tree was leafless, and its stark black limbs lent an anachronistic feeling of Halloween to the drizzly January night.
“Fire,” Julie said. “Then they tore down what was left.”
“Let’s talk to a neighbor.”
The empty lot was flanked by houses. But lights glowed only at the house on the north side.
The man who answered the doorbell was about fifty-five, six feet two, solidly built, with gray hair and a neatly trimmed gray mustache. His name was Park Hampstead, and he had the air of a retired military man. He invited them in, with the proviso that they leave their sodden shoes on the front porch. In their socks, they followed him to a breakfast nook off the kitchen, where the yellow vinyl dinette upholstery was safe from their damp clothing; even so, Hampstead made them wait while he draped thick peach-colored beach towels over two of the chairs.
“Sorry,” he said, “but I’m something of a fussbudget.”
The house had bleached-oak floors and modem furniture, and Bobby noticed that it was spotless in every corner.
“Thirty years in the Marine Corps left me with an abiding respect for routine, order, and neatness,” Hampstead explained. “In fact, when Sharon died three years ago—she was my wife—I think maybe I got a little crazy about neatness. The first six or eight months after her funeral, I cleaned the place top to bottom at least twice a week, because as long as I was cleaning, my heart didn’t hurt so bad. Spent a fortune on Windex, paper towels, Fantastik, and sweeper bags. Let me tell you, no military pension can support the Endust habit I developed! I got over that stage. I’m still a fussbudget but not obsessed with neatness.”
He had just brewed a fresh pot of coffee, so he poured for them as well. The cups, saucers, and spoons were all spotless. Hampstead provided each of them with two crisply folded paper napkins, then sat across the table from them.
“Sure,” he said, after they raised the issue, “I knew Jim Roman. Good neighbor. He was a chopper jockey out of the El Toro Air Base. That was my last station before retirement. Jim was a hell of a nice guy, the kind who’d give you the shirt off his back, then ask if you needed money to buy a matching tie.”
“Was?” Julie asked.
“He die in the fire?” Bobby asked, remembering the scorched shrubbery and soot-blackened concrete slab next door.
Hampstead frowned. “No. He died about six months after Sharon. Make it . . . two and a half years ago. His chopper crashed on maneuvers. He was only forty-one, eleven years younger than me. Left a wife, Maralee. A fourteen-year-old daughter named Valerie. Twelve-year-old son, Mike. Real nice kids. Terrible thing. They were a close family, and Jim’s accident devastated them. They had some relatives back in Nebraska, but no one they could really turn to.” Hampstead stared past Bobby, at the softly humming refrigerator, and his eyes swam out of focus. “So I tried to step in, help out, advise Maralee on finances, give a shoulder to lean on and an ear to listen when the kids needed that. Took ’em to Disneyland and Knott’s from time to time, you know, that sort of thing. Maralee told me lots of times what a godsend I was, but it was really me who needed them more than the other way around, because doing things for them was what finally began to take my mind off losing Sharon.”
Julie said, “So the fire happened more recently?”
Hampstead did not respond. He got up, went to the sink, opened the cupboard door below, returned with a spray bottle of Windex and a dish towel, and began to wipe the refrigerator door, which already appeared to be as clean as the antiseptic surfaces in a hospital surgery. “Valerie and Mike were terrific kids. After a year or so it almost got to seem like they were my kids, the ones me and Sharon never had. Maralee grieved for Jim a long time, almost two years, before she began to remember she was a woman in her prime. Maybe what started to happen between her and me would’ve upset Jim, but I don’t think so; I think he’d have been happy for us, even if I was eleven years older than her.”
When he finished wiping the refrigerator, Hampstead inspected the door from the side, at an angle to the light, apparently searching for a fingerprint or smudge. As if he had just heard the question that Julie had asked a minute ago, he suddenly said, “The fire was two months ago. I woke up in the middle of the night, heard sirens, saw an orange glow at the window, got up, looked out....”
He turned away from the refrigerator, studied the kitchen for a moment, then went to the nearest tile-topped counter and began to spritz and wipe that gleaming surface.
Julie looked at Bobby. He shook his head. Neither of them said anything.
After a moment Hampstead continued: “Got over to their house just ahead of the firemen. Went in through the front door. Made it into the foyer, then to the foot of the steps, but couldn’t get up to the bedroom, the heat was too intense, and the smoke. I called their names, nobody answered. If I’d heard an answer maybe I would’ve found the strength to go up there somehow in spite of the flames. I guess I must’ve blacked out for a few seconds and been carried out by firemen, ’cause I woke up on the front lawn, coughing, choking, a paramedic bent over me, giving me oxygen.”
