Mr. Murder (23 page)

And that was why he didn’t try to dissuade Clocker from bringing the .357 Magnum.

Steeling himself for the unexpected, Oslett knocked on the metal door. Knocking seemed a ludicrous way to announce himself under the circumstances, but he knocked anyway, waited several seconds, and knocked again, louder.

No one answered.

The door was unlocked. He opened it.

Enough yellow light from the parking-lot lamps filtered through the windshield to illuminate the cockpit of the motorhome. Oslett could see that no immediate threat loomed.

He stepped up onto the door sill, leaned in, and looked back through the Road King, which tunneled away into a swarming darkness as deep as the chambers of ancient catacombs.

“Be at peace, Alfie,” he said softly.

That spoken command should have resulted in an immediate ritual response, as in a litany:
I am at peace, Father.

“Be at peace, Alfie,” Oslett repeated less hopefully.

Silence.

Although Oslett was neither Alfie’s father nor a man of the cloth, and therefore in no way could lay a legitimate claim to the honorific, his heart nevertheless would have been gladdened if he had heard the whispered and obedient reply:
I am at peace, Father.
Those five simple words, in an answering murmur, would have meant that all was essentially well, that Alfie’s deviation from his instructions was less a rebellion than a temporary confusion of purpose, and that the killing spree on which he had embarked was something that could be forgiven and put behind them.

Though he knew it was useless, Oslett tried a third time, speaking louder than before: “Be at peace, Alfie.”

When nothing in the darkness answered him, he switched on the flashlight and climbed into the Road King.

He couldn’t help but think what a waste and humiliation it would be if he got himself shot to death in a strange motorhome along an interstate in the Oklahoma vastness at the tender age of thirty-two. Such a bright young man of such singular promise (the mourners would say), with two degrees—one from Princeton, one from Harvard—and an enviable pedigree.

Moving out of the cockpit as Clocker entered behind him, Oslett swept the beam of the flashlight left and right. Shadows billowed and flapped like black capes, ebony wings, lost souls.

Only a few members of his family—fewer still among that circle of Manhattan artists, writers, and critics who were his friends—would know in what line of duty he had perished. The rest would find the details of his demise baffling, bizarre, possibly sordid, and they would gossip with the feverishness of birds tearing at carrion.

The flashlight revealed Formica-sheathed cabinets. A stove top. A stainless-steel sink.

The mystery surrounding his peculiar death would ensure that myths would grow like coral reefs, incorporating every color of scandal and vile supposition, but leaving his memory with precious little tint of respect. Respect was one of the few things that mattered to Drew Oslett. He had demanded respect since he was only a boy. It was his birthright, not merely a pleasing accoutrement of the family name but a tribute that must be paid to all of the family’s history and accomplishments embodied in him.

“Be at peace, Alfie,” he said nervously.

A hand, as white as marble and as solid-looking, had been waiting for the flashlight beam to find it. The alabaster fingers trailed on the carpet beside the padded booth of a dining nook. Higher up: the white-haired body of a man slumped over the bloodstained table.

Paige got up from the dining-room table, went to the nearest window, tilted the shutter slats to make wider gaps, and stared out at the gradually fading storm. She was looking into the backyard, where there were no lights. She could see nothing clearly except the tracks of rain on the other side of the glass, which seemed like gobs of spit, maybe because she wanted to spit at Lowbock, right in his face.

She had more hostility in her than did Marty, not just toward the detective but toward the world. All her adult life, she had been struggling to resolve the conflicts of childhood that were the source of her anger. She had made considerable progress. But in the face of provocation like this, she felt the resentments and bitterness of her childhood rising anew, and her directionless anger found a focus in Lowbock, making it difficult for her to keep her temper in check.

Conscious avoidance—facing the window, keeping the detective out of sight—was a proven technique for maintaining self-control.
Counselor, counsel thyself.
Reducing the level of interaction was supposed to reduce anger as well.

She hoped it worked better for her clients than it worked for her, because she was still
seething.

