“I see.”
“You are welcome to come inside and check the house for yourselves if you wish.”
The four officers looked at each other. Des from Seattle shook his head. The Bellevue officer turned back to Vogl. “Thanks, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary. We appreciate your cooperation. Sorry to have taken up your time.”
Five pairs of feet retraced their steps to the two police cars parked in the forecourt. Corfe knew he wasn’t doing himself any favors, but there was no other way. “Then there’s no other place,” he remonstrated. “She must be at the firm. They’ve taken her to Microbotics.”
“Mr. Corfe, why don’t you give it a break?” Des advised.
“Look, I’m not crazy,” Corfe said. “I know how this must sound, but it’s only a couple of miles away. I’m telling you, a person’s life is in danger. These people have killed before. If I’m wrong, okay, you can charge me with wasting your time or whatever. But what if I’m not wrong? Do you want that on your record?”
The senior man from the Bellevue car held up his hands. “Well, I guess you won’t be needing us anymore. That’s over our line. Good luck, guys.” He motioned to his companion, and they got back into their car.
Des looked at Corfe long and balefully, as if making sure his face would be permanently filed for future reference. “Get in,” he said, and walked around to the other side of the car. “Okay, Greg, let’s move out,” he told the driver. “I’ll call the Redmond dispatcher to have someone meet us there.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Garsten’s voice rose, close-by yet at the same time in the background, dissociated from what Vanessa was seeing. Its note of alarm grated on her nerves, distracting her. “Vanessa, what is it? What’s happening? What do you mean, someone else is there? How can there be?”
The surprise of encountering the intruder had been too great for her to stifle her reaction. It could only be Kevin. How he was doing it or where the other mec had come from, she had no time to think about now.
“Vanessa, will you please tell us what—”
“Shut up!”
“Phil, just cool it for a moment,” she heard Finnion murmur. She concentrated on visual and tactile space, closing out reminders of her actual physical surroundings.
The intruder was permanently immobilized now. Its sudden appearance, just when she had been at her most keyed-up, had left Vanessa in a strangely obsessive shocked condition. She was conscious of one goal only: to complete the task that she had embarked on. Where the intruder had come from and how it had gotten there; how much Kevin knew; who else was a party to it—all of those things could wait. The obstacle represented by Eric symbolized everything. If she failed to eliminate that now, she would forfeit all.
She dropped down from the top of the cardboard box to the floor as before, and climbed the carpeted base of the plinth supporting the front-seat armrests. Finding holds in the seamwork and stitching, she scaled the leather upholstery to the level space at the top. From there, the sides of the two front seatbacks soared up on either side of her like the World Trade Center towers, while in front, the utility top with its sunken recesses for maps, cups, and change extended away like a city street between the walls of the two armrests. Vanessa moved left to the driver’s seatback and stared up at the climb for the second time. Reflexes conditioned in a different realm still made it visually daunting, but she knew from experience that the actuality was effortless. She cast a last look back down into the cardboard box that she had come from, just to be certain. The odd, froglike mec with the enormous eyes, one of them gouged into an empty socket, was standing motionless as she had left it, the sticky, congealed, entrapping mass already setting hard. This time, then. She turned back to commence the climb. . . .
And then something yellow, moving fast, came at her out of nowhere. Metal flashed in an arc through the air. Although there was no sound, the pulse of vibration as Vanessa’s arm flew away registered as an acoustic buzz to her senses. Momentarily too shocked to react, she stared in stupor at the severed stump of metal. The blade sliced downward again, and half of one of her center legs was gone. She stared in disbelief at the striped shape already closing again, raising some awful, scintillating weapon, the size of which alone evoked pure terror. Although the features were devoid of expression, its precise, purposeful movements left no doubts as to its intent.