Shattered Page 9

  “Who's there?” Doyle finally asked. He was surprised at the strength and self-possession so evident in his voice. Indeed, he was surprised that he could even speak at all.

  The wire stopped moving.

  “Who's there?” Doyle demanded once more, louder this time but with less genuine courage and more false bravado than before.

  Rapid footsteps—certainly those of a large man—sounded on the concrete promenade floor and were quickly swallowed up in the steady roar of the storm.

  They waited, listening intently. But the man was gone.

  Alex fumbled for the light switch by the door, found it.

  For a moment they were both blinded by the sudden glare. Then the familiar lines of the tritely designed motel room filtered back to them.

  “He'll return,” Colin said.

  The boy was standing by the desk, wearing only his skivvies and his Coke-bottle glasses. His thin brown legs were trembling uncontrollably, the bony knees nearly knocking together. Doyle, also standing there in his underwear, wondered if his own body was betraying his state of mind.

  “Maybe not,” he said. “Now that he knows we're up and around, he might not risk coming back.”

  Colin was adamant. “He will.”

  Doyle knew what the situation demanded, but he did not want to face up to it. He did not want to go out there in the rain, looking for the man who had tried to pick the room lock.

  “We could call the police,” Colin said.

  “Oh? We still haven't anything to tell them, any proof. We'd sound like a couple of raving lunatics.”

  Colin went back to his bed and sat down, pulled the blanket around himself, so that he looked like a miniature American Indian.

  In the bathroom, Doyle drew a glass of tap water and drank it slowly, swallowing with some difficulty.

  As he rinsed the glass and put it on the fake-marble shelf beside the porcelain sink, he caught sight of his face in the mirror. He was pale and haggard. The fear was etched in painfully obvious lines at the corners of his bloodless mouth and all around his eyes. He did not like what he saw, and he could barely meet his own gaze.

  Christ, he thought, doesn't the frightened little boy ever fade away and let the man come through? Won't you ever outgrow it, Alex? Are you going to be so easily terrified all the rest of your life? Now that you have a wife to protect? Do you think that maybe Colin will grow up fast enough so that he will be able to look after both you and Courtney?

  Angry with himself, half ashamed, but still undeniably frightened, he turned away from the mirror and his own accusing countenance, and went back into the main room.

  Colin had not moved from the bed or dropped the blanket from his shoulders. He looked at Doyle, his large eyes magnified by the eyeglasses, the speck of fear magnified as well. “What would he have done if he'd been able to pick the lock without waking us?”

  Doyle stood there in the middle of the room, unable to answer.

  “When he got in here with us,” the boy said, “what would he have done? Like you said when all this started—we don't have anything worth stealing.”

  Doyle nodded stupidly.

  “I think he's just what you said,” Colin went on. “I think he's like one of those people you read about in the papers. I think he's a maniac.” His voice had become almost inaudible.

  Though he knew that it was no real answer and was probably even untrue, Alex said, “Well . . . he's gone now.”

  Colin just looked at him.

  The boy's expression might have meant anything, or nothing at all. But Alex saw in it the beginnings of doubt and a subtle shift of judgment. The boy, he felt certain, was reevaluating him just as surely as the rain pattered on the roof overhead. And although Colin was far too intelligent to sum up anyone in an absolute term or category, too clever to think in blacks and whites, his opinion of Doyle was this minute changing for the worse, no matter how minimally.

  But, Doyle asked himself, did one child's opinion mean all that much to him? And he knew immediately that when it was this child, the answer was yes. All of his life Doyle had been afraid of people, too timid to let himself be close to anyone. He had been too unsure of himself to risk loving. Until he had met Courtney. And Colin. And now their opinions of him were more important than anything else in the world.

  He heard his own voice as if it had come from someone else. “I guess I better go outside and have a look around. If I can get a glimpse of him, see what he looks like, get the license number for that van of his . . . Then we'll at least know something about our enemy. He won't be such a cipher - and he'll seem less frightening.”

