The Vision (16 page)

“Shit,” Patmore said. He walked back to the front of the squad car, picked up the walkie-talkie, and called Winterman, Holtzman, and Teagarten out of the towers.

“I’m sorry,” Mary said to Lou. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault he’s an idiot.”

Max opened the car door. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

* * *

When they were
settled in Lou Pasternak’s book-strewn living room once more, Max asked, “What now?”

“We wait,” Mary said.

“For what?” Lou asked.

Wearily, she said, “We wait for him to start killing people again.”

Friday, December 25

16

The motel room
was dark.

She was lying on her side. She turned onto her back.

She felt claustrophobic, as if the ceiling had begun to descend upon her.

“Can’t shut off your mind?” Max asked.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I’ve been waiting for you to doze off first.”

“You were so quiet,” she said.

“Trying not to disturb you.”

“What time is it?”

“Three o’clock.”

“Go to sleep, darling. I’ll be fine.”

“I can’t sleep if I know you’re worried.”

“I keep thinking I hear someone trying the door.”

“No one’s been at the door. I’d have heard it.”

“And I keep thinking someone’s at the window.”

“Not that either. It’s nerves.”

“Screaming mimis,” she said.

“Maybe you should take a sedative.”

“I had a sleeping pill two hours ago.”

“So take another.”

“What is he, Max?”

“Who?”

“The killer.”

“Just a man.”

“No.”

“Yes, Mary. Yes. Just a man.”

Darkness pulsed around her.

“He’s something more,” she said.

“Take another sleeping pill.”

“I guess I should. But I was beginning to cut down. I was beginning to break the habit.”

“After this case you can go cold turkey. But right now the pills aren’t an indulgence. You’ve got good reason to need them.”

“Will you get one for me?”

He fetched a glass of water and the sedative, waited while she took it, switched off the light and returned to bed.

“Move close,” she said.

Her back was against his chest. Her buttocks against his groin. Two spoons in a drawer.

Several minutes passed in warm silence.

At last she said, “I’m getting sleepy.”

“Good.” He stroked her hair.

Still later: “Max?”

“Hmmm?”

“Maybe he can’t help being bad and doing awful things. Maybe he was born bad. Maybe evil isn’t
always
learned. Maybe parents and environment aren’t
always
to blame for an evil child. Sometimes maybe it’s in the genes.”

“Will you hush?”

“Max, am I going to die?”

“Eventually. We all do.”

“But soon? Will I die soon?”

“Not soon. I’m here.”

“Hold me.”

“I’m holding you.”

“I want to be strong.”

“You are strong.”

“I am?”

“You just don’t realize it.”

In ten minutes she was asleep.

He continued to stroke her hair.

He listened to her breathing.

He didn’t want her to die. He hoped she didn’t
have
to die. He wished with all of his heart and mind that she would give up on this case. Let the killing be done. She shouldn’t feel responsible. Just let the killing be done. Did society feel responsible? No. Did the police feel responsible? They sometimes did their jobs, occasionally made an effort to find the killer, but they had as much contempt for victim as for victimizer; and none of them lost sleep over it. So let the killing be done. Forget it, Mary. Maybe she thought she was something special. Was that it? Unconsciously she might think that because of her psychic powers she couldn’t die. Well, she could. Like all the rest of the tender, sweet young girls who thought they, too, would live forever. She would be as vulnerable, as soft against the knife as all the others had been. So she should stop. Go away from this. If she forced the issue, if she pursued the case, she might have to die. She was standing in front of a juggernaut. She was in the path of a force she didn’t understand, a force that drew its greatest strength from the past, from an event that was twenty-four years old.

In the darkness, holding her as she slept, he wept at the thought of life without her.

* * *

Although sunrise was
not far away, his flashlight was the only relief from inky blackness. His footsteps were the only sounds in the deserted arcade. He crossed the large main room. In summer it was filled with pinball machines and electronic games. Now the floor was bare, the main room empty. He entered the stairwell above which hung a large sign:
THIS WAY TO OBSERVATION DECK
.

The enclosed stairwell of the tower of Kimball’s Games and Snacks was narrow, cold, and dirty. It had not yet been repainted for the next season. His flashlight played off yellow-white walls that bore a thousand stains: children’s handprints, streaks of spilled soft drinks, names and messages scrawled in pencil and felt-tip markers.

The wooden steps creaked.

When he reached the walled platform at the top of the winding stairs, he switched off the flashlight. He doubted anyone would be watching at this hour; however, he didn’t want to risk drawing attention to himself.

Dawn was nothing but a thin, lustrous purple line on the eastern horizon, as if a razor had been drawn lightly across the skin of the night.

