Velocity. Part 45

Beyond the windows, twilight approached.

He intended to go to Whispering Pines and spend a few hours. He had arranged to stay throughout the night in a prayer vigil; but in spite of his ten-hour sleep, he didn't think he would be able to stay that long. With Valis dead, midnight had no meaning.

When Billy had tended to the nail wound, as he sat at the table finishing the beer, his attention fell on the microwave. The security video.

All this while, he'd been recording himself at the table. Then he realized that he had caught himself taking the hands out of the freezer. The camera had a wide-angle lens, but he didn't believe that it could have captured his gruesome work well enough to serve as evidence.

Nevertheless...

He got the stepladder from the pantry. He climbed it and opened the cabinet above the microwave.

Using the reverse-scan mode, he studied the small review screen, watching himself walk backward around the kitchen. The angle had not revealed the severed hands.

Suddenly wondering whether Valis might have visited the house for some purpose between the time Billy had left the previous day and their meeting in the motor home before dawn, he continued the reverse scan beyond his entrance shortly after six o'clock.

He didn't have to go all the way to the previous day. At 3:07 this same day, while Billy had still been asleep at the Olsen place, a man walked backward out of the living room, across the kitchen to the door, and reversed out of the house.

The intruder was not Valis, of course, because Valis was dead.

Chapter 75.

Billy couldn't remember the number. Using Lanny's cell phone, he called directory a.s.sistance in Denver, and they put him through to Detective Ramsey Ozgard.

Billy paced while the phone rang out there in the shadow of the Rockies.

Maybe Valis had been confident of Billy's conversion because he had previously bent someone else instead of destroying him. None of the sixteen members of his crew was like him, but that didn't mean the artist was a lone hunter.

Ramsey Ozgard answered on the fifth ring, and Billy identified himself as Lanny Olsen, and Ozgard said, "I hear blood in your voice, Deputy. Tell me you've got your man."

"I think I will have shortly," Billy said. "I've got an urgent situation here. I need to know-the year Judith Kesselman vanished, was there a professor at the university, calling himself Valis?"

"Not a professor," Ozgard said. "He was the artist in residence for six months. At the end of his time, he did this ridiculous thing he called performance art, wrapped two campus buildings in thousands of yards of blue silk and hung them with-"

Billy interrupted. "Steve Zillis had a perfect alibi."

"It was watertight," Ozgard a.s.sured him. "I can walk you through it if you have ten minutes."

"I don't. But tell me-do you remember-at the university, what was Zillis's major?"

"He was an art major."

"Sonofab.i.t.c.h."

No wonder Zillis hadn't wanted to talk about the mannequins. They weren't just expressions of the sick dreams of a sociopathic killer-they were his art.

At that point, Billy hadn't yet discovered the key words that would reveal the ident.i.ty of the freak-performance art. He'd had only performance, and Zillis instinctively hadn't wanted to give him the rest of it, not when he was doing so well playing a harmless, put-upon pervert.

"The son of a b.i.t.c.h deserves an Oscar," Billy said. "I left his place feeling like the world's worst s.h.i.t, the way I treated him."

"Deputy?"

"The famous and respected Valis vouched for Steve Zillis-didn't he?-said that Steve was with him on a retreat or something on the day Judith Kesselman disappeared."

"You're right. But you'd only jump to that if-"

"Turn on your evening news, Detective Ozgard. By the time Judi Kesselman vanished, Steve and Valis were working together. They were each other's alibi. Gotta go."

Billy remembered to press END before dropping Lanny's phone.

He still had Lanny's pistol and Taser. He threaded the Wilson Combat holster onto his belt.

From the closet in his bedroom, he snared a sport coat, shrugged into it to conceal the pistol as best he could.

He slipped the Taser in an inner coat pocket.

What had Steve been doing here in the afternoon? By then he would have known that his mentor had been outed, the collection of hands and faces discovered. He might even suspect that Valis was dead.

Billy remembered finding the light on in the study. He went in there, all the way behind the desk this time, and found the computer in sleep mode. He hadn't left it on.

When he moved the mouse, a doc.u.ment appeared. Can torture wake the comatose? Her blood, her mutilation will be your third wound.

Billy flew through the house. He leaped off the back-porch steps, stumbled when he landed, and ran.

Night had fallen. An owl hooted. Wings against the stars.

Chapter 76.

At 9:06 the guest parking lot in front of Whispering Pines contained only one car. Visiting hours ended at nine.

They hadn't locked the front door yet. Billy pushed inside, crossed to the main nurses' station.

Two nurses were behind the counter. He knew them both. He said, "I made arrangements to stay-"

The overhead lights went out. The parking-lot lights died, too. The main hall was almost as black as a lava pipe.

