Cursing under my breath, I drew the Glock from my jacket pocket. I held it in the candlelight, searching desperately for safeties.
I found only one switch that might be what I wanted. When I pressed it down, an intense beam of red light shot out of a smaller hole below the muzzle and painted a bright dot on the refrigerator door.
My dad, wanting a weapon that was user-friendly even to gentle professors of literature, had paid extra for laser sighting. Good man.
I didn’t know much about handguns, but I knew some models of pistols featured “safe action” systems with only internal safety devices that disengaged as the trigger was pulled and, after firing, engaged again. Maybe this was one of those weapons. If not, then I would either find myself unable to get off a shot when confronted by an assailant — or, fumbling in panic, would shoot myself in the foot.
Although I wasn’t trained for this work, there was no one but me to do the job. Admittedly, I thought about getting out of there, climbing on my bike, riding to safety, and placing an anonymous emergency call to the police. Thereafter, however, I would never be able to look at myself in a mirror — or even meet Orson’s eyes.
I didn’t like the way my hands were shaking, but I sure as hell couldn’t pause for deep-breathing exercises or meditation.
As I crossed the kitchen to the open door at the dining room, I considered returning the pistol to my pocket and taking a knife from the cutlery drawer. Telling the story of the monkey, Angela had shown me where the blades were kept.
Reason prevailed. I was no more practiced with knives than I was expert with firearms.
Besides, using a knife, slashing and gouging at another human being, seemed to require a ruthlessness greater than that needed to pull a trigger. I figured I could do whatever was necessary if my life — or Angela’s — was on the line, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility that I was better suited to the comparatively dry business of shooting than to the up-close-and-personal wet work of evisceration. In a desperate confrontation, a flinch might be fatal.
As a thirteen-year-old boy, I had been able to look into the crematorium. Yet all these years later, I still wasn’t ready to watch the grimmer show in an embalming chamber.
Swiftly crossing the dining room, I called out to Angela once more. Again, she failed to respond.
I wouldn’t call her a third time. If indeed an intruder was in the house, I would only be revealing my position each time I shouted Angela’s name.
In the living room, I didn’t pause to switch off the lamp, but I stepped wide of it and averted my face.
Squinting in the stinging rain of foyer light, I glanced through the open door to the study. No one was in there.
The powder-room door was ajar. I pushed it all the way open. I didn’t need to turn on a light to see that no one was in there, either.
Feeling naked without my cap, which I had left on the kitchen table, I switched off the ceiling fixture in the foyer. Blessed gloom fell.
I peered up at the landing where the shadowy stairs turned back and disappeared overhead. As far as I could tell, no lights were lit on the upper floor — which was fine with me. My dark-adapted eyes were my biggest advantage.
The cellular phone was clipped to my belt. As I started up the stairs, I considered calling the police.
After my failure to keep our appointment earlier in the evening, however, Lewis Stevenson might be looking for me. If so, then the chief himself would answer this call. Maybe the bald man with the earring would come along for the ride.
Manuel Ramirez couldn’t assist me himself, because he was the duty officer this evening, restricted to the station. I didn’t feel safe asking for any other officer. As far as I knew, Chief Stevenson might not be the only compromised cop in Moonlight Bay; perhaps every member of the force, except Manuel, was involved in this conspiracy. In fact, in spite of our friendship, I couldn’t trust Manuel, either, not until I knew a lot more about this situation.
Climbing the stairs, I gripped the Glock with both hands, ready to press the laser-sighting switch if someone moved. I kept reminding myself that playing hero meant trying not to shoot Angela by mistake.
I turned at the landing and saw that the upper flight was darker than the lower. No ambient light from the living room reached this high. I ascended quickly and silently.
My heart was doing more than idling; it was revving nicely, but I was surprised that it wasn’t racing. Only yesterday, I could not have imagined that I would be able to adapt so rapidly to the prospect of imminent violence. I was even beginning to recognize within myself a disconcerting enthusiasm for danger.
Four doors opened off the upstairs hall. Three were closed. The fourth — the door farthest from the stairs — was ajar, and from the room beyond came a soft light.
I disliked passing the three closed rooms without confirming that they were deserted. I would be leaving my back vulnerable.
Given my XP, however, and especially considering how quickly my eyes would sting and water when exposed to very bright light, I’d be able to search those spaces only with the pistol in my right hand and the penlight in my left. This would be awkward, time-consuming, and dangerous. Each time I stepped into a room, no matter how low I crouched and how fast I moved, the penlight would instantly pinpoint my location for any would-be assailant before I found him with the narrow beam.
My best hope was to play to my strengths, which meant using the darkness, blending with the shadows. Moving sideways along the hall, keeping a watch in both directions, I made no sound, and neither did anyone else in the house.
The second door on the left was open only a crack, and the narrow wedge of light revealed little of the room beyond. Using the gun barrel, I pushed the door inward.
The master bedroom. Cozy. The bed was neatly made. A gaily colored afghan draped one arm of an easy chair, and on the footstool waited a folded newspaper. On the bureau, a collection of antique perfume bottles sparkled.
One of the nightstand lamps was aglow. The bulb was not strong, and the pleated-fabric shade screened most of the rays.
Angela was nowhere to be seen.
A closet door stood open. Perhaps Angela had come upstairs to fetch something from there. I couldn’t see anything but hanging clothes and shoe boxes.
The door to the adjacent bathroom was ajar, and the bathroom was dark. To anyone in there, looking out, I was a well-lit target.
I approached the bathroom as obliquely as possible, aiming the Glock at the black gap between the door and the jamb. When I pushed on the door, it opened without resistance.
The smell stopped me from crossing the threshold.
Because the glow of the nightstand lamp didn’t illuminate much of the space before me, I fished the penlight from my pocket. The beam glistered across a red pool on a white tile floor. The walls were sprayed with arterial gouts.
Angela Ferryman was slumped on the floor, head bent backward over the rim of the toilet bowl. Her eyes were as wide, pale, and flat as those of a dead seagull that I had once found on the beach.
At a glance, I thought her throat appeared to have been slashed repeatedly with a half-sharp knife. I couldn’t bear to look at her too closely or for too long.
The smell was not merely blood. Dying, she had fouled herself. A draft bathed me in the stench.
A casement window was cranked all the way open. It wasn’t a typically small bathroom window but large enough to have provided escape for the killer, who must have been liberally splashed with his victim’s blood.
Perhaps Angela had left the window open. If there was a first-story porch roof under it, the killer could have entered as well as exited by this route.
Orson had not barked — but then this window was toward the front of the house, and the dog was at the back.
Angela’s hands were at her sides, almost lost in the sleeves of the cardigan. She looked so innocent. She looked twelve.
All her life, she had given of herself to others. Now someone, unimpressed by her selfless giving, had cruelly
