Mr. Murder (24 page)

Oslett dreaded reporting the bad news to the home office in New York. The organization didn’t kill the bearer of bad tidings, especially not if his surname happened to be Oslett. However, as Alfie’s primary handler, he knew that some of the blame would stick to him even though the operative’s rebellion was not his fault to any degree whatsoever. The error must be in Alfie’s fundamental conditioning, damn it, not in his handling.

Leaving Clocker in the kitchen to keep a lookout for unwanted visitors, Oslett quickly inspected the rest of the motorhome.

He found nothing else of interest except a pile of discarded clothes on the floor of the main bedroom at the back of the vehicle. In the beam of the flashlight, he needed to disturb the garments only slightly with the toe of his shoe to see that they were what Alfie had been wearing when he had boarded the plane for Kansas City on Saturday morning.

Oslett returned to the kitchen, where Clocker waited in the dark. He turned the flashlight on the dead pensioners one last time. “What a mess. Damn it, this didn’t have to happen.”

Referring disdainfully to the murdered couple, Clocker said, “Who cares, for God’s sake? They were nothing but a couple of fucking Klingons anyway.”

Oslett had been referring not to the victims but to the fact that Alfie was more than merely a renegade now, was an
untraceable
renegade, thus jeopardizing the organization and everyone in it. He had no more pity for the dead man and woman than did Clocker, felt no responsibility for what had happened to them, and figured the world, in fact, was better off without two more non-productive parasites sucking on the substance of society and hindering traffic in their lumbering home on wheels. He had no love for the masses. As he saw it, the basic problem with the average man and woman was precisely that they were so
average
and that there were so many of them, taking far more than they gave to the world, quite incapable of managing their own lives intelligently let alone society, government, the economy, and the environment.

Nevertheless, he was alarmed by the way Clocker had phrased his contempt for the victims. The word “Klingons” made him uneasy because it was the name of the alien race that had been at war with humanity through so many television episodes and movies in the
Star Trek
series before events in that fictional far future had begun to reflect the improvement of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in the real world. Oslett found
Star Trek
tedious, insufferably boring. He never had understood why so many people had such a passion for it. But Clocker was an ardent fan of the series, unabashedly called himself a “Trekker,” could reel off the plots of every movie and episode ever filmed, and knew the personal histories of every character as if they were all his dearest friends.
Star Trek
was the only topic about which he seemed willing or able to conduct a conversation; and as taciturn as he was most of the time, he was to the same degree garrulous when the subject of his favorite fantasy arose.

Oslett tried to make sure that it
never
arose.

Now, in his mind, the dreaded word “Klingons” clanged like a firehouse bell.

With the entire organization at risk because Alfie’s trail had been lost, with something new and exquisitely violent loose in the world, the return trip to Oklahoma City through so many miles of lightless and unpeopled land was going to be bleak and depressing. The last thing Oslett needed was to be assaulted by one of Clocker’s exhaustingly enthusiastic monologues about Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Scotty, the rest of the crew, and their adventures in the far reaches of a universe that was, on film, stuffed with far more meaning and moments of sophomoric enlightenment than was the real universe of hard choices, ugly truths, and mindless cruelty.

“Let’s get out of here,” Oslett said, pushing past Clocker and heading for the front of the Road King. He didn’t believe in God, but he prayed nonetheless ardently that Karl Clocker would subside into his usual self-absorbed silence.

Cyrus Lowbock excused himself temporarily to confer with some colleagues who wanted to talk to him elsewhere in the house.

Marty was relieved by his departure.

When the detective left the dining room, Paige returned from the window and sat once more in the chair beside Marty.

Although the Pepsi was gone, some of the ice cubes had melted in the mug, and he drank the cold water. “All I want now is to put an end to this. We shouldn’t be here, not with that guy out there somewhere, loose.”

“Do you think we should be worried about the kids?”

Marty said, “Yeah. I’m worried shitless.”

