brain like crystal, and we rush forward and drive the ashtray against the back of his head, drive him flat to the floor, fall beside him and hit him again and then it stops, at last it stops, and he is still and silent and we know he is dead.
The confusion still has control of us; our head has begun to ache intolerably. We’re afraid, for the first time we’re terrified.
And inside us something seems to be happening We stand again, panting, and stare down at Harper. The back of his skull is crushed and bloody. We can’t make this one look like an accident, they’ll, know it’s murder. But there is nothing we can do now, and — we’re losing the fusion, that’s what is happening inside us, we’re losing control-Still holding the ashtray. When we look at it we see our fingers smeared with crimson, Harper’s blood on our hand. We fling the ashtray away from us, hear it bounce and clatter across the floor, then frantically scrub my fingers — our fingers, scrub our fingers clean on the tail of his dressing gown. Then I back away
We back away, we do it. But I is trying to take over and we mustn’t let me do it. Get out of here before I realizes the truth! We turn blindly and stumble to the door, pull it open. Moonshine engulfs me
Us. Engulfs me us me
Moonshine-and then darkness…
He was standing in the guest-house doorway.
He could not seem to remember walking here, he could not seem to remember opening the door; he was simply standing in the doorway, blinking away a wetness that dimmed his vision. In his mind there was upheaval, as though he were just starting to emerge from some sort of dreamlike state. Malignant pain in his head, too. Perspiration encasing his body, warm and mucilaginous like that caused by high fever.
Fuzzy thoughts: What’s happening to me? I was all right a little while ago, I didn’t feel sick And he saw the body.
His vision cleared and he saw the body of Maxwell Harper lying bloody and twisted on the cottage floor.
Shock. Horror. The pain in his head magnifying, manufacturing the illusion of sound in his ears, like the whine of a high-speed drill. Upheaval filling all the spaces of him; pieces of his mind seeming to fragment, cohesive thought, all rationality breaking up into a swirl of bright shards.
Look at his head, Maxwell’s head, no accident somebody killed him murdered him Justice was right, psychopath killing people Briggs and Wexford it’s true, but who, why does my head ache like this why can’t I remember, psychopath, no, psychopath…
Vertigo assailed him and he leaned hard against the doorjamb to keep from falling, clung to the wood there with his right hand. The hand was up in front of his face and he saw it like a claw, a fat white claw with dark spots on it, liver spots, and something else too, something adhering in the skin ridges on the backs of his knuckles, something that might have been dirt and might have been coagulated fluid, blood-blood! He ripped the hand down, thrust it behind him to hide it from his eyes, to hide it from — the other eyes. There were other eyes close by, tyes that watched him in the night.
He jerked his head up in panic. In the room’s north wall, beyond Harper’s body, was another window, and the shades were not drawn across it, and a face peered in at him there. Frozen behind glass, eyes enormous, mouth open with incredulity. Familiar, agonized, accusing.
Justice’s face.
The implacable face of Justice.
The panic consumed him and he turned, Nicholas Augustine turned, the President of the United States turned and fled into the night.
Sixteen
Continuing his vigil, Justice had moved past the dark tennis courts, come back through the fruit trees that grew in even rows between the rear of the guest cottages and the security fence. The two northernmost cottages had been dark, but lights still shone inside the third; he had walked up alongside it, as he had done earlier, and glanced through the side window: Frank Tanaguchi still seated at the desk in the front room, working over a stack of papers, listening to classical music on a portable radio.
Justice had turned away immediately, gone past the fourth and fifth cottages, both of which were dark, and approached the sixth, the one occupied by Maxwell Harper. The bright rectangle of light that was the side window drew him again. He looked inside.
And went rigid.
And stared with sick fascination at Harper’s body lying on the floor and the President standing in the doorway beyond, holding onto the jamb and gazing fixedly at his right hand.
Oh my God I knew it, it’s my fault, I should have found a way to prevent it The President, what is the President doing here?
Augustine looked ghastly; his face had a gray ravaged appearance, like decaying wood. Shock, that was it. He had come to talk to Harper for some reason and found him like this. But then why was he staring at his hand that way? It was almost as if No.
Chills on Justice’s body, nausea in his stomach.
The President?
No! Potential victim, he couldn’t be the psychopath! Augustine pulled his hand down from the doorjamb, shoved it behind him. Then his expression changed all at once to one of panic and his head came up and he was looking straight across at the window. His body tensed, and Justice thought: he sees me, he’ll beckon me inside now, he The President spun and ran.
Justice was stunned. It couldn’t be Augustine-but when someone ran from the scene of a crime, ran from the presence of an officer of the law, it was almost always because of guilt. The President had no reason to run from his bodyguard unless he was guilty. But he couldn’t be guilty.
Then why did he run?
Justice shook himself, and the policeman in him took command and sent him racing around to the front of the cottage. He slowed near the door, scanned the moonlit grounds with quick jerks of his head. At first he did not see Augustine; then there was a flash of movement to the south, in the shadows cast by a line of four-foot high cinquefoil shrubs. A second later the President appeared as a silhouette against the bright moonglow, running southeast in long lurching strides.
Justice sprinted in that direction, leaving the paths where they meandered around trees and shrubs and flowers so that he could maintain a straight-ahead course in Augustine’s wake. He lost sight of him in the small copse of evergreens planted as a windbreak near the garage barns. Plunged through the trees and saw him again seventy yards away, heading across open ground toward the rear of the barns. Except for the two of them, the night seemed desertednothing moving anywhere. And Justice was thankful for that: he did not want anyone to see the President running, he did not want anyone else to catch him.
Catch him, he thought, catch the President.
Draw his gun and shout at him to halt, as he would have done with any homicide suspect? Hold him at bay, spread him out and search him? Question him, demand to know why he had run? A feeling of surreality came over Justice. That was the President up there, he was chasing the Chief Executive of the United States across the grounds of his own estate. There was a psychopath loose at The Hollows and he was running after the President and the President was not the one, he was not the one.
Ahead, Augustine had vanished again behind the first of the barns. Justice fought to lengthen his strides, reached the corner, turned past it. The President was midway along the rear wall of the second barn, running with his head down and his arms pumping like cylinder valves. The distance between them was still at least seventy-five yards.
When Augustine was beyond the second barn he veered at an angle to the west. Justice, coming out along there moments later, saw him heading toward the far side of the stable, and clenched his teeth in frustration because the gap that separated them seemed to have increased: the President was maintaining the frenzied pace of someone half his age.
The stable loomed blackly; the fence rails enclosing the corral and the paddock were like black bars drawn on
