Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

Most likely, however, the reason for this singular degree of discretion had been the groom's intention to kill his stepson and stepdaughter if his expectation of extraterrestrial healers wasn't fulfilled. Fewer questions will be asked about your missing children if no one knows they existed in the first place.

Micky remembered Leilani saying that Maddoc didn't use his own name at campgrounds when they traveled in their motor home and that he affected a different appearance these days. Judging by copyright dates, the most recent photos of him were at least four years old.

Staring at Dr. Doom's blithe face on the computer, she suspected that his murderous intent toward Lukipela and Leilani wasn't the only reason he kept his marriage secret. A mystery awaited revelation.

She logged off. The resources on the Internet were exhaustive, but Micky could learn nothing more of use from them. The real world always trumped the virtual, and it always would. The next step was to meet Preston Maddoc face-to-face and take his measure.

Leaving the library, she was no longer self-conscious about her too-short, too-tight skirt. If she hadn’t canceled, she could have gone to the job interview with confidence.

In the past couple hours, she'd changed in some fundamental way. She felt this difference profoundly, but she couldn't yet define it.

Brooding about bioethics, Micky arrived at her Camaro without quite realizing that she'd crossed the parking lot, as though she had teleported from the library to the car in an instant.

Behind the wheel, she didn't switch on the radio. She always drove by radio. Silences made her edgy, and music was a caulking that filled every jagged chink. But not today.

The real world trumped the virtual.

Bioethicists were dangerous because they devised their rules and schemes not for the real world but for a virtual reality in which human beings have no heart, no capacity to love, and where everyone is as convinced of the meaninglessness of life as are the ethicists themselves, where everyone believes that humanity is just meat.

On her way home, the highways were as clogged as an aging sumo wrestler's arteries. Usually she chafed at the stop-and-go traffic. But not today.

Maddoc and his fellow bioethicists ceased to be merely dangerous and became bloody tyrants when they obtained the power to try to make the world conform to their abstract model of it, a model that was in conflict with human nature and no more representative of reality than an idiot savant's math tricks are representative of true genius.

Stop, go. Stop, go.

She remembered reading that California had halted freeway construction for eight years in the 1970s and '80s. The governor back then believed automobiles would no longer be in wide use by 1995. Public transit would take over. Alternate technology. Miracles.

In all the years that she'd railed at bumper-to-bumper traffic, during so many frustrating two-hour drives that should have taken thirty minutes, she had never before connected that idiotic public policy to the current mess. Suddenly she felt that by her own choice she'd been living entirely in the current moment, in a bubble that separated her from the past and the future, from cause and effect.

Stop, go. Stop, go.

How many millions of gallons of gasoline were wasted in traffic like this, how much unnecessary pollution generated by the unintended consequence of that moratorium on highway construction? And yet the current governor had announced his own ban on freeway construction.

If she let Leilani die, how could she live with herself other than by embracing the we're-just-meat philosophy of Maddoc's crowd? In her own way, she'd been living by that empty faith for years — and look where it had gotten her.

One new thought led to another. Stop, go. Stop, go.

Micky felt as if she were waking from a twenty-eight-year dream.

WITH THE SWIFTNESS of a genie's spirit rising from the prison of his lamp, the sweet oily fragrance of vanilla magically spread through the humid air to every corner of Mrs. D's kitchen the moment that she opened the bottle.

"Mmmmm. That's the best smell in the world, don't you think?"

Putting ice cubes in the two tall glasses, Leilani drew a deep breath. "Wonderful. Unfortunately, it reminds me of old Sinsemilla's bath water."

"Good heavens. Your mother bathes in vanilla?"

As she watched Geneva dribble vanilla extract over the ice in the glasses, as she carried the glasses to the table, and as Geneva followed with cans of Coke, Leilani explained Sinsemilla's passion for purging toxins through reverse osmosis in hot baths.

"Then it must be a little like belling the cat," said Mrs. D, handing Leilani one of the Cokes.

"Mrs. D, you've lost me again. I'm afraid I'm hampered in conversation by a need to grasp how each comment springs logically from the one preceding it."

"How sad for you, dear. I meant you always know when your mom's coming because she's preceded by clouds of wonderful fragrances."

"Not so wonderful when she's had a bath seasoned with garlic, condensed cabbage juice, and stinkweed extract."

They sat at the table and sampled their vanilla Cokes.

"This is fabulous," Leilani enthused. "I can't believe you've never mixed one before."

"Well, we rarely have cola in the fridge. Old Sinsemilla says caffeine inhibits development of your natural telepathic ability."

"Then you must be a terrific little mind reader."

"Scarily good. Right now you're trying to remember the names of all the singers who've ever been in the group Destiny's Child, and you can only recall four."

"Uncanny, dear. What I'm actually thinking is how this vanilla Coke would go perfectly with a big fat sugar cookie."

"I like the way you think, Mrs. D, even if your mind is too complex to be read accurately."

"Leilani, would you like a big fat sugar cookie?"

"Yes, thank you."

"So would I. Very much. Unfortunately, we don't have any. Some nice crisp cinnamon cookies would be good, too. How about cinnamon cookies with vanilla Cokes?"

"You've talked me into it."

"We don't have any of those, either, I'm afraid." Geneva sipped her drink, pondered a moment. "Do you think chocolate-almond cookies would go with vanilla Cokes?"

"I'm reluctant to have an opinion, Mrs. D."

"Really? Why's that, dear?"

"It seems pointless somehow."

"Too bad. Not to brag, but my chocolate-almond cookies are quite wonderful."

"Do you have any?"

"Six dozen."

"More than enough, thank you." Geneva brought a plate of the treats to the table. Leilani sampled a cookie. "Phenomenal. And they go with vanilla Cokes just fine. But these aren't almonds. They're pecans."

"Yes, I know. I don't particularly care for almonds, so when I make chocolate-almond cookies, I use pecans instead."

"There's something I'm dying to ask, Mrs. D, but I don't want you to think I'm being disrespectful."

Geneva's eyes widened. "You couldn't be if you tried. You're an absolute, no-doubt-about-it. " Geneva frowned. "What is the term?"

"Absolute, no-doubt-about-it, fine young mutant."

"If you say so, dear."

"I ask this with great affection, Mrs. D, but do you work at being a charming screwball, or does it just come naturally?"

Delighted, Geneva said, "Am I a charming screwball?"

"In my estimation, yes."

"Why, you sweet child, I can't imagine anything better to be! As to your question… let me think. Well, if I am a charming screwball, I'm not sure whether I always was, or maybe only since being shot in the head. Either way, no, I don't work at it. I wouldn't know how."

Munching, Leilani said, "Dr. Doom is going to haul us to Idaho."

A quiver of alarm rang the smile off Geneva's face. "Idaho? When?"