“Neither do I,” Tessa said. “And that’s why I’m here.”
Reluctantly, with a final squeeze, Harry let go of Tessa’s hand. “So many bodies lately, most of them hauled into Callan’s at night, and more than a few times with cops hanging around, overseeing things—it’s strange as hell for a quiet little town like this.”
From across the table, Sam said, “Twelve accidental deaths or suicides in less than two months.”
“Twelve?” Harry said.
“Didn’t you realize it was that many?” Sam asked.
“Oh, it’s more than that.”
Sam blinked.
Harry said, “Twenty, by my count.”
50
After Watkins left, Shaddack returned to the computer terminal in his study, reopened his link to Sun, the supercomputer at New Wave, and set to work again on a problematic aspect of the current project. Though it was two-thirty in the morning, he would put in a few more hours, for the earliest he went to bed was dawn.
He had been at the terminal a few minutes when his most private phone line rang.
Until Booker was apprehended, the telephone company computer was allowing service only among those who had been converted, from one of their numbers to one of their numbers. Other lines were cut off, and calls to the outside world were interrupted before being completed. Incoming calls to Moonlight Cove were answered by a recording that pleaded equipment failure, promised a return to full service within twenty-four hours, and expressed regret at the inconvenience.
Therefore, Shaddack knew the caller must be among the converted and, because it was his most private line, must also be one of his closest associates at New Wave. A LED readout on the base of the phone displayed the number from which the call was being placed, which he recognized as that of Mike Peyser. He picked up the receiver and said, ” Shaddack here.”
The caller breathed heavily, raggedly into the phone but said nothing.
Frowning, Shaddack said, “Hello?”
Just the breathing.
Shaddack said, “Mike, is that you?”
The voice that finally responded to him was hoarse, guttural, but with a shrill edge, whispery yet forceful, Peyser’s voice yet not his, strange: “… something wrong, wrong, something wrong, can’t change, can’t … wrong … wrong …”
Shaddack was reluctant to admit that he recognized Mike Peyser’s voice in those queer inflections and eerie cadences. He said, “Who is this?”
“… need, need … need, want, I need …”
“Who is this?” Shaddack demanded angrily, but in his mind was another question: What is this?
The caller issued a sound that was a groan of pain, a mewl of deepest anguish, a thin cry of frustration, and a snarl, all twisted into one rolling bleat. The receiver dropped from his hand with a hard clatter.
Shaddack put his own phone down, turned back to the VDT, tapped into the police data system, and sent an urgent message to Loman Watkins.
51
Sitting on the stool in the dark third-floor bedroom, bent to the eyepiece, Sam Booker studied the rear of Callan’s Funeral Home. All but scattered scrims of fog had blown away on the wind, which still blustered at the window and shook the trees all along the hillsides on which most of Moonlight Cove was built. The serviceway lamps were extinguished now, and the rear of Callan’s lay in darkness but for the thin light radiating from the blind-covered windows of the crematorium wing. No doubt they were busily feeding the flames with the bodies of the couple who had been murdered at Cove Lodge.
Tessa sat on the edge of the bed behind Sam, petting Moose, who was lying with his head in her lap.
Harry was in his wheelchair nearby. He used a penlight to study a spiral-bound notebook in which he had kept a record of the unusual activities at the mortuary.
“First one—at least the first unusual one I noticed—was on the night of August twenty-eighth,” Harry said. “Twenty minutes to midnight. They brought four bodies at once, using the hearse and the city ambulance. Police accompanied them. The corpses were in body bags, so I couldn’t see anything about them, but the cops and the ambulance attendants and the people at Callan’s were visibly … well … upset. I saw it in their faces. Fear. They kept looking around at the neighboring houses and the alleyway, as if they were afraid someone was going to see what they were up to, which seemed peculiar because they were only doing their jobs. Right? Anyway, later, in the county paper, I read about the Mayser family dying in a fire, and I knew that was who’d been brought to Callan’s that night. I supposed they didn’t die in a fire any more than your sister killed herself.”