Dean Koontz - Innocence

Gwyneth took a corner so suddenly and so fast that I was thrown against the passenger door and almost dropped the phone.

Telford said, “This time, Judge Gallagher didn’t have to jump through flaming hoops to please them. He just had to tell them what happened to the girl, the one the court records call Jane Doe 329.”

“Don’t touch her,” Gwyneth said. “Don’t.”

The curator seemed to strain at something again, and I imagined that he must be tied to a chair and struggling to be free of his bonds, though that made no sense.

He said, “If you don’t come here, I’ll do to Jane Doe 329 what I promised I’d do to you five years ago. She doesn’t raise my flag as high as you do, little mouse. She’s pale and she won’t even be aware of how good I am when I jam it to her.”

“She’s a child.”

“But she’s pretty enough, and they’ve fed her right, exercised her every day, so she does have nice enough muscle tone.”

“I’m on my way,” Gwyneth said.

“For her sake, I hope so.”

“Twenty minutes.”

“You sure that’s enough time?”

“Twenty minutes,” she insisted.

“Twenty-one will be too late.”

He terminated the call. I pressed END on Gwyneth’s phone.

“You have the Mace,” she said. “I have the Taser.”

“They’ll have guns.”

“We have momentum.”

“I saw my father shot down.”

“Hope for a little luck.”

“There’s no such thing as luck.”

“No,” she said. “There’s not.”

THAT WE SHOULD MEET IN THE WHIRL OF LIFE THAT spins more people apart than together, that we should find in each other so much that was compatible, that we should lift each other out of doubt and out of weakness into conviction and strength, that we should fall in love in spite of being unable to consummate it physically, a love that was of mind for mind, heart for heart, soul for soul: This rare gift was priceless. And the elaborate chain of cause and effect from which it arose exceeded in intricacy and in beauty the most exquisitely decorated Fabergé egg, or a hundred of them.

To preserve that love and to have years in which to explore a fraction of its passageways and sanctums, we must now make not one wrong decision, either of us, but do from moment to moment the right thing in the most effective manner.

We passed a plow that must have broken down. Its rooftop beacon shone bright, but the waves of yellow light were pent up and stilled in one glowing ball. Headlights doused, driver’s cab deserted, door hanging open, engine quiet, flakes melting on its still-warm housing, the big vehicle canted on a curbside ridge of compacted snow.

Minutes later, in a residential neighborhood, I wondered at the number of houses with windows aglow. In a few instances, people might have forgotten to switch off their exterior Christmas lighting before going to bed, although of the fraction of houses decorated for the season, light issued from the windows of fully half, their occupants evidently still awake, as were the residents of many other homes. The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the real dark night of the soul was always three o’clock in the morning, and those sixty minutes between three o’clock and four were reliably and literally the darkest in the city. Not this night.

On the street lined with bare-limbed maples, cars at curbside and mounds of plowed snow allowed no place to park. Gwyneth killed the engine, set the brake, and we got out of the Rover in the street directly in front of the yellow-brick house, leaving one lane open for traffic.

The gate in the wrought-iron fence, the porch steps, the door, each salient point on the final approach seemed full of threat, as the cold wind and the snow at our backs pressed us to cross the threshold and enter whatever hell lay beyond. Telford knew we were coming. There could be no hope of stealth.

Before Gwyneth rang the bell, I said, “Maybe this is the time, this once, in spite of who we are, maybe this is the time to call the police.”

“Telford has nothing to lose now. If he sees police, he’ll pull the pin and blow it all up. And what kind of police might come? Can we hope they’ll be the kind who take an oath seriously? And will they come at all? On this night of all nights, will they still answer a call? From here on, Addison, we’re alone, we’re all alone, everyone alone. We’ll be late in two minutes.”

She rang the bell.

When no one responded, she opened the door, and we went inside, where Walter lay dead in the archway between the foyer and the living room. He had been shot more than once.

Lamps lit the living room, the candle at the shrine to the Holy Mother flickered, the voices on TV spoke in soothing tones—Walter and his sister had been watching it at this hour—and Janet lay in a lake of blood, having died a slower death than had her brother.

Her brutal murder long behind her, the lost wife, Claire, smiled eternally in the two photographs framed in chased silver.

Gwyneth’s Goth makeup couldn’t fully conceal her anguish. The thick mascara colored her tears as black as her grief.

The newsreader on the TV said something about a moratorium on all international air traffic in and out of the United States, but we couldn’t consider his breaking news because the stairs commanded our ascent, as the steps to the gallows call forth those condemned.

In the upper hallway, we passed the open door to the children’s bedroom, where the nurse named Cora had been brought to be murdered with them. There were no children there now, no nurse. They had gone and left their bodies behind them.

In the room where the nameless girl received care, Ryan Telford sat on the edge of the bed in which Cora should have been sleeping. He bent forward with his forearms on his thighs, hands between his knees, a pistol gripped in them. He looked up as we entered the room and smiled, but there was no humor in his smile, only the feverish glee of a rabid jackal.

TELFORD’S HAIR HUNG AS WET AND LANK AS IF HE had just stepped from the shower, but this was the greasy wetness of sour sweat. In his pale glistening face, the centers of his bloodshot eyes appeared less like black irises than like portals to the lightless realm of his mind. His ham-pink lips were overlaid with gray, as if he had gone for a touch of Goth himself.

“Little mouse, you’re a masturbation fantasy.”

“You’re not,” she said.

“Who’s the masked man, Kemosabe?”

“Don’t you recognize him, the hood and all? He’s Death.”

“I don’t think Death goes skiing.”

His voice was as throaty as on the phone, and perhaps weaker.

“You don’t look well,” Gwyneth said.

“I would agree.”

Soaked with sweat, his shirt clung to him, and his pants were spattered with blood, but the blood wasn’t his.

Moving to the nameless girl’s bed, looking across it at Telford, Gwyneth said, “You were in Japan.”

“The Far East isn’t good for business anymore.”

“So you came back ahead of schedule.”

“Not soon enough.”

Concerned that we were now surrounded, I asked, “Where are your two… associates?”

“Bastards spooked and ran.”

“ After slaughtering a family,” I said.

“That doesn’t faze them. But I have one of my moments, and they run away like little girls.”

“Moments?”

That mirthless smile again. “You’ll see.” Gwyneth put her contact Taser on the nightstand.

“I’m not up for it, either,” Telford said, and put his pistol aside on the bed where he sat.

She said, “When did your symptoms start?”

“A little light-headed late morning. Slight queasiness midafternoon. Fever by dinnertime. Then wham.”