The Devouring b-2 Read online

  The woman beneath Hap whispered, "I'm happy with my children."

  It was a typically cryptic remark for her, so Hap merely shrugged and got back to the business of "giving her a poke or two."

  He did not see the small silver knife she kept in the bodice of her dress, which lay now on the floor beside the bed.

  And because his mind was very much on other things, he did not see her reach and take the knife into her long, graceful fingers.

  And when she traced a thin, foot-long gash into his back with the knife, he thought at first that in the throes of her passion, her fingernails were digging hard into him, so he breathed at her, "Oh baby, baby!"

  She plunged the inch-long blade into the small of his back.

  He stiffened on her; his mouth and eyes opened wide; small stuttering sounds came from him.

  She whispered, "Oh, yes, yes-you are never more alive than when death is near! Live, live!" And she plunged the knife quickly into a buttock, then into his side, below the rib cage, then into his spine, and at last he rolled off her to the floor, where he lay on his back and twitched.

  She stood above him, feet on either side of him. She leaned over, put her lips near his chest. "Live!" she breathed. "Live!" She put her lips to his chest.

  He was dead five minutes later.

  Chapter Five

  In Boston

  The desk clerk at the Ritz Carlton Hotel was losing his patience. "I'm sorry, Mr. Biergarten," he said stiffly, "but as I've told you a half-dozen times already, there is no Joan Mott Evans registered here."

  Ryerson was losing patience, too. Because when Joan had been about ready to leave his house on Newbury Street and he'd asked her where in Boston she was staying, the name Ritz Carlton had flashed into his head as bright as neon. But now, two hours later, facing off with this thin, balding, temperamental desk clerk, he was beginning to think that Joan had tricked him.

  He said, "Let me describe her to you again," although he'd described her already.

  "No," the desk clerk said, "as I told you, no one of that description is registered here. And if you don't let me attend to more pressing business, sir, I will be forced to call the house detective."

  Ryerson shifted Creosote from one arm to the other. It was impossible for him to tell psychically if the man was lying-hard emotion, such as the man's growing impatience, was often a barrier to reception. Ryerson had to admit anyway that the man had no reason to lie-either Joan was staying at the Ritz Carlton, or she wasn't.

  The desk clerk said, "Can I assume that that will be all for the evening, sir?"

  Ryerson said, "Sure. Thank you," and shifted Creosote to his other arm. He wanted to press the subject further but could think of no way to do it. "I didn't mean to bother you," he added, then went over to one of three big red leather couches in the lobby and sat down sullenly with Creosote. "Yes," he whispered to the dog, "that's precisely what she did. She tricked me." At the other end of the couch, a chubby sixtyish man in an ill-fitting gray suit speared the air with a dark wooden cane and bellowed, "I'll have no more of that, Falstaff!"

  Ryerson glanced at him, wondered if he was doing some bastardization of Shakespeare, read from him only what appeared in his mind's eye as a mass of live reddish worms-which was often all he could read from crazies-and looked away, embarrassed because the man had caught him looking.

  "Fine dog," the man said heartily, manfully, as if commenting on Ryerson's ability at arm wrestling.

  Ryerson glanced at him, smiled a little, said, "Thank you," and looked away again. He didn't like dealing with public crazies. Too often when he tried to untangle what he saw moving about in their heads he became frustrated and depressed; it was like working a huge jigsaw puzzle which, when finished, formed only one piece of an almost infinitely larger puzzle. And he usually read a profound and soul-shattering despair beneath the bubbly exterior, as if a personality, a human being, had been buried alive and was slowly suffocating.

  It was the same sort of thing he'd encountered six months earlier, in Rochester, New York, when his investigation into what had come to be known as "The Park Werewolf" was nearly at an end. He had the name of the murderer, but no real proof. His only proof was a desperate whisper of despair from within the innermost recesses of the murderer's brain-as if someone were calling for help from the bottom of a very deep well. It was the same sort of whisper of despair that he read now from the man at the other end of the couch. The only difference was what had overlaid it-not a mass of live reddish worms, but something stiff and black and opaque, like an iced-over river choked with pollution.

  The man on the couch speared the air again. "I'll have no more of that, Falstaff!" he bellowed, and within seconds a big, middle-aged, dark-haired man in a tight-fitting black suit appeared beside him, leaned over, and crooned, "Okay, Al, I think it's time for bed." He put one hand on Al's back, the other on his wrist, and helped him to his feet.