  “And if he does try anything serious,” Colin said, “we'll have a description to give the cops.”

  Doyle nodded numbly, then went to the closet and took out the rumpled, soiled clothes he had worn the day before. He got dressed.

  At the door a few minutes later, he looked back at Colin. “Will you be all right here by yourself?”

  The boy nodded and drew the blanket tightly around himself.

  “I'll lock the door when I go out-and I won't take a key. Don't open up for anyone but me. And don't even open for me until you're certain that you recognize my voice.”

  “Okay.”

  “I won't be long.”

  Colin nodded again. Then, as frightened as he was for himself and Alex, he managed a bit of gallows humor. “You better be careful. It would be utterly tasteless for an artist to let himself be killed in a cheap, dismal place like this.”

  Doyle smiled grimly. “No chance.” Then he went outside, making sure the door had locked behind him.

  Earlier in the evening and fifteen hundred miles to the east, Detective Ernie Hoval opened the front door of a thirty-thousand dollar three-bedroom ranch house in a pleasant middle-class development between Cambridge and Cadiz, Ohio, just off Route 22, and stepped into an entrance foyer which was liberally splashed with blood. Long red stains smeared the walls on both sides where desperate hands had slid down the plaster. Thick droplets of blood spotted the beige carpet and the yellow-brocade loveseat by the coat closet.

  Hoval closed the door and walked into the living room, where a dead woman lay half on the sofa and half on the floor. She had been in her late forties, rather handsome if not pretty, tall and dark. She had taken a shotgun blast in the stomach.

  Newspaper reporters and lab photographers circled her like wolves. Four lab technicians, as silent as a quartet of deaf-mutes, crawled all over the big room on their hands and knees, measuring and charting the spray patterns of the blood, which seemed to have reached into every nook and cranny. They were most likely fighting to keep from being sick.

  “Christ,” Hoval said.

  He went through the living room and down the narrow hall to the first bathroom, where there was an extremely pretty teenage girl sprawled at the foot of a bloodstained commode. She was wearing skimpy blue panties, nothing else, and had been shot once in the back of the head. The bathroom was even bloodier than the foyer and the living room combined.

  In the smallest bedroom, a good-looking, long-haired bearded boy in his early twenties was lying on his back in bed, covers drawn up to his chin, his hands folded peacefully on his chest. The pastel blanket was soaked with blood and shredded in the center by shotgun pellets. The poster of the Rolling Stones stapled to the wall above the bed was streaked with red and curled damply at the edges.

  “I thought you were only working on the Pulham case.”

  Hoval turned to see who had spoken and confronted the ineffectual-looking lab man who had lifted the killer's fingerprints from Rich Pulham's squad car. “I heard the report of the initial find and thought maybe this was tied in. It is kind of similar.”

  “It was a family thing,” the lab man said.

  “They already have a suspect?”

  “They already have a confession,” the technician said, glancing uninterestedly at the dead boy on the bed.

  “Who?”

  “Husband a
nd father.”

  “He killed his own family?” This was not the first time Hoval had encountered a thing like that, but it never failed to shock him. His own wife and kids meant too much to him, were too intricate a part of his life for him to ever understand how another man could bring himself to slaughter his own flesh and blood.

  “He was waiting for the arresting officers,” the technician said. “He was the one who telephoned for them.”

  Hoval felt ill.

  “Anything on the Pulham situation?”

  Hoval leaned against the wall, remembered the blood, pulled away and checked for stains. But the wall here was clean. He leaned back again, uneasy, a chill coursing along his spine. “We think we have something,” he told the technician. “It might have started at Breen's Cafe back at the interchange.” He summarized what they had learned from Janet Kinder, the waitress who had served an unnamed oddball his lunch Monday afternoon. “If Pulham went after the man—and it looks more and more like he did—then our killer is driving a rented van on his way to California.”

