Velocity. Part 29

When he pulled the trap down, an accordion ladder unfolded from the back of it.

He heard something behind him. In his mind, he saw a mannequin with teeth in its eye sockets, reaching toward him.

He pivoted, clawing for the gun under his belt. He was alone. He had probably heard just a settling noise, an old house easing itself at the insistence of gravity.

At the top of the ladder, he found a light switch set in the frame of the trap. Two bare bulbs, dimmed by dust, illuminated a raftered s.p.a.ce empty of everything except the smell of wood rot.

Evidently the freak was canny enough to keep his incriminating souvenirs elsewhere.

Billy suspected that Zillis stayed in this rental house but did not in the truest sense live here. With its minimum of furniture and utter lack of decorative items, the place had the feeling of a way station. Steve Zillis had no roots here. He was just pa.s.sing through.

He had worked at the tavern for five months. Where had he been between the University of Colorado at Denver, five and a half years ago, when Judith Kesselman had disappeared, and this place?

Across the World Wide Web, his name had been linked to only one disappearance, and to no murders at all. Googled, Billy himself would not appear that clean.

But if you had a list of the towns in which Steve Zillis had settled for a while, if you researched murders and disappearances that occurred in those communities, the truth might be clearer.

The most successful serial killers were the vagabonds, roamers who covered a lot of ground between their homicidal frenzies. When cl.u.s.ters of killings were separated by hundreds of miles and scores of jurisdictions, they were less likely to be connected; patterns in landscape, visible from an airplane, are seldom discernible to a man on foot.

An itinerant bartender who's a good mixologist, who's outgoing and able to charm the customers, can get work anywhere. If he applies to the right places, he won't often be asked for a formal employment history, only for a social-security card, a driver's license, and an all-clean report from the state liquor-control board. Jackie O'Hara, typical of his breed, didn't phone an applicant's former employers; he made hiring decisions based on gut instinct.

Billy turned out the lights as he left the house. He used the spare key to lock up after himself, and he pocketed it again because he expected to return.

Chapter 46.

The dying sun spilled fierce b.l.o.o.d.y light on the dimensional mural under construction across the highway from the tavern.

As Billy drove past on his way home to collect Cottle's body, this scintillant display seized his attention. It captured him so completely that he pulled to the shoulder of the road and stopped.

Outside the large yellow-and-purple tent in which the artists and artisans of the project regularly met for lunch, for progress meetings, and for receptions in honor of various art- and academic-world dignitaries, they a.s.sembled now to a.s.sess this fleeting work of nature.

Parked near the tent, the giant yellow-and-purple motor home, built on a bus cha.s.sis and emblazoned with the name Valis, offered much chrome and steel in which the sun could reveal a latent fire. The tinted windows glowed a crimson bronze, sullen and smoky, yet incandescent.

Neither the festive tent nor the rock-star motor home, nor the glamorous artists and artisans enjoying the effects of sunset were what brought Billy to a stop.

At first he would have said that the scarlet-and-gold brightness of the spectacle was the primary thing that arrested him. This self-conscious a.n.a.lysis, however, missed the truth.

The construction was pale gray, but reflections of the sun's fury blazed in the glossy enamel. This glistering glaze and the heat s.h.i.+mmering the air as it rose off the hot painted surfaces combined to create the illusion of the mural afire.

And briefly this seemed to be what pulled Billy to the side of the highway: this clairvoyant vision of the blazing construct, which would indeed be razed after it had been completed.

Here was an eerie foretelling by a fluke of seasonal light and atmospheric conditions. The fire to come. And even the ultimate ashes could be glimpsed as a grayness underlying the phantom flames.

As the intensity of these pyrotechnics increased simultaneously with the distillation of the sun's last light, a truer reason for the hypnotic power of the scene grew clear to Billy. What riveted him was the great figure caught in the stylized machinery, the man struggling to survive among the giant grinding wheels, the tearing gears, the hammering pistons.

During the weeks of construction, as the mural had been crafted and refined, the man in the machine had always appeared to be trapped by it, just as the artist intended. He had been a victim of forces larger than himself.

Now by the peculiar grace of the setting sun, the man didn't appear to be burning as did the machine shapes around him. He was luminous, yes, but uniquely so, luminous and solid and strong, not being consumed by the flames but impervious to them.

Nothing about the phantasmagoric machine made engineering sense. A mere a.s.semblage of symbols of machines, it had no functional purpose.

A machine without productive function is without meaning. It can not serve even as a prison.

The man could step out of the machine whenever he wished. He was not trapped. He only believed himself to be imprisoned, a belief born of self-indulgent despair and herewith revealed as fallacious. The man must walk away from meaninglessness, find meaning, and from meaning at last take upon himself a worthwhile purpose.

