The Dark Half

sort of thing. What the computer synthesizes is pitch and tone — what the experts call head voice — and timbre and resonance, which is known as chest or gut voice. They are verbal fingerprints, and like fingerprints, no one has ever found two which are exactly alike. I'm told that the difference in the voice-prints of identical twins is much wider than the difference in their fingerprints.'

  He paused.

   'We've sent a high-resolution copy of the tape we got to FOLE in Washington. What we'll get is a comparison of your voice-print and his voice-print. The guys at the state police barracks here wanted to tell me I was crazy. I could see it in their faces, but after the fingerprints and your alibi, no one quite had the nerve to come right out and say it.'

  Thad opened his mouth, tried to speak, couldn't, wet his lips, tried again, and still couldn't.

  'Thad? Are you hanging up on me again?'

   'No,' he said, and all at once there seemed to be a cricket in the middle of his voice. 'Thank you, Alan.'

   'No, don't say that. I know what you're thanking me for, and I don't want to niislead you. All I'm trying to do is follow standard investigatory procedure. The procedure is a little odd in this case, granted, because the circumstances are a little odd. That doesn't mean you should make unwarranted assumptions. Get me?'

  'Yes. What's FOLE?'

  'F — ? Oh. The Federal Office of Law Enforcement. Maybe the only good thing Nixon did the whole damn time he was in the White House. It's mostly made up of computer banks that serve as a central clearing—house for the local law —enforcement agencies . . . and the program-crunchers who run them, of course. We can access the fingerprints of almost anyone in America convicted of a felony crime since 1969 or so. FOLE also supplies ballistics reports for comparison, bloodtyping on felons where available, voice-prints and computer-generated pictures of suspected criminals.'

  'So we'll see if my voice and his — ?'

  'Yes. We should have it by seven. Eight if there's heavy computer traffic down there.'

  Thad was shaking his head. 'We didn't sound anything alike.'

    'I heard the tape and I know that,' Pangborn said. 'Let me repeat: a voice-print has absolutely nothing to do with speech. Head voice and gut voice, Thad. There's a big difference.'

'But — '

'Tell me something. Do Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck, sound the same to you?'

Thad blinked. 'Well . . . no.'

    'Not to me, either,' Pangborn said, 'but a guy named Mel Blanc does both of them . . . not to mention the voices of Bugs Bunny, Tweetie Bird, Foghorn Leghorn, and God knows how many others. I've got to go. See you tonight, okay?'

  'Yes.'

  'Between seven-thirty and nine, all right?'

  'We'll look for you, Alan.'

  'Okay. However this goes, I'll be heading back to The Rock tomorrow, and barring some unforeseen break in the case, there I will remain.'

   'The finger, having writ, moves on, right?' Thad said, and thought: That's what he's counting on, after all.

'Yeah — I've got lots of other fish to fry. None are as big as this one, but the people of Castle County pay my salary for fryin em. You know what I mean?' This seemed to Thad to be a serious question and not just a place— holder in the conversation.

'Yes. I do know.' We both do. Me . . . and foxy George.

   'I'll have to go, but you'll see a state police cruiser parked out in front of your house twenty-four hours a day until this thing is over. Those guys are tough, Thad. And if the cops in New York let down their guards a little, the Bears you got watching out for you won't. No one is going to underestimate this spook again. No one is going to forget you, or leave you and your family to cope with this on your own. People will be working on this case, and while they do, other people will be watching out for you and yours. You understand that, don't you?'

   'Yes. I understand.' And thought: Today. Tomorrow. Next week. Maybe next month. But next year? No way. I know it. And he knows it, too. Right now they don't completely believe what he said about coming to his senses and laying off. Later on, they will . . . as the weeks pass and nothing happens, it will become more than politic for them to believe it; it will also become economic. Because George and I know how the world goes rolling around the sun in its accustomed groove, just as we know that, as soon as everybody is busy frying those other fish, George will show up and fry me. US.

4

Fifteen minutes later, Alan was still in the Orono State Police Barracks, still on the telephone, and still on hold. There was a click on the line. A young woman spoke to him in a slightly apologetic tone. 'Can you hold a little longer, Chief Pangborn? The computer is having one of its slow days.'

   Alan considered telling her he was a sheriff, not a chief, and then didn't bother. It was a mistake everyone made. 'Sure,' he said.

  Click.

  He was returned to Hold, that latter-twentieth-century version of limbo.

    He was sitting in a cramped little office all the way to the rear of the barracks; any farther back and he would have been doing business in the bushes. The room was filled with dusty files. The only desk was a grammar—school refugee, the type with a sloping surface, a hinged lid, and an inkwell. Alan balanced it on his knees and swung it idly back and forth that way. At the same time he turned the piece of paper on the desk around and around. Written on it in Alan's small, neat hand were two pieces of information: Hugh Pritchard and Bergenfield County Hospital, Bergenfield, New Jersey.

  He thought of his last conversation with Thad, half an hour ago. The one where he had told him all about how the brave state troopers were going to protect him and his wife from the bad old crazyman who thought he was George Stark, if the bad old crazyman showed up. Alan wondered if Thad had believed it. He doubted it; he guessed that a man who wrote fiction for a living would have a keen nose for fairy tales.

  Well, they would try to protect Thad and Liz; give them that. But Alan kept remembering something which had happened in Bangor in 1985.

  A woman had requested and had received police protection after her estranged husband had beaten her severely and threatened to come back and kill her if she went through with her plans for a divorce. For two weeks, the man had done nothing. The Bangor P.D. had been about to cancel the watch when the husband showed up, driving a laundry truck and wearing green fatigues with the laundry's name on the back of the shirt. He had walked up to the door, carrying a bundle of laundry. The police might have recognized the man, even in the uniform, if he had come earlier, when the watch order was fresh, but that was moot; they hadn't recognized him when he did show up. He knocked on the door and when the woman opened it, her husband pulled a gun out of his pants pocket and shot her dead. Before the cops assigned to her had fully realized what was happening, let alone got out of their car, the man had been standing on the stoop with his hands raised. He had tossed the smoking gun into the rose bushes. 'Don't shoot me,' he'd said calmly. 'I'm finished.' The truck and the uniform, it turned out, had been borrowed from an old drinking buddy who didn't even know the perp had been fighting with his wife.

  The point was simple: if someone wanted you badly enough, and if that someone had just a little luck, he would get you. Look at Oswald; look at Chapman; look what this fellow Stark had done to those people in New York.

  Click.

  'Are you still there, Chief?' the female voice from Bergenfield County Hospital asked brightly.

  'Yes,' he said. 'Still right here.'

    'I have the information you requested,' she said. 'Dr Hugh Pritchard retired in 1978. I have an address and telephone number for him in the town of Fort Laramie, Wyoming.'

  'May I have it, please?'

  She gave it to him. Alan thanked her, hung up, and dialed the number. The telephone uttered half a ring, and then an answering machine cut in and began spieling its recorded announcement into Alan's ear.

  'Hello, this is Hugh Pritchard,' a gravelly voice said. Well, Alan thought, the guy hasn't croaked, anyway — that's a step in the right direction. 'Helga and I aren't in right now. I'm probably playing golf; God knows what Helga's up to. ' There was an old man's rusty chuckle. 'If you've got a message, please leave it at the sound of the tone. You've got about thirty seconds.'

  Bee-eep!

    'Dr Pritchard, this is Sheriff Alan Pangborn,' he said. 'I'm a law-enforcement officer in Maine. I need to talk to you about a man