He stared out at the harbor.

He waited.

In a few minutes, from the corner of his eye, he caught movement in the air. He heard the flutter of wings.

Something roosted in the crossbeams of the peaked roof, rustled for a moment, then was silent.

He stared into the crouching shadows above and trembled with pleasure.

Tonight, he thought. Tonight, the blood again.

He could feel death all around him, a thick and tangible current in the air.

To the east, the wound in the sky grew wider, deeper. Morning oozed into the world.

He yawned and wiped the back of one hand across his mouth. He would have to get back to the hotel soon, get some rest. He hadn’t slept much in the past few days.

Three times within the next ten minutes, the sound of wings came again. On each occasion there was a temporary commotion in the rafters, and each time silence swiftly returned.

Eventually anemic light filtered through congealed masses of storm clouds and gradually painted the harbor, hills, and houses of King’s Point.

He was filled with a deep sense of loss. With light came depression. He functioned best in the blackest hours. Always had. But recently that was increasingly true. He felt at home in the night.

Overhead the highest rafters remained shrouded in shadows. The inside of the roof—a hollow, inverted funnel—was fifteen feet high; and even at noon darkness clung to its upper regions.

Dim as it was, morning had arrived; and now his flashlight wouldn’t be noticed by anyone below. He switched it on and pointed it up into the hollow roof.

This was what he had come to see: bats. A dozen bats or more. Clinging to the wooden rafters. Wings folded tightly around them. Some with eyes shut. Some with open eyes that gleamed iridescently in the beam of light.

The sight exhilarated him.

Tonight, the blood again.

* * *

At nine o’clock
that morning Lou called Roger Fullet. “I’m sorry to have to bother you on Christmas.”

“You’re never a bother. Besides, you just saved me from a tedious little chore. The electric train went off the track and all the cars came uncoupled. If I talk to you for a few minutes, I’ll get back to the layout after junior’s got everything put back together.”

“I’ve learned something very interesting about this Berton Mitchell case.”

“Such as?”

“Apparently, Mitchell’s wife and son were murdered.”

“My God, when?”

“Five years after what he did to Mary.”

“You’ve got to be wrong.”

“Did you check to see if there were separate morgue files for the wife and son?”

“No. But even if there are, everything of importance should be duplicated in the Berton Mitchell file.”

“Doesn’t the
Times
make mistakes?”

“We’re loath to admit it. But occasionally things don’t get done right. Who killed the Mitchells?”

“Mary doesn’t know.”

“Nineteen years ago?”

“That’s what she says.”

“It happened here in L.A.?”

“I gather it did. Do me a favor?”

“I’m not working today, Lou.”

“The
Times
doesn’t shut down altogether on holidays. There are people working. Can’t you call in and have someone check this out for me?”

“It’s that important?”

“A matter of life and death.”

“What all do you want to know?”

“Everything about the murders . . . if they took place.”

“I’ll call you back.”

“How long will it take?”

“Maybe two hours.”

Roger called back in an hour and a half. “There was a separate file on the murders of the wife and son. The story wasn’t cross-filed as it should have been.”

“It’s nice to know even you big city slickers can be wrong.”

“This is really a sick one, Lou.”

“Tell me about it.”

“After Berton Mitchell committed suicide, Virginia Mitchell and her son, Barry Francis Mitchell, rented a small house on the west side of Los Angeles. Judging from the address, I’d say it couldn’t have been more than a mile from the Tanner estate. Nineteen years ago, on October 31, Halloween, at two o’clock in the morning, someone used gasoline to start a fire that nearly burned the place to the ground with the mother and son inside.”

“Fire. That’s the death I fear most.”

“This has ruined my appetite for Christmas dinner.”

“I’m sorry, Roger. I had to know.”

“That’s not the worst of it. Although the bodies were badly burned, the medical examiner was later able to deduce that mother and son were stabbed to death in their sleep before the blaze started.”

“Stabbed . . . ”

“Virginia had been stabbed so often in the throat that she’d been pretty much decapitated.”

“Sweet Jesus.”

“The son, Barry . . . was stabbed in the throat and chest. Then . . . ”

“Then what?”

“His genitals were cut off.”

“There goes my dinner, too.”

“Before the fire burned it out, that place must have looked like a slaughterhouse. What kind of man could do all of that, Lou? What kind of maniac would be so gruesomely thorough?”

“Did they ever solve the case?”

“Never arrested anyone.”

“Did they at least have suspects?”

“Three of them.”

“What were their names?”

“I didn’t bother jotting them down. Each of them had an alibi, and each alibi eventually checked out.”

