The Dark Half (32 page)

Thad opened his mouth, tried to speak, couldn't, wet his lips, tried again, and still couldn't.

“Thad? Are you hanging up on me again?”

“No,” he said, and all at once there seemed to be a cricket in the middle of his voice. “Thank you, Alan. ”

“No, don't say that. I know what you're thanking me for, and I don't want to mislead you. All I'm trying to do is follow standard investigatory procedure. The procedure is a little odd in this case, granted, because the circumstances are a little odd. That doesn't mean you should make unwarranted assumptions. Get me?”

“Yes. What's FOLE?”

“F—? Oh. The Federal Office of Law Enforcement. Maybe the only good thing Nixon did the whole damn time he was in the White House. It's mostly made up of computer banks that serve as a central clearing-house for the local law-enforcement agencies . . . and the program-crunchers who run them, of course. We can access the fingerprints of almost anyone in America convicted of a felony crime since 1969 or so. FOLE also supplies ballistics reports for comparison, blood-typing on felons where available, voice-prints, and computer-generated pictures of suspected criminals. ”

“So we'll see if my voice and his—?”

“Yes. We should have it by seven. Eight if there's heavy computer traffic down there. ”

Thad was shaking his head. “We didn't sound anything alike. ”

“I heard the tape and I know that,” Pangborn said. “Let me repeat: a voice-print has absolutely nothing to do with speech. Head voice and gut voice, Thad. There's a big difference. ”

“But—”

“Tell me something. Do Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck sound the same to you?”

Thad blinked. “Well . . . no. ”

“Not to me, either,” Pangborn said, “but a guy named Mel Blanc does both of them . . . not to mention the voices of Bugs Bunny, Tweetie Bird, Foghorn Leghorn, and God knows how many others. I've got to go. See you tonight, okay?”

“Yes. ”

“Between seven-thirty and nine, all right?”

“We'll look for you, Alan. ”

“Okay. However this goes, I'll be heading back to The Rock tomorrow, and barring some unforeseen break in the case, there I will remain. ”

“The finger, having writ, moves on, right?” Thad said, and thought:
That's
what
he's
counting on, after all.

“Yeah—I've got lots of other fish to fry. None are as big as this one, but the people of Castle County pay my salary for fryin em. You know what I mean?” This seemed to Thad to be a serious question and not just a placeholder in the conversation.

“Yes. I do know.”
We both do
.
Me
. . .
and foxy George
.

“I'll have to go, but you'll see a State Police cruiser parked out in front of your house twenty-four hours a day until this thing is over. Those guys are tough, Thad. And if the cops in New York let down their guards a little, the Bears you got watching out for you won't. No one is going to underestimate this spook again. No one is going to forget you, or leave you and your family to cope with this on your own. People will be working on this case, and while they do, other people will be watching out for you and yours. You understand that, don't you?”

Fifteen minutes later, Alan was still in the Orono State Police Barracks, still on the telephone, and still on hold. There was a click on the line. A young woman spoke to him in a slightly apologetic tone. “Can you hold a little longer, Chief Pangborn? The computer is having one of its slow days. ”

Alan considered telling her he was a Sheriff, not a Chief, and then didn't bother. It was a mistake everyone made. “Sure,” he said.

He was returned to Hold, that latter-twentieth-century version of limbo.

He was sitting in a cramped little office all the way to the rear of the Barracks; any farther back and he would have been doing business in the bushes. The room was filled with dusty files. The only desk was a grammar-school refugee, the type with a sloping surface, a hinged lid, and an inkwell. Alan balanced it on his knees and swung it idly back and forth that way. At the same time he turned the piece of paper on the desk around and around. Written on it in Alan's small, neat hand were two pieces of information:
Hugh Pritchard
and
Bergenfield
County
Hospital
,
Bergenfield
,
New
Jersey
.

He thought of his last conversation with Thad, half an hour ago. The one where he had told him all about how the brave State Troopers were going to protect him and his wife from the bad old crazyman who thought he was George Stark, if the bad old crazyman showed up. Alan wondered if Thad had believed it. He doubted it; he guessed that a man who wrote fiction for a living would have a keen nose for fairy-tales.

Well, they would try to protect Thad and Liz; give them that. But Alan kept remembering something which had happened in Bangor in 1985.

A woman had requested and had received police protection after her estranged husband had beaten her severely and threatened to come back and kill her if she went through with her plans for a divorce. For two weeks, the man had done nothing. The Bangor P. D. had been about to cancel the watch when the husband showed up, driving a laundry truck and wearing green fatigues with the laundry's name on the back of the shirt. He had walked up to the door, carrying a bundle of laundry. The police might have recognized the man, even in the uniform, if he had come earlier, when the watch order was fresh, but that was moot; they hadn't recognized him when he did show up. He knocked on the door, and when the woman opened it, her husband pulled a gun out of his pants pocket and shot her dead. Before the cops assigned to her had fully realized what was happening, let alone got out of their car, the man had been standing on the stoop with his hands raised. He had tossed the smoking gun into the rose bushes. “Don't shoot me,” he'd said calmly. “I'm finished.” The truck and the uniform, it turned out, had been borrowed from an old drinking buddy who didn't even know the perp had been fighting with his wife.

The point was simple: if someone wanted you badly enough, and if that someone had just a little luck, he would get you. Look at Oswald; look at Chapman; look what this fellow Stark had done to those people in New York.

“Are you still there, Chief?” the female voice from Bergenfield County Hospital asked brightly.

