Dark Rivers of the Heart (20 page)

The owl vanishes.

The night remains.

I rise to my feet.

I creep toward the van, powerfully drawn by the mystery of it, by the promise of adventure. And by a terrible truth, which I don’t yet know that I know.

The sound of the owl’s wings, though so recent and frightening, doesn’t remain with me. But that pitiful cry, heard at the open window, echoes unrelentingly in my memory. Perhaps I’m beginning to acknowledge that it wasn’t the plaint of any wild animal meeting its end in the fields and forests, but the wretched and desperate plea of a human being in the grip of extreme terror….

In the Explorer, speeding across the moonlit Mojave, wingless but now as wise as any owl, Spencer followed insistent memory all the way into the heart of darkness, to the flash of steel from out of shadows, to the sudden pain and the scent of hot blood, to the wound that would become his scar, forcing himself toward the ultimate revelation that always eluded him.

It eluded him again.

He could recall nothing of what happened in the final moments of that hellish, long-ago encounter, after he pulled the trigger of the revolver and returned to the slaughterhouse. The police had told him how it must have ended. He had read accounts of what he’d done, by writers who based their articles and books upon the evidence. But none of them had been there. They couldn’t know the truth beyond a doubt. Only he had been there. Up to a point, his memories were so vivid as to be profoundly tormenting, but memory ended at a black hole of amnesia; after sixteen years, he’d still not been able to focus even one beam of light into that darkness.

If he ever recalled the rest, he might earn lasting peace. Or remembrance might destroy him. In that black tunnel of amnesia, he might find a shame with which he could not live, and the memory might be less desirable than a self-administered bullet to the brain.

Nevertheless, by periodically unburdening himself of everything that he
did
remember, he always found temporary relief from anguish. He found it again in the Mojave Desert, at fifty-five miles an hour.

When Spencer glanced at Rocky, he saw that the dog was curled on the other seat, dozing. The mutt’s position seemed awkward, if not precarious, with his tail dangling down into the leg space under the dashboard, but he was evidently comfortable.

Spencer supposed that the rhythms of his speech and the tone of his voice, after countless repetitions of his story over the years, had become soporific whenever he turned to that subject. The poor dog couldn’t have stayed awake even if they’d been in a thunderstorm.

Or perhaps, for some time, he had not actually been talking aloud. Perhaps his soliloquy had early faded to a whisper and then into silence while he continued to speak only with an inner voice. The identity of his confessor didn’t matter—a dog was as acceptable as a stranger in a barroom—so it followed that it was not important to him if his confessor listened. Having a willing listener was merely an excuse to talk
himself
through it once more, in search of temporary absolution or—if he could shine a light into that final darkness—a permanent peace of one kind or another.

He was fifty miles from Vegas.

Windblown tumbleweeds as big as wheelbarrows rolled across the highway, through his headlight beams, from nowhere to nowhere.

The clear, dry desert air did little to inhibit his view of the universe. Millions of stars blazed from horizon to horizon, beautiful but cold, alluring but unreachable, shedding surprisingly little light on the alkaline plains that flanked the highway—and, for all their grandeur, revealing nothing.

When Roy Miro woke in his Westwood hotel room, the digital clock on the nightstand read 4:19. He had slept less than five hours, but he felt rested, so he switched on the lamp.

He threw back the covers, sat on the edge of the bed in his pajamas, squinted as his eyes adjusted to the brightness—then smiled at the Tupperware container that stood beside the clock. The plastic was translucent, so he could see only a vague shape within.

He put the container on his lap and removed the lid. Guinevere’s hand. He felt blessed to possess an object of such great beauty.

How sad, however, that its ravishing splendor wouldn’t last much longer. In twenty-four hours, if not sooner, the hand would have deteriorated visibly. Its comeliness would be but a memory.

Already it had undergone a color change. Fortunately, a certain chalkiness only emphasized the exquisite bone structure in the long, elegantly tapered fingers.

Reluctantly, Roy replaced the lid, made sure the seal was tight, and put the container aside.

He went into the living room of the two-room suite. His attaché case computer and cellular phone were already connected, plugged in, and arranged on a luncheon table by a large window.

