Mr. Murder (20 page)

He was blessed with an attractive wife who was well worth staring at even when rain-soaked and distraught; she wasn’t merely attractive but smart, charming, amusing, loving, singular. His daughters were great kids. He had a prospering career as a novelist, and he profoundly enjoyed his work. Nothing was going to change any of that. Nothing.

Yet even as the cops removed the handcuffs and helped him to his feet, even as Paige hugged him and as he embraced her gratefully, Marty was acutely and uncomfortably aware that twilight was giving way to nightfall. He looked over her shoulder, searching countless shadowed places along the street, wondering from which nest of darkness the next attack would come. The rain seemed so cold that it ought to have been sleet, the emergency beacons stung his eyes, his throat burned as if he’d gargled with acid, his body ached in a score of places from the battering he had taken, and instinct told him that the worst was yet to come.

No.

No, that wasn’t instinct speaking. That was just his overactive imagination at work. The curse of the writer’s imagination. Always searching for the next plot twist.

Life wasn’t like fiction. Real stories didn’t have second and third acts, neat structures, narrative pace, escalating denouements. Crazy things just happened, without the logic of fiction, and then life went on as usual.

The policemen were all watching him hug Paige.

He thought he saw hostility in their faces.

Another siren swelled in the distance.

He was so cold.

Three

The Oklahoma night made Drew Oslett uneasy. Mile after mile, on both sides of the interstate highway, with rare exception, the darkness was so deep and unrelenting that he seemed to be crossing a bridge over an enormously wide and bottomless abyss. Thousands of stars salted the sky, suggesting an immensity that he preferred not to consider.

He was a creature of the city, his soul in tune with urban bustle. Wide avenues flanked by tall buildings were the largest open spaces with which he was entirely comfortable. He had lived for many years in New York, but he had never visited Central Park; those fields and vales were encircled by the city, yet Oslett found them sufficiently large and bucolic to make him edgy. He was in his element only in sheltering forests of highrises, where sidewalks teemed with people and streets were jammed with noisy traffic. In his midtown Manhattan apartment, he slept with no drapes over the windows, so the ambient light of the metropolis flooded the room. When he woke in the night, he was comforted by periodic sirens, blaring horns, drunken shouts, car-rattled manhole covers, and other more exotic noises that rose from the streets even during the dead hours, though at diminished volume from the glorious clash and jangle of mornings, afternoons, and evenings. The continuous cacophony and infinite distractions of the city were the silk of his cocoon, protecting him, ensuring that he would never find himself in the quiet circumstances that encouraged contemplation and introspection.

Darkness and silence offered no distraction and were, therefore, enemies of contentment. Rural Oklahoma had too damned much of both.

Slightly slumped in the passenger seat of the rented Chevrolet, Drew Oslett shifted his attention from the unnerving landscape to the state-of-the-art electronic map that he was holding on his lap.

The device was as big as an attaché case, though square instead of rectangular, and operated off the car battery through a cigarette-lighter plug. The flat top of it resembled the front of a television set: mostly screen with a narrow frame of brushed steel and a row of control buttons. Against a softly luminous lime-green background, interstate highways were indicated in emerald green, state routes in yellow, and county roads in blue; unpaved dirt and gravel byways were represented by broken black lines. Population centers—precious few in this part of the world—were pink.

Their vehicle was a red dot of light near the middle of the screen. The dot moved steadily along the emerald-green line that was Interstate 40.

“About four miles ahead now,” Oslett said.

Karl Clocker, the driver, did not respond. Even in the best of times, Clocker was not much of a conversationalist. The average rock was more talkative.

The square screen of the electronic map was set to a mid-range scale, displaying a hundred square miles of territory in a ten-mile-by-ten-mile grid. Oslett touched one of the buttons, and the map blinked off, replaced almost instantly by a twenty-five-square-mile block, five miles on a side, that enlarged one quadrant of the first picture to fill the screen.

The red dot representing their car was now four times larger than before. It was no longer in the center of the picture but off to the right side.

