Jenny hung up.
“Dead line,” she told the deputies.
She didn't think they believed her. They stared at her trembling hands.
Bryce sat at the central operations desk, talking by telephone to headquarters in Santa Mira.
The APB on Timothy Flyte had turned up nothing whatsoever. Flyte wasn't wanted by any police agency in the United States or Canada. The FBI had never heard of him. The name on the bathroom mirror at the Candle glow Inn was still a mystery.
The San Francisco police had been able to supply background on the missing Harold Ordnay and wife, in whose room Timothy Flyte's name had been found. The Ordnays owned two bookstores in San Francisco. One was an ordinary retail outlet. The other was an antiquarian and rare book dealership; apparently, it was by far the more profitable of the two. The Ordnays were well known and respected in collecting circles. According to their family, Harold and Blanche had gone to Snowfield for a four-day weekend to celebrate their thirty-first anniversary. The family had never heard of Timothy Flyte. When police were granted permission to look through the Ordnays' personal address book, they found no listing for anyone named Flyte.
The police had not yet been able to locate any of the bookstores' employees; however, they expected to do so as soon as both shops opened at ten o'clock this morning. It was hoped that Flyte was a business acquaintance of the Ordnays' and would be familiar to the employees.
“Keep me posted,” Bryce told the morning desk man in Santa Mira, “How're things there?”
“Pandemonium.”
“It'll get worse.”
As Bryce was putting down the receiver, Jenny Paige returned from her safari in search of drugs and medical equipment. “Where's Lisa?”
“With the kitchen detail,” Bryce said.
“She's all right?”
“Sure. There are three big, strong, well-armed men with her. Remember? Is something wrong?”
“Tell you later.”
Bryce assigned Jenny's three armed guards to new duties, then helped her establish an infirmary in one corner of the lobby.
“This is probably wasted effort,” she said.
“Why?”
“So far no one's been injured. Just killed.”
“Well, that could change.”
“I think
“Maybe. But with all these men toting guns, and with everyone so damned jumpy, I wouldn't be half surprised if someone accidentally winged someone else or even shot himself in the foot.”
Arranging bottles in a desk drawer, Jenny said, “The telephone rang at my place and again over at the pharmacy. It was Wargle.” She told him about both calls.
“You're sure it was really him?”
“I remember his voice clearly. An unpleasant voice.”
“But, Jenny, he was—”
“I know, I know. His face was eaten away, and his brain was gone, and all the blood was sucked out of him. I know. And it's driving me crazy trying to figure it out.”
“Someone doing an impersonation?”
“If it was, then there's someone out there who makes Rich Little look like an amateur.”
“Did he sound as if he—”
Bryce broke off in mid-sentence, and both he and Jenny turned as Lisa ran through the archway.
The girl motioned to them. “Come on! Quick! Something weird is happening in the kitchen.”
Before Bryce could stop her, she ran back the way she had come.
Several men started after her, drawing their guns as they went, and Bryce ordered them to halt. “Stay here. Stay on the job.”
Jenny had already sprinted after the girl.
Bryce hurried into the dining room, caught up with Jenny, moved ahead of her, drew his revolver, and followed Lisa through the swinging doors into the hotel kitchen.
The three men assigned to this shift of kitchen duty — Gordy Brogan, Henry Wong, and Max Dunbar — had put down their can openers and cooking utensils in favor of their service revolvers, but they didn't know what to aim at. They glanced up at Bryce, looking disconcerted and baffled.
“
The air was filled with a child's singing. A little boy. His voice was clear and fragile and sweet.
“
“The sink,” Lisa said, pointing.
Puzzled, Bryce went to the nearest of three double sinks. Jenny came close behind him.
The song had changed. The voice was the same:
“
The child's voice was coming out of the drain in the sink, as if he were trapped far down in the pipes.
“
For metronomic seconds, Bryce listened with spellbound intensity. He was speechless.
He glanced at Jenny. She gave him the same astonished stare that he had seen on his men's faces when he had first pushed through the swinging doors.
“It just started all of a sudden,” Lisa said, raising her voice above the singing.
“When?” Bryce asked.
“A couple of minutes ago,” Gordy Brogan said.
“I was standing at the sink,” Max Dunbar said. He was a burly, hairy, rough-looking man with warm, shy brown eyes.
“When the singing started up… Jesus, I must've jumped two feet!”
The song changed again. The sweetness was replaced by a cloying, almost mocking piety:
“
“I don't like this,” Henry Wong said, “How can it be?”
“
Nothing about the singing was overtly threatening; yet, like the noises Bryce and Jenny had heard on the telephone, the child's tender voice, issuing from such an unlikely source, was unnerving. Creepy.
“
The singing abruptly ceased.
“Thank God!” Max Dunbar said with a shudder of relief, as if the child's melodic crooning had been unbearably harsh, grating, off-key. “That voice was drilling right through to the roots of my teeth!”
After several seconds had passed in silence, Bryce began to lean toward the drain, to peer into it—
— and Jenny said maybe he shouldn't—
— and something exploded out of that dark, round hole.
Everyone cried out, and Lisa screamed, and Bryce staggered back in fear and surprise, cursing himself for not being more careful, jerking his revolver up, bringing the muzzle to bear on the thing that came out of the
