J. JANCE - Hour of the Hunter

Sliding down the mountain, not caring now whether or not he stayed out of sight or made too much noise, Andrew Carlisle started toward the house. He had spent seven long years waiting for this moment. Now that it was finally starting, he could barely contain himself. Diana Ladd was going to make it all worthwhile.

At ten minutes to six, when the phone rang in the house on Weber Drive, Myrna Louise was waiting. She had gone out to the car to bring in her suitcase from the trunk and had subsequently discovered everything hidden there-her bankbook, her blank checks, the gun, the bag of lime, and the luggage with someone else’s name on it. She didn’t bother to open the luggage. It had been stolen from someone else as surely as her own savings-account book had been stolen from her. And her cash, too, as she discovered moments later.

For half an hour now, she had sat quietly in her rocking chair, wondering what it all meant. She had already assimilated the idea that Andrew, her own son, had meant to kill her, would have killed her, if she hadn’t taken the crazy notion into her head to drive off in the car. Sure knowledge of Andrew’s murderous intentions had shocked her at first, but initial shock had worn into fuming anger.

Now, she sat rehearsing what she would say to him when Andrew finally called her, as she knew he would. She had considered turning him in herself but decided against it. Someone else would have to do the dirty work, not her, not his own mother. But if the cops happened to come to her house looking for him, she wouldn’t raise a hand to stop them.

Constantly rephrasing her speech, she decided to tell Andrew that if he ever came near her again, if he ever darkened her doorstep or wrote her a letter or even so much as tried to contact her by phone, she would see to it that he rotted in prison for the rest of his natural life. How did that sound?

Andrew had finally stepped beyond Myrna Louise’s considerable threshold of tolerance. Having once reached the end of her rope, she determined to no longer have a son. She would declare him null and void. As far as she was concerned, Andrew Carlisle would cease to exist.

So when the phone finally rang, it was his voice she expected to hear on the other end of the line, whining and blathering. Instead, the voice was that of a total stranger.

“Is Andrew there?” the man asked.

Myrna Louise’s heart skipped a beat as she tried to conceal her disappointment “Who’s calling, please?” she asked guardedly.

“A friend of his,” the man said. “Is he there?”

“Not right now. May I take a message?”

It sounded as though the person on the other end of the line let out a long sigh, but Myrna Louise couldn’t be sure.

“No,” he said. “That’s all right. I’ll call back later.”

He hung up-slammed the phone down in her ear, actually. She hung up, too, sitting there for a long time afterward with her hand still resting on the receiver. She wished it had been Andrew on the phone so she could have had it out with him once and for all, but it wasn’t. For that she would have to wait a little longer.

The human body isn’t quite like anything else, Brandon Walker thought. People talk about pulling the plug, but just turning off life-sustaining machines doesn’t necessarily mean it’s over, doesn’t mean the person gives up the ghost and dies the way a light goes off when you disconnect a cord from the socket. It wasn’t that simple. Nothing ever is.

The machines had been silenced for over an hour now, but Toby Walker stubbornly clung to life, persisting in breathing on his own much to the doctor’s surprise and dismay. His blood pressure was gradually falling, but there had been no marked or sudden change.

Nurses looked in on them every once in a while, respectfully, as though conscious that their presence was now an intrusion, not a help. Their concern focused on the two nonpatients-a woman quiet at last, worn out from continual weeping, and a man, the son, whose narrow jaw worked constantly, but who sat beside his dying father stiff and straight, dry-eyed and silent.

Brandon Walker had forgotten he was a cop in all this, forgotten that there was another duty calling. Sitting there, he was nothing but a grieving son, a lost, abandoned, and nearly middle-aged child, facing his own bleak future in a universe suddenly devoid of its center, an unthinkable world where his father didn’t exist.

The three people waited together in a room where the silence was broken only by the old man’s shallow breathing. No words were necessary. They had all been spoken long ago, and Brandon was convinced that in that broken shell of a man on the bed, there was no one left to listen.

Detective G. T. Farrell was well outside his Pinal County jurisdiction. He should have contacted the local law-enforcement agencies, either Maricopa County, or, in this case, the Tempe Police Department to ask for backup, but that would have taken time. Farrell knew in his gut there was no time to lose. He was propelled forward by the common force that drives all those who pursue serial killers-the horrifying and inevitable knowledge that time itself is the enemy.

Refusing to be rushed, Farrell had systematically worked the problem, marching down the Spaulding column in the phone book, calling each number in turn, always asking for Andrew-a first name Andrew-rather than giving out any further information. He had tried Spauldings in Phoenix proper. Next he worked the suburbs. Halfway through that process, a frail-sounding old woman answered the phone.

As soon as he asked for Andrew and heard the sharp, involuntary intake of breath, he knew he had hit pay dirt. Even while he talked to her, making sure his voice on the phone stayed calm and noncommittal, he was frantically tearing the page with her name on it out of the book. This was no time for scribbling notes.

But once in the car, Farrell couldn’t risk lights or siren. That would have raised too many unpleasant questions had anyone stopped him. He drove only as fast as the traffic would bear.

A resourceful man who always carried a selection of maps in his car, Geet headed East on Camelback in the general direction of Tempe, using crosstown stops at lights and the usual rush-hour slowdowns to locate the exact whereabouts of Weber Drive and to pinpoint the address in his Thomas Guide. Farrell figured it would take him about forty-five minutes to get there. His actual elapsed time was thirty-eight minutes flat.

Getting out of the car on Weber Drive half a block away from the address, he patted his holster and felt the reassuring presence of his.38 Special. It was possible that the old woman had lied and that her son had been right there in the room with her all along, but Farrell doubted it. The old woman didn’t sound as though she was that glib or that fast on her feet. She wasn’t that capable a liar. At least Geet Farrell fervently hoped she wasn’t.

Taking a deep breath, Farrell opened the gate, strode up the long walkway, and rang the doorbell. Almost immediately, he heard movement inside the small house. He swallowed hard to calm himself as the door opened and an old woman peered nearsightedly out at him through a screen door. “Yes?” she asked.

Carefully, using deliberate gestures, he brought out his badge. “I’m a police officer,” he said, holding it up to the screen so she could see it. “I’m looking for Andrew Carlisle.”

The woman squinted at the badge without reading it. “He isn’t here,” she said.

“Could I talk to you then? Are you his mother?”

“For the time being,” she answered.

Farrell wondered what that meant. He wondered, too, if she recognized his voice from the phone. If so, her next question gave no hint of it. “What do you want with him?”