The apple of his eye.
Fric. Fric must still be on the second floor, in the library, selecting a book to get him through the night.
Okay. The thing to do was go to the library. Hustle the boy into the nearest panic room. Tuck him away safely in that comfy, armored, self-contained vault. Then chase this situation to its source, find out what the hell was happening.
He stepped out of his apartment, turned left in the west hall, and ran to the back stairs that earlier he had taken to the third floor and the white room.
Goofing, having more fun than the law allowed, proceeding at times with exaggerated stealth, in a crouch like a commando slipping through an enemy fortress, at other times strutting like Vin Diesel when he knows the script specifies that all bullets will miss him, Corky followed the north hall past the breakfast room, the butler’s pantry, the kitchen.
He wished that it would have been practical to wear his yellow slicker and his droopy yellow hat. He would have enormously enjoyed seeing Truman’s amazed expression when confronted by a banana-bright assassin spitting death.
In the west hall, the door to the security chief’s apartment stood open.
At the sight of this, Corky at once grew more serious. With caution he approached the apartment. He stood with his back to the hallway wall, beside the open door, listening.
When he crossed the threshold, he went in low and fast, holding the Glock in two hands, sweeping left to right, right to left.
The study was deserted.
Quickly but prudently, he searched the rest of the apartment and found no sign of his quarry.
Returning to the front room, he noticed the contents of the six black boxes on the desk. Evidently, Truman was still trying to solve the riddle. Amusing.
Lines of text on the computer screen drew his attention. Truman appeared to have stepped out in the middle of reading e-mail.
Indulging the curiosity that was such a fundamental part of him and that had served him remarkably well over the years, Corky spotted YORN at the end of the e-mail. William Yorn, the groundskeeper.
He read the message from the top: FRIC IS MAKING HIMSELF A HIDEY-HOLE IN THE CONSERVATORY…. Much of Yorn’s complaint meant nothing to Corky, but the stuff about the hidey-hole definitely interested him.
With his two targets roving beyond Corky’s ken, he needed to get to another Crestron panel, and fast. One was inlaid in the bedroom wall here in the security chief’s apartment, but Truman might return at any moment, while Corky was distracted in the other room.
He saw something on the floor, near the sofa. A cell phone. As if it had been not dropped but flung aside.
Cautiously he returned to the west hall. He followed it to the door of the McBees’ apartment.
The blueprints had specified a Crestron panel in their living room. Happily, they were in Santa Barbara.
According to Ned Hokenberry, in order to facilitate cleaning and other household services, the live-in staff seldom locked the doors to their private quarters other than when they were in residence.
Good old dead Hokenberry, the freak, proved to be as reliable as the blueprints. Corky entered the McBee apartment and closed the door behind him.
Next to the front door, the Crestron panel brightened at his touch. He didn’t bother with a lamp.
A quick motion-detector scan through the ground floor showed no blip except Corky’s, here in the McBee living room.
On the second floor, someone turned out of the west hall into the long north wing, proceeding in the direction of the library. Perhaps Truman. Perhaps the young Manheim. Whichever, he appeared to be hurrying.
No movement or detectable body heat on the third floor.
He surveyed the two subterranean levels. Nothing.
The figure on the second floor had reached the library. The blip had to be Ethan Truman. He must have gone up there by the back stairs in the west wing.
Where was the boy? Undetected. Not moving. Not producing any heat within range of the sensors.
The kid could be in his bedroom or a bathroom. No sensors in those areas.
Or he might be hunkered in his hidey-hole in the conservatory.
This hidey-hole business was odd. Judging by Yorn’s message, the staff thought it was peculiar, too.
Truman running to the library. The kid missing. The cell phone flung aside on the floor of Truman’s apartment.
Corky Laputa believed in meticulous planning and on the faithful execution of the plan. He was also a friend of chaos.
He recognized the hand of chaos in this moment. He suspected that Truman knew the property had been breached.
