The Vanishing (25 page)

‘‘Peripheral.’’

‘‘Maybe.’’

Brian looked at him.

Wilson shrugged. ‘‘At this point, anything’s up for grabs.’’

‘‘I just wish I could find my dad.’’

‘‘Have you thought about involving the police, telling them what you know, explaining that he’s missing?’’

‘‘He’s been missing for twenty years. And what do I know? Only what my mom told me.’’

‘‘But you have those letters.’’

‘‘And I believe they’re from him. But there’s no way to prove it.’’ Brian took a sip of his Coke and sighed. ‘‘So what’s the next step? Wait until someone else dies and we get a phone message or a videotape?’’

‘‘As a financial journalist, I have one overriding motto: Follow the money. It works for almost everything. Since, with the possible exception of your father, everyone involved with this story seems to be someone from my beat, I suggest we do exactly that. Maybe what all these men have in common can be ascertained from looking into their financial dealings and backgrounds. My hunch is that we will find connections we did not know were there.’’

‘‘That’s not a bad idea,’’ Brian said.

‘‘Thank you.’’

Brian tossed his wadded-up burrito wrapper into the trash can. Or tried to. He missed by about a foot and was about to pick it up and try again when his cell phone rang.

It was Jillian. His sister was uncharacteristically tongue-tied, and Brian got a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. ‘‘Mom?’’ he asked quickly. ‘‘Is it Mom?’’

‘‘No,’’ she said, but there was a long pause after that, and for several seconds he thought his phone had dropped the call.

‘‘Hello?’’ he prodded. ‘‘Jill?’’

‘‘I just finished talking to the police. They matched the prints at the church. It wasn’t Stewart who killed Reverend Charles,’’ she said. ‘‘It was Dad.’’

He was almost getting used to the drive.

Brian sped up the Grapevine, stopping for coffee at a McDonald’s in Gorman before heading down the highway into the Central Valley. Wilson had offered to come with him, but Brian didn’t really want company. This part of the story was his own. It was personal, and he didn’t want to share it with anyone else.

The small towns flew by, the abandoned buildings and trailer courts, the fields, the orchards. He’d driven this route more in the past week than in the past decade, and he was actually starting to recognize some of the landmarks along this narrow stretch of highway.

Once in Bakersfield, he drove immediately to the police station, where he asked for Captain Disch, whom he’d interviewed extensively for the article. ‘‘Why didn’t you just call?’’ the captain said after the desk clerk had led Brian back to his office. ‘‘I could’ve told you we have no idea where your father is.’’

‘‘I figured that. But . . .’’ Brian took a deep breath. ‘‘Do you have any other information on him? I assume you’ve done some type of background check. Do you have any idea where he lives, where he works . . . what he’s been doing for the past twenty-some years? I don’t know if my sister told you, but my dad abandoned us. I haven’t seen him since I was a kid.’’

Disch nodded. ‘‘She told us the whole story. And of course we did a background check. Or tried to. But the thing of it is, your father’s off the grid. We have nothing on him more recent than the mid-eighties, when he abandoned your family. I have two men working on it, and I’m sure we’ll eventually dig up something, but for now we’re flying blind. In fact, I was kind of hoping
you
could help
us.
It’s obvious he’s here somewhere in the Bakersfield area. Do you know of any friends he might be staying with, places he might go, bars or restaurants where he might hang out? Is there anything you remember from your childhood, anything at all, that you could tell us about him, that might give us a clue to his whereabouts?’’

Brian thought back, seriously trying to recall information about his dad that might be of help, but all of his memories were from a kid’s perspective and involved his mom, his sister or himself. He knew nothing about his dad in relation to the real world; everything he remembered had to do with their family. He agreed to meet with a couple of detectives, however, to see what they could get out of him, and though he answered all of their questions, nothing jogged his memory, and he was unable to provide any new information.

