Dean Koontz: Whispers

"This helps," Laurenski said. "Even identical twins don't get the same cavities in the same places on the same teeth. Two sets of dental records will prove there were two Bruno Fryes."

A while later, while searching a bedroom closet, Deputy Larsson made an unsettling discovery. One of the shoe boxes did not have shoes in it. Instead, the box contained a dozen wallet-size snapshots of a dozen young women, driver's licenses for six of them, and another eleven licenses belonging to eleven other women. In each snapshot and in each license photo, the woman looking out at the camera had things in common with all the other women in the collection: a pretty face, dark eyes, dark hair, and an indefinable something in the lines and angles of the facial structure.

"Twenty-three women who vaguely resemble Katherine," Joshua said. "My God. Twenty-three."

"A gallery of death," Hilary said, shivering.

"At least they're not all unidentified snapshots," Tony said. "With the licenses, we've got names and addresses."

"We'll get them out on the wire right away," Laurenski said, sending Larsson out to the car to radio the information to HQ. "But I think we all know what we'll find."

"Twenty-three unsolved murders spread over the past five years," Tony said.

"Or twenty-three disappearances," the sheriff said.

They spent two more hours in the house, but they didn't find anything else as important as the photographs and driver's licenses. Hilary's nerves were frayed, and her imagination was stimulated by the disturbing realization that her own driver's license had nearly wound up in that shoe box. Each time she opened a drawer or a cupboard door, she expected to find a shriveled heart with a stake through it or a dead woman's rotting head. She was relieved when the search was finally completed.

Outside, in the chilly night air, Laurenski said, "Will the three of you be coming to the coroner's office in the morning?"

"Count me out," Hilary said.

"No thanks," Tony said.

Joshua said, "There's really nothing we can do there."

"What time should we meet at the cliff house?" Laurenski asked.

Joshua said, "Hilary and Tony and I will go up first thing in the morning and open all the shutters and windows. The place has been closed up for five years. It'll need to be aired out before any of us will want to spend hours poking through it. Why don't you just come on up and join us whenever you're finished at the coroner's?"

"All right," Laurenski said. "See you tomorrow. Maybe the Los Angeles police will get the bastard during the night."

"Maybe," Hilary said hopefully.

Up in the Mayacamas Mountains, soft thunder roared.

***

Bruno Frye spent half the night talking to himself, carefully planning Hilary-Katherine's death.

The other half, he slept while the candles flickered. Thin streams of smoke rose from the burning wicks. The dancing flames cast jiggling, macabre shadows on the walls, and they were reflected in the staring eyes of the corpse.

***

Joshua Rhinehart had trouble sleeping. He tossed and turned, getting increasingly tangled in the sheets. At three o'clock in the morning, he went out to the bar and poured himself a double shot of bourbon, drank it fast. Even that didn't settle him down a whole lot.

He had never missed Cora so much as he did that night.

Hilary woke repeatedly from bad dreams, but the night did not go by slowly. It swept past at rocket speeds. She still had the feeling that she was hurtling toward a precipice, and she could do nothing to stop her forward rush.

***

Near dawn, as Tony lay awake, Hilary turned to him, came against him, and said, "Make love to me."

For half an hour, they lost themselves in each other, and although it was not better than before, it was not one degree worse either. A sweet, silken, hushed togetherness.

Afterwards, she said, "I love you."

"I love you, too."

"No matter what happens," she said, "we've had these few days together."

"Now don't get fatalistic on me."

"Well... you never know."

"We've got years ahead of us. Years and years and years together. Nobody's going to take them away from us."

"You're so positive, so optimistic. I wish I'd found you a long time ago."

"We're through the worst of this thing," he said. "We know the truth now."

"They haven't caught Frye yet."

"They will," Tony said reassuringly. "He thinks you're Katherine, so he's not going to stray too far from Westwood. He'll keep checking back at your house to see if you've shown up, and sooner or later the surveillance team will spot him, and it'll all be over."

"Hold me," she said.

"Sure."

"Mmmm. That's nice."

"Yeah."

"Just being held."

"Yeah."

"I feel better already."

"Everything's going to be fine."

"As long as I have you," she said.

"Forever, then."

***

The sky was dark and low and ominous. The peaks of the Mayacamas were shrouded in mist.

Peter Laurenski stood in the graveyard, hands in his pants pockets, shoulders hunched against the chill morning air. Using a backhoe for most of the way, then tossing out the last eight or ten inches of dirt with shovels, workmen at Napa County Memorial Park gouged into the soft earth, tearing open Bruno Frye's grave. As they labored, they complained to the sheriff that they were not being paid extra for getting up at dawn and missing breakfast and coming in early, but they got very little sympathy from him; he just urged them to work faster.

At 7:45, Avril Tannerton and Gary Olmstead arrived in the Forever View hearse. As they walked across the green hillside toward Laurenski, Olmstead looked properly somber, but Tannerton was smiling, taking in great lungfuls of the nippy air, as if he were merely out for his morning constitutional.

"Morning, Peter."

"Morning, Avril. Gary."

"How long till they have it open?" Tannerton asked.

"They say fifteen minutes."

At 8:05, one of the workmen climbed up from the hole and said, "Ready to yank him out?"

"Let's get on with it," Laurenski said.

Chains were attached to the casket, and it was brought out of the ground by the same device that had lowered it in just last Sunday. The bronze coffin was caked with earth around the handles and in the frill work, but overall it was still shiny.

By 8:40, Tannerton and Olmstead had loaded the big box into the hearse.

"I'll follow you to the coroner's office," the sheriff said.

Tannerton grinned at him. "I assure you, Peter, we aren't going to run off with Mr. Frye's remains."

***

At 8:20, in Joshua Rhinehart's kitchen, while the casket was being exhumed at the cemetery a few miles away, Tony and Hilary stacked the breakfast dishes in the sink.

"I'll wash them later," Joshua said. "Let's get up to the cliff and open that house. It must smell like hell in there after all these years. I just hope the mildew and mold haven't done too much damage to Katherine's collections. I warned Bruno about that a thousand times, but he didn't seem to care if--" Joshua stopped, blinked. "Will you listen to me babble on? Of course he didn't care if the whole lot of it rotted away. Those were Katherine's collections, and he wouldn't have cared a damn about anything she treasured."

They went to Shade Tree Vineyards in Joshua's car. The day was dreary; the light was dirty gray. Joshua parked in the employees' lot.

Gilbert Ulman hadn't come to work yet. He was the mechanic who maintained the aerial tramway in addition to caring for all of Shade Tree Vineyards' trucks and farm equipment.

The key that operated the tramway was hanging on a pegboard in the garage, and the winery's night manager, a portly man named Iannucci, was happy to get it for Joshua.

Key in hand, Joshua led Hilary and Tony up to the second floor of the huge main winery, through an area of administrative offices, through a viniculture lab, and then onto a broad catwalk. Half the building was open from the first floor to the ceiling, and in that huge chamber there were enormous three-story fermentation tanks. Cold, cold air flowed off the tanks, and there was a yeasty odor in the place. At the end of the long catwalk, at the southwest corner of the building, they went through a heavy pine door with black iron hinges, into a small room that was open at the end opposite from where they entered. An overhanging roof extended twelve feet out from the missing wall, to keep rain from slanting into the open chamber. The four-seat cable car--a fire-engine-red number with lots of glass--was nestled under the overhang, at the brink of the room.