and I dared not look away. “What about you, Odd? Whatever’s coming ... is there a path for you to walk through it to someplace safe?”
I forced a smile. “I know about all that’s Otherly and Beyond—remember?”
She locked eyes with me a moment longer, then put her arms around me. We held each other tight.
I didn’t ask Viola if she saw death in me. She had never claimed to have a foretelling gift ... but I was afraid nevertheless that she would say yes.
LONG AFTER “ALL NIGHT WITH SHAMUS Cocobolo” had gone off the air and the strains of Glenn Miller had traveled out of the stratosphere toward distant stars, with no Elvis CDs to comfort me, I cruised the streets of Pico Mundo in the silence of the sun, wondering where all the bodachs had gone.
At a service station, I stopped to fuel the Chevy and to use the men’s room. In the streaked mirror above the sink, my face suggested that I was a hunted man, haggard and hollow-eyed.
From the adjacent minimart, I bought a screw-top sixteen-ounce Pepsi and a small bottle of caffeine tablets.
With the chemical assistance of No-Doz, cola, and the sugar in the plate of cookies that Mrs. Sanchez had given me, I could remain awake. Whether I could think clearly enough on such a regimen would not be entirely evident until the bullets started flying.
Lacking a name or face to put to Robertson’s collaborator, my psychic magnetism would not lead me to my quarry. Cruising randomly, I would arrive nowhere of consequence.
With clear intention, I drove to Camp’s End.
The chief had ordered surveillance on Robertson’s house the previous evening, but that stakeout had apparently been withdrawn. With the chief shot and the entire police department in shock, someone had decided to shift resources elsewhere.
Suddenly I realized that the chief might not have been targeted solely to frame me for a second murder. Robertson’s kill buddy might have wanted to eliminate Wyatt Porter in order to ensure that the Pico Mundo PD would be shaken, disoriented, and slow to respond to whatever crisis was coming.
Instead of parking across the street and down the block from the pale yellow casita with the faded blue door, I left the Chevy at the curb in front of the place. I walked boldly to the carport.
My driver’s license still served its fundamental purpose. The door latch popped, and I entered the kitchen.
For a minute, I stood inside the threshold, listening. The hum of the refrigerator motor. Faint ticks and creaks marked the steady expansion of the old house’s joints in the ascending heat of the new morning.
Instinct told me that I was alone.
I went directly to the neatly kept study. Currently, it didn’t serve as a train station for incoming bodachs.
From the wall above the file cabinets, McVeigh, Manson, and Atta watched me as if with conscious awareness.
At the desk, I sifted through the contents of the drawers once more, seeking names. On my previous visit, I had considered the small address book to be of little value, but this time I paged through it with interest.
The book contained fewer than forty names and addresses. None resonated with me.
I didn’t peruse the bank statements again, but I stared at them, thinking about the $58,000 in cash that he’d withdrawn over the past two months. More than four thousand had been in his pants pockets when I found his body.
If you were a rich sociopath interested in funding well-planned acts of mass murder, how big a circus of blood could you purchase for approximately $54,000?
Even sleep-deprived, with a caffeine headache and a sugar buzz, I could answer that one without much consideration: big. You could buy a three-ring circus of death—bullets, explosives, poison gas, just about anything short of a nuclear bomb.
Elsewhere in the house, a door closed. Not with a bang. Quietly, with a soft thump and click.
Moving stealthily but quickly, I went to the open door of the study. I stepped into the hall.
No intruder in sight. Except me.
The bathroom and bedroom doors stood open, as they had been.
In the bedroom, the closet door was a slider. That couldn’t have made the sound I heard.
Aware that death is frequently the reward for the reckless and the timid alike, I moved with cautious haste into the living room. Deserted.
The swinging door to the kitchen could not have been what I heard. The entry door to the house remained closed, as it had been.
In the front left corner of the living room, a closet. In the closet: two jackets, a few sealed cartons, an umbrella.
Into the kitchen. No one.
Maybe I had heard an intruder leaving. Which meant someone had been in the house when I arrived and had crept out when certain that I was distracted.
Perspiration prickled my brow. A single bead quivered down the nape of my neck and traced my spine to the coccyx.
The morning heat was not the sole cause of my sweat.
I returned to the study and switched on the computer. I sampled Robertson’s programs, surfed his directories, and found a library of sleaze that he had downloaded from the Internet. Files of sadistic porn. Child porn. Still others were about serial killers, ritualistic mutilation, and satanic ceremonies.
None of it seemed certain to lead me to his collaborator, at least not quickly enough to resolve the current crisis favorably. I switched the computer off.
If I’d had some Purell, the sanitizing gel that the nurse used at the hospital, I might have poured half a bottle on my hands.
During my first visit to this casita, I had conducted a quick search, which concluded when I’d made enough disturbing discoveries to take my case against Robertson to the chief. Although a countdown clock ticked in my head, this time I went through the house more thoroughly, grateful that it was small.
In the bedroom, in one drawer of a highboy, I found several knives of different sizes and curious design. Latin phrases were engraved in the blades of the first few weapons that I examined.
Although I don’t read Latin, I sensed that the character of the words would prove, on translation, to be as wicked as the sharpness of each razor-edged blade.
Another knife featured hieroglyphics from the hilt to the point. These pictographs meant no more to me than did the Latin, although I recognized a few of the highly stylized images: flames, falcons, wolves, snakes, scorpions ...
Searching a second drawer, I discovered a heavy silver chalice. Engraved with obscenities. Polished. Cool in my hands.
This unholy chalice was a hateful mockery of the communion cup that held consecrated wine in a Catholic Mass. The ornate handles were inverted crucifixes: Christ turned on His head. Latin encircled the rim, and around the bowl of the cup were engraved images of naked men and women engaged in various acts of sodomy.
In the same drawer, I found a black-lacquered pyx likewise decorated with pornographic images. On the sides and the lid of this small box, colorful hand-painted scenes of lurid degradation depicted men and women copulating not with one another but with jackals, hyenas, goats, and serpents.
In an ordinary church, the pyx contains the Eucharist, communion wafers of unleavened bread. This box brimmed with coal-black crackers flecked with red.
Unleavened bread exudes a subtle, appealing aroma. The contents of this pyx had an equally faint but repellent odor. First whiff—herbal. Second whiff—burnt matches. Third whiff—vomit.
The highboy contained other