“All three of them died?” Bobby asked.
“Yeah,” Hampstead said.
“What caused the fire?”
“I’m not sure they ever figured that out. I might’ve heard something about a short in the wiring, but I’m not sure. I think they even suspected arson for a while, but that never led anywhere. Doesn’t much matter, does it?”
“Why not?”
“Whatever caused it, they’re all three dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Bobby said softly.
“Their lot’s been sold. Construction starts on a new house sometime this spring. More coffee?”
“No, thank you,” Julie said.
Hampstead surveyed the kitchen, then moved to the stainless-steel range hood, which he began to clean in spite of the fact that it was spotless. “I apologize for the mess. Don’t know how the place gets like this when it’s just me living here. Sometimes I think there must be gremlins sneaking behind my back, messing things up to torment me.”
“No need for gremlins,” Julie said. “Life itself gives us all the torment we can handle.”
Hampstead turned away from the range hood. For the first time since he had gotten up from the table and begun his cleaning ritual, he made eye contact with them. “No gremlins,” he agreed. “Nothing as simple and easy to handle as gremlins.” He was a big man and obviously tough from years of military training and discipline, but the shimmering, watery evidence of grief brimmed in his eyes, and at the moment he seemed as lost and helpless as a child.
IN THE CAR again, staring through the rain-spattered windshield at the vacant lot where the Roman house had once stood, Bobby said, “Frank finds out that Mr. Blue Light knows about the Farris ID, so he gets new ID in the name of James Roman. But Mr. Blue eventually learns about that, too, and he goes looking for Frank at the Roman address, where he discovers only the widow and the kids. He kills them, same way he killed the Farris family, but this time he sets fire to the house to cover the crime. Is that the way it looks to you?”
“Could be,” Julie said.
“He bums the bodies because he bites them, like the Phans told us, and the bite marks help the police tie his crimes together, so he wants to throw the cops off the trail.”
Julie said, “Then why doesn’t he bum them every time?”
“Because that would be just as much of a giveaway as the bite marks. Sometimes he burns the bodies, sometimes he doesn’t, and maybe sometimes he disposes of them so they’re never even found.”
They were both silent for a moment. Then she said, “So we’re dealing with a mass murderer, a serial killer, who’s evidently a raving psychotic.”
“Or a vampire,” Bobby said.
“Why’s he after Frank?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Frank once tried to drive a wooden stake through his heart.”
“Not funny.”
“I agree,” Bobby sa
id. “Right now, nothing seems funny.”
35
FROM DYSON Manfred’s house full of insect specimens in Irvine, Clint Karaghiosis drove through the chilly rain to his own house in Placentia. It was a homey two-bedroom bungalow with a robed-shingle roof, a deep front porch in the California Craftsman style, and French windows full of warm amber light. By the time he got there, the car heater had pretty much dried his rain-soaked clothes.
Felina was in the kitchen when Clint entered by way of the connecting door from the garage. She hugged him, kissed him, held fast to him for a moment, as if surprised to see him alive again.
She believed that his job was fraught with danger every day, though he had often explained that he did mostly boring leg-work. He chased facts instead of culprits, pursued a trail of paper rather than blood.
He understood his wife’s concern, however, because he worried unreasonably about her too. For one thing, she was an attractive woman with black hair, an olive complexion, and startlingly beautiful gray eyes; in this age of lenient judges, with a surfeit of merciless sociopaths on the streets, a good-looking woman was regarded by some as fair game. Furthermore, though the office where Felina worked as a data processor was only three blocks from their house, an easy walk even in bad weather, Clint nevertheless worried about the danger she faced at the busiest of the intersections that she had to cross; in an emergency, a warning cry or blaring horn would not alert her to onrushing death.
He could not let her know how much he worried, for she was justly proud that she was so independent in spite of her deafness. He did not want to diminish her self-respect by indicating in any way that he was not entirely confident of her ability to deal with every rotten tomato that fate threw at her. So he daily reminded himself that she had lived twenty-nine years without coming to serious harm, and he resisted the urge to be overly protective.
While Clint washed his hands at the sink, Felina set the kitchen table for a late dinner. An enormous pot of homemade vegetable soup was heating on the stove, and together they ladled out two large bowls of it. He got a shaker of Parmesan cheese from the refrigerator, and she unwrapped a loaf of crusty Italian bread.
He was hungry, and the soup was excellent—thick with vegetables and chunks of lean beef—but by the time Felina had finished her first bowlful, Clint had eaten less than half of his, because he repeatedly paused to talk to her. She could not read his lips well when he tried to converse and eat at the same time, and for the moment his hunger was less compelling than his need to tell her about his day. She refilled her bowl and refreshed his.
