Mr. Murder - Mr. Murder Part 8
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Mr. Murder Part 8

The City of Orange. Tustin. In the southern California suburban maze.

Such powerful magnetism, pulling, pulling ruthlessly.

More than magnetism. Gravity. Down into the vortex of the black hole.

Switch to the Santa Ana Freeway.

Mouth dry. A bitter metallic taste. Heart pounding fiercely, pulse throbbing in his temples.

"I need to be someone."

Faster. As if tied to a massive anchor on an endless chain, plummeting into the lightless fathoms of a bottomless ocean trench.

Past Irvine, Laguna Hills, El Toro.

Into the dark heart of the mystery.

"* need* need* need* need* need*"

Mission Viejo. This exit. Yes.

Off the freeway.

Seeking the magnet. The enigmatic attractant.

All the way from Kansas City to find the unknown, to discover his strange and wondrous future. Home. Identity. Meaning.

Turn left here, two blocks, turn right. Unfamiliar streets. But to find the way, he needs only to give himself to the power that pulls him.

Mediterranean houses. Neatly trimmed lawns. Palm shadows on pale-yellow stucco walls.

Here.

That house.

To the curb. Stop. Half a block away.

Just a house like the others. Except. Something inside. Whatever he first sensed in faraway Kansas. Whatever draws him. Some The attraction Inside.

Waiting.

A wordless cry of triumph escapes him, and he shudders violently with relief. He no longer needs to seek his destiny.

Although he does not yet know what it may be, he is certain that he's found it, and he sags in his seat, his sweaty hands slipping off the steering wheel, pleased to be at the end of the long journey.

He is more excited than he has ever been, filled with curiosity, however, released at last from the iron grip of compulsion, he loses his sense of urgency. His trip-hammering heart decelerates to a more normal number of beats per minute. His ears stop ringing, and he is able to breathe more deeply and evenly than he has for at least fifty miles. In startlingly short order, he is as outwardly calm and selfcontained as he was in the big house in Kansas City, where he gratefully shared the tender intimacies of death with the man and woman in the antique Georgian bed.

By the time Marty took the keys to the Taurus off the kitchen pegboard, stepped into the garage, locked the door to the house, and pushed the button to raise the automatic garage door, his awareness of impending danger was so acute and harrowing that he was on the edge of blind panic. In the feverish thrall of paranoia, he was convinced that he was being hunted by an uncanny enemy who employed not merely crazy notion, for God's sake, straight out of the National Enquirer, crazy yet inescapable because he actually could feel a presence..

. a violent stalking presence that was conscious of him, pressing him, probing. He felt as if a viscous fluid was squirting into his skull under tremendous pressure, compressing his brain, squeezing consciousness out of him. A very real physical effect was part of it, too, because he was as weighed down as a deep-sea diver under a crushing tonnage of water, joints aching, muscles burning, lungs reluctant to expand and accept new breath. Extreme sensitivity to every stimulant nearly incapacitated him, the hard clatter of the rising garage door was ear-splitting, intruding sunlight seared his eyes, and a musty odor-ordinarily too faint to be detected exploded like a poisonous cloud of spores out of a corner of the garage, so pungent that it made him nauseous.

In an instant, the seizure passed, and he was in full control of himself. Although it had seemed as if his skull would burst, the internal pressure relented as abruptly as it had grown, and he no longer teetered on the brink of unconsciousness. The pain in his joints and muscles was gone, and the sunlight didn't sting his eyes.

It was like snapping out of a nightmare except he was awake on both sides of the snap.

Marty leaned against the Taurus. He was hesitant to believe that the worst was past, waiting tensely for another inexplicable wave of paranoid terror to batter him.

He looked out from the shadowy garage at the street, which was simultaneously familiar and strange, half expecting some monstrous phantasm to rise out of the pavement or descend through the sundrenched air, a creature inhuman and merciless, ferocious and bent upon his destruction, the invisible specter of his nightmare now made flesh.

His confidence didn't return, and he couldn't stop shaking, but his apprehension gradually diminished to a tolerable level, until he was able to consider whether he dared to drive. What if a similarly disorienting spasm of fear hit him while he was behind the wheel?

He would be virtually oblivious of stop signs, oncoming traffic, and hazards of all kinds.

More than ever, he needed to see Dr. Guthridge.

He wondered if he should go back into the house and call a taxi.

But this wasn't New York City, streets as warm with cabs, in southern California, the words "taxi service" were, more often than not, an oxymoron. By the time he could reach Guthridge's office by taxi, he might have missed his appointment.

He got in the car, started the engine. With wary concentration, he backed out of the garage and into the street, handling the wheel as stiffly as a ninety-year-old man acutely aware of the brittleness of his bones and the tenuous thread of his existence.