At the table with the detective, Marty seemed determined to be reasonable and cooperative. Being Marty, he would cling as long as possible to the hope that Lowbock’s mysterious antagonism could be assuaged. Angry as he might be himself—and he was angrier than she had ever seen him—he still had tremendous faith in the power of good intentions and words, especially words, to restore and maintain harmony under any circumstances.

To Lowbock, Marty said, “It had to be him drank the beers.”

“Him?” Lowbock asked.

“The look-alike. He must’ve been in the house a couple of hours while I was out.”

“So the intruder drank the three Coronas?”

“I emptied the trash last night, Sunday night, so I know they aren’t empties left from the weekend.”

“This guy, he broke into your house because . . . how did he say it exactly?”

“He said he needed his life.”

“Needed his life?”

“Yes. He asked me why I’d stolen his life, who was I.”

“So he breaks in here,” Lowbock said, “agitated, talking crazy, well-armed . . . but while he’s waiting for you to come home, he decides to kick back and have three bottles of Corona.”

Without turning away from the window, Paige said, “My husband didn’t have those beers, Lieutenant. He’s not a drunk.”

Marty said, “I’d certainly be willing to take a Breathalyzer test, if you’d like. If I drank that many beers, one after another, my blood-alcohol level would show it.”

“Well,” Lowbock said, “if we were going to do that, we should have tested you first thing. But it’s not necessary, Mr. Stillwater. I’m certainly not saying you were intoxicated, that you imagined the whole thing under the influence.”

“Then what are you saying?” Paige demanded.

“Sometimes,” Lowbock observed, “people drink to give themselves the courage to face a difficult task.”

Marty sighed. “Maybe I’m dense, Lieutenant. I know there’s an unpleasant implication in what you just said, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what I’m supposed to infer from it.”

“Did I say I meant for you to infer anything?”

“Would you just please stop being cryptic and tell us why you’re treating me like this, like a suspect instead of a victim?”

Lowbock was silent.

Marty pressed the issue: “I
know
this situation is incredible, this dead-ringer business, but if you’d just bluntly tell me the reasons you’re so skeptical, I’m sure I could eliminate your doubts. At least I could try.”

Lowbock was unresponsive for so long that Paige almost turned from the window to have a look at him, wondering if his expression would reveal something about the meaning of his silence.

Finally he said, “We live in a litigious world, Mr. Stillwater. If a cop makes the slightest mistake handling a delicate situation, the department gets sued and sometimes the officer’s career gets flushed away. It happens to good men.”

“What’ve lawsuits got to do with this? I’m not going to sue anyone, Lieutenant.”

“Say a guy catches a call about an armed robbery in progress, so he answers it, does his duty, finds himself in real jeopardy, getting shot at, blows away the perp in self-defense. And what happens next?”

“I guess you’ll tell me.”

“Next thing you know, the perp’s family and the ACLU are after the department about excessive violence, want a financial settlement. They want the officer dismissed, even put the poor sucker on trial, accuse him of being a fascist.”

Marty said, “It stinks. I agree with you. These days it seems like the world’s been turned upside-down but—”

“If the same cop
doesn’t
respond with force, and some bystander gets hurt ’cause the perp wasn’t blown away at the first opportunity, the department gets sued for negligence by the victim’s family, and the same activists come down on our necks like a ton of bricks, but for different reasons. People say the cop didn’t pull the trigger fast enough because he’s insensitive to the minority group the victim was a part of, would’ve been quicker if the victim was white, or they say he’s incompetent, or he’s a coward.”

“I wouldn’t want your job. I know how difficult it is,” Marty commiserated. “But no cop has shot or failed to shoot anyone here, and I don’t see what this has to do with our situation.”

“A cop can get in as much trouble making accusations as he can shooting perps,” Lowbock said.

“So your point is, you’re skeptical of my story, but you won’t say
why
until you’ve got absolute proof it’s bullshit.”