  Ryerson said, "Pardon me, but is he registered here?"

  The big man looked critically at Ryerson. "Who's asking?"

  Ryerson shook his head as an apology for butting in. "No one. I'm just curious."

  "He's my friend," the man said, and turned his attention back to Al. "C'mon, Al. Big day tomorrow."

  Ryerson began, "It's just that-"

  "Who's he hurtin'?" the big man cut in. "He ain't hurtin' no one. All he does is sit here and talk to himself. So what? I seen you talking to yourself a few minutes ago."

  And Ryerson, regretting his words immediately, said, "Yes, I know, but for his own good-"

  The beefy man said, "What's for his own good is between him and me, 'cuz we're friends, you know. I look after him, and he looks after me, when he can. Just because he's sick don't mean he ain't my friend no more, and it don't mean I don't know how he feels inside. Shit, you put him away and he'd die in a month. At least here he's got me; we got each other."

  Ryerson wanted to say, That's a hell of a speech, but he knew the man would mistake it for sarcasm, so he said, "Yes, I agree, I'm sorry," and watched as the two of them made their way slowly-Al as if in pain-to the elevators.

  ~ * ~

  In Buffalo

  "Now why'd I do that?!" mumbled Sergeant Guy Mallory.

  His partner, Gail Newman, looked over at him from her desk, grinned, and said, "Do what?"

  He grimaced. "This stupid thing." He held up a white paper cup, put it back on his desk, grimaced again. "My wife's after me to take vitamins, you know. Vitamin A especially, because I've got this skin problem and vitamin A is supposed to be good for that, she says."

  "The eyes, too," Gail said. "Carrots have a lot of vitamin A. So do fish."

  Mallory harrumphed. "Tell me about it. I got these fish oil capsules and I thought, Why don't I put them in the coffee-"

  "Why would you do that?"

  "Well, you know," he explained haltingly, as if embarrassed, "some people don't like to take pills. Hell, Gail, they glom up right here." He pointed at a spot just above his Adam's apple. "So I thought, why not put them in the coffee?"

  Gail chuckled. "And now the coffee tastes like fish, right?"

  "Damn right!" he said, and dumped the cup of fishy-tasting coffee into the wastebasket.

  Gail laughed. "You're a scream sometimes, Mallory. Did you know that?"

  "Yeah," he said glumly. "I know it." He sighed, nodded at a file folder on her desk. "Did you get anything from the neighbors, Gail?" That afternoon-it was close to 5:00 now-she had gone to interview John and Vera Brownleigh's next-door neighbors while Mallory kept a 3:00 P.M. court date. She'd gotten back from the interviews less than five minutes earlier. She shook her head. "Nothing substantial. One of the neighbors"- she checked her notepad-"a Mrs. Garfungle-"

  "Garfungle? With a `g'? Are you sure?"

  Gail nodded. "Yes. I thought it was Garfunkel, too, but she corrected me. Anyway, she says that she heard loud talking at"- she checked her notebook-"at 10:45 on the night of the murders."

  "Uh-huh," M
allory said. "How close is she to the Brownleigh house?"

  "Mrs. Garfungle? Fifty feet or so."

  "And did she have her windows open?"

  Gail hesitated, then answered, "I don't know. I didn't ask. Is it important?"

  Mallory shrugged. "Not really. It's just that if she didn't have her windows open, and the Brownleighs didn't have theirs open either-and it was the end of October-then the ‘loud talking' she heard had to have been very loud." He hesitated. "Louder, I mean, than a simple argument. Do you follow me?"

  Gail nodded. "Yes, Mallory. I follow you."

  She looked a little miffed, Mallory thought; he said, "I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead."

  She flipped a page of her notebook. "I asked her if she could make out any single words or sentences. She said no. Only loud talking. She said it was nothing new, that they argued quite a lot apparently-"

  "And what do you think of that, Gail?"

  "Think of what?"

  "Of the fact that this Garfungle woman said that the Brownleighs argued a lot."

  "I don't know," Gail answered. "I guess I'd have to wonder why she'd notice the time of this particular argument."

  "And?"

