The Vision (12 page)

The death of her father
was
more important than whatever Berton Mitchell had done to her.

Why couldn’t Dr. Cauvel see that?

 
 
In the dark bedroom, when it became evident that neither of them could sleep, Max touched her. His hands affected her in the same way that the rapidly vibrating tines of a tuning fork would affect fine crystal. She trembled uncontrollably and shattered. She broke against him, weeping.

He didn’t speak. Words no longer mattered.

He held her for a few minutes, and then he began to stroke her. He slid one hand over her silk pajamas, along her flank, across her buttocks. Slow, warm movement. And then he popped open two buttons on her blouse, slipped his hand inside, felt her warm breast, his fingers lingering on her nipple only for an instant. She put her open mouth to his neck, against the hard muscle. His strong pulse was transmitted to her through her tender lips. He undressed her and then himself. The bandage on his hand brushed her bare thigh.

“Your finger,” she said.

“It’ll be fine.”

“The cut might come open,” she said. “It might start to bleed again.”

“Sshhh,
” he said.

He was not in the mood to be patient, and although she hadn’t said a word, he sensed she was equally anxious. He rose above her in the lightless air, as if taking flight, then settled over her. Although she had expected nothing more than the special joy of closeness, she climaxed within a minute. Not intensely. A gentle rush of pleasure. However, when she came a second time, moments before he finished far down inside of her, she cried out with delight.

For a while she lay at his side, holding his hand. Finally she said, “Don’t ever leave me. Stay with me as long as I live.”

“As long as you live,” Max promised.

At five-thirty on Wednesday morning, in the middle of a nightmare vision of the killer’s next crime, Mary was catapulted from sleep by the sound of gunfire. A single shot, ear-splitting, too close. Even as the boom was bouncing off the bedroom walls, she sat up, threw off the blanket and sheet, swung her legs out of bed. “Max! What’s wrong? Max!”

Beside her, he switched on the lamp, jumped up from the bed. He stood, swaying, blinking.

The sudden light hurt her eyes. Although she was squinting, she could see there was no intruder in the room.

Max reached for the loaded handgun that he kept on the nightstand. It was not there.

“Where’s the pistol?” he asked.

“I didn’t touch it,” she said.

Then, as her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw the gun. It was floating in the air near the foot of the bed, floating five feet above the floor, as if it were suspended from wires, except that there were no wires. The barrel was pointed at her.

The poltergeist.

“Jesus!” Max said.

Although no visible finger pulled the trigger, a second shot exploded. The bullet tore into the headboard inches from Mary’s face.

She panicked. Gasping, whimpering, she ran across the room, hunched as if she were crippled. The gun traversed to the left, covering her. She came to a corner, stopped. Trapped. She realized she should have gone in the opposite direction, where she could have at least locked herself in the bathroom.

The third shot smashed into the floor beside her feet. Bits of a throw rug and splinters of wood sprayed up.

“Max!”

He grabbed at the gun, but it slid away from him, rose and fell and swung from side to side, bobbled and weaved, forced him into a clumsy ballet.

She looked for something to hide behind.

There was nothing.

The fourth shot passed over her head, piercing a framed, glass-covered watercolor of Newport Beach harbor.

Max connected with the pistol, clutched it. The barrel twisted in his hands until it was pointed at his chest. Sweating, cursing, he struggled to pull the weapon from a pair of hands that he couldn’t see. Surprisingly, after a few seconds, the unseen contestant surrendered, and Max staggered backward with the prize.

She stood with her back to the wall, hands to her face. She couldn’t take her eyes from the barrel of the gun.

“It’s safe now,” Max said. “It’s over.” He started toward her.

“For God’s sake, unload it!” she said, pointing at the gun in his hand.

He stopped, stared at the pistol, and then took the magazine out of the handgrip.

“All of the bullets should be taken from the clip,” she said.

“I doubt that’s necessary if I—”

His big hands were shaking as he took the bullets from the magazine. He placed all of the pieces on the bed
_;
pistol, empty magazine, unspent ammunition. For a minute he studied the items, as she did, waiting for one of them to rise off the blanket.

