The Bad Place (25 page)

THE HOUSE was gone. If anyone named James Roman had lived there, he had new lodgings now. A bare concrete slab lay in the middle of the lot, surrounded by grass, shrubbery, and several trees, as if the structure had been snared from above by intergalactic moving men and neatly spirited away.

Bobby parked in the driveway, and they got out of the Toyota to have a closer look at the property. Even in the slashing rain, a nearby streetlamp cast enough light to reveal that the lawn was trampled, gouged by tires, and bare in spots; it was also littered with splinters of wood, pale bits of Sheetrock, crumbled stucco, and a few fragments of glass that sparkled darkly.

The strongest clue to the fate of the house was to be found in the condition of the shrubbery and trees. Those bushes closest to the slab were all either dead or badly damaged, and on closer inspection appeared to be scorched. The nearest 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 modern 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 said. “Right now, nothing seems funny.”

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.