slid the lid aside.
No draft rose out of the hole. Billy could smell nothing but a faint cindery scent, and under that the vaguest hint of salt, a whiff of lime. Grunting with the effort, he hauled the dead man out of the SUV and dragged him to the vent.
He wasn’t concerned about the trail he left through the brush or about the trail the Explorer had left. Nature was resilient. In a few days, the disturbance would not be obvious.
Although the dead man might not have approved, given his status as a former member of the Society of Skeptics, Billy murmured a brief prayer for him before shoving his body into the hole.
Ralph Cottle made a lot more noise going down than had any of the ball bearings. The first few impacts sounded bone-shattering.
Then the slippery tarp produced an eerie whistling sound as the tunnel angled from the vertical and the plastic-wrapped mummy slid at increasing velocity into the depths, perhaps spiraling around the walls of the lava tube as a bullet spirals along the grooved barrel of a gun.
199
Billy parked the explorer on the lawn behind the garage, where it could not be seen by any motorist who might use the dead end of the lane as a turnaround. He worked his hands into latex gloves.
With the spare key that he had taken from the hole in the oak stump little more than nineteen hours earlier, he let himself into the house through the back door.
He had with him the tarp, the strapping tape, the rope. And of course the
.38 revolver.
As Billy moved forward through the ground floor, he turned on lights. Wednesday and Thursday were Lanny’s days off, so he might not be thought missing for another thirty-six hours. If a friend dropped by unannounced for a visit, however, saw lights in the house, but could not get an answer to the doorbell, trouble would follow.
Billy intended to do what needed to be done as quickly as possible and get out, turning the lights off after himself.
The cartoon hands, pointing the way to the corpse, were still taped to the walls. He would remove them later, as part of the cleanup. If Lanny’s body had been salted with evidence pointing to Billy, as Cottle said that Giselle Winslow’s had been, none of it could be used in a court of law if Lanny lay forever at rest a mile or more under the earth. Billy realized, as he eliminated planted evidence incriminating himself, he also would be destroying any evidence of the killer’s guilt that the freak might unintentionally have left. He was doing cleanup for both of them. The cunning with which this trap had been designed and the early choices that Billy had made as the performance unfolded had virtually ensured that he would come to this juncture and would have to proceed as he was proceeding now.
He didn’t care. Nothing mattered but Barbara. He had to stay free to protect her, because no one else would.
If Billy came under suspicion in a homicide, John Palmer would lock him down fast and tight. The sheriff would seek vindication in the conviction of Billy for murder, and if he got that conviction, he would use it to try to rewrite history, as well.
200
They could hold him on suspicion alone. He wasn’t sure how long. Certainly for forty-eight hours.
By then Barbara would be dead. Or missing, gone, like Judith Kesselman, music student, dog fancier, walker on beaches.
The performance would be concluded. Maybe the freak would have another face in another jar.
Past, present, future, all time eternally present in the here and now, and racing—he swore he could hear the hands on his watch whirring—and so he hurried to the stairs and climbed.
Even before arriving at this house, he’d feared that he would not find Lanny’s body in the bedroom armchair where he had last seen it. Another move in the game, one more twist in the performance.
When he reached the top of the stairs, he hesitated, stopped by that same dread. He hesitated again at the doorway to the master bedroom. Then he crossed the threshold and switched on the light.
Lanny sat in the chair with the book in his lap, the photograph of Giselle Winslow tucked in the book.
The corpse didn’t look good. Perhaps delayed somewhat by the air conditioning, visible decomposition had not yet occurred, but blood vessels in his face had begun to be revealed as a faint green marbling. Lanny’s eyes shifted to follow Billy across the room, but that was just a trick of the light.
201
After spreading the polyurethane tarp on the floor but before proceeding further, Billy sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the phone. Careful not to make the error that he had claimed to have made earlier in the day, he keyed in 411. From directory assistance he obtained the area code for Denver. Even if Ramsey Ozgard continued to serve as a detective with the Denver Police Department, he might not live within the city. He might be in one of several suburbs, in which case locating him would be too difficult. His home number might also be unlisted.
When Billy called directory assistance in Denver, he got lucky. He was overdue for some luck. They had a listing for Ozgard, Ramsey G., in the city. It was 10:54 in Colorado, but the hour might make the call seem more urgent and therefore more credible.
A man answered on the second ring, and Billy said, “Detective Ozgard?”
“Speaking.”
“Sir, this is Deputy Lanny Olsen of the Napa County Sheriff’s Department, here in California. First, I want to apologize for disturbing you at this hour.”
“I’m a lifelong insomniac, Deputy, and now I have like six hundred channels on the TV, so I’ll be watching