  “Hardly enough data for you to put out an APB, is there?”

  Hoval nodded glumly. “Must be a thousand Automovers going west on I-70. It'll take weeks to go through them all, trace the drivers, winnow it down to the bastard that did it.”

  “This waitress give a description?” the lab man asked.

  “Yeah. She's man-crazy, so she remembers these things well.” He repeated the description they had gotten from the waitress.

  “He doesn't sound like a left-wing revolutionary to me,” the lab man said. “More like an ex-marine.”

  “There's no way to tell these days,” Ernie Hoval said. “The SDS and some of these other crazies are cutting their hair, shaving, bathing, blending right in with your decent average citizens.” He was impatient with the sallow man and did not want to pursue the subject; quite obviously, they were not on the same wavelength. He leaned away from the wall and looked once more into the bloody bedroom. “Why?”

  “Why this? Why'd he kill his own family?

  “Yes.”

  “He's very religious,” the technician said, smiling again.

  Hoval didn't get it. He said so.

  “He's a lay preacher. Very dedicated to Christ, you know. Spreads the Good Word as much as he can, reads the Bible for an hour every night . . . Then he sees his boy going off the deep end with drugs—or at least pot. He thinks his daughter's got loose morals or maybe no morals at all, because she won't tell him who she's dating or why she stays out so late. And the mother took up for both the kids a little too much. She was encouraging them to sin, as it were.”

  “And what finally set him off?” Hoval asked.

  “Nothing much. He says that all the little day-to-day things mounted up until he couldn't stand it any longer.”

  “And the solution was murder.”

  “For him, anyway.”

  Hoval shook his head sadly, thinking of the pretty girl lying on the bathroom floor. “What's the world coming to these days?”

  “Not the world,” the slim man said. “Not the whole world.”

  Eleven

  It was a hard rain, a downpour, a seemingly perpetual cloudburst. The wind from the east pushed it across high Denver in vicious, eroding sheets. It streamed off the peaked black-slate roofs of the four motel wings, chuckled rather pleasantly along the horizontal sections of spouting, roared down the wide vertical spouts, and gushed noisily into the drainage gratings in the ground. Everywhere, trees dripped, shrubs dripped, and flat surfaces glistened darkly. Dirty water collected in depressions in the courtyard lawn. The hard-driven droplets shattered the crystalline tranquility of the swimming pool, danced on the flagstones laid around the pool, flattened the tough grass that encircled the flagstones.

  The gusting wind brought the rain under the awning and into the second-level promenade outside of Doyle's room. The moment he closed the door, locking Colin inside, a whirlwind of cold water raced along the walkway and spun over him, soaking his right side. His blue work shirt and one leg of his well-worn jeans clung uncomfortably to his skin.

  Shivering, he looked southward, down the longest stretch of the walkway, to the courtyard steps at the far end. The shadows were deep. None of the rooms had light in them; and the weak night lights on the promenade were spaced fifty or sixty feet apart. The night mist complicated the picture, curling around the iron awning supports and eddying in the recessed entrances to the rooms. Nevertheless, Doyle was fairly sure that there was no one prowling about in that direction.

  Thirty feet to the north, two rooms beyond their own, another wing of the motel grid intersected this one, forming the northeast corner of the courtyard overlook. Whoever had been at their door might have run up there in a second, might have ducked quickly out of sight Alex tucked his head down to keep the rain out of his face, ' hurried up that way and peered cautiously around the corner.

  There was nothing down the short arm of that corridor except more red doors, the night mist, darkness, and wet concrete. A blue safety bulb burning behind a protective wire cage marked another set of open steps that led down to the first level, this time to the parking lot which completely ringed the complex.

  The last segment of his own walkway, running off to the north, was equally deserted, as was the remainder of the second-level east-west wing.

  He walked back to the wrought-iron railing and looked down into the courtyard at the pool and the landscaped grounds around it. The only things that moved down there were those stirred by the wind and the rain.

