Devoted, page 30
Until a knock on the door of the motor home would eventually wake him to a new and astonishing world, a river of what-ifs carried Carson Conroy into sleep. He dreamed of dogs, a glorious panoply of breeds, and of a world transformed in the most magical way.
99
Morning. Sheriff Eckman had thought that the interminable night would never end, that morning would never come, but now that it had come, he wished it hadn’t. The cloud-filtered morning sun at the windows of the heating-cooling plant was the light of blame, the light of accountability, and it could not be escaped.
Here a jigsaw skull, there a headless Norseman. The wind raving like rabid wolves outside, the building seeming filled with machine sounds, as if the robots of the Apocalypse were being manufactured here.
Sheriff Hayden Eckman felt his world fragmenting just like Thad Fenton’s skull had been cracked into pieces and pried apart.
Nobody could locate Carson Conroy. He was supposed to be on call at all hours if a crime scene required his presence. But he wasn’t answering his phone, and he wasn’t at home.
Jim Harmon, Conroy’s assistant, took photos, gathered evidence, attended to the dead, but he wasn’t Dr. Carson Conroy, he was only Jim Harmon, just thirty-four years old, damn it, a mere assistant medical examiner, and this was the biggest crime in the history of Pinehaven County, a murder spree that could destroy more than the killer’s victims, that could also vaporize Hayden Eckman’s career.
He couldn’t tolerate being in the plant manager’s office with all the blood and biological debris. When he had run for sheriff, it had never crossed his mind that he would have to wade through a damn abattoir, that he would see things that would give him nightmares for the rest of his life. The urgent need to pee that had almost embarrassed him earlier, when he had barely avoided soiling himself in front of his deputies, was nothing compared to the compulsion to vomit that surged anew each time that he thought he had repressed it; his throat burned with the tides of stomach acid that washed up and down, up and down.
Pretending only that he wanted to stay out of Jim Harmon’s way, the sheriff stationed himself in the large room with the boilers and chillers. He was sitting on the top step of a three-step ladder. The throbbing pumps pushing water through the maze of insulated pipes sometimes matched the rhythm of a strong impulse to regurgitate, but that was better than the sights and smells of the scene in the plant office.
When Freeman Johnson came to report on Eric Norseman’s missing vehicle, which Lee Shacket had surely stolen, he had more bad news. Norseman was a hot-rodder who drove a black ’48 Ford pickup that had been chopped, channeled, sectioned, and further customized. Although the truck might be easily spotted once an APB had been issued, it had no GPS, which meant it was not emitting a signal that could be located almost immediately.
“By the way,” Johnson said, “there’s no doubt about it now.”
“No doubt about what?”
“Fenton’s brain is gone.”
Eckman grimaced. “I thought that was already obvious.”
“Well, Jim Harmon had to make a thorough search.”
“Did he expect to find it in a desk drawer?”
“You never know with a lunatic like this.”
“Is Harmon nearly finished?”
“He’ll need another hour. You know Norseman’s head?”
“I never met him. I wouldn’t recognize his head.”
“Jim says it’s definitely gone, nowhere on the premises.”
Sheriff Eckman didn’t want to talk about the missing head.
“You know what some of the guys are calling it?” Johnson asked.
The sheriff answered the question with silence and hoped that Johnson would take the hint.
Johnson didn’t take the hint. “They’re calling the missing head Shacket’s lunch pail.”
Hayden Eckman shuddered. “I am so screwed.”
100
In his sleep, Woody went to Castle Wyvern, but Kipp went with him, their dreams as synchronized as their snoring. Together, they walked the ramp to the drawbridge and crossed the moat and entered under the portcullis of the first gatehouse, into the outer ward. The sky was blue and without lightning, and no dragons flew as the boy and the dog passed through the second gatehouse, into the inner ward. They climbed the spiral stone stairs in the southwest tower of the inner curtain wall and went through the ironbound door into the high redoubt with its timbered ceiling and narrow windows at each of the four points of the compass.
The dog and boy turned in a circle, gazing at the high windows.
The sky remained blue.
All dragons had been vanquished.
As they completed a full turn, the castle disappeared.
In the dream, they stood in a meadow overlooking the sea.
From the sea, in all other directions, the meadow stretched a hundred miles, a thousand.
Out of nowhere appeared a foil balloon, buoyant with helium.
It floated across the field.
The words Happy Birthday were printed on it in red.
Although this was neither Kipp’s nor Woody’s birthday, they found the balloon irresistible, for it was strange to see it adrift here in the wilds. The bright, mirrored Mylar, trailing a red satin ribbon, seemed important. It must mean something. They pursued it with exuberance. Kipp leaped to bite at the long ribbon, and Woody leaped higher and missed, but they would not give up. They would never give up. Laughing, barking, they raced across the meadow. Through knee-high golden grass they ran and ran, ran and ran.
