Chauncey McLain kept Eden company and observed her need for silence. Chauncey liked the horses, their every liquid, elegant movement evidence of important speed, but none of them would come near her, no matter how she coaxed or attempted bribes with treats she had appropriated from the kitchen of the low white farmhouse with its overhanging roof of blood red quarry tile. Sugar cubes, carrots, apple sections—nothing lured the horses to the fence. Possibly they all sensed what was alien in her. In both girls, perhaps: the other with her closely held African walking stick of mysterious properties and, when called for, occult force.
Finally Chauncey gave up her efforts and tossed the fruit and carrots into the pasture. She unclipped the pager Danny Cheng had given her from her belt and glanced at the message.
"They want us at the house. Maybe Lu Ping was able to get something out of—
him
."
Eden looked at Chauncey, folded her lower lip tight between her teeth but still said nothing. Worry was like a fever in her eyes. They got into a golf cart and Chauncey drove them the quarter mile up to the house.
Lu Ping sat with her uncle on a small patio outside of Danny's office, which was dominated by a mainframe computer. He wore dark glasses, the third pair Eden had seen today. The lenses of these glasses tightly fitted the sockets of his eyes. Lu Ping looked as if she were getting a few minutes of fresh air following a lengthy illness. Her skin color a cloudy shade of brass.
She looked at Eden and shook her head slowly, wincing as if in apology.
"Is Betts dead?"
"I don't know, Eden. Couldn't find out."
"Let me try, then," Eden said with quiet savagery. The gold head of the charmed walking stick flashed above her clenched fist.
"We could steam his balls in a sauna," Danny Cheng said thoughtfully, "then stab them with a fork. But even that probably wouldn't get a reaction. He's in a state of tonic immobility. He sits where you put him, doesn't move for hours. Raise one of his arms, even into an awkward position; it stays suspended in the air. Mind's in lockdown. Extreme dementia."
"He's faking!" Eden cried.
Lu Ping shook her head again.
"But I would know. You can't deceive a Peeper. There's no mind left. I was in there. It's like an old empty movie house. Projector's running, flickety-flick, but all that's on the screen is a single repetitious memory of—" She paused. Her glossy black hair that she wore tightly pulled back into a single elaborate braid reminded Eden of a playmate she'd once envied, because her own hair as a child had been too lax and flyaway for supple braiding. Lu Ping tugged mnemonically at her braid, which was draped over one shoulder like a Victorian bell pull. "—A terrible thing that happened to him, probably when he was very young."
"An accident? Is that how he got that face?"
"No. The incident he's totally focused on, that he has ritualized as part of his trauma, had an even more drastic effect on his psyche. I saw him taking these...
things
out of a bloody feed sack. Slowly. One by one. Kittens, puppies, who knows, they were destroyed to the point they're unrecognizable. Just lumps of flesh and mashed bone. He sits with his scabby little legs crossed and the sack between them, removing, holding each little body, laying them in a neat row in front of him. Tears? No tears, he's too deep in shock. He goes to a great deal of trouble to be sure the row is perfectly straight, the bodies evenly spaced." Lu Ping's own eyes watered; she wiped her lower eyelashes. "Devastating. Once the sack is empty, there's almost a total void in his—adult—mind. He's aware of lights, voices. Doesn't know where he is. External stimuli have no coherence. Then the childhood memory repeats. It's chilling."
"I couldn't care less about his crummy childhood." Eden looked at Danny Cheng. "You said he was a professional assassin."
"Yes."
"Working for the FBI."
"No, not recently. My information is that Impact Sector was purged along with some other rotten elements at the Bureau when Nick Grella was appointed director a few months ago."
"Not all of the rotten elements, apparently. I almost had my throat cut this morning."
With thumb and forefinger Danny massaged a somewhat cruel-looking but sensual mouth. He was a handsome man in spite of weak eyes he hid behind the several changes of dark glasses and an occasional bout of shakes and sweats Danny amiably identified as his "three-minute ague."
