Max was grim. “We’ll know at seven o’clock tonight.” He looked at his watch. “A little more than seven hours to go.”
The gray water looked cold and oily. It rolled against the docks; and the prows of boats cleaved it like knives slicing dark gelatin.
They had a window table at The Sea Locker. Initially, while Max and Lou talked politics, Mary sat in silence and studied the sky for sea gulls. But there were no birds today, and gradually she shifted her attention to the traffic on the harbor and to the conversation.
Although there were no gulls to worry her, she wasn’t able to relax. She ate too little and drank too much; there were jokes about her trying to drink Lou under the table; but the whiskey didn’t steady her hands.
At two o’clock, after Lou had gone to his office and they had returned to the motel, she stretched out on the bed, on her side, intending to take a nap. She would need to be rested and alert for the manhunt tonight.
She closed her eyes and tried to switch off her mind. The wine she had drunk at lunch was of some help. She felt she was drifting in lazy circles on a rubber raft in a gigantic swimming pool. She began some light meditation, repeating the word “one” to herself until it filled her and pushed out all other thoughts.
At the borderland of sleep she heard onrushing wings: wicka-wicka-wicka!
She opened her eyes.
Nothing there.
Imagination.
Max was behind her in an armchair, reading the King’s Point Press. If there had been any unusual sound, he would have spoken.
She closed her eyes and began thinking the word “one” again.
Wicka-wicka-wicka!
She opened her eyes. Still nothing.
She knew the wings had something to do with Berton Mitchell. And they were also part of the case she was working on now. The killer she was stalking was somehow connected to Berton Mitchell. Impossible. Unthinkable. But...
She felt tormented. All she wanted was some peace. All she wanted was to be left alone. All she wanted was to get through this case!
She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to stop the tears, but they spilled down her cheeks anyway.
She was frightened. She wanted Max. She wanted him to get up and come to her. She started to roll toward him, was about to say his name, and then she thought: No, by God! Be strong for once.
Sooner or later she would have to learn to handle some of her own problems. She was increasingly aware of the fragility of life. She could feel her mortality—and not merely her own but Max’s and Lou’s and Alan’s, too—feel it as surely as if it were fragments of ice melting through her fingers. Someday Max might be gone, and how would she survive if she couldn’t deal with adversity on her own?
She would have to face up to what had happened twenty-four years ago. She would have to think, force herself back in time, find the meaning of the wings. She wouldn’t be able to uncover the connection between Berton Mitchell and this killer until she remembered all about the wings and what had happened in the caretaker’s cottage.
She waited until the tears had dried, then got up from the bed.
“Something wrong?” Max asked.
“Can’t sleep.”
“Do you want to talk?”
“Go ahead and read the paper. I just want to think. ”
She picked up the spiral-bound notebook and pen that were on the nightstand. She went to the small desk and sat down.
She would do what she always did when she had a problem that no one could solve for her: she would write about it. She would write dozens of questions, one on every sixth or seventh line, and search for answers to put on the lines between them. That process always relaxed her. Of course, she sought more than relaxation. She wanted answers. Sometimes she got them.
However, after all these years, she could no longer delude herself. Knowing the solution and being able to act on it were two very different things. She had the wit but not the strength. Although she had performed this ritual with notebook and pen hundreds of times, she had never gotten from it what she most expected: she had yet to reach an important decision entirely on her own; she had yet to handle a serious problem without someone’s help.
This time would be different. It had to be different. She sensed that if she failed to find a new strength within herself, she wouldn’t survive much longer.
She opened the notebook which she had purchased the day before but had not yet used, and she saw writing on the first ruled page.
Mary! Run for your life!
It was written in ballpoint pen. The words appeared to have been put down in haste. And although it was definitely her own handwriting, she had no memory whatsoever of having scribbled it.
Roger Fullet called at four o’clock and gave Lou a detailed synopsis of the Berton Mitchell story as it had been reported by the Los Angeles Times. “... and after only twenty minutes of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of all charges. His lawyer immediately filed an appeal based on technicalities, but Mitchell must have realized there wasn’t any chance of a new trial. His sentences on all counts were to be served consecutively and amounted to a minimum of twenty-five years.”
“And he hanged himself?” Lou asked.
“Just like you’ve been told. He did it the day after the sentencing, before he was transferred from the county jail to prison.”
“You mentioned his family.”
“The wife and one son.”
“What was the son’s name?”
“Barry. Barry Mitchell.”
“How old was he when this happened?”
“I didn’t make a note of it. But I seem to remember he was sixteen.”
“Was there anything more on him in your files?” Lou asked.
“He visited his father in jail every day. He was convinced Mitchell was innocent like he claimed.”
“Anything else?”
