feminine eye appear at the edge of the curtain and vanish. It probably helped build the suspense that was part of the appeal of the show. But Prescott could not afford to be seen.
He moved up the corridor to the door of Dick Hobart’s office, stepped to the side, and knocked. He listened, but the music from the main room grew louder, so he heard nothing. He knocked again, this time rapping his knuckles hard on the wood so he could hear it clearly over the music. He waited, but Hobart did not appear.
Prescott moved on, opened the door to the storeroom, and switched on the light. The tall shelves shone white with stacked rolls of paper towels and toilet paper for the rest rooms. On the lower shelves there were bottles of floor wax, cans of metal polish, mop heads, sponges. The empty spaces on the floor held buckets, mop wringers, brooms propped against the wall. There was no way for Prescott to know whether anyone had been here who didn’t work here, but he could see there was nobody here now. He turned off the light and went out.
Prescott moved toward the door near the side of the stage that led out into the public part of the building, then stopped. There was still a room back here that he could not be sure about: Hobart’s office. He could not leave a room at his back that had not been searched.
Millikan had settled into his spot near the bar, where he could keep his back against the wall and not be jostled too often by the men who made their way past him to buy more drinks. The light in the margins of the cavernous room was red and dim: the stage lights were a bit brighter, a compromise between not paying enough attention to the lady who was working up there, and having a stage awash in white light that would make her skin look pink and raw, like flesh in an operating room.
Millikan was in a dim place that was not too visible, but he was not able to see the other customers well either. He concentrated on looking at every face that presented itself. Prescott had warned him that the crowd at night was young, and now he saw that it was making what he had to do more difficult and dangerous. Everyone he saw seemed to be twenty-five and in good physical shape, with shortish hair and an unlined, undistinctive face. It was their height that was bothering him the most at the moment. He had been aware that each generation grew a bit taller than the last. No forensics specialist could possibly not know that, and anyone who spent time on a college campus could see it. But there were few times when Millikan had found himself in such cramped quarters with an audience made up exclusively of young males. He craned his neck, he stood on his toes, he glanced between passing customers, but he never could see far enough to be sure he was seeing even a significant proportion of the men in the big room.
Prescott had told him that in Minnesota the killer’s hair had been dyed light brown—or maybe the first time, it had been dyed dark brown. It didn’t matter which was the natural shade, or if either was. Once it had been established that the man had ever changed the color, it was simply not something Millikan could use. He had to look directly into the man’s face to see if he matched his portrait, and how could Millikan possibly stare into the eyes without having the eyes stare back?
Prescott managed to push the fifth pin into line with the others on the cylinder of the lock on Dick Hobart’s office, then turn the cylinder. He gently pushed the knob to let the door swing inward, and in the first fraction of a second he received the first bit of disturbing news: the light was on. In the next fraction of a second, the door stopped. Prescott pushed the door again, and the sound was the one he had already begun to dread. What had stopped the door’s arc was the sole of a shoe. He pushed on the door harder, and the side of the shoe scraped against the concrete floor as he moved the heavy weight far enough to put his head in and look down.
Dick Hobart’s foot was against the door because his head had a hole in it. It was a neat hole, on the left side. That was the entry wound. The side that was down against the floor was the exit wound, and it would not be so neat. Since the killer’s left forearm was the one that Prescott had clipped in the dark in Minnesota, he had certainly shot Dick Hobart with his right. That meant that Hobart had been facing him.
Prescott pulled back and closed the door, then turned the cylinder to lock it again. He was sorry. Dick Hobart had been eager to get involved in arranging a murder. He supposed that this was not entirely an event that Hobart had a right to expect would never happen, but it was something Prescott had tried to prevent. He moved back up the corridor the way he had come.
The beer bottle Varney carried in his left hand was an empty one he had picked up from a table. He had it so that the way he held his injured left forearm resting across his stomach looked natural. He moved with slow, intermittent progress across the big, crowded room. Nearly everyone but Varney had his eyes focused on the woman up on the stage. Varney turned his face in that direction for a few seconds each time he waited. When he saw another gap in the crowd, he stepped into it, then paused again and pretended to watch.
He did not want to be aggressive in making his way out. It would be easy in a place like this to get into a fight if he pushed one of these big bastards too hard. There was no question he could put any one of them down, even tonight, when his left arm was throbbing, but it would require him to do serious damage.
Throwing a punch in this kind of crowd was foolish. They were all big and stupid. Half of them were already feeling the effect of the alcohol, and that was the half that had been most aggressive about elbowing their way to the head of the line at the bar while they were sober.
As he moved, he looked past each of them, not wanting to make eye contact, his gaze on his destination instead. Each time he was forced by the crush of bodies to pause again, he had to look up at the stage, and he hated it. The woman up there was very blond and very tall, but that did not help. The fact that she was not remotely like Mae forced him to think of Mae and compare. When he did, even the dissimilarity was not exactly real: there was a similarity between the shapes of all attractive women, their movements and expressions. The differences were like the differences between two zebras, probably enormous to a zebra, but practically invisible to any other animal.
He turned away again to watch the fluid movements of the crowd, waiting for a path to appear. His eyes passed across two big men who had just come in a few minutes ago, after he had begun to make his way toward the door. At that moment, one of them turned his body to the side to look over his shoulder—maybe in response to something that was said, but was only audible at that end of the room—and his companion took one step toward the bar. In the half second the space between them widened by a foot, and Varney saw something that made him gasp.
It seemed to be the guy he had seen on television months ago, right after the job in Louisville. Varney instinctively turned and drifted to the side along with the pressure of the crowd, toward the bar, so he would be harder to see while he looked. He never took his eyes from the space near the door, barely blinking, trying to be sure.
Another man stopped and looked at the stage just as the one ahead of him took a step toward the bar, and another space opened. Varney got a clear look beyond them, and this time the name came back to him: Millikan. He wasn’t even sure why he had remembered it, but the old guy’s name was Millikan.
Varney’s eyes moved from side to side, looking for a new path through the crowd. He would have to make his way to the front door on the left side, so that he wouldn’t pass on Millikan’s side. He was sure Millikan must have seen the picture Prescott had posted in Buffalo. He could not have come here by sheer coincidence. Varney decided that as soon as he could make it to the left side of the door, just before he slipped out of the light into the night, he would have to be sure that Millikan got a good look.
Millikan had been wondering what had become of Prescott. He had agreed with the strategy, and had, in fact, considered it inevitable. One man had to gain control of the doorway while the other moved systematically through the crowd from the far wall toward the door, looking at faces. But Millikan had taken his station near the door at least a half hour ago, and he still had not seen Prescott. He caught himself. It probably had not been a half hour. It had been proven experimentally that it took no more than two minutes before the average person began to overestimate duration, and as time went on, the exaggeration grew. Millikan had not looked at his watch when he came in, so there was no point in looking now. He corrected his time sense by looking at the only objective measure he could see. The woman on the stage was the only one in the building who was making visible progress of any kind. He supposed that merely taking off her clothes to music couldn’t take more than fifteen minutes, and she had not finished yet. He returned his eyes to the faces in the crowd.
He quickly scanned the faces from the door inward into the big room. There was still no sign of Prescott, but he had just convinced himself that his wait had not been so long. He moved his eyes from face to face, moving back toward the door. He stopped. His eyes were caught by a face. He saw that the young man was standing absolutely still, staring at him too. He took a breath and it seemed to keep coming, his lungs expanding as though he were preparing to shout. The hair was not light anymore, as Prescott had said it had been, but he could not change his eyes.