Soon he was in touch with Mama. He requested the results of the investigation that he’d asked her to undertake the previous evening, when he and his men had discovered that the DMV address for Spencer Grant was an uninhabited oil field.

He had been so furious then.

He was calm now. Cool. In control.

Reading Mama’s report from the screen, tapping the
PAGE DOWN
key each time he wanted to continue, Roy quickly saw that the search for Spencer Grant’s true address hadn’t been easy.

During Grant’s months with the California Multi-Agency Task Force on Computer Crime, he’d learned a lot about the nationwide Infonet and the vulnerabilities of the thousands of computer systems it comprised. Evidently, he had acquired codes-and-procedures books and master programming atlases for the computer systems of various telephone companies, credit agencies, and government offices. Then he must have managed to carry or electronically transmit them from the task-force offices to his own computer.

After quitting his job, he had erased every reference to his whereabouts from public and private records. His name appeared only in his military, DMV, Social Security, and police department files, and in every case the given address was one of the two that had already proved to be false. The national file of the Internal Revenue Service contained other men with his name; however, none was his age, had his Social Security number, lived in California, or had paid withholding taxes as an employee of the LAPD. Grant was missing, as well, from the records of the State of California tax authorities.

If nothing else, he was apparently a tax evader. Roy hated tax evaders. They were the epitome of social irresponsibility.

According to Mama, no utility company currently billed Spencer Grant—yet no matter where he lived, he needed electricity, water, telephone, garbage pickup, and probably natural gas. Even if he had erased his name from billing lists to avoid paying for utilities, he couldn’t exit their
service
records without triggering disconnection of essential services. Yet he could not be found.

Mama assumed two possibilities. First: Grant was honest enough to pay for utilities; however, he altered the companies’ billing and service records to transfer his accounts to a false name that he had created for himself. The sole purpose of those actions would be to further his apparent goal of disappearing from public record, making himself hard to find if any police agency or governmental body wanted to talk to him. Like now. Or, second: He was dishonest, eliminating himself from billing records, paying for nothing—while maintaining service under a false name. In either case, he and his address were
somewhere
in those companies’ files, under the name that was his secret identity; he could be located if his alias could be uncovered.

Roy froze Mama’s report and returned to the bedroom to get the envelope that contained the computer-projected portrait of Spencer Grant. This man was an unusually crafty adversary. Roy wanted to have the clever bastard’s face for reference while reading about him.

At the computer again, he paged forward in the report.

Mama had been unable to find an account for Spencer Grant at any bank or savings and loan association. Either he paid for everything with cash, or he maintained accounts under an alias. Probably the former. There was unmistakable paranoia in this man’s actions, so he wouldn’t trust his funds in a bank under any circumstances.

Roy glanced at the portrait beside the computer. Grant’s eyes
did
look strange. Feverish. No doubt about it. A trace of madness in his eyes. Maybe even more than a trace.

Because Grant might have formed an S-chapter corporation through which he did his banking and bill paying, Mama had searched the files of the California Secretary of the Treasury and various regulatory bodies, seeking his name as a registered corporate officer. Nothing.

Every bank account had to be tied to a Social Security number, so Mama looked for a savings or checking account with Grant’s number, regardless of the name under which the money was deposited. Nothing.

He might own the home in which he lived, so Mama had checked property tax records in the counties that Roy targeted. Nothing. If he
did
own a home, he held title under a false name.

Another hope: If Grant had ever taken a university class or been a hospital patient, he might not have remembered that he’d supplied his home address on applications and admissions forms, and he might not have deleted them. Most educational and medical institutions were regulated by federal laws; therefore, their records were accessible to numerous government agencies. Considering the number of such institutions even in a limited geographical area, Mama needed the patience of a saint or a machine, the latter of which she possessed. And for all her efforts, she found nothing.

Roy glanced at the portrait of Spencer Grant. He was beginning to think that this man was not merely mentally disturbed, but something far darker than that. An actively
evil
person. Anyone this obsessed with his privacy was surely an enemy of the people.

Chilled, Roy returned his attention to the computer.