Billy Wiles was not a man given to epiphanies. He had spent his life fleeing them. Insight and pain were all but synonymous to him.

He recognized this as an epiphany, however, and he did not flee from it. Instead, as he drove back onto the highway and continued homeward into the darkling twilight, he climbed a mental stairway of ascending implications, came to a turning in the stair, and climbed, and came to another turning.

He could not foresee what he would make of this sudden intuitive perception. He might not be man enough to make anything worthwhile of it, but he knew that he would make something.

When he arrived home under an indigo sky with one thin smear of evidence remaining in the west, Billy drove off the driveway, onto the back lawn. He parked with the tailgate near the porch steps, to facilitate the loading of Ralph Cottle.

He could not be seen from the county road or from the property of the nearest neighbor. Getting out of the SUV, he heard the first hoot of a night owl. Only the owl would see him, and the stars.

Inside, he took the stepladder out of the pantry and checked the video-disk recorder in the cabinet above the microwave. Replayed at high speed in the review screen, the security recording revealed that no one had entered the house in Billy's absence, at least not through the kitchen.

He hadn't expected to see anyone. Steve Zillis was working at the tavern.

After putting away the stepladder, he dragged Cottle through the house, onto the back porch and down the steps, using the rope handle that he had fas.h.i.+oned around the tarp-wrapped corpse. Loading Cottle into the back of the Explorer required more patience and muscle than Billy had expected.

He gazed across the dark yard at the black woods, the regimented ranks of sentinel trees. He did not have a sense of being watched. He felt deeply alone.

Although locking the house seemed pointless, he locked it and then drove the Explorer to the garage.

At the sight of his table saw and drill press and tools, Billy irrationally wanted to turn from the crisis at hand. He wanted to smell fresh-cut wood, experience the satisfaction of a well-made dovetail joint.

In recent years, he had built so much for the house, for himself, all for himself. If now he were to build for others, with what would he begin except with what was needed: coffins. He had built for himself a career in coffins.

Grimly, he stowed another plastic tarp, a coil of st.u.r.dy rope, strapping tape, a flashlight, and other needed items in the Explorer. He added a few folded moving blankets and a couple of empty cardboard boxes atop and around the wrapped corpse to disguise its telltale shape.

Before Billy lay a long night of death and graveyard work, and he was afraid not solely of the homicidal freak but of many things in the darkness ahead. Darkness conjures infinite terrors in the mind, but it is true-and he took hope from this-it is true that darkness also reminds us of light. The light. Regardless of what waited in the hours immediately ahead, he did believe that he would live in the light again.

Chapter 47.

Four hours of sleep facilitated by Vicodin and Elephant beer had not been sufficient rest.

More than twelve active hours had pa.s.sed since Billy had rolled out of bed. He still had physical resources, but the wheels of his mind, so long racing, were not spinning as fast as they had been, as fast as he needed them to spin.

Confident that the Explorer did not look like the death wagon that it was, he stopped at a convenience store. He bought Anacin for a swelling headache and a package of No-Doz caffeine tablets.

He'd eaten two English m.u.f.fins for breakfast and later a ham sandwich. He was in a calorie deficit, and shaky.

The store offered vacuum-packaged sandwiches and a microwave in which to heat them. For some reason, just the thought of meat stirred a billowing sensation in his stomach.

He bought six Hershey's bars for sugar, six Planters Peanut Bars for protein, and a bottle of Pepsi to wash down the No-Doz.

Referring to all the candy, the cas.h.i.+er said, "Is it Valentine's Day in July or something?"

"Halloween," Billy said.

Sitting in the SUV, he took the Anacin and the No-Doz.

On the pa.s.senger's seat lay the newspaper he'd bought in Napa. He'd not yet found time to read the story about the Winslow murder.

With the newspaper were a few Denver Post articles downloaded from the library computer. Judith Kesselman, gone missing forever.

As he ate a Hershey's bar, a Planters, he read the printouts. University, public, and police officials were quoted. Everyone except the police expressed confidence that Judith would be found safe.

The cops were guarded in their statements. Unlike the academics, bureaucrats, and politicians, they avoided bulls.h.i.+t. They were the only ones who sounded as if they truly cared about the young woman.

The officer in charge of the investigation was Detective Ramsey Ozgard. Some of his colleagues called him Oz.

Ozgard had been forty-four at the time of the disappearance. At that point in his career, he'd received three citations for bravery.

At fifty, he was probably still on the force, a likelihood supported by the only other personal information about him in the articles. When he was thirty-eight, Ramsey Ozgard had been shot in the left leg. He had been approved for permanent disability. He had turned it down. He did not limp.

