Phantoms (38 page)

“And the barricaded room at the Oxleys’,” Jenny said.

Captain Arkham said, “It’s almost an argument for the general’s nerve gas theory.”

Then Arkham unclipped a miniaturized geiger counter from his utility belt and carefully examined the car. But it wasn’t radiation that had killed the woman inside.

The second car, half a block away, was a pearl-white Lexus. On the pavement behind it were black skid marks. The Lexus was angled across the street, blocking it. The front end was punched into the side of a yellow Chevy van. There wasn’t a lot of damage because the Lexus had almost braked to a stop before hitting the parked vehicle.

The driver was a middle-aged man with a bushy mustache. He was wearing cut-off jeans and a Dodgers T-shirt. Jenny knew him, too. Marty Sussman. He had been Snowfield’s city manager for the past six years. Affable, earnest Marty Sussman. Dead. Again, the cause of death was clearly not related to the collision.

The doors of the Lexus were locked. The windows were closed up tight, just as they had been on the Cadillac.

“Looks like they both were trying to escape from something,” Jenny said.

“Maybe,” Tal said. “Or they might just have been out for a drive or going somewhere on an errand when the attack came. If they were trying to escape, something sure stopped them cold, forced them right off the street.”

“Sunday was a warm day. Warm but not
too
warm,” Bryce said. “Not hot enough to ride around with the windows closed and the air conditioner on. It was the kind of day when most people keep the windows down, taking advantage of the fresh air. So it looks to me as if, after they were forced to stop, they put up the windows and locked themselves in, trying to keep something out.”

“But it got them anyway,” Jenny said.

Ned and Sue Marie Bischoff owned a lovely Tudor-style home set on a double lot, nestled among huge pine trees. They lived there with their two boys. Eight-year-old Lee Bischoff could already play the piano surprisingly well, in spite of the smallness of his hands, and once told Jenny he was going to be the next Stevie Wonder “only not blind.” Six-year-old Terry looked exactly like a black-skinned Dennis the Menace, but he had a sweet temper.

Ned was a successful artist. His oil paintings sold for as much as thirty thousand dollars, and his limited edition prints went for two grand apiece.

He was a patient of Jenny’s. Although he was only thirty-two and was already a success in life, she had treated him for an ulcer.

The ulcer wouldn’t be bothering him any more. He was in his studio, lying on the floor in front of an easel, dead.

Sue Marie was in the kitchen. Like Hilda Beck, Jenny’s housekeeper, and like many other people all over town, Sue Marie had died while preparing dinner. She had been a pretty woman. Not any more.

They found the two boys in one of the bedrooms.

It was a wonderful room for kids, large and airy, with bunk beds. There were built-in bookshelves full of children’s books. On the walls were paintings that Ned had done just for his kids, whimsical fantasy scenes quite unlike the pieces for which he was well known: a pig in a tuxedo, dancing with a cow in an evening gown; the interior of a spaceship command chamber, where all the astronauts were toads; an eerie yet charming scene of a school playground at night, bathed in the light of a full moon, no kids around, but with a huge and monstrous-looking werewolf having a grand and giddy time on a set of swings.

The boys were in one corner, beyond an array of overturned Tonka Toys. The younger boy, Terry, was behind Lee, who seemed to have made a valiant effort to protect his smaller brother. The boys were staring out into the room, eyes bulging, their dead gazes still fixed upon whatever had threatened them yesterday. Lee’s muscles had locked, so that his thin arms were in the same position now as they had been in the last seconds of his life: raised in front of him, shielding him, palms spread, as if warding off blows.

Bryce knelt in front of the kids. He put one trembling hand against Lee’s face, as if unwilling to believe that the child was actually dead.

Jenny knelt beside him.

“Those are the Bischoffs’ two boys,” she said, unable to keep her voice from breaking. “So now the whole family’s accounted for.”

Tears were streaming down Bryce’s face.

Jenny tried to remember how old his own son was. Seven or eight? About the same age as Lee Bischoff. Little Timmy Hammond was lying in the hospital in Santa Mira this very minute, comatose, just as he had been for the past year. He was pretty much a vegetable. Yes, but even that was better than this. Anything was better than
this.

Eventually, Bryce’s tears dried up. There was rage in him now. “I’ll get them for this,” he said. “Whoever did this . . . I’ll make them pay.”

Jenny had never met a man quite like him. He had considerable masculine strength and purpose, but he was also capable of tenderness.

She wanted to hold him. And be held.

But, as always, she was far too guarded about expressing her own emotional state. If she had possessed his openness, she would never have become estranged from her mother. But she wasn’t that way, not yet, although she wanted to be. So, in response to his vow to get the killers of the Bischoffs’ children, she said, “But what if it isn’t anything human that killed them? Not all evil is in men. There’s evil in nature. The blind maliciousness of earthquakes. The uncaring evil of cancer. This thing here could be like that—remote and unaccountable. There’ll be no taking it to court if it isn’t even human. What then?”