When Mama undertook a search as extensive as the one that Roy had requested of her and when that search was fruitless, she didn’t give up. She was programmed to apply her spare logic circuits—during periods of lighter work and between assignments—to riffle through a large store of mailing lists that the agency had accumulated, looking for the name that couldn’t be found elsewhere. Name soup. That was what the lists were called. They were lifted from book and record clubs, national magazines, Publishers Clearing House, major political parties, catalogue-sales companies peddling everything from sexy lingerie to electronic gadgetry to meat by mail, interest groups like antique-car enthusiasts and stamp collectors, as well as from numerous other sources.

In the name soup, Mama had found a Spencer Grant different from the others in the Internal Revenue Service records.

Intrigued, Roy sat up straighter in his chair.

Almost two years ago,
this
Spencer Grant had ordered a dog toy from a mail-order catalogue aimed at pet owners: a hard-rubber, musical bone. The address on that list was in California. Malibu.

Mama had returned to the utility companies’ files, to see whether services were maintained at that address. They were.

The electrical connection was in the name of Stewart Peck.

The water service and trash collection account was in the name of Mr. Henry Holden.

Natural gas was billed to James Gable.

The telephone company provided service to one John Humphrey. They also billed a cellular phone to William Clark at that address.

AT&T provided long-distance service for Wayne Gregory.

Property tax records listed the owner as Robert Tracy.

Mama had found the scarred man.

In spite of his efforts to vanish behind an elaborate screen of multifarious identities, though he had diligently attempted to erase his past and to make his current existence as difficult to prove as that of the Loch Ness monster, and though he had nearly succeeded in being as elusive as a ghost, he had been tripped up by a musical rubber bone. A dog toy. Grant had seemed inhumanly clever, but the simple human desire to please a beloved pet had brought him down.

NINE

Roy Miro watched from the blue shadows of the eucalyptus grove, enjoying the medicinal but pleasant odor of the oil-rich leaves.

The rapidly assembled SWAT team hit the cabin an hour after dawn, when the canyon was quiet except for the faintest rustle of the trees in an offshore breeze. The stillness was broken by shattering glass, the
whomp
of stun grenades, and the crash of the front and back doors going down simultaneously.

The place was small, and the initial search required little more than a minute. Toting a Micro Uzi, wearing a Kevlar jacket so heavy that it appeared to be capable of stopping even Teflon-coated slugs, Alfonse Johnson stepped out onto the back porch to signal that the cabin was deserted.

Dismayed, Roy came out of the grove and followed Johnson through the rear entrance into the kitchen, where shards of glass crunched under his shoes.

“He’s taken a trip somewhere,” Johnson said.

“How do you figure?”

“In here.”

Roy followed Johnson into the only bedroom. It was almost as sparsely furnished as a monk’s cell. No art brightened the roughly plastered walls. Instead of drapes or curtains, white vinyl blinds hung at the windows.

A suitcase stood near the bed, in front of the only nightstand.

“Must have decided he didn’t need that one,” said Johnson.

The simple cotton bedspread was slightly mussed—as if Grant had put another suitcase there to pack for his trip.

The closet door stood open. A few shirts, jeans, and chinos hung from the wooden rod, but half the hangers were empty.

One by one, Roy pulled out the drawers on a highboy. They contained a few items of clothing—mostly socks and underwear. A belt. One green sweater, one blue.

Even the contents of a large suitcase, if returned to the drawers, would not have filled them. Therefore, Grant had either packed two or more suitcases—or his clothing and home-decorating budgets were equally frugal.

“Any signs of a dog?” Roy asked.

Johnson shook his head. “Not that I noticed.”

“Look around, inside and out,” Roy ordered, leaving the bedroom.

Three members of the SWAT team, men with whom Roy had not worked before, were standing in the living room. They were tall, beefy guys. In that confined space, their protective gear, combat boots, and bristling weapons made them appear to be even larger than they were. With no one to shoot or subdue, they were as awkward and uncertain as professional wrestlers invited to tea with the octogenarian members of a ladies’ knitting club.

Roy was about to send them outside when he saw that the screen was lit on one of the computers in the array of electronic equipment that covered the surface of an L-shaped corner desk. White letters glowed on a blue background.

