registered by the flame ionization detector, the exact chemical composition of the vapor would be known.
He and Scott Maple waited until a readout appeared on the PC’s screen.
'Exit rate of forty-five point three seconds,' Maple said.
'What is it?'
'Not sure. Almost like a pesticide, maybe. I’m running it through the database now. We ought to-Oh, shit.'
His voice had dropped an octave with the last word. Mobius took a step closer, and on the monitor he saw a long chemical name beginning with O-ethyl-S.
'Tell me,' he said.
'It says here this is…this is…'
Maple turned toward him. Above the antiseptic mask, his eyes were wide and helpless.
'Tell me,' Mobius repeated.
The kid told him.
And Mobius smiled.
When he was finished at the lab, Mobius visited Tess.
He knew where she was staying, of course. He had even sat in the motel parking lot and watched her enter and leave on a few occasions. It had occurred to him that it would not be difficult to kill her whenever he wished. So far he had felt no particular urgency about it. But now the time had come.
He guided his car into the motel parking lot and brought it to rest under a dead street lamp. The time was 4:45, still too early for any activity around the motel. The windows were unlighted, the drapes shut.
Canister in hand, he crossed the parking lot to the door of room 14. It would be locked, naturally-he didn’t even bother testing the knob. He had no need to get inside the room.
He cast a long, cautious look around, then crouched near the air conditioner.
It was a large unit installed under the window, and it was off now. He didn’t know if Tess had left it off when she’d gone to sleep, or if it had clicked off automatically during the coolest part of the night. But this March was unseasonably warm, with near-record highs forecast for Saturday. She would turn it on eventually.
He put on his gloves and the mask from the lab. Averting his face, he opened the canister and dribbled a few drops of its contents into the AC unit’s air-intake duct. When the air conditioner started running, the liquid would be aerosolized and dispersed as a mist throughout the room.
'No more postcards, Tess,' he whispered behind the mask. 'I’m sending you a message of a different kind.'
Now he was home in his private room, his special sanctuary, staring at a wall covered with a collage of newspaper clippings, photos, and yellowed archival documents. One of the smallest items in the display was the one he most cherished-a black-and-white photo of his mother that he’d found in her high school yearbook. She had attended a small, private, fancy school for girls, a school catering to debutantes and heiresses. His mother had been both, until the first fruits of her germinating insanity had gotten her disinherited.
He had tracked down the yearbook in the school library and ripped out the crucial page, using exactly the same ruse Jack Nicholson had employed in Chinatown, a phony sneeze to cover the sound of tearing paper. Now she was on his wall of memories, or perhaps he should call it his wailing wall, a place to mourn the dead. Only in this case, it was his own death he came to mourn.
His mother had been just nineteen, a graduating senior, when the photo was taken. Melinda Davenport, later to be Mrs. Harrison Beckett. A pretty girl, austere and fine-featured and smooth-skinned. Looking at her, no one could guess that less than ten years later, in 1968, she would go insane.
After his mother had stopped living with them, his dad had warned him that someday she might try to get him to go with her, and that it would be dangerous to go. But when she’d visited him at recess, she hadn’t seemed dangerous. And he hated school, which was boring, and he hated recess even more, because he was never picked for any games. So when she’d asked if he wanted to go to the rodeo, he’d said yes.
But there hadn’t been any rodeo. There had been only miles of blurry back roads and the crazed repetition of a single song on an eight-track player, and she had hummed along with it in a furious nasal monotone.
'Na na na na na na na, na na na na na na naaa…'
By the time they reached the Howard Johnson’s in Alcomita, New Mexico, he hated her. He knew this one thing with certainty. He didn’t like to be scared, and she was scaring him very badly. If he’d had a gun, he would have shot her- bang, dead-and she wouldn’t have scared him anymore. When her back was turned, he even pretended to have a gun, and he pantomimed pulling the trigger and making his mother go away.
Bang.
Dead.
Sometime in late morning, while a policeman talked through a bullhorn outside and the crazy song played on the portable phonograph, his mother filled the bathtub.
'You’re dirty,' she said. 'You need to be clean. You’re a very dirty boy, and you’ve caused me a lot of trouble.'
He didn’t think he had caused any trouble. He had been quiet and good. But he did not protest, because he liked baths.
'Can I play with my submarine?' he asked. The submarine was a plastic model he had taken to school for show-and-tell and had brought with him in the car.
She didn’t answer, just went on filling the tub.
When the bath was ready, he slipped out of his day-old clothes and eased into the hot water, taking his submarine with him. Outside, the policeman was saying something, but over the blare of the record player he couldn’t hear it. When the music started to bother him, he submerged, holding his breath, moving the toy sub underwater and imagining nautical adventures.
Needing air, he surfaced, and his mother was there.
She stood over the tub, and her face…her face was strange. It was not his mother’s face at all. There was no love in her eyes, not even any recognition. She looked at him as if he were a stranger.
'Mommy?' he whispered.
She did not move, did not blink.
'Wipe out,' she said, and the gun bucked in her hand.
Mobius blinked, reliving it-the impact, the sudden inexplicable numbness. He touched his chest. Through the thin fabric of his shirt, he could feel the lump of scar tissue in the shape of a starfish, where the. 38-caliber round had entered, and where the long ribbons of blood had come out.
His gaze switched from his mother’s photo to the central item in the collage-the entire front page, both above and below the fold, of the Albuquerque Tribune ’s September 21, 1968, edition. A huge headline stretched over the multicolumn story.
'WIPE-OUT' IN ALCOMITA HOJO’S
A tense, hours-long standoff at the Howard Johnson’s motor inn in Alcomita came to an abrupt and tragic end at 12:20 P.M. when sheriff’s deputies heard two shots discharged inside the room where alleged kidnapper and former mental patient Melinda Ellen Beckett was holding her eight-year-old son…
Melinda Beckett had lost custody of the boy after her third hospitalization for mental illness. She was recently separated from her husband, Mr. Harrison Beckett, who had been raising their son alone. Mrs. Beckett is said to have become obsessed with violent, paranoid thoughts, and had twice been placed in restraints while institutionalized.
Sheriff’s deputies report that throughout the standoff Mrs. Beckett played the song 'Wipe Out,' an early 1960s hit for the Surfaris, on a portable phonograph. Deputies also found an eight-track tape containing the song in the dashboard tape player of Mrs. Beckett’s 1964 Buick Grand Sport.
Harrison Beckett, who arrived at the scene only minutes after the twin shootings, is described as being in a state of shock and is currently under medical care…
He would never leave medical care. Harrison Beckett was still in a hospital somewhere-Mobius had long since lost track of his father’s whereabouts, as the Wyoming bureaucracy shuttled him from one institution to another. He was an incurable patient, one who-in the quaint parlance of 1968-had suffered a 'nervous breakdown.' Quite simply, he had lost all contact with the outside world on that day in New Mexico.
Two parents, both crippled by mental illness. It was almost enough to make him doubt his own sanity.
