Phantoms

Page 35

They found the two boys in one of the bedrooms.
It was a wonderful room for kids, large and airy, with bunk beds. There were built-in bookshelves full of children's books. On the walls were paintings that Ned had done just for his kids, whimsical fantasy scenes quite unlike the pieces for which he was well known: a pig in a tuxedo, dancing with a cow in an evening gown; the interior of a spaceship command chamber, where all the astronauts were toads; an eerie yet charming scene of a school playground at night, bathed in the light of a full moon, no kids around, but with a huge and monstrous-looking werewolf having a grand and giddy time on a set of swings.
The boys were in one corner, beyond an array of overturned Tonka Toys. The younger boy, Terry, was behind Lee, who seemed to have made a valiant effort to protect his smaller brother. The boys were staring out into the room, eyes bulging, their dead gazes still fixed upon whatever had descended upon them yesterday. Lee's muscles had locked, so that his thin arms were in the same position now as they had been in the last seconds of his life: raised in front of him, shielding him, palms spread, as if warding off blows.
Bryce knelt in front of the kids. He put one trembling hand against Lee's face, as if unwilling to believe that the child was actually dead.
Jenny knelt beside him.
“Those are the Bischoffs' two boys,” she said, unable to keep her voice from breaking. “So now the whole family's accounted for.”
Tears were streaming down Bryce's face.
Jenny tried to remember how old his own son was. Seven or eight? About the same age as Lee Bischoff. Little Timmy Hammond was lying in the hospital in Santa Mira this very minute, comatose, just as he had been for the past year. He was pretty much a vegetable. Yes, but even that was better than this. Anything was better than this.
Eventually, Bryce's tears dried up. There was rage in him now. “I'll get them for this,” he said, “Whoever did this… I'll make them pay.”
Jenny had never met a man quite like him. He had considerable masculine strength and purpose, but he was also capable of tenderness.
She wanted to hold him. And be held.
But, as always, she was far too guarded about expressing her own emotional state. If she had possessed his openness, she would never have become estranged from her mother. But she wasn't that way, not yet, although she wanted to be. So, in response to his vow to get the killers of the Bischoffs' children, she said, “But what if it isn't anything human that killed them? Not all evil is in men. There's evil in nature. The blind maliciousness of earthquakes. The uncaring evil of cancer. This thing here could be like that-remote and unaccountable. There'll be no taking it to court if it isn't even human. What then?”
“Whoever or whatever the hell it is, I'll get it. I'll stop it. I'll make it pay for what's been done here,” he said stubbornly.
Frank Autry's search team prowled through three deserted houses after leaving the Catholic church. The fourth house wasn't empty. They found Wendel! Hulbertson, a high school teacher who worked in Santa Mira but who chose to live here in the mountains, in a house that had once belonged to his mother. Gordy had been in Hulbertson's English class only five years ago. The teacher was not swollen or bruised like the other corpses; he had taken his own life. Backed into a corner of his bedroom, he had put the barrel of a.32 automatic in his mouth and had pulled the trigger. Evidently, death by his own hand had been preferable to whatever it had been about to do to him.
After leaving the Bischoff residence, Bryce led his group through a few houses without finding any bodies. Then, in the fifth house, they discovered an elderly husband and wife locked in a bathroom, where they had tried to hide from their killer. She was sprawled in the tub. He was in a heap on the floor.
“They were patients of mine,” Jenny said, “Nick and Melina Papandrakis.”
Tal wrote their names down on a list of the dead.
Like Harold Ordnay and his wife in the Candle glow Inn, Nick Papandrakis had attempted to leave a message that would point a finger at the killer. He had taken some iodine from the medicine cabinet and had used it to paint on the wall. He hadn't had a chance to finish even one word. There were only two letters and part of a third:
PR(
“Can anyone figure out what he intended to write?” Bryce asked.
They all took turns squeezing into the bathroom and stepped over Nick Papandrakis's corpse to have a look at the orange brown letters on the wall, but none of them had any flashes of inspiration.
Bullets.
In the house next to the Papandrakis’s, the kitchen floor was littered with expended bullets. Not entire cartridges. Just dozens of lead slugs, and their brass casings.
The fact that there were no ejected casings anywhere in the room indicated that no gunfire had taken place here. There was no odor of gunpowder. No bullet holes in the walls or cabinets.
