Sitting down once more, peeved that he was called
“I don’t know who she was. But I wonder if you could check your video record to see if she left the stairs on the first floor or the basement. She passed me going down when I was at the second-floor landing.”
“If she does live here, letting you track her movement would be a violation of her privacy.”
“I don’t think she lives here.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
“Listen, something’s wrong here.” Hawks hesitated. His eyes were shifty, just like you’d expect a crooked financial adviser’s eyes to be. “These odd things have been happening. This one happened like three or four minutes ago, but maybe she won’t appear on the video. That wouldn’t surprise me.”
Frowning, Vernon said, “So Spangler told you about the missing twenty-three seconds. Well,
Vernon opted out of real-time images on the center screen and accessed archived video. As there were no cameras in the stairwells, he first called up the basement hall outside the north stairs, going back five minutes to watch for someone to come out of that door. If there was a heist going on, or a murder, or
In the study, blanket-wrapped dead Jerry stood on the cargo ledge of the hand truck. Three tightly pulled straps bound him to the frame and held him erect.
Mickey considered the corpse from different angles. From every perspective it looked like a stiff in a blanket.
He retrieved two spare pillows from the linen closet. He kept them in a plastic bag with a lemon-scented sachet. He paused to bury his face in each pillow, savoring the fragrance of lemony goose down.
Using duct tape, he fixed the pillows to the microfiber blanket in the area of the dead man’s lower legs to disguise the limbs. He liked the strength, flexibility, and feel of duct tape. Duct tape was sexy.
From a cabinet under the kitchen sink, he fetched a bucket. He jammed the bucket over Jerry’s head and secured it with the tape.
In his bedroom closet were several book boxes containing his beloved mother’s correspondence with other famous intellectuals. Mickey was going to put them in order and donate them to Harvard, where she would be immortalized.
One of the boxes was only a third full. He tenderly removed the letters—which carried a vague trace of her signature perfume, Nightshade—and set them aside. He took the empty carton into the study, where he duct-taped it to Jerry’s chest.
He got another microfiber blanket from the closet. He draped it loosely over the bundled corpse and all of its taped-on accessories. Now dead Jerry looked like nothing more than a precarious stack of junk.
Mickey tipped the hand truck backward, onto its wheels. He rolled it out of the study and through the living room. In the foyer, he parked it near the front door.
In the bedroom, Mickey shrugged into a shoulder holster. He tucked the .32 pistol, with its sound suppressor, into the rig and put on a sport coat tailored to conceal a weapon. He studied himself in the full-length mirror. He looked sexy.
He looked so good, in fact, that he thought he might not have to confine his erotic encounters with Sparkle Sykes to his imagination. If he came on to her, she might find him irresistible. Many women found him irresistible and not because he paid them. They often said that with him it wasn’t only about money, and he knew they were telling the truth. The risk was rejection, which he didn’t handle well. If she turned him down without being polite about it, he would as a matter of pride take what he wanted and clean up afterward. Better to restrain his affair with Sparkle to his imagination.
Mickey left Jerry on the hand truck, in the foyer. He stepped into the hall, locked the apartment, and set out to kill the guard in the security room.
In the kitchen of Earl Blandon’s apartment, Logan gargled repeatedly with some of the senator’s whiskey supply and spat it in the sink, hoping that it would destroy—or at least wash out—any spores that might have gotten into his mouth and throat. He blew his nose so often and so hard that he risked rupturing a blood vessel, hoping to purge most of the tiny seeds from his tingling nasal passages and sinuses.
Logan worried that the spores might be toxic. Perhaps not a lethal poison, but in some way disabling. There were fungi that, when eaten, produced hallucinations and even lasting psychological damage. The bizarre fungi in the half bath seemed like something Alice might have found if she went through a looking glass so dark that the land beyond was nearer to Hell than to Wonderland, and it was difficult to imagine that they might be benign.
He wondered if contact with the spores caused the visions of abandoned and ruined rooms, but that made no sense because the fungi and their spores were
