Phantoms

stubbornly.

Frank Autry's search team prowled through three deserted houses after leaving the Catholic church. The fourth house wasn't empty. They found Wendel! Hulbertson, a high school teacher who worked in Santa Mira but who chose to live here in the mountains, in a house that had once belonged to his mother. Gordy had been in Hulbertson's English class only five years ago. The teacher was not swollen or bruised like the other corpses; he had taken his own life. Backed into a corner of his bedroom, he had put the barrel of a.32 automatic in his mouth and had pulled the trigger. Evidently, death by his own hand had been preferable to whatever it had been about to do to him.

After leaving the Bischoff residence, Bryce led his group through a few houses without finding any bodies. Then, in the fifth house, they discovered an elderly husband and wife locked in a bathroom, where they had tried to hide from their killer. She was sprawled in the tub. He was in a heap on the floor.

“They were patients of mine,” Jenny said, “Nick and Melina Papandrakis.”

Tal wrote their names down on a list of the dead.

Like Harold Ordnay and his wife in the Candle glow Inn, Nick Papandrakis had attempted to leave a message that would point a finger at the killer. He had taken some iodine from the medicine cabinet and had used it to paint on the wall. He hadn't had a chance to finish even one word. There were only two letters and part of a third:

PR(

“Can anyone figure out what he intended to write?” Bryce asked.

They all took turns squeezing into the bathroom and stepped over Nick Papandrakis's corpse to have a look at the orange brown letters on the wall, but none of them had any flashes of inspiration.

Bullets.

In the house next to the Papandrakis’s, the kitchen floor was littered with expended bullets. Not entire cartridges. Just dozens of lead slugs, and their brass casings.

The fact that there were no ejected casings anywhere in the room indicated that no gunfire had taken place here. There was no odor of gunpowder. No bullet holes in the walls or cabinets.

There were just bullets all over the floor, as if they had rained magically out of thin air.

Frank Autry scooped up a handful of the gray lumps of metal. He wasn't a ballistics expert, but, oddly, none of the bullets was fragmented or badly deformed, and that enabled him to see that they had come from a variety of weapons. Most of them—scores of them — with caliber of ammunition that was spat out by the submachine guns with which General Copperfield's support units were armed.

Are these slugs from Sergeant Harker's gun? Frank wondered. Are these the rounds Harker fired at his killer in the meat locker at Gil Martin's Market?

He frowned, perplexed.

He dropped the bullets, and they clattered on the floor. He plucked several other slugs off the tiles. There were a.22 and a.32 and another.22 and a.38. There were even a lot of shotgun pellets.

He picked up a single .45-caliber bullet and examined it with special interest. It was exactly the ammunition that his own revolver handled.

Gordy Brogan hunkered down beside him.

Frank didn't look at Gordy. He continued to stare intently at the slug. He was wrestling with an eerie thought.

Gordy scooped a few bullets off the kitchen tiles. “—They aren't deformed at all.”

Frank nodded.

“They had to've hit something,” Gordy said, “So they should be deformed. Some of them should be, anyway, “He paused, then said.” Hey, you're a million miles away. What're — you thinking about?”

“Paul Henderson.” Frank held the .45 slug in front of Gordy's face, “Paul fired three like this last night, over at the substation.”

“At his killer.”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

“So I have this crazy hunch that if we asked the lab to run ballistics tests on it, they'd find residue from Paul's revolver.”

Gordy blinked at him.

“And,” Frank said, “I also think that if we searched through all of the slugs on the floor here, we'd find exactly two more like this one. Not just one more, mind you. And not three more. Just two more with precisely the same markings as this one.”

“You mean… the same three Paul fired last night.”

“Yeah.”

“But how'd they get from there to here?”

Frank didn't answer. Instead, he stood and thumbed the send button on the walkie-talkie. “Sheriff?”

Bryce Hammond's voice issued crisply from the small speaker. “What is it, Frank?”

“We're still here at the Sheffield house. I think you'd better come over. There's something you ought to see.”

“More bodies?”

“No, sir. Uh… something sort of weird.”

“We'll be there,” the sheriff said.

Then, to Gordy, Frank said, “What I think is… sometime within the past couple of hours, sometime after Sergeant Harker was taken from Gil Martin's Market, it was here, right in this room. It got rid of all the bullets it'd taken last night and this morning.”

“The hits it took?”

“Yes.”

“Got rid of them? Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Frank said.

“But how?”

“Looks like it just sort of… expelled them. Looks like it shed those bullets the way a dog shakes off loose hairs.”

Chapter 29 On the Run

Driving through Santa Mira in the stolen Datsun, Fletcher Kale heard about Snowfield on the radio.

Although it had captured the rest of the country's attention, Kale wasn't very interested. He was never particularly compassionate about other people's tragedies.

He reached out to switch off the radio, already weary of hearing about Snowfield when he had so many problems of his own — and then he caught a name that did mean something to him. Jake Johnson. Johnson was one of the deputies who had gone up to Snowfield last night. Now he was missing and might even be dead.

Jake Johnson…

A year ago, Kale had sold Johnson a solidly built log cabin on five acres in the mountains.

Johnson had professed to be an avid hunter and had pretended to want the cabin for that purpose. However, from a number of things the deputy let slip, Kate decided dud Johnson was actually a survivalist, one of those doomsayers who believed the would was rushing toward Armageddon and that society was going to collapse either because of runaway inflation or nuclear war or some other Kale became increasingly convinced that Johnson wanted the cabin for a hiding place that could be stocked with food and ammunition then easily defended in times of social upheaval.

The cabin was certainly remote enough for that purpose. it was on Snowtop Mountain, all the way around the other side from the town of Snowfield. To get to the place, you had to go up a county fire road, a narrow dirt