Dark Rivers of the Heart (69 page)

He found the willpower to censor the mental image of the corpse. He rang the bell again.

The night was so hushed that he felt as though he would be able to hear the earthworms deep in the ground, below the frost line, if only he could clear his mind and listen for their telltale writhing.

When no one responded to the bell the second time, Spencer retrieved the spare key from the hiding place atop the door head. The Dresmunds had been instructed to leave it there, in the event that it was ever needed by the owner. The deadbolt locks of the house and barn were keyed the same. With that freezing bit of brass half sticking to his fingers, he hurried back to the black pickup.

The driveway forked. One lane led past the front of the barn and the other behind it. He took the second route.

“I should go inside the same way I went that night,” he told Ellie. “By the back door. Re-create the moment.”

They parked where the van with the rainbow mural had stood in a long-ago darkness. That vehicle had been his father’s. He’d seen it for the first time that night because it had always been garaged off the property and registered under a false name. It was the hunting wagon in which Steven Ackblom had traveled to various distant places to stalk and capture the women and the girls who were destined to become permanent residents of his catacombs. For the most part, he’d driven it onto the property only when his wife and son had been away, visiting her parents or at horse shows—though also on rare occasions when his darker desires became stronger than his caution.

Ellie wanted to stay in the pickup truck, leave the engine running, and keep the computer on her lap, with her fingers poised over the keys, ready to respond to any provocation.

Spencer couldn’t imagine anything that she could possibly do, while actually under attack, to force a call-back of the agency thugs. But she was dead serious, and he knew her well enough to trust that her plan, however peculiar, was not frivolous.

“They’re not here,” he told her. “No one’s waiting for us. If they were here, they’d have been all over us by now.”

“I don’t know….”

“To remember what happened in those missing minutes, I’m going to have to go down…into that place. Rocky isn’t company enough. I don’t have the courage to go alone, and I’m not ashamed to say so.”

Ellie nodded. “You shouldn’t be. If I were you, I’d never have been able to come this far. I’d have driven by, never looked back.” She surveyed the moon-dappled fields and hills behind the barn.

“No one,” he said.

“All right.” Her fingers tapped across the laptop keyboard, and she pulled back from whatever computer she had invaded. The display screen went dark. “Let’s go.”

Spencer doused the headlights. He switched off the engine.

He took the pistol. Ellie had the Micro Uzi.

When they got out of the truck, Rocky insisted on scrambling out with them. He was shaking, saturated by his master’s mood, afraid to go with them but equally afraid to stay behind.

Shivering more violently than the dog. Spencer peered into the sky. It was as clear and star-spattered as it had been on that July night. This time, however, the cataracts of moonlight revealed neither an owl nor an angel.

In the dark gallery, where Roy had spoken of many things and the artist had listened with increasing interest and gratifying respect, the grumble of the approaching truck brought a temporary halt to the sharing of intimacies.

To avoid the risk of being seen, they took one step back from the window. They still had a view of the driveway.

Instead of stopping in front of the barn, the pickup continued around to the back of the building.

“I brought you here,” Roy said, “because I have to know how your son’s involved with this woman. He’s a wild card. We can’t figure him. There’s a feeling of organization about his involvement. That disturbs us. For some time, we’ve suspected there may be a loosely woven organization out to undo our work or, failing that, cause us as many headaches as it can. He might be involved with such a group. If it exists. Maybe they’re assisting the woman. Anyway, considering Spencer’s…I’m sorry. Considering
Michael’s
military training and his obvious Spartan mind-set, I don’t think he’ll crack under the usual methods of interrogation, no matter how much pain is involved.”

“He’s a strong-willed boy,” Steven acknowledged.

“But if
you
interrogate him, he’ll break wide open.”

“You might be right,” Steven said. “Quite perceptive.”

“And this also gives me a chance to help right a wrong.”

“What wrong would that be?”

“Well, of course, it’s wrong for a son to betray his father.”

“Ah. And in addition to being able to avenge that betrayal, may I have the woman?” Steven asked.

Roy thought of those lovely eyes, so direct and challenging. He had coveted them for fourteen months. He would be willing to relinquish his claim, however, in return for the opportunity to witness what a creative genius of Steven Ackblom’s stature could achieve when permitted to work in the medium of living flesh.

In anticipation of visitors, they now spoke in whispers:

“Yes, that seems only fair,” Roy said. “But I want to watch.”

“You understand that what I’ll do to her will be…extreme.”

“The timid never know transcendence.”

“That’s very true,” Steven agreed.

“‘They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died,’” Roy quoted.

“And you want to see that brief, perfect beauty,” Ackblom said.

“Yes.”

From the far end of the building came the scrape and clack of a lock bolt. A hesitation. Then the faint creak of door hinges.

Darius braked at the stop sign. He was traveling east, and he lived two and a half blocks north of where he had stopped, but he didn’t put on the turn signal.

