Dean Koontz - Velocity

The bathroom, closet, and other bedroom doors were closed, as he had left them.

He didn’t feel a pressing need to search those rooms again. He might have heard nothing but an ordinary settling noise as the old house protested the weight of time, but it almost certainly had not been the sound of a door opening or closing.

He blotted the damp palm of his left hand on his shirt, switched the gun to it, blotted his right hand, returned the gun to it, and went to the head of the stairs.

From the lower floor, from the porch beyond the open front door, came nothing but a summer-night silence, a dead-of-night hush.

Chapter 13

As he stood at the head of the stairs, listening, pain had begun to throb in Billy’s temples. He realized that his teeth were clenched tighter than the jaws of a vise. He tried to relax and breathe through his mouth. He rolled his head from side to side, working the stiffening muscles of his neck. Stress could be beneficial if you used it to stay focused and alert. Fear could paralyze, but also sharpen the survival instinct. He returned to the master bedroom. Approaching the door, he suddenly thought body and book would be gone. But Lanny still sat in the armchair. From a tissue box on one of the nightstands, Billy plucked two Kleenex. Using them as an impromptu glove, he moved the dead man’s hand off the book. Leaving the book on the cadaver’s lap, he opened it to the place that had been marked by the photograph. He expected sentences or paragraphs to have been highlighted in some fashion: a further message. But

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the text was pristine. Still using the Kleenex, he picked up the photo, a snapshot.

She was young and blond and pretty. Nothing in the picture gave a clue to her profession, but Billy knew that she had been a teacher. Her killer must have found this snapshot in her house, down in Napa. Before or after finding it, he brutally beat the beauty out of her. No doubt the freak had left the photograph in the book to confirm for the authorities that the two murders had been the work of the same man. He was bragging. He wanted the credit that he had earned. The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility…

The freak hadn’t learned that lesson. Perhaps his failure to learn it would lead to his fall.

If it was possible to feel genuinely heartbroken over the fate of a stranger, the photo of this young woman would have done the job had Billy stared at it too long. He returned it to the book and closed it in the yellowing pages. After putting the dead man’s hand atop the book, as it had been, he wadded the two Kleenex in his fist. He went into the bathroom that was part of the master suite, pushed the plunger with the Kleenex, and then dropped them into the whirling water in the toilet bowl.

In the bedroom, he stood beside the armchair, not sure what he should do. Lanny did not deserve to be left here alone without benefit of prayer or justice. If not a close friend, he had nevertheless been a friend. Besides, he was Pearl Olsen’s son, and that ought to count for a lot.

Yet to phone the sheriff’s department, even anonymously, and report the crime might be a mistake. They would want an explanation for the call that had been placed from this house to Billy’s place soon after the murder; and he still had not decided what to tell them.

Other issues, things he didn’t know about, might point the finger of suspicion at him. Circumstantial evidence.

Perhaps the ultimate intention of the killer was to frame Billy for these murders and for others.

Undeniably, the freak saw this as a game. The rules, if any, were known only to him.

Likewise, the definition of victory was known only to him. Ginning the pot, capturing the king, scoring the final touchdown might mean, in this case,

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sending Billy to prison for life not for any rational reason, not so the freak himself could escape justice, but for the sheer fun of it. Considering that he could not even discern the shape of the playing field, Billy didn’t relish being interrogated by Sheriff John palmer. He needed time to think. A few hours at least. Until dawn. “I’m sorry,” he told Lanny.

He switched off one of the bedside lamps and then the other. If the house glowed like a centenarian’s birthday cake through the night, someone might notice. And wonder. Everyone knew Lanny Olsen was an early-to-bed guy. The house stood at the highest and loneliest point of the deadend lane. Virtually no one drove up here unless they were coming to see Lanny, and no one was likely to visit during the next eight or ten hours. Midnight had turned Tuesday to Wednesday. Wednesday and Thursday were Lanny’s days off. No one would miss him at work until Friday. Nevertheless, one by one, Billy returned to the other upstairs rooms and switched off those lights as well.

He doused the hall lights and went down the stairs, uneasy about all the darkness at his back.

In the kitchen, he closed the door to the porch and locked it. He intended to take Lanny’s spare key with him.

As he went forward once more through the first floor, he turned off all the lights, including the ceramic gas-fueled logs in the den fireplace, using the barrel of the handgun to flip the switches.

Standing on the front porch, he locked that door as well, and wiped the knob.

He felt watched as he descended the steps. He surveyed the lawn, the trees, glanced back at the house.

All the windows were black, and the night was black, and Billy walked away from that closed darkness into an open darkness under an India-ink sky in which stars seemed to float, seemed to tremble.

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Chapter 14

He walked briskly downhill along the shoulder of the lane, ready to take cover in the roadside brush if headlights appeared.

Frequently, he glanced back. As far as he could tell, no one followed him. Moonless, the night favored a stalker. It should have favored Billy, too, but he felt exposed by the stars.

At the house with the chest-high fence, the half-seen dog once more raced back and forth along the pickets, beseeching Billy with a whimper. It sounded desperate.

He sympathized with the animal and understood its condition. His plight, however, and his need to plan left him no time to stop and console the beast.

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Besides, every expression of desired friendship has potential bite. Every smile reveals the teeth.

So he continued down the lane, and glanced behind, and held tight to the revolver, and then turned left into the meadow where he waded through the grass in a fear of snakes.

One question pressed upon him more urgently than others: Was the killer someone he knew or a stranger?

If the freak had been in Billy’s life well prior to the first note, a secret sociopath who could no longer keep his homicidal urges bottled up, identifying him might be difficult but possible. Analysis of relationships and a search of memory with an eye for anomaly might unearth clues. Deductive reasoning and imagination would likely paint a face, spell out a twisted motive. In the event that the freak was a stranger who selected Billy at random for torment and eventual destruction, detective work would be more difficult. Imagining a face never seen and sounding for a motive in a vacuum would not prove easy.

Not long ago in the history of the world, routine daily violence—excluding the ravages of nations at war—had been largely personal in nature. Grudges, slights to honor, adultery, disputes over money triggered the murderous impulse.

In the modern world, more in the postmodern, most of all in the postpostmodern, much violence had become impersonal. Terrorists, street gangs, lone sociopaths, sociopaths in groups and pledged to a Utopian vision killed people they did not know, against whom they had no realistic complaint, for the purpose of attracting attention, making a statement, intimidation, or even just for the thrill of it.