“Whoever or whatever the hell it is, I’ll get it. I’ll stop it. I’ll make it pay for what’s been done here,” he said stubbornly.

 

 

Frank Autry’s search team prowled through three deserted houses after leaving the Catholic church. The fourth house wasn’t empty. They found Wendell Hulbertson, a high school teacher who worked in Santa Mira but who chose to live here in the mountains, in a house that had once belonged to his mother. Gordy had been in Hulbertson’s English class only five years ago. The teacher was not swollen or bruised like the other corpses; he had taken his own life. Backed into a corner of his bedroom, he had put the barrel of a .32 automatic in his mouth and had pulled the trigger. Evidently, death by his own hand had been preferable to whatever it had been about to do to him.

 

 

After leaving the Bischoff residence, Bryce led his group through a few houses without finding any bodies. Then, in the fifth house, they discovered an elderly husband and wife locked in a bathroom, where they had tried to hide from their killer. She was sprawled in the tub. He was in a heap on the floor.

“They were patients of mine,” Jenny said. “Nick and Melina Papandrakis.”

Tal wrote their names down on a list of the dead.

Like Harold Ordnay and his wife in the Candleglow Inn, Nick Papandrakis had attempted to leave a message that would point a finger at the killer. He had taken some iodine from the medicine cabinet and had used it to paint on the wall. He hadn’t had a chance to finish even one word. There were only two letters and part of a third:

“Can anyone figure out what he intended to write?” Bryce asked.

They all took turns squeezing into the bathroom and stepped over Nick Papandrakis’s corpse to have a look at the orange-brown letters on the wall, but none of them had any flashes of inspiration.

Bullets.

In the house next to the Papandrakis’s, the kitchen floor was littered with expended bullets. Not entire cartridges. Just dozens of lead slugs, sans their brass casings.

The fact that there were no ejected casings anywhere in the room indicated that no gunfire had taken place here. There was no odor of gunpowder. No bullet holes in the walls or cabinets.

There were just bullets all over the floor, as if they had rained magically out of thin air.

Frank Autry scooped up a handful of the gray lumps of metal. He wasn’t a ballistics expert, but, oddly, none of the bullets was fragmented or badly deformed, and that enabled him to see that they had come from a variety of weapons. Most of them—
scores
of them—appeared to be the type and caliber of ammunition that was spat out by the submachine guns with which General Copperfield’s support troops were armed.

Are these slugs from Sergeant Harker’s gun? Frank wondered. Are these rounds Harker fired at his killer in the meat locker at Gilmartin’s Market?

He frowned, perplexed.

He dropped the bullets, and they clattered on the floor. He plucked several other slugs off the tile. There were a .22 and a .32 and another .22 and a .38. There were even a lot of shotgun pellets.

He picked up a single 9mm bullet and examined it with special interest.

Gory Brogan hunkered down beside him.

Frank didn’t look at Gordy. He continued to stare intently at the slug. He was wrestling with an eerie thought.

Gordy scooped a few bullets off the kitchen tiles. “They aren’t deformed at all.”

Frank nodded.

“They had to’ve hit
something,”
Gordy said. “So they should be deformed. Some of them should be, anyway.” He paused, then said, “Hey, you’re a million miles away. What’re you thinking about?”

“Paul Henderson.” Frank held the 9mm slug in front of Gordy’s face. Paul carried a pistol. He fired three like this last night, over at the substation.”

“At his killer.”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

“So I have this crazy hunch that if we asked the lab to run ballistics tests on it, they’d find it came from Paul’s weapon.”

Gordy blinked at him.

“And,” Frank said. “I also think that if we searched through all of the slugs on the floor here, we’d find exactly two more like this one. Not just one more, mind you. And not three more. Just two more with precisely the same markings as this one.”

“You mean . . . the same three Paul fired last night.”

“Yeah.”

“But how’d they get from there to here?”

Frank didn’t answer. Instead, he stood and thumbed the send button on the walkie-talkie. “Sheriff?”

Bryce Hammond’s voice issued crisply from the small speaker. “What is it, Frank?”

“We’re still here at the Sheffield house. I think you’d better come over. There’s something you ought to see.”

“More bodies?”

“No, sir. Uh . . . something sort of weird.”

“We’ll be there,” the sheriff said.

Then, to Gordy, Frank said, “What I think is... sometime within the past couple of hours, sometime after Sergeant Harker was taken from Gilmartin’s Market,
it
was here, right in this room. It got rid of all the bullets it’d taken last night and this morning.”

“The hits it took?”

“Yes.”

“Got
rid
of them? Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Frank said.

“But how?”

“Looks like it just sort of . . . expelled them. Looks like it shed those bullets the way a dog shakes off loose hairs.”