Dean Koontz - Your Heart Belongs To Me

Walking, he paused frequently to listen to the whisper of the trees, a sound he had always loved. The aspens were so sensitive to air movement because their leafstalks were only narrow ribbons and were set at right angles to the hanging leaf-blades.

As he rested on a bench, he realized that he could not recall when he had ever before heard aspens whispering or how he knew the design of their leafstalks was what gave them an unceasing voice.

His initial sight of the park had strummed a sympathetic chord in him. Upon first walking among the trees, he had felt an affection for them that was entirely familiar.

Now, on this bench under a canopy of shiny yellow leaves, the affection ripened into a more intense sentiment, into a tender-hearted yearning that was nostalgic in character. Inexplicably, though he had never been here before, he felt that he had sat beneath these very trees many times, in all seasons and weather.

Wood warblers, soon to migrate south, sang in the whispering trees, sweet high clear notes: swee-swee-swee-ti-ti-ti-swee.

Ryan did not know where he had learned these birds were wood warblers, but suddenly their song moved him from a curious nostalgic yearning to full-blown deja vu. Today was not his first experience of this park.

The certainty that he had been here before, not just once but often, became so electrifying that it brought him off the bench, to his feet, so pierced by a sense of unnatural forces at work that his scalp prickled and the hairs quivered on the nape of his neck, and a chill traced the contours of his spinal column with the specificity of a diligent physiology professor using a laser pointer.

Although the church had interested him only as backdrop, Ryan turned toward it with the conviction that, on some occasion now forgotten, he had been inside of the place. Earlier, he had not been near enough to the church to see its name, but somehow he knew that the denomination was Roman Catholic.

The day remained mild, yet he grew steadily colder. He slipped his hands into his jacket pockets as he crossed the park to the church.

Because they had been swept clean for the morning services, the concrete steps of St. Gemma’s were brightened by only a few aspen leaves. The last Mass of the day had been offered, and the church stood quiet now.

Hesitating at the bottom of the steps, Ryan knew the crucifix above the altar would be of carved wood, that the crown of thorns on Christ’s head would be gilded, likewise the nails in His hands and feet. Behind the cross, a gilded oval. And radiating from the oval, carved and gilded rays of holy light.

He climbed the steps.

At the door, he almost turned away.

Shadows gathered in the narthex, fewer in the nave, where daylight pressed colorfully through the stained-glass windows and where some altar lights remained aglow.

In every detail, the impressive crucifix proved to be as he had foreseen it.

Alone in the church, he stood in the center aisle, transfixed, trembling like the quaking aspens in the park.

Ryan remained certain that he had never been here before, and he was not a Catholic. Yet he was overcome by the sense of comfort that one feels in well-loved places.

This comfort did not warm him, however, and did not calm him, but compelled him to retreat.

Outside, on the steps, he needed a minute to regain control of his ragged breathing.

In the park once more, on a bench to which his wobbly legs had barely carried him, he used his cell phone to call Wilson Mott’s most private number.

After speaking with Mott, he expected to sit there for a while, because he was not yet calm or fit to drive. But the brilliance of the aspens, the black iron lampposts with crackle-glass panes, the wrought-iron bench painted glossy black, and the herringbone brick walkway filled him with yearning for a past he could not recall, indeed for a past that he had never lived.

The weirdness of it all became too much for him, and he left the park at something less than a run but more than a walk.

After Ryan entered the name of his hotel in the Escalade’s navigator, the mellifluous voice of a patient young woman guided him successfully through Denver in spite of a few missed turns.

In the library of the presidential suite, high above Denver, Ryan Perry worked obsessively on the digitized photo of dead Teresa.

The photographic-analysis package provided numerous tools with which he could enhance the cadaver’s eyes, enlarging and clarifying the scene reflected in those glassy surfaces. Some of the techniques could be used in combination. And when the zone of interest was so enlarged that it lost resolution, the computer was able to clone the pixels until density and definition had been restored to the image.

Nevertheless, by 7:05 Sunday evening, when Wilson Mott’s agent arrived, Ryan had not been able to make anything of the patterns of light and shadow in those optic reflections.

Earlier, just before leaving the park, when he had called Mott to request the services of a trusted and discreet phlebotomist, he had been told that the nearest such medical technician that could be tapped for the job was George Zane, who had not yet returned from Las Vegas to the security company’s offices in Los Angeles. Before signing on with Mott, Zane had been a U.S. Army Medical Corpsman, administering first aid on the battlefields of Iraq.

Now, Ryan stretched out on a bed in the master bedroom, with a towel under his arm, while Zane performed a venesection and drew 40 milliliters of blood into eight 5-milliliter vials.

“I want to be tested for every known poison,” Ryan said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Not just those that are known to cause cardiac hypertrophy.”

“We’ve located a cooperative lab right here in Denver and two blood specialists who’ll work through the night on it. You don’t want to know their fee.”

“I don’t care about their fee,” Ryan assured Zane.

One of the best things about having serious wealth was that if you knew the right service providers-like Wilson Mott-you could get what you wanted, when you wanted it. And no matter how eccentric the request, no one raised an eyebrow, and everyone treated you with the utmost respect, at least to your face.

“I want to be tested for drugs, too. Including-no, especially-for hallucinogenics and for drugs that might cause hallucinations or delusions as a side effect.”

“Yes, sir,” said Zane, setting aside the fourth vial, “Mr. Mott has informed me of all that.”

With the knots of scar tissue on his bald head, with his intense purple-black eyes, with his wide nostrils flaring wider as though the scent of blood excited him, George Zane should have been a disturbing figure. Instead, he was a calming presence.

“You’re very good with the needle, George.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Didn’t sting at all. And you have a good bedside manner.”

“Because of the army.”

“I didn’t realize they taught bedside manner in the army.”

“The battlefield teaches it. The suffering you see. You want to be gentle.”

“I never served in the military.”

“Well, in the military or not, we all go to war every day. Two more syringes, sir.”

As Zane removed the blood-filled barrel from the cannula and attached an empty one, Ryan said, “You probably think I’m some kind of paranoid.”

“No, sir. There’s evil in the world, all right. Being aware of it makes you a realist, not a paranoid.”

“The idea that someone’s poisoning me or drugging me…”

“You wouldn’t be the first. The enemy isn’t always on the other end of a gun or a bomb. Sometimes he’s very close. Sometimes he looks like us, which makes him almost invisible, and that’s when he’s most dangerous.”