Ditching the plan for the time being, his heart thrilling to this unexpected development, Corky trusted chaos and sprinted for the conservatory.
Leaving Maxwell Dalton alone with assurances that he would return in a minute, Hazard Yancy hurried downstairs while the window-breaking can of pine-scented disinfectant was still bouncing from the porch roof to the lawn.
Tall sidelights flanked the front door, but neither was wide enough to accommodate a man, especially not one as large as Hazard. Furthermore, the relationship of the sidelights to the door lock made it impossible for him to claim to have reached inside and disengaged the deadbolt after smashing either pane.
Having holstered his handgun, opening the door, Hazard suddenly expected to be confronted by Laputa. Or Hector X. Only the night came face to face with him, cold and wet.
He stepped onto the front porch. As far as he could see, the sound of shattering glass hadn’t brought curious neighbors outside.
Someone might be watching at a window. He’d taken bigger risks.
On the porch were several potted plants. He picked a small one.
After waiting for a car to splash past in the street, he threw the ten-pound terra-cotta pot, with plant, through one of the living-room windows. The consequent crash-clink-clatter of exploding and falling glass ought to have attracted attention in the most mind-your-own-damn-business neighborhood.
He drew his gun and used the butt to smash out a few stubborn shards still bristling from the sash. Then he climbed inside through the window, thrusting aside the drapes, knocking over a pedestal and a vase, blundering as though he had never been in the Laputa house before.
He had his story now. In answer to the cry for help that had come through the broken bedroom window, he had rung the bell, pounded on the door. When he received no response, he broke a window, went upstairs, and found Maxwell Dalton.
This concoction had the texture not of smooth sweet truth but of a cow pie; however, it was his cow pie, and he was going to serve it with enthusiasm.
After returning to the front porch by the more conventional route of the door, in consideration of Dalton’s perilous condition, Hazard used his cell phone to call 911. He gave the dispatcher his badge number and explained the situation. “I need paramedics and some jakes here sooner than soon.” As an afterthought he said, “Jakes are uniformed officers.”
“I know,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“That’s all right,” she said.
“I need a CSU—”
“I know,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Are you new, Detective?”
“I’m forty-one,” he said, immediately realizing that his reply qualified for a stupidity commendation.
“I mean new to Robbery/Homicide,” she said.
“No, ma’am. I’ve been washed so many times I shouldn’t have any color left.”
This was, however, his first case involving a ghost, or whatever the hell Dunny Whistler might be when he could shape your dreams and disappear into a mirror. This was also his first involving a phone call from a dead hit man, and his first involving a perp who starved and tortured a victim while keeping him alive on an IV drip.
Some days you thought you had seen everything. This wasn’t one of them.
Having concluded the 911 call, he dart
ed across the street in the rain, to his department sedan. He stowed the Lockaid lock-release gun under the driver’s seat.
By the time he returned to the front porch, he heard approaching sirens.
Coming through the library door, Ethan saw the creased and tattered photograph on the floor. Hannah. The same picture that had once stood on the desk in Dunny’s apartment, that had been torn out of the silver frame.
The disappearance of the string of little bells from Ethan’s desk suggested that Dunny had been in Palazzo Rospo. The e-mails from Devonshire, Yorn, and Hachette had supported what the missing bells suggested. As far as Ethan was concerned, this photo qualified as hard proof.
Dead, stone-solid-perfect dead, according to Dr. O’Brien at Our Lady of Angels, Dunny remained at large in the world, but with powers that defied reason and that defined a supernatural entity.
He had been in Palazzo Rospo.
He was here now.
Ethan wouldn’t have believed in a walking dead man if he hadn’t been shot point-blank in the gut, hadn’t died and been resurrected, if he hadn’t been trashed by a PT Cruiser and a truck, hadn’t been on his feet again an instant after his second death. He himself wasn’t a ghost, but after the events of the past two days, he could believe in a ghost, all right, and in lots of things to which previously he had given no credence.
Maybe Dunny wasn’t a ghost, either. He might be something else for which Ethan had no name.
