Dean Koontz - Velocity

He had Lanny’s cell phone, which he hesitated to add to the cooler. As if the hands would strip off their foil shrouds and call 911. He put the cell phone on the kitchen table.

To get the hands out of the house, he took the cooler to the garage and put it in the Explorer, on the floor in front of the passenger’s seat. He locked the garage after himself.

The hot afternoon had waned. Six-thirty-six.

High overhead, a hawk conducted its last hunt of the day.

Billy stood watching as the bird described a widening gyre.

294

Then he went inside, eager to take a long shower as hot as he could tolerate.

The business with the women’s hands had suppressed his appetite. He didn’t think he would feel comfortable eating at home.

Maybe he would return to the truck stop for dinner. He felt as if he owed the waitress, Jasmine, even a bigger tip than the one he had previously left her. In the hallway, heading for the bathroom, Billy saw a light in his office. When he looked through the doorway, he found the shades drawn, as he had left them.

He didn’t remember leaving the desk lamp on, but he had split in a hurry, eager to dispose of Cottle. Without going around the desk, he switched off the lamp.

Although Cottle was no longer sitting on the toilet, Billy could too easily remember him there. This was his only bathroom, however, and his desire for a shower proved greater than his squeamishness.

The hot water gradually melted the aches from his muscles. The soap smelled glorious.

A couple of times, he grew claustrophobic behind the shower curtain and became half convinced that he had been cast in the Janet Leigh role in a gender-reversal version of Psycho.

Happily, he managed not to embarrass himself by whipping the curtain open. He concluded his shower without being knifed.

He wondered how much time would have to pass before he got over the heebie-jeebies. Most likely, the rest of his life.

After toweling off and dressing, he applied a fresh bandage to the hook wounds in his forehead.

He went into the kitchen, opened an Elephant beer, and used it to chase a pair of Motrin. The inflammation in his left hand worried him a little. At the table with the beer, and with a few first-aid items, he tried to introduce iodine into the nail wound, then applied a fresh liquid bandage. Beyond the windows, twilight approached.

He intended to go to Whispering Pines and spend a few hours. He had arranged to stay throughout the night in a prayer vigil; but in spite of his tenhour sleep, he didn’t think he would be able to stay that long. With Valis dead, midnight had no meaning.

295

When Billy had tended to the nail wound, as he sat at the table finishing the beer, his attention fell on the microwave. The security video. All this while, he’d been recording himself at the table. Then he realized that he had caught himself taking the hands out of the freezer. The camera had a wide-angle lens, but he didn’t believe that it could have captured his gruesome work well enough to serve as evidence.

Nevertheless…

He got the stepladder from the pantry. He climbed it and opened the cabinet above the microwave.

Using the reverse-scan mode, he studied the small review screen, watching himself walk backward around the kitchen. The angle had not revealed the severed hands.

Suddenly wondering whether Valis might have visited the house for some purpose between the time Billy had left the previous day and their meeting in the motor home before dawn, he continued the reverse scan beyond his entrance shortly after six o’clock.

He didn’t have to go all the way to the previous day. At 3:07 this same day, while Billy had still been asleep at the Olsen place, a man walked backward out of the living room, across the kitchen to the door, and reversed out of the house.

The intruder was not Valis, of course, because Valis was dead.

296

Chapter 75

Billy couldn’t remember the number. Using Lanny’s cell phone, he called directory assistance in Denver, and they put him through to Detective Ramsey Ozgard.

Billy paced while the phone rang out there in the shadow of the Rockies. Maybe Valis had been confident of Billy’s conversion because he had previously bent someone else instead of destroying him. None of the sixteen members of his crew was like him, but that didn’t mean the artist was a lone hunter.

Ramsey Ozgard answered on the fifth ring, and Billy identified himself as Lanny Olsen, and Ozgard said, “I hear blood in your voice, Deputy. Tell me you’ve got your man.”

“I think I will have shortly,” Billy said. “I’ve got an urgent situation here. I need to know—the year Judith Kesselman vanished, was there a professor at the university, calling himself Valis?”

“Not a professor,” Ozgard said. “He was the artist in residence for six months. At the end of his time, he did this ridiculous thing he called performance art, wrapped two campus buildings in thousands of yards of blue silk and hung them with—”

Billy interrupted. “Steve Zillis had a perfect alibi.”

“It was watertight,” Ozgard assured him. “I can walk you through it if you have ten minutes.”

“I don’t. But tell me—do you remember—at the university, what was Zillis’s major?”

“He was an art major.”

“Sonofabitch.”

297

No wonder Zillis hadn’t wanted to talk about the mannequins. They weren’t just expressions of the sick dreams of a sociopathic killer—they were his art.

At that point, Billy hadn’t yet discovered the key words that would reveal the identity of the freak-performance art. He’d had only performance, and Zillis instinctively hadn’t wanted to give him the rest of it, not when he was doing so well playing a harmless, put-upon pervert.

“The son of a bitch deserves an Oscar,” Billy said. “I left his place feeling like the world’s worst shit, the way I treated him.”

“Deputy?”

“The famous and respected Valis vouched for Steve Zillis—didn’t he?—

said that Steve was with him on a retreat or something on the day Judith Kesselman disappeared.”

“You’re right. But you’d only jump to that if—”

“Turn on your evening news, Detective Ozgard. By the time Judi Kesselman vanished, Steve and Valis were working together. They were each other’s alibi. Gotta go.”

Billy remembered to press END before dropping Lanny’s phone. He still had Lanny’s pistol and Taser. He threaded the Wilson Combat holster onto his belt.

From the closet in his bedroom, he snared a sport coat, shrugged into it to conceal the pistol as best he could.

He slipped the Taser in an inner coat pocket.

What had Steve been doing here in the afternoon? By then he would have known that his mentor had been outed, the collection of hands and faces discovered. He might even suspect that Valis was dead.

Billy remembered finding the light on in the study. He went in there, all the way behind the desk this time, and found the computer in sleep mode. He hadn’t left it on.

When he moved the mouse, a document appeared. Can torture wake the comatose? Her blood, her mutilation will be your third wound. Billy flew through the house. He leaped off the back-porch steps, stumbled when he landed, and ran.

Night had fallen. An owl hooted. Wings against the stars.

298

Chapter 76

At 9:06 the guest parking lot in front of Whispering Pines contained only one car. Visiting hours ended at nine.

They hadn’t locked the front door yet. Billy pushed inside, crossed to the main nurses’ station.

Two nurses were behind the counter. He knew them both. He said, “I made arrangements to stay—”

The overhead lights went out. The parking-lot lights died, too. The main hall was almost as black as a lava pipe.