The cellular phone was clipped to my belt. As I started up the stairs, I considered calling the police.
After my failure to keep our appointment earlier in the evening, however, Lewis Stevenson might be looking for me. If so, then the chief himself would answer this call. Maybe the bald man with the earring would come along for the ride.
Manuel Ramirez couldn’t assist me himself, because he was the duty officer this evening, restricted to the station. I didn’t feel safe asking for any other officer. As far as I knew, Chief Stevenson might not be the only compromised cop in Moonlight Bay; perhaps every member of the force, except Manuel, was involved in this conspiracy. In fact, in spite of our friendship, I couldn’t trust Manuel, either, not until I knew a lot more about this situation.
Climbing the stairs, I gripped the Glock with both hands, ready to press the laser-sighting switch if someone moved. I kept reminding myself that playing hero meant trying not to shoot Angela by mistake.
I turned at the landing and saw that the upper flight was darker than the lower. No ambient light from the living room reached this high. I ascended quickly and silently.
My heart was doing more than idling; it was revving nicely, but I was surprised that it wasn’t racing. Only yesterday, I could not have imagined that I would be able to adapt so rapidly to the prospect of imminent violence. I was even beginning to recognize within myself a disconcerting
enthusiasm
for danger.
Four doors opened off the upstairs hall. Three were closed. The fourth—the door farthest from the stairs—was ajar, and from the room beyond came a soft light.
I disliked passing the three closed rooms without confirming that they were deserted. I would be leaving my back vulnerable.
Given my XP, however, and especially considering how quickly my eyes would sting and water when exposed to very bright light, I’d be able to search those spaces only with the pistol in my right hand and the penlight in my left. This would be awkward, time-consuming, and dangerous. Each time I stepped into a room, no matter how low I crouched and how fast I moved, the penlight would instantly pinpoint my location for any would-be assailant before I found him with the narrow beam.
My best hope was to play to my strengths, which meant using the darkness, blending with the shadows. Moving sideways along the hall, keeping a watch in both directions, I made no sound, and neither did anyone else in the house.
The second door on the left was open only a crack, and the narrow wedge of light revealed little of the room beyond. Using the gun barrel, I pushed the door inward.
The master bedroom. Cozy. The bed was neatly made. A gaily colored afghan draped one arm of an easy chair, and on the footstool waited a folded newspaper. On the bureau, a collection of antique perfume bottles sparkled.
One of the nightstand lamps was aglow. The bulb was not strong, and the pleated-fabric shade screened most of the rays.
Angela was nowhere to be seen.
A closet door stood open. Perhaps Angela had come upstairs to fetch something from there. I couldn’t see anything but hanging clothes and shoe boxes.
The door to the adjacent bathroom was ajar, and the bathroom was dark. To anyone in there, looking out, I was a well-lit target.
I approached the bathroom as obliquely as possible, aiming the Glock at the black gap between the door and the jamb. When I pushed on the door, it opened without resistance.
The smell stopped me from crossing the threshold.
Because the glow of the nightstand lamp didn’t illuminate much of the space before me, I fished the penlight from my pocket. The beam glistered across a red pool on a white tile floor. The walls were sprayed with arterial gouts.
Angela Ferryman was slumped on the floor, head bent backward over the rim of the toilet bowl. Her eyes were as wide, pale, and flat as those of a dead seagull that I had once found on the beach.
At a glance, I thought her throat appeared to have been slashed repeatedly with a half-sharp knife. I couldn’t bear to look at her too closely or for too long.
The smell was not merely blood. Dying, she had fouled herself. A draft bathed me in the stench.
A casement window was cranked all the way open. It wasn’t a typically small bathroom window but large enough to have provided escape for the killer, who must have been liberally splashed with his victim’s blood.
Perhaps Angela had left the window open. If there was a first-story porch roof under it, the killer could have entered as well as exited by this route.
Orson had not barked—but then this window was toward the front of the house, and the dog was at the back.