"I think the Assassin was acting for someone else."
"Doesn't matter right now. He used Betts to get at me. If he took her place in Ghirardelli Square, means he didn't need Betts anymore—doesn't it?" she added with aggressive anxiety. Her eyes flashed to Lu Ping. "Where is she? Alive? Dead? I have to
know
!"
"I'm sorry, Eden. I tried. It won't come from him."
"Do you mean today? When
will
he get over this 'immobility' bullshit? Next week? Next year?
Never?
"
Danny shrugged slightly. Lu Ping looked at the patio floor. Eden walked away from everyone, shouldering her oppressive burden of fears, getting her face under fragile control.
"Yeah, okay" she said in a quieter voice. "Thanks for trying to help. Coming to my rescue. What are you going to do with that head case you've got in the barn loft?"
"Waste disposal," Danny said after a few moments, "is another business I'm invested in. Meanwhile Teddy is keeping an eye on him, and a finger on the trigger of his Bull-pup."
Eden nodded grimly, and turned back to them.
"Does anyone remember what happened to the Assassin's knife?"
Danny looked at Lu Ping, who shook her head. Chauncey said, "Your friendly lion bit the blade in half.
The Assassin dropped the rest when his jaw was broken." Eden said, "It could still be there, by the fountain. Who would want to pick up a knife with a busted blade? Chauncey, I need to find it."
"Why?" Danny asked her.
"If Betts is dead, and he, that sorry shit, killed her with the knife he was going to use on me, I'll know. Just by touching it."
"Telekinesis," Lu Ping explained to her uncle Danny.
"Doesn't always work for me," Eden said. "I need to have a lot of emotional energy invested in order to get feedback." Her lips were chalky. "Like now. But if it happened, I'll be able to see—when. Where."
Danny was already on his feet. "Let's get going," he said.
PLEASANT HILL
,
CALIFORNIA
OCTOBER 16
4:25 P.M. P
D
T
T
he weather north of Missoula had turned, with snow squalls accompanying plunging temperatures for the second day, so Edmund Ruddy returned ahead of time from his two-week fishing trip to Montana to find someone else's Winnebago motor home jutting out into the drive from one of his allotted parking spaces beside his snugly covered BMW convertible.
The elaborate covenants of the Heather Ridge garden condos complex in the East Bay community of Pleasant Hill prohibited residents from leaving motor homes, boats, or trailers anywhere but in the fenced, key-entry lot in a far corner of the thirty-six-acre grounds, out of sight behind a tall screen of Italian cypress.
Ed's reaction was irritation and indignation. He checked with those neighbors he could find at home, but they didn't know who the unwelcome Winnebago belonged to. It was late on Sunday. There were a couple of relief handymen in Maintenance, neither of whom spoke good English. No help there.
After unloading his gear and leaving it in the foyer of his two-bedroom unit, he drove to the out-of-the-way parking lot and left his own twenty-one-foot motor home there. Trudged back past the north tennis courts and the indoor pool pavilion with its tall windows opaque from condensation. Brooded about the intrusion on
his
space. They were probably weekend visitors unfamiliar with the rules, but they could be anywhere. There were four hundred condos situated for maximum privacy along the winding, hilly drives.
Or, just possibly, someone was inside. The Winnebago's engine wasn't running, but the sun had been in and out of clouds and the temperature was only in the high fifties.
Before leaving a firmly worded note taped to the door, he knocked and called, "Excuse me? Anyone here?"
No reply. Ed shrugged; it was all he could do, but there was still that tiny kernel of indignation bobbing around in his heart. He was a man of order in a disorderly world. He left the reprimanding note and went into his house, closing the door firmly. Here he was in control. He had no wife and kept no pets. He enjoyed his library, his old shellac recordings of Irish tenors, and his coin collection of early American issues, worth a tidy sum, recession-proof.
He turned on a lamp in the front room where he watched television and had his solitary meals on a tray. Then he crossed the parquet hail floor to the kitchen to make coffee.
