Mr. Murder

Marty followed an indirect route across Mission Viejo, initially stayed off main streets as much as possible, and successfully avoided the police. Block after block, Paige continued to study the traffic around them, expecting the battered Buick to appear and try to force them off the pavement. Twice she turned to look out the rear window, certain that the Buick was following them, but her fears were never realized.

When Marty picked up the Marguerite Parkway and headed south, Paige finally asked, “Where are we going?”

He glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know. Just away from here. I’m still thinking about where.”

“Maybe they would’ve believed you this time.”

“Not a chance.”

“People back there must’ve seen the Buick.”

“Maybe. But they didn’t see the man driving it. None of them can back up my story.”

“Vic and Kathy must’ve seen him.”

“And thought he was me.”

“But now they’ll realize he wasn’t.”

“They didn’t see us together, Paige. That’s what matters, damn it! Someone seeing us together, an independent witness.”

She said, “Charlotte and Emily. They saw him and you at the same time.”

Marty shook his head. “Doesn’t count. I wish it did. But Lowbock won’t put any stock in the testimony of little kids.”

“Not so little,” Emily piped up from beside Paige, sounding even younger and tinier than she actually was.

Charlotte remained uncharacteristically quiet. Both girls were still shivering, but Charlotte had a worse case of the shakes than did Emily. She was leaning against her mother for warmth, her head pulled turtlelike into the collar of her coat.

Marty had the heater turned up as high as it would go. The interior of the BMW should have been suffocatingly hot. It wasn’t.

Even Paige was cold. She said, “Maybe we should go back and try to talk sense to them anyway.”

Marty was adamant. “Honey, no, we can’t. Think about it. They’ll sure as hell take the Beretta. I shot at the guy with it. From their point of view, one way or another, there’s been a crime, and the gun was used in the commission of it. Either somebody really attempted to kidnap the girls, and I tried to kill him. Or it’s still all a hoax to sell books, get me higher on the bestseller list. Maybe I hired a friend to drive the Buick, shot a bunch of blanks at him, induced my own kids to lie, now I’m filing another false police report.”

“After all this, Lowbock won’t still be pushing that ridiculous theory.”

“Won’t he? The hell he won’t.”

“Marty, he can’t.”

He sighed. “Okay, all right, maybe he won’t, probably he won’t.”

Paige said, “He’ll realize that something a lot more serious is going on—”

“But he won’t believe my story either, which I’ve got to admit sounds nuttier than a giant-size can of Planters finest. And if you’d read the piece in People . . . Anyway, he’ll take the Beretta. What if he discovers the shotgun in the trunk?”

“There’s no reason for him to take that.”

“He might find an excuse. Listen, Paige, Lowbock’s not going to change his mind about me that easily, not just because the kids tell him it’s all true. He’ll still be a lot more suspicious of me than of any guy in a Buick he’s never seen. If he takes both guns, we’re defenseless. Suppose the cops leave, then this bastard, this look-alike, he walks into the house two minutes later, when we don’t have anything to protect ourselves.”

“If the police still don’t believe it, if they won’t give us protection, then we won’t stay at the house.”

“No, Paige, I literally mean what if the bastard walks in two minutes after the cops leave, doesn’t even give us a chance to clear out?”

“He’s not likely to risk—”

“Oh, yes, he is! Yes, he is. He came back almost immediately after the cops left the first time—didn’t he?—just boldly walked up to the Delorios’ front door and rang the damn bell. He seems to thrive on risk. I wouldn’t put it past the bastard to break in on us while the cops were still there, shoot everyone in sight. He’s crazy, this whole situation is crazy, and I don’t want to bet my life or yours or the kids’ lives on what the creep is going to do next.”

Paige knew he was right.

However, it was difficult, even painful, to accept that their situation was so dire as to place them beyond the help of the law. If they couldn’t receive official assistance and protection, then the government had failed them in its most basic duty: to provide civil order through the fair but strict enforcement of a criminal code. In spite of the complex machine in which they rode, in spite of the modern highway on which they traveled and the sprawl of suburban lights that covered most of the southern California hills and vales, this failure meant they were not living in a civilized world. The shopping malls, elaborate transit systems, glittering centers for the performing arts, sports arenas, imposing government buildings, multiplex movie theaters, office towers, sophisticated French restaurants, churches, museums, parks, universities, and nuclear power plants amounted to nothing but an elaborate facade of civilization, tissue-thin for all its apparent solidity, and in truth they were living in a high-tech anarchy, sustained by hope and self-delusion.

The steady hum of the car tires gave birth in her to a mounting dread, a mood of impending calamity. It was such a common sound, hard rubber tread spinning at high speed over blacktop, merely a part of the quotidian music of daily life, but suddenly it was as ominous as the drone of approaching bombers.

When Marty turned southwest on the Crown Valley Parkway, toward Laguna Niguel, Charlotte at last broke her silence. “Daddy?”

Paige saw him glance at the rearview mirror and knew by his worried eyes that he, too, had been troubled by the girl’s unusual spell of introversion.

He said, “Yes, baby?”

“What was that thing?” Charlotte asked.

“What thing, honey?”

“The thing that looked like you.”

“That’s the million-dollar question. But whoever he is, he’s just a man, not a thing. He’s just a man who looks an awful lot like me.”

Paige thought about all the blood in the upstairs hall, about how quickly the look-alike had recovered from two chest wounds to make a quick escape and to return, a short time later, strong enough to renew the assault. He didn’t seem human. And Marty’s statements to the contrary were, she knew, nothing but the obligatory reassurances of a father who knew that children sometimes needed to believe in the omniscience and unshakable equanimity of adults.

After further silence, Charlotte said, “No, it wasn’t a man. It was a thing. Mean. Ugly inside. A cold thing.” A shudder wracked her, causing her next words to issue tremolo: “I kissed it and said ‘I love you’ to it, but it was just a thing.”

The upscale garden-apartment complex encompasses a score or more of large buildings housing ten or twelve apartments each. It sprawls over parklike grounds shaded by a small forest of trees.

The streets within the complex are serpentine. Residents are provided with community carports, redwood structures with only a back wall and roof, eight or ten stalls in each. Bougainvillea climbs the columns that support each roof, lending a note of grace, although at night the vivid blossoms are bleached of most of their color by the detergent-blue light of mercury-vapor security lamps.

Throughout the development are uncovered parking areas where the white curbs are stenciled with black letters: VISITOR PARKING ONLY.

In a deep cul-de-sac, he finds a visitors’ zone that provides him with a perfect place to spend the night. None of the six spaces is occupied, and the last is flanked on one side by a five-foot-high oleander hedge. When he backs the car into the slot, tight against the hedge, the oleander conceals the damage along the driver’s side.

An acacia tree has been allowed to encroach upon the nearest street lamp. Its leafy limbs block most of the