Rebecca said. “Suppose a lot of rats, a few dozen of them, jammed up against one another in the duct, all struggling to get out through a ventilation grille. If a real horde of them put enough pressure on the other side of the grille, would they be able to pop the screws through the flange and then shove the grille into the room, out of their way?”
“Maybe,” Jack said with more than a little doubt.
“Even that sounds too smart for rats. But I guess if the holes in the flange were too much bigger than the screws that passed through them, the threads wouldn't bite on anything, and the grille could be forced off.”
He tested the vent plate that he had been examining. It moved slightly back and forth, up and down, but not much.
He said, “This one's pretty tightly fitted.”
“One of the others might be looser.”
Jack stepped down from the chair and put it back where he'd gotten it.
They went through the suite until they'd found all the vents from the heating system: two in the parlor, one in the bedroom, one in the bath. At each outlet, the grille was fixed firmly in place.
“Nothing got into the suite through the heating ducts,” Jack said. “Maybe I can make myself believe that rats could crowd up against the back of the grille and force it off, but I'll never in a million years believe that they left through the same duct and somehow managed to replace the grille behind them. No rat — no animal of any kind you can name — could be that welltrained, that dexterous.”
“No. Of course not. It's ridiculous.”
“So,” he said.
“So,” she said. She sighed. “Then you think it's just an odd coincidence that the men here were apparently bitten to death shortly after Wicke heard rats in the walls.”
“I don't like coincidences,” he said.
“Neither do I.”
“They usually turn out not to be coincidences.”
“Exactly.”
“But it's still the most likely possibility. Coincidence, I mean. Unless…”
“Unless what?” she asked.
“Unless you want to consider voodoo, black magic—”
“No thank you.”
“-demons creeping through the walls—”
“Jack, for God's sake!”
“-coming out to kill, melting back into the walls and just disappearing.”
“I won't listen to this.”
He smiled. “I'm just teasing, Rebecca.”
“Like hell you are. Maybe you think you don't put any credence in that kind of baloney, but deep down inside, there's a part of you that's—”
“Excessively open-minded,” he finished.
“If you insist on making a joke of it—”
“I do. I insist.”
“But it's true, just the same.”
“I may be excessively open-minded, if that's even possible—”
“It is.”
“-but at least I'm not inflexible.”
“Neither am I.”
“Or rigid.”
“Neither am I.”
“Or frightened.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“You figure it.”
“You're saying I'm frightened?”
“Aren't you, Rebecca?”
“Of what?”
“Last night, for one thing.”
“Don't be absurd.”
“Then let's talk about it.”
“Not now.”
He looked at his watch. “Twenty past eleven. We'll break for lunch at twelve. You promised to talk about it at lunch.”
“I said
“We'll have time.”
“I don't think so.”
“We'll have time.”
“There's a lot to be done here.”
“We can do it after lunch.”
“People to interrogate.”
“We can grill them after lunch.”
“You're impossible, Jack.”
“Indefatigable.”
“Stubborn.”
“Determined.”
“Damnit.”
“Charming, too,” he said.
She apparently didn't agree. She walked away from him. She seemed to prefer looking at one of the mutilated corpses.
Beyond the window, snow was falling heavily now. The sky was bleak. Although it wasn't noon yet, it looked like twilight out there.
XII
Lavelle stepped out of the back door of the house. He went to the end of the porch, down three steps. He stood at the edge of the dead brown grass and looked up into the whirling chaos of snowflakes.
He had never seen snow before. Pictures, of course. But not the real thing. Until last spring, he had spent his entire life — thirty years — in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and on several other Caribbean islands.
He had expected winter in New York to be uncomfortable, even arduous, for someone as unaccustomed to it as he was. However, much to his surprise, the experience had been exciting and positive, thus far. If it was only the novelty of winter that appealed to him, then he might feel differently when that novelty eventually wore off, but for the time being, he found the brisk winds and cold air invigorating.
Besides, in this great city he had discovered an enormous reservoir of the power on which he depended in order to do his work the infinitely useful power of evil. Evil flourished everywhere, of course, in the countryside and in the suburbs, too, not merely within the boundaries of New York City. There was no shortage of evil in the Caribbean, where he had been a practicing
