Dark Rivers of the Heart Read online

  He could not stop shivering. The damp chill in the house was as penetrating as that of the February air outside. The heat must have been off all day, which meant that Valerie had left early.

  On his cold face, the scar burned.

  A closed door was centered in the back wall of the dining room. He opened it and discovered a narrow hallway that led about fifteen feet to the left and fifteen to the right. Directly across the hall, another door stood half open; beyond, he glimpsed a white tile floor and a bathroom sink.

  As he was about to enter the hall, he heard sounds other than the monotonous and hollow drumming of the rain on the roof. A thump and a soft scrape.

  He immediately switched off the flashlight. The darkness was as perfect as that in any carnival fun house just before flickering strobe lights revealed a leering, mechanical corpse.

  At first the sounds had seemed stealthy, as if a prowler outside had slipped on the wet grass and bumped against the house. However, the longer Spencer listened, the more he became convinced that the source of noise might have been distant rather than nearby, and that he might have heard nothing more than a car door slamming shut, out on the street or in a neighbor’s driveway.

  He switched on the flashlight and continued his search in the bathroom. A bath towel, a hand towel, and a washcloth hung on the rack. A half-used bar of Ivory lay in the plastic soap dish, but the medicine cabinet was empty.

  To the right of the bathroom was a small bedroom, as unfurnished as the rest of the house. The closet was empty.

  The second bedroom, to the left of the bath, was larger than the first, and it was obviously where she had slept. An inflated air mattress lay on the floor. Atop the mattress were a tangle of sheets, a single wool blanket, and a pillow. The bifold closet doors stood open, revealing wire hangers dangling from an unpainted wooden pole.

  Although the rest of the bungalow was unadorned by artwork or decoration, something was fixed to the center of the longest wall in that bedroom. Spencer approached it, directed the light at it, and saw a full-color, closeup photograph of a cockroach. It seemed to be a page from a book, perhaps an entomology text, because the caption under the photograph was in dry academic English. In closeup, the roach was about six inches long. It had been fixed to the wall with a single large nail that had been driven through the center of the beetle’s carapace. On the floor, directly below the photograph, lay the hammer with which the spike had been pounded into the plaster.

  The photograph had not been decoration. Surely, no one would hang a picture of a cockroach with the intention of beautifying a bedroom. Furthermore, the use of a nail—rather than pushpins or staples or Scotch tape—implied that the person wielding the hammer had done so in considerable anger.

  Clearly, the roach was meant to be a symbol for something else.

  Spencer wondered uneasily if Valerie had nailed it there. That seemed unlikely. The woman with whom he’d talked the previous evening at The Red Door had seemed uncommonly gentle, kind, and all but incapable of serious anger.

  If not Valerie—who?

  As Spencer moved the flashlight beam across the glossy paper, the roach’s carapace glistened as if wet. The shadows of his fingers, which half blocked the lens, created the illusion that the beetle’s spindly legs and antennae jittered briefly.

  Sometimes, serial killers left behind signatures at the scenes of their crimes to identify their work. In Spencer’s experience, that could be anything from a specific playing card, to a Satanic symbol carved in some part of the victim’s anatomy, to a single word or a line of poetry scrawled in blood upon a wall. The nailed photo had the feeling of such a signature, although it was stranger than anything he had seen or about which he had read in the hundreds of case studies with which he was familiar.

  A faint nausea rippled through him. He had encountered no signs of violence in the house, but he had not yet looked in the attached single-car garage. Perhaps he would find Valerie on that cold slab of concrete, as he had seen her earlier in his mind’s eye: lying with one side of her face pressed to the floor, unblinking eyes open wide, a scrollwork of blood obscuring some of her features.

  He knew that he was jumping to conclusions. These days, the average American routinely lived in anticipation of sudden, mindless violence, but Spencer was more sensitized to the dark possibilities of modern life than were most people. He had endured pain and terror that had marked him in many ways, and his tendency now was to expect savagery as surely as sunrises and sunsets.

