6

So for another hour I sat in the comfortable leather chair, leafing through the police files on the Blue Rose case, deciphering the handwriting of half a dozen policemen and two detectives, Fulton Bishop and William Damrosch. Bishop, who was destined for a long, almost sublimely corrupt career in the Millhaven police department, had been taken off the case after two weeks: his patrons had been protecting him from what they saw as a kind of tar baby. I wished that they had let him investigate for another couple of weeks. His small, tight handwriting was as easy to read as print. His typed reports looked like a good secretary's. Damrosch scribbled even when he was relatively sober and scrawled when he was not. Anything he wrote after about two in the afternoon was a hodgepodge in which whole words disappeared into wormy knots. He typed the way an angry child plays piano. After ten minutes, my head hurt; after twenty, my eyes ached.

By the time I had gone through all the statements and reports, all I had come up with was a sense that very few people had liked Robert Bandolier. The only new thing I learned was that the killings had not been savage mutilations, like the murder of Grant Hoffman and Walter Dragonette's performances: Blue Rose's victims had been stabbed once, neatly, in the heart, and then their throats had been cut. It was as passionless as ritual slaughter.

"Well, nothing jumped out at me, either," Tom said. "There are a few minor points, but they can wait." He looked at me almost cautiously. "I suppose you're about ready to go?"

"Well, your coffee is going to keep me awake for a while," I said. "I could stay a little longer."

Tom's obvious gratitude at my willingness to stay made him seem like a child left alone in a splendid house.

"How about a little music?" he said, already getting up.

"Sure."

He pulled a boxed set from the rows of CDs, removed one, and inserted the disc in the player. Mitsuko Uchida began playing the Mozart piano sonata in F. Tom leaned back into his leather couch, and for a time neither of us spoke.

Despite my exhaustion, I wanted to stay another half hour, and not merely to give him company. I thought it was a privilege. I couldn't banish Tom's sorrows any more than he could banish mine, but I admired him as much as anyone I've ever known.

"I wish we had discovered some disgruntled desk clerk named Lenny Valentine," he said.

"Do you really think there's some connection between Elvee Holdings and the Blue Rose murders?"

"I don't know."

"What do you think is going to happen?"

"I think a dead body is going to turn up in front of the Idle Hour." He reached for his drink and took another sip. "Let's talk about something else."

I forgot I was tired, and when I looked at my watch I found that it was past two.

After we had gone over what I was going to do the next day, Tom went to his desk and picked up the book with the plain gray binding. "Do you think you'll have time to look through this over the next few days?"

"What is it?" I should have known that the book wasn't on his desk by accident.

"The memoirs of an old soldier, published by a vanity press. I've been doing a lot of reading about Vietnam, and there are some questions about what John actually did during his last few months in the service."

"He was at Lang Vei," I said. "There aren't any questions about that."

"I think he was ordered to say he was there."

"He wasn't at Lang Vei?"

Tom did not answer me. "Do you know anything about a strange character named Franklin Bachelor? A Green Beret major?"

"I met him once," I said, remembering the scene in Billy's. "He was one of John's heroes."

"Read this and see if you can get John to talk about what happened to him, but—"

"I know. Don't tell him you gave me the book. Do you think he's going to lie to me?"

"I'd just like to find out what actually happened."

Tom handed me the book. "It's probably a waste of time, but indulge me."

I turned the book over in my hands and opened it to the title page. WHERE WE WENT WRONG, or The Memoirs of a Plain Soldier, by Col. Beaufort Runnel (Ret.). I turned pages until I got to the first sentence.

I have always loathed and detested deceit, prevarication, and dishonesty in all their many forms.

"I'm surprised he ever made it to colonel," I said, and then a coincidence I trusted was meaningless occurred to me. "Lang Vei starts with the initials LV," I blurted.

"Maybe you didn't flunk out of Famous Detective School after all." He grinned at me. "But I still hope we come across Lenny Valentine one of these days."

He took me downstairs and let me out into the warm night. What looked like millions of stars hung in the enormous reaches of the sky. As soon as I got to the sidewalk, I realized that for something like four hours, Tom had nursed a single glass of malt whiskey.

<2h>7

The lights were turned off in all the big houses along Eastern Shore Road. Two blocks down from An Die Blumen, the taillights of a single car headed toward Riverwood. I turned the corner into An Die Blumen with a mind full of William Writzmann and an empty shell called the Green Woman Taproom.

The long empty street stretched out in front of me, lined with the vague shapes of houses that seemed to melt together in the night. Street lamps at wide intervals cast fuzzy circles of light on the cracked cement. Everything before me seemed deceptively peaceful, not so much at rest as in concealment. The scale of the black sky littered with stars made me feel tiny. I shoved my hands into my pockets and began to walk faster.

I had gone half a block down An Die Blumen before I fully realized what was happening to me—not a sudden descent of panic, but a gradual approach of fear that felt different from the way the past usually invaded me. No men in black flitted unseen across the landscape, no groans leaked out of the earth. I could not tell myself that this was just another bad one and sit down on someone else's grass until it went away. It wasn't just another bad one. It was something new.

I hurried along with my hands in my pockets, unconsciously huddled into myself. I stepped down off a curb and walked across an empty street, and the dread that had come over me slowly focused itself into the conviction that someone or something was watching me. Somewhere in the blanket of shadows on the other side of An Die Blumen, a creature that seemed barely human followed me with its eyes.

Then, with an absolute certainty, I knew: this was not just panic, but real.

I moved down the next block, feeling the eyes claiming me from their hiding place. The touch of those eyes made me feel appallingly dirty, soiled in some way I could not bear to define —the being that looked through those eyes knew that it could destroy me secretly, could give me a secret wound visible to no one but itself and me.

I moved, and it moved with me, sliding through the darkness across the street. At times it lagged behind, leaning against an invisible stone porch and smiling at my back. Then it melted through the shadows and passed among the trees and effortlessly moved ahead of me, and I felt its gaze linger oh my face.

I walked down three more blocks. My palms and my forehead were wet. It was concealed in the darkness in front of a building like a tall blank tomb, breathing through nostrils the size of my fists, taking in enormous gulps of air and releasing fumes.

I can't stand this, I thought, and without knowing I was going to do it, I walked across the street and went up the edge of the sidewalk in front of the frame house. My knees shook. A tall shadow moved sideways in the dark and then froze before a screen of black that might have been a hedge Of rhododendrons and became invisible again. My heart thudded, and I nearly collapsed. "Who are you?" I said. The front of the house was a featureless slab. I took a step forward onto the lawn.

A dog snarled, and I jumped. A section of the darkness before me moved swiftly toward the side of the house. My terror flashed into anger, and I charged up onto the lawn.

A light blazed behind one of the second-floor windows. A black silhouette loomed against the glass. The man at the window cupped his hands over his eyes. Light, pattering footsteps disappeared down the side of the house. The man in the window yelled at me.

I turned and ran back across the street. The dog pushed itself toward a psychotic breakdown. I ran as hard as I could down to the next corner, turned, and pounded up the street.

When I got to John's house, I waited outside the front door for my breathing to level out. I was covered in sweat, and my chest was heaving. I leaned panting against the door. I didn't think the man in the Lexus could have moved that quietly or quickly, so who could it have been?

An image moved into the front of my mind, so powerfully that I knew it had been hidden there all along. I saw a naked creature with thick legs and huge hands, ropes of muscle bulking in his arms and shoulders. A mat of dark hair covered his wide chest. On the massive neck sat the enormous horned head of a bull.