“So their killer might still be alive and loose. Were the police sure of the bodies?”

“Sure of them in what sense?”

“Identities.”

“I guess they weren’t burned beyond recognition. Besides, the house was occupied by Virginia and her son.”

“The woman’s body was probably Virginia’s. But isn’t it conceivable that the dead man they found was her lover and not her son?”

“They were killed in different bedrooms. Lovers would have been found together. And if Barry was alive, he’d have come forward.”

“Not if he was the killer.”

“What?”

“It’s not impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible, but—”

“Barry would have been twenty-one when the house burned that night. Maybe almost twenty-two. Roger, isn’t that a bit old for a boy to be living with his mother?”

“Hell, no. Lou, we didn’t all rush out to grab our piece of the action at sixteen, like you did. I lived with my folks until I was twenty-three. Why are you so anxious to believe Barry’s alive?”

“It would make things easier to understand down here.”

“You’re too good a newsman to try to reshape facts to fit some preconceived notion.”

“Yeah. You’re right. I’ve run into another stone wall.”

“What’s the story with this Mary Bergen? What are you involved in?”

“I’m afraid it’s going to be very messy. I don’t want to talk about it yet.”

“And maybe I don’t want to hear about it either.”

“Go play with your train.”

“Somehow I’m no longer in the mood for play. Take care of yourself, Lou. Be careful. Be damned careful. And . . . Merry Christmas.”

17

They sat in
Lou’s living room, listening to music—and waiting for something to happen. Mary couldn’t imagine a grimmer Christmas. She and Max weren’t even able to exchange gifts. The things he had gotten her were at the stores where he’d left them to be wrapped, and as she’d become preoccupied with this case, she’d had no opportunity to go shopping for him.

Her spirits lifted when Alan called at three o’clock to say he was in San Francisco at his friend’s house. He’d tried the number in Bel Air, and the housekeeper had told him to call Lou. He was worried, but she understated the gravity of her situation and calmed him. No sense ruining
his
Christmas, too. When Alan finally hung up, her spirits sank again; she missed him so much.

Because no one had eaten breakfast or lunch, Lou served an early dinner at five o’clock. Chicken Kiev on a bed of rice. Cylinders of grilled zucchini filled with spinach paté. Tomatoes stuffed with hot cheese, bread crumbs, and peppers. There were baked apples for dessert.

No one was hungry. They picked at their food. Mary didn’t even taste her wine. By six o’clock they were finished.

Over coffee Mary said, “Lou, do you have a Ouija board?”

He put down his cup. “I have one, but I haven’t used it in years.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“The spare-bedroom closet, I think.”

“Would you get it while Max and I clear the table?”

“Sure. What are we going to do with it?”

“I’m tired of waiting for the killer to make the next move,” she said. “We’re going to try to force the issue.”

“I’m all for that. But how?”

Max said, “Sometimes, when Mary can’t recall the fine details of a vision, she can prod her memory with a Ouija board. She doesn’t get answers from the spirit world, mind you. The things she wants to know are things she’s forgotten. They’re buried in her subconscious. Not always, but often enough to make it worthwhile when nothing else works, the Ouija board provides her with a pipeline to her subconscious.”

Lou nodded with understanding. “The answers the board gives actually come from Mary.”

“Right,” Max said.

“But I don’t consciously guide the trivet,” she said. “I let it go where it wants to go.”

“Where your subconscious wants it to go,” Max said. “You
do
influence the trivet with your fingers, but in a way that you’re not aware of.”

“I suppose,” she said.

Lou put a few more drops of cream in his coffee and said, “So the Ouija board acts like a lens.”

“Exactly,” she said. “It focuses my attention, my memory, and my psychic abilities.”

Lou drank his coffee in three long swallows and stood up. “It sure sounds interesting. Anything’s better than sitting around waiting for the ax to fall. I’ll be right back.” He hurried out of the dining room and down the hall toward the spare bedroom.

Max and Mary stacked the dishes and silverware in the kitchen sink. She finished wiping off the glossy pine dining table just as Lou returned.

“One Ouija board, as requested,” he said.

Mary went into the living room to fetch her notebook from the sofa where she’d left it with her purse.

Lou said, “Got to clean out that spare-bedroom closet one of these days. The board was literally buried in crap.”

“Literally?” Max said, amused.

“Well, it was under at least a hundred issues of the
New York Review of Books
.”

“Ouch,” Max said. “You set me up for that one.”

Lou took a notepad and pencil from the kitchen counter and sat down at the table. He was prepared to record each letter that the Ouija board gave them.

