“Kill him, and then it stops.”
“Assuming the institute doesn’t come after us.”
“You heard Ahriman in the office this morning. This wasn’t any part of that. This was personal. And now we know just how personal.”
“You kill him,” she said, “and you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely. Because no judge will allow a cockamamie defense like, ‘I killed him because he was a brainwashing fiend.’”
“Then they’ll put me away for ten years in an asylum. That’s better, anyway.”
“Not unless they put the two of us in the same asylum.”
Valet raised his head and looked at them as if to say
Someone was running in the upstairs hall, and it proved to be Fig Newton when he burst into the room, his glasses askew and his face more red than usual. “Skeet.”
“What about him?” Martie asked, thrusting to her feet.
“Gone.”
“Where?”
“Ahriman.”
“Gun.”
Dusty was on his feet, too. “Damn it, Fig, enough telegraphy already. Talk!”
Nodding, Fig stretched himself: “Took the gun off the dead man. And one of the full magazines. Took the Lexus. Said none of you was safe until he did it.”
To Dusty, Martie said, “Tell the cops, let them stop him?”
“Tell them he’s on his way to shoot a prominent citizen, armed with a machine pistol? In a stolen car? Skeet’s as good as dead if we do that.”
“Then we have to get there ahead of him,” she said. “Fig, you watch out for Valet. There’re people around here might kill him just for the fun of it.”
“Don’t feel too safe myself,” Fig said.
“Do the others know where Skeet’s gone?”
“No. Don’t yet know he’s gone at all.”
“You tell them he popped pills earlier today and now suddenly got funny. Took the gun and said he was going up to Santa Barbara, settle with some people for selling him bad dope.”
“Doesn’t sound like Skeet. Too macho.”
“Lampton will love it. Helps muddy the waters.”
“What happens when I lie to cops?”
“You don’t say a word to the cops. You’re good at that. You just tell Lampton, and
By the time Dusty and Martie reached the foyer, clambered around the body and the overturned sideboard, and reached the front porch, with Lampton and Claudette shouting behind them, Dusty could hear sirens in the distance.
They cleared the driveway, turned south on the highway, and went more than a mile before they saw the first black-and-white racing north toward the Lampton house.
Neck deep and sinking.
75
In his fourteenth-floor office, the doctor worked on his current book, polishing an amusing anecdote about a phobic patient whose fear of food had caused her to drop from one hundred forty pounds to just eighty-six, where she’d hovered near death for many days before he discovered the key to her condition and cured her with no time to spare. Her entire story wasn’t amusing, of course, but rather dark and dramatic, just the right stuff to ensure him a long segment on
He wasn’t able to concentrate on his work as intensely as usual, because his mind kept straying to Malibu. After calculating the time Eric would need to visit the self-storage yard and drive all the way to the Lamptons’ house, he decided that the first shot would be fired at approximately a quarter to one, perhaps as late as one o’clock.
He was also distracted, although not much, by thoughts of the Keanuphobe, who had not yet phoned. He wasn’t concerned. She would call soon. Few people were more reliable than obsessives and phobics.
The.380 Beretta lay on the near-right corner of his desktop, within easy reach.
He did not expect that the Keanuphobe would rappel down from the roof and crash through his aerie window, carrying a submachine gun and lobbing grenades, but he didn’t underestimate her, either. Over the years, the toughest women he’d ever encountered were attired in stylish but conservative St. John knit suits and Ferragamo shoes. Many of them had been the wives of long-married, older studio heads and power agents; they looked as Brahmin as any Boston dowager whose family tree had roots deep under Plymouth Rock, were refined and aristocratic — but nevertheless would eat your heart for lunch, with your kidneys in a mousse on the side, accompanied by a glass of fine Merlot.
Able to order in from a deli that believed in the righteousness of mayonnaise, butter solids, and animal fat in all forms, the doctor was content to have lunch at his desk. He ate with the blue bag near his plate, its neck crimped and angled jauntily. He wasn’t offended by the knowledge of its contents, because it was a cheerful reminder of the condition in which Derek Lampton’s body would be found by the police.
By one-fifteen, lunch finished, he had cleared his desk of deli plates and wrappings, but he had not resumed composing the bulimia anecdote for his book. On his Corinthian-leather blotter with faux-ivory inlays, the blue bag stood alone.
Regrettably, he could not enjoy Lampton’s humiliation firsthand, and unless one of the sleazier tabloids did its job well, he wasn’t likely to see even one satisfying picture. Photographs of uncapped skulls stuffed full of ordure were not rushed into print by
Fortunately, the doctor had a good imagination. With the blue bag before him for inspiration, he had no trouble painting the most vivid and entertaining mind pictures.
By one-thirty, he assumed Eric Jagger had completed the shooting and was busy — perhaps nearly finished — with the amateur craniotomy. When he closed his eyes, the doctor could hear the rhythmic rasp of the cranial blade. Considering the density of bone mass in Lampton’s skull, sending a spare blade had been a wise decision. In the event that the Lamptons didn’t have a dog, he hoped Eric’s dietary regimen included a high-fiber cereal every morning.
His greatest regret was that he had not been able to play out his original game plan, in which Dusty, Skeet, and Martie would have tortured and killed Claudette and the two Dereks. Before committing suicide, Dusty, Skeet, and Martie would have written a long statement accusing the elder Derek and his wife of horrendous physical abuse of Skeet and Dusty when they were children, and of repeated Rohypnol-facilitated rapes of Martie and of Susan Jagger, whom Ahriman might even have chosen to include as part of the killing team if she hadn’t gotten clever with a video camera. The death toll would have been seven, plus housekeepers and visiting neighbors, if any, which was by Ahriman’s calculations the minimum magnitude of slaughter necessary to attract the attention of the national media — although with Derek’s reputation as a pop-psych guru, seven deaths would receive as much coverage as a bomb blast that killed two hundred but that produced no celebrity among the casualties.
Well, although the game had been played with less grace than he would have preferred, he took satisfaction in winning. With no way to take possession of Derek Lampton’s brain, perhaps he would have the blue bag vacuum-sealed in Lucite as a symbolic trophy.
