Mr. Murder (50 page)

“It’s ringing.”

“Maybe not on their end.”

Spicer tried again with no different result. “Come on,” he said, grabbing his leather flight jacket and heading for the door.

“You’re not going over there?” Oslett said. “Aren’t you still worried about blowing their cover?”

“It’s already been blown. Something’s wrong.”

Clocker had pulled on his tweed coat over his clashing orange cashmere sweater. He didn’t bother to put on his hat because he had never bothered to take it off. Tucking the
Star Trek
paperback in a pocket, he also headed for the door.

Following them with the black briefcase, Oslett said, “But what could’ve gone wrong? Everything was moving along so smoothly again.”

Already, the storm had put down half an inch of snow. The flakes were fine and comparatively dry now, and the streets white. Evergreen boughs had begun to acquire Christmasy trimmings.

Spicer drove the Explorer, and in a few minutes they reached the street where Stillwater’s parents lived. He pointed out the house when they were still half a block from it.

Across the street from the Stillwater place, two vehicles were parked at the curb. Oslett pegged the red recreational van as the surveillance post because of the mirrored side windows in its rear section.

“What’s that florist’s van doing here?” Spicer wondered.

“Delivering flowers,” Oslett guessed.

“Fat chance.”

Spicer pulled past the van and parked the Explorer in front of it.

“Is this really smart?” Oslett wondered.

Using the cellular phone, Spicer called the surveillance team one more time. They didn’t answer.

“We don’t have a choice,” Spicer said as he opened his door and got out into the snow.

The three of them walked to the back of the red van.

On the blacktop between that vehicle and the delivery van, a large floral arrangement lay in ruins. The ceramic container was shattered. The stems of the flowers and ferns were still embedded in the spongy green material that florists used to fix arrangements, so the mild wind had not blown any of them away, though they looked as if they had been stepped on more than once. The colors of some flowers were masked by snow, which meant they hadn’t been disturbed in the past thirty to forty-five minutes.

The ruined blossoms and frost-paled ferns had a curious beauty. Snap a photo, hang it in an art gallery, title it something like “Romance” or “Loss,” and people would probably stand before it for long minutes, musing.

As Spicer rapped on the back door of the surveillance vehicle, Clocker said, “I’ll check the delivery van.”

No one answered the knock, so Spicer boldly opened the door and climbed inside.

As he followed, Oslett heard Spicer say softly, “Oh, shit.”

The interior of the van was dark. Little light penetrated the two-way mirrors that served as windows. Only the scopes and screens of the electronic equipment illuminated the space.

Oslett took off his sunglasses, saw the dead men, and pulled the rear door shut.

Spicer had taken off his sunglasses too. His eyes were an odd, baleful yellow. Or maybe that was just a color they reflected from the scopes and gauges.

“Alfie must’ve been coming to the Stillwater place, spotted the van, recognized it for what it was,” Spicer said. “Before he went over there, he stopped here, took care of business, so he wouldn’t be interrupted across the street.”

The electronic gear operated off banks of solar batteries wired to flat solar cells on the roof. When surveillance was conducted at night, the batteries could be charged in the conventional fashion, if necessary, by starting the van’s engine for short periods. Even on overcast days, however, the cells collected enough sunlight to keep the system operative.

Without the engine running, the interior temperature of the van was nonetheless comfortable, if slightly cool. The vehicle was unusually well insulated, and the solar cells also operated a small heater.

Stepping over the corpse on the floor, looking through one of the view windows, Oslett said, “If Alfie was drawn to that house, it had to be because Martin Stillwater was already there.”

“I guess.”

“Yet this team never saw him go in or out.”

“Evidently not,” Spicer agreed.

“Wouldn’t they have let us know if they’d seen Stillwater, his wife, or kids?”

“Absolutely.”

“So . . . is he over there now? Maybe they’re all over there, the whole family and Alfie.”

Peering through the other window, Spicer added, “And maybe not. Somebody left there not long ago. See the tracks in the driveway?”

A vehicle with wide tires had backed out of the garage that was attached to the white clapboard house. It had reversed to the left as it entered the street, then had shifted into forward and had driven away to the right. The snow had barely begun to fill in the multiple arcs of the tracks.

Clocker opened the rear door, startling them. He climbed inside and pulled the door shut after him, with no comment about the bloody ice axe on the floor or the two murdered operatives. “Looks like Alfie must’ve stolen the florist’s van for cover. The deliveryman’s in the back with the flowers, dead as the moon.”

In spite of the extended wheelbase that added extra room to the interior of the van, the space unoccupied by surveillance equipment and corpses was not large enough to accommodate the three of them comfortably. Oslett felt claustrophobic.

Spicer pulled the seated dead man out of the swivel chair in which he’d died. The corpse tumbled to the floor. Spicer checked the chair for blood before sitting down and turning to the array of monitors and switches, with which he appeared to be familiar.

Uncomfortably aware of Clocker looming over him, Oslett said, “Is it possible there was a phone call to the house that these guys never got a chance to report to us before Alfie wasted them?”

Spicer said, “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

As Spicer’s fingers flew over the programming keyboard, brightly colored graphs and other displays popped onto the half dozen video monitors.

Contriving, in those tight quarters, to ram his elbow into Clocker’s gut, Oslett turned again to the first of the side-by-side view windows. He watched the house across the street.

Clocker stooped to look out the other window. Oslett figured the Trekker was pretending to be at a starship portal, squinting through foot-thick glass at an alien world.

A couple of cars passed. A pickup truck. A black dog ran along the sidewalk; with snow on his paws, he looked as if he was wearing four white socks. The Stillwater house stood silent, serene.