Whatever Dunny proved to be, he was no longer merely a man. His motives, therefore, couldn’t be identified either by the process of deduction or by the intuition on which a cop relied.
Nevertheless, Ethan sensed now that his childhood friend, so long estranged, wasn’t the source of the threat to Fric, that Dunny’s role in these bizarre events was more benign than not. A man who had loved Hannah, who had kept her picture five years after her death, must have within him at least the potential for good and surely could not harbor the purity of evil required to harm a blameless child.
Folding the photo away into a pocket, Ethan called out, “Fric! Fric, where are you?”
When he received no answer, he hurried through the library, along the canyons of books, from Aesop and Conrad Aiken to Alexandre Dumas, from Gustave Flaubert to Victor Hugo, from Somerset Maugham to Shakespeare, all the way to Emile Zola, afraid of finding the boy dead and of not finding him at all.
No Fric.
The reading nook farthest from the library entrance included not only armchairs but also a worktable with a telephone and a computer.
Although the outgoing lines were no longer working, the in-house intercom was a function of the system separate from phone service. Only a power failure could disable it.
Ethan pressed the button labeled INTERCOM, then pressed HOUSE, and broke one of Mrs. McBee’s cardinal rules by paging the boy from the third floor to the lower garage. His summons issued from the speaker in every phone in the mansion: “Fric? Where are you, Fric? Wherever you are, speak to me.”
He waited. Five seconds was an excruciatingly long time. Ten equaled eternity.
“Fric? Talk to me, Fric!”
Beside the telephone, the computer switched on. Ethan hadn’t touched it.
The ghost operating the computer accessed the house-control program. Instead of presenting him with the usual three columns of icons, the screen immediately revealed the floor plan of the ground level of the mansion, the eastern half.
Before him, unbidden, was the motion-detector display. A blip, signifying movement and body heat, blinked in the conservatory.
Seventy-four feet in diameter, forty-eight feet from floor to ceiling, the conservatory was a jungle with windows, tall panels of leaded glass, salvaged from a palace in France that had been mostly destroyed in World War One.
Here Mr. Yorn and his men maintained and continually refreshed a collection of exotic palm trees, tulip trees, frangipanis, mimosas, many species of ferns, spaths, smithianthas, orchids, and a shitload of other plants that Fric was not able to identify. Narrow pathways of decomposed granite wound through the curbed planters.
A few steps after you entered the green maze, the illusion of tropical wilderness was complete. You could pretend to be lost in Africa, on the trail of the rare albino gorilla or in search of the lost diamond mines of King Solomon.
Fric called it Giungla Rospo, which was Italian for “Toad Jungle,” and felt that it had all the cool stuff of a real tropical forest but none of the bad. No humongous insects, no snakes, no monkeys in the trees, shrieking and throwing their crap at your head.
At the center of its carefully orchestrated wildness, Giungla Rospo offered a gazebo built of bamboo and bubinga wood. There you could have dinner or get puking drunk if you were old enough, or just pretend to be Tarzan before the nuisance of Jane.
Fourteen feet in diameter, raised five feet above the floor of the conservatory, reached by eight wooden steps, the gazebo held a round table and four chairs. A secret panel in the floor, when slid aside, revealed the door to a small refrigerator stocked with Coke, beer, and bottles of natural spring water, though not so natural that it came with dysentery, typhoid fever, cholera, or ravenous parasites that would eat you alive from the inside out.
Another secret panel, when slid aside, provided access to the five-foot-high space under the gazebo. This allowed the refrigerator to be serviced if it broke down, and made it possible for the guys with the monthly pest-control service to get under the gazebo and ensure that no nasty spiders or disease-bearing mice would establish nests in this cozy dark refuge.
Dark it was. During the day, no hint of sunshine penetrated to the subgazebo den, which meant at night the quake lights would not be seen from outside if the conservatory lamps were all extinguished.
