Mr. Murder

kids did now and then, or whether she was expressing a more genuine concern about the depth of the trouble that had rolled over them.

He had heard the television come on in the other room while he had been sitting on the edge of the bed with Charlotte, so he knew Paige was awake. He got up to go say good morning to her.

As he was approaching the connecting door, Paige called to him. “Marty, quick, look at this.”

When he hurried into the other room, he saw her standing in front of the TV. She was watching an early- morning news program.

“It’s about us,” she said.

He recognized their own home on the screen. A woman reporter was standing in the street, her back to the house, facing the camera.

Marty squatted in front of the television and turned up the sound.

“. . . so the mystery remains, and the police would very much like to talk to Martin Stillwater this morning . . .”

“Oh, this morning they want to talk,” he said disgustedly.

Paige shushed him.

“. . . an irresponsible hoax by a writer too eager to advance his career, or something far more sinister? Now that the police laboratory has confirmed the large amount of blood in the Stillwater house is indeed of human origin, the need for the authorities to answer that question has overnight become more urgent.”

That was the end of the piece. As the reporter gave her name and location, Marty registered the word “LIVE” in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Although the four letters had been there all along, the importance of them hadn’t registered immediately.

“Live?” Marty said. “They don’t send reporters out live unless the story’s ongoing.”

“It is ongoing,” Paige said. She was standing with her arms folded across her chest, frowning down at the television. “The lunatic is still out there somewhere.”

“I mean, like a robbery in progress or a hostage situation with a SWAT team waiting to storm the place. By TV standards, this is boring, no action, no one on scene to shove a microphone at, just an empty house for visuals. It’s not the kind of story they use for a live spot, too expensive and no excitement.”

The broadcast had gone back to the studio. To his surprise, the anchorman wasn’t one of the second-string newsreaders from a Los Angeles station, who would ordinarily have pulled duty on an early-morning program, but a well-known network face.

Astonished, Marty said, “This is national. Since when does a breaking-and-entry report rate national news?”

“You were assaulted too,” Paige said.

“So what? These days, there’s a worse crime than this every ten seconds somewhere in the country.”

“But you’re a celebrity.”

“The hell I am.”

“You may not like it, but you are.”

“I’m not that much of a celebrity, not with only two paperback bestsellers. You know how hard it is to get on this program for one of their chat segments, as an invited guest?” He rapped a knuckle against the face of the anchorman on the screen. “Harder than getting an invitation to a state dinner at the White House! Even if I hired a publicist who’d sold his soul to the devil, he couldn’t get me on this program, Paige. I’m just not big enough. I’m a nobody to them.”

“So . . . what’re you saying?”

He went to the window that provided a view of the parking lot, and parted the draperies. Pale sunlight. Steady traffic out on Pacific Coast Highway. The trees stirred lazily in the mildest of on-shore breezes.

Nothing in the scene was threatening or unusual, yet it seemed ominous to him. He felt that he was looking out at a world that was no longer familiar, a world changed for the worse. The differences were indefinable, subjective rather than objective, perceptible to the spirit more than to the senses but nonetheless real. And the pace of that dark change was accelerating. Soon the view from this room or any other would be, to him, like something seen through the porthole of a spacecraft on a far alien planet which superficially resembled his own world but which was, below its deceptive surface, infinitely strange and inimical to human life.

“I don’t think,” he said, “that the police would ordinarily have completed their tests on those blood samples so quickly, and I know it’s not standard practice to release crime-lab results so casually to the media.” He let the draperies fall into place and turned to Paige, whose brow was furrowed with worry. “National news? Live, on the scene? I don’t know what the hell is happening, Paige, but it’s even stranger than I thought it was last night.”

While Paige showered, Marty pulled up a chair in front of the television and channel-hopped, searching for other news programs. He caught the end of a second story about himself on a local channel—and then a third piece, complete, on a national show.

He was trying to guard against paranoia, but he had the distinct impression that both stories suggested, without making accusations, that the falsity of his statement to the Mission Viejo Police was a foregone conclusion and that his real motive was either to sell more books or something darker and weirder than mere career-pumping. Both programs made use of the photograph from the current issue of People, in which he resembled a movie zombie with glowing eyes, lurching out of shadows, violent and demented. And both pointedly mentioned the three guns of which he’d been relieved by the police, as if he might be a suburban survivalist living atop a bunker packed solid with arms and ammunition. Toward the end of the third report, he thought an implication was made to the effect that he might even be dangerous, although it was so smooth and so subtly inserted that it was more a matter of the reporter’s tone of voice and expressions than any words in the script.

Rattled, he switched off the television.

For a while he stared at the blank screen. The gray of the dead monitor matched his mood.

After everyone was showered and dressed, the girls got in the back seat of the BMW and dutifully put on their seatbelts while their parents stowed the luggage in the trunk.

When Marty slammed the trunk lid and locked it, Paige spoke to him quietly, so Charlotte and Emily couldn’t hear. “You really think we have to go this far, do these things, it’s really that bad?”

“I don’t know. Like I told you, I’ve been brooding about this ever since I woke up, since three o’clock this morning, and I still don’t know if I’m over-reacting.”

“These are serious steps to take, even risky.”

“It’s just that . . . as strange as this already is, with The Other and everything he said to me, whatever underlies it all is stranger still. More dangerous than one lunatic with a gun. Deadlier and a lot bigger than that. Something so big it’ll crush us if we try to stand up to it. That’s how I felt in the middle of the night, afraid, more scared even than when he had the kids in his car. And after what I saw on TV this morning, I’m more—not less— inclined to go with my gut feelings.”

He realized that his expression of dread was extreme, with an unmistakable flavor of paranoia. But he was no alarmist, and he was confident that his instincts could be trusted. Events had dissolved all of his doubts about his mental well-being.

He wished he could identify an enemy other than the improbable dead-ringer, for he knew intuitively that there was another enemy, and it would be comforting to have it defined. The Mafia, Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, consortiums of evil bankers, the board of directors of some ferociously greedy international conglomerate, right-wing generals intent on establishing a military dictatorship, a cabal of insane Mideastern zealots, mad scientists intent on blowing the world to smithereens for the sheer hell of it, or Satan himself in all his horned splendor—any of the standard villains of television dramas and countless novels, regardless of how unlikely and cliched, would be preferable to an adversary without face or form or name.

Chewing her lower lip, lost in thought, Paige let her gaze travel across the breeze-ruffled trees, other parked cars, and the front of the motel, before tilting her head back and looking up at three shrieking sea gulls that wheeled across the mostly blue and uncaring azure sky.

“You sense it too,” he said.

“Yes.”