Mary opened the board on one corner of the table. She placed the felt-footed trivet on it.

Max sat down, laced his fingers, and cracked his knuckles.

She opened her spiral-bound notebook to a page filled with her handwriting.

“What’s that?” Lou asked.

“Questions I want to ask it,” Mary said.

She pulled up her chair and sat down at a ninety-degree angle to Max. She put the tips of her fingertips on one side of the plastic triangle. Max put his fingertips on another side of it; his hands were nearly too large for the game.

“Start easy,” Max told her.

She was tense, and that was not good. The trivet wouldn’t move an inch if her touch was too heavy. She took several deep breaths. She tried to make her arms limp. She wanted her fingers to feel independent of her—loose, soft, like rags.

Max wasn’t as nervous as she was. He didn’t appear to need any preparation.

Finally, when she had achieved a relatively relaxed state of mind and body, she stared at the board in front of her and said, “Are you ready to give us answers?”

The indicator didn’t move.

“Are you ready to give us answers?”

Nothing.

“Are you ready to give us answers?”

Under their fingers, as if it were suddenly embodied with a life energy of its own, the indicator glided to that part of the board marked
YES
.

“Good,” she said. “We are in pursuit of a man who has killed at least eight people in the last few days. Is he still here in King’s Point?”

The indicator swept around the board, returned to
YES
.

She asked, “Is King’s Point this man’s hometown?”

NO
.

“Where does he come from?”

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS
.

“Make sense to anyone?” Lou asked.

Refining the question, trying to be more specific, Mary asked, “Where does the killer
live?
”

Letter by letter:
BEAUTIFUL
.

“Beautiful?” Lou asked. “Is that in answer to your question, Mary?”

“A town named Beautiful?” she asked.

The trivet didn’t move.

“Where does the killer live?” she asked again.

The trivet picked out seventeen letters.

Lou wrote them down as they were given, and when the indicator ceased to move, he said, “It says,
‘THE AIR IS BEAUTIFUL.’
What’s that supposed to mean?”

The air at Mary’s back seemed suddenly colder, as if an icy breath had been expelled against the nape of her neck. The answers the Ouija board gave were less direct and more perplexing than usual. Supposedly the Ouija messages came from her, from deep in her subconscious mind. Ordinarily she believed that was true. But not now. Tonight she felt another presence, an unseen presence looming over her.

“We’re getting sidetracked,” Max said impatiently. He looked at the trivet. “Where is the killer staying in King’s Point?”

The indicator slid back and forth, then quickly moved from one letter to another.

Lou copied them down, but the word was so simple that Mary didn’t need to ask what had been recorded:
HOTEL
.

“Which hotel?” Max asked.

The indicator didn’t move.

“Which hotel?”

Again, it spelled
HOTEL
.

Lou said, “Try something else.”

Mary said, “The man we’re after has killed women with a knife. Where did he get that knife?”

“That’s not important,” Max said.

The trivet moved:
LINGARD
.

“
You
made it spell that,” Max said.

“I don’t believe I did.”

“Then why did you ask it such a question? We don’t really have to know where the knife came from.”

“I wanted to see what it would say.”

Max studied her with piercing gray eyes.

She looked away from him, consulted her notebook and addressed the board again. “Did I ever know a girl by the name of Beverly Pulchaski?”

SHE IS DEAD
.

“Did I ever know her?”

SHE IS DEAD
.

“Did I know a girl named Susan Haven?”

SHE IS DEAD
.

Cold breath on the neck again.

She shuddered.

“Did I ever know Linda Proctor?”

SHE IS DEAD
.

“Did I know Marie Sanzini?”

SHE IS DEAD
.

Mary sighed. The muscles in her arms and shoulders flexed repeatedly, involuntarily. It was a struggle to stay sufficiently relaxed to allow the Ouija indicator to function. Already she was weary.

Lou said, “Who were those women?”

She said, “The nurses who were murdered in Anaheim. When I first foresaw their deaths, I had the notion that I knew or at least had met one of them. But if I ever did, I can’t remember where or when it was.”

“Probably because you don’t
want
to remember,” Max said.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because maybe if you remembered, we’d know who the killer was. And maybe you don’t want to know that.”

“Don’t be absurd, Max. I want to know very much.”

“Even if the killer’s connected somehow to Berton Mitchell and the wings? Even if, by finding the killer, you’re forced to remember what you’ve spent your life forgetting?”

She stared at him and licked her lips. “I’m feeling something right now that I never thought I’d feel.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m scared of you, Max.”

There was an unearthly quiet in the house. The three of them seemed suspended in time.

