Bruno Frye had slept in the back of the blue Dodge van, in a supermarket parking lot, until eleven o'clock that morning, when he had been awakened by a nightmare that resonated with fierce, threatening, yet meaningless whispers. For a while, he sat in the stuffy, dimly-lit cargo hold of the van, hugging himself, feeling so desperately alone and abandoned and afraid that he whimpered and wept as if he were a child.
I'm dead, he thought. Dead. The bitch killed me. Dead. The rotten, stinking bitch put a knife in my guts.
As his weeping gradually subsided, he had a peculiar and disturbing thought: But if I'm dead ... how can I be sitting here now? How can I be alive and dead at the same time?
He felt his abdomen with both hands. There were no tender spots, no knife wounds, no scars.
Suddenly, his thoughts cleared. A gray fog seemed to lift from his mind, and for a minute everything shone with a multifaceted, crystalline light. He began to wonder if Katherine really had come back from the grave. Was Hilary Thomas only Hilary Thomas and not Katherine Anne Frye? Was he mad to want to kill her? And all the other women he had killed over the past five years--had they actually been new bodies in which Katherine had hidden? Or had they been real people, innocent women who hadn't deserved to die?
Bruno sat on the floor of the van, stunned, overwhelmed by this new perspective.
And the whispers that invaded his sleep every night, the awful whispers that terrified him....
Suddenly, he knew that, if only he concentrated hard enough, if only he searched diligently through his childhood memories, he would discover what the whispers were, what they meant. He remembered two heavy wooden doors that were set in the ground. He remembered Katherine opening those doors, pushing him into darkness beyond. He remembered her slamming and bolting the doors behind him, remembered steps that led down, down into the earth....
No!
He clamped his hands over his ears as if he could block out unwanted memories as easily as he could shut out unpleasant noise.
He was dripping sweat, Shaking, shaking.
'No,' he said. 'No, no, no!'
For as long as he could remember, he had wanted to find out who was whispering in his nightmares. He had longed to discover what the whispers were trying to tell him, so that, perhaps, he could then banish them from his sleep forever. But now that he was on the verge of knowing, he found the knowledge more horrifying and devastating than the mystery had been, and, panic-stricken, he turned away from the hideous revelation before it could be delivered unto him.
Now the van was full of whispers again, sibilant voices, haunting susurrations.
Bruno cried out in fear and rocked back and forth on the floor.
Strange things were crawling on him again. They were trying to climb up his arms and chest and back. Trying to get to his face. Trying to squeeze between his lips and teeth. Trying to scurry up his nostrils.
Squealing, writhing, Bruno brushed them away, slapped at them, flailed at himself.
But the illusion was fed by darkness, and there was too much light in the van for the grotesque hallucinations to hold their substance. He could see there was nothing on him, and gradually the panic drained away, leaving him limp.
For several minutes, he just sat there, his back against the wall of the van, patting his sweaty face with a handkerchief, listening to his ragged breathing grow softer and softer.
Finally, he decided it was time to start looking for the bitch again. She was out there--waiting, hiding, somewhere in the city. He had to locate her and kill her before she found a way to kill him first.
The brief moment of mental clarity, the lightning flash of lucidity was gone as if it had never existed. He had forgotten the questions, the doubts. Once again, he was absolutely certain that Katherine had come back from the dead and that she must be stopped.
Later, after a quick lunch, he drove to Westwood and parked up the street from Hilary Thomas's house. He climbed into the cargo hold again and watched her place from a small, decorative porthole on the side of the Dodge.
A commercial van was parked in the circular driveway at the Thomas house. It was painted white with blue and gold lettering on the sides:
MAIDS UNLIMITED
WEEKLY CLEANING, SPRING CLEANING
& PARTIES
WE EVEN DO WINDOWS
Three women in white uniforms were at work in the house. They made a number of trips from the house to the van and back, carrying mops and brooms and vacuum sweepers and buckets and bundles of rags, bringing out plastic bags full of trash, taking in a machine for steam- cleaning carpets, bringing out fragments of the furniture that Frye had broken during his rampage in the pre-dawn hours of yesterday morning.
Although he watched all afternoon, he didn't get even one quick glimpse of Hilary Thomas, and he was convinced that she was not in the house. In fact, he figured that she wouldn't come back until she was positive that it was safe, until she knew he was dead.
'But I'm not the one who's going to die,' he said aloud as he studied the house. 'Do you hear me, bitch? I'll nail you first. I'll get you before you have a chance to get me. I'll cut off your fucking head.'
At last, shortly after five o'clock, the maids brought out their equipment and loaded it into the back of their van. They locked up the house and drove away.
He followed them.
They were his only lead to Hilary Thomas. The bitch had hired them. They must know where she was. If he could get one of the maids alone and force her to talk, he would find out where Katherine was hiding.
Maids Unlimited was headquartered in a single-story stucco structure on a grubby side street, half a block off
