He was glad, but the tension within him still had not dissipated, and he closed the door and turned around, approaching the bed with trepidation. He saw in his mind the oddly shaped woman from the photograph, sliced up and shoved beneath the bed, her bony arms and legs twisted grotesquely around the slaughtered body of her husband. Crouching down, he used the knife to lift up the bed’s skirt. At the last second, he thought that he might see Joan under there—but the space was empty. Gary stood on shaky legs, breathing deeply.
He checked the rest of the house. The other rooms were empty as well. He felt relieved, but he was right back where he’d started. Where were Joan’s parents? He thought of the notes Kara had left back in the dorm room about an unidentified man calling for Joan. He and his friends had told Williams about the notes, had even shown them to him, but the detective hadn’t seemed very interested at the time. Gary wondered if the police had bothered to check Joan’s and Kara’s phone records, to track down the caller.
Or maybe that sort of thing only happened in movies.
An idea occurred to him, and he returned to the living room, where he recalled seeing a telephone on a small end table next to the couch. Beside the phone, as he’d hoped, was an address book. He opened it quickly and flipped through the pages. There seemed to be names and phone numbers but no addresses. Out of curiosity, he looked under J for Joan but found nothing. He looked under D for Joan Daniels and found only a single word—Daughter—along with Joan’s cell phone and dorm room numbers.
That was weird.
Gary closed the address book. He’d take it with him and call the listed numbers. Someone might be able to provide him with information. Returning to the kitchen, he picked up the picture frame and headed toward the front door. He wondered if there wasn’t something in the garage that he should investigate—
Dead bodies in the car?
—but there was no entrance to the garage from the house, and he didn’t dare draw attention to himself by opening the garage door from the outside. Besides, it was probably locked. Once again pulling his sleeve over his hand so as not to leave fingerprints, Gary turned the knob and opened the front door.
Standing in front of the house, next to his car, was a young boy of around seven or eight. The kid had been kicking the car’s left rear tire, but he looked up as Gary stepped outside and closed the door behind him. Gary was acutely aware of how suspicious he looked, with his sleeve pulled over his right hand, the knife in his left hand and the address book and picture frame held under each arm. He tried to smile at the boy in an open, friendly manner. “Hi,” he said.
“Mom!” The kid took off running. “Mom!”
Shit! Gary hurriedly opened the car door, threw everything on the passenger seat, got in and backed out of the driveway, swinging the car around so it was headed in the opposite direction from the one the boy had taken. This was the last thing he needed. He kept his speed low so as not to draw attention to himself, but he made a beeline for the highway, and once he was out of town, he pressed down on the gas pedal and pushed it up to the limit of sixty-five.
There was a single small rain cloud above him, and a smattering of drops appeared on the windshield. It was already difficult to see through the glass, which was flecked with black spots of unknown origin and yellow blobs of butterfly blood from the trip over, and the droplets of rain made it worse. He turned on the wipers, but they only smeared the glass, turning the highway, cars and surrounding landscape into little more than an impressionist blur. He leaned forward as he drove, squinting through the multicolored streaks. In Morro Bay, a few miles down the coast, he stopped at an Arco station and filled up for the trip back, using a squeegee soaking in a water bucket between the pumps to clean off his windshield. He half expected to hear the sound of sirens as police, alerted by the boy, came speeding after him, but nothing like that happened, and moments later he was back on the road.
Fifteen minutes farther on, just outside San Luis Obispo, a patrol car did pull next to him on the highway. Afraid to glance over, afraid of what he might see, Gary kept his eyes on the road ahead, held his hands at ten and two, and maintained a speed just below the limit. Another police car pulled up on the other side of him, and for a brief, harrowing moment, he was sandwiched between them, certain the two policemen had done this on purpose as part of some tactic to force him to the side of the road.
But then the cop on the left sped away, the one on the right pulled off at the next exit, and he was on his own once again, free and safe. He drove the rest of the way back being extra careful to obey all traffic laws, afraid that if he were pulled over and his plates run, the police might connect him to the break-in at Joan’s parents’ house. And the dead dog. And maybe the Danielses’ disappearance.
Or deaths.
He hit early commuter traffic outside Thousand Oaks, and it took him longer to get back than he’d expected. Gary thought of calling Reyn several times while stuck in a line of cars on the 101 freeway but was afraid a cop would see and cite him. It was after six when he finally reached UCLA and his mercifully empty parking space. He walked slowly into the dorm and up to his floor, intending to call Reyn as soon as he went to the bathroom and got something to drink. Feeling exhausted, he pulled the key ring from his pocket, found his room key and unlocked the door.
The place had been ransacked.
Gary stood in the doorway, too stunned to move. Before him, the contents of his desk, dresser and closet lay strewn about the floor: books, notebooks, papers, pens, pencils, towels, clothes, CDs and DVDs all thrown together in the center of the room. The drawers from his desk and dresser had been pulled out and thrown into the bathroom. Even the bedspread and sheet had been yanked off his now-bare mattress and tossed against a wall.
Gary turned and went quickly to the next room over, banging on his neighbors’ door. Two flighty freshmen lived there, Matt and Greg, although only Matt was in. “Someone broke into my room,” Gary said breathlessly when the other student opened his door.
“It wasn’t me!” Matt said, holding up his hands.
“I didn’t think it was you,” Gary assured him. “I just wanted to know if you’d heard or seen anything.”
“No, man, nothing. And I’ve been here most of the day, chillin’. I would know if something happened.”
“Something did happen.”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
Gary nodded and hurried back next door. He noticed upon second look that, strangely enough, nothing seemed to have been stolen. His laptop and iPod were both still there—on the floor but still there—and if someone had wanted to take something those would have been the natural choices. Instead, it looked as though some crazy person had come in, indiscriminately thrown around the contents of the room and left.
How could Matt not have heard what was going on in here?
For the first time, he wished he had a roommate. Until now, he’d considered himself lucky that he was not forced to share his dorm room with someone else. Sure, his place was a lot smaller than all of the others on his floor, a single-windowed efficiency that appeared to have been constructed to fill the little bit of extra space between the last full-sized room and the stairwell. But it was worth it to have the privacy. If he’d had a roommate, though, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Or maybe the perpetrator would have been spotted.
No, he thought upon reflection. It probably would have happened while his roommate was out as well.
Surveying the damage, he wondered once again who could have done this.