  As he turned away from the photograph of the roach, wondering if he dared to investigate the garage, the bedroom window shattered inward, and a small black object hurtled through the draperies. At a glimpse, tumbling and airborne, it resembled a grenade.

  Reflexively, he switched off the flashlight even as broken glass was still falling. In the gloom, the grenade thumped softly against the carpet.

  Before Spencer could turn away, he was hit by the explosion. No flash of light accompanied it, only ear-shattering sound—and hard shrapnel snapping into him from his shins to his forehead. He cried out. Fell. Twisted. Writhed. Pain in his legs, hands, face. His torso was protected by his denim jacket. But his hands, God, his hands. He wrung his burning hands. Hot pain. Pure torment. How many fingers lost, bones shattered? Jesus, Jesus, his hands were spastic with pain yet half numb, so he couldn’t assess the damage.

  The worst of it was the fiery agony in his forehead, cheeks, the left corner of his mouth. Excruciating. Desperate to quell the pain, he pressed his hands to his face. He was afraid of what he would find, of the damage he would feel, but his hands throbbed so fiercely that his sense of touch wasn’t trustworthy.

  How many new scars if he survived—how many pale and puckered cicatricial welts or red keloid monstrosities from hairline to chin?

  Get out, get away, find help.

  He kicked-crawled-clawed-twitched like a wounded crab through the darkness. Disoriented and terrified, he nevertheless scrambled in the right direction, across a floor now littered with what seemed to be small marbles, into the bedroom doorway. He clambered to his feet.

  He figured he was caught in a gang war over disputed turf. Los Angeles in the nineties was more violent than Chicago during Prohibition. Modern youth gangs were more savage and better armed than the Mafia, pumped up with drugs and their own brand of racism, as cold-blooded and merciless as snakes.

  Gasping for breath, feeling blindly with aching hands, he stumbled into the hall. Pain coruscated through his legs, weakening him and testing his balance. Staying on his feet was as difficult as it would have been in a revolving fun-house barrel.

  Windows shattered in other rooms, followed by a few muffled explosions. The hallway was windowless, so he wasn’t hit again.

  In spite of his confusion and fear, Spencer realized he didn’t smell blood. Didn’t taste it. In fact, he wasn’t bleeding.

  Suddenly he understood what was happening. Not a gang war. The shrapnel hadn’t cut him, so it wasn’t actually shrapnel. Not marbles, either, littering the floor. Hard rubber pellets. From a sting grenade. Only law-enforcement agencies had sting grenades. He had used them himself. Seconds ago a SWAT team of some kind must have initiated an assault on the bungalow, launching the grenades to disable any occupants.

  The moving van had no doubt been covert transport for the assault force. The movement he had seen at the back of it, out of the corner of his eye, hadn’t been imaginary after all.

  He should have been relieved. The assault was an action of the local police, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, or another law-enforcement organization. Apparently he had stumbled into one of their operations. He knew the drill. If he dropped to the floor, facedown, arms extended over his head, hands spread to prove they were empty, he would be fine; he wouldn’t be shot; they would handcuff him, question him, but they wouldn’t harm him further.

  Except that he had a big problem: He didn’t belong in that bungalow. He was a trespasser. From their point of vi
ew, he might even be a burglar. To them, his explanation for being there would seem lame at best. Hell, they would think it was crazy. He didn’t really understand it himself—why he was so stricken with Valerie, why he had needed to know about her, why he had been bold enough and stupid enough to enter her house.

  He didn’t drop to the floor. On wobbly legs, he staggered through the tunnel-black hall, sliding one hand along the wall.

  The woman was mixed up in something illegal, and at first the authorities would think that he was involved as well. He would be taken into custody, detained for questioning, maybe even booked on suspicion of aiding and abetting Valerie in whatever she had done.

  They would find out who he was.

  The news media would dredge up his past. His face would be on television, in newspapers and magazines. He had lived many years in blessed anonymity, his new name unknown, his appearance altered by time, no longer recognizable. But his privacy was about to be stolen. He would be center ring at the circus again, harassed by reporters, whispered about every time he went out in public.