He left the nurses in confusion and followed the corridor toward the west wing.

At first he hurried, but within a dozen steps, in the dark, he collided with a wheelchair, grabbed at it, felt the shape of it.

From the chair, a frightened old woman said, "What's happening, what're you doing?"

"It's all right, you'll be okay," he a.s.sured her, and went on.

He didn't move as fast now, arms in front of him like a blind man feeling for obstructions.

Wall-mounted emergency lights flickered on, then off, pulsed again and died.

An authoritative male voice calmly called out, "Please stay in your rooms. We will come to you. Please stay in your rooms."

The emergency sconces tried to function again. But they pulsed at one-third brightness, and erratically.

These flares and leaping shadows were disorienting, but Billy could see well enough to avoid the people in the halls. Another nurse, an orderly, an elderly man in pajamas, looking bewildered...

A fire alarm issued an electronic ululation. A recorded voice began to give evacuation instructions.

A woman in a walker intercepted Billy as he approached her, plucked at his sleeve, seeking information.

"They've got it under control," he a.s.sured her as he hurried past.

He turned the corner into the west wing. Just ahead, on the right. The door stood open.

The room was dark. No auxiliary sconce in here. His own body blocked what little light pulsed in from the west hall.

Slamming doors, a cacophony of slamming doors, which weren't doors at all, but his heart.

He felt his way toward the bed. He should have reached it. He went two steps farther. The bed wasn't here.

He pirouetted blindly, sweeping his arms through the air. All he found was the barstool.

Her bed was on wheels. Someone had moved her.

In the hallway again, he looked left, looked right. A few of the ambulatory patients had come out of their rooms. A nurse was marshaling them for an orderly exit.

Through the dance of light and shadow, Billy saw a man pushing a bed at the far end of the hall, moving fast toward a flashing red EXIT sign.

Dodging patients, nurses, phantoms of shadow, Billy ran.

The door at the end of the hall banged open as the man slammed the bed through it.

A nurse grabbed Billy by the arm, halting him. He tried to pull loose, but she had a grip.

"Help me roll some of the bedridden out of here," she said.

"There's no fire."

"There must be. We've got to evacuate them."

"My wife," he declared, though he and Barbara had never married, "my wife needs help."

He tore loose of the nurse, nearly knocking her off her feet, and hurried toward the flashing exit sign.

He shoved through the door, into the night. Dumpsters, cars and SUV's in a staff parking lot.

For a moment, he didn't see the man, the bed. There. An ambulance waited thirty feet away, to the left, its engine running. The wide rear door stood open. The guy with the bed had almost reached it.

Billy drew the 9-mm pistol but didn't dare use it. He might hit Barbara.

Crossing the blacktop, he holstered the pistol, fumbled the Taser out of an inner coat pocket.

At the last instant, Steve heard Billy coming. The freak had a pistol. He fired twice as he turned.

Billy was already coming in under Steve's arm. The gun boomed over his head.

He jammed the business end of the Taser into Steve's abdomen and clicked the trigger. He knew it would work through thin clothing, a shirt, but he had never checked to be sure that it contained fresh batteries.

Zillis spasmed as the electric charge cried havoc along the wires of his nervous system. He didn't merely drop his gun but flung it away. His knees buckled. He rapped his head on the b.u.mper of the ambulance as he fell.

Billy kicked him. He tried to kick him in the head. He kicked him again.

The fire department would be coming. The police. Sheriff John Palmer, sooner or later.

He put his hand to Barbara's face. Her breath feathered his palm. She seemed to be all right. He could feel her eyes moving under her lids, dreaming d.i.c.kens.

Glancing back at Whispering Pines, he saw that no one had yet evacuated through the west-wing exit.

He rolled Barbara's bed aside.

On the ground, Steve was twitching, saying, "Unnn, unnn, unnn," in a bad imitation of an epileptic fit.

Billy zapped him again with the Taser, then pocketed it.

He grabbed the freak by his belt, by the collar of his shirt, hauled him off the blacktop. He didn't think he had the strength to lift and shove Zillis into the back of the ambulance, but panic flushed him with adrenaline.

The knuckles of the freak's right hand rapped uncontrollably against the floor of the ambulance, as did the back of his skull.

Billy slammed the door, seized the foot rail of Barbara's bed, and pushed her toward Whispering Pines.

When he was less than ten feet from the door, it opened, and an orderly appeared, leading a patient in a walker.

"This is my wife," Billy said. "I got her out. Will you look after her while I help some others?"

"It's covered," the orderly a.s.sured him. "I better get her a safe distance if there's fire."