  "And I'd have to wonder if there was something different about it that would make her notice the time." Mallory saw a small grin appear and disappear quickly on Gail's lips. She went on. "And wondering that, I guess I'd have to ask her to think about it. I'd have to say to her, 'Just try and remember what you heard, Mrs. Garfungle. Was it pretty much the same as their other arguments, or was there something different about it?' " She hesitated; Mallory sighed. She went on. "And, of course, that's what I asked her."

  Mallory sighed again. "Okay, okay, so I'm a bastard-what else is new? Just tell me what this Mrs. Garfinkle, Garfunkle, whateverGarfungle said, okay?"

  Gail smiled coyly at him. "You're not a bastard, Mallory. You're just taking your promotion a little too seriously." She hesitated, went on. "Mrs. Garfungle said, and I quote, 'Yes. There was something different about it, young lady. There were three voices. Not two. Three. Two women, and him, Mr. Brownleigh.'"

  Mallory's phone rang. He snatched it up. "Mallory here," he said. After a few moments he said, "Yes, thanks, we'll be there in twenty minutes," and hung up. He said to Gail, "We've got another one."

  "Another one?"

  "Another one like the Brownleighs."

  "Shit," Gail said. "Who?"

  "Some woman named Drake; she lives up near Orchard Park." He hesitated, then pushed himself heavily, wearily, to his feet. "Dammit, Gail-her daughter found her, for Christ's sake-her twelve-year-old daughter found her!"

  ~ * ~

  In the Records Division of the Buffalo Police Department, Irene Sabitch again sat scowling at her computer monitor, and, again, her coworker Glen Coffman looked over and told her she looked like she'd just chomped down on a clove of garlic.

  "It's this same damned file directory," she said, eyes glued to the screen. "I put the whole thing aside, you know, the other day. I didn't want to mess with it. But I went and got that list of user numbers you mentioned, and I inputted all of them-"

  ."All of them?" Glen asked, astonished. "How many were there?"

  "Seventeen hundred and eighty-six," she answered. "Of course, the computer helped me."

  "Oh. Yes, of course."

  "But none of them work."

  "None of them?"

  "None of them. So I called upstairs to Homicide-"

  "How do you know it's a Homicide file?"

  "I don't." She glanced at him. "But I had to start somewhere, didn't I?"

  He nodded. "Sure."

  She looked back at her monitor. "And they don't have any hard copies on anyone named 'Curtis, L.' or 'Hawkins' "-she was referring to two of the file names-"so I called Vice, and I called a couple of other precincts, and no one seems to have a hard copy on any of this stuff."

  Glen shook his head knowingly. "That can't be, Irene. And I'll tell you why-"

  "I know why."

  "I'll tell you anyway. It can't be because everyone has a personal user number-whether they use it or not-and every case on the subsystem has a duplicate hard file somewhere. The subsystem files, Irene-"

  "I know," she interrupted, "the subsystem files come from the hard copies."

  "That's right."

  "Then I'd assume, Glen, that someone has been messing with the hard copies."

  "Sure," he said, "I'd assume that, too."

  "So now," she said, "all I've got to find out is who, and then we can nail his ass to the wall!"

  Chapter Six

  In Boston

  Ryerson Biergarten did many things on impulse. He'd married Coreen on impulse, and it had turned out to be a mistake. He'd bought his first house on impulse-after Conversations with Charlene topped the country's best seller lists-and got taken. It was an old farmhouse just outside Boston which the owner swore was in top condition. And Ryerson, trusting his hunches, and reading nothing but goodwill from the man, bought it. It was six months later that he discovered the dry rot, and the leaky roof, when its temporary patches gave way, and the equally leaky cellar walls, whose equally temporary patches had also given way. It was then that Ryerson resolved to remember that some people could lie with goodwill not only on their lips but in their hearts as well.

  Most of his impulses, however, proved out.

