She reached the Ford without incident. She drove back to the San Fernando Valley, where she would spend a second night in her most recent motel room and move on in the morning.
Tomorrow, she would start with Dr. Emily Jo Rossman, the L.A. forensic pathologist who examined the brain of Benedetta Ashcroft, the woman who had committed suicide in a Century City hotel. The autopsy report, provided by Robert Branwick, alias Jimmy Radburn, referenced photographs, but the photos were not in the file.
Jane didn’t know where she would go after Dr. Rossman. Sooner than later, she had to make a move on Bertold Shenneck. But getting at him on his seventy-acre property in Napa Valley looked like a job for a Navy SEAL team, not for a lone woman.
She had half an idea, a crazy and reckless idea, based on a wild guess. But she had come to a crisis point in the investigation. There was no way back, and she was at a brink. If Overton’s body was discovered on Monday, his associates in Far Horizons might assume that he’d earned his death by some bit of shady business unconnected to them, but they were more likely to raise their guard even higher than it already was. With a cliff ahead and no way back, crazy and reckless ideas had an appeal if they were the only ideas you had.
20
* * *
NOW THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY. The monocular moon in the black cowl of the sky. Friday-night traffic, drivers jostling for every advantage. The attack in Philadelphia, not yet five days in the past, had been consigned to a memory hole as everybody hurried to one weekend pleasure or another before there might be no pleasures anymore.
Jane stopped at Pizza & More to get takeout. Two submarine sandwiches and an order of pepper slaw.
At the door to her motel room in Tarzana, she put down the tote bag with its incriminating treasures and the bag of takeout. She fished the key from a pocket of her sport coat and suddenly thought, He’s in there waiting for me.
The he in this flash of fantasy was the hulk from Palisades Park, the same who had come blasting a shotgun into the kitchen at the Branwick house the previous night.
He could not possibly have tracked her to this place. Her alarm had no origin in intuition or even in cruder instinct. The events of the evening had pulled her nerves as taut as bowstrings.
She considered drawing her pistol, but she did not, could not. If she started doing firearm protocol because of an obviously bogus threat, there would be no end to the bogeymen springing from her imagination. The edge she needed would be worn away until she would one day mistake a real threat for just another phantom.
She unlocked the door. Reached inside. Flipped the wall switch.
No one waited for her in the bedroom.
She picked up the tote bag and the takeout and went inside and pressed the door shut with her hip. She set down the tote bag and engaged the deadbolt.
After putting the takeout on the small table, she went to the bathroom, pushed open the door, turned on the light. No one.
She returned to the bedroom with a drinking glass and put it on the table, and then she slid open the closet door. The only things in there were suitcases and the trash bag full of autopsy reports.
“Better have a peek under the bed,” she said sourly as she took off her gloves, but she didn’t allow herself to look.
She went outside to the nearby vending-machine alcove to fill the ice bucket and get a couple of Cokes.
When she returned to her room, she did not check the bathroom and closet again.
Coke and vodka over ice. She took a drink. Added some Coke.
She went into the bathroom and washed her hands and dried them and stared at herself in the mirror and thought she looked different in some fundamental way, though she couldn’t name the difference.
In the bedroom, sitting at the table, for a while she held in her hand the half of the locket, the silver oval with the soapstone cameo. Then she put it on the table beside her drink.
She tore open the takeout bag and used it as a placemat. She took the meat and cheese and other filling from one sub and stuffed it into the other sandwich, and discarded the empty bun. There was a plastic fork for the container of coleslaw.
She didn’t turn on any music. At the moment, it seemed that music might mask some other sound she would need to hear.
Later, lying on her back in bed, the Heckler & Koch under the neighboring pillow, she thought about how she had killed two perps in almost seven years as an FBI special agent, about how she had killed two more in just the past two days, and she wondered who she would be a year from now, or tomorrow.
She thought of LuLing, those dark eyes of oceanic depths in which little or nothing swam.
When she slept, she dreamed that she was naked, lying on a slab of stainless steel, alive but unable to move. The two men whom she had most recently killed now appeared as they had been in life. With great solemnity, they rolled the steel slab toward the flame-filled maw of a cremator. Although paralyzed, she was able to speak, and in the voice of LuLing, she said, “I would like nothing more than to make you happy.” The two men gazed down at her and opened their mouths to speak, but instead of words, from them issued white mice swarming as if they were bees.
21
* * *
AT TEN O’CLOCK FRIDAY evening, Bertold Shenneck rolls a kitchen cart onto the terrace of his house in Napa Valley.
The clarity of the cool air is such that the sky is replete with stars uncountable that are rarely if ever seen above cities.
The moon rides high. Its secondhand sunlight haunts the dark valley and paints an ectoplasmic glow along the crests of the mountains to the west.
On the two shelves of the kitchen cart are dishpans containing raw chickens that one of the rayshaws purchased at the supermarket in town that afternoon.
Shenneck carries a dishpan into the yard. He places the poultry at intervals across the grass. The pale flesh glisters in moonlight.
The coyotes are not at the moment present. These are their hunting hours. They prowl the meadows and the woods singly and in small packs, chasing down rodents and rabbits and other prey.
From the second dishpan, Shenneck plucks the denuded birds and distributes them as he did the first group.
There is some evidence, far from definitive, that the coyotes he controls are proving to be less successful hunters than they were prior to their brain implants. Until he can study the matter further and gather more data, he finds it advisable to augment their diet in this manner.
In the past month, there have been two incidents that Shenneck doesn’t want to see repeated. The coyote, Canis latrans, is a fierce predator, but it is not among the very few species that will eat its own kind. Yet twice in this very yard, during the night when Inga and Bertold have been asleep, one coyote has attacked another and killed it and partly eaten it.
He would have thought a mountain lion had done the deed, but the security camera had revealed the disturbing truth.
Shenneck assumes that a diminishment in the coyotes’ ability to track and seize their usual prey has left some of them hungry enough to turn on others of their kind. He is, however, considering other curious aspects of these incidents that may give rise to another theory.
Because he can electronically track every individual that has been injected with a self-assembling nano-implant, he knows that the other twelve are still mobile and alive. The only two that have fallen victim to other coyotes are the two killed on this lawn.
Why here rather than in the wild?
It almost seems to the good doctor that these two killings have a ritualistic quality, as if they were meant to make a statement of some kind. This is not possible, of course, because beasts of such low intelligence have neither the capacity to formulate rituals nor the desire to make a statement. And yet…
Shenneck rolls the cart into the kitchen and switches off the backyard lights. He leaves the dishpans for one of the rayshaws to clean and put away in the morning, and he goes upstairs to bed.