Bringing doughnuts, other noiseless foods, foil-wrapped moist towelettes, and Rubbermaid chamber pots, Fric earlier in the day had claimed this as his deep and special secret place. With Moloch in the house, he now sat powwow-style, legs crossed, in this bubinga bunker, which his guardian angel apparently believed would save him from that eater of children.
He had been in his hideaway less than two minutes, listening to his heart mimic runaway horses, when he heard something other than the stampede in his chest. Footsteps. Ascending to the gazebo.
More likely than not, it was Mr. Truman, looking for him. Mr. Truman. Not Moloch. Not a child-eating beast with baby bones in its teeth. Just Mr. Truman.
On a tour, the footsteps circled the platform, first moving toward the concealed panel, then away. But then toward it again.
Fric held his breath.
The footsteps halted. The tongue-and-groove planks creaked overhead as the man above shifted his weight.
Fric silently poured out the staleness in his lungs, silently eased fresh air in, and held this breath, as well.
The creaking stopped and was followed by subtle sounds: a faint brushing, a soft scrape, a click.
Now would be a bad time for an asthma attack.
Fric almost screamed out loud at himself for being so stupid as to think such a stupid thought at a dangerous time like this. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Only in movies did the asthmatic kid or the diabetic kid, or the epileptic kid, suffer a seizure at the worst of all possible moments. Only in movies, not in real life. This was real life or at least something that passed for it.
Did he feel an itchiness between his shoulders? Spreading to the back of his neck? A real itch would be a sign of an impending asthma attack. An imaginary itch would be a sign that he was a totally lame, lily-livered, hopelessly feeble geek.
Directly above him, the secret panel slid open.
He found himself face to face with Moloch, who was evidently smarter than Fric’s guardian angel: a freckle-faced guy with jackal eyes and a big grin. No splinters of baby bones in his teeth.
Brandishing the six-inch blade that he had requisitioned from Mr. Hachette’s cutlery drawer, Fric warned, “I’ve got a knife.”
; “And I’ve got this,” said Moloch, producing a tiny aerosol can the size of a pepper-spray container. He blasted Fric in the face with a cold stream of stuff that tasted like nutmeg and that smelled like undiluted civet probably smelled.
CHAPTER 93
AT NIGHT, THE CONSERVATORY WAS MAGICALLY illuminated: every golden nimbus, starry twinkle, and silken scarf of faux moonlight as enchanting as the finest Hollywood wizards of stage lighting could design. After sunset, with the flip of a switch, a mere pocket jungle became this tropical Shangri-la.
Entering, pistol in a two-hand grip, Ethan didn’t call out to Fric. The blip he’d seen on the motion-sensor display in the library might not have been the boy.
He was unable to imagine how the estate grounds and then the house could have been penetrated without setting off numerous alarms. But the idea of an intruder getting into Palazzo Rospo astonished him far less than other things he’d witnessed lately.
The loose pebbles in the decomposed-granite pathways crunched under him, making a stealthy search impossible. He stepped carefully to minimize noise. The tiny, shifting bits of stone provided unstable footing.
He didn’t like the shadows, either. Shadows, shadows everywhere in layered complexity, calculated for dramatic effect, unnatural and therefore double deceiving.
Nearing the center of the jungle, Ethan heard a strange sound, thhhup, and then again, thhhup, and heard greenery click-rustle-snap, but he didn’t realize that he was being shot at until the bole of a palm tree took a bullet inches in front of his face, spraying him with flecks of its green tissue.
He dropped fast and flat. He rolled off the path and crawled through ferns and pittosporum, through mimulus drenched with red-purple flowers, into sheltering gloom where he was grateful for all shadows, natural and not.
The jakes arrived before the ambulance, and after Hazard briefed them and told them where to send the paramedics, he went upstairs to look after Maxwell Dalton.
The withered man, more hideously emaciated on third sight than he had appeared to be on first and second, rolled his sunken eyes and grimaced, greatly agitated, struggling to cough up barbed words from his no doubt cracked and bleeding throat.