mundane.
He continued to the end of the dirt road and turned right because he recalled that they had turned left on the way here. The paved roads were well marked, and he returned not to the Campbell estate — which he hoped he would not see again — but to the interstate.
Post-midnight traffic was light. He drove north, never faster than five miles per hour above the speed limit, an excess that the law rarely punished.
The Chrysler Windsor was a beautiful machine. Seldom do dead men return to haunt the living in such style.
Chapter 36
Mitch arrived in the city of Orange at 2:20 a.m., and parked on a street that was a block away from the one on which his house stood.
He rolled up the four windows and locked the Chrysler.
With his shirttail pulled out to conceal it, he carried a pistol under his belt. The weapon had belonged to the smooth-faced gunman who, having said Die, failed to find the strength to flex his trigger finger one last time. It contained eight cartridges; Mitch hoped that he would not need any of them.
He was parked under an old jacaranda in full flower, and when he moved into the light from the street lamp, he saw that he walked on a carpet of purple petals.
Warily, he approached his property along the alleyway behind it.
A rattling induced him to switch on his flashlight. From between two trash cans that had been set out for morning collection, a city-adapted possum, like a large pale-faced rat, twitched its pink nose.
Mitch clicked off the light and proceeded to his garage. The gate at the corner of the building was never locked. He passed through it into the backyard.
His house keys, with his wallet and other personal items, had been confiscated in Campbell's library.
He kept a spare key in a small key safe that was padlocked to a ringbolt low on the garage wall, concealed behind a row of azaleas.
Risking the flashlight but hooding it with his fingers, Mitch parted the azaleas. He dialed in the combination, disengaged the lock, plucked the key from the safe, and switched off the light.
Making not a sound, he let himself into the garage, which was keyed to match the house.
The moon had traveled westward; and trees let little of that light through the windows. He stood in the dark, listening.
Either the silence convinced him that he was alone or the darkness reminded him too much of the car trunk that he had twice escaped, and he switched on the garage lights.
His truck was where he had left it. The Honda's space was empty.
He climbed the stairs to the loft. The boxes were still stacked to disguise the gap in the railing.
At the front of the loft, he discovered that the recorder and electronic surveillance gear were gone. One of the kidnappers must have come to collect the equipment.
He wondered what they thought had happened to John Knox. He worried that Knox's disappearance had already had consequences for Holly.
When a fit of tremors shook him, he forced his mind away from that dark speculation.
He was not a machine, and neither was she. Their lives had meaning, they had been brought together by destiny for a purpose, and they would fulfill their purpose.
He had to believe that was true. Without it, he had nothing.
Leaving the garage dark, he entered the house through the back door, confident that the place was no longer watched.
The staged murder scene in the kitchen remained as he had last seen it. The spattered blood, dry now. Hand prints on the cabinetry.
In the adjacent laundry room, he took off his shoes and examined them in the fluorescent light. He was surprised to find no blood.
His socks were not stained, either. He stripped them off anyway and threw them in the washing machine.
He found small smears on his shirt and jeans. In the shirt pocket, he found Detective Taggart's card. He saved the card, tossed the clothes in the machine, added soap, and started the wash cycle.
Standing at the laundry sink, he scrubbed his hands and forearms with soap and a soft-bristle brush. He wasn't washing away evidence. Perhaps certain memories were what he hoped to flush down the drain.
With a wet rag, he wiped his face, his neck.
His weariness was profound. He needed rest, but he had no time for sleep. Anyway, if he tried to sleep, his mind would be ridden by dreads both known and nameless, would be ridden hard in circles, howling, to wide-eyed exhaustion.
In shoes and underwear, carrying the pistol, he returned to the kitchen. From the refrigerator, he got a can of Red Bull, a high-caffeine drink, and chugged it.
Finishing the Red Bull, he saw Holly's purse open on a nearby counter. It had been there earlier in the day.
Earlier, however, he had not taken time to notice the debris scattered on the counter beside the purse. A wadded cellophane wrapper. A small box, the top torn open. A pamphlet of instructions.
Holly had bought a home pregnancy-test kit. She had opened it and evidently had used it, sometime between when he had left for work and when the kidnappers had taken her.
Sometimes as a child in the learning room, when you have spoken to no one for a long time, nor heard a voice other than your muffled own, and when you have been denied food — though never water — for as much as three days, when for a week or two you have seen no light except for the brief daily interruption when your urine bottles and waste bucket are traded for fresh containers, you reach a point where the silence and the darkness seem not like conditions any longer but like objects with real mass, objects that share the room with you and, growing by the hour, demand more space, until they press on you from all sides, the silence and the darkness, and weigh on you from above, squeezing you into a cubic minim that your body can occupy only if it is condensed like an automobile compressed by a junkyard ram. In the horror of that extreme claustrophobia, you tell yourself that you cannot endure another minute, but you do, you endure another minute, another, another, an hour, a day, you endure, and then the door opens,
the banishment ends, and there is light, there is always eventually light.
Holly had not revealed that her period was overdue. False hopes had been raised twice before. She had wanted to be sure this time before telling him.
Mitch had not believed in destiny; now he did. And if a man believes in destiny, after all, he must believe in one that is golden, one that shines. He will not wait to see what he is served, damn if he will. He'll butter his bread thick with fate and eat the whole loaf.
Carrying the pistol, he hurried to the bedroom. The switch by the door turned on one of two bedside lamps.
With single-minded purpose, he went to the closet. The door stood open.
His clothes were disarranged. Two pair of jeans had slipped from their hangers and lay on the closet floor.
He didn't remember having left the closet in this condition, but he snatched a pair of jeans from the floor and pulled them on.
Shrugging into a dark-blue long-sleeved cotton shirt, he turned from the closet and for the first time saw the clothes strewn on the bed. A pair of khakis, a yellow shirt, white athletic socks, white briefs and T-shirt.
They were his clothes. He recognized them.
They were mottled with dark blood.
By now he knew the look of planted evidence. Some new outrage was to be hung around his neck.
He retrieved the pistol from the closet shelf where he had put it while dressing.
