Mr. Murder

was not.

Oslett told him that their names were Charlie Brown and Dagwood Bumstead.

The contact didn’t seem to get the joke. He helped them carry their luggage out to the parking lot, where he loaded it in the trunk of a green Oldsmobile.

Lomax was one of those Californians who had made a temple of his body and then had proceeded to more elaborate architecture. The exercise-and-health-food ethic had long ago spread into every corner of the country, and for years Americans had been striving for hard buns and healthy hearts to the farthest outposts of snowy Maine. However, the Golden State was where the first carrot-juice cocktail had been poured, where the first granola bar had been made, and was still the only place where a significant number of people believed that sticks of raw jicama were a satisfactory substitute for french fries, so only certain fanatically dedicated Californians had enough determination to exceed the structural requirements of a temple. Jim Lomax had a neck like a granite column, shoulders like limestone door lintels, a chest that could buttress a nave wall, a stomach as flat as an altar stone, and had pretty much made a great cathedral out of his body.

Although a storm front had passed through earlier in the night and the air was still damp and chilly, Lomax was wearing just jeans and a T-shirt on which was a photo of Madonna with her breasts bared (the rock singer, not the mother of God), as if the elements affected him as little as they did the quarried walls of any mighty fortress. He virtually strutted instead of walking, performing every task with calculated grace and evident self-consciousness, obviously aware and pleased that people were prone to watch and envy him.

Oslett suspected Lomax was not merely a proud man but profoundly vain, even narcissistic. The only god worshipped in the cathedral of his body was the ego that inhabited it.

Nevertheless Oslett liked the guy. The most appealing thing about Lomax was that, in his company, Karl Clocker appeared to be the smaller of the two. In fact it was the only appealing thing about the guy, but it was enough. Actually, Lomax was probably only slightly—if at all—larger than Clocker, but he was harder and better honed. By comparison, Clocker seemed slow, shambling, old, and soft. Because he was sometimes intimidated by Clocker’s size, Oslett delighted at the thought of Clocker intimidated by Lomax—though, frustratingly, if the Trekker was at all impressed, he didn’t show it.

Lomax drove. Oslett sat up front, and Clocker slumped in the back seat.

Leaving the airport, they turned right onto MacArthur Boulevard. They were in an area of expensive office towers and complexes, many of which seemed to be the regional or national headquarters of major corporations, set back from the street behind large and meticulously maintained lawns, flowerbeds, swards of shrubbery, and lots of trees, all illuminated by artfully placed landscape lighting.

“Under your seat,” Lomax told Oslett, “you’ll find a Xerox of the Mission Viejo Police report on the incident at the Stillwater house. Wasn’t easy to get hold of. Read it now, ’cause I have to take it with me and destroy it.”

Clipped to the report was a penlight by which to read it. As they followed MacArthur Boulevard south and west into Newport Beach, Oslett studied the document with growing astonishment and dismay. They reached the Pacific Coast Highway and turned south, traveling all the way through Corona Del Mar before he finished.

“This cop, this Lowbock,” Oslett said, looking up from the report, “he thinks it’s all a publicity stunt, thinks there wasn’t even an intruder.”

“That’s a break for us,” Lomax said. He grinned, which was a mistake, because it made him look like the poster boy for some charity formed to help the willfully stupid.

Oslett said, “Considering the whole damn Network is maybe being sucked down a drain here, I think we need more than a break. We need a miracle.”

“Let me see,” Clocker said.

Oslett passed the report and penlight into the back seat, and then said to Lomax, “How did our bad boy know Stillwater was even out here, how did he find him?”

Lomax shrugged his limestone-lintel shoulders. “No-body knows.”

Oslett made a wordless sound of disgust.

To the right of the highway, they passed a pricey gate-guarded golf-course community, after which the lightless Pacific lay so vast and black to the west that they seemed to be driving along the edge of eternity.

Lomax said, “We figure if we keep tabs on Stillwater, sooner or later our man will turn up, and we’ll recover him.”

“Where’s Stillwater now?”

“We don’t know.”

“Terrific.”

“Well, see, not half an hour after the cops left, there was this other thing happened to the Stillwaters, before we got to them, and after that they seemed to . . . go into hiding, I guess you’d say.”

“What other thing?”

Lomax frowned. “Nobody’s sure. It happened right around the corner from their house. Different neighbors saw different pieces, but a guy fitting Stillwater’s description fired a lot of shots at another guy in a Buick. The Buick slams into a parked Explorer, see, gets hung up on it for a second. Two kids fitting the description of the Stillwater girls tumble out the back seat of the Buick and run, the Buick takes off, Stillwater empties his gun at it, and then this BMW—which fits the description of one of the cars registered to the Stillwaters—it comes around the corner like a bat out of hell, driven by Stillwater’s wife, and all of them get in it and take off.”

“After the Buick?”

“No. It’s long gone. It’s like they’re trying to get out of there before the cops arrive.”

“Any neighbors see the guy in the Buick?”

“No. Too dark.”

“It was our bad boy.”

Lomax said, “You really think so?”

“Well, if it wasn’t him, it must’ve been the Pope.”

Lomax gave him an odd look, then stared thoughtfully at the highway ahead.

Before the dimwit could ask how the Pope was involved in all of this, Oslett said, “Why don’t we have the police report on the second incident?”

“Wasn’t one. No complaint. No crime victim. Just a report of the hit-and-run damage to the Explorer.”

“According to what Stillwater told the cops, our Alfie thinks he is Stillwater, or ought to be. Thinks his life was stolen from him. The poor boy’s totally over the edge, whacko, so to him it makes sense to go right back and steal the Stillwater kids because somehow he thinks they’re his kids. Jesus, what a mess.”

A highway sign indicated they would soon reach the city limits of Laguna Beach.

Oslett said, “Where are we going?”

“Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Dana Point,” Lomax replied. “You’ve got a suite there. I took the long way so you’d both have a chance to read the police report.”

“We napped on the plane. I sort of thought, once we landed, we’d get right into action.”

Lomax looked surprised. “Doing what?”

“Go to the Stillwater house for starters, have a look around, see what we can see.”

“Nothing to see. Anyway, I’m supposed to take you to the Ritz. You’re to get some sleep, be ready to go by eight in the morning.”

“Go where?”

“They expect to have a lead on Stillwater or your boy or both by morning. Someone will come to the hotel to give you a briefing at eight o’clock, and you’ve gotta be rested, ready to move. Which you should be, since it’s the Ritz. I mean, it’s a terrific hotel. Great food too. Even from room service. You can get a good, healthy breakfast, not typical greasy hotel crap. Egg-white omelets, seven-grain bread, all kinds of fresh fruit, non-fat yogurt—”

Oslett said, “I sure hope I can get a breakfast like I have in Manhattan every morning. Alligator embryos and chicken-fried eel heads on a bed of seaweed sauteed in a garlic butter, with a double side order of calves’ brains. Ahhh, man, you never in your life feel half as pumped as you do after that breakfast.”

So astonished that he let the speed of the Oldsmobile fall to half of what it had been, Lomax stared at Oslett. “Well, they have great food at the Ritz but maybe not as exotic as what you can get in New York.” He looked at the street again, and the car picked up speed. “Anyway, you sure that’s healthy food? Sounds packed with cholesterol