Dean Koontz - From the Corner of His Eye

They say ...

As usual, Vanadium had spoken in a monotone, putting no special emphasis on those two words. Yet Junior sensed that the detective harbored doubts about the explanation of the girl's death.

Maybe every accidental death was suspicious to Vanadium. His obsessive hounding of Junior might be his standard operating procedure.

After too many years investigating homicides, after too much experience of human evil, perhaps he had grown both misanthropic and paranoid.

Junior could almost feel sorry for this sad, stocky, haunted detective, deranged by years of difficult public service.

The bright side was easy to see. If Vanadium's reputation among other cops and among prosecutors was that of a paranoid, a pathetic a after phantom perpetrators, his unsupported belief that Naomi murdered would be discounted. And if every death was suspicious to him, then he would quickly lose interest in Junior and move on to a new enthusiasm, harassing some other poor devil.

Supposing that this new enthusiasm was an attempt to uncover skullduggery in Seraphim's accident, then the girl would be doing Junior a service even after her demise. Whether or not the traffic accident was an accident, Junior hadn't had anything to do with it.

Gradually he grew calm. His great frosty exhalations diminished to a diaphanous dribble that evaporated two inches from his lips.

Reading the dates on the headstone, he saw that the minister's daughter had died on the seventh of January, the day after Naomi had fallen from the fire tower. If ever asked, Junior would have no trouble accounting for his whereabouts on that day.

He switched off the flashlight and stood solemnly for a moment, paying his respects to Seraphim. She had been so sweet, so innocent, so supple, so exquisitely proportioned.

Ropes of sadness bound his heart, but he didn't cry.

If their relationship had not been limited to a single evening of passion, if they had not been of two worlds, if she had not been underage and therefore jailbait, they might have had an open romance, and then her death would have touched him more deeply.

A ghostly crescent of pale light shimmered on the black granite.

Junior looked up from the tombstone to the moon. It seemed like a wickedly sharp silver scimitar suspended by a filament more fragile than a human hair.

Although it was just the moon, it unnerved him.

Suddenly the night seemed ... watchful.

Without using his flashlight, depending only on the moon, he ascended through the cemetery to the service road.

When he reached the Suburban and closed his right hand around the handle on the driver's door, he felt something peculiar against his palm. A small, cold object balanced there.

Startled, he snatched his hand back. The object fell, ringing faintly against the pavement.

He switched on his flashlight. In the beam, on the blacktop, a silver disc. Like a full moon in a night sky.

A quarter.

The quarter, surely. The one that had not been in his robe pocket where it should have been, the previous Friday.

He swept the immediate area with the flashlight, and shadows spun with shadows, waltzing spirits in the ballroom of the night.

No sign of Vanadium. Some of the taller monuments offered hiding places on both sides of the cemetery road, as did the thicker trunks of the larger trees.

The detective could be anywhere out there. Or already gone.

After a brief hesitation, Junior picked up the coin.

He wanted to fling it into the graveyard, send it spinning far into the darkness.

If Vanadium was watching, however, he would interpret the pitch of the coin to mean that his unconventional strategy was working, that Junior's nerves were frayed to the breaking point. With an adversary as indefatigable as this cuckoo cop, you dared never show weakness.

Junior dropped the coin into a pants pocket.

Switched off the light. Listened.

He half expected to hear Thomas Vanadium in the distance, softly singing “Someone to Watch over Me."

After a minute, he slipped his hand into his pocket. The quarter was still there.

He got in the Suburban, pulled the door shut, but didn't at once start the engine.

In retrospect, coming here wasn't a wise move. Evidently, the detective had been following him. Now, Vanadium would puzzle out a motive for this late-night graveyard tour.

Junior, putting himself in the detective's place, could think of a few reasons for this visit to Seraphim's grave. Unfortunately, not one of them supported his contention that he was an innocent man.

At worst, Vanadium might begin to wonder if Junior had a link to Seraphim, might uncover the physical-therapy connection, and in his paranoia, might erroneously conclude that Junior had something to do with her traffic accident. That was nuts, of course, but the detective was evidently not a rational man.

At best, Vanadium might decide Junior had come here to learn what other funeral his nemesis had attended-which was, in fact, the true motivation. But this made it clear that Junior feared him and was striving to stay one step ahead of him. Innocent men didn't go to such length. As far as the fruitcake cop was concerned, Junior might as well have painted I killed Naomi on his forehead.

He nervously fingered the fabric of his slacks, outlining the quarter in his pocket. Still there.

Calcimine moonlight cast an arctic illusion over the boneyard. The grass was as eerily silver as snow at night, and gravestones tilted like pressure ridges of ice in a fractured wasteland.

The black service road seemed to come out of nowhere, then to vanish into a void, and Junior suddenly felt dangerously isolated, alone as he had never been, and vulnerable.

Vanadium was no ordinary cop, as he himself had said. In his obsession, convinced that Junior had murdered Naomi and impatient with the need to find evidence to prove it, what was to stop the detective if he decided to deal out justice himself? What was to prevent him from walking up to the Suburban right now and shooting his suspect pointblank?

Junior locked the door. He started the engine and drove out of the cemetery faster than was prudent on the winding service road.

On the way home, he repeatedly checked the rearview mirror. No vehicle followed him.

He lived in a rental house: a two-bedroom bungalow. Enormous deodar cedars with layers of drooping branches surrounded the place, and usually they seemed sheltering, but now they loomed, ominous.

Entering the kitchen from the garage, snapping on the overhead he was prepared to find Vanadium sitting at the pine table, enjoying- a cup of coffee. The kitchen was deserted.

Room by room, closet by closet, Junior conducted a search for the detective. The cop was not here.

Relieved but still wary, he toured the small house again to be sure doors and windows were locked.

After undressing for the night, he sat on the edge of the bed for a while, rubbing the coin between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, brooding about Thomas Vanadium. He tried rolling it across his knuckles; he dropped it repeatedly.

Eventually he put the quarter on the nightstand, switched off the lamp, and slipped into bed.

He could not sleep.

This morning he had changed the sheets. Naomi's scent was no longer with him in the bedclothes.

He had not yet disposed of her personal effects. In the dark, he went to the dresser, opened a drawer, and found a cotton sweater that she had worn recently.

At the bed, he spread the garment across his pillow. Lying down, he pressed his face into the sweater. The sweet subtle scent of Naomi was as effective as a lullaby, and soon he dozed off.

When he woke in- the morning, he raised his head from the pillow to look at the alarm clock-and saw the twenty-five cents on his nightstand. Two dimes and a nickel.