Beyond the walls of his own small home, he was only slightly more talkative than a stone, but in Felina’s company he was as loquacious as a talk-show host. He didn’t just prattle, either, but settled with surprising ease into the role of a polished raconteur. He had learned how to deliver an anecdote in such a way as to sharpen its impact and maximize Felina’s response, for he loved to elicit a laugh from her or watch her eyes widen with surprise. In all of Clint’s life, she was the first person whose opinion of him truly mattered, and he wanted her to think of him as smart, clever, witty, and fun.
Early in their relationship he had wondered if her deafness had anything to do with his ability to open up to her. Deaf since birth, she had never heard the spoken word and therefore had not learned to speak clearly. She responded to Clint—and would later tell him about her own day—by way of sign language, which he had studied in order to understand her nimble-fingered speech. Initially he had thought that the main encouragement to intimacy was her disability, which ensured that his innermost feelings and secrets, once revealed to her, would go no further; a conversation with Felina was nearly as private as a conversation with himself. In time, however, he finally understood that he opened up to her in spite of her deafness, not because of it, and that he wanted her to share his every thought and experience—and to share hers in return—simply because he loved her.
When he told Felina how Bobby and Julie had adjourned to the bathroom for three private chats during Frank Pollard’s appointment, she laughed delightedly. He loved that sound; it was so warm and singularly melodious, as if the great joy in life that she could not express in spoken words was entirely channeled into her laughter.
“They’re some pair, the Dakotas,” he said. “When you first meet them, they seem so dissimilar in some ways, you figure they can’t possibly work well together. But then you get to know them, you see how they fit like two pieces of a puzzle, and you realize they’ve got a nearly perfect relationship.”
Felina put down her soup spoon and signed: So do we.
“We sure do.”
We fit better than puzzle pieces. We, fit like a plug and socket.
“We sure do,” he agreed, smiling. Then he picked up on the sly sexual connotation of what she’d said, and he laughed. “You’re a filthy-minded wench, aren’t you?”
She grinned and nodded.
“Plug and socket, huh?”
Big plug, tight socket, good fit.
“Later on, I’ll check your wiring.”
I am in desperate need of a first-rate electrician. But tell me more about this new client.
Thunder cracked and clattered across the night outside, and a sudden gust of wind rattled the rain against the window. The sounds of the storm made the warm and aromatic kitchen even more inviting by comparison. Clint sighed with contentment, then was touched by a brief sadness when he realized that the deeply satisfying sense of shelter, induced by the sounds of thunder and rain, was a specific pleasure that Felina could never experience or share with him.
From his pants pocket he withdrew one of the red gems that Frank Pollard had brought to the office. “I borrowed this one ’cause I wanted you to see it. The guy had a jarful of them.”
She pinched the grape-sized stone between thumb and index finger and held it up to the light. Beautiful, she signed with her free hand. She put the gem beside her soup bowl, on the cream-white Formica surface of the kitchen table. Is it very valuable?
“We don’t know yet,” he said. “We’ll get an opinion from a gemologist tomorrow.”
I think it’s valuable. When you take it back to the office, make sure there’s no hole in your pocket. I have a hunch you’d have to work a long time to pay for it if you lost it.
The stone took in the kitchen light, bounced it from prism to prism, and cast it back with a bright tint, painting Felina’s face with luminous crimson spots and smears. She seemed to be spattered with blood.
A queer foreboding overtook Clint.
She signed, What’re you frowning about?
He didn’t know what to say. His uneasiness was out of proportion to the cause of it. A cold prickling swiftly progressed from the base of his spine all the way to the back of his neck, as if dominoes of ice were falling in a row. He reached out and moved the gem a few inches, so the blood-red reflections fell on the wall beside Felina instead of on her face.
36
BY ONE-THIRTY in the morning, Hal Yamataka was thoroughly hooked by the John D. MacDonald novel, The Last One Left. The room’s only chair wasn’t the most comfortable seat he’d ever parked his butt in, and the antiseptic smell of the hospital always made him a bit queasy, and the chile rellenos he’d eaten for dinner were still coming back on him, but the book was so involving that eventually he forgot all of those minor discomforts.
He even forgot Frank Pollard for a while, until he heard a brief hiss, like air escaping under pressure, and felt a sudden draft. He looked away from the book, expecting to see Pollard sitting up in the bed or trying to get out of it, but Pollard was not there.
Startled, Hal sprang up, dropping the book.