  No. Intolerable. He couldn’t go through that again. He would rather die.

  They were cops of some kind, and he was innocent of any serious offense; but they were not on his side right now. Without meaning to destroy him, they would do so simply by exposing him to the press.

  More shattering glass. Two explosions.

  The officers on the SWAT team were taking no chances, as if they thought they were up against people crazed on PCP or something worse.

  Spencer had reached the midpoint of the hall, where he stood between two doorways. A dim grayness beyond the right-hand door: the dining room. On his left: the bathroom.

  He stepped into the bathroom, closed the door, hoping to buy time to think.

  The stinging in his face, hands, and legs was slowly subsiding. Rapidly, repeatedly, he clenched his hands, then relaxed them, trying to improve the circulation and work off the numbness.

  From the far end of the house came a wood-splintering crash, hard enough to make the walls shudder. It was probably the front door slamming open or going down.

  Another crash. The kitchen door.

  They were in the house.

  They were coming.

  No time to think. He had to move, relying on instinct and on military training that was, he hoped, at least as extensive as that of the men who were hunting him.

  In the back wall of the cramped room, above the bathtub, the blackness was broken by a rectangle of faint gray light. He stepped into the tub and, with both hands, quickly explored the frame of that small window. He wasn’t convinced that it was big enough to provide a way out, but it was the only possible route of escape.

  If it had been fixed or jalousied, he would have been trapped. Fortunately, it was a single pane that opened inward from the top on a heavy-duty piano hinge. Collapsible elbow braces on both sides clicked softly when fully extended, locking the window open.

  He expected the faint squeak of the hinge and the click of the braces to elicit a shout from someone outside. But the unrelenting drone of the rain screened what sounds he made. No alarm was raised.

  Spencer gripped the window ledge and levered himself into the opening. Cold rain spattered his face. The humid air was heavy with the fecund smells of saturated earth, jasmine, and grass.

  The backyard was a tapestry of gloom, woven exclusively from shades of black and graveyard grays, washed by rain that blurred its details. At least one man—more likely two—from the SWAT team had to be covering the rear of the house. However, though Spencer’s vision was keen, he could not force any of the interwoven shadows to resolve into a human form.

  For a moment his upper body seemed wider than the frame, but he hunched his shoulders, twisted, wriggled, and scraped through the opening. The ground was a short drop from the window. He rolled once on the wet grass and then lay flat on his stomach, head raised, surveying the night, still unable to spot any adversaries.

  In the planting beds and along the property line, the shrubbery was overgrown. Several old fig trees, long untrimmed, were mighty towers of foliage.

  Glimpsed between the branches of those mammoth ficuses, the heavens were not black. The lights of the sprawling metropolis reflected off the bellies of the eastbound storm clouds, painting the vault of the night with deep and sour yellows that, toward the oceanic west, faded into charcoal gray.

  Though familiar to Spencer, the unnatural color of the city sky filled him with a surprising and superstitious dread, for it seemed to be a malevolent firmament under which men were meant to die—and to the sight of which they might wake in Hell. It was a mystery how the yard could remain unlit under that sulfurous glow, yet he could have sworn that it grew blacker the longer he squinted at it.

  The stinging in his legs subsided. His hands still ached but not disablingly, and the burning in his face was less intense than it had been.

  Inside the dark house, an automatic weapon stuttered briefly, spitting out several rounds. One of the cops must be trigger-happy, shooting at shadows or ghosts. Curious. Hair-trigger nerves were uncommon among special-forces officers.

  Spencer scuttled across the sodden grass to the shelter of a nearby triple-trunk ficus. Rising to his feet, with his back against the bark, he surveyed the lawn, the shrubs, and the line of trees along the rear property wall, half convinced he should make a break for it, but also half convinced that he would be spotted and brought down if he stepped into the open.