“Yes,” he said. “Still right here. ”

“I have the information you requested,” she said. “Dr. Hugh Pritchard retired in 1978. I have an address and telephone number for him in the town of Fort Laramie, Wyoming. ”

“May I have it, please?”

She gave it to him. Alan thanked her, hung up, and dialed the number. The telephone uttered half a ring, and then an answering machine cut in and began spieling its recorded announcement into Alan's ear.

“Hello, this is Hugh Pritchard,” a gravelly voice said.
Well
, Alan thought,
the
guy hasn't
croaked
,
anyway-that's a step in the right direction.
“Helga and I aren't in right now. I'm probably playing golf; God knows what
Helga's
up to.” There was an old man's rusty chuckle. “If you've got a message, please leave it at the sound of the tone. You've got about thirty seconds. ”

“Dr. Pritchard, this is Sheriff Alan Pangborn,” he said. “I'm a law-enforcement officer in Maine. I need to talk to you about a man named Thad Beaumont. You removed a lesion from his brain in 1960, when he was eleven. Please call me collect at the Orono State Police Barracks—207. 555-2121. Thank you. ”

He finished in a mild sweat. Talking to answering machines always made him feel like a contestant on Beat the Clock.

The answer he had given Thad was a simple one: procedure. Alan himself could not be satisfied with such a pat answer, because he knew it wasn't procedure. It might have been—conceivably—if this Pritchard had operated on the man calling himself
Stark
,

(except he's not anymore now he says he knows who he really
is)
but he hadn't. He had operated on
Beaumont,
and in any case, that had been twenty-eight long years ago.

So why?

Because none of it was right, that was why. The fingerprints weren‘t, the blood-type obtained from the cigarette ends wasn't, the combination of cleverness and homicidal rage which their man had displayed wasn't, Thad's and Liz's insistence that the pen name was real wasn't. That most of all. That was the assertion of a couple of lunatics. And now he had something else which wasn't right. The State Police accepted the man's assertion that he now understood who he really was without a qualm. To Alan, it had all the authenticity of a three-dollar bill. It screamed trick, ruse, runaround.

Alan thought maybe the man was still coming.

But none of that answers the question
, his mind whispered.
Why are you bothering with all this? Why are you calling Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and chasing down an old
doc who probably doesn't
remember Thad Beaumont from a hole in the wall?

Because I don't have anything better to do, he answered himself irritably. Because
I
can call from here without the town selectmen bitching about the goddam long-distance charges. And because THEY believe it—Thad and Liz. It's crazy, all right, but they seem sane enough otherwise
. . .
and, goddammit, THEY believe
it. That doesn't mean
I do
.

And be didn't.

Did he?

The day passed slowly. Dr. Pritchard didn't call back. But the voice-prints came in shortly after eight o'clock, and the voice-prints were amazing.

They weren't what Thad had expected at all.

He had expected a sheet of graph paper covered with spiky mountains and valleys which Alan would try to explain. He and Liz would nod wisely, as people did when someone was explaining a thing too complex for them to understand, knowing that if they
did
ask questions, the explanations which followed would be even
less
comprehensible.

Instead, Alan showed them two sheets of plain white paper. A single line ran across the middle of each. There were a few groups of spike-points, always in pairs or trios, but for the most part, the lines were peaceful (if rather irregular) sine-waves. And you only had to look from one to the other with the naked eye to see that they were either identical or very close to it.

“That's it?” Liz asked.

“Not quite,” Alan said. “Watch.” He slid one sheet on top of the other. He did this with the air of a magician performing an exceptionally fine trick. He held the two sheets up to the light. Thad and Liz stared at the doubled sheets.

“They really are,” Liz said in a soft, awed voice. “They're just the same. ”

“Well . . . not quite,” Alan said, and pointed at three spots where the voice-print line on the undersheet showed through the tiniest bit. One of these show-throughs was above the line on the top sheet, the other two below. In all three cases, the show-through was in places where the line spiked. The sine-wave itself seemed to match perfectly. “The differences are in Thad's print, and they come only at stress-points.” Alan tapped each show-through in turn. “Here: ‘What do you want, you son of a bitch, just what the fuck do you want. ' And here: ”That's a goddam lie and you know it. ' And, finally, here: ‘Quit lying, goddammit. ' Right now everyone's focusing on these three minute differences, because they want to hang onto their assumption that no two voice-prints are ever alike. But the fact is, there
weren't
any
stress-points
in Stark's part of the conversation. The bastard stayed cool, calm, and collected all the way through. ”

“Yeah,” Thad said. “He sounded like he was drinking lemonade. ”

Alan put the voice-prints down on an endtable. “Nobody at State Police Headquarters
really
believes these are two different voice-prints, even with the minute differences,” he said. “We got the prints back from Washington very fast. The reason I'm so late is because, after the expert in Augusta saw them, he wanted a copy of the tape. We sent it down on an Eastern Airlines commuter flight out of Bangor and they ran it through a gadget called an audio enhancer. They use it to tell if someone actually spoke the words under investigation or if they're listening to a voice which was on tape. ”

“Is it live or is it Memorex?” Thad said. He was sitting by the fireplace, drinking a soda.

Liz had returned to the playpen after looking at the voice-prints. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, trying to keep William and Wendy from rapping their heads together as they examined each other's toes. “Why did they do that?”

Alan cocked a thumb at Thad, who was grinning sourly. “Your husband knows. ”