“He won’t even admit to being skeptical,” Paige said sourly. “He won’t take any position, one way or the other, because taking a position means taking a risk.”

Marty said, “But, Lieutenant, how are we going to get done with this, how am I going to be able to convince you all of this happened just as I said it did, if you
won’t
tell me why you doubt it?”

“Mr. Stillwater, I haven’t said that I doubt you.”

“Jesus,” Paige said.

“All I ask,” Lowbock said, “is that you do your best to answer my questions.”

“And all
we
ask,” Paige said, still keeping her back to the man, “is that you find the lunatic who tried to kill Marty.”

“This look-alike.” Lowbock spoke the word flatly, without any inflection whatsoever, which seemed more sarcastic than if he had said it with a heavy sneer.

“Yes,” Paige hissed, “this look-alike.”

She didn’t doubt Marty’s story, as wild as it was, and she knew that somehow the existence of the dead-ringer was tied to—and would ultimately explain—her husband’s fugue, bizarre nightmare, and other recent problems.

Now her fury at the detective faded as she began to accept that the police, for whatever reason, were not going to help them. Anger gave way to fear because she realized they were up against something exceedingly strange and were going to have to deal with it entirely on their own.

Clocker returned from the front of the Road King to report that the keys were in the ignition in the ON position, but the fuel tank was evidently empty and the battery dead. The cabin lights could not be turned on.

Worried that the flashlight beam, seen from outside, would look suspicious to anyone pulling into the rest area, Drew Oslett quickly examined the two cadavers in the cramped dining nook. Because the spilled blood was thoroughly dry and caked hard, he knew the man and woman had been dead more than just a few hours. However, although rigor mortis was still present in both bodies, they were no longer entirely stiff; the rigor evidently had peaked and had begun to fade, as it usually did between eighteen and thirty-six hours after death.

The bodies had not begun to decompose noticeably as yet. The only bad smell came from their open mouths—the sour gases produced by the rotting food in their stomachs.

“Best guesstimate—they’ve been dead since sometime yesterday afternoon,” he told Clocker.

The Road King had been sitting in the rest area for more than twenty-four hours, so at least one Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer must have seen it on two separate shifts. State law surely forbade using rest areas as campsites. No electrical connections, water supplies, or sewage-tank pump-outs were provided, which created a potential for health problems. Sometimes cops might be lenient with retirees afraid of driving in weather as inclement as the storm that had assaulted Oklahoma yesterday; the American Association of Retired People bumper sticker on the back of the motorhome might have gained these people some dispensation. But not even a sympathetic cop would let them park
two
nights. At any moment, a patrol car might pull into the rest area and a knock might come at the door.

Averse to complicating their already serious problems by killing a highway patrolman, Oslett turned away from the dead couple and hastily proceeded with the search of the motorhome. He was no longer cautious out of fear that Alfie, dysfunctional and disobedient, would put a bullet in his head. Alfie was long gone from here.

He found the discarded shoes on the kitchen counter. With a large serrated knife, Alfie had sawed at one of the heels until he had exposed the electronic circuitry and the attendant chain of tiny batteries.

Staring at the Rockports and the pile of rubber shavings, Oslett was chilled by a premonition of disaster. “He never knew about the shoes. Why would he get it in his head to cut them open?”

“Well, he knows what he knows,” Clocker said.

Oslett interpreted Clocker’s statement to mean that part of Alfie’s training included state-of-the-art electronic surveillance equipment and techniques. Consequently, though he was not told that he was “tagged,” he knew that a microminiature transponder could be made small enough to fit in the heel of a shoe and, upon receipt of a remote microwave activating signal, could draw sufficient power from a series of watch batteries to transmit a trackable signal for at least seventy-two hours. Although he was unable to recall what he was or who controlled him, Alfie was intelligent enough to apply his knowledge of surveillance to his own situation and reach the logical conclusion that his controllers had made prudent provisions for locating and following him in the event he went renegade, even if they had been thoroughly convinced rebellion was not possible.