There were just bullets all over the floor, as if they had rained magically out of thin air.
Frank Autry scooped up a handful of the gray lumps of metal. He wasn't a ballistics expert, but, oddly, none of the bullets was fragmented or badly deformed, and that enabled him to see that they had come from a variety of weapons. Most of them-scores of them-with caliber of ammunition that was spat out by the submachine guns with which General Copperfield's support units were armed.
Are these slugs from Sergeant Harker's gun? Frank wondered. Are these the rounds Harker fired at his killer in the meat locker at Gil Martin's Market?
He frowned, perplexed.
He dropped the bullets, and they clattered on the floor. He plucked several other slugs off the tiles. There were a.22 and a.32 and another.22 and a.38. There were even a lot of shotgun pellets.
He picked up a single.45-caliber bullet and examined it with special interest. It was exactly the ammunition that his own revolver handled.
Gordy Brogan hunkered down beside him.
Frank didn't look at Gordy. He continued to stare intently at the slug. He was wrestling with an eerie thought.
Gordy scooped a few bullets off the kitchen tiles. “-They aren't deformed at all.”
Frank nodded.
“They had to've hit something,” Gordy said, “So they should be deformed. Some of them should be, anyway, “He paused, then said.” Hey, you're a million miles away. What're-you thinking about?”
“Paul Henderson.” Frank held the.45 slug in front of Gordy's face, “Paul fired three like this last night, over at the substation.”
“At his killer.”
“Yeah.”
“So?”
“So I have this crazy hunch that if we asked the lab to run ballistics tests on it, they'd find residue from Paul's revolver.”
Gordy blinked at him.
“And,” Frank said, “I also think that if we searched through all of the slugs on the floor here, we'd find exactly two more like this one. Not just one more, mind you. And not three more. Just two more with precisely the same markings as this one.”
“You mean… the same three Paul fired last night.”
“Yeah.”
“But how'd they get from there to here?”
Frank didn't answer. Instead, he stood and thumbed the send button on the walkie-talkie. “Sheriff?”
Bryce Hammond's voice issued crisply from the small speaker. “What is it, Frank?”
“We're still here at the Sheffield house. I think you'd better come over. There's something you ought to see.”
“More bodies?”
“No, sir. Uh… something sort of weird.”
“We'll be there,” the sheriff said.
Then, to Gordy, Frank said, “What I think is… sometime within the past couple of hours, sometime after Sergeant Harker was taken from Gil Martin's Market, it was here, right in this room. It got rid of all the bullets it'd taken last night and this morning.”
“The hits it took?”
“Yes.”
“Got rid of them? Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Frank said.
“But how?”
“Looks like it just sort of… expelled them. Looks like it shed those bullets the way a dog shakes off loose hairs.”
Chapter 29 – On the Run
Driving through Santa Mira in the stolen Datsun, Fletcher Kale heard about Snowfield on the radio.
Although it had captured the rest of the country's attention, Kale wasn't very interested. He was never particularly compassionate about other people's tragedies.
He reached out to switch off the radio, already weary of hearing about Snowfield when he had so many problems of his own-and then he caught a name that did mean something to him. Jake Johnson. Johnson was one of the deputies who had gone up to Snowfield last night. Now he was missing and might even be dead.
Jake Johnson…
A year ago, Kale had sold Johnson a solidly built log cabin on five acres in the mountains.
Johnson had professed to be an avid hunter and had pretended to want the cabin for that purpose. However, from a number of things the deputy let slip, Kate decided dud Johnson was actually a survivalist, one of those doomsayers who believed the world was rushing toward Armageddon and that society was going to collapse either because of runaway inflation or nuclear war or some other Kale became increasingly convinced that Johnson wanted the cabin for a hiding place that could be stocked with food and ammunition then easily defended in times of social upheaval.
The cabin was certainly remote enough for that purpose. It was on Snowtop Mountain, all the way around the other side from the town of Snowfield. To get to the place, you had to go up a county fire road, a narrow dirt track that was passable virtually only to a four-wheel vehicle, then switch to another, even tougher track. The final quarter-mile had to be covered on foot.
Two months after Johnson purchased the mountain property, Kale sneaked up there on a warm June morning when he knew the deputy was on duty in Santa Mira. He wanted to see if Johnson was turning the place into a wilderness fortress, as he suspected.
