Билл Пронзини - In an Evil Time

He remembered the street Rhona Pierce Collins lived on, but not the number, so he stopped in one of the nearby malls (so insipidly conventional it might have been a shopping center anywhere in the country) and looked it up. When he got to the equally uniform three-bedroom tract he didn’t see Pierce’s pickup; but he stopped anyway, went up, and rang the bell.

Rhona was a female counterpart of her brother, except that she’d put on at least twenty pounds since Hollis had last seen her, the result of two children, poor diet, and not enough exercise. Yes, she said, Ryan had been there, but he’d left more than an hour ago. No, she didn’t know where he’d gone. Then, as Hollis was about to turn away, she beamed at him and said, “Well, I guess congratulations are in order, Mr. Hollis.”

“Congratulations?”

“Angela and Ryan getting back together, getting married again.” He said nothing, but his expression was enough to turn her smile upside-down. “Gee, I hope I didn’t let the cat out of the bag. You did know about it, you and your wife?”

“Yes,” he said, “thanks, Rhona,” and put his back to her before she could read the full message in his face and eyes.

Sunday Afternoon

He couldn’t find Pierce anywhere. He looked for the Dodge downtown, on another pass by Angela’s apartment, a few other places, and then drove out Western Avenue Extension to Chileno Valley Road. The Gugliotta ranch was seven miles out, a beef and dairy cattle operation on several thousand acres spread over the rocky foothills. The Dodge wasn’t there, either; and old Fred Gugliotta, whom he knew slightly, told him he hadn’t seen Pierce since Friday afternoon.

Frustration rode heavily with him on the way back to town. He ached to get this business over and done with; the longer it went on the more stressed he would be, and another of Stan Otaki’s warnings had been to avoid stressful situations. For the third time he did a drive-by at Angela’s. Still no sign of the pickup.

It was nearly one by then, and he was tired and hungry. He gave up the hunt and headed home. Later he’d call Angela, and if Pierce had returned he’d arrange to meet him somewhere. Just the two of them, alone, with the Colt Woodsman in his pocket as backup.

Cassie was home from church and a lunch date afterward; he parked beside her van in the driveway. As soon as he shut off the engine he could hear Fritz barking his fool head off inside the house. Terrific. While Angela was in Utah, Cassie had worked with the Doberman to control his high-strung nature, the worst part of which was incessant barking. Mostly, now, the dog stayed quiet when they were home or arriving home. Something must have set him off.

Fritz wasn’t confined to his usual place on the back porch; Hollis could hear him moving around and making his racket on the other side of the front door. He said loudly, “Shut up, boy, it’s me,” as he opened it. The Doberman backed off to let him enter the hallway, but then stood quivering with hackles up, a low growl in place of the barks. Hollis frowned. “What’s the matter with you? You forget who puts the Alpo in your food dish?” He spoke the words in a quiet voice, but the dog kept right on growling.

“Cass?” he called. “What’s got Fritz so stirred up?”

No answer.

The muscles in his back and neck began a slow bunching. He called her name again, louder, and again there was no response. He sidled past the Doberman, went ahead into the living room.

And stopped dead, slam-frozen with shock.

The room was a shambles.

Worse than that... it had been systematically, brutally raped.

The fabric on the couches and chairs had been slashed by some sharp object, with such viciousness that there was little left except strips like flayed flesh. Stuffing bulged through the wounds in his armchair, gouts of it like white-and black-streaked blood. End tables were overturned, Cassie’s glass-fronted curio cabinet toppled and shattered, the glass top of the coffee table smashed, bar stools savaged and tossed aside, bottles broken on the floor behind the wet bar. And over everything, the furniture and the carpet and the walls, a mad pattern of stripes and swirls of shiny black spray paint. Now that he was in here he could smell both the paint and the spilled liquor. The odors closed his throat, intensified the sudden blood-throb in his temples.

Cassie was there in the midst of the wreckage, slumped against a torn couch armrest. She stared straight ahead, not moving in any way; in profile her face had the splotchy white consistency of buttermilk. One arm was raised in front of her, the fingers extended, and he realized she was pointing.

The wall on the far side of the fireplace. A once-beige wall decorated with two watercolors by local artists, now defaced by the black paint. But the marks there were not meaningless like the rest; they formed crude letters a foot high—

He picked his way across the room, trying to avoid the still-sticky paint, to Cassie’s side. Except for lowering her arm, she remained immobile; did not look at him when he bent to grip her shoulders. Her eyes had a moist, glassy shine. Her body seemed to have no softness or resiliency, as if he were touching petrified wood. He tried to turn her against him, but she wouldn’t yield — not resisting, just not responding.

“Cass? You all right?”

“I haven’t been home long,” she said, as if she were answering a different question. “Fritz was barking. I went out to the porch to quiet him, but he broke away and came running in here.”

“The rest of the house...”

“I don’t know. This... I couldn’t...”

“I’ll check. You stay here.”

“It’ll never be the same again,” she said as he released her and straightened up. “No matter what we do. Never the same again.”

His gaze went again to the spray-painted wall. Rage boiled to the surface, came spilling out before he could stop it. “That son of a bitch. He’ll pay for this. I’ll make him sorry he was ever born.”

Now she was looking at him, with a kind of laser intensity. “Rakubian,” she said.

He didn’t answer. He stepped away from her, around behind the couch and along the inside wall into the hallway. Fritz was still there, no longer growling, but the muscled body still quivering. Hollis sidestepped him and went upstairs first to look into the master bedroom, then Angela’s and Eric’s old rooms. None of them had been violated. Downstairs again, he checked the dining room, TV room, his study, the kitchen. Intact, untouched. The Doberman followed him here, toenails clicking loudly on the hardwood floor.

All that barking, he thought. Scared Pierce off before he could do any more damage. Unless the living room was his only intended target. Tear it apart, leave his goddamn message, get out quick. The whole thing could have been done in less than ten minutes. Destroy an entire room... less than ten minutes.

The side kitchen window was open a few inches. Left that way after breakfast, carelessly, or left unlatched — Pierce could have gotten in through there. Or he could have come in through the front door. Hollis was sure he’d locked it when he left, but Pierce could have taken Angela’s key without her knowing it, walked right up, let himself in.

He quit the house by the patio door, went around to the front and into the Archers’ yard. There was no answer when he rang their bell. The Lippmans, their neighbors on the north, weren’t home, either. He crossed the street to the Changs’. They were in, but they had nothing to tell him; they’d been working in their backyard all morning.