Thr3e (4 page)

“If this guy makes contact in any other way, I want to hear about it immediately, you understand?”

“Of course.”

“And pardon my insensitivity, but this isn’t just about you anymore.” His eyes twinkled. “We have reporters all over the place and they want an explanation. You might have some media attention. Don’t talk to them. Don’t even look at them. Stay focused,
capice?
”

“I’m the victim here, right? Why do I get the feeling I’m the one under investigation?”

Milton placed both of his palms on the table. The air conditioning kicked in above them. “Because you are. We have a monster out there and that monster has chosen you. We need to know why. That means we need to know more about you. We have to establish motivation. That’s the way it works.”

Kevin nodded. Actually, it made perfect sense.

“You’re free to go.” The detective handed him a card. “Call me. Use the cell number on the back.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Do you always stare people down while you’re talking to them, or are you hiding something?”

Kevin hesitated. “Has it ever occurred to you that you have a tendency to terrify your witnesses, Detective?”

The man did one of his flash-blink routines—four this time. Paul Milton might have political aspirations, but unless the people decided to turn the country over to vampires, Kevin didn’t think the detective had a chance.

Milton stood and walked out.

3

Friday
Afternoon

A
FRIENDLY COP NAMED STEVE ushered Kevin out the back and took him to the Hertz rental-car agency. Twenty minutes later Kevin held the keys to a Ford Taurus, nearly identical to the Sable that was no more.

“You’re sure you’re okay to drive?” Steve asked.

“I can drive.”

“Okay. I’ll follow you home.”

“Thanks.”

The home was an old two-story that Kevin had purchased five years earlier, when he was twenty-three, using some of the money from a trust fund established by his parents before the car accident. A drunk driver had slammed into Ruth and Mark Little’s car when Kevin was only one—their deaths had reportedly been immediate. Their only son, Kevin, had been with a baby-sitter. The insurance settlement went to Ruth’s sister, Balinda Parson, who received full custody of Kevin and subsequently adopted him. With a few strokes of a judge’s pen, Kevin ceased being a Little and became instead a Parson. He had no memories of his real parents, no brothers or sisters, no possessions that he knew of. Only a trust account beyond anyone’s reach until he turned eighteen, much to Aunt Balinda’s chagrin.

As it turned out, he had no need to touch the money until he turned twenty-three, and by that time it had grown into a sum in excess of three hundred thousand dollars—a small gift to help him build a new life once he got around to discovering he needed one. He’d called Balinda “Mother” until then. Now he called her his aunt. That’s all she was, thank God. Aunt Balinda.

Kevin pulled into the garage and stepped out of the Taurus. He waved as the cop drove by, then closed the garage door. The timed light slowly faded. He stepped into the laundry room, glanced at a full hamper, and made a mental note to finish his laundry before he went to bed. If there was one thing he hated, it was disorder. Disorder was the enemy of understanding, and he’d lived long enough without understanding. How meticulous and organized did a chemist have to be in order to understand DNA? How organized had NASA been in reaching out to understand the moon? One mistake and
boom
.

Mounds of dirty clothes reeked of disorder.

Kevin walked into the kitchen and set the keys on the counter.
Someone just blew up your car and you’re thinking about doing laundry
. Well, what was he supposed to do? Crawl into the corner and hide? He’d just escaped death—he should be throwing a party. Let’s toast life, comrades. We have faced the enemy and we have survived the bomb blast down by the Wal-Mart.

Please, get a grip. You’re babbling like a fool here.
Still, in light of the past several hours, it was a blessing to be alive, and gratefulness was warranted.
Great is thy faithfulness. Yes indeed, what a blessing we have received. Long live Kevin.

He stared past the breakfast nook with its round oak dinette, through the picture window that overlooked the front yard. An oil pump sat dormant on a dirt hill beyond the street. This was his view. It’s what two hundred thousand dollars bought you these days.

On the other hand, there was that hill. Kevin blinked. With a pair of binoculars, anyone with a mind to could park himself at the base of that oil pump and watch Kevin Parson organize his laundry in complete anonymity.

The trembles were suddenly back. Kevin rushed over to the window and quickly lowered the miniblinds. He spun around and scanned the main floor. Besides the kitchen and laundry room, there was the living room, the bathroom, and sliding glass doors, which led to a small lawn encircled by a white picket fence. The bedrooms were upstairs. From this angle he could see right through the living room into the backyard. For all he knew, Slater could have been watching him for months!

No. That was stupid. Slater knew of him, maybe something from his past—a demented motorist he’d hacked off on the highway. Maybe even—

No, it couldn’t be that. He was just a kid then.

Kevin wiped his forehead with his arm and stepped into the living room. A large leather sofa and a recliner faced a forty-two-inch flat-screen television. What if Slater had actually been
in
here?

He scanned the room. Everything was in its place, the coffee table dusted, the carpet vacuumed, the magazines in their rack beside the recliner. Order. His
Introduction to Philosophy
text sat on the dinette beside him. Large two-by-three-foot travel posters covered the walls in a hopscotch arrangement. Sixteen in all, counting the ones upstairs. Istanbul, Paris, Rio, the Caribbean, a dozen others. An unknowing person might think he ran a travel agency, but to Kevin the images were simply gateways to the real world, places he would one day visit to broaden his horizon.

To expand his understanding.

Even if Slater had been here, there would be no way to tell, short of dusting for prints. Maybe Milton should send out a team.

Easy, boy. This is an isolated incident, not a full-scale invasion. No need to tear the house down yet.

Kevin paced to the couch and then back. He picked up the remote control and turned on the television. He preferred to spin through the channels on the huge Sony picture tube rather than settle on any particular channel for long. The TV was yet another window into life—a wonderful montage of the world in all of its beauty and ugliness. Didn’t matter; it was real.

