them.
A search of the bedroom and closet turned up another disturbing discovery. Under the bed were a dozen pornographic videos, the covers of which depicted naked women in handcuffs, in chains, some gagged, some blindfolded, cowering women threatened by sadistic men.
These weren’t homemade videos. They were professionally packaged and probably available in any adult- video shop, whether brick-and-mortar or online.
Billy put them back where he had found them, and he considered whether he had discovered enough to warrant calling the police.
No. Neither the mannequins nor the pornography proved that Steve Zillis had ever harmed a real human being, only that he nurtured a sick and vivid fantasy life.
Meanwhile, a dead man was wrapped for disposal and stowed behind the sofa in Billy’s house.
If he became a suspect in the murder of Giselle Winslow in Napa or if Lanny Olsen’s body was found and Billy became a suspect in that murder, he would at the very least be put under surveillance. He would lose his freedom of action.
If they found Cottle’s body, he would be arrested.
No one would understand or believe the threat against Barbara. They would not take his warnings seriously. When you were a prime suspect, what
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the police wanted to hear from you was what they expected to hear from you, which was a confession.
He knew how it worked. He knew exactly how it worked.
During the twenty-four hours or the forty-eight hours—or the week, the month, the year—that it took to establish his innocence, if he ever could establish it, Barbara would be vulnerable, without a guardian. He had been drawn in too deep. Nobody could save him except he himself. If he found the face in a jar of formaldehyde and other grisly souvenirs, he might be able to nail Zillis for the authorities. But nothing less would convince them.
Like most California houses, this one didn’t have a basement, but it did have an attic. The hall ceiling featured a trapdoor with a dangling rope handle. When he pulled the trap down, an accordion ladder unfolded from the back of it.
He heard something behind him. In his mind, he saw a mannequin with teeth in its eye sockets, reaching toward him.
He pivoted, clawing for the gun under his belt. He was alone. He had probably heard just a settling noise, an old house easing itself at the insistence of gravity.
At the top of the ladder, he found a light switch set in the frame of the trap. Two bare bulbs, dimmed by dust, illuminated a raftered space empty of everything except the smell of wood rot.
Evidently the freak was canny enough to keep his incriminating souvenirs elsewhere.
Billy suspected that Zillis stayed in this rental house but did not in the truest sense live here. With its minimum of furniture and utter lack of decorative items, the place had the feeling of a way station. Steve Zillis had no roots here. He was just passing through.
He had worked at the tavern for five months. Where had he been between the University of Colorado at Denver, five and a half years ago, when Judith Kesselman had disappeared, and this place?
Across the World Wide Web, his name had been linked to only one disappearance, and to no murders at all. Googled, Billy himself would not appear that clean.
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But if you had a list of the towns in which Steve Zillis had settled for a while, if you researched murders and disappearances that occurred in those communities, the truth might be clearer.
The most successful serial killers were the vagabonds, roamers who covered a lot of ground between their homicidal frenzies. When clusters of killings were separated by hundreds of miles and scores of jurisdictions, they were less likely to be connected; patterns in landscape, visible from an airplane, are seldom discernible to a man on foot.
An itinerant bartender who’s a good mixologist, who’s outgoing and able to charm the customers, can get work anywhere. If he applies to the right places, he won’t often be asked for a formal employment history, only for a social-security card, a driver’s license, and an all-clean report from the state liquor-control board. Jackie O’Hara, typical of his breed, didn’t phone an applicant’s former employers; he made hiring decisions based on gut instinct. Billy turned out the lights as he left the house. He used the spare key to lock up after himself, and he pocketed it again because he expected to return.
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The dying sun spilled fierce bloody light on the dimensional mural under construction across the highway from the tavern.
As Billy drove past on his way home to collect Cottle’s body, this scintillant display seized his attention. It captured him so completely that he pulled to the shoulder of the road and stopped.
Outside the large yellow-and-purple tent in which the artists and artisans of the project regularly met for lunch, for progress meetings, and for receptions in honor of various art-and academic-world dignitaries, they assembled now to assess this fleeting work of nature.
Parked near the tent, the giant yellow-and-purple motor home, built on a bus chassis and emblazoned with the name Valis, offered much chrome and steel in which the sun could reveal a latent fire. The tinted windows glowed a crimson bronze, sullen and smoky, yet incandescent.
Neither the festive tent nor the rock-star motor home, nor the glamorous artists and artisans enjoying the effects of sunset were what brought Billy to a stop.