Near the left end of the display, less than four miles away, a blinking white X remained stationary just a fraction of an inch to the right of Interstate 40. X marked the prize.

Oslett enjoyed working with the map because the screen was so colorful, like the board of a well-designed video game. He liked video games a lot. In fact, although he was thirty-two, some of his favorite places were arcades, where arrays of cool machines tantalized the eye with strobing light in every color and romanced the ear with incessant beeps, tweets, buzzes, hoots, whoops, waw-waws, clangs, booms, riffs of music, and oscillating electronic tones.

Unfortunately, the map had none of the action of a game. And it lacked sound effects altogether.

Still, it excited him because not just anyone could get his hands on the device—which was called a SATU, for Satellite Assisted Tracking Unit. It wasn’t sold to the public, partly because the cost was so exorbitant that potential purchasers were too few to justify marketing it broadly. Besides, some of the technology was encumbered by strict national-security prohibitions against dissemination. And because the map was primarily a tool for serious clandestine tracking and surveillance, most of the relatively small number of existing units were currently used by federally controlled law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering agencies or were in the hands of similar organizations in countries allied with the United States.

“Three miles,” he told Clocker.

The hulking driver did not even grunt by way of reply. Wires trailed from the SATU and terminated in a three-inch-diameter suction cup that Oslett had fixed to the highest portion of the curved windshield. A locus of microminiature electronics in the base of the cup was the transmitter and receiver of a satellite up-link package. Through coded bursts of microwaves, the SATU could quickly interface with scores of geosynchronous communication and survey satellites owned by private industry and various military services, override their security systems, insert its program in their logic units, and enlist them in its operations without either disturbing their primary functions or alerting their ground monitors to the invasion.

By using two satellites to search for—and get a lock on—the unique signal of a particular transponder, the SATU could triangulate a precise position for the carrier of that transponder. Usually the target transmitter was an inconspicuous package that had been planted in the undercarriage of the surveillance subject’s car—sometimes in his plane or boat—so he could be followed at a distance without ever being aware that someone was tailing him.

In this case, it was a transponder hidden in the rubber heel and sole of a shoe.

Oslett used the SATU controls to halve the area represented on the screen, thereby dramatically enlarging the details on the map. Studying the new but equally colorful display, he said, “He’s still not moving. Looks like maybe he’s pulled off the side of the road in a rest stop.”

The SATU microchips contained detailed maps of every square mile of the continental United States, Canada, and Mexico. If Oslett had been operating in Europe, the Mideast or elsewhere, he could have installed the suitable cartographical library for that territory.

“Two and a half miles,” Oslett said.

Driving with one hand, Clocker reached under his sportcoat and withdrew the revolver he carried in a shoulder holster. It was a Colt .357 Magnum, an eccentric choice of weaponry—and somewhat dated—for a man in Karl Clocker’s line of work. He also favored tweed jackets with leather-covered buttons, leather patches on the elbows, and on occasion—as now—leather lapels. He had an eccentric collection of sweater vests with bold harlequin patterns, one of which he was currently wearing. His brightly colored socks were usually chosen to clash with everything else, and without fail he wore brown suede Hush Puppies. Considering his size and demeanor, no one was likely to comment negatively on his taste in clothes, let alone make unasked-for observations about his choice of handguns.

“Won’t need heavy firepower,” Oslett said.

Without saying a word to Oslett, Clocker put the .357 Magnum on the seat beside him, next to his hat, where he could get to it easily.

“I’ve got the trank gun,” Oslett said. “That should do it.”

Clocker didn’t even look at him.

Before Marty would agree to get out of the rainswept street and tell the authorities what had happened, he insisted that a uniformed officer watch over Charlotte and Emily at the Delorios’ house. He trusted Vic and Kathy to do anything necessary to protect the girls. But they would not be a match for the vicious relentlessness of The Other.

He wasn’t sanguine that even a well-armed guard was enough protection.