Nothing moved.

“What was it?” he asked.

“Poltergeist.”

“Whatever it was—is it still here?”

She closed her eyes, tried to relax, tried to feel. After a while she said, “No. It’s gone.”

PERCY OSTERMAN, THE Orange County sheriff, opened the door for Max and Mary, motioned for them to go ahead of him.

The room was gray. The paint was gray, the floor tile gray, the windowsills gray with dust. A set of gray metal storage shelves was bolted to one wall, and the wall opposite the shelves contained a lot of built-in file drawers with burnished steel fronts. The few pieces of furniture were fashioned of tubular steel and gray vinyl. The screens over the ceiling lights were gray, and the fuzzy fluorescent illumination transformed the scene into a chiaroscuro print.

The only spots of brightness in the room were the well scrubbed porcelain sinks and the slanted autopsy table, which was fiercely white with polished, gleaming stainless steel fixtures.

The sheriff was all hard lines and sharp angles. He was nearly as tall as Max, but forty pounds lighter and far less muscular. Yet he did not appear wasted or weak. His hands were large, boney, almost fleshless, the fingers like talons. His shoulders sloped forward. His neck was thin with a prominent Adam’s apple. In his pinched, sun-browned face, his eyes were quick, nervous, a curious pale shade of amber.

Osterman’s frown was ominous, his smile easy and kind. He was not smiling when he opened one of the six large drawers and pulled the shroud from the face of the corpse.

Mary stepped away from Max, moved closer to the dead man.

“Kyle Nolan,” Osterman said. “Owned the beauty shop. Worked there as a hair stylist.”

Nolan was short, broad-shouldered, barrelchested. Bald. A bushy mustache. Shave off the mustache, Mary thought, and he’d look like that actor, Edward Asner.

She put one hand on the drawer and waited for a rush of psychic impressions. Although she didn’t understand how or why, she knew that, for a time after passing away, the dead maintained a bubble of energy around them, an invisible capsule that contained memories, vivid scenes of their lives and especially of their last minutes. Ordinarily, contact with the victim of a murder, or with the victim’s belongings, would generate a torrent of clairvoyant images, sometimes clear as reality and sometimes hopelessly blurry and meaningless, most of them dealing with the moment of death and with the identity of the killer.

In this case, for the first time in her experience, she sensed absolutely nothing. Not even a shapeless flurry of movement or color.

She touched the dead man’s cold face.

Still nothing.

Osterman closed the drawer, opened the one next to it. As he folded back the shroud, he said, “Tina Nolan. Kyle’s wife.”

Tina was an attractive but hard-faced woman with brittle, bleached hair that her husband should have found professionally embarrassing. Although they had been closed hours ago by the coroner, her eyes had come open again. She stared at Mary as if she were trying to impart some dreadfully important news
_;
but in the end she provided nothing more than poor Kyle had done.

The woman in the third drawer was in her late twenties. She had once been beautiful.

“Rochelle Drake,” Percy Osterman said. “Nolan’s last customer for the day.”

“Rochelle Drake?” Max said. He came closer, peered into the drawer. “Don’t I know that name?”

“Recognize her?” Sheriff Osterman asked.

Max shook his head. “No. But... Mary? Does that name mean anything to you?”

“No,” she said. “When you foresaw these killings, you said you thought you knew one of the victims.”

“I was wrong,” she said. “These people are strangers.”

“That’s odd,” Max said. “I’d swear... well, I don’t know
what
I’d swear... except this one’s name... Rochelle Drake... it’s familiar.”

Mary was not paying much attention to him, for she perceived a familiar electricity in the air, a stirring of psychic forces. The Drake woman was going to provide what the other bodies should have offered but didn’t. Mary opened her mind to the psychic emanations, made herself as receptive as she could, and put her hand on the dead woman’s forehead.

Wings.

Startled, Mary pulled her hand away from the corpse as if she had been bitten.

