Chapter Six

In Boston

Ryerson Biergarten did many things on impulse. He'd married Coreen on impulse, and it had turned out to be a mistake. He'd bought his first house on impulse—after Conversations with Charlene topped the country's best seller lists—and got taken. It was an old farmhouse just outside Boston which the owner swore was in top condition. And Ryerson, trusting his hunches, and reading nothing but goodwill from the man, bought it. It was six months later that he discovered the dry rot, and the leaky roof, when its temporary patches gave way, and the equally leaky cellar walls, whose equally temporary patches had also given way. It was then that Ryerson resolved to remember that some people could lie with goodwill not only on their lips but in their hearts as well.

Most of his impulses, however, proved out.

His '48 Ford wagon—known as a "Woody" because of the genuine wood paneling along the doors and rear quarter panels—was one of those impulses. He hadn't bought the car merely because it was an antique. He couldn't have cared less about its age per se. He'd bought it because it was full of happy memories that he could feel and taste and enjoy as strongly as anyone else experienced the smell of a new car. He found that those memories faded over time, as if, he theorized, he'd somehow coaxed them away with the memories that were piling up in his own life. But, happily, they did not fade altogether. What remained after two years was like the faint odor of a delicate perfume that lingers in a room long after the woman wearing it has gone. It made driving the car a distinct pleasure. It was, he admitted—moving along the Massachusetts Turnpike at fifty miles per hour, the car's top speed—the only thing that made driving it a pleasure. Not only was it slow, it also handled like a truck, which it was, in essence, and its suspension system was long past due for an overhaul. (He'd been waiting six months now for the right parts. "Car that old," the mechanic told him, "ain't a jiffy to get parts for, you know.") He was on his way to Buffalo. His hunch was that Joan Mott Evans was already back there, and if she wasn't, he'd surprise her.

The main thing pushing him to Buffalo was what he had sensed in Joan during her visit to his house on Newbury Street. He had sensed love in her, very clearly—the love she had for her dead friend, Lila, and the love she had simply for being alive. She was, Ryerson thought, a woman whose very existence had love as its focus. It was that love, he thought, that had made her do to Lila what she had, ultimately, decided she had to do.

He'd also sensed that Joan saw a connection between Lila Curtis and what had happened in Rochester. For months now he'd suspected that there was a connection, though he wasn't certain what it was, exactly. With Joan's help, perhaps he could find out.

Most of all, he wanted to know if what had happened in Rochester was simply some strange and singular twist of reality. Or if it was repeatable. If, perhaps, it was being repeated even as he drove south down the Massachusetts Turnpike.

He reached over and gave Creosote, asleep on the passenger's seat, a few long, slow, loving strokes. The dog grumbled in its sleep, wheezed, snorted, fell silent. Ryerson put his hand back on the wheel—the wagon was too hard to control with just one hand. He was happy to be leaving the city for a few days. He loved Boston; it was his home, it would always be his home. But it was still a city. And the continual barrage of psychic input in any city was almost deafening at times. It wasn't bad if he stayed in the house, or went walking very early, when most of the city's people were asleep, or in the mid-evening, when most of its people had been sated by a good meal and were camped in front of the tube with their minds on hold. But if he had to go out on a weekday, when the streets were teeming with people, what escaped their minds and shot into his—all their worries and joys and complaints—had more than once driven him back to his house. He thought he knew how an agoraphobic felt at such times. There was a way to shut out most of the input; he simply erected a mental wall made of bricks and mortar—much as the adults in the movie Village of the Damned had done to ward off the psychic probing of their unearthly children. But he didn't like to do that because then he had to rely solely on his five senses to gauge the world around him. He wasn't used to using only five senses; he'd used six senses since birth. So, when he erected that mental brick wall, he felt cut off from all that was going on around him, the same way a sighted man feels when the room he's in is suddenly darkened.

Now, at a little past 7:00 on the Massachusetts Turnpike, thirty miles south of Boston, he got an occasional short psychic blast as cars zipped by—sometimes what he got was coherent, a sentence or two, and sometimes it was merely a brief feeling of pleasure, or a smell, or pain. Quite often he got nothing at all, and he would think momentarily, at such times, that he'd suddenly lost his psychic ability. It was his greatest fear—that he would wake up one morning to discover that the gift he'd been given at birth had been taken from him. If that did happen, he'd decided, then he'd have to look upon the loss as eminently fair; after all, he'd still have the use of five senses, and that was as much as anyone was entitled to. Still, he had to admit that he'd sooner lose his hearing or his sight than his ability to know, if usually just at random, what was going on in the minds of those around him.

