Mr. Murder [067-011-4.9]
By: Dean R. Koontz
Synopsis:
Mystery writer Marty Stillwater's happy life in southern California is
turned upside-down by a stranger claiming to be he. By the best-selling
author of Midnight.
Berkley Pub Group;
ISBN: 0425144429
Copyright 1996
Winter that year was strange and gray.
The damp wind smelled of Apocalypse, and morning skies had a peculiar
way of slipping cat-quick into midnight.
--The Book of Counted Sorrows
Life is an unrelenting comedy. Therein
lies the tragedy of it.
the Dead Bishop, Martin Stillwater Leaning back in his comfortable
leather office chair, rocking gently, holding a compact cassette
recorder in his right hand and dictating a letter to his editor in New
York, Martin Stillwater suddenly realized he was repeating the same two
words in a dreamy whisper.
". . . I need . . . I need . . . I need . .."
Frowning, Marty clicked off the recorder.
His train of thought had clattered down a siding and chugged to a stop.
He could not recall what he had been about to say.
Needed what?
The big house was not merely quiet but eerily still. Paige had taken
the kids to lunch and a Saturday matinee movie.
But this childless silence was more than just a condition. It had
substance. The air felt heavy with it.
He put one hand to the nape of his neck. His palm was cool and moist.
He shivered.
Outside, the autumn day was as hushed as the house, as if all of
southern California had been vacated. At the only window of his
second-floor study, the wide louvers of the plantation shutters were
ajar. Sunlight slanted between angled slats, imprinting the sofa and
carpet with narrow red-gold stripes as lustrous as fox fur, the nearest
luminous ribbon wrapped one corner of the U-shaped desk.
I need . . .
Instinct told him that something important had happened only a moment
ago, just out of his sight, perceived subliminally.
He swiveled his chair and surveyed the room behind him. Other than the
fasciae of coppery sunshine interleaved with louver shadows, the only
light came from a small desk lamp with a stained-glass shade. Even in
that gloom, however, he could see he was alone with his books, research
files, and computer.
Perhaps the silence seemed unnaturally deep only because the house had
been filled with noise and bustle since Wednesday, when the schools had
closed for the Thanksgiving holiday. He missed the kids. He should
have gone to the movie with them.
I need . . .
The words had been spoken with peculiar tension--and long Now an ominous
feeling overcame him, a keen sense of impending danger. It was felt in
his novels, and which he always struggled to describe without resorting
to cliches.
He had not actually experienced anything like it in years, not since
Charlotte had been seriously ill when she was four and the doctor had
prepared them for the possibility of cancer. All day in the hospital,
as his little girl had been wheeled from one lab to another for tests,
all that sleepless night, and during the long days that followed before
the physicians ventured a diagnosis, Marty felt haunted by a malevolent
spirit whose presence thickened the air, making it difficult to breathe,
to move, to hope. As it turned out, his daughter had been threatened
neither by supernatural malevolence nor malignancy. The problem was a
treatable blood disorder. Within three months Charlotte recovered.
But he remembered that oppressive dread too well.
He was in its icy grip again, though for no discernible reason.
Charlotte and Emily were healthy, well-adjusted kids. He and Paige were
happy together--absurdly happy, considering how many thirty-something
couples of their acquaintance were divorced, separated, or cheating on
each other. Financially, they were more secure than they had ever
expected to be.
Nevertheless, Marty knew something was wrong.
He put down the tape recorder, went to the window, and opened the
shutters all the way. A leafless sycamore cast stark, elongated shadows
across the small side yard. Beyond those gnarled branches, the
pale-yellow stucco walls of the house next door appeared to have soaked
up the sunshine, gold and russet reflections painted the windows, the
place was silent, seemingly serene.
To the right, he could see a section of the street. The houses on the
other side of the block were also Mediterranean in style, stucco with
clay-tile roofs, gilded by late-afternoon sun, filigreed by overhanging
queen-palm fronds. Quiet, well landscaped, planned to the square inch,
their neighborhood--and indeed the entire town of Mission Viejo seemed
to be a haven from the chaos that ruled so much of the rest of the world
these days.
He closed the shutters, entirely blocking the sun.
Apparently the only danger was in his mind, a figment of the same active
imagination that had made him, at last, a reasonably successful mystery
novelist.