The bed was empty. Pollard had been there all night, asleep for the last hour, but now he was gone. The place was not brightly lighted because the fluorescents behind the bed were turned off, but the shadows beyond the reading lamp were too shallow to conceal a man. The sheets were not tossed aside but were draped neatly
across the mattress, and both of the side railings were locked in place, as if Frank Pollard had evaporated like a figure carved from Dry Ice.
Hal was certain that he would have heard Pollard lower one of the railings, get out of bed, then lift the railing into place again. Surely he would have heard Pollard climbing over it too.
The window was closed. Rain washed down the glass, glimmering with silvery reflections of the room’s light. They were on the sixth floor, and Pollard could not escape by the window, yet Hal checked it, noting that it was not merely closed but locked.
Stepping to the door of the adjoining bathroom, he said, “Frank?” When no one answered, he entered. The bath was deserted.
Only the narrow closet remained as a viable hiding place. Hal opened it and found two hangers that held the clothes Pollard had been wearing when he’d checked into the hospital. The man’s shoes were there, too, with his socks neatly rolled and tucked into them.
“He can’t have gotten past me and into the hall,” Hal said, as if giving voice to that contention would magically make it true.
He pulled open the heavy door and rushed into the corridor. No one was in sight in either direction.
He turned to the left, hurried to the emergency exit at the end of the hall, and opened the door. Standing on the sixth-floor landing, he listened for footsteps rising or descending, heard none, peered over the iron railing, down into the well, then up. He was alone.
Retracing his steps, he returned to Pollard’s room and glanced inside at the empty bed. Still disbelieving, he proceeded to the junction of corridors, where he turned right and went to the glass-walled nurses’ station.
None of the five night-shift nurses had seen Pollard on the move. Since the elevators were directly opposite the nurses’ station, where Pollard would have had to wait in full view of the people on duty, it seemed unlikely that he had left the hospital by that route.
“I thought you were watching over him,” said Grace Fulgham, the gray-haired supervisor of the sixth-floor night staff. Her solid build, indomitable manner, and life-worn but kind face would have made her perfect for the female lead if Hollywood ever started remaking the old Tugboat Annie or Ma and Pa Kettle movies. “Wasn’t that your job?”
“I never left the room, but—”
“Then how did he get past you?”
“I don’t know,” Hal said, chagrined. “But the important thing is ... he’s suffering from partial amnesia, somewhat confused. He might wander off anywhere, out of the hospital, God knows where. I can’t figure how he got past me, but we have to find him.”
Mrs. Fulgham and a younger nurse named Janet Soto began a swift and quiet inspection of all the rooms along Pollard’s corridor.
Hal accompanied Nurse Fulgham. As they were checking out 604, where two elderly men snored softly, he heard eerie music, barely audible. As he turned, seeking the source, the notes faded away.
If Nurse Fulgham heard the music, she did not remark on it. A moment later in the next room, 606, when those strains arose once more, marginally louder than before, she whispered, “What is that?”
To Hal it sounded like a flute. The unseen flautist produced no discernible melody, but the flow of notes was haunting nonetheless.
They reentered the hall as the music stopped again, and just as a draft swept along the corridor.
“Someone’s left a window open—or probably a stairway door,” the nurse said quietly but pointedly.
“Not me,” Hal assured her.
Janet Soto stepped out of the room across the hall just as the blustery draft abruptly died. She frowned at them, shrugged, then headed toward the next room on her side.
The flute warbled softly. The draft struck up again, stronger than before, and beneath the astringent odors of the hospital, Hal thought he detected a faint scent of smoke.
Leaving Grace Fulgham to her search, Hal hurried toward the far end of the corridor. He intended to check the door at the head of the emergency stairs, to make sure that he hadn’t left it open.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the door to Pollard’s room beginning to swing shut, and he realized that the draft must be coming from in there. He pushed through the door before it could close, and saw Frank sitting up in bed, looking confused and frightened.
The draft and flute had given way to stillness, silence.
“Where did you go?” Hal asked, approaching the bed.
“Fireflies,” Pollard said, apparently dazed. His hair was spiked and tangled, and his round face was pale.
“Fireflies?”
“Fireflies in a windstorm,” Pollard said.
Then he vanished. One second he was sitting in bed, as real and solid as anyone Hal had ever known, and the next second he was gone as inexplicably and neatly as a ghost abandoning a haunt. A brief hiss, like air escaping from a punctured tire, accompanied his departure.
Hal swayed as if he had been stricken. For a moment his heart seemed to seize up, and he was paralyzed by surprise.
Nurse Fulgham stepped into the doorway. “No sign of him in any of the rooms off this corridor. He might’ve gone up or down another floor—don’t you think?”
“Uh....”