  Suddenly Alex had the eerie notion that he was not merely alone out here—but that he was the only living soul in the entire motel. He felt as if all the rooms were empty, the lobby empty, the manager's quarters empty, all of it abandoned in the wake—or perhaps the approach—of some great cataclysm. The overbearing silence, except for the rain, and the bleak concrete hallways generated and fed this odd fantasy until it became disturbingly real and a bit upsetting.

  Don't let the frightened little kid come to the surface again, Doyle warned himself. You've done well so far. Don't lose your cool now.

  After a few minutes of observation, during which he leaned with both hands on the fancy iron safety railing, Doyle was convinced that the miniature pine trees and the neatly trimmed shrubbery in the courtyard below did not conceal anyone; their shadows were entirely their own.

  The crisscrossing promenades remained quiet, deserted.

  The windows were all dark.

  Underneath the steadily drumming rain and the occasional banshee cries of the storm wind, the sepulcher silence continued undisturbed.

  Standing by the rail, Alex had been without protection, and now he was thoroughly drenched. His shirt and trousers were sodden. Water had even gotten into his boots and had made his socks all cold and squishy. His arms were decorated with rank on rank of goose pimples, and he was shivering uncontrollably. His nose was running, and his eyes were teary from squinting out at the rain and fog.

  Nevertheless, Doyle felt better than he had for some time. Although he had not found the stranger who was harassing them, he had at least tried to confront the man. Finally, he had done something more than run away from the situation. He could have remained in the room despite Colin's accusing look, could have made it through the night without taking this risk. But he had taken the risk, after all, and now he felt somewhat better, pleased with himself.

  Of course, there was nothing more to be done. Whoever the stranger was, and whatever the hell he had intended to do once he had picked their lock, the man had obviously lost interest in his game when he realized that they were awake and onto him. He would not be back tonight. Perhaps they would never see him again at all, here or anywhere.

  When he turned and started back toward their room, all of his good humor was abruptly forgotten . . .

  Two hundred feet along the same walkway which he had first examined on coming out of the room, along a corridor that had appeared to be
absolutely empty and safe, a man stepped out of a recess in front of a door and hurried to the courtyard steps in the southeast corner of the overlook, thumped down them two at a time. He was very nearly invisible, thanks to the mist and the rain and the darkness. Doyle saw him only as a shapeless figure, a shadowy phantom . . . However, the hollow sound of his footsteps on the open stairs was proof that he was no imagined spirit.

  Doyle went to the railing and looked down.

  A big man dressed in dark clothes, made otherwise featureless by the night and the storm, loped across the lawn and the flagstones by the pool. He ducked under the floor of the second-level walkway which served as the roof over the first-level promenade.

  Before he quite realized what he was doing, Alex started after the man. He ran to the head of the courtyard steps and went down fast, came out on the lawn where the rain and wind rolled openly.

  The stranger was no longer over there on the ground-floor walkway where he had been when Doyle had last seen him. Indeed, he seemed to have vanished into thin air.

  Doyle looked at the pines and shrubs from this new prospective, and he realized that the stranger might have doubled back to wait for him. The feathery shadows were menacing, far too deep and too dangerous . . .

  Taking advantage of the yellow and green lights that surrounded the swimming pool and avoiding the shadows, Doyle crossed the courtyard without incident. However, he had no sooner gotten out of the worst of the wind and rain than he heard footsteps again. This time they were at the back of the complex, to the north, going up to the second level on this wing. He followed the hauntingly hollow thump-thump-thump which was barely audible above the rain sounds.

  The stairwell was deserted when he got to it, a straight flight of wet and mottled gray-brown risers.

  He stood at the bottom for a minute, looking up, thinking. He was quite aware of the easy target that he would make when he came out at the top, all too vulnerable to a gun or knife or even to a quick shove that would carry him back down the way he had come.