She felt wings, leathery wings, shuddering like the membranes of drums.

This isn’t possible, she thought frantically. The wings have something to do with Berton Mitchell. Not with this dead woman. Not with the man who killed her. The wings have to do with the past, not the present. Berton Mitchell couldn’t be involved in this. He hung himself in a jail cell nearly twenty-four years ago.

But now she could smell the wings as well as feel them, smell the wings and the creatures behind them—a dank, musty, musky odor that nauseated her.

What if the man who murdered Rochelle Drake and the others was not possessed by the spirit of Richard Lingard? What if, instead, he was possessed by the soul of another psychopath, by the spirit of Berton Mitchell? Wasn’t it conceivable that Lingard himself had been possessed by Berton Mitchell? And when Barnes shot Lingard, perhaps Mitchell’s spirit moved on to another host. Perhaps she had unknowingly crossed the path of an old nemesis. Perhaps she would spend the remainder of her life in pursuit of Berton Mitchell. Perhaps she would be compelled to follow him from one host to another until he finally found the opportunity to kill her.

No. That was madness. She was thinking like a lunatic.

Max asked, “Is something wrong?”

Wings brushed her face, her neck, shoulders and breasts and belly, fluttered against her ankles and up her calves and then against her inner thighs.

She was determined not to succumb to fear. But she was also half convinced that if she didn’t stop thinking about the wings, they would carry her off into everlasting darkness. A ridiculous notion. Nevertheless, she turned away from the morgue drawer.

“Are you receiving something?” Max asked.

“Not now,” she lied.

“But you were?”

“For an instant.”

“What did you see?” he asked.

“Nothing important. Just meaningless movement.”

“Can you pick it up again?” Max asked.

“No.”

She mustn’t pursue it. If she did, she would see what lay behind those wings. She must never see what lay behind those wings.

Osterman closed the drawer.

Mary sighed with relief.

 
Sheriff Osterman went with them to the far corner of the municipal parking lot, where they’d left their car.

The December sky was like the morgue—shades of gray. The fast-moving clouds were reflected in the polished hood of the Mercedes.

Shivering, Mary put her hands in her coat pockets and hunched her shoulders against the wind.

“Heard good things about you,” Osterman told Mary in his peculiarly economical way of speaking. “Often thought about working with you.

Pleased when you called this morning. Hoped you’d come up with a lead.”

“I hoped so, too,” she said.

“Foresaw these murders, did you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Those nurses in Anaheim, too?”

“That’s right.”

“Same killer, you think?”

“Yes,” she said.

Osterman nodded. “We think so, too. Have some evidence of it.”

“What sort of evidence?” Max asked.

“When he killed the nurses,” Osterman said, each word sharp and quick, “he busted up some stuff. Religious things. Two crucifixes. Statuette of the Virgin Mary. Even strangled one girl with a rosary. Found something similar in this beauty shop case.”

“What?” Mary asked.

“Pretty ugly bit of business. Maybe you don’t want to hear it.”

“I’m used to hearing and seeing ugly things,” she said.

He regarded her for a moment, amber eyes hooded. “Guess that’s true.” He leaned against the Mercedes. “This woman in the beauty shop. Rochelle Drake. She wore a necklace. A gold cross. He raped her, killed her. Tore the cross off her neck. Pushed it up ... inside of her.”

Mary felt ill. She hugged herself.

“Then he’s a psychopath with some sort of religious hangup,” Max said.

“Appears so,” Osterman said. He looked at Mary and asked, “So where do you go from here?”

“Down to the shore,” she said.

“King’s Point,” Max said.

“Why there?”

She hesitated, glanced at Max. “That’s where the next murders will take place.”

Osterman did not seem surprised. “Had another vision, did you?”

“Early this morning,” she said.

“When will it happen?”

“Tomorrow night,” she said.

“Christmas Eve?”

“Yes.”

“Where in King’s Point?”

“On the harbor,” she said.

“Pretty good-sized harbor.”

“It’ll be near the shops and restaurants.”