Max spoke softly, but his voice filled the room. “You’re scared of me because you think I’m going to force you to face up to what happened twenty-four years ago.”

“Is that all it is?”

“What else?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Max asked the board another question, but he did not take his wintry gray eyes from her. “Did Mary know Rochelle Drake?”

SHE IS DEAD
.

“I know she’s dead,” Max said irritably, still watching Mary, suffocating her with his attention, pinning her with his gaze. “But did Mary ever know her?”

DEAD
.

“Who’s Rochelle Drake?” Lou asked.

Mary took the opportunity to look away from Max. Her mouth was dry. Her heart was beating much too fast.

To Lou, Max said, “Rochelle Drake was the girl who was killed in that Santa Ana beauty salon a few days ago. I swear I’ve heard the name before. Haven’t you?”

“Can’t say I have,” Lou said.

“Well, I’m positive I heard the name before Percy Osterman used it in the morgue. I don’t think I ever met the girl. But I heard the name. I can’t imagine where.”

Mary said, “Well, I
don’t
remember her. I would have recognized her at the morgue if I’d ever seen her before.”

Suddenly, beneath their hands, the trivet began to move in wide, aimless circles.

“What the hell?” Max said, surprised.

Lou said, “No one asked it a question.”

Mary allowed her hands to float freely with the indicator as it moved less erratically and with increasing purpose. Her thoughts were too muddled at the moment, and she was too frightened to have the wit to decipher the chain of letters as it grew. Finally the trivet stopped. She took her hands from it at once; they ached with the strain of forced relaxation.

Lou said, “It’s a name.” He held up the notepad for them to see.

P-A-T-R-I-C-I-A-S-P-O-O-N-E-R.

Patricia Spooner?
Mary thought. She stared at the name in disbelief.

She felt as if a snake of ice lay at the center of her, its crystalline tongue flicking rapidly, its sinuous body radiating cold like the coils of a freezer.

“Who’s Patricia Spooner?” Max asked.

“Means nothing to me,” Lou said.

“I . . . knew her,” Mary said stiffly.

“When?” Max asked.

“Eleven . . . twelve years ago.”

“You’ve never mentioned her.”

“She was a good friend at UCLA.”

“A college friend?”

“Yes. A very pretty girl.”

“Why does her name come up now?”

“I don’t have any idea.”

“It came from your subconscious.”

“No. I’m not controlling the trivet.”

“Nonsense,” Max said.

“There’s someone . . . something here with us.”

“Maybe the board just gave us the name of the next victim,” Lou said, to avert a quarrel. “Have you kept in touch with this Patricia Spooner? Maybe we should call her and see if she’s okay.”

Max said, “Should we call Patricia Spooner? Mary?”

“She’s dead,” Mary said.

Lou said, “Oh, my God. Then the man we’re after’s already killed her?”

She had difficulty speaking. “Patty . . . Patty’s been . . . dead . . . dead almost . . . eleven years.”

Although the room was not warm, Lou was perspiring. He wiped his aristocratic face with his broad, thick-fingered, big-knuckled hand. He looked as pale as she felt. “How? Mary, how did Patty Spooner die?”

Mary shivered and closed her eyes. She opened them at once because the memories behind them were too ugly, too brutal. “She was . . . murdered.”

The dead, Mary thought, don’t stay dead. Not forever. Not even for long. They rise up from their graves. The ground doesn’t hold them. Remorse doesn’t hold them. Neither grief nor acceptance, neither fear nor forgetfulness holds them. Nothing holds them. They come back. Berton Mitchell. Barry Mitchell. Virginia Mitchell. My mother. My father. And now Patty Spooner. Oh, God, don’t let them come back. I’ve been haunted by the dead most of my life. I’ve had enough!

“Murdered,” Lou said quietly, almost as if in shock.

Mary said, “There was a church. Patty and I sometimes went to Mass together. I was a practicing Catholic then. It was a lovely church. It had a very large, hand-carved wooden altar that was made in Poland and shipped over here in the early nineteen hundreds. The church was open all the time, night and day. Patty liked to go and sit in the front pew when no one else was there. Late at night. Her mother had died of a heart condition a few years before. She was always lighting candles for her mother. Patty was very devout. She . . . she died there.”

“In the church?” Lou asked.

Max was watching her intently. He put a hand on her shoulder; vibrations, more emotional than physical, neither good nor bad but powerful, exploded through her from the point of contact.

Max said, “Who killed her?”

“They never found him.”

Lou leaned across the table. His eyebrows were drawn together, his face pinched. “She was your good friend. Didn’t you use your psychic talent to see the killer’s face, his name?”