But now he whistled it, a little Mozart two-finger melody, because he didn't want to think about Andi Manette tricking him, because he didn't want to kill her yet.
Had she done this? She had-he knew it in his heart. And it made him so angry. Because he'd trusted her. He'd given her an opportunity, and she'd betrayed him. This always happened. He should have known it was going to happen again. He put his hands to his temples, he could feel the blood beating through them, the pain that was going to come. Christ, this was the story of his life: when he tried to do something, somebody always spoiled it.
He took several laps around the living room and the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, looked blindly inside, slammed it; the whistling began a humming noise deep in his throat, and the humming became a growl-still two-finger Mozart-and then he walked out the back door and cut across the lawn toward the pasture beyond, and the old house in the back.
He jumped the fallen-down fence, passed an antique iron disker half-buried in the bluestem and asters; halfway up the hill, he was running, his fists clenched, his eyes like frosted marbles.
They thought they were making progress, working on Maiclass="underline" he hadn't become gentle, but Andi felt a relationship forming. If she didn't exactly have power, she had influence.
And they were still working on the nail. They couldn't move it, but a full inch of it was exposed. A few more hours, she thought, and they might pull it free.
Then Mail came.
They heard him running across the floor above them, pounding down the stairs. She and Grace looked at each other. Something was happening, and Grace, who'd been squatting in front of the game monitor, rocked uneasily.
Then the door opened, and Mail's face was a boiled-egg mask with the turned-in, frosted-marble eyes, his hair bushed like a frightened cat's. He said, "Get the fuck out here."
Grace could hear the beating.
She could feel it, even through the steel door. She stretched herself up the door and pounded on it and cried, "Mom, mama, mother. Mom…"
And after a while, she stopped and went back to the mattress and put her hands on her ears so she couldn't hear. A few minutes later, weeping, she closed her eyes and put her hands on her mouth like the speak-no-evil monkey and felt herself a traitor. She wanted the beating to stop, but she wouldn't cry out. She didn't want Mail to come for her.
An hour after he'd taken Andi, Mail brought her back. Always, in the past, her mother had been clothed when Mail put her back in the room: this time, she was nude, as was Mail himself.
Grace huddled back against the wall as he stood in the doorway, facing her, the hostile frontality frightening as nothing else ever had been. Finally, she bowed her head between her knees and closed her eyes and began to sing to herself, to close out the world. Mail listened to her for a moment, then a tiny, bitter smile crossed his face, and he shut the door with a clang.
Andi didn't move.
When the door closed, Grace was afraid to look up-afraid that Mail might be inside the room with her. But after a few seconds, when nothing moved, she peeked. He was gone.
Grace whispered, "Mother? Mom?"
Andi moaned and turned to look at her daughter, and blood ran out of her mouth.
CHAPTER 16
Lucas put down the file and picked up the phone. "Lucas Davenport."
"Yeah, um, I'm a game player?" The woman's voice was tentative, slightly unplugged. Her statements came as questions. "I was told I should talk to you?"
"Yes?"
He was impatient; he was waiting for the LA cops to get back with information on Francis Xavier Peter, the fire-starting actor.
"I think, um, I've seen the guy in the picture," the woman said. "I played D amp;D with him a couple of months ago, in this girl's house? In Dinkytown?"
Lucas sat up. "Do you know his name, or where he lives?"
"No, but he was with this girl, and we were at her house, so she knows him."
"How sure are you?"
"I wouldn't be sure except for his eyes? The eyes are the same. The mouth's different? But the eyes are right? And he was really a gamer, he was a good dungeon master, he knew everything. But he was scary? Really wired? And something this girl said made me think he'd been in treatment?"
Lucas looked at his watch. "Where are you? I'd like to come over and talk." He wrote it down.
"Sloan, c'mon," Lucas said.
The narrow man got his jacket, a new one, a new shade of brown. "Where're we going?"
Lucas explained as they walked out. "She had a sound about her," Lucas said. "I don't think it's bullshit."
The woman lived in a student apartment complex across I-494 from the university. Lucas put the gray city Plymouth in a fire zone and they went inside, following a blonde co-ed in a short skirt and bowling jacket. They all stopped at the elevator, Sloan and Lucas looking at the girl from the corners of their eyes; she was very pretty, with round blue eyes and a retroussй nose that might have been natural. The girl studied the numbers at the top of the elevator doors with rapt attention. Nobody said anything. The elevator came, they all got on, and all three watched the numbers at the top of the door.
The woman got off at three, turned, smiled, and walked away. The doors closed and Sloan said, "I think she smiled at me."
"I beg your pardon," Lucas said. "I believe it was me she smiled at."
"Bullshit. You stepped in front of it, that's all."
Cindy McPherson, the gamer, was a confused Wisconsin milkmaid. She was a large girl with a perfect complexion and a sweet country smile, who dressed in black from head to foot, and wore a seven-pointed star around her neck on a leather shoestring.
"The more I looked at the picture, the more I was sure it was him," she said. She sat on the edge of the Salvation Army couch, using her hands to talk: Lucas had the impression that under the black dress was a former high school basketball jock. "There's something about his face," she said. "It's like a coyote's-he's got those narrow eyes and the cheekbones. He could've been pretty sexy, but it was like there was something… missing. He just didn't connect. I think he connected with Gloria, though. She was pawing him."
"This Gloria-what's her last name?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. I've seen her around with people, we hang out over there, but she's not a good friend of mine. A couple of years ago, there were some raves over, like, in the industrial park up 280? That's where I met her. Then I'd see her over in Dinkytown, and a couple of months ago I saw her and she said they were starting a game. So I went up and he was the dungeon master."
"Can you show us the place?" Sloan asked.
"Sure. And Gloria's name is on the mailbox. She checked her mailbox when we were going up the stairs and I saw that it said Gloria something."
Dinkytown is an island of well-worn commerce off the campus at the University of Minnesota, two- and three-story buildings selling clothes and fast food and compact discs and pharmaceuticals and Xerox copies. They were backing into a parking space when McPherson pointed across the street and said, "There she is. That's Gloria. And that's her building."
Gloria was a thin, hunch-shouldered woman, dressed, like McPherson, in head-to-toe black; like McPherson, she wore an amulet. But while McPherson had that perfect, open face and peaches-and-cream complexion, Gloria was dark, saturnine, her face closed and wary like a fox's.
"Wait here, or go get a sandwich or something," Lucas said to McPherson. "We might have some more questions for you."
He and Sloan scrambled through the traffic and hurried through the apartment house door. Gloria was just locking her mailbox and held a green electric-bill envelope in her teeth.
"Gloria?" Lucas was out front.