Yet his heart was beating faster than ever.
Marty walked out of his office into the second-floor hall, as far as the
head of the stairs. He stood as still as the newel post on which he
rested one hand.
He wasn't certain what he expected to hear. The soft creak of a door,
stealthy footsteps? The furtive rustles and clicks and muffled thumps
of an intruder slowly making his way through the house?
Gradually, as he heard nothing suspicious and as his racing heart grew
calmer, his sense of impending disaster faded. Anxiety became mere
uneasiness.
"Who's there?" he asked, just to break the silence.
The sound of his voice, full of puzzlement, dispelled the portentous
mood. Now the hush was only that of an empty house, devoid of menace.
He returned to his office at the end of the hall and settled in the
leather chair behind his desk. With the shutters tightly closed and no
lamps on except the one with the stained-glass shade, the corners of the
room seemed to recede farther than the dimensions of the walls allowed,
as if it were a place in a dream.
Because the motif of the lamp shade was fruit, the protective glass on
the desk top reflected luminous ovals and circles of cherry-red,
plum-purple, grape-green, lemon-yellow, and berry-blue. In its polished
metal and Plexiglas surfaces, the cassette recorder, which lay on the
glass, also reflected the bright mosaic, glimmering as if encrusted with
jewels. When he reached for the recorder, Marty saw that his hand
appeared to be sheathed in the pebbly, iridescent rainbow skin of an
exotic lizard.
He hesitated, studying the faux scales on the back of his hand and the
phant
om jewels on the recorder. Real life was as layered with illusion
as any piece of fiction.
He picked up the recorder and pressed the rewind button for a second or
two, seeking the last few words of the unfinished letter to his editor.
The thin, high-speed whistle-shriek of his voice in reverse issued like
an alien language from the small, tinny speaker.
When he thumbed the play button, he found that he had not reversed far
enough, ". . . I need . . . I need . . . I need . .."
Frowning, he switched the machine to rewind, taking the tape back twice
as far as before.
But still, ". . . I need . . . I need . .."
Rewind. Two seconds. Five. Ten. Stop. Play.
. . . I need . . . I need . . . I need . .."
After two more attempts, he found the letter, ". . . so I should be able
to have the final draft of the new book in your hands in about a month.
I think this one is . . . this one is . . . uh . . . this one . .."
The dictation stopped. Silence unreeled from the tape and the sound of
his breathing.
By the time the two-word chant finally began to issue from the speaker,
Marty had leaned forward tensely on the edge of the chair, frowning at
the recorder in his hand. .
. . . I need . . . I need . .."
He checked his watch. Not quite six minutes past four o'clock.
Initially the dreamy murmur was the same as when he'd first come to his
senses and heard soft chanting like the responses to an interminable,
unimaginative religious litany. After about half a minute, however, his
voice on the tape changed, became sharp with urgency, swelled with
anguish, then with anger.
". . . NEED . . . NEED . . . NEED . . . " Frustration seethed through
those two words.
The Marty Stillwater on the tape--who might as well have been a total
stranger to the listening Marty Stillwater--sounded in acute emotional
pain for want of something that he could neither describe nor imagine.
Mesmerized, he scowled at the notched white spools of the cassette
player turning relentlessly behind the plastic view window.
Finally the voice fell silent, the recording ended, and Marty consulted
his watch again. More than twelve minutes past four.
He had assumed that he'd lost his concentration for only a few seconds,
slipped into a brief daydream. Instead, he'd sat with the recorder
gripped in his hand, the letter to his editor forgotten, repeating those
two words for seven minutes or longer.
Seven minutes, for God's sake.
And he had remembered none of it. As if in a trance.
Now he stopped the tape. His hand was trembling, and when he put the
cassette recorder on the desk, it rattled against the glass.
He looked around the office, where he had passed so many solitary hours
in the concoction and solution of so many mysteries, where he had put
uncounted characters through enormous travail and challenged them to
find their way out of mortal danger. The room was so familiar, the
overflowing bookshelves, a dozen original paintings that had been
featured on the dust jackets of his novels, the couch that he had bought
in anticipation of lazy plotting sessions but on which he had never had
the time or inclination to lie, the computer with its oversize monitor.