101
At ten o’clock Thursday morning, after three hours of deep though nightmare-riddled sleep, Megan came downstairs to a kitchen redolent of baking cheese and tomato sauce and basil, where Ben Hawkins was at work, on both guard and culinary duty.
She stood in the doorway, watching as he finished layering a second pan of lasagna, getting ready to put it in the oven after the first pan came out. He was unaware of her, softly singing an old Boyz II Men song, “4 Seasons of Loneliness,” though he somehow made it sound upbeat.
She said, “You even cook.”
Glancing at her, he said, “That’s what I call it. Cooking. Not everyone who tastes it thinks the term is appropriate.”
“You really believe we’ll have something to celebrate.”
“Lots of people have shot at me, nobody ever hit me, so there’s precedent to expect a need to celebrate.” He spooned sauce over the top layer of noodles. “Anyway, I looked through your pantry, it’s a massive pantry, all those packages of pasta, plus all the treasures you packed away in that humongous freezer—enough choice sirloin hamburger patties and fine steaks for half a dozen Independence Day parties—and I was inspired. Well, first I said to myself, ‘Ben’—I call myself Ben—I said, ‘Ben, this woman must be seriously worried that cattle are going extinct,’ and then I was inspired to start making use of all that stuff, because I’ve got it on good authority that cattle will be around for at least another millennium.”
“I have this need to be prepared for anything,” Megan said. “We have a generator, runs on propane, so we can power the entire house for a month if the electric company goes down.”
He nodded. “In case it’s taken out by terrorists.”
She said, “Or in a cattle stampede.”
He was covering the top layer of noodles with mozzarella. He knew what he was doing. “I assumed Woody likes lasagna.”
“As long as it and each vegetable is in a separate dish.”
“Maybe that’s all behind him.”
“Amazing if true. But whatever happens, he’s the best, a great kid. My turn for guard duty. Get some sleep while you can.”
“Six deputies left and six new ones came about two hours ago.”
She looked toward the back door, at the police SUV parked athwart the porch steps.
He said, “I’ve just begun to cook. There’s still a lot for you to do.”
“Good. It’ll keep my mind off . . . everything.”
“The first pan comes out of the oven in five minutes.”
He washed his hands, dried them on a paper towel.
As she stood at the oven, peering in at the baking lasagna, he said, “I like your paintings. They’re very good.”
She shrugged. “They’re all I know how to do.”
“I doubt that. I’d like to talk with you about them, when this business is over.”
“I hope it’ll be over soon.”
“It will.”
He went to the door. As he was about to step into the hallway, Megan said, “Which was your favorite? Of the paintings.”
He turned and smiled. “Everything. I like everything I’ve seen.”
102
In his three-bedroom suite in the hotel in Sacramento, after only five hours of sleep, at 11:10 a.m. Haskell Ludlow woke from a dream about the murders in the abandoned shopping mall. He got out of bed and went to the nearest of three bathrooms. After he relieved himself, he intended to go to a different bedroom, where the sheets were fresh and no nightmare lingered to enfold him again.
Bad dreams were such a dependable part of his sleep for so many years that he had begun to wonder if a supernatural entity, perhaps the evil twin of the Sandman, had taken a disliking to him and was targeting him with horrific visions. At first this was a frivolous thought; maybe it still was, but as the years passed, he came to take it more than half seriously. By changing bedrooms in the middle of the night, Haskell Ludlow was taking evasive action. In his house in Menlo Park, where he lived alone when not traveling, there were nine bedrooms through which he cycled.
Now, as he was crossing the living room of the hotel suite, the disposable phone, which he’d left on a coffee table, began to ring. Only John Verbotski and Bradley Knacker, of Atropos & Company, had this number, and Ludlow would destroy the phone once the business with Megan Bookman, in Pinehaven, had been concluded.
Being Alexander Gordius, he sat on the sofa and picked up the burner on the third ring and said, “Yeah?”
John Verbotski said, “We’ve been trying to get you for hours.”
“I was wiped out, sleeping.”
“We’ve gotten some sleep, too, but we’re taking turns at it.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got no one to take turns with me. What’s happening?”
“We’re in position, four of us, but we can’t visit the lady because the sheriff’s got six deputies at her house as protection.”
Bewildered, Ludlow said, “Six deputies? How did he know she’d need protection?”
“Not protection from us. We’re monitoring police radio traffic here. They’re protecting her from some guy named Nathan Palmer, he went after her.”
“Who the hell is Nathan Palmer?”
“He killed a couple of people yesterday afternoon. His real name seems to be Lee Shacket.”
Ludlow was for a moment speechless. Lee Shacket? The CEO of Refine? Because he only knew what the media was reporting about events in Springville, he said, “But Shacket is dead. Everyone’s dead there.”
“Everyone’s dead where?” Verbotski asked.
Ludlow bit his lip and finally said, “Shacket knew Megan Bookman a long time ago. Why the hell would he go after her now?”
“Why do crazy guys go after women all the time?” Verbotski said. “That’s a rhetorical question.”