  Flexing his hands to work off the pain, he considered climbing into the web of wood above him and hiding in the higher bowers. Useless, of course. They would find him in the tree, because they would not admit to his escape until they had searched every shadow and cloak of greenery, both high and low.

  In the bungalow: voices, a door slamming, not even a pretense of stealth and caution any longer, not after the precipitous gunfire. Still no lights.

  Time was running out.

  Arrest, revelation, the glare of videocam lights, reporters shouting questions. Intolerable.

  He silently cursed himself for being so indecisive.

  Rain rattled the leaves above.

  Newspaper stories, magazine spreads, the hateful past alive again, the gaping stares of thoughtless strangers to whom he would be the walking, breathing equivalent of a spectacular train wreck.

  His booming heart counted cadence for the ever quickening march of his fear.

  He could not move. Paralyzed.

  Paralysis served him well, however, when a man dressed in black crept past the tree, holding a weapon that resembled an Uzi. Though he was no more than two strides from Spencer, the guy was focused on the house, ready if his quarry crashed through a window into the night, unaware that the very fugitive he sought was within reach. Then the man saw the open window at the bathroom, and he froze.

  Spencer was moving before his target began to turn. Anyone with SWAT-team training—whether local cop or federal agent—would not go down easily. The only chance of taking the guy quickly and quietly was to hit him hard while he was in the grip of surprise.

  Spencer rammed his right knee into the cop’s crotch, putting everything he had behind it, trying to lift the guy off the ground.

  Some special-forces officers wore jockstraps with aluminum cups on every enter-and-subdue operation, as surely as they wore bullet-resistant Kevlar body jackets or vests. This one was unprotected. He exhaled explosively, a sound that wouldn’t have carried ten feet in the rainy night.

  Even as Spencer was driving his knee upward, he seized the automatic weapon with both hands, wrenching it violently clockwise. It twisted out of the other man’s grasp before he could convulsively squeeze off a burst of warning fire.

  The gunman fell backward on the wet grass. Spencer dropped atop him, carried forward by momentum.

  Though the cop tried to cry out, the agony of that intimate blow had robbed him of his voice. He couldn’t even inhale.

  Spencer could have slamme
d the weapon—a compact submachine gun, judging by the feel of it—into his adversary’s throat, crushing his windpipe, asphyxiating him on his own blood. A blow to the face would have shattered the nose and driven splinters of bone into the brain.

  But he didn’t want to kill or seriously injure anyone. He just needed time to get the hell out of there. He hammered the gun against the cop’s temple, half checking the blow but knocking the poor bastard unconscious.

  The guy was wearing night-vision goggles. The SWAT team was conducting a night stalk with full technological assistance, which was why no lights had come on in the house. They had the vision of cats, and Spencer was the mouse.

  He rolled onto the grass, rose into a crouch, clutching the submachine gun in both hands. It was an Uzi: He recognized the shape and heft of it. He swept the muzzle left and right, anticipating the charge of another adversary. No one came at him.

  Perhaps five seconds had passed since the man in black had crept past the ficus tree.

  Spencer sprinted across the lawn, away from the bungalow, into flowers and shrubs. Greenery lashed his legs. Woody azaleas poked his calves, snagged his jeans.

  He dropped the Uzi. He wasn’t going to shoot at anyone. Even if it meant being taken into custody and exposed to the news media, he would surrender rather than use the gun.

  He waded through the shrubs, between two trees, past a eugenia with phosphorescent white blossoms, and reached the property wall.

  He was as good as gone. If they spotted him now, they wouldn’t shoot him in the back. They’d shout a warning, identify themselves, order him to freeze, and come after him, but they wouldn’t shoot.

  The stucco-sheathed, concrete-block wall was six feet high, capped with bull-nose bricks that were slippery with rain. He got a grip, pulled himself up, scrabbling at the stucco with the toes of his athletic shoes.

  As he slid onto the top of the wall, belly against the cold bricks, and drew up his legs, gunfire erupted behind him. Bullets smacked into the concrete blocks, so close that chips of stucco sprayed his face.

  Nobody shouted a goddamned warning.