“Who turned that on?” he asked the three men.

They gazed at the computer, baffled.

“Must’ve been on when we came in,” one of them said.

“Wouldn’t you have noticed?”

“Maybe not.”

“Grant must’ve left in a hurry,” said another.

Alfonse Johnson, just entering the room, disagreed: “It wasn’t on when I came through the front door. I’d bet anything.”

Roy went to the desk. On the computer screen was the same number repeated three times down the center:

31

31

Suddenly the numbers changed, beginning at the top, continuing slowly down the column, until all were the same:

32

32

32

Simultaneously with the appearance of the third thirty-two, a soft
whirrrrr
arose from one of the electronic devices on the large desk. It lasted only a couple of seconds, and Roy couldn’t identify the unit in which it originated.

The numbers changed from top to bottom, as before: 33, 33, 33. Again: that whispery two-second
whirrrrr.

Although Roy was far better acquainted with the capabilities and operation of sophisticated computers than was the average citizen, he had never seen most of the gadgetry on the desk. Some items appeared to be homemade. Small red and green bulbs shone on several peculiar devices, indicating that they were powered up. Tangles of cables, in various diameters, linked much of the familiar equipment with the units that were mysterious to him.

34

34

34

Whirrrrr.

Something important was happening. Intuition told Roy that much. But
what
? He couldn’t understand, and with growing urgency he studied the equipment.

On the screen, the numbers advanced, from top to bottom, until all of them were thirty-five.
Whirrrrr.

If the numbers had been descending, Roy might have thought that he was watching a countdown toward a detonation. A bomb. Of course, no cosmic law required that a time bomb had to be triggered at the end of a count
down.
Why not a count
up
? Start at zero, detonate at one hundred. Or at fifty. Or forty.

36

36

36

Whirrrrr.

No, not a bomb. That didn’t make sense. Why would Grant want to blow up his own home?

Easy question. Because he was crazy. Paranoid. Remember the eyes in the computer-generated portrait: feverish, touched with madness.

Thirty-seven, top to bottom.
Whirrrrr.

Roy started exploring the tangle of cables, hoping to learn something from the way in which the devices were linked.

A fly crept along his left temple. He brushed impatiently at it. Not a fly. A bead of sweat.

“What’s wrong?” Alfonse Johnson asked. He loomed at Roy’s side—abnormally tall, armored, and armed, as if he were a basketball player from some future society in which the game had evolved into a form of mortal combat.

On the screen, the count had reached forty. Roy paused with his hands full of cables, listened to the
whirrrrr,
and was relieved when the cabin didn’t blow up.

If it wasn’t a bomb, what was it?

To grasp what was happening, he needed to think like Grant. Try to imagine how a paranoid sociopath might view the world. Look out through the eyes of madness. Not easy.

Well, all right, even if Grant was psychotic, he was also cunning, so after nearly being apprehended in the assault on the bungalow Wednesday night in Santa Monica, he had figured that a surveillance unit had photographed him and that he had become the subject of an intense search. He was an ex-cop, after all. He knew the routine. Although he’d spent the past year performing a gradual disappearing act from every public record, he hadn’t yet taken the final step into invisibility, and he’d been acutely aware that they would find his cabin sooner or later.

“What’s wrong?” Johnson repeated.

Grant would have expected them to break into his home in the same manner as they had broken into the bungalow. An entire SWAT team. Searching the place. Milling around.

Roy’s mouth was dry. His heart was racing. “Check the door frame. We must’ve set off an alarm.”

“Alarm? In this old shack?” Johnson said doubtfully.

“Do it,” Roy ordered.

Johnson hurried away.

Roy frantically sorted through the loops and knots of cables. The computer in action was the one with the most powerful logic unit among Grant’s collection. It was connected to a lot of things, including an unmarked green box that was, in turn, linked to a modem that was itself linked to a six-line telephone.

For the first time he realized that one of the red power-on lights gleaming in the equipment was actually the in-use indicator on line one of the telephone. An outgoing call was in progress.

He picked up the handset and listened. Data transmission was under way in the form of a cascade of electronic tones, a high-speed language of weird music without melody or rhythm.