All the way to the doctor's office in Irvine, Marty Stillwater thought about Paige and Charlotte and Emily. By the treachery of his own weak flesh, he could be denied the satisfaction of seeing the girls become women, the pleasure of growing old at his wife's side. Although he believed in a world beyond death where eventually he might be reunited with those he loved, life was so precious that even the promise of a blissful eternity would not compensate for the loss of a few years on this side of the veil.

From half a block away, the killer watches the car slowly back out of the garage.

As the Ford turns away from him and gradually recedes through the vinegar-gold autumn sunshine, he realizes the magnet which drew him from Kansas is in that car. Perhaps it is the dimly seen man behind the steering wheel-though it might not be a person at all but a talisman hidden elsewhere in the vehicle, a magical object beyond his understanding and to which his destiny is linked for reasons yet unclear.

The killer almost starts the Honda to follow the attractant, but decides the stranger in the Ford will return sooner or later.

He puts on his shoulder holster, slips the pistol into it, and shrugs into the leather jacket.

From the glove compartment, he removes the zippered leather case that contains his set of burglary tools. It includes seven springsteel picks, an L-shaped tension tool, and a miniature aerosol can of graphite lubricant.

He gets out of the car and proceeds boldly along the sidewalk toward the house.

At the end of the driveway stands a white mailbox on which is stenciled a single name-STILLWATER. Those ten black letters seem to possess symbolic power. Still water. Calm. Peace. He has found still water.

He has come through much turbulence, violent rapids and whirlpools, and now he has found a place where he can rest, where his soul will be soothed.

Between the garage and the property-line fence, he opens the gravity latch on a wrought-iron gate. He follows a walkway flanked by the garage on his left and a head-high eugenia hedge on his right, all the way to the rear of the house.

The shallow backyard is lushly planted. It boasts mature ficus trees and a continuation of the sideyard eugenia hedge, which screen him from the prying eyes of neighbors.

The patio is sheltered by an open-beam redwood cover through which thorny trailers of bougainvillea are densely intertwined.

Even on this last day of November, clusters of blood-red flowers fringe the patio roof. The concrete floor is spattered with fallen petals, as though a hard-fought battle was waged here.

A kitchen door and large sliding glass door provide two possible entrances from the patio. Both are locked.

The sliding door, beyond which he can see a deserted family room with comfortable furniture and a large television, is further secured by a wooden pole wedged into the interior track. If he gets through the lock, he nevertheless will need to break the glass to reach inside and remove the pole.

He knocks sharply on the other door, although the window beside it reveals that no one is in the kitchen. When there is no response, he knocks again with the same result.

From his compact kit of burglary tools, he withdraws the can of graphite. Crouching before the door, he sprays the lubricant into the lock. Dirt, rust, or other contamination can bind the pin tumblers.

He trades the graphite spray for the tension tool and that pick known as a "rake." He inserts the L-shaped wrench first to maintain the necessary tension on the lock core. He pushes the rake into the key channel as deep as it will go, then brings it up until he feels it press against the pins. Squinting into the lock, he rapidly draws the rake out, but it does not raise all of the pin tumblers to their shear point, so he tries again, and again, and finally on the sixth try the channel seems to be clear.

He turns the knob.

The door opens.

He half expects an alarm to go off, but there is no siren. A quick scan of the header and jamb fails to reveal magnetic switches, so there must not be a silent alarm, either.

After he puts the tools away and zippers shut the leather case, he steps across the threshold and softly closes the door behind him.

He stands for a while in the cool, shadowy kitchen, absorbing the vibrations, which are good. This house welcomes him. Here, his future begins, and it will be immeasurably brighter than his confused and amnesia-riddled past.

As he moves out of the kitchen to explore the premises, he does not draw the P7 from his shoulder holster. He is sure that no one is at home. He senses no danger, only opportunity.

"I need to be someone," he tells the house, as if it is a living entity with the power to grant his wishes.

The ground floor offers nothing of interest. The usual rooms are filled with comfortable but unremarkable furniture.

Upstairs, he stops only briefly at each room, getting an overall picture of the second-floor layout before taking time for a thorough investigation. There's a master bedroom with attached bath, walk-in closet* a guest bedroom* kids' room* another bath*

The final bedroom at the end of the hall-which puts him at the front of the house-is used as an office. It contains a big desk and computer system, but it's more cozy than businesslike. A plump sofa stands under the shuttered windows, a stained-glass lamp on the desk.

One of the two longest walls is covered with paintings hung in a double row, frames almost touching. Although the pieces of the collection are obviously by more than one artist, the subject matter, without exception, is dark and violent, rendered with unimpeachable skill, twisted shadows, disembodied eyes wide with terror, a Ouija board on which stands a blood-spotted trivet, ink-black palm trees silhouetted against an ominous sunset, a face distorted by a funhouse mirror, the gleaming steel blades of sharp knives and scissors, a mean street where menacing figures lurk just beyond the sour-yellow glow of street lamps, leafless trees with coly limbs, a hot-eyed raven perched upon a bleached skull, pistols, revolvers, shotguns, an ice pick, meat cleaver, hatchet, a queerly stained hammer lying obscenely on a silk negligee and lace-trimmed bedsheet*

He likes this artwork.