‘‘You have my cell number,’’ he told Disch before he left. ‘‘Call me if you learn anything.
Anything.
’’

The captain nodded soberly. ‘‘I will. And, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I know how tough all of this must be on you.’’

‘‘Thanks,’’ Brian said.

He drove to his mom’s house.

He pulled to a stop in the driveway. It was evening. The house was dark, and the yard seemed even more overgrown than before, though he didn’t see how that was possible. He got out of the car and looked around carefully. Was his dad here somewhere, hiding? There were plenty of bushes to conceal him, plenty of spots where he could be lurking.

What would his dad look like now? Brian wondered. He’d probably be gray, perhaps bald, and there’d be lines etched on his face that represented all of the years spent away. Thinking of his dad as an old man was almost as difficult as thinking about him as a murderer, Brian realized. He didn’t want to consider either option. He wished that his father had never shown up again and had left him with only untainted memories.

He got out of the car and walked slowly up to the front of the house, alert for any signs of movement, listening for stray sounds. Opening the door with his key, Brian stepped inside and turned on the living room light. Rather than dispelling the darkness, it only pushed it back to the hallway and the kitchen, making those areas seem even blacker by contrast. He was suddenly filled with the absurd conviction that he was not alone in the house, and he called out, ‘‘Hey!’’ in the toughest voice he could muster. ‘‘Who’s there?’’

Silence greeted his query, and rather than moving slowly and cautiously through each room, Brian decided to take the bull by the horns and ran quickly through the house, flipping on each light as he passed, ready at any second to either jump away from danger or defend himself. He was alone, thankfully, and once the place was completely illuminated, he immediately set about to search every room. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he figured he’d know it when he found it.

Or maybe he wouldn’t find anything.

He was prepared for that, too. But he felt the need to be here, to explore the house and inspect his mom’s belongings in order to find out whatever he could about his dad.

Before rifling through closets and cupboards, drawers and dressers, Brian gave the room a quick once-over to make sure there was nothing he had missed. He’d been so concerned with trying to find an intruder that he hadn’t really paid attention to the contents of the individual rooms, and he walked from his mom’s sewing room to the hall bathroom to the master bedroom—

And stopped.

For lying in the middle of the flowered bedspread was a torn and dirty scrap of paper. It was easy to miss. The dull tan cast of the old paper matched almost exactly the hue of the background between the colored flowers, making it blend in. But he saw it now, and with tightly held breath Brian walked across the room to the bed.

He picked it up, turned it over. There was a message written on the opposite side in what appeared to be charcoal.
STOP ME
, the message said. The letters were written crudely, as though by a child.

Or someone who was just remembering how to write after an absence of many years.

Yes,
Brian thought. That was exactly what the shaky letters looked like, and he recalled the previous message, with its random vowels and consonants that seemed to be trying to break through the straitjacket of the alien language. It was as if his dad were gradually regaining his faculties, coming up from the bottom of some mental well and slowly remembering life in the real world.

Brian’s chest tightened as he reread the message. It was the plea of a tortured serial killer, and the shred of doubt to which he’d been clinging had vanished the second he saw those words. His dad was not an unwilling accomplice or someone who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a murderer, responsible for the death of Reverend Charles and God knew who else.

But
was
his father really responsible? Brian wondered. The fact that these bloody rampages seemed to be spreading like a plague across the land and that nearly all of them seemed to be accompanied by messages written in the same alien language indicated that there was something bigger at work here. His father was undoubtedly a killer, but he was also a victim, and whatever person or power or virus was making him do this was ultimately accountable.

Brian still continued his search through the house, going through all of the cupboards and drawers, but he found nothing, and an examination of the front, back and side yards similarly yielded no results, although if he returned in daylight he still might conceivably find something. Locking up the house, he knew what he had to do, but first he stopped off at a twenty-four-hour Kinko’s and made a copy of his father’s message.

Then he drove to the police station and gave the original to the cops.

Wilson St. John arrived home after dark, an event that to his chagrin was becoming all too common. One of the things he’d always liked about the financial beat was that, for the most part, it allowed him to keep banker’s hours. But looking into these murders and suicides was time consuming.