But that familiarity was not comforting any more, because now it was
tainted by the strangeness of what had happened minutes ago.
He blotted his damp palms on his jeans.
Having briefly lifted from him, dread settled again in the manner of
Poe's mysterious raven perching above a chamber door.
Waking from the trance, perceiving danger, he had expected to find the
threat outside in the street or in the form of a burglar roaming through
the rooms below. But it was worse than that. The threat was not
external. Somehow, the wrongness was within him.
The night is deep and free of turbulence.
Below, the clotted clouds are silver with reflected moonlight, and for a
while the shadow of the plane undulates across that vaporous sea.
The killer's flight from Boston arrives on time in Kansas City,
Missouri. He goes directly to the baggage-claim area.
Thanksgiving holiday travelers will not head home until tomorrow, so the
airport is quiet. His two pieces of luggage--one of which contains a
Heckler & Koch P7 pistol, detachable silencer, and expanded magazines
loaded with 9mm ammunition--are first and second to drop onto the
carrousel.
At the rental-agency counter he discovers that his reservation has not
been misplaced or misrecorded, as often happens. He will receive the
large Ford sedan that he requested, instead of being stuck with a
subcompact.
The credit card in the name of John Larrington is accepted by the clerk
and by the American Express verifying machine with no problem, although
his name is not John Larrington.
When he receives the car, it runs well and smells clean. The heater
actually works.
Everything seems to be going his way.
Within a few miles of the airport he checks into a pleasant if anonymous
four-story motor hotel, where the red-haired clerk at the reception
counter tells him that he may have a complimentary breakfast--pastries,
juice, and coffee delivered in the morning simply by requesting it. His
Visa card in the name of Thomas E. Jukovic is accepted, although Thomas
E. Jukovic is not his name.
His room has burnt-orange carpet and striped blue wallpaper.
However, the mattress is firm, and the towels are fluffy.
The suitcase containing the automatic pistol and ammunition remains
locked in the trunk of the car, where it will offer no temptation to
snooping motel employees.
After sitting in a chair by the window for a while, staring at Kansas
City by starlight, he goes down to the coffee shop to have dinner. He
is six feet tall, weighs a hundred and eighty pounds, but eats as
heartily as a much larger man. A bowl of vegetable soup with garlic
toast. Two cheeseburgers, french fries. A slice of apple pie with
vanilla ice cream. Half a dozen cups of coffee.
He always has a big appetite. Often he is ravenous, at times his hunger
seems almost insatiable.
While he eats, the waitress stops by twice to ask if the food is
prepared well and if he needs anything else. She is not merely
attentive but flirting with him.
Although he is reasonably attractive, his looks don't rival those of any
movie star. Yet women flirt with him more frequently than with other
men who are handsomer and better dressed than he. Consisting of
Rockport walking shoes, khaki slacks, a dark-green crew-neck sweater, no
jewelry, and an inexpensive wristwatch, his wardrobe is unremarkable,
unmemorable. Which is the idea. The waitress has no reason to mistake
him for a man of means. Yet here she is again, smiling coquettishly.
Once, in a Miami cocktail lounge where he had picked her up, a blonde
with whiskey-colored eyes had assured him that an intriguing aura
surrounded him. A compelling magnetism arose, she said, from his
preference for silence a
nd from the stony expression that usually
occupied his face. "You are," she'd insisted playfully, "the epitome of
the strong silent type. Hell, if you were in a movie with Clint
Eastwood and Stallone, there wouldn't be any dialogue at all. Later he
had beaten her to death.
He had not been angered by anything she'd said or done. In fact, sex
with her had been satisfying.
But he had been in Florida to blow the brains out of a man named Parker
Abbotson, and he'd been concerned that the woman might somehow later
connect him with the assassination. He hadn't wanted her to be able to
give the police a description of him.
After wasting her, he had gone to see the latest Spielberg picture, and
then a Steve Martin flick.
He likes movies. Aside from his work, movies are the only life he has.
Sometimes it seems his real home is a succession of movie theaters in
different cities yet so alike in their shopping-center multiplexity that
they might as well be the same dark auditorium.
Now he pretends to be unaware that the coffee-shop waitress is
interested in him. She is pretty enough, but he wouldn't dare kill an
employee of the restaurant in the very motel where he's staying. He