He found the cabin untouched, but he discovered that Johnson was doing extensive work in some of the limestone caves to which there was an entrance on his land. Outside the caves, there were sacks of cement and sand, a wheelbarrow, and a pile of stones.
Just inside the mouth of the first cave, there had been two Coleman gas lanterns standing on the stone floor, by the wall. Kale had picked up one of the lanterns and had gone deeper into the subterranean chambers.
The first cave was long and narrow, little more than a tunnel. At the end of it, he followed a series of doglegs, twisting through irregular limestone antechambers, before he came into the first roomlike cave.
Stacked against one wall were cases of five-pound, vacuum sealed cans of nitrogen-preserved milk powder, freeze-dried fruits and vegetables, freeze-dried soup, powdered eggs, cans of honey, drums of whole grain. An air mattress. And much more. Jake had been busy.
The first underground room led to another. In this one, there was a naturally formed hole in the floor, about ten inches in diameter, and odd noises were rising out of it. Whispering voices. Menacing laughter. Kale almost turned and ran, but then he realized that he was hearing nothing more sinister than the chuckling of running water. An underground stream. Jake Johnson had lowered one-inch rubber tubing into the natural well and had rigged a hand pump beside it.
All the comforts of home.
Kale decided that Johnson was not merely cautious. The man was obsessed.
On another day at the end of that same summer, late in August, Kale returned to the mountain property. To his surprise, the cave mouth-which was about four feet high and five feet wide-was no longer visible. Johnson had created an effective barrier of vegetation to conceal the entrance to his hideaway.
Kale pushed through the brush, careful not to harm it.
He had brought his own flashlight this time. He crawled through the mouth of the cave, stood up once he was inside, followed the tunnel down three doglegs-and suddenly came up against an unexpected dead end. He knew there should be one more short doglegged passageway and then the first of the large caves. Instead, there was only a wall of limestone, a flat face of it that sealed off the rest of the caverns.
For a moment Kale was at the barrier, confused. Then he examined it closely, and in a few minutes he found the hidden release. The rock was actually a thin facade that had been bonded with epoxy to a door that Johnson had cleverly mounted in the natural frame between the final dogleg and the first of the room-size caves.
That day in August, marveling over the hidden door, Kale decided that he would take the retreat for his own if the need ever arose. After all, maybe these survivalists were on to something. Maybe they were right. Maybe the fools out there would try to blow up the world some day. If so, Kale would get to this retreat first, and when Johnson came through his cleverly hidden door, Kale would simply blow him away.
That thought pleased him.
It made him feel shrewd. Superior.
Thirteen months later, he had, much to his surprise and horror, seen the end of the world coming. The end of his world. Locked up in the county jail, charged with murder, he knew where he could go if he could only manage to escape: into the mountains, to the caves. He could stay up there for several weeks, until the cops finally stopped looking for him in and around Santa Mira County.
Thank you, Jake Johnson.
Jake Johnson…
Now, in the stolen yellow Datsun, with the county jail only a few minutes behind him, Kale heard about Johnson on the radio. As he listened, he began to smile. Fate was on his side.
After escaping, his biggest problem was disposing of his jail clothes and getting properly outfitted for the mountains.
He hadn't been quite sure how he would do that.
As soon as he heard the radio reporter say that Jake Johnson was dead-or at least out of the way, up there in Snowfield Kale knew he would go straight to Johnson's house, here in Santa Mira. Johnson had no family. It was a safe, temporary hiding place. Johnson wasn't exactly Kale's size, but they were close enough so that Kale could swap his jail uniform for the most suitable items in the deputy's closet.
And guns. Jake Johnson, survivalist that he was, would surely have a gun collection somewhere in the house.
The deputy lived in the same one-story, three-bedroom house that he had inherited from his father, Big Ralph Johnson. It wasn't what you would call a showplace. Big Ralph hadn't spent his bribe and graft money with reckless abandon; he had known how to keep a low profile when it came to anything that might draw the attention of a passing IRS agent. Not that the Johnson place was a shack. It was in the center block of Pine Shadow Lane, a well-established neighborhood of mostly larger homes, oversized lots, and mature trees. The Johnson house, one of the smaller ones, had a large Jacuzzi sunk in the tile floor of its rear sun porch, an enormous game room with an antique pool table, and a number of other creature comforts not visible from outside.