“These days the press would badger the hell out of the wife and son. America’s gotten more ghoulish in the past couple decades. Every day newspaper readers have a greater interest in peeking into personal tragedies than they had the day before. But twenty-four years ago Americans still had some sense of privacy and propriety. The wife and son were left alone. There’s nothing more in our files.”
Lou drummed a pencil on the top of his desk. “I wonder what happened to the son.”
“Can’t help you, I’m afraid.”
“You’ve done more than enough. Thanks, Roger.”
After they exchanged another round of holiday greetings, Lou hung up.
As he put down the receiver, his secretary came in to wish him a merry Christmas before going home. The office was quiet after she had gone.
He hadn’t turned on any lights when he came back from lunch. Now, as the early darkness gradually descended, he sat alone in lengthening shadows, staring; thinking.
What was it that Mary feared?
What was so special about this case?
One pet theory had been demolished by what Roger Fullet had told him. The psychopathic killer loose in King’s Point was not Berton Mitchell.
The son? Barry Mitchell? He would be forty, Max’s age. Not much older than his father had been when he attacked Mary. Madness sometimes ran in families, didn’t it? Like father, like son. Maybe it would be Barry Mitchell who would climb those tower stairs at seven o’clock tonight.
As the muddy evening light replaced the afternoon, the office grew chilly. Finally, for warmth, Lou got up and poured a double shot of bourbon.
Determined not to run to Max with the five-word warning in the front of her notebook, Mary wrote down fifty-four questions and half as many answers, seeking understanding and solutions in the only way she knew. As yet she had discovered nothing new about the tortures and outrages that had transpired in that cottage twenty-four years earlier, not the slightest clue to the meaning of the wings, but she was not ready to quit.
Although it interrupted her train of thought and made her increasingly nervous, she repe
atedly turned back to the first page and read the two short sentences: Mary! Run for your life! She tried to convince herself that it was someone else’s work, that some stranger had sneaked into the motel room and had written the warning while she and Max were out. Perhaps the killer had done it. But she knew that wasn’t true. It made no sense. Besides, she recognized her penmanship. She must have gotten out of bed in the middle of the night without disturbing Max and, while still sound asleep, scrawled an urgent message to herself. Asleep, she had foreseen great danger. But what knowledge had she possessed in sleep that eluded her now that she was awake?
Getting out of the armchair behind her, Max said, “Do you want to freshen up?”
She turned. “What?”
“It’s five-thirty. We’re to meet Lou at six. I thought you’d want to freshen up.”
“Oh, sure.” She closed the notebook. She stood.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He stared at her, concerned.
“No,” she said. “No, I’m not.”
He came to her, kissed her cheek.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“So am I,” he said.
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“Nothing bad,” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“I do know,” he said. “Stay close to me tonight, until they catch the bastard.”
She asked, “What if they don’t catch him?”
“You said they would.”
“No. I just said he’d be in one of the towers.”
“If they’re waiting for him, they’ll catch him,” Max said soothingly.
“Maybe.”
15
6:00 P.M.
Officer Lyle Winterman parked the squad car out of sight in an alleyway and walked two blocks to St. Luke’s Lutheran Church. Even with a streetlight every hundred feet Harbor Avenue seemed dark.
Winterman kept his right hand on the holstered revolver at his hip. The flap of the holster was unsnapped. His palm was on the gun butt. He expected someone to leap out at him. After Patmore’s talk at the station, the deputy was jumpy as hell.
Reverend Richard Erdman was waiting in the nave of the church. They shook hands and went to the door that opened on the bell tower stairs.
“What’s this all about?” Erdman asked.
“We’re working on a tip,” Winterman said.
“A tip about what?”
“Chief Patmore would rather I didn’t say.”
“Is there going to be violence?”
“There might be.”
“I don’t want violence in my church.”
“Neither do I, Reverend.”
“This is God’s house. It will remain a place of peace.”
“I hope so. just the same, you’d better go back to the rectory and lock your doors.”
“I have a Christmas Eve service to prepare for.”
“That doesn’t start until later, does it?”
“Eleven,” Erdman said. “But I begin preparing at ten.”
“I’ll be gone long before that,” Winterman said.
The officer unhooked a flashlight that was clipped to his belt and switched it on. He directed its beam to the tower stairs, hesitated, then began to climb.
Erdman shut the door behind him.
6:05 P.M.
Officer Rudy Holtzman wasn’t supposed to be working on Christmas Eve. It was his night off.
All the way up the tower stairs he cursed John Patmore.
Psychics, premonitions, fortune-tellers, extra-sensory perception—it was all bullshit. The chief was making a fool of himself. Nothing new about that, of course. But a clairvoyant? Too much.
Holtzman reached the top of the tower at Kimball’s Games and Snacks. Under him the deserted building was quiet.
He switched off his flashlight and looked out at the harbor for a moment. On a half dozen boats, parties had already gotten underway.
“Damn!” Holtzman said.