The coffee was already on.
Ed stared at the coffeemaker, at a used cup and saucer and crumpled paper napkin on the counter. Beside the coffeemaker there was half a bag of a specialty blend he knew about but never would have bought for his own pleasure because it was both hard to locate and damned expensive.
Then he saw the message that had been left for him on the chalkboard mounted on the wall by the refrigerator, Things To Do Today.
Upstairs, Ed, and make it snappy!!
His heart lurched; the skin on his forearms crept coldly and made livid wormlike ridges, as if he were breaking out in hives. His throat closed when he looked up at the ceiling in response to a muted spectral thumping.
Ed's bedroom was above the kitchen. He grabbed the tool closest to hand, a meat tenderizer with studded metal plates on the mallet head. A glance at the space where the cordless phone was plugged in, but only the recharger remained on the wall. The other phone was, of course, beside his bed.
Parquet steps to the second floor of the duplex condo, the staircase lined with framed photos of his departed parents—as teenagers during the last Great Depression; as newlyweds far from St. Joe, Missouri, in even more turbulent times, his father wearing the uniform of an officer in the Army Air Corps; and posed, finally, white-haired, in a tenderly lit portrait for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Ed had not known until he was well into his thirties that his parents were first cousins. A subject no one in the family, those survivors who knew about it, had ever touched on. No matter; he cherished them still, and sometimes reflected on the passion that had made it unbearable for them to ever be apart, fortunate to have had each other in spite of the inevitable censure and muted scandal back home. Memories—trampled on, despoiled by an intruder in
his home
. Nearing the top of the stairs, Ed got his voice back, more or less.
"Whoever you are! I have studied aikido for five years! I won't hesitate to use what I know to defend myself!"
He paused, eyes on his bedroom door a few feet away. The meat-tenderizer mallet raised in his right hand like a Vandal's mace.
"I want you to come out
now
with your hands on the top of your head!"
Thump. Thump
. As if someone was—but he couldn't be sure. The sound seemed, however, unthreatening. A helpless kind of banging. On the concave walnut headboard of his bed? It also had been his parents' bed. He had been conceived there, probably, had first lain in the bed beside his mother when he was two days old. Ed had tears in his eyes, but he was furious. Edmund Ruddy was not someone you could push around and expect to get away with it.
He stood back from the door, reached out for the cut-glass knob with his left hand. Turned it, pushed the door open with a cautious foot. Light from the hall illuminated the inside of his bedroom like a torch in a cave.
The figure on the bed leaped out at him in shadowy relief. It was a woman, bound hand and foot and with a wide, soiled, double layer of adhesive tape across her mouth. She wore a flashy aluminum-gray jogging suit with red piping. She was pushing strenuously against the headboard with the top of her head, nostrils pinched and white as she sucked in air. Her hair was so short she appeared to have a crew cut. The bumping of the headboard against the wall beneath a small Winslow Homer seascape (it had been in the family for eighty years) was what he was hearing. Her eyes were tightly closed, face a mottled red and glistening with perspiration.
Edmund Ruddy switched on the overhead lighting fixture, bringing new definition to familiar things. He was alert for further surprises, someone else lunging at him from the closet or bathroom. Heartbeat at full acceleration. But what caught his eye was a white business envelope that was cheerily pinned to the jacket of the jogging outfit with one of those ready-made Christmas wrap bows, green with twinkly threads of gold.
"Stop that!" Ed said sharply.
Her eyes opened and she looked toward the doorway. Probably she saw more of the meat tenderizer in his hand than she did of his face. She shook her head furiously, now fighting the tight cords holding ankles and wrists together and to the bed frame on either side.
It occurred to Ed that she assumed he was there to silence her with the mallet. But the glimpse he'd had of her eyes and that curt headshake, accompanied by a clenching of jaw muscles, were images that bolted at him from the mists of thirty-odd years ago. No one else like her, ever; one reason why he had gone unwed until, really, it was too late to think about—