Those hopes suffered a setback a little before ten o’clock, when he first saw Bredloe.
The captain had been moved into the intensive care unit. He had not regained consciousness. Frank tried to tell himself that he had seen crime victims survive more terrible injuries, but he had not known those individuals personally or seen them before they were hurt. He could not reconcile the Bredloe he knew, always a strong and healthy man, with the pale, stitched, and bandaged one lying so still on this hospital bed, attached by tubing and wiring to machines and medications.
The doctors seemed to think that their work to save the captain’s life had gone well and were optimistic about his chances for survival, even if they avoided predicting what impairments the head injuries would cause.
An orderly handed Miriam a large plastic bag, explaining that it contained the clothing her husband had been wearing when he was admitted. Frank watched as she peered into the bag, then reached to support her as she nearly fainted.
“Let Frank look through it for you,” Irene suggested as he guided Miriam to a chair.
But Miriam shook her head and began sorting what remained of the bloodstained and battered clothing from inside the bag. She separated the contents, placing them on the chair next to her own, then tenderly folded each item before putting it back in the bag. The pants were completely ruined, obviously cut away by ER doctors hurrying to treat his wounds. His shirt had not fared much better. She was smoothing the stained but relatively intact suit coat when she paused, then reached into an inside pocket. She removed what Frank at first thought was a document of some kind. She held it up, a puzzled look on her face.
“What in the world was he doing with this?” she asked.
As Frank drew closer, he saw the reason for her question. What he had thought to be a document was a fancy paper airplane.
14
Monday, July 10, 10:01 P.M.
A Private Home in Las Piernas
The Looking Glass Man double-checked all the blinds and curtains. He secured all three dead bolts on the front door, pausing to polish his fingerprints from their gleaming brass surfaces. He did not do this because of concerns regarding evidence — it was perfectly natural that his own fingerprints would be found in his own home. He simply did not like to see any sort of smudge on the locks.
Satisfied with these and other safeguards, he moved to the back of the house, to the large walk-in closet off his bedroom. The light was already on — triggered by a motion detector in the bedroom itself. He took a moment to survey the perfectly polished and aligned shoes, to admire the shirts on their hangers — all facing the same way, each buttoned up to the second highest button on the front. They were arranged by color, lightest to darkest, and each was spaced exactly three-quarters of an inch from the shirt next to it, so that they never touched and therefore never wrinkled or creased a neighboring shirt. He glanced at the side of the closet that held his more casual clothes and adjusted the neatly ironed pair of blue jeans so that it was more precisely centered on its hanger.
The switch for the closet light was in the “on” position. It was always in this position. He pushed slightly on one side of the switch plate, which, like the switch itself, was nothing more than camouflage. The plate swung away to reveal an alarm keypad. He entered a code and heard a series of bolts click in the ceiling above him. He moved a small step stool to the middle of the closet floor.
He pulled down on the access door to the attic, which was unlocked. He did not place a lock on the door because he did not wish to draw attention to it. He returned the step stool to its place, then lowered the ladder built into the access door. Carefully, he climbed until he could reach the true barrier to the attic: a heavy, steel- plated hatch. He lifted it, reaching for the switches for the lights and ventilation system inside the attic before climbing higher.
He smiled to himself, just as he always did when entering this room. He still used other sites as needed, but after the Randolph killings he felt it had become imperative that he acquire a permanent residence over which he was the only landlord, the only man with keys to the front door.
The element of risk did not excite him. He disliked risk. That was why he needed a special house, a house that would seem like any other house from the outside. He had patiently waited for a house in this tract, where every fifth or sixth home was of a style with a high-pitched roof. It was, in fact, the very neighborhood where Wendell Leroy Wallace had once lived. Wallace had been a man with the kind of genius that the Looking Glass Man admired. Like Wallace, he needed a place to build unique devices.
Not that anyone looking at the house from the street would be aware of the extraordinary activities taking place within it. Even from the inside — unless one knew where to look — the house seemed average.
Far less important to him than the house itself was this attic room. He bought this house because of the pitch of its roof. He ran the numbers in his head — the pitch of the roof was 12/12 — the attic was fifteen feet high under the ridge and sloped steeply to zero at the walls — a lovely space of eight hundred square feet where the headroom was over seven feet. He found construction nearly as fascinating as destruction.
He ate and slept and bathed in the house, but these were activities he could have carried out in any house. Some said a man’s home was his castle, but he preferred to think of his home as a moat, a large defense system protecting the real castle — this attic with its hidden treasures.
He had done almost all of the work on the attic himself, a fact that pleased him for many reasons — one being that his participation reduced the need to eliminate more than two skilled workmen after they had completed their part of the project. It had not been difficult to arrange the deaths of a roofer and his helper at their next job site. People expected roofers to fall off roofs in the same way they expected race car drivers to crash.
He regretted the necessity, of course. He did not enjoy killing. Murder was always a last resort, to be avoided if at all possible. The roofers — although they
He cringed, realizing that he was guilty of an inaccuracy. Bredloe was still clinging to life, and Bredloe could not, therefore, be counted as a murder victim. Not yet.
Careless thinking. Careless thinking easily led to careless actions. He did not have a perfect record. He knew this. It was the source of most of his unhappiness.
He pulled the ladder up after him, secured the access door and hatch, and reset the alarm from a pad inside the attic. Should anyone enter the house while he was up here, he would have plenty of time to destroy any incriminating materials. The mere thought of finding it necessary to do so made him shudder.