  His '48 Ford wagon-known as a "Woody" because of the genuine wood paneling along the doors and rear quarter panels-was one of those impulses. He hadn't bought the car merely because it was an antique. He couldn't have cared less about its age per se. He'd bought it because it was full of happy memories that he could feel and taste and enjoy as strongly as anyone else experienced the smell of a new car. He found that those memories faded over time, as if, he theorized, he'd somehow coaxed them away with the memories that were piling up in his own life. But, happily, they did not fade altogether. What remained after two years was like the faint odor of a delicate perfume that lingers in a room long after the woman wearing it has gone. It made driving the car a distinct pleasure. It was, he admitted-moving along the Massachusetts Turnpike at fifty miles per hour, the car's top speed-the only thing that made driving it a pleasure. Not only was it slow, it also handled like a truck, which it was, in essence, and its suspension system was long past due for an overhaul. (He'd been waiting six months now for the right parts. "Car that old," the mechanic told him, "ain't a jiffy to get parts for, you know.") He was on his way to Buffalo. His hunch was that Joan Mott Evans was already back there, and if she wasn't, he'd surprise her.

  The main thing pushing him to Buffalo was what he had sensed in Joan during her visit to his house on Newbury Street. He had sensed love in her, very clearly-the love she had for her dead friend, Lila, and the love she had simply for being alive. She was, Ryerson thought, a woman whose very existence had love as its focus. It was that love, he thought, that had made her do to Lila what she had, ultimately, decided she had to do.

  He'd also sensed that Joan saw a connection between Lila Curtis and what had happened in Rochester. For months now he'd suspected that there was a connection, though he wasn't certain what it was, exactly. With Joan's help, perhaps he could find out.

  Most of all, he wanted to know if what had happened in Rochester was simply some strange and singular twist of reality. Or if it was repeatable. If, perhaps, it was being repeated even as he drove south down the Massachusetts Turnpike.

  He reached over and gave Creosote, asleep on the passenger's seat, a few long, slow, loving strokes. The dog grumbled in its sleep, wheezed, snorted, fell silent. Ryerson put his hand back on the wheel-the wagon was too hard to control with just one hand. He was happy to be leaving the city for a few days. He loved Boston; it was his home, it would always be his home. But it was still a city. And the continual barrage of psychic input in any city was almost deafening at times. It wasn't bad if he stayed in the house, or went walking very early, when most of the city's people were a
sleep, or in the mid-evening, when most of its people had been sated by a good meal and were camped in front of the tube with their minds on hold. But if he had to go out on a weekday, when the streets were teeming with people, what escaped their minds and shot into his-all their worries and joys and complaints-had more than once driven him back to his house. He thought he knew how an agoraphobic felt at such times. There was a way to shut out most of the input; he simply erected a mental wall made of bricks and mortar-much as the adults in the movie Village of the Damned had done to ward off the psychic probing of their unearthly children. But he didn't like to do that because then he had to rely solely on his five senses to gauge the world around him. He wasn't used to using only five senses; he'd used six senses since birth. So, when he erected that mental brick wall, he felt cut off from all that was going on around him, the same way a sighted man feels when the room he's in is suddenly darkened.

  Now, at a little past 7:00 on the Massachusetts Turnpike, thirty miles south of Boston, he got an occasional short psychic blast as cars zipped by-sometimes what he got was coherent, a sentence or two, and sometimes it was merely a brief feeling of pleasure, or a smell, or pain. Quite often he got nothing at all, and he would think momentarily, at such times, that he'd suddenly lost his psychic ability. It was his greatest fear-that he would wake up one morning to discover that the gift he'd been given at birth had been taken from him. If that did happen, he'd decided, then he'd have to look upon the loss as eminently fair; after all, he'd still have the use of five senses, and that was as much as anyone was entitled to. Still, he had to admit that he'd sooner lose his hearing or his sight than his ability to know, if usually just at random, what was going on in the minds of those around him.

  He stroked Creosote again, felt the wagon drift right, toward the guard rail, steered left with both hands. He whispered, "What's the matter, Woody? Tie rods going?" And he thought, not for the first time, how nice it would be if he could peer into the hearts of machines, too. And that brought up what, for him, was the old saw that he could not peer into hearts so much as into heads. He was, he imagined, much like the fledgling computer programmer who had gotten to the point where he could write and read very complex programs but had little idea how the lines and commands and algorithms he wrote were interpreted and acted upon by the machine itself. His experience buying his first house had proved that; and so had his experience dealing with the poor demented creature responsible for the murders in Rochester. That damned soul had proved dramatically that some people-many people, perhaps-were able to use the output of their brains to hide what was going on in their hearts, even from people like Ryerson. Even, amazingly, from themselves.