid that this incessant if subtle noise will mask some other sound in the night that I must hear in order to survive. I have no idea what that other sound would be. It’s a groundless and childish fear, and I’m embarrassed by it. Yet it dictates my sleeping habits. The upstairs hallway is silvered with moonlight, which streams through a pair of skylights. Here and there along both walls, the polished-pine floor glimmers softly. Down the middle of the hall is an intricately patterned Persian runner, in which the curved and curled and undulant shapes absorb the radiance of the full moon and glow dimly with it: Hundreds of pale, luminous coelenterate forms seem to be not immediately under my feet but well below me, as if I am not on a carpet but am walking Christlike on the surface of a tidepool while gazing down at the mysterious denizens at the bottom. I pass my father’s room. The door is closed. I reach the head of the stairs, where I hesitate. The house is silent. I descend the stairs, quaking, rubbing my bare arms with my hands, wondering at my inexplicable fear. Perhaps even at that moment, I dimly realize that I am going down to a place from which I’ll never again quite be able to ascend. . . .
With the dog as his confessor, Spencer spun his story all the way through that long-ago night, to the hidden door, to the secret place, to the beating heart of the nightmare. As he recounted the experience, step by barefoot step, his voice faded to a whisper. When he finished, he was in a temporary state of grace that would burn away with the coming of the dawn, but it was even sweeter for being so tenuous and brief. Purged, he was at last able to close his eyes and know that dreamless sleep would come to him. In the morning he would begin to search for the woman. He had the uneasy feeling that he was walking into a living hell to rival the one that he had so often described to the patient dog. He could do nothing else. Only one acceptable road lay ahead of him, and he was compelled to follow it. Now sleep. Rain washed the world, and its susurration was the sound of absolution—though some stains could never be permanently removed.
SIX
In the morning, Spencer had a few tiny bruises and red marks on his face and hands, from the sting-grenade pellets. Compared with his scar, they would draw no comments. For breakfast, he had English muffins and coffee at his desk in the living room while he hacked into the county tax collector’s computer. He discovered that the bungalow in Santa Monica, where Valerie had been living until the previous day, was owned by the Louis and Mae Lee Family Trust. Property tax bills were mailed in care of something called China Dream, in West Hollywood. Out of curiosity, he requested a list of other properties—if any—owned by that trust. There were fourteen: five more homes in Santa Monica; a pair of eight-unit apartment buildings in Westwood; three single-family homes in Bel Air; and four adjacent commercial buildings in West Hollywood, including the address for China Dream. Louis and Mae Lee had done all right for themselves. After switching off the computer, Spencer stared at the blank screen and finished his coffee. It was bitter. He drank it anyway. By ten o’clock, he and Rocky were heading south on the Pacific Coast Highway. Traffic passed him at every opportunity, because he obeyed the speed limit. The storm had moved east during the night, taking every cloud with it. The morning sun was white, and in its hard light, the westward-tilting shadows had edges as sharp as steel blades. The Pacific was bottle green and slate gray. Spencer tuned the radio to an all-news station. He hoped to hear a story about the SWAT-team raid the night before and to learn who had been in charge of it and why Valerie was wanted. The news reader informed him that taxes were going up again. The economy was slipping deeper into recession. The government was further restricting gun ownership and television violence. Robbery, rape, and homicide rates were at all-time highs. The Chinese were accusing us of possessing “orbiting laser death rays,” and we were accusing them of the same. Some people believed that the world would end in fire; others said ice; both were testifying before Congress on behalf of competing legislative agendas designed to save the world. When he found himself listening to a story about a dog show that was being picketed by protesters who were demanding an end to selective breeding and to the “exploitation of animal beauty in an exhibitionistic performance no less repugnant than the degrading of young women in topless bars,” Spencer knew that there would be no report of the incident at the bungalow in Santa Monica. Surely a SWAT-team operation would rate higher on any reporter’s agenda than unseemly displays of canine comeliness. Either the media had found nothing newsworthy in an assault on a private home by cops with machine guns—or the agency conducting the operation had done a first-rate job of misdirecting the press. They had turned what should have been a public spectacle into what amounted to a covert action. He switched off the radio and entered the Santa Monica Freeway. East by northeast, in the lower hills, the China Dream awaited them. To Rocky, he said, “What’s your opinion of this dog-show thing?” Rocky looked at him curiously. “You’re a dog, after all. You must have an opinion. These are your people being exploited.” Either he was a dog of extreme circumspection when it came to discussing current affairs or he was just a carefree, culturally disengaged mutt with no positions on the weightiest social issues of his time and species. “I would hate to think,” Spencer said, “that you are a dropout, resigned to the status of a lumpen mammal, unconcerned about being exploited, all fur and no fury.” Rocky peered forward at the highway again. “Aren’t you outraged that purebred females are forbidden to have sex with mongrels like you, forced to submit only to purebred males? Just to make puppies destined for the degradation of showrings?” The mutt’s tail thumped against the passenger door. “Good dog.” Spencer held the steering wheel with his left hand and petted Rocky with his right. The dog submitted with pleasure. Thump-thump went the tail. “A good, accepting dog. You don’t even think it’s strange that your master talks to himself.” They exited the freeway at Robertson Boulevard and drove toward the fabled hills. After the night of rain and wind, the sprawling metropolis was as free of smog as the seacoast from which they had traveled. The palms, ficuses, magnolias, and early-blooming bottlebrush trees with red flowers were so green and gleaming that they appeared to have been hand-polished, leaf by leaf, frond by frond. The streets were washed clean, the glass walls of the tall buildings sparkled in the sunshine, birds wheeled across the piercingly blue sky, and it was easy to be deceived into believing that all was right with the world.
