Shadowfires

confused at times. And then at one point his eyes just sort of clouded up even worse, and he started making this funny little wheezing noise. He turned away from me and looked around, as if he was really mixed up… you know, bewildered. He seemed to get weak, too, because he leaned against the wall there by the bathroom door and hung his head down.”

Rachael remembered the bloody palmprint on the bedroom wall, beside the bathroom door.

“And when he was like that,” Sarah said, “when he was distracted, I was flat on the bathroom floor, hurt real bad, hardly able to move, and so the best I could do was crawl into the shower stall, and I was sure he'd come in after me when he got his senses back, you know, but he didn't. Like he forgot me. Came to his senses and either didn't remember I'd been there or couldn't figure out where I'd gone to. And then, after a while, I heard him farther back in the house, pounding things, breaking things.”

“He pretty much wrecked the kitchen,” Rachael said, and in a dark corner of her memory was the image of the knives driven deep into the kitchen wall.

Tears slid first from Sarah's good eye, then from the blackened and swollen one, and she said, “I can't figure…”

“What?” Rachael asked.

“Why he'd come after me.”

“He probably didn't come after you specifically,” Rachael said. “If there was a wall safe in the house, he would've wanted the money from it. But basically, I think he's just… looking for a place to go to ground for a while, until the process… runs its course. Then, when he blanked out for a moment and you hid from him, and when he came around again and didn't see you, he probably figured you'd gone for help, so he had to get out of there fast, go somewhere else.”

“The cabin, I'll bet.”

“What cabin?”

“You don't know about his cabin up at Lake Arrowhead?”

“No,” Rachael said.

“It's not on the lake, really. Farther up there on the mountain. He took me up to it once. He owns a couple of acres of woods and this neat cabin—”

Someone tapped on the window.

Rachael and Sarah cried out in surprise.

It was only Benny. He pulled open Rachael's door and said, “Come on. I've got us a new set of wheels. It's a gray Subaru — one hell of a lot less conspicuous than this buggy.”

Rachael hesitated, catching her breath, waiting for her drumming heartbeat to slow down. She felt as if she and Sarah were kids who'd been sitting at a camp fire, telling ghost stories, trying to spook each other and succeeding all too well. For an instant, crazily, she had been certain that the tapping at the window was the hard, bony click-click-click of a skeletal finger.

12 SHARP

From the moment Julio met Anson Sharp, he disliked the man. Minute by minute, his dislike intensified.

Sharp came into Rachael Leben's house in Placentia in more of a swagger than a walk, flashing his Defense Security Agency credentials as if ordinary policemen were expected to fall to their knees and venerate a federal agent of such high position. He looked at Becky Klienstad crucified on the wall, shook his head, and said, “Too bad. She was a nice-looking piece, wasn't she?” With an authoritarian briskness that seemed calculated to offend, he told them that the murders of the Hernandez and Klienstad women were now part of an extremely sensitive federal case, removed from the jurisdiction of local police agencies, for reasons that he could not — or would not — divulge. He asked questions and demanded answers, but he would give no answers of his own. He was a big man, even bigger than Reese, with chest and shoulders and arms that looked as if they had been hewn from immense timbers, and his neck was almost as thick as his head. Unlike Reese, he enjoyed using his size to intimidate others and had a habit of standing too close, intentionally violating your space, looming over you when he talked to you, looking down with a vague, barely perceptible, yet nevertheless infuriating smirk. He had a handsome face and seemed vain about his looks, and he had thick blond hair expensively razor-cut, and his jewel-bright green eyes said, I'm better than you, smarter than you, more clever than you, and I always will be.

Sharp told Orin Mulveck and the other Placentia police officers that they were to vacate the premises and immediately desist in their investigation. “All of the evidence you've collected, photographs you've taken, and paperwork you've generated will be turned over to my own team at once. You will leave one patrol car and two officers at the curb and assign them to assist us in any way we see fit.”

Clearly, Orin Mulveck was no happier with Sharp than Julio and Reese were. Mulveck and his people had been reduced to the role of the federal agent's glorified messenger boys, and none of them liked it, though they would have been considerably less offended if Sharp had handled them with more tact — hell, with any tact at all.

“I'll have to check your orders with my chief,” Mulveck said.

“By all means,” Sharp said. “Meanwhile, please get all your people out of this house. And you are all under orders not to speak of anything you've seen here. Is that understood?”

“I'll check with my chief,” Mulveck said. His face was red and the arteries were pounding in his temples when he stalked out.

Two men in dark suits had come with Sharp, neither as large as he, neither as imposing, but both of them cool and smug. They stood just inside the bedroom, one on each side of the door, like temple guards, watching Julio and Reese with unconcealed suspicion.

Julio had never encountered Defense Security Agency men before. They were far different from the FBI agents that he had sometimes worked with, less like policemen than FBI men were. They wore elitism as if it were a pungent cologne.

To Julio and Reese, Sharp said, “I know who you are, and I know a little bit about your reputations — two hound dogs. You bite into a case and you just never let go. Usually that's admirable. This time, however, you've got to unclench your teeth and let go. I can't make it clear enough. Understand me?”

“It's basically our case,” Julio said tightly. “It started in our jurisdiction, and we caught the first call.”

Sharp frowned. “I'm telling you it's over and you're out. As far as your department's concerned, there is no case for you to work on here. The files on Hernandez, Klienstad, and Leben have all been pulled from your records, as if they never existed, and from now on we handle everything. I've got my own forensics team driving in from L.A. right now. We don't need or want anything you can provide. Comprende, amigo? Listen, Lieutenant Verdad, you're gone. Check with your superiors if you don't believe me.”

“I don't like it,” Julio said.

“You don't have to like it,” Sharp said.

* * *

Julio drove only two blocks from Rachael Leben's house before he had to pull over to the curb and stop. He threw the car into park with a violent swipe at the gearshift and said, “Damn! Sharp's so sold on himself he probably thinks someone ought to bottle his piss and sell it as perfume.”

During the ten years Reese had worked with Julio, he. had never seen his partner this angry. Furious. His eyes looked hard and hot. A tic in his right cheek made half his face twitch. The muscles in his jaws clenched and unclenched, and the cords in his neck were taut. He looked like he wanted to break something in half. Reese was struck by the weird thought that if Julio had been a cartoon character, steam would have been pouring from his ears.

Reese said, “He's an asshole, sure, but he's an asshole with a lot of authority and connections.”

“Acts like a damn storm trooper.”

“I suppose he's got his job to do.”