“Pentel Rolling Writer,” Spicer said. “Taken from a box of them in a drawer of Stillwater’s desk.”
“This is what the suicide note was written with?”
“Yeah. Leave it somewhere in the vicinity of his body, with the cap off.”
Smiling, Oslett reviewed the array of items on the table. “This is really going to be fun.”
While they waited for an alert from the surveillance team that was staking out the elder Stillwaters’ house, Oslett risked a walk to a ski shop in a cluster of stores and restaurants across the street from the motel. The air seemed to have grown more bitter in the short time they had been in the room, and the sky looked bruised.
The merchandise in the shop was first-rate. He was quickly able to outfit himself in well-made thermal underwear imported from Sweden and a black Hard Corps Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suit. The suit had a reflective silver lining, foldaway hood, anatomically shaped knees, ballistic nylon scuff guards, insulated snowcuffs with rubberized strippers, and enough pockets to satisfy a magician. Over this he wore a purple U.S. Freestyle Team vest with Thermoloft insulation, reflective lining, elasticized gussets, and reinforced shoulders. He bought gloves too— Italian leather and nylon, almost as flexible as a second skin. He considered buying high-quality goggles but decided to settle for a good pair of sunglasses, since he wasn’t actually intending to hit the slopes. His awesome ski boots looked like something a robot Terminator would wear to kick his way through concrete-block walls.
He felt incredibly tough.
As it was necessary to try on every item of clothing, he used the opportunity to change out of the clothes in which he’d entered the shop. The clerk obligingly folded the garments into a shopping bag, which Oslett carried with him when he set out on the return walk to the motel in his new gear.
By the minute, he was more optimistic about their prospects. Nothing lifted the spirits like a shopping spree.
When he returned to the room, though he had been gone half an hour, there had been no news.
Spicer was sitting in an armchair, still wearing sunglasses, watching a talk show. A heavyset black woman with big hair was interviewing four male cross-dressers who had attempted to enlist, as women, in the United States Marine Corps, and had been rejected, though they seemed to believe the President intended to intervene on their behalf.
Clocker, of course, was sitting at the table by the window, in the fall of silvery pre-storm light, reading
whatever the damn book was called. His only concession to the Sierra weather had been to change from a harlequin-pattern sweater-vest into a fully sleeved cashmere sweater in a stomach-curdling shade of orange.
Oslett carried the black briefcase into one of the two bedrooms that flanked the living room. He emptied the contents on one of the queen-size beds, sat cross-legged on the mattress, took off his new sunglasses, and examined the clever props that would ensure Martin Stillwater’s postmortem conviction of multiple murder and suicide.
He had a number of problems to work out, including how to kill all these people with the least amount of noise. He wasn’t concerned about the gunfire, which could be muffled one way or another. It was the screaming that worried him. Depending on where the hit went down, there might be neighbors. If alerted, neighbors would call the police.
After a couple of minutes, he put on his sunglasses and went out to the living room. He interrupted Spicer’s television viewing: “We waste them, then what police agency’s going to be dealing with it?”
“If it happens here,” Spicer said, “probably the Mammoth County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Do we have a friend there?”
“Not now, but I’m sure we could have.”
“Coroner?”
“Out here in the boondocks—probably just a local mortician. ”
“No special forensic skills?”
Spicer said, “He’ll know a bullet hole from an asshole, but that’s about it.”
“So if we terminated the wife and Stillwater first, nobody’s going to be sophisticated enough to detect the order of homicides?”
“Big-city forensic lab would have a hard time doing that if the difference was, say, less than an hour.”
Oslett said, “What I’m thinking is . . . if we try to deal with the kids first, we’ll have a problem with Stillwater and his wife.”
“How so?”
“Either Clocker or I can cover the parents while the other one takes the kids into a different room. But stripping the girls, wiring their hands and ankles—it’ll take ten, fifteen minutes to do right, like in Maryland. Even with one of us covering Stillwater and his wife with a gun, they aren’t going to sit still for that. They’ll both rush me or Clocker, whoever’s guarding them, and together they might get the upper hand.”
“I doubt it,” Spicer said.
“How can you be sure?”
“People are gutless these days.”
“Stillwater fought off Alfie.”
“True,” Spicer admitted.
“When she was sixteen, the wife found her father and mother dead. The old man killed the mother, then himself—”
Spicer smiled. “Nice tie-in with our scenario.”
Oslett hadn’t thought about that. “Good point. Might also explain why Stillwater couldn’t write the novel based on the case in Maryland. Anyway, three months later she petitioned the court to free her from her guardian and declare her a legal adult.”
“Tough bitch.”
“The court agreed. It granted her petition.”
“So blow away the parents first,” Spicer advised, shifting in the armchair as if his butt had begun to go numb.
“That’s what we’ll do,” Oslett agreed.
Spicer said, “This is fucking crazy.”
For a moment Oslett thought Spicer was commenting on their plans for the Stillwaters. But he was referring to the television program, to which his attention drifted again.
On the talk show, the host with big hair had ushered off the cross-dressers and introduced a new group of guests. There were four angry-looking women seated on the stage. All of them were wearing strange hats.
As Oslett left the room, he saw Clocker out of the corner of his eye. The Trekker was still at the table by the window, riveted by the book, but Oslett refused to let the big man spoil his mood.
In the bedroom he sat on the bed again, amidst his toys, took off his sunglasses, and happily enacted and re-enacted the homicides in his mind, planning for every contingency.
Outside, the wind picked up. It sounded like wolves.
He stops at a service station to ask directions to the address he remembers from the Rolodex card. The young attendant is able to help him.
By 2:10 he enters the neighborhood in which he was evidently raised. The lots are large with numerous winter-bare birches and a wide variety of evergreens.
His mom and dad’s house is in the middle of the block. It’s a modest, two-story, white clapboard structure with forest-green shutters. The deep front porch has heavy white balusters, a green handrail, and decoratively scalloped fasciae along the eaves.
The place looks warm and welcoming. It is like a house in an old movie. Jimmy Stewart might live here. You know at a glance that a loving family resides within, decent people with much to share, much to give.
He cannot remember anything in the block, least of all the house in which he apparently spent his childhood and adolescence. It might as well be the residence of utter strangers in a town which he has never seen until this very day.
He is infuriated by the extent to which he has been brainwashed and relieved of precious memories. The lost