Angela’s hands were at her sides, almost lost in the sleeves of the cardigan. She looked so innocent. She looked twelve.
All her life, she had given of herself to others. Now someone, unimpressed by her selfless giving, had cruelly taken all that was left.
Anguished, shaking uncontrollably, I turned away from the bathroom.
I hadn’t approached Angela with questions. I hadn’t brought her to this hideous end. She had called me, and although she had used her car phone, someone had known that she needed to be silenced permanently and quickly. Maybe these faceless conspirators decided that her despair made her dangerous. She had quit her job at the hospital. She felt that she had no reason to live. And she was terrified of
becoming,
whatever that meant. She was a woman with nothing to lose, beyond their control. They would have killed her even if I had not responded to her call.
Nevertheless, I was awash in guilt, drowning in cold currents, robbed of breath, and I stood gasping.
Nausea followed those currents, rippling like a fat slippery eel through my gut, swimming up my throat and almost surging into my mouth. I choked it down.
I needed to get out of here, yet I couldn’t move. I was half crushed under a weight of terror and guilt.
My right arm hung at my side, pulled as straight as a plumb line by the weight of the gun. The penlight, clutched in my left hand, stitched jagged patterns on the wall.
I could not think clearly. My thoughts rolled thickly, like tangled masses of seaweed in a sludge tide.
On the nearer nightstand, the telephone rang.
I kept my distance from it. I had the queer feeling that this caller was the deep-breather who had left the message on my answering machine, that he would try to steal some vital aspect of me with his bloodhound inhalations, as if my very soul could be vacuumed out of me and drawn away across the open telephone line. I didn’t want to hear his low, eerie, tuneless humming.
When at last the phone fell silent, my head had been somewhat cleared by the strident ringing. I clicked off the penlight, returned it to my pocket, raised the big pistol from my side—and realized that someone had switched on the light in the upstairs hall.
Because of the open window and the blood smeared on the frame, I had assumed I was alone in the house with Angela’s body. I was wrong. An intruder was still present—waiting between me and the stairs.
The killer couldn’t have slipped out of the master bath by way of the bedroom; a messy trail of blood would have marked his passage across the cream-colored carpet. Yet why would he have escaped from the upstairs only to return immediately through a ground-floor door or window?
If, after fleeing, he had changed his mind about leaving a potential witness and had decided to come back to get me, he wouldn’t have turned on the light to announce his presence. He would have preferred to take me by surprise.
Cautiously, squinting against the glare, I stepped into the hallway. It was deserted.
The three doors that had been closed when I had first come upstairs were now standing wide open. The rooms beyond them were forbiddingly bright.
14
Like blood out of a wound, silence welled from the bottom of the house into this upstairs hall. Then a sound rose, but it came from outside: the keening of the wind under the eaves.
A strange game seemed to be under way. I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know the identity of my adversary. I was screwed.
Flicking a wall switch, I brought forth a soothing flow of shadows to the hall, which made the lights in the three open rooms seem brighter by comparison.
I wanted to run for the stairs. Get down, out, away. But I didn’t dare leave unexplored rooms at my back this time. I’d end up like Angela, throat slashed from behind.
My best chance of staying alive was to remain calm. Think. Approach each door with caution. Inch my way out of the house. Make sure my back was protected every step of the way.
I squinted less, listened more, heard nothing, and moved to the doorway opposite the master bedroom. I didn’t cross the threshold but remained in the shadows, using my left hand as a visor to shade my eyes from the harsh overhead light before me.
This might have been a son’s or daughter’s room if Angela had been able to have children. Instead, it contained a tool cabinet with many drawers, a bar stool with a back, and two high worktables placed to form an L. Here she spent time at her hobby: dollmaking.
A quick glance along the hallway. Still alone.
Keep moving. Don’t be an easy target.
I pushed the hobby-room door all the way open. No one was hiding behind it.
I stepped briefly into the brightly lighted room, staying sideways to the hall to cover both spaces.
