gorgeous plumed tail, excited by the sight of the girls, held in place not by a leash but by her master's softly spoken command.
I carried the cake into the kitchen, where I politely declined Sharlene's offer of ice-cold lemonade, an apple dumpling, three varieties of cookies, and homemade peanut brittle.
Lying on the floor with four legs in the air, forepaws bent in submission, Posey solicited a belly rub, which the girls were quick to provide.
I dropped to one knee and interrupted long enough to say happy birthday to Levanna. I gave each of the girls a hug.
They seemed terribly small and fragile. So little force would be required to shatter them, to rip them out of this world. Their vulnerability frightened me.
Viola accompanied me through the house to the front porch, where she said, 'You were gonna bring me a picture of the man I'm supposed to be on the lookout for.'
'You don't need it now. He's… out of the picture.'
Her huge eyes were full of trust that I didn't deserve. 'Odd, tell me honest-to- Jesus, do you still see death in me?'
I didn't know what might be coming, but though the desert day made a bright impression on my eyes, it seemed storm-dark to my sixth sense, with great thunder pending. Changing their plans, canceling the movie and dinner at the Grille-that would surely be enough to change their fate. Surely. 'You're okay now. And the girls, too.'
Her eyes searched mine, and I dared not look away. 'What about you, Odd? Whatever's coming…is there a path for you to walk through it to someplace safe?'
I forced a smile. 'I know about all that's Otherly and Beyond- remember?'
She locked eyes with me a moment longer, then put her arms around me. We held each other tight.
I didn't ask Viola if
FORTY-EIGHT
LONG AFTER 'ALL NIGHT WITH SHAMUS COCOBOLO' had gone off the air and the strains of Glenn Miller had traveled out of the stratosphere toward distant stars, with no Elvis CDs to comfort me, I cruised the streets of Pico Mundo in the silence of the sun, wondering where all the bodachs had gone.
At a service station, I stopped to fuel the Chevy and to use the men's room. In the streaked mirror above the sink, my face suggested that I was a hunted man, haggard and hollow-eyed.
From the adjacent minimart, I bought a screw-top sixteen-ounce Pepsi and a small bottle of caffeine tablets.
With the chemical assistance of No-Doz, cola, and the sugar in the plate of cookies that Mrs. Sanchez had given me, I could remain awake. Whether I could think clearly enough on such a regimen would not be entirely evident until the bullets started flying.
Lacking a name or face to put to Robertson's collaborator, my psychic magnetism would not lead me to my quarry. Cruising randomly, I would arrive nowhere of consequence.
With clear intention, I drove to Camp's End.
The chief had ordered surveillance on Robertson's house the previous evening, but that stakeout had apparently been withdrawn. With the chief shot and the entire police department in shock, someone had decided to shift resources elsewhere.
Suddenly I realized that the chief might not have been targeted solely to frame me for a second murder. Robertson's kill buddy might have wanted to eliminate Wyatt Porter in order to ensure that the Pico Mundo PD would be shaken, disoriented, and slow to respond to whatever crisis was coming.
Instead of parking across the street and down the block from the pale yellow casita with the faded blue door, I left the Chevy at the curb in front of the place. I walked boldly to the carport.
My driver's license still served its fundamental purpose. The door latch popped, and I entered the kitchen.
For a minute, I stood inside the threshold, listening. The hum of the refrigerator motor. Faint ticks and creaks marked the steady expansion of the old house's joints in the ascending heat of the new morning.
Instinct told me that I was alone.
I went directly to the neatly kept study. Currently, it didn't serve as a train station for incoming bodachs.
From the wall above the file cabinets, McVeigh, Manson, and Atta watched me as if with conscious awareness.
At the desk, I sifted through the contents of the drawers once more, seeking names. On my previous visit, I had considered the small address book to be of little value, but this time I paged through it with interest.
The book contained fewer than forty names and addresses. None resonated with me.
I didn't peruse the bank statements again, but I stared at them, thinking about the $58,000 in cash that he'd withdrawn over the past two months. More than four thousand had been in his pants pockets when I found his body.
If you were a rich sociopath interested in funding well-planned acts of mass murder, how big a circus of blood could you purchase for approximately $54,000?
Even sleep-deprived, with a caffeine headache and a sugar buzz, I could answer that one without much consideration; big. You could buy a three-ring circus of death-bullets, explosives, poison gas, just about anything short of a nuclear bomb.
Elsewhere in the house, a door closed. Not with a bang. Quietly, with a soft thump and click.
Moving stealthily but quickly, I went to the open door of the study. I stepped into the hall.
No intruder in sight. Except me.
The bathroom and bedroom doors stood open, as they had been.
In the bedroom, the closet door was a slider. That couldn't have made the sound I heard.
Aware that death is frequently the reward for the reckless and the timid alike, I moved with cautious haste into the living room. Deserted.
The swinging door to the kitchen could not have been what I heard. The entry door to the house remained dosed, as it had been.
In the front left corner of the living room, a closet. In the closet: two jackets, a few sealed cartons, an umbrella.
Into the kitchen. No one.
Maybe I had heard an intruder
Perspiration prickled my brow. A single bead quivered down the nape of my neck and traced my spine to the coccyx.
The morning heat was not the sole cause of my sweat.
I returned to the study and switched on the computer. I sampled Robertson's programs, surfed his directories, and found a library of sleaze that he had downloaded from the Internet. Files of sadistic porn. Child porn. Still others were about serial killers, ritualistic mutilation, and satanic ceremonies.