“Got it,” Spicer said, taking off a set of headphones he had put on when Oslett had been staring out the window.

What he had, as it turned out, was a telephone call monitored, traced, and recorded by the automated equipment perhaps as long as thirty minutes
after
Alfie killed the surveillance team. In fact, Alfie had been in the Stillwater house when the call came through and had answered it after seven rings. Spicer played it back on a speaker instead of through headphones, so the three of them could listen at the same time.

“The first voice you hear is the caller,” Spicer said, “because the man who picks up the receiver in the Stillwater house doesn’t initially say anything.”

Stopping the tape, Spicer said, “That second voice is the receiving phone—and it’s Alfie.”

“They both sound like Alfie.”

“The other one’s Stillwater. Alfie also speaks next.”

They listened to the entire conversation. It was over-the -top creepy because it sounded as if one man was talking to himself, a radically split personality. Worse, their bad boy was obviously not just a renegade but flat-out psychotic.

When the tape ended, Oslett said, “So Stillwater never stopped at his parents’ house.”

“Evidently not.”

“Then how did Alfie find it? And why did he go there? Why was he interested in Stillwater’s parents, not just Stillwater himself?”

Spicer shrugged. “Maybe you’ll get a chance to ask the boy if you manage to recover him.”

Oslett didn’t like having so many unanswered questions. It made him feel as if he wasn’t in control.

He glanced out the window at the house and at the tire tracks in the snow-covered driveway. “Alfie’s probably not over there any more.”

“Went after Stillwater,” Spicer agreed.

“Where was that call placed?”

“Cellular phone.”

Oslett said, “We can still trace that, can’t we?”

Pointing to three lines of numbers on a display terminal, Spicer said, “We’ve got a satellite triangulation.”

“That’s meaningless to me, just numbers.”

“This computer can plot it on a map. To within a hundred feet of the signal source.”

“How long will that take?”

“Five minutes tops,” Spicer said.

“Good. You work on it. We’ll check the house.”

Oslett stepped out of the red van with Clocker close behind.

As they crossed the street through the snow, Oslett didn’t care if a dozen nosy neighbors were at their windows. The situation was already blown wide open and couldn’t be salvaged. He, Clocker, and Spicer would clear out, with their dead, in less than ten minutes, and after that no one would ever be able to prove they’d been there.

They walked boldly onto the elder Stillwaters’ porch. Oslett rang the bell. No one answered. He rang it again and tried the door, which proved to be unlocked. From across the street it would appear as if Jim or Alice Stillwater had opened up and invited them inside.

In the foyer, Clocker closed the front door behind them and drew his Colt .357 Magnum from his shoulder holster. They stood for a few seconds, listening to the silent house.

“Be at peace, Alfie,” Oslett said, even though he doubted that their bad boy was still hanging around the premises. When there was no ritual response to that command, he repeated the four words louder than before.

Silence prevailed.

Cautiously they moved deeper into the house—and found the dead couple in the first room they checked. Stillwater’s parents. Each of them somewhat resembled the writer—and Alfie, too, of course.

During a swift search of the house, repeating the command phrase before they went through each new doorway, the only thing of interest they found was in the laundry. The small room reeked of gasoline. What Alfie had been up to was made apparent by the scraps of cloth, funnel, and partly empty box of detergent that littered the counter beside the sink.

“He’s taking no chances this time,” Oslett said. “Going after Stillwater as if it’s war.”

They had to stop the boy—and fast. If he killed the Stillwater family or even just the writer himself, he would make it impossible to implement the murder-suicide scenario which would so neatly tie up so many loose ends. And depending on what insane, fiery spectacle he had in mind, he might draw so much attention to himself that keeping his existence a secret and returning him to the fold would become impossible.

“Damn,” Oslett said, shaking his head.

“Sociopathic clones,” Clocker said, almost as if
trying
to be irritating, “are always big trouble.”

Sipping hot chocolate, Paige took her turn at guard duty by the front window.

Marty was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with Charlotte and Emily, playing with a deck of cards they’d gotten from the game chest. It was the least animated game of Go Fish that Paige had ever seen, conducted without comment or argument. Their faces were grim, as if they weren’t playing Go Fish at all but consulting a Tarot deck that had nothing but bad news for them.

Studying the snowswept day outside, Paige suddenly knew that both she and Marty shouldn’t be waiting in the cabin. Turning away from the window, she said, “This is wrong.”

“What?” he asked, looking up from the cards.

“I’m going outside.”

“For what?”

“That rock formation over there, under the trees, halfway out toward the county road. I can lie down in there and still see the driveway.”

Marty dropped his hand of cards. “What sense does that make?”

“Perfect sense. If he comes in the front way, like we both think he will—like he
has
to—he’ll go right past me, straight to the cabin. I’ll be behind him. I can pump a couple of rounds into the back of the bastard’s head before he knows what’s happening.”

Getting to his feet, shaking his head, Marty said, “No, it’s too risky.”

“If we both stay inside here, it’ll be like trying to defend a fort.”

“A fort sounds good to me.”

“Don’t you remember all those movies about the cavalry in the Old West, defending the fort? Sooner or later, no matter how strong the place was, the Indians overran it and got inside.”

“That’s just in the movies.”

“Yeah, but maybe he’s seen them too. Come here,” she insisted. When he joined her at the window, she pointed to the rocks, which were barely visible in the sable shadows under the pines. “It’s perfect.”

“I don’t like it.”

“It’ll work.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You know it’s right.”

“Okay, so maybe it’s right, but I still don’t have to like it,” he said sharply.

“I’m going out.”

He searched her eyes, perhaps looking for signs of fear that he could exploit to change her mind. “You think you’re an adventure-story heroine, don’t you?”