Angela was a fine dollmaker, as proved by the thirty dolls on the shelves of an open display cabinet at the far end of the hobby room. Her creations were attired in richly imagined, painstakingly realized costumes that Angela herself had sewn: cowboy and cowgirl outfits, sailor suits, party dresses with petticoats…. The wonder of the dolls, however, was their faces. She sculpted each head with patience and real talent, and she fired it in a kiln in the garage. Some were matt-finish bisque. Others were glazed. All were hand-painted with such attention to detail that their faces looked real.
Over the years, Angela had sold some of her dolls and had given many away. These remaining were evidently her favorites, with which she had been most reluctant to part. Even under the circumstances, alert for the approach of a psychopath with a half-sharp knife, I saw that each face was unique—as though Angela wasn’t merely making dolls but was lovingly imagining the possible faces of the children whom she had never carried in her womb.
I switched off the ceiling fixture, leaving only a worktable lamp. In the sudden swelling of shadows, the dolls appeared to shift on the shelves, as if preparing to leap to the floor. Their painted eyes—some bright with points of reflected light and some with a fixed inky glare—seemed watchful and intent.
I had the heebie-jeebies. Big time.
The dolls were only dolls. They were no threat to me.
Back into the corridor, sweeping the Glock left, right, left again. No one.
Next along this side of the hall was a bathroom. Even with my eyes narrowed to slits to filter out the dazzle of porcelain and glass and mirrors and yellow ceramic tile, I could see into every corner. No one was waiting there.
As I reached inside to switch off the bathroom lights, a noise rose behind me. Back toward the master bedroom. A quick rapping like knuckles on wood. From the corner of my eye, I saw movement.
I spun toward the sound, bringing up the Glock in a two-hand grip again, as if I knew what the hell I was doing, imitating Willis and Stallone and Schwarzenegger and Eastwood and Cage from a hundred jump-run-shoot-chase movies, as if I actually believed that
they
knew what the hell they were doing. I expected to see a hulking figure, demented eyes, an upraised arm, an arcing knife, but I was still alone in the hallway.
The movement I’d seen was the master-bedroom door being pushed shut from the inside. In the diminishing wedge of light between the moving door and the jamb, a twisted shadow loomed, writhed, shrank. The door fell shut with a solid sound like the closing of a bank vault.
That room had been deserted when I left it, and no one had come past me since I’d stepped into the hallway. Only the murderer could be in there—and only if he’d returned through the bathroom window from a porch roof where he’d been when I’d discovered Angela’s body.
If the killer was already in the master bedroom again, however, he couldn’t also have slipped behind me, moments earlier, to turn on the second-floor lights. So there were two intruders. I was caught between them.
Go forward or back? Lousy choice. Deep shit either way, and me without rubber boots.
They would expect me to run for the stairs. But it was safer to do the unexpected, so without hesitation I rushed to the master-bedroom door. I didn’t bother with the knob, kicked hard, sprung the latch, and pushed inside with the Glock in front of me, ready to squeeze off four or five shots at anything that moved.
I was alone.
The nightstand lamp was still lit.
No bloody footprints stained the carpet, so no one could have reentered the splattered bathroom from outside and then returned here by that route to close the hall door.
I checked the bathroom anyway. I left the penlight in my pocket this time, relying on an influx of faint light from the bedroom lamp, because I didn’t need—or want—to see all the vivid details again. The casement window remained open. The smell was as repulsive as it had been two minutes ago. The shape slumped against the toilet was Angela. Although she was mercifully veiled in gloom, I could see her mouth gaping as though in amazement, her wide eyes unblinking.
I turned away and glanced nervously at the open door to the hall. No one had followed me in here.
Baffled, I retreated to the middle of the bedroom.
The draft from the bathroom window was not strong enough to have blown the bedroom door shut. Besides, no draft had cast the twisted shadow that I had glimpsed.
Although the space under the bed might have been large enough to hide a man, he would have been uncomfortably compressed between the floor and the box springs, with frame slats banding his back. Anyway, no one could have squirmed into that hiding place before I’d kicked my way into the room.