That was a perfect word for it. Because investigating this . . . situation was quickly becoming an obsession with him—if it wasn’t already—eating up not only his work hours but his personal time. He was sorely tempted to call Brian on his cell phone and find out what he’d learned, but Rona was probably mad that he was late for dinner. As she had every right to be.

Bringing work home after coming back at such an hour would be adding insult to injury.

Besides, Brian would call him if he found out anything important.

Wilson opened the front door and walked inside. ‘‘I’m home!’’ he called. He didn’t wait for an answer but tossed his newspaper on the coffee table and sat down on the couch to take off his shoes. He smelled what he thought was spinach quiche. Not one of his favorites, but coming home this late, he didn’t dare complain. He stood up and walked through the dining room into the kitchen. ‘‘So—’’ he began.

And stopped.

The kitchen was empty. The oven door was open, and cold quiche sat untouched on the tiled counter. Rona could be in the bathroom. Or helping Julie with her homework. But the house seemed too quiet. And Rona never left the oven door open, never left food out.

Something was wrong.

‘‘Rona?’’ he called. ‘‘Julie?’’

Where
were
his wife and daughter?

The lights went out.

They went off all at once, every light in the house.
It could be the circuit breaker,
Wilson thought, but that was just wishful thinking. Feeling his way through the darkness, he stumbled past the refrigerator into the hall. He wanted to call Rona’s and Julie’s names, but he was afraid. He didn’t know who—
what
—was out there, or where, and he needed to be careful. He followed the hallway wall until his hand reached the open space of Julie’s bedroom doorway. He was drenched with fear sweat, and he didn’t know whether to whisper her name, go silently into the room or keep walking on down the hall.

‘‘Your daughter’s here. I killed her.’’

The voice, wild and crazy sounding, came at him from somewhere deep within Julie’s bedroom. Fear was shoved aside by anger, and Wilson stepped through the doorway. ‘‘Julie!’’ he called.

There was a soft click, and a red dot of light in the darkness.

Someone was videotaping this.

‘‘Julie!’’ He stumbled forward blindly, hands extended, dimly aware that the red light of the video camera was moving around him, behind him. He nearly tripped over something pillowlike on the floor but quickly caught himself and grabbed a corner of the bedpost.

It was wet.

The lights flipped on.

The pillowlike thing on the floor was Rona’s body. She was curled into a fetal position, her clothes shredded, and the skin of her arms and legs had been sliced open and peeled away. Julie’s body lay on the bed, savagely eviscerated. The tendons of her face had been slashed, and her mouth was stretched out in a grotesque parody of a smile. His hand was covered with her blood.

Wilson heard screaming, terrible cries unlike anything his ears had ever before experienced, and it took him a moment to realize that they were coming from him.

The walls, he saw through the haze of his anguish, were covered with symbols scrawled in blood, the primitive scrawls and squiggles that he recognized from the other murder scenes and from Brian’s letters. There was no sign of the person with the video camera, but he caught a glimpse of movement in the dresser mirror and turned around to see what it was.

The man who emerged from the hall was naked and horribly deformed. Parts of his body had scales instead of skin, and there were ridges along his hairy back that resembled those of a stegosaurus.

He was also a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who last year had spent millions of dollars on an unsuccessful run for governor.

Wilson recognized him immediately. Arthur Fawcett.

Fawcett was laughing, a low, steady Renfieldian laugh that threatened never to stop. At some point, Wilson had quit screaming, and now he just stood there mute and drained as the cackling millionaire advanced on him. The man’s hands looked normal, but his scaly feet had nails like needles. With one quick flip, Fawcett was walking on his hands, his legs in the air, not sticking straight up but moving around, seemingly just as agile as a monkey. His head was near the ground, but his face was still looking at Wilson and laughing that endless laugh, his feet jabbing and thrusting, the needlelike nails swishing through the air.