He flipped the channels, one every other second or so. Football, a cooking show, a woman in a brown dress showing how to plant geraniums, a Vidal Sassoon commercial, Bugs Bunny. He paused on Bugs.
I say, what’s up, doc?
Bugs Bunny had more truth to speak about life than the humans on the tube. “If you stay in the hole too long, it becomes your tomb.” Wasn’t that the truth. That was Balinda’s problem—she was still in the hole. He flipped the station. The news . . .

The news. He stared at the aerial images, fascinated by the surreal shots of the smoldering car. His car. “Wow,” he mumbled. “That’s me.” He shook his head in disbelief and ruffled his hair. “That’s really me. I survived that.”

What falls but never breaks? What breaks but never falls?
He will call again. You do know that, don’t you?

Kevin clicked the tube off. A psychobabblist once told him that his mind was unusual. He’d tested with an IQ in the top one percentile—no problems there. In fact, if there was a problem—and Dr. Swanlist the psychobabblist certainly didn’t think there was a problem at all—it was that his mind still processed information at a rate normally found in others during their formative years. Age normally slowed down the synapses, which explained why old folks could be downright scary behind the wheel. Kevin tended to view the world through the eyes of an adult with the innocence of a child. Which was really psychobabble for nothing of any practical value, regardless of how excited Dr. Swanlist got.

He looked at the stairs. What if Slater had gone up there?

He walked to the stairs and took them two at a time. One master bedroom on the left, one guest bedroom that he used as an office to his right, and one bathroom between the two. He headed for the guest bedroom, flipped on the light switch, and poked his head in. A desk with a computer, a chair, and several bookcases, one with a dozen textbooks and the rest heavy with over two hundred novels. He’d discovered the miracles of stories in his early teens, and ultimately they had set him free. There was no better way to understand life than to live it—if not through your own life, then through another’s. There was once a man who owned a field. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Not to read was to turn your back on the wisest minds.

Kevin scanned the fiction titles. Koontz, King, Shakespeare, Card, Stevenson, Powers—an eclectic collection. He’d read the books eagerly in his recent renaissance. To say Aunt Balinda didn’t approve of novels was like saying the ocean is wet. She would feel no better about his philosophy and theology textbooks.

The travel posters in this room boasted of Ethiopia, Egypt, South Africa, and Morocco. Brown, brown, green, brown. That was it.

He closed the door and walked into the bathroom. Nothing. The man in the mirror had brown hair and blue eyes. Gray in bad light. Somewhat attractive if he was any judge, but generally average looking.
Not the kind of person stalked by a psychopath.
He grunted and hurried to his room.

The bed was made, the dresser drawers closed, the shade open. All in order.
You see, you’ve been hearing ghosts.

Kevin sighed and peeled off his dress shirt and slacks. Thirty seconds later he’d changed into a pale blue T-shirt and jeans. He had to get back to a semblance of normalcy here. He tossed the dress shirt into the laundry bin, hung up his trousers, and headed for the door.

A flash of color on the nightstand caught his eye. Pink. A pink ribbon peeked out from behind the lamp.

Kevin’s heart responded before his mind did, pounding into overdrive. He walked forward and stared at the thin pink hair ribbon. He’d seen it before. He could swear he’d seen this ribbon. A long time ago. Samantha had given him one exactly like it once, and it had gone missing years ago.

He spun around. Had Sam heard about the incident and driven down from Sacramento? She’d phoned recently but hadn’t mentioned coming to visit him. The last time he’d seen his childhood friend was when she’d left for college at age eighteen, ten years earlier. She’d spent the last few years in New York working in law enforcement and had recently moved to Sacramento for employment with the California Bureau of Investigation.

But this ribbon was hers!

“Samantha?” His voice echoed softly in the room.

Silence. Of course—he’d already checked the place. Unless . . .

He snatched up the ribbon, ran for the stairs, and descended them in three long strides. “Samantha!”

It took Kevin exactly twenty seconds to search the house and rule out the possibility that his long-lost friend had paid him a visit and was hiding like they had as children. Unless she had come, left the ribbon, and then departed, intending to call him later. Would she do that? Under any other circumstance it would be a wonderful surprise.

Kevin stood in the kitchen, perplexed. If she’d left the ribbon, she would have left a message, a note, a phone call, something.

But there was no note. His black VTech phone sat on the kitchen counter. Number of messages: a big red “0.”

What if Slater had left the ribbon? He should call Milton. Kevin ran a hand through his hair. Milton would want to know about the ribbon, which meant telling him about Samantha, which meant opening up the past. He couldn’t open up the past, not after running from it for so long.

The silence felt thick.

Kevin looked at the pink ribbon trembling slightly in his hand and sat slowly at the dinette. The past. So long ago. He closed his eyes.

Kevin was ten years old when he first saw the pretty girl from down the street. That was a year before they met the boy who wanted to kill them.

Meeting Sam two days after his birthday was his best present. Ever. His brother, Bob, who was really his cousin, had given him a yo-yo, which he really did like, but not as much as meeting Samantha. He would never tell Bob that, of course. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d tell Bob about Samantha at all. It was his secret. Bob might be eight years older than Kevin, but he was a bit slow—he’d never catch on.

The moon was full that night, and Kevin was in bed by seven o’clock. He always went to bed early. Sometimes before supper. But tonight he’d been under the covers for what seemed like an hour, and he couldn’t sleep. He thought maybe it was too bright with the moonlight coming through the white shade. He liked it dark when he slept. Pitch-dark, so he couldn’t even see his hand when he put it an inch from his nose.