Billy wanted to talk to Ozgard. To do so, however, he could not use his real name or his phone.

As the candy, Pepsi, and No-Doz began to lubricate the flywheels of his mind, Billy drove to Lanny Olsen's place.

He did not park at the church and walk from there, as he'd done before. When he arrived at the isolated house at the end of the lane, he drove across the ascending backyard, past the pistol range with the hay-bale-and-hillside backstop.

Lawn gave way to wild gra.s.s, to brambles and spa.r.s.e brush. The terrain grew stony and furrowed.

He stopped two-thirds of the way up the slope, put the Explorer in park, and engaged the emergency brake.

He could have benefited from the headlights. This high on the hillside, however, they could be seen from the residences down near the county road.

Worried about attracting attention and inspiring curiosity, he switched off the lights. He killed the engine.

On foot, using a flashlight, he quickly found the vent hole, twenty feet from the SUV.

Before vineyards, before the arrival of Europeans, before the ancestors of American Indians had crossed a land or ice bridge from Asia, volcanoes shaped this valley. They had defined its future.

The old Rossi winery, now the aging cellars for Heitz, and other buildings in the valley were built of rhyolite, the volcanic form of granite, quarried locally. The knoll on which the Olsen house stood was largely basalt, another volcanic stone, dark and dense.

When an eruption is exhausted, it sometimes leaves lava pipes, long tunnels through surrounding stone. Billy didn't know enough volcanology to conclude whether the dormant vent on this knoll was such a pipe or was a fumarole that had expelled fiery gases.

He knew, however, that the vent was four feet wide at the mouth-and immeasurably deep.

This property was intimately familiar to Billy, because when he had been fourteen and alone, Pearl Olsen had given him a home. She never feared him, as some had. She knew the truth when she heard it. Her good heart opened to him, and in spite of her recurring cancer, she raised him as if he were her son.

The twelve-year difference in Billy's age and Lanny's meant they were never like brothers, although they lived in the same house. Besides, Lanny had always been self-contained and when not on duty with the sheriff's department had lost himself in his cartooning.

The two of them had been friendly enough. And occasionally Lanny could be an engaging honorary uncle.

On one such day, Lanny had involved Billy in an attempt to determine the depth of the vent.

Although no young children played on the brambly knoll, Pearl worried for the safety of even imaginary tykes. Years earlier, she'd had a redwood frame bolted to the stone rim of the vent. A redwood lid was screwed to the frame.

After removing the lid, Lanny and Billy began their research with a handheld police spotlight powered off a pickup-truck engine. The beam illuminated the walls to about three hundred feet but could not find the bottom.

Past the mouth, the shaft widened to between eight and ten feet. The walls were undulant, whorled, and strange.

They tied one pound of bra.s.s washers to the end of a length of binder twine and lowered them into the center of the hole, listening for the distinctive ring of the discs meeting the vent floor. They only had a thousand feet of twine, which proved inadequate.

Finally they dropped steel ball bearings into the abyss, timing their fall to a first impact, using textbook formulae to calculate distance. No bearing ever hit short of fourteen hundred feet.

The bottom did not lie at fourteen hundred feet.

After that long vertical drop, the vent apparently descended further at an angle, perhaps more than once changing direction, too.

After the hard clack of the initial strike, each bearing ricocheted from wall to wall, rattling on, the noise never suddenly coming to a stop but always fading, fading until it dwindled into silence.

Billy guessed that the lava pipe was miles long and descended at least a few thousand feet under the floor of the valley.

Now, by the glow of the flashlight, he used a battery-powered screwdriver to extract the twelve Phillips-head steel screws that held the redwood lid-a more recent one than they had removed almost twenty years ago. He slid the lid aside.

No draft rose out of the hole. Billy could smell nothing but a faint cindery scent, and under that the vaguest hint of salt, a whiff of lime.

Grunting with the effort, he hauled the dead man out of the SUV and dragged him to the vent.

He wasn't concerned about the trail he left through the brush or about the trail the Explorer had left. Nature was resilient. In a few days, the disturbance would not be obvious.

Although the dead man might not have approved, given his status as a former member of the Society of Skeptics, Billy murmured a brief prayer for him before shoving his body into the hole.

Ralph Cottle made a lot more noise going down than had any of the ball bearings. The first few impacts sounded bone-shattering.

Then the slippery tarp produced an eerie whistling sound as the tunnel angled from the vertical and the plastic-wrapped mummy slid at increasing velocity into the depths, perhaps spiraling around the walls of the lava tube as a bullet spirals along the grooved barrel of a gun.