Punching the button to erase the messages, he thought: The cops will want to talk to me sooner or later.
Then he wondered why he was worried about the police. Maybe the murderer was already in custody, in which case no suspicion would fall upon him. But why should he come under suspicion anyway? He had done nothing. Nothing. Why was guilt creeping through him like the Millipede inching up a long tunnel?
Millipede?
The utterly enigmatic nature of that image chilled him. He couldn't reference the source of it. As if it wasn't his own thought but something he had … received.
He hurried upstairs.
Lindsey was lying on her back in bed, adjusting the covers around her.
The newspaper was on his nightstand, where she always put it. He snatched it up and quickly scanned the front page.
“Hatch?” she said. “What's wrong?”
“Cooper's dead.”
“What?”
“The guy driving the beer truck. William Cooper. Murdered.”
She threw back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed.
He found the story on page three. He sat beside Lindsey, and they read the article together.
According to the newspaper, police were interested in talking to a young man in his early twenties, with pale skin and dark hair. A neighbor had glimpsed him fleeing down the alleyway behind the Palm Court apartments. He might have been wearing sunglasses. At night.
“He's the same damned one who killed the blonde,” Hatch said fearfully. “The sunglasses in the rearview mirror. And now he's picking up on my thoughts. He's acting out my anger, murdering people that I'd like to see punished.”
“That doesn't make sense. It can't be.”
“It is.” He felt sick. He looked at his hands, as if he might actually find the truck driver's blood on them. “My God, I sent him after Cooper.”
He was so appalled, so psychologically oppressed by a sense of responsibility for what had happened, that he wanted desperately to wash his hands, scrub them until they were raw. When he tried to get up, his legs were too weak to support him, and he had to sit right down again.
Lindsey was baffled and horrified, but she did not react to the news story as strongly as Hatch did.
Then he told her about the reflection of the black-clad young man in sunglasses, which he had seen in the mirrored door in place of his own image, last night in the den when he had been ranting about Cooper. He told her, as well, how he lay in bed after she was asleep, brooding about Cooper, and how his anger suddenly exploded into artery-popping rage. He spoke of the sense he'd had of being invaded and overwhelmed, ending in the blackout. And for a kicker, he recounted how his anger had escalated unreasonably as he had read the piece in Arts American earlier this evening, and he took the magazine out of his nightstand to show her the inexplicably scorched pages.
By the time Hatch finished, Lindsey's anxiety matched his, but dismay at his secretiveness seemed greater than anything else she was feeling. “Why'd you hide all of this from me?”
“I didn't want to worry you,” he said, knowing how feeble it sounded.
“We've never hidden anything from each other before. We've always shared everything. Everything.”
“I'm sorry, Lindsey. I just… it's just that… these last couple months … the nightmares of rotting bodies, violence, fire,… and the last few days, all this weirdness. …”
“From now on,” she said, “there'll be no secrets.”
“I only wanted to spare you—”
“No secrets,” she insisted.
“Okay. No secrets.”
“And you're not responsible for what happened to Cooper. Even if there is some kind of link between you and this killer, and even if that's why Cooper became a target, it's not your fault. You didn't know that being angry at Cooper was equivalent to a death sentence. You couldn't have done anything to prevent it.”
Hatch looked at the heat-seared magazine in her hands, and a shudder of dread passed through him. “But it'll be my fault if I don't try to save Honell.”
Frowning, she said, “What do you mean?”, “If my anger somehow focused this guy on Cooper, why wouldn't it also focus him on Honell?”
Honell woke to a world of pain. The difference was, this time he was on the receiving end of it — and it was physical rather than emotional pain. His crotch ached from the kick he'd taken. A blow to his throat had left his esophagus feeling like broken glass. His headache was excruciating. His wrists and ankles burned, and at first he could not understand why; then he realized he was tied to the four posts of something, probably his bed, and the ropes were chafing his skin.
He could not see much, partly because his vision was blurred by tears but also because his contact lenses had been knocked out in the attack. He knew he had been assaulted, but for a moment he could not recall the identity of his assailant.
Then the young man's face loomed over him, blurred at first like the surface of the moon through an unadjusted telescope. The boy bent closer, closer, and his face came into focus, handsome and pale, framed by thick black hair. He was not smiling in the tradition of movie psychotics, as Honell expected he would be. He was not scowling, either, or even frowning. He was expressionless — except, perhaps, for a subtle hint of that solemn professional curiosity with which an entomologist might study some new mutant variation of a familiar species of insect.
“I'm sorry for this discourteous treatment, sir, after you were kind enough to welcome me into your home. But I'm rather in a hurry and couldn't take the time to discover what I need to know through ordinary conversation.”
“Whatever you want,” Honell said placatingly. He was shocked to hear how drastically his mellifluous voice, always a reliable tool for seduction and expressive instrument of scorn, had changed. It was raspy, marked by a wet gurgle, thoroughly disgusting.
“I would like to know who Lindsey Sparling is,” the young man said dispassionately, “and where I can find her.”
Hatch was surprised to find Honell's number in the telephone book. Of course, the author's name was not as familiar to the average citizen as it had been during his brief glory years, when he had published Miss Culvert and Mrs. Towers. Honell didn't need to be worried about privacy these days; evidently the public gave him more of it than he desired.
While Hatch called the number, Lindsey paced the length of the bedroom and back. She had made her position clear: she didn't think Honell would interpret Hatch's warning as anything other than a cheap threat.
Hatch agreed with her. But he had to try.
He was spared the humiliation and frustration of listening to Honell's reaction, however, because no one answered the phone out there in the far canyons of the desert night. He let it ring twenty times.
He was about to hang up, when a series of images snapped through his mind with a sound like short-circuiting electrical wires: a disarranged bed quilt; a bleeding, rope-encircled wrist; a pair of frightened, bloodshot, myopic eyes … and in the eyes, the twin reflections of a dark face looming close, distinguished only by a pair of sunglasses.
Hatch slammed down the phone and backed away from it as if the receiver had turned into a rattlesnake in his hand. “It's happening now.”
The ringing phone fell silent.
Vassago stared at it, but the ringing did not resume. He returned his attention to the man who was tied spread-eagle to the brass posts of the bed. “So Lindsey Harrison is the married name?”