LITMIR.BIZ

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      Opening off the upper hallway were three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a closet. Four of those five doors were closed.

      On both sides of the entrance to the master bedroom were cartoon hands pointing to that open door.

      Reluctant to be herded, thinking of animals driven up a ramp at a slaughterhouse, Billy left the master bedroom for last. He first checked the hall bath. Then the closet and the two other bedrooms, in one of which Lanny kept a drawing table.

      Using the dishtowel, he wiped all the doorknobs after he touched them.

      With only the one space remaining to be searched, he stood in the hall, listening. No pin dropped.

      Something had stuck in his throat, and he couldn’t swallow it. He couldn’t swallow it because it was no more real than the sliver of ice sliding down the small of his back.

      He entered the master bedroom, where two lamps glowed.

      The rose-patterned wallpaper chosen by Lanny’s mother had not been removed after she died and not even, a few years later, after Lanny moved out of his old room into this one. Age had darkened the background to a pleasing shade reminiscent of a light tea stain.

      The bedspread had been one of Pearl Olsen’s favorites: rose in color overall, with embroidered flowers along the borders.

      Often during Mrs. Olsen’s illness, following chemotherapy sessions, and after her debilitating radiation treatments, Billy had sat with her in this room. Sometimes he just talked to her or watched her sleep. Often he read to her.

      She had liked swashbuckling adventure stories. Stories set during the Raj in India. Stories with geishas and samurai and Chinese warlords and Caribbean pirates.

      Pearl was gone, and now so was Lanny. Dressed in his uniform, he sat in an armchair, legs propped on a footstool, but he was gone just the same.

      He had been shot in the forehead.

      Billy didn’t want to see this. He dreaded having this image in his memory. He wanted to leave.

      Running, however, was not an option. It never had been, neither twenty years ago nor now, nor any time between. If he ran, he would be chased down and destroyed.

      The hunt was on, and for reasons he didn’t understand, he was the ultimate game. Speed of flight would not save him. Speed never saved the fox. To escape the hounds and the hunters, the fox needed cunning and a taste for risk.

      Billy didn’t feel like a fox. He felt like a rabbit, but he would not run like one.

      The lack of blood on Lanny’s face, the lack of leakage from the wound suggested two things: that death had been instantaneous and that the back of his skull had been blown out.

      No bloodstains or brain matter soiled the wallpaper behind the chair. Lanny had not been drilled as he sat there, had not been shot anywhere in this room.

      As Billy had not found blood elsewhere in the house, he assumed that the killing occurred outside.

      Perhaps Lanny had gotten up from the kitchen table, from his rum and Coke, half drunk or drunk, needing fresh air, and had stepped outside. Maybe he realized that his aim wouldn’t be neat enough for the bathroom and therefore went into the backyard to relieve himself.

      The freak must have used a plastic tarp or something to move the corpse through the house without making a mess.

      Even if the killer was strong, getting the dead man from the backyard to the master bedroom, considering the stairs, would have been a hard job. Hard and seemingly unnecessary.

      To have done it, however, he must have had a reason that was important to him.

      Lanny’s eyes were open. Both bulged slightly in their sockets. The left one was askew, as if he’d had a cast eye in life.

      Pressure. For the instant during which the bullet had transited the brain, pressure inside the skull soared before being relieved.

      A book-club novel lay in Lanny’s lap, a smaller and more cheaply produced volume than the handsome edition of the same title that had been available in bookstores. At least two hundred similar books were shelved at one end of the bedroom.

      Billy could see the title, the author’s name, and the jacket illustration. The story was about a search for treasure and true love in the South Pacific.

      A long time ago, he had read this novel to Pearl Olsen. She had liked it, but then she had liked them all.

      Lanny’s slack right hand rested on the book. He appeared to have marked his place with a photograph, a small portion of which protruded from the pages.

      The psychopath had arranged all of this. The tableau satisfied him and had emotional meaning to him, or it was a message—a riddle, a taunt.

      Before disturbing the scene, Billy studied it. Nothing about it seemed compelling or clever, nothing that might have excited the murderer enough to motivate him to put forth such effort in its creation.

      Billy mourned Lanny; but with a greater passion, he hated that Lanny had been afforded no dignity even in death. The freak dragged him around and staged him as if he were a mannequin, a doll, as if he had existed only for the creep’s amusement and manipulation.

      Lanny had betrayed Billy; but that didn’t matter anymore. On the edge of the Dark, on the brink of the Void, few offenses were worth remembering. The only things worth recalling were the moments of friendship and laughter.

      If they had been at odds on Lanny’s last day, they were on the same team now, with the same and singular adversary.

      Billy thought he heard a noise in the hall.

      Without hesitation, holding the revolver in both hands, he left the master bedroom, clearing the doorway fast, sweeping the .38 left to right, seeking a target. No one.

      The bathroom, closet, and other bedroom doors were closed, as he had left them.

      He didn’t feel a pressing need to search those rooms again. He might have heard nothing but an ordinary settling noise as the old house protested the weight of time, but it almost certainly had not been the sound of a door opening or closing.

      He blotted the damp palm of his left hand on his shirt, switched the gun to it, blotted his right hand, returned the gun to it, and went to the head of the stairs.

      From the lower floor, from the porch beyond the open front door, came nothing but a summer-night silence, a dead-of-night hush.

       13

      As he stood at the head of the stairs, listening, pain had begun to throb in Billy’s temples. He realized that his teeth were clenched tighter than the jaws of a vise.

      He tried to relax and breathe through his mouth. He rolled his head from side to side, working the stiffening muscles of his neck.

      Stress could be beneficial if you used it to stay focused and alert. Fear could paralyze, but also sharpen the survival instinct.

      He returned to the master bedroom.

      Approaching the door, he suddenly thought body and book would be gone. But Lanny still sat in the armchair.

      From a tissue box on one of the nightstands, Billy plucked two Kleenex. Using them as an impromptu glove, he moved the dead man’s hand off the book.

      Leaving the book on the cadaver’s lap, he opened it to the place that had been marked by the photograph.

      He expected sentences or paragraphs to have been highlighted in some fashion: a further message. But the text was pristine.

      Still using the Kleenex, he picked up the photo, a snapshot.

      She was young and blond and pretty. Nothing in the picture gave a clue

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