Mr. Murder (7 page)

He stares up, half in a trance, straining for glimpses of the westbound vehicles.

Usually melancholy, the highway cantata is now enticing, calling him, making a mysterious promise which he does not understand but which he feels compelled to explore.

He dresses, and packs his clothes.

Outside, the motor courtyard and walkways are deserted. Faced toward the rooms, cars wait for morning travel. In a nearby vending-machine alcove, a soft-drink dispenser clicks-clinks as if conducting repairs upon itself. The killer feels as if he is the only living creature in a world now run by—and for the benefit of—machines.

Moments later, he is on Interstate 70, heading toward Topeka, the pistol on the seat beside him but covered with a motel towel.

Something west of Kansas City calls him. He doesn’t know what it is, but he feels inexorably drawn westward in the way that iron is pulled toward a magnet.

Strange as it might be, none of this alarms him, and he accedes to this compulsion to drive west. After all, for as long as he can remember, he has gone places without knowing the purpose of his trip until he has reached his destination, and he has killed people with no clue as to why they have to die or for whom the killing is done.

He is certain, however, that this sudden departure from Kansas City is not expected of him. He is supposed to stay at the motel until morning and catch an early flight out to ... Seattle.

Perhaps in Seattle he would have received instructions from the bosses he cannot recall. But he will never know what might have happened because Seattle is now stricken from his itinerary.

He wonders how much time will pass before his superiors—whatever their names and identities—will realize that he has gone renegade. When will they start looking for him, and how will they ever find him if he is no longer operating within his program?

At two o’clock in the morning, traffic is light on Interstate 70, mostly trucks, and he speeds across Kansas in advance of some of the big rigs and in the blustery wakes of others, remembering a movie about Dorothy and her dog Toto and a tornado that plucked them out of that flat farmland and dropped them in a far stranger place.

With both Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas, behind him, the killer realizes he’s muttering to himself:
“I need, I need.”

This time he feels close to a revelation that will identify the precise nature of his longing.

As the suburbs and finally the dark prairie flash past on both sides, excitement builds steadily in him. He trembles on the brink of an insight that, he senses, will change his life.

At once, he understands the meaning of what he has said. By “to be someone,” he does not mean what another man might intend to say with those same three words; he does not mean that he needs to be someone famous or rich or important. Just someone. Someone with a real name. Just an ordinary Joe, as they used to say in the movies of the forties. Someone who has more substance than a ghost.

The pull of the unknown lodestar in the west grows stronger by the mile. He leans forward slightly, hunching over the steering wheel, peering intently into the night.

Beyond the horizon, in a town he can’t yet envision, a life awaits him, a place to call home. Family, friends. Somewhere there are shoes into which he can step, a past he can wear comfortably, purpose. And a future in which he can be like other people—accepted.

The car speeds westward, cleaving the night.

Half past midnight, on his way to bed, Marty Stillwater stopped by the girls’ room, eased open the door, and stepped silently across the threshold. In the butterscotch-yellow glow of the Mickey Mouse nightlight, he could see both of his daughters sleeping peacefully.

Now and then he liked to watch them for a few minutes while they slept, just to convince himself that they were real. He’d had more than his share of happiness and prosperity and love, so it followed that some of his blessings might prove transitory or even illusory; fate might intervene to balance the scales.

To the ancient Greeks, Fate was personified in the form of three sisters: Clotho, who spun the thread of life; Lachesis, who measured the length of the thread; and Atropos, smallest of the three but the most powerful, who snipped the thread at her whim.

Sometimes, to Marty, that seemed a logical way to look at things. He could imagine the faces of those white-robed women in more detail than he could recall his own Mission Viejo neighbors. Clotho had a kind face with merry eyes, reminiscent of the actress Angela Lansbury, and Lachesis was as cute as Goldie Hawn but with a saintly aura. Ridiculous, but that’s how he saw them. Atropos was a bitch, beautiful but cold—pinched mouth, anthracite-black eyes.

The trick was to remain in the good graces of the first two sisters without drawing the attention of the third.

Five years ago, in the guise of a blood disorder, Atropos had descended from her celestial home to take a whack at the thread of Charlotte’s life and, thankfully, had failed to cut it all the way through. But this goddess answered to many names besides Atropos: cancer, cerebral hemorrhage, coronary thrombosis, fire, earthquake, poison, homicide, and countless others. Now perhaps she was paying them a return visit under one of her many pseudonyms, with Marty as her target instead of Charlotte.

Frequently, the vivid imagination of a novelist was a curse.

A whirring-clicking noise suddenly arose from the shadows on Charlotte’s side of the room, startling Marty. As low and menacing as a rattlesnake’s warning. Then he realized what it was: one half of the gerbil’s big cage was occupied by an exercise wheel, and the restless rodent was running furiously in place.

“Go to sleep, Wayne,” he said softly.

He took one more look at his girls, then stepped out of the room and pulled the door shut quietly behind him.

He reaches Topeka at three o’clock in the morning.

He is still drawn toward the western horizon as a migrating creature might be pulled relentlessly southward with the approach of winter, answering a call that is soundless, a beacon that can’t be seen, as though it is the trace of iron in his very blood that responds to the unknown magnet.

Exiting the freeway on the outskirts of the city, he scouts for another car.

Somewhere there are people who know the name John Larrington, the identity under which he rented the Ford. When he does not show up in Seattle for whatever job awaits him, his strange and faceless superiors will no doubt come looking for him. He suspects they have substantial resources and influence; he must shed every connection with his past and leave the hunters with no means of tracking him.

He parks the rental Ford in a residential neighborhood and walks three blocks, trying the doors of the cars at the curb. Only half are locked. He is prepared to hot-wire a car if it comes to that, but in a blue Honda he finds the keys tucked behind the sun visor.