He stroked Creosote again, felt the wagon drift right, toward the guard rail, steered left with both hands. He whispered, "What's the matter, Woody? Tie rods going?" And he thought, not for the first time, how nice it would be if he could peer into the hearts of machines, too. And that brought up what, for him, was the old saw that he could not peer into hearts so much as into heads. He was, he imagined, much like the fledgling computer programmer who had gotten to the point where he could write and read very complex programs but had little idea how the lines and commands and algorithms he wrote were interpreted and acted upon by the machine itself. His experience buying his first house had proved that; and so had his experience dealing with the poor demented creature responsible for the murders in Rochester. That damned soul had proved dramatically that some people—many people, perhaps—were able to use the output of their brains to hide what was going on in their hearts, even from people like Ryerson. Even, amazingly, from themselves.

Ryerson wondered if Joan Mott Evans was such a person. He didn't think so. He supposed that if he were still a betting man, he'd have put very high odds against it. But the simple fact that he had asked the question proved that there was indeed a question, a doubt. And that doubt was yet another reason he was going back to Buffalo.

~ * ~

In Buffalo

Gail Newman liked her work. Most of it, anyway. The challenge in homicide investigation was often—though by no means always—to outwit the murderer, and she'd been able to do that with an amazing degree of success. She was, in fact, the youngest female candidate for promotion to sergeant in the history of the Buffalo Police Department; it was a promotion which had, for various internal reasons, gone to her partner, Guy Mallory, instead.

She did not, however, like the physical act of examining victims. She wasn't squeamish—at least no more so than any of her colleagues, and far less than some. She had, instead, a highly developed sense of what was private. A person's. body and a person's anguish were very private. So the victim of a murder—who had had his or her privacy violated in a terribly overt and ultimate way—should not have to suffer the indignity of still more violation. Never mind that a murder victim was, rationally, beyond suffering and anguish and violation. Rationally, the victim was merely a slab of flesh and hair and bone that the medical examiner could saw into and probe about in while making quick, grisly jokes to no one in particular. Rationally, the victim had ceased being a person at all. But that was, of course—as Gail bent over the body of Margaret Drake—just the sort of rational thinking that was all but impossible at times like these. There, for instance, were the victim's hands—long and graceful-looking, the ends of the red-polished nails chipped slightly. Maybe they were hands that had once drifted lovingly and beautifully over the keys of a piano. Or maybe they'd tried and had been found wanting. But they wouldn't try anymore. And there were the victim's eyes. Open halfway. With a soft glaze on them. What had they seen that morning, for instance, when they'd fluttered open from sleep? The usual and familiar things, no doubt. A nightstand. A clock radio. A window, curtains open; sunlight. A new day—better than yesterday, perhaps. Not as good as tomorrow.

Gail heard from above her, "She's a real mess, isn't she?" It was Mallory's voice.

Gail had yet to focus fully on the great gaping hole at the side of the woman's neck. "Yes," she whispered, and turned her head to look up at Mallory. "A real mess." A police photographer appeared, asked, "Can I get in here now?" Gail said, glancing stiffly at him, "No. Not yet. A few minutes, okay?"

The photographer shrugged, said, "Okay," then said something about the body "not going anywhere anyway," which was his standard line, and backed off.

Gail looked again at Margaret Drake's body. She focused on the gaping hole at the side of the woman's neck. There was, strangely, very little blood around the body, or even around that awful wound, possibly, Gail thought, because a wound like that would have caused the woman to go into shock, and thus inhibit the flow of blood. The M.E. would have a better answer, no doubt. She said, eyes still on the wound, "It's not as bad as the male victim's, though. It's not as bad as Mr. Brownleigh was."

"It's bad enough," Mallory said.

Gail turned from the body, started for the door, looked back at Mallory. "I'm going to talk to the daughter. You coming?"

Mallory shook his head. "No. The two of us will scare her, I think. You go ahead. I think she'd probably rather talk to a woman anyway.''

~ * ~

Andrew Spurling, Detective Third Grade

Andrew Spurling, thirty-two, was tall, well-built, average-looking, which is to say that his face could have been an amalgamation of male faces at a football game or wrestling match. He had no hobbies, although he was very attentive of his gun, a Smith and Wesson .38.

His record at the Buffalo Police Department was unremarkable. He'd been a little over a year with the force, and in that time had not distinguished himself in any way, good or bad. He was a run-of-the-mill cop who did his job and tried to stay out of the way. That had not always been his attitude; as a child in Syracuse, New York, he was known as the toughest kid on the block. That toughness did not transfer in any meaningful way to his work at the Buffalo Police Department. He was usually assigned the job of picking up people who'd written bad checks in amounts of under $100. Such checks constituted a class A misdemeanor, not a felony, which usually put the bad-check artist in the easy-to-handle category. Detective Spurling was not astoundingly happy with this kind of work, but he was willing to do it because it was work, after all. .

Occasionally, he fantasized about being twelve years old, growing up in Syracuse, New York, when he was top dog and people did what he told them to do.