On the Delorios’ front porch, rain streamed from the overhang. It looked like holiday tinsel in the glow of the brass hurricane lamp. Sheltering there, Marty tried to make Vic understand the girls were still in danger. “Don’t let anyone in except the cops or Paige.”

“Sure, Marty.” Vic was a physical-education teacher, coach of the local high-school swimming team, Boy Scout troop leader, primary motivator behind their street’s Neighborhood Watch program, and organizer of various annual charity fund drives, an earnest and energetic guy who enjoyed helping people and who wore athletic shoes even on occasions when he also wore a coat and tie, as if more formal footwear would not allow him to move as fast and accomplish as much as he wished. “Nobody but the cops or Paige. Leave it to me, the kids will be okay with me and Kathy. Jesus, Marty, what happened over there?”

“And for God’s sake, don’t give the girls to anyone, cops or anyone, unless Paige is with them. Don’t even give them to
me
unless Paige is with me.”

Vic Delorio looked away from the police activity and blinked in surprise.

In memory, Marty could hear the look-alike’s angry voice, see the flecks of spittle flying from his mouth as he raged:
I want my life, my Paige . . . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .

“You understand, Vic?”

“Not to you?”

“Only if Paige is with me.
Only
then.”

“What—”

“I’ll explain later,” Marty interrupted. “Everybody’s waiting for me.” He turned and hurried along the front walk toward the street, looking back once to say, “Only Paige.”

At home, in the kitchen, while recounting the assault to the officer who had caught the call and been first on the scene, Marty allowed a police technician to ink his fingers and roll them on a record sheet. They needed to be able to differentiate between his prints and those of the intruder. He wondered if he and The Other would prove to be as identical in that regard as they seemed in every other.

Paige also submitted to the process. It was the first time in their lives that either of them had been fingerprinted. Though Marty understood the need for it, the whole process seemed invasive.

After he got what he required, the technician moistened a paper towel with a glycerol cleanser and said that it would remove all the ink. It didn’t. No matter how hard he rubbed, dark stains remained in the whorls of his skin.

Before sitting down to make a more complete statement to the officer in charge, Marty went upstairs to change into dry clothes. He also took four Anacin.

He turned up the thermostat, and the house quickly overheated. But periodic shivers still plagued him—largely because of the unnerving presence of so many police officers.

They were everywhere in the house. Some were in uniforms, others were not, and all of them were strangers whose presence made Marty feel further violated.

He hadn’t anticipated how utterly a victim’s privacy was peeled away beginning the moment he reported a serious crime. Policemen and technicians were in his office to photograph the room where the violent confrontation had begun, dig a couple of bullets out of the wall, dust for fingerprints, and take blood samples from the carpet. They were also photographing the upstairs hall, stairs, and foyer. In their search for evidence that the intruder might have left behind, they assumed they had an invitation to poke into any room or closet.

Of course they were in his house to help him, and Marty was grateful for their efforts. Yet it was embarrassing to think that strangers might be noting the admittedly obsessive way he organized the clothes in his closet according to color—he and Emily both—the fact that he collected pennies and nickels in a half-gallon jar as might a boy saving for his first bicycle, and other unimportant yet highly personal details of his life.

And he was more unsettled by the plainclothes detective in charge than by the rest of them combined. The guy’s name was Cyrus Lowbock, and he elicited a complex response that went beyond mere embarrassment.

The detective could have made a good living as a male model posing for magazine advertisements for Rolls-Royce, tuxedoes, caviar, and stock-brokerage services. He was about fifty, trim, with salt-and-pepper hair, a tan even in November, an aquiline nose, fine cheekbones, and extraordinary gray eyes. In black loafers, gray cords, dark-blue cable-knit sweater, and white shirt—he had taken off a windbreaker—Lowbock managed to appear both distinguished and athletic, although the sports one would associate with him were not football and baseball but tennis, sailing, powerboat racing, and other pursuits of the upper classes. He looked less like any popular image of a cop than like a man who had been born to wealth and knew how to manage and preserve it.