“Magnetic contact here on the doorsill!” Johnson called from the front entrance.

“Visible wires?” Roy asked, dropping the telephone handset into the cradle.

“Yeah. And this was just hooked up. Bright, new copper at the contact point.”

“Follow the wires,” Roy said.

He glanced at the computer again.

On the screen, the count was up to forty-five.

Roy returned to the green box that linked computer and modem, and he grabbed another gray cable that led from it to something that he had not yet found. He traced it across the desk, through snarled cords, behind equipment, to the edge of the desk, and then to the floor.

On the other side of the room, Johnson was ripping up the alarm wire from the baseboard to which it was stapled, and winding it around one gloved fist. The other three men were watching him and edging backward, out of the way.

Roy followed the gray cable along the floor. It disappeared behind a tall bookcase.

Following the alarm wire, Johnson reached the other side of the same bookcase.

Roy jerked on the gray cable, and Johnson jerked on the alarm wire. Books wobbled noisily on the next to the highest shelf.

Roy looked up from the cable on which his attention had been fixed. Almost directly in front of him, slightly higher than eye level, a one-inch lens peered darkly at him from between the spines of thick volumes of history. He pulled books off the shelf, revealing a compact videocamera.

“What the hell’s this?” Johnson asked.

On the display screen, the count had just reached forty-eight at the top of the column.

“When you broke the magnetic contact at the door, you started the videocamera,” Roy explained.

He dropped the cable and snatched another book from the shelf.

Johnson said, “So we just destroy the videotape, and no one knows we were here.”

Opening the book and tearing off one corner of a page, Roy said, “It’s not so easy as that. When you turned on the camera, you also activated the computer, the whole system, and it placed an outgoing phone call.”

“What system?”

“The videocamera feeds to that oblong green box on the desk.”

“Yeah? What’s it do?”

After working up a thick gob of saliva, Roy spat on the page fragment that he had torn from the book, and he pasted the paper to the lens. “I’m not sure exactly what it does, but somehow the box processes the video image, translates it from visuals to another form of information, and feeds it to the computer.”

He stepped to the display screen. He was less tense than he had been before finding the camera, for now he knew what was happening. He wasn’t happy about it—but at least he understood.

51

50

50

The second number changed to fifty-one. Then the third.

Whirrrrr.

“Every four or five seconds, the computer freezes a frame’s worth of data from the videotape and sends it back to the green box. That’s when the first number changes.”

They waited. Not long.

52

51

51

“The green box,” Roy continued, “passes that frame of data to the modem, and that’s when the second number changes.”

52

52

51

“The modem translates the data into tonal code, sends it to the telephone, then the third number changes and—”

52

52

52

“—at the far end of the phone line, the process is reversed, translating the encoded data back into a picture again.”

“Picture?” Johnson said. “Pictures of us?”

“He’s just received his fifty-second picture since you entered the cabin.”

“Damn.”

“Fifty of them were nice and clear—before I blocked the camera lens.”

“Where? Where’s he receiving them?”

“We’ll have to trace the phone call the computer made when you broke down the door,” Roy said, pointing to the red indicator light on line one of the six-line phone. “Grant didn’t want to meet us face-to-face, but he wanted to know what we look like.”

“So he’s looking at printouts of us right now?”

“Probably not. The other end could be just as automated as this. But he’ll stop by there eventually to see if anything’s been transmitted. By then, with a little luck, we’ll find the phone to which the call was placed, and we’ll be waiting there for him.”

The three other men had backed farther away from the computers. They regarded the equipment with superstition.

One of them said, “Who
is
this guy?”

Roy said, “He’s nothing special. Just a sick and hateful man.”

“Why didn’t you pull the plug the minute you realized he was filming us?” Johnson demanded.

“He already had us by then, so it didn’t matter. And maybe he set up the system so the hard disk will erase if the plug is pulled. Then we wouldn’t know what programs and information had been in the machine. As long as the system’s intact, we might get a pretty good idea of what this guy’s been up to here. Maybe we can reconstruct his activities for the past few days, weeks, even months. We should be able to turn up a few clues about where he’s gone—and maybe even find the woman through him.”