On the other hand, their pliability made his job a hell of a lot easier than it otherwise might have been.
He followed Dormon, Johnson, and Vecchio outside, and he was the last to drive away. He glanced repeatedly at the house, but no faces appeared at the door or at any of the windows.
A disaster had been narrowly averted.
Roy, who prided himself on his generally even temper, could not remember being as angry with anyone in a long time as he was with Spencer Grant. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on the guy.
Spencer packed a canvas satchel with several cans of dog food, a box of biscuit treats, a new rawhide bone, Rocky’s water and food bowls, and a rubber toy that looked convincingly like a cheeseburger in a sesame-seed bun. He stood the satchel beside his own suitcase, near the front door.
The dog was still checking the windows from time to time, but not as obsessively as before. For the most part, he had overcome the nameless terror that propelled him out of his dream. Now his fear was of a more mundane and quieter variety: the anxiety that always possessed him when he sensed that they were about to do something out of their daily routine, a wariness of change. He padded after Spencer to see if any alarming actions were being taken, returned repeatedly to the suitcase to sniff it, and visited his favorite corners of the house to sigh over them as though he suspected that he might never have the chance to enjoy their comforts again.
Spencer removed a laptop computer from a storage shelf above his desk and put it beside the satchel and suitcase. He’d purchased it in September, so he could develop his own programs while sitting on the porch, enjoying the fresh air and the soothing susurration of autumn breezes stirring the eucalyptus grove. Now it would keep him wired into the great American info network during his travels.
He returned to his desk and switched on the larger computer. He made floppy-disk copies of some of the programs he had designed, including the one that could detect the faint electronic signature of an eavesdropper on a phone line being used for a computer-to-computer dialogue. Another would warn him if, while he was hacking, someone began hunting him down with sophisticated trace-back technology.
Rocky was at a window again, alternately grumbling and whining softly at the night.
At the west end of the San Fernando Valley, Roy drove into hills and across canyons. He was not yet beyond the web of interlocking cities, but there were pockets of primordial blackness between the clustered lights of the suburban blaze.
This time, he would proceed with more caution than he had shown previously. If the address from the DMV proved to be the home of another family who, like the Zelinskys, had never heard of Spencer Grant, Roy preferred to find that out
In this age of impending social chaos, breaking into a private home — whether behind the authority of a genuine badge or not — was a riskier business than it had once been. The residents might be anything from child- molesting worshipers of Satan to cohabiting serial killers with cannibalistic tendencies, refrigerators full of body parts, and eating utensils prettily hand-carved out of human bones. On the cusp of the millennium, some damned strange people were loose out there in fun-house America.
Following a two-lane road into a dark hollow that was threaded with gossamer fog, Roy began to suspect he wouldn’t be confronted with an ordinary suburban house or with the simple question of whether or not it was occupied by Spencer Grant. Something else awaited him.
The blacktop became one lane of loose gravel, flanked by sickly palms that had not been trimmed in years and that sported long ruffs of dead fronds. At last it came to a gate in a chain-link fence.
The phony pizza-shop truck was already there; its red taillights were refracted by the thin mist. Roy checked his rearview mirror and saw headlights a hundred yards behind him: Johnson and Vecchio.
He walked to the gate. Cal Dormon was waiting for him.
Beyond the chain-link, in the headlight-silvered fog, strange machines moved rhythmically, in counterpoint to one another, like giant prehistoric birds bobbing for worms in the soil. Wellhead pumps. It was a producing oil field, of which many were scattered throughout southern California.
Johnson and Vecchio joined Roy and Dormon at the gate.
“Oil wells,” Vecchio said.
“Goddamned oil wells,” Johnson said.
“Just a bunch of goddamned oil wells,” Vecchio said.
At Roy’s direction, Dormon went to the van to get flashlights and a bolt cutter. It was not just a fake pizza- delivery truck, but a well-equipped support unit with all the tools and electronic gear that might be needed in a field operation.
“We going in there?” Vecchio asked. “Why?”
“There might be a caretaker’s cottage,” Roy said. “Grant might be an on-site caretaker, living here.”
Roy sensed that they were as anxious as he to avoid being made fools of twice in one evening. Nevertheless, they knew, as he did, that Grant had likely inserted a phony address in his DMV records and that the chance of finding him in the oil field was between slim and nil.
After Dormon snapped the gate chain, they followed the gravel lane, using their flashlights to probe between the seesawing pumps. In places, the previous night’s torrential rain had washed away the gravel, leaving mud. By the time they looped through the creaking-squeaking-clicking machinery and returned to the gate, without finding a caretaker, Roy had ruined his new shoes.
In silence, they cleaned off their shoes as best they could by shuffling their feet in the wild grass beside the lane.
While the others waited to be told what to do next, Roy returned to his car. He intended to link with Mama and find another address for Spencer snake-humping-crap-eating-piece-of-human-garbage Grant.
He was angry, which wasn’t good. Anger inhibited clear thinking. No problem had ever been solved in a rage.
He breathed deeply, inhaling both air and tranquility. With each exhalation, he expelled his tension. He visualized tranquility as a pale-peach vapor; he saw tension, however, as a bile-green mist that seethed from his nostrils in twin plumes.
From a book of Tibetan wisdom, he had learned this meditative technique of managing his emotions. Maybe it was a Chinese book. Or Indian. He wasn’t sure. He had explored many Eastern philosophies in his endless search for deeper self-awareness and transcendence.
When he got in the car, his pager was beeping. He unclipped it from the sun visor. In the message window he saw the name Kleck and a telephone number in the 714 area code.
John Kleck was leading the search for the nine-year-old Pontiac registered to “Valerie Keene.” If she’d followed her usual pattern, the car had been abandoned in a parking lot or along a city street.
When Roy called the number on the pager, the answering voice was unmistakably Kleck’s. He was in his twenties, thin and gangly, with a huge Adam’s apple and a face resembling that of a trout, but his voice was deep, mellifluous, and impressive.
“It’s me,” Roy said. “Where are you?”
The words rolled off Kleck’s tongue with sonorous splendor: “John Wayne Airport, down in Orange County.” The search had begun in L.A. but had been widening all day. “The Pontiac’s here, in one of the long-term parking garages. We’re collecting the names of the airline ticket agents working yesterday afternoon and evening. We’ve got photographs of her. Someone may remember selling her a ticket.”
“Follow through, but it’s a dead end. She’s too smart to dump the car where she made her next connection. It’s misdirection. She knows we can’t be sure, so we’ll have to waste time checking it out.”
“We’re also trying to talk to all the cabdrivers who worked the airport during that time. Maybe she didn’t fly out but took a taxi.”
“Better carry it one step further. She might have walked from the airport to one of the hotels around there. See if any doormen, parking valets, or bellmen remember her asking for a cab.”
“Will do,” Kleck said. “She’s not going to get far this time, Roy. We’re going to stay right on her ass.”
Roy might have been reassured by Kleck’s confidence and by the rich timbre of his voice — if he hadn’t known that Kleck looked like a fish trying to swallow a cantaloupe. “Later.” He hung up.