Facing the Microbus from across the intersection were four television-news vans with elaborate microwave dishes on the roofs. Two were parked to the left, two to the right, bathed in the sodium-yellow light-fall from the streetlamps. One was from KNBC, the local affiliate of the national network, and another was marked KTLA, which was Channel 5, the independent station with the highest news ratings in the Los Angeles market. Harris couldn’t make out the call letters on the other vans, but he figured they would be from the ABC and CBS affiliate stations in Los Angeles. Behind them were a few cars, and in addition to the people in all those vehicles, half a dozen others were milling around, talking.

Darius’s voice was colored by both heavy sarcasm and anger: “Must be a breaking story.”

“Not quite yet,” Harris said grimly. “Best to drive straight through, right by them, and not so fast that they pay any attention to us.”

Instead of turning left, toward home, Darius did as his brother asked.

Passing the media, Harris leaned forward, as if fiddling with the radio, averting his face from the windows. “They’ve been tipped off, asked to stay a few blocks away until it goes down. Somebody wants to ensure there’ll be plenty of film of me being taken out of the house in handcuffs. If they go as far as using a SWAT team, then just before the bastards break down the door, these TV vans will get the word to come on up.”

Behind Harris, from the middle of three rows of seats, Ondine leaned forward. “Daddy, you mean they’re all here to film
you?”

“I’d bet on it, honey.”

“The bastards,” she fumed.

“Just newsmen doing their job.”

Willa, more emotionally fragile than her sister, began to cry again.

“Ondine’s right,” Bonnie agreed. “Stinking bastards.”

From the very back of the Microbus, Martin said, “Man, this is wild. Uncle Harris, they’re going after you like you were Michael Jackson or someone.”

“Okay, we’re past them,” Darius said, so Harris could sit up straight again.

Bonnie said, “The police must think we’re home, ’cause of the way the security system handles the lights when no one’s there.”

“It’s programmed with a dozen scenarios,” Darius explained. “It cycles through a different one every night no one’s there, switching off lamps in one room, on in another, switching radios and TVs on and off, imitating realistic patterns of activity. Supposed to convince burglars. Never expected I’d be happy about it convincing cops.”

Bonnie asked, “What now?”

“Let’s just drive for a while.” Harris put his hands in front of the heater vents, in the jets of hot air. He couldn’t get warm. “Just drive while I think about this.”

Already they had spent fifteen minutes cruising through Bel Air while he’d told them about the man who had approached him during his walk, the second stranger in the theater men’s room, and the redhead in the green coat. Even before seeing the TV-news vans, they had all regarded the woman’s warning as seriously as the events of the past few days argued that they should. But it had seemed feasible to drive by the house, quickly leave off Bonnie and Martin, then return ten minutes later and pick them up, along with the clothes that Ondine and Willa had gotten at the mall and with the pathetically few belongings that Jessica and the girls had been able to remove from their own home during the eviction on Saturday. However, their aimless cruising had resulted in an indirect approach to the house, a chance encounter with the TV-news vans, and the realization that the warning had been even more urgent than they had thought.

Darius drove to Wilshire Boulevard and headed west, toward Santa Monica and the sea.

“When I’m charged with the premeditated murder of seven people, including three children,” Harris thought aloud, “the prosecutor is going to go for ‘first-degree murder, special circumstances,’ sure as God made little green apples.”

Darius said, “Bail’s out of the question. Won’t be any. They’ll say you’re a flight risk.”

From her seat at the back, beside Martin, Jessica said, “Even if there was bail, we have no way to raise the money to post it.”

“Court calendars are clogged,” Darius noted. “So many laws these days, seventy thousand pages out of Congress last year. All those defendants, all those appeals. Most cases move like glaciers. Jesus, Harris, you’ll be in jail a year, maybe two, just waiting for a day in court, getting through the trial—”

“That’s time lost forever,” Jessica said angrily, “even if the jury finds him innocent.”

Ondine began to cry again, with Willa.

Harris vividly recalled each of his incapacitating attacks of jailhouse claustrophobia. “I’d never make it six months, not a chance, maybe not even a month.”

Circling through the city, where the millions of bright lights were inadequate to hold back the darkness, they discussed options. In the end, they realized that there
were
no options. He had no choice but to run. Yet without money or ID, he wouldn’t get far before he was chased down and apprehended. His only hope, therefore, was the mysterious group to which the redhead in the green coat and the other two strangers belonged, although Harris knew too little about them to feel comfortable putting his future in their hands.

Jessica, Ondine, and Willa were adamantly opposed to being separated from him. They feared that any separation was going to be permanent, so they ruled out the option of his going on the run alone. He was sure they were right. Besides, he didn’t want to be apart from them, because he suspected that they would remain targets in his absence.

Looking back through the shadow-filled Microbus, past the dark faces of his children and his sister-in-law, Harris met the eyes of his wife, where she sat next to Martin. “It can’t have come to this.”

“All that matters is that we’re together.”

“Everything we’ve worked so hard for—”

“Gone already.”

“—to start over at forty-four—”

“Better than dying at forty-four,” said Jessica.

“You’re a trooper,” he said lovingly.

Jessica smiled. “Well, it could’ve been an earthquake, the house gone, and all of us besides.”

Harris turned his attention to Ondine and Willa. They were done with tears, shaky but with a new light of defiance in their eyes.

He said, “All the friends you’ve made in school—”