Midnight

Just the breathing.

Shaddack said, 'Mike, is that you?'

The voice that finally responded to him was hoarse, guttural, but with a shrill edge, whispery yet forceful, Peyser's voice yet not his, strange: '… something wrong, wrong, something wrong, can't change, can't … wrong … wrong …'

Shaddack was reluctant to admit that he recognized Mike Peyser's voice in those queer inflections and eerie cadences. He said, 'Who is this?'

'… need, need … need, want, I need …'

'Who is this?' Shaddack demanded angrily, but in his mind was another question: What is this?

The caller issued a sound that was a groan of pain, a mewl of deepest anguish, a thin cry of frustration, and a snarl, all twisted into one rolling bleat. The receiver dropped from his hand with a hard clatter.

Shaddack put his own phone down, turned back to the VDT, tapped into the police data system, and sent an urgent message to Loman Watkins.

51

Sitting on the stool in the dark third-floor bedroom, bent to the eyepiece, Sam Booker studied the rear of Callan's Funeral Home. All but scattered scrims of fog had blown away on the wind, which still blustered at the window and shook the trees all along the hillsides on which most of Moonlight Cove was built. The serviceway lamps were extinguished now, and the rear of Callan's lay in darkness but for the thin light radiating from the blind- covered windows of the crematorium wing. No doubt they were busily feeding the flames with the bodies of the couple who had been murdered at Cove Lodge.

Tessa sat on the edge of the bed behind Sam, petting Moose, who was lying with his head in her lap.

Harry was in his wheelchair nearby. He used a penlight to study a spiral-bound notebook in which he had kept a record of the unusual activities at the mortuary.

'First one — at least the first unusual one I noticed — was on the night of August twenty-eighth,' Harry said. 'Twenty minutes to midnight. They brought four bodies at once, using the hearse and the city ambulance. Police accompanied them. The corpses were in body bags, so I couldn't see anything about them, but the cops and the ambulance attendants and the people at Callan's were visibly … well … upset. I saw it in their faces. Fear. They kept looking around at the neighboring houses and the alleyway, as if they were afraid someone was going to see what they were up to, which seemed peculiar because they were only doing their jobs. Right? Anyway, later, in the county paper, I read about the Mayser family dying in a fire, and I knew that was who'd been brought to Callan's that night. I supposed they didn't die in a fire any more than your sister killed herself.'

'Probably not,' Tessa said.

Still watching the back of the funeral home, Sam said, 'I have the Maysers on my list. They were turned up in the investigation of the Sanchez-Bustamante case.'

Harry cleared his throat and said, 'Six days later, September third, two bodies were brought to Callan's shortly after midnight. And this was even weirder because they didn't come in a hearse or an ambulance. Two police cars pulled in at the back of Callan's, and they unloaded a body from the rear seat of each of them, wrapped in blood-streaked sheets.'

'September third?' Sam said. 'There's no one on my list for that date. Sanchez and the Bustamantes were on the fifth. No death certificates were issued on the third. They kept those two off the official records.'

'Nothing in the county paper about anyone dying then, either,' Harry said.

Tessa said, 'So who were those two people?'

'Maybe they were out-of-towners who were unlucky enough to stop in Moonlight Cove and stumble into something dangerous,' Sam said. 'People whose deaths could be completely covered up, so no one would know where they'd died. As far as anyone knows, they just vanished on the road somewhere.'

'Sanchez and the Bustamantes were on the night of the fifth,' Harry said, 'and then Jim Armes on the night of the seventh.'

'Armes disappeared at sea,' Sam said, looking up from the telescope and frowning at the man in the wheelchair.

'They brought the body to Callan's at eleven o'clock at night,' Harry said, consulting his notebook for details. 'The blinds weren't drawn at the crematorium windows, so I could see straight in there, almost as good as if I'd been right there in that room. I saw the body the mess it was in. And the face. Couple of days later, when the paper ran a story about Armes's disappearance, I recognized him as the guy they'd fed to the furnace.'

The large bedroom was dressed in cloaks of shadow except for the narrow beam of the penlight, which was half shielded by Harry's hand and confined to the open notebook. Those white pages seemed to glow with light of their own, as if they were the leaves of a magic or holy — or unholy — book.

Harry Talbot's careworn countenance was more dimly illumined by the backwash from those pages, and the peculiar light emphasized the lines in his face, making him appear older than he was. Each line, Sam knew, had its provenance in tragic experience and pain. Profound sympathy stirred in him. Not pity. He could never pity anyone as determined as Talbot. But Sam appreciated the sorrow and loneliness of Harry's restricted life. Watching the wheelchair-bound man, Sam grew angry with the neighbors. Why hadn't they done more to bring Harry into their lives? Why hadn't they invited him to dinner more often, drawn him into their holiday celebrations? Why had they left him so much on his own that his primary means of participating in the life of his community was through a telescope and binoculars?

Sam was cut by a pang of despair at people's reluctance to reach out to one another, at the way they isolated themselves and one another. With a jolt, he thought of his inability to communicate with his own son, which only left him feeling bleaker still.

To Harry, he said, 'What do you mean when you say Armes's body was a mess?'

'Cut. Slashed.'

'He didn't drown?'

'Didn't look it.'

'Slashed … Exactly what do you mean?' Tessa asked.

Sam knew that she was thinking about the people whose screams she had heard at the motel — and about her own sister.

Harry hesitated, then said: 'Well, I saw him on the table in the crematorium, just before they slipped him into the furnace. He'd been … disemboweled. Nearly decapitated. Horribly … torn. He looked as bad as if he'd been standing on an antipersonnel mine when it went off and been riddled by shrapnel.'

They sat in mutual silence, considering that description.

Only Moose seemed unperturbed. He made a soft, contented sound as Tessa gently scratched behind his ears.

Sam thought it might not be so bad to be one of the lower beasts, a creature mostly of feelings, untroubled by a complex intellect. Or at the other extreme … a genuinely intelligent computer, all intellect and no feelings whatsoever. The great dual burden of emotion and high intelligence was singular to humankind, and it was what made life so hard; you were always thinking about what you were feeling instead of just going with the moment, or you were always trying to feel what you thought you should feel in a given situation. Thoughts and judgment were inevitably colored by emotions — some of them on a subconscious level, so you didn't even entirely understand why you made certain decisions, acted in certain ways. Emotions clouded your thinking; but thinking too hard about your feelings took the edge off them. Trying to feel deeply and think perfectly clearly at the same time was like simultaneously juggling six Indian clubs while riding a unicycle backward along a high wire.

'After the story in the paper about Armes disappearing,' Harry said, 'I kept waiting for a correction, but none was printed, and that's when I began to realize that the odd goingson at Callan's weren't just odd but probably criminal, as well and that the cops were part of it.'

'Paula Parkins was torn apart too,' Sam said.