“But you shot the guy twice in the chest.”

“I thought I’d left him in the foyer with a broken back, too, but he got up and ran away. Or limped away. Or maybe even vanished into thin air. I don’t know what the hell’s going on here, Paige, but it’s wilder than anything I’ve ever put in a novel. And it’s not over, not by a long shot.”

“If it was just Vic and Kathy looking after them, but there’s a cop over there too.”

“If this bastard knew where the girls were, he’d waste that cop, Vic, and Kathy in about a minute flat.”

“You handled him.”

“I was lucky, Paige. Just damned lucky. He never imagined I had a gun in the desk drawer or that I’d use one if I had it. I took him by surprise. He won’t let that happen again. He’ll have all the surprise on
his
side.”

He tilted the mug to his lips, let a melting ice cube slide onto his tongue.

“Marty, when did you take the guns out of the garage cabinet and load them?”

Speaking around the ice cube, he said, “I saw how that jolted you. I did it this morning. Before I went to see Paul Guthridge.”

“Why?”

As best he could, Marty described the curious feeling he’d had that something was bearing down on him and was going to destroy him before he even got a chance to identify it. He tried to convey how the feeling intensified into a panic attack, until he was certain he would need guns to defend himself and became almost incapacitated by fear.

He would have been embarrassed to tell her, would have sounded unbalanced—if events had not proved the validity of his perceptions and precautions.

“And something
was
coming,” she said. “This dead-ringer. You sensed him coming.”

“Yeah. I guess so. Somehow.”

“Psychic.”

He shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t call it that. Not if you mean a psychic vision. There wasn’t any vision. I didn’t see what was coming, didn’t have a clear premonition. Just this . . . this awful sense of pressure, gravity . . . like on one of those whip rides at an amusement park, when it swings you around real fast and you’re pinned to the seat, feel a weight on your chest. You know, you’ve been on rides like that, Charlotte always loves them.”

“Yeah. I understand . . . I guess.”

“This started out like that . . . and got a hundred times worse, until I could hardly breathe. Then suddenly it just stopped as I was leaving for the doctor’s office. And later, when I came home, the sonofabitch was here, but I didn’t feel anything when I walked into the house.”

They were silent for a moment.

Wind flung pellets of rain against the window.

Paige said, “How could he look exactly like you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why would he say you stole his life?”

“I don’t know, I just don’t know.”

“I’m scared, Marty. I mean, it’s all so weird. What’re we going to do?”

“Past tonight, I don’t know. But tonight, at least, we’re not staying here. We’ll go to a hotel.”

“But if the police don’t find him dead somewhere, then there’s tomorrow . . . and the day after tomorrow.”

“I’m battered and tired and not thinking straight. For now I can only concentrate on tonight, Paige. I’ll just have to worry about tomorrow when tomorrow gets here.”

Her lovely face was lined with anxiety. He had not seen her even half this distraught since Charlotte’s illness five years ago.

“I love you,” he said, laying his hand gently against the side of her head.

Putting her hand over his, she said, “Oh, God, I love you, too, Marty, you and the girls, more than anything, more than life itself. We can’t let anything happen to us, to what we all have together. We just
can’t.”

“We won’t,” he said, but his words sounded as hollow and false as a young boy’s braggadocio.

He was aware that neither of them had expressed the slightest hope that the police would protect them. He could not repress his anger over the fact they were not accorded anything resembling the service, courtesy, and consideration that the characters in his novels always received from the authorities.

At the core, mystery novels were about good and evil, about the triumph of the former over the latter, and about the reliability of the justice system in a modern democracy. They were popular because they reassured the reader that the system worked far more often than not, even if the evidence of daily life sometimes pointed toward a more troubling conclusion. Marty had been able to work in the genre with conviction and tremendous pleasure because he liked to believe that law-enforcement agencies and the courts delivered justice most of the time and thwarted it only inadvertently. But now, the first time in his life that he’d turned to the system for help, it was in the process of failing him. Its failure not only jeopardized his life—as well as the lives of his wife and children—but seemed to call into doubt the value of everything that he had written and the worthiness of the purpose to which he had committed so many years of hard work and struggle.