“Who’re the two people Shacket killed?”
“Four. There’ve been two more since he went after the lady and failed to get her.”
After Verbotski listed the killings and gave what details he knew, Ludlow could not suppress his astonishment. “He beheaded a guy? He bit people? He ate people?”
“Parts of people, not whole people,” Verbotski clarified. “He’s some kind of freak. You knew this freak?”
Ignoring the question, Ludlow said, “And he’s still there in Pinehaven?”
“They don’t know. He stole a pickup. He’s on the run. It’s a ’48 Ford pickup, custom hot rod. So it should be easy to spot.”
“Holy shit, this must be big news. I never listen to the news, I’m done with news. But this must be wall-to-wall on cable.”
“Not yet. The sheriff hasn’t released a statement.”
“Hasn’t released a statement about four murders and the suspect on the loose? That’s insane. The first murders were yesterday when—afternoon?”
“Yeah. But it looks like, last night, jurisdiction on those was transferred to the attorney general in Sacramento.”
Ludlow rose from the sofa. “To Tio Barbizon?”
“Yeah, I think that’s the name.”
Shacket was supposed to be dead in Springville. He wasn’t. Tio Barbizon had taken jurisdiction in the first two murders—and had not yet conducted a press briefing or issued any statement. Tio was in Dorian Purcell’s pocket and always had been.
Ludlow stood in silence with the phone pressed to his ear so long that Verbotski at last said, “You still there?”
“Yeah.”
“We can’t move on the lady with all those deputies there.”
“Stay put. She’s still on the agenda. I’ve got to make another call. Then I’ll be back to you.”
Ludlow pressed End.
He picked up another disposable phone from the coffee table. This one had been purchased solely to report to Dorian Purcell on the situation with the murder-for-hire operation called Tragedy. Taped to the unit was the number of yet another disposable that was in Dorian’s possession. When the Tragedy website and the breach of security related to it were erased, along with everyone involved, Ludlow and Purcell would destroy these two burner phones.
Considering the ever-escalating criminal activity in this country, Haskell Ludlow congratulated himself on having long ago invested significant capital in the disposable-phone business.
He keyed in Dorian’s number.
103
Parable headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, included an eight-thousand-square-foot apartment in which Dorian Purcell could be in the heart of corporate affairs when a new acquisition was pending or when a new product launch was being fine-tuned, or when any politician on the make insisted on a secure face-to-face sit-down with Dorian himself to work out the terms under which the public servant would sell out his office and constituents. On this Thursday in September, Dorian was not residing in this apartment.
Slightly farther up the coast, in Palo Alto, Dorian owned a twelve-thousand-square-foot estate on a two-acre parcel with a view of San Francisco Bay. He lived in this resplendent house with his fiancée, Paloma Pascal, who was highly educated and charming and stunningly beautiful, who could move with confidence and grace in the most rarefied social circles, who made a positive and lasting impression on everyone, and who would remain his fiancée as long as she never insisted on getting married. Dorian was not at the moment in this residence.
In a stately building atop Nob Hill, in the heart of San Francisco, Dorian owned a fourteen-thousand-square-foot, two-floor apartment with spectacular views of the city, from some of its most glorious and iconic architecture to its homeless encampments and feces-strewn sidewalks. He lived in this exquisitely appointed penthouse with Saffron “Sunny” Ketterling, twenty-three, who was even more stunningly beautiful than Paloma Pascal. Sunny was also remarkably lithe and supple, because she had been a devoted gymnast since the age of six. Currently, at 11:40 a.m., Sunny was sleeping. She and Dorian had gone to bed at 1:15 a.m., but they hadn’t settled down to sleep until six o’clock, when there had been no further positions to explore.
Dorian had awakened at ten thirty, after little more than four hours of sleep. Since late childhood, when he had fully understood death, he had not slept more than five hours a night and had been driven to embrace excess as a rebuke to the Grim Reaper. Now Dorian was in his study on the lower of the two floors of the apartment, at an immense stainless-steel and blue-quartzite desk, having breakfast that had been served by the butler, Franz. He was also consuming the first 40 of the 124 vitamin-mineral supplements that he downed every day, and composing the eulogy that he would give at the memorial service for the employees of Refine who perished in the tragic fire at the Springville, Utah, facility.
When the disposable phone rang, he knew who was calling, for only Haskell Ludlow had the number.
He took the call. “Life is good.”
“Life is complicated,” Haskell said.
“Tell me.”
“Our old friends in the pest-control service located that troublesome cockroach. Now they’re out of business.”
So the principals of Tragedy were dead. But they had found the cockroach, the hacker.
“Our new friends in pest control,” Haskell continued, “are ready to do the job.”
That would be Verbotski and the boys from Atropos.
“But the problem I’ve been dealing with,” Haskell said, “and the problem you’ve been dealing with have become the same problem.”
“How so?”
“You didn’t tell me that one of the ninety-three beat the big bang and hit the road.”
