Dean Koontz - Lost Souls

Green was the perfect camouflage these days. If you worked for a company with green in its name, you were assumed to be responsible, compassionate, farsighted, of high moral character, one of the good guys-which was ironic, because Frost was one of the good guys even though he worried not at all about his carbon footprint.

“If I were a serial killer,” Frost said, “I’d travel the country pretending to be an environmental activist, wearing clothes made from soybean fabric. Women wouldn’t just throw themselves at me, they’d also give me the hatchet to chop them up with.”

“I don’t need soybean clothes,” Dagget said. “I have the natural pheromones that women can’t resist.”

“Yeah? You have them in a spray can or a roll-on stick?”

The house rented by 21st-Century Green was on Bearpaw, across the street from the park.

Frost said, “Come on over. We’ll check the computer, see where Chief Jarmillo is, then maybe do some surveillance on him.”

The two-bedroom bungalow was furnished as if austerity had been proclaimed the new glamour, but at least it was clean.

As they passed through the living room and dining room to the kitchen, where Frost’s laptop and scanner were set up, Dagget said, “This makes Shaker furniture look decadent. Does the place come with a bed of nails?”

“No, but there’s a complimentary selection of woven bramble scourges if you’d like to whip yourself.”

“Maybe later. While you’re checking on Jarmillo, I’ll call Moomaw, see if the whistle-blower has turned up anything more about this. I don’t mind flying backward and upside down, but I don’t like flying blind, too.”

Maurice Moomaw was their superior in the Bureau. No one dared make fun of his name, even though Maurice was his middle name and his full name was Saint Maurice Moomaw. His father had been a black activist who changed his surname from Johnson, and his mother had been a devout Catholic who insisted on naming him after one of the few black saints. Maurice Moomaw had skin, hair, and eyes all pretty much the same shade of mahogany, and he stood as big as a tree. He had a law degree from Yale, and though he would never say a cross word to a subordinate in front of anyone else, in private he could cut you in half with words faster than a chain saw could do the job.

As Frost booted up the laptop and checked on Jarmillo, Dagget spoke with Moomaw by satellite phone, using the word sir a lot. When he terminated the call and came to the table, he said, “Moomaw says word is the Moneyman is coming here tomorrow.”

Frost was surprised.

“Well, not to this monk’s cell of yours,” Dagget said, “but he’s coming somewhere in the Rainbow Falls area, they don’t know where. He’s coming in by chopper from Billings.”

“Why?”

“They don’t know why. Probably to see what his money’s buying.”

“This is big. Moomaw thinks it’s big, doesn’t he?”

“Moomaw now thinks it’s huge.”

“This is dirty business of some kind. Why would the Moneyman risk being tied to it?”

“Dirty business is his favorite kind. Maybe you’ll get a chance to ask him why.”

“Wouldn’t that be something?” Frost said.

“Except it’s pretty much certain, if you ask the question, you’ll get a bullet for an answer.”

Standing at a window in Room 218, Bryce watched a hospital janitor hosing off the area of parking-lot pavement where Travis had seen a man beaten and perhaps murdered. The boy said the man below was the same one who had swung the club.

In the armchair, crossed legs drawn up onto the seat, he said, “It happened. I didn’t imagine it.”

“I know you didn’t,” Bryce assured him.

Each half of the bronze casement window featured a handle with which it could be cranked open for ventilation. The center post was strong enough to support the weight of a climber. The distance from the windowsill to the blacktop appeared to be about fifteen feet.

Entirely plausible.

Bryce stepped away from the window, went down on one knee beside the armchair, and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “There’s hardly any staff on this floor because they’re downstairs, and I think it’s because they’re helping to guard every entrance to the basement and every exterior door on the ground floor.”

“Why did they kill that man?”

“He must’ve seen something they didn’t want him to see.”

“What? What did he see?”

“Listen, Travis, we’ve got to hang tough. Don’t give them any reason to think you’re suspicious.”

“But it’s just like I told you, isn’t it? They aren’t who they used to be. They’re not real anymore.”

“They’re real, son, they’re plenty real. But they’re different now.”

“What’re they doing to people down in the basement?”

“Whatever it is, we don’t want them doing it to us.”

Bryce’s own voice sounded alien to him, not because the pitch and timbre of it had changed, which they had not, but because of the things he heard himself saying. He remained a writer of Westerns, but his life had changed genres.

“There’s something we can do,” Bryce said, “but it’s going to take nerve, and we’ve got to be cautious.”

He outlined his plan, and the boy listened without interruption.

When Bryce finished, Travis said only, “Will it work?”

“It has to, doesn’t it?” Bryce said.

In the main basement hallway of the hospital, Chief Jarmillo and Dr. Henry Lightner stood on opposite sides of the gurney on which rested the body of Brian Murdock.

“The whole face is stoved in,” Jarmillo said.

“Cody had to stop him.”

“Of course.”

“You or I would have done the same.”

“Perhaps not so aggressively.”

“Or perhaps more so,” Lightner said.

Jarmillo looked up from the body and met the physician’s eyes. “Obsessing of any kind must be reported.”

“He wasn’t obsessing.”

“How many blows with the nightstick?”

“We don’t have time for an autopsy. With everything we have to accomplish by tonight, that wouldn’t be an efficient use of time.”

“But how many blows do you think? Just a guess.”

“Not many.”

“Really?”

“Not many,” Lightner repeated. “Not many. He did what he had to do.”

“And efficiently. The problem is where he did it. In the open.”

“No one saw,” Lightner said.

“We can’t be sure of that.”

“If someone saw, they would have told a nurse, an orderly, they would have wanted us to call the police.”

“Not if they’re suspicious of… all of us.”

“Why suspicious? Even dogs can’t smell a difference between us and them.”

“We might not mimic as well as we think we do. Maybe the more perceptive of their kind can sense something wrong.”

“If one of them saw, he’ll soon be dead anyway.”

Jarmillo nodded. “You need Cody here.”

“I need everybody to get this done.”

“And no one at the scene thinks he was obsessing?”

“No one.”

Jarmillo considered the situation for a moment. None of the hospital patients had phone service. Cell phones and text-messaging devices had been collected using one excuse or another. No one in the building could leave without either being returned to his room or being dealt with as Cody had dealt with Murdock. They had hoped to begin delivering the patients to the Builders after visiting hours. But if someone had seen the killing, and if he had a visitor, they risked exposure if that visitor left the hospital.