After driving back to the Ford and transferring his suitcases and the pistol to the Honda, he cruises in ever-widening circles, searching for a twenty-four-hour-a-day convenience store.

He has no map of Topeka in his head because no one expected him to go there. Unnerved to see street signs on which all of the names are unfamiliar, he has no knowledge of where any route will lead.

He feels more of an outcast than ever.

Within fifteen minutes he locates a convenience store and nearly empties the shelves of Slim Jims, cheese crackers, peanuts, miniature doughnuts, and other food that will be easy to eat while driving. He is already starved. If he is going to be on the road for as much as another two days—assuming he might be drawn all the way to the coast—he will need considerable supplies. He does not want to waste time in restaurants, yet his accelerated metabolism requires him to eat larger meals and more frequently than other people eat.

After adding three six-packs of Pepsi to his purchase, he goes to the checkout counter, where the sole clerk says, “You must be having an all-night party or something.”

“Yeah.”

When he pays the bill, he realizes the three hundred bucks in his wallet—the amount of cash he
always
has with him on a job—will not take him far. He can no longer use the phony credit cards, of which he still has two, because someone will surely be able to track him through his purchases. He will need to pay cash from now on.

He takes the three large bags of supplies to the Honda and returns to the store with the Heckler & Koch P7. He shoots the clerk once in the head and empties the register, but all he gets is his own money back plus fifty dollars. Better than nothing.

At an Arco service station, he fills the tank of the Honda with gasoline and buys a map of the United States.

Parked at the edge of the Arco lot, under a sodium-vapor light that colors everything sickly yellow, he eats Slim Jims. He’s ravenous.

By the time he switches from sausages to doughnuts, he begins to study the map. He could continue westward on Interstate 70—or instead head southwest on the Kansas Turnpike to Wichita, keep going to Oklahoma City, and then turn directly west again on Interstate 40.

He is not accustomed to having choices. He usually does what he is . . . programmed to do. Now, faced with alternatives, he finds decision-making unexpectedly difficult. He sits irresolute, increasingly nervous, in danger of being paralyzed by indecision.

At last he gets out of the Honda and stands in the cool night air, seeking guidance.

The wind vibrates the telephone wires overhead—a haunting sound, as thin and bleak as the frightened crying of dead children wandering in a dark Beyond.

He turns westward as inexorably as a compass needle seeks magnetic north. The attraction feels psychic, as if a presence out there calls to him, but the connection is less sophisticated than that, more biological, reverberating in his blood and marrow.

Behind the wheel of the car again, he finds the Kansas Turnpike and heads toward Wichita. He is still not sleepy. If he has to, he can go two or even three nights without sleep and lose none of his mental or physical edge, which is only one of his special strengths. He is so excited by the prospect of being someone that he might drive nonstop until he finds his destiny.

Paige knew that Marty half expected to be stricken by another blackout, this time in public, so she admired his ability to maintain a carefree facade. He seemed as lighthearted as the kids.

From the girls’ point of view, Sunday was a perfect day.

Late-morning, Paige and Marty took them to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Dana Point for the Thanksgiving-weekend brunch. It was a place they went only on special occasions.

As always, Emily and Charlotte were enchanted by the lushly landscaped grounds, beautiful public rooms, and impeccable staff in crisp uniforms. In their best dresses, with ribbons in their hair, the girls had great fun playing at being cultured young ladies—almost as much fun as raiding the dessert buffet twice each.

In the afternoon, because it was unseasonably warm, they changed clothes and visited Irvine Park. They walked the picturesque trails, fed the ducks in the pond, and toured the small zoo.

Charlotte loved the zoo because the animals were, like her menagerie at home, kept in enclosures where they were safe from harm. There were no exotic specimens—all the animals were indigenous to the region—but in her typical exuberance, Charlotte found each to be the most interesting and cutest creature she had ever seen.

Emily got into a staring contest with a wolf. Large, amber-eyed, with a lustrous silver-gray coat, the predator met and intensely held the girl’s gaze from his side of a chain-link fence.

“If you look away first,” Emily calmly and somberly informed them, “then a wolf will just eat you all up.”

The confrontation went on so long that Paige became uneasy in spite of the sturdy fence. Then the wolf lowered his head, sniffed the ground, yawned elaborately to show he had not been intimidated but had merely lost interest, and sauntered away.

“If he couldn’t get the three little pigs with all his huffing and puffing,” Emily said, “then I
knew
he couldn’t get me, ’cause I’m smarter than pigs.”

She was referring to the Disney cartoon, the only version of the fairy tale with which she was familiar.

Paige resolved never to let her read the Brothers Grimm version, which was about seven little goats instead of three pigs. The wolf swallowed six of them whole. They were saved from digestion at the last minute when their mother cut open the wolf’s belly to pull them from his steaming innards.

Paige glanced back at the wolf as they walked away. It was watching Emily again.

Sunday is a full day for the killer.

In Wichita, just before dawn, he gets off the turnpike. In another residential neighborhood rather like the one in Topeka, he swaps the license plates on the Honda for those on a Chevy, making his stolen vehicle more difficult to locate.

Shortly after nine Sunday morning he arrives in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where he stops long enough to fill the tank with gasoline.

A shopping mall is across the road from the service station. In one corner of the huge deserted parking lot stands an unmanned Goodwill Industries collection box, as large as a garden shed. After tanking up, he leaves his suitcases and their contents with Goodwill. He keeps only the clothes he’s wearing and the pistol.

During the night, on the highway, he had time to think about his peculiar existence—and to wonder if he might be carrying a compact transmitter that would help his superiors locate him. Perhaps they anticipated that one day he would go renegade on them.