It speaks to him.

This is life as he knows it.

Turning from the gallery wall, he clicks on the stained-glass lamp and marvels at its multi-hued luminous beauty.

In the clear sheet of glass that protects the top of the desk, the mirror-image circles and ovals and teardrops of color are still lovely but darker than when viewed directly. In some indefinable way, they are also foreboding.

Leaning forward, he sees the twin ovals of his eyes staring back at him from the polished glass. Glimmering with their own tiny reflections of the mosaic lamplight, they seem to be not eyes, in fact, but the luminous sensors of a machine or, if eyes, then the fevered eyes of something soulless-and he quickly looks away from them before too much self-examination leads him to fearful thoughts and intolerable conclusions.

"I need to be someone," he says nervously.

His gaze falls upon a photograph in a silver frame, which also stands on the desk. A woman and two little girls. A pretty trio.

Smiling.

He picks up the photograph to study it more closely. He presses one fingertip against the woman's face and wishes he could touch her for real, feel her warm and pliant skin. He slides his finger across the glass, first touching the blond-haired child, and then the dark-haired pixie.

After a minute or two, when he moves away from the desk, he carries the photograph with him. The three faces in the portrait are so appealing that he needs to be able to look at them again whenever the desire arises.

As he investigates the titles on the spines of the volumes in the bookcases, he makes a discovery that gives him an understanding, however incomplete, of why he was drawn from the gray autumnal plains of the Midwest to the post-Thanksgiving sun of California.

On a few of the shelves, the books-mystery novels-are by the same author, Martin Stillwater. The surname is the one he saw on the mailbox outside.

He puts aside the silver-framed portrait and withdraws a few of these novels from the shelves, surprised to see that some of the dustjacket illustrations are familiar because the original paintings are hanging on the gallery wall that so fascinated him. Each title appears in a variety of translations, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Japanese, and several other languages.

But nothing is as interesting as the author's photo on the back of each jacket. He studies them for a long time, tracing Stillwater's features with one finger.

Intrigued, he peruses the copy on the jacket flaps. Then he reads the first page of a book, the first page of another, and another.

He happens upon a dedication page in the front of one book and reads what is printed there, This opus is for my mother and father, Jim and Alice Stillwater, who taught me to be an honest man-and who can't be blamed if I am able to think like a criminal.

His mother and father. He stares in astonishment at their names.

He has no memory of them, cannot picture their faces or recall where they might live.

He returns to the desk to consult the Rolodex. He discovers Jim and Alice Stillwater in Mammoth Lakes, California. The street address means nothing to him, and he wonders if it is the house in which he grew up.

He must love his parents. He dedicated a book to them. Yet they are ciphers to him. So much has been lost.

He returns to the bookshelves. Opening the U.S. or British edition of every title in the collection to study the dedication, he eventually characters are based-excluding, of course, the homicidal psychopaths.

And two volumes later, To my daughters, Charlotte and Emily, with the hope they will read this book one day when they are grown up and will know that the daddy in this story speaks my own heart when he talks with such conviction and emotion about his feelings for his own little girls.

Putting the books aside, he picks up the photograph once more and holds it in both hands with something like reverence.

The attractive blonde is surely Paige. A perfect wife.

The two girls are Charlotte and Emily,-although he has no way of knowing which is which. They look sweet and obedient.

Paige, Charlotte, Emily.

At last he has found his life. This is where he belongs. This is home.

The future begins now.

Paige, Charlotte, Emily.

This is the family toward which destiny has led him.

"I need to be Marty Stillwater," he says, and he is thrilled to have found, at last, his own warm place in this cold and lonely world.

Dr. Paul Guthridge's office suite had three examination rooms. Over the years, Marty had been in all of them. They were identical to one another, indistinguishable from rooms in doctors' offices from Maine to Texas, pale-blue walls, stainless-steel fixtures, otherwise white-on white, scrub sink, stool, an eye chart. The place had no more charm than a morgue though a better smell.

Marty sat on the edge of a padded examination table that was protected by a continuous roll of paper sheeting. He was shirtless, and the room was cool. Though he was still wearing his pants, he felt naked, vulnerable. In his mind's eye, he saw himself having a catatonic seizure, being unable to talk or move or even blink, whereupon the physician would mistake him for dead, strip him naked, wire an ID tag to his big toe, tape his eyelids shut, and ship him off to the coroner for processing.

Although it earned him a living, a suspense writer's imagination made him more aware of the constant proximity of death than were most people.