not to mention cheaper, simply to call me, or at least to leave a note. But Veil had to be in some kind of trouble and, whether or not he had meant to send me some kind of message, there seemed to be absolutely nothing I could do about it.
Except hang around and wait to see what might happen. I slid the door shut, then turned the rest of the lights down to a dim glow. I went over to the mats, lay down, and rested my head on my gym bag. And I waited.
2
I awoke tired and stiff, with a milky, blurred January dawn seeping into my face through the skylight over my head. I knew Veil was not there; even if I had missed the opening and closing of the steel door, he would certainly have covered me with something, if not woken me up. It was cold in the loft, and I was shivering. Wishing I had worn my parka, I zipped up the jacket of my warm-up suit, pulled the hood over my head, then jogged in place a few minutes to get my circulation going before pulling back the drapes on a gray, cheerless morning that looked pregnant with snow.
In the early morning light Veil Kendry's vaguely menacing seascape seemed even eerier and more otherworldly, like some great sign posted to warn me that I was in a place where I did not belong.
There was zone heating in the loft, and the living quarters turned out to be warmer than the work area. In the kitchen, I went to the stove and put on a kettle of water to boil. After making myself a large mug of instant coffee, I unzipped my jacket and went to the telephone extension next to the sink. Once again I called all the hospital emergency rooms, and once again found that Veil wasn't in any of them; I hadn't expected that he would be, but thought it a necessary base to touch. Next, I called my service, but the only message that had been left was from a panicky student who feared-with good cause-that he'd failed my course. I didn't bother calling Garth. I assumed Garth would have gotten back to me if Veil's name had turned up on an arrest sheet, and I no longer considered it probable that Veil's trouble was with the police; it wouldn't explain the open loft and burning lights. Veil's problem, whatever it was, had to be more serious than one of his periodic run-ins with the cops, and his absence was beginning to feel like an oppressive weight growing ever heavier on me. Uninvited, I had entered more than a painter's loft; I had walked into a situation I was not certain how to walk away from.
Picking up my coffee mug, I went back out into the work area, went to the wooden equipment box next to the mats, and opened the lid. A chill that had nothing to do with the cold in this part of the loft went through me as I looked down into the box. Veil's oversize gym bag was missing, along with the half dozen
Closing the lid, I leaned back against the box, sipped at my coffee, and tried to think. Wherever Veil was and whatever he was doing was his business, I thought, not mine. The missing weapons indicated that Veil was taking care of that business, and my chief concern should be for whoever it was Veil had gone to do business with. It had nothing to do with me. Veil would have asked for my help if he needed it, and he hadn't.
Or had he …?
Aside from locking up his loft and turning off his lights, what the hell did he expect me to do?
My coffee had gone cold. I set the mug down on top of the equipment box, glanced nervously at my watch, then went across the loft to the wall where the seascape hung. Walking slowly toward the opposite end, I carefully examined each canvas in the mosaic, thinking there might be some answer hidden in one of them. There wasn't-at least none that I could find. Viewed individually and at close range, each canvas indeed became 'abstract,' and even the menacing figures beneath the surface of the sea sank from sight. I could find no indication of anything in the individual canvases except for the fact that Veil Kendry's imagination and artistic talent seemed as unique to him as his almost superhuman fighting skills. Searching for my friend in the loft he had vacated was getting to be most frustrating, and it seemed increasingly apparent that I was on the errand of a fool.
Adding to my frustration was a sense of mounting time pressure. In slightly less than an hour and a half I was supposed to deliver a lecture-and not just any lecture, and not to students. As far as my career in academia was concerned, it was probably the most important speech I would ever make. There were police chiefs and criminologists in town from all over the world to attend a four-day symposium on serial murderers under the auspices of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The keynote address was being delivered at my university because it had the only auditorium large enough to accommodate all of the people expected to attend. In ninety minutes a few hundred people, including the university chancellor and the head of my department, were going to be sitting in their seats in the huge lecture hall, staring up at the lectern and expecting to see-me.
Some research I'd done on the minds and motives of serial murderers, published in a half dozen monographs in various professional journals, was now considered seminal, and possibly even predictive. As a result of those papers, I'd been invited to deliver the keynote address and was expected to discuss my most recent work. It was a signal honor, the kind of thing that allows one to advance rapidly in the academic world, an intense focus of attention on one's self and work for which most professors would sacrifice a year's sabbatical. I should have been home eating a good breakfast, studying my lecture notes, and trying to relax. Instead I was unshaven and grungy from spending the night on a gym mat, dressed in old, patched sweats and worn, dirty sneakers. If I got lucky and found a cab at this hour of the morning, or if I left immediately and sprinted to the subway, I might just make it to my apartment in time to shave, shower, put on my one good suit, and get to the university with a minute or two to spare before I was scheduled to begin speaking.
Turning back toward the far end of the loft, I caught a wink of light high up on the bank of windows. Puzzled, I moved a few feet to my left, keeping my eye on the spot, then realized with a start that what I was looking at was a bullet hole. I had not seen it the night before because of the darkness and would probably not have seen it at all if I had not been standing in the right place and looking up at the right angle. The fact that the glass had not been shattered indicated to me that the weapon used had been small bore, high velocity. I could now see that the glass was thicker than it first appeared and optically distorting. It could explain why the bullet had missed its mark.
If it had missed its mark.
The bullet had to have been fired from the roof of the factory building across the alley, which was some two stories higher that the loft. That gave me an approximate downward angle, but it wasn't much help in allowing me to determine the exact trajectory of the bullet into the loft.
The canvases on the one wall hadn't been damaged, which meant that the bullet hadn't entered there. Slowly, eyes on the floor, I began to walk back and forth across the work area, looking for a bullet hole or bloodstain. I gave up after a couple of minutes; if there were bloodstains on the wrinkled tarpaulins that covered the floor, they would be indistinguishable from the innumerable splotches of red paint.
The good news, I thought, was that there had been no bloodstains in the elevator; but then, Veil, if he had been hurt, could always have bandaged the wound. Whatever had happened to Veil, the answer to where he had gone, and why, did not seem to be in this part of the loft.
Which did not mean that there might not be answers somewhere else in the loft.
I went back into the living quarters, through the kitchen into the area where Veil slept. I'd been in this area before, but only now did it strike me how very little there was to see. After the vast expanse of the work area, the living quarters seemed excessively cramped and ascetic, like a monk's cell. It was all strictly functional. Just to the right of the kitchen entrance was a neatly made bed covered by a thick brown quilt that matched the color of the walls and ceiling. There was a bathroom with toilet and shower, and next to the bed a leather reclining chair with a reading lamp behind it. There was a bookshelf filled with books that looked well worn. Judging from the titles of the books, his reading was thoroughly eclectic, from Carlos Castaneda to Proust to Melville to Ross Macdonald, in addition to lots of history, philosophy, and science. A separate bookcase held dozens of back issues of magazines and newspapers-
