Mr. Murder

Worried that the flashlight beam, seen from outside, would look suspicious to anyone pulling into the rest area, Drew Oslett quickly examined the two cadavers in the cramped dining nook. Because the spilled blood was thoroughly dry and caked hard, he knew the man and woman had been dead more than just a few hours. However, although rigor mortis was still present in both bodies, they were no longer entirely stiff; the rigor evidently had peaked and had begun to fade, as it usually did between eighteen and thirty-six hours after death.

The bodies had not begun to decompose noticeably as yet. The only bad smell came from their open mouths—the sour gases produced by the rotting food in their stomachs.

“Best guesstimate—they’ve been dead since sometime yesterday afternoon,” he told Clocker.

The Road King had been sitting in the rest area for more than twenty-four hours, so at least one Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer must have seen it on two separate shifts. State law surely forbade using rest areas as campsites. No electrical connections, water supplies, or sewage-tank pump-outs were provided, which created a potential for health problems. Sometimes cops might be lenient with retirees afraid of driving in weather as inclement as the storm that had assaulted Oklahoma yesterday; the American Association of Retired People bumper sticker on the back of the motorhome might have gained these people some dispensation. But not even a sympathetic cop would let them park two nights. At any moment, a patrol car might pull into the rest area and a knock might come at the door.

Averse to complicating their already serious problems by killing a highway patrolman, Oslett turned away from the dead couple and hastily proceeded with the search of the motorhome. He was no longer cautious out of fear that Alfie, dysfunctional and disobedient, would put a bullet in his head. Alfie was long gone from here.

He found the discarded shoes on the kitchen counter. With a large serrated knife, Alfie had sawed at one of the heels until he had exposed the electronic circuitry and the attendant chain of tiny batteries.

Staring at the Rockports and the pile of rubber shavings, Oslett was chilled by a premonition of disaster. “He never knew about the shoes. Why would he get it in his head to cut them open?”

“Well, he knows what he knows,” Clocker said.

Oslett interpreted Clocker’s statement to mean that part of Alfie’s training included state-of-the-art electronic surveillance equipment and techniques. Consequently, though he was not told that he was “tagged,” he knew that a microminiature transponder could be made small enough to fit in the heel of a shoe and, upon receipt of a remote microwave activating signal, could draw sufficient power from a series of watch batteries to transmit a trackable signal for at least seventy-two hours. Although he was unable to recall what he was or who controlled him, Alfie was intelligent enough to apply his knowledge of surveillance to his own situation and reach the logical conclusion that his controllers had made prudent provisions for locating and following him in the event he went renegade, even if they had been thoroughly convinced rebellion was not possible.

Oslett dreaded reporting the bad news to the home office in New York. The organization didn’t kill the bearer of bad tidings, especially not if his surname happened to be Oslett. However, as Alfie’s primary handler, he knew that some of the blame would stick to him even though the operative’s rebellion was not his fault to any degree whatsoever. The error must be in Alfie’s fundamental conditioning, damn it, not in his handling.

Leaving Clocker in the kitchen to keep a lookout for unwanted visitors, Oslett quickly inspected the rest of the motorhome.

He found nothing else of interest except a pile of discarded clothes on the floor of the main bedroom at the back of the vehicle. In the beam of the flashlight, he needed to disturb the garments only slightly with the toe of his shoe to see that they were what Alfie had been wearing when he had boarded the plane for Kansas City on Saturday morning.

Oslett returned to the kitchen, where Clocker waited in the dark. He turned the flashlight on the dead pensioners one last time. “What a mess. Damn it, this didn’t have to happen.”

Referring disdainfully to the murdered couple, Clocker said, “Who cares, for God’s sake? They were nothing but a couple of fucking Klingons anyway.”

Oslett had been referring not to the victims but to the fact that Alfie was more than merely a renegade now, was an untraceable renegade, thus jeopardizing the organization and everyone in it. He had no more pity for the dead man and woman than did Clocker, felt no responsibility for what had happened to them, and figured the world, in fact, was better off without two more non-productive parasites sucking on the substance of society and hindering traffic in their lumbering home on wheels. He had no love for the masses. As he saw it, the basic problem with the average man and woman was precisely that they were so average and that there were so many of them, taking far more than they gave to the world, quite incapable of managing their own lives intelligently let alone society, government, the economy, and the environment.

Nevertheless, he was alarmed by the way Clocker had phrased his contempt for the victims. The word “Klingons” made him uneasy because it was the name of the alien race that had been at war with humanity through so many television episodes and movies in the Star Trek series before events in that fictional far future had begun to reflect the improvement of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in the real world. Oslett found Star Trek tedious, insufferably boring. He never had understood why so many people had such a passion for it. But Clocker was an ardent fan of the series, unabashedly called himself a “Trekker,” could reel off the plots of every movie and episode ever filmed, and knew the personal histories of every character as if they were all his dearest friends. Star Trek was the only topic about which he seemed willing or able to conduct a conversation; and as taciturn as he was most of the time, he was to the same degree garrulous when the subject of his favorite fantasy arose.

Oslett tried to make sure that it never arose.

Now, in his mind, the dreaded word “Klingons” clanged like a firehouse bell.

With the entire organization at risk because Alfie’s trail had been lost, with something new and exquisitely violent loose in the world, the return trip to Oklahoma City through so many miles of lightless and unpeopled land was going to be bleak and depressing. The last thing Oslett needed was to be assaulted by one of Clocker’s exhaustingly enthusiastic monologues about Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Scotty, the rest of the crew, and their adventures in the far reaches of a universe that was, on film, stuffed with far more meaning and moments of sophomoric enlightenment than was the real universe of hard choices, ugly truths, and mindless cruelty.

“Let’s get out of here,” Oslett said, pushing past Clocker and heading for the front of the Road King. He didn’t believe in God, but he prayed nonetheless ardently that Karl Clocker would subside into his usual self-absorbed silence.

6

Cyrus Lowbock excused himself temporarily to confer with some colleagues who wanted to talk to him elsewhere in the house.

Marty was relieved by his departure.

When the detective left the dining room, Paige returned from the window and sat once more in the chair beside Marty.

Although the Pepsi was gone, some of the ice cubes had melted in the mug, and he drank the cold water. “All I want now is to put an end to this. We shouldn’t be here, not with that guy out there somewhere, loose.”

“Do you think we should be worried about the kids?”

... need . . . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .

Marty said, “Yeah. I’m worried shitless.”

“But you shot the guy twice in the chest.”

“I thought I’d left him in the foyer with a broken back, too, but he got up and ran away. Or limped away. Or maybe even vanished into thin air. I don’t know what the hell’s going on here, Paige, but it’s wilder than anything I’ve ever put in a novel. And it’s not over, not by a long shot.”

“If it was just Vic and Kathy looking after them, but there’s a cop over there too.”

“If this bastard knew where the girls were, he’d waste that cop, Vic, and Kathy in about a minute flat.”

“You handled him.”

“I was lucky, Paige. Just damned lucky. He never imagined I had a gun in the desk drawer or that I’d use one if I had it. I took him by surprise. He won’t let that happen again. He’ll have all the surprise on his side.”