Lieutenant Lowbock returned through the living room, looking and moving as if in the middle of an
Esquire
magazine fashion-photography session. He was carrying a clear plastic evidence bag, which contained a black zippered case about half the size of a shaving kit. He put the bag on the dining-room table as he sat down.

“Mr. Stillwater, was the house securely locked when you left it this morning?”

“Locked?” Marty asked, wondering where they were headed now, trying not to let his anger show. “Yes, locked up tight. I’m careful about that sort of thing.”

“Have you given any thought as to how this intruder might have gained entry?”

“Broke a window, I guess. Or forced a lock.”

“Do you know what’s in this?” he asked, tapping the black leather case through the plastic bag.

“I’m afraid I don’t have X-ray vision,” Marty said.

“I thought you might recognize it.”

“No.”

“We found it in your master bedroom.”

“I’ve never seen it before.”

“On the dresser.”

Paige said, “Get it over with, Lieutenant.”

Lowbock’s faint shadow of a smile passed across his face again, like a visiting spirit shimmering briefly in the air above a séance table. “It’s a complete set of lock picks.”

“That’s how he got in?” Marty asked.

Lowbock shrugged. “I suppose that’s what I’m expected to deduce from it.”

“This is tiresome, Lieutenant. We have children we’re worried about. I agree with my wife—just get it over with.”

Leaning over the table and regarding Marty once more with his patented intense gaze, the detective said, “I’ve been a cop for twenty-seven years, Mr. Stillwater, and this is the first time I’ve ever encountered a break-in at a private residence where the intruder used a set of professional lock picks.”

“So?”

“They break glass or force a lock, like you said. Sometimes they pry a sliding door or window out of its track. The average burglar has a hundred ways of getting in—all of which are a lot faster than picking a lock.”

“This wasn’t an average burglar.”

“Oh, I can see that,” Lowbock said. He leaned away from the table, settled back in his chair. “This guy is a lot more theatrical than the average perp. He contrives to look exactly like you, spouts a lot of strange stuff about wanting his life back, comes armed with an assassin’s gun threaded for a silencer, uses burglary tools like a Hollywoodized professional heist artist in a caper movie, takes two bullets in the chest but isn’t fazed, loses enough blood to kill an ordinary man but walks away. He’s downright flamboyant, this guy, but he’s also
muy misterioso,
the kind of character Andy Garcia could play in a movie or, a lot better yet, that Ray Liotta who was in
Goodfellas.”

Marty suddenly saw where the detective was headed and understood why he was going there. The inevitable terminus of the interrogation should have been obvious sooner, but Marty simply hadn’t tumbled to it because it was
too
obvious. As a writer, he had been seeking some more exotic, complex reason for Lowbock’s barely concealed disbelief and hostility, when all the while Cyrus Lowbock had been going for the cliché.

Still, the detective had one more unpleasant surprise to reveal. He leaned forward again and made eye contact in what had ceased to be an effective confrontational manner and had become instead a personal tic as annoying and transparent as Peter Falk’s disarmingly humble posture and relentless self-deprecation when he played Columbo, Nero Wolfe’s thoughtful puckering of the mouth in moments of inspiration, James Bond’s knowing smirk, or any of the slew of colorful traits by which Sherlock Holmes was characterized. “Do your daughters have pets, Mr. Stillwater?”

“Charlotte does. Several.”

“An odd collection of pets.”

Paige said cooly, “Charlotte doesn’t think they’re odd.”

“Do you?”

“No. What does it matter if they’re odd or not?”

“Has she had them long?” Lowbock inquired.

“Some longer than others,” Marty said, baffled by this new twist in the questioning even as he remained convinced that he understood the theory Lowbock was laboring to prove.