He sat down with his back to the waist-high wall around the observation deck. He put his revolver on the floor beside him.
He half hoped that some bastard with a rifle did try to come up those stairs. Maybe he would feel better if he could shoot someone.
6:10 P.M.
A well lighted eighty-foot yacht cruised around the bay end of the harbor and started down the north channel toward the sea. Waves from its wake slapped rhythmically against the sea wall.
The wind from the ocean carried a vague odor of decay.
John Patmore and his assistant—a young, overweight officer named Rollins—used a corner of The Laughing Dolphin Restaurant’s parking lot as a command post for the operation. From there they had a view of all three towers.
The Mercedes was parked beside the patrol car. Mary leaned against the fender. Max was at her left side, Lou at her right.
She was hoping for another vision. She still had time to foresee which tower the killer would try to use, time to help the police consolidate their efforts, perhaps even time enough to prevent the slaughter to come. Thus far, however, she had received no new images.
She was shivering uncontrollably, but not because of the cool night air.
At six-fifteen, Officer Teagarten, who was assigned to the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity, called Patmore on the walkie-talkie to say religious services were in progress. Furthermore, the Knights of Columbus were having a party in the church basement that would last until confessions began prior to midnight Mass. It was Teagarten’s opinion that no killer, not even a psychopath, would attempt to use Trinity’s bell tower if he had to walk through so many witnesses to get there. Teagarten wanted to go home.
“You,” Patmore said over the walkie-talkie, “until I’ve told you different, stay right the hell where you are.”
Officer Rollins divided his attention among the three towers, studying them through binoculars.
Patmore ignored Mary. He hadn’t bothered to say hello when she arrived, and he still refused even to look her way.
“If this doesn’t work out,” Lou said, “the chief will swear he never met you.”
6:30 P.M.
A dozen boat parties were in progress all along the harbor. Within an hour there would be a dozen more. Laughter, the squeals of young women, and music from several stereos drifted across the water.
Most of the craft, from the smallest sailboats to the largest motor yachts, were decorated for the season. Strings of colored lights wound around the deck railings and encircled the ports. A few of the biggest yachts, able to tap the power in their huge engines and banks of batteries, were swathed in layers of light, as if weighed down beneath scores of incandescent Hawaiian leis. There were boats with green lights arranged to form Christmas trees on their masts, boats that used golden lights to transform their masts into gigantic crosses, boats carrying life-size statues of Santa Claus, boats with cardboard and Styrofoam reindeer capering across cabin roofs, boats draped with paper chrysanthemums, evergreen boughs, holly, and fresh flowers. The ships blazed against the night.
In his own way Lou Pasternak was proud of King’s Point. He could deliver an hour-long monologue dissecting its many faults, but he never failed to point out that it was, if nothing else, the loveliest beach town in California.
Pretty as it was, however, the harbor could not distract him for more than a few minutes tonight. He finally turned to Mary and said, “Can we talk about Barry Mitchell?”
She jerked as if he’d pinched her.
“Mary?” he said.
“You startled me”
“I’m sorry.”
“What about Barry Mitchell?” she asked.
“He was what... ten years older than you?”
“About that, I think.”
“Do you recall what he looked like?”
“He was tall, a big boy.”
“What color was his hair?”
“Dark,” she said. “Brown, I suppose.”
<
br /> “His eyes?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You said he killed Alan’s pets.”
“And the few I had as well.”
“Was he caught at it?”
“Alan saw him killing a squirrel we owned.”
“Was he apprehended in the act?”
“No. He was too big for Alan.”
“Were charges ever brought?”
“We had no proof,” she said.
“You had Alan’s testimony.”
“The word of one boy against another.”
“So you stopped keeping pets,” Lou said.
“Yes.”
Max put his arm around Mary’s shoulders.
“Nothing was done to Barry Mitchell?” Lou asked.
“My father’s attorney had a talk with his mother.”
“What did he accomplish?”
“Nothing. Barry Mitchell denied killing them.”
Max asked, “Why all these questions, Lou?”
Lou hesitated, then decided there was no reason to keep his suspicions a secret. “You’ve told me there’s something very unusual about the killer we’re after tonight. Max has told me the same thing. The two of you disagree as to what is unusual about him. But suppose... what if the man we’re tracking is Berton Mitchell’s son?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Why not?” Lou asked.
“He’s dead,” she said.
Lou stared in surprise.
“You mean Barry Mitchell’s dead?” Max asked.
“His mother, too,” Mary said.
“What?”
“His mother died, too. The same night.”
Lou asked, “When did this happen?”
“I was eleven at the time.”
“Nineteen years ago.”
“That’s about right.”
“They died together?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“They were killed by an intruder.”
“A burglar?” Lou asked.
“I suppose so. I don’t remember.”
“You don’t know the killer’s name?”
“Is that important?”