unimaginative religious litany. After about half a minute, however, his
voice on the tape changed, became sharp with urgency, swelled with
anguish, then with anger.
“. . . NEED . . . NEED . . . NEED . . . ” Frustration seethed through
those two words.
The Marty Stillwater on the tape–who might as well have been a total
stranger to the listening Marty Stillwater–sounded in acute emotional
pain for want of something that he could neither describe nor imagine.
Mesmerized, he scowled at the notched white spools of the cassette
player turning relentlessly behind the plastic view window.
Finally the voice fell silent, the recording ended, and Marty consulted
his watch again. More than twelve minutes past four.
He had assumed that he’d lost his concentration for only a few seconds,
slipped into a brief daydream. Instead, he’d sat with the recorder
gripped in his hand, the letter to his editor forgotten, repeating those
two words for seven minutes or longer.
Seven minutes, for God’s sake.
And he had remembered none of it. As if in a trance.
Now he stopped the tape. His hand was trembling, and when he put the
cassette recorder on the desk, it rattled against the glass.
He looked around the office, where he had passed so many solitary hours
in the concoction and solution of so many mysteries, where he had put
uncounted characters through enormous travail and challenged them to
find their way out of mortal danger. The room was so familiar, the
overflowing bookshelves, a dozen original paintings that had been
featured on the dust jackets of his novels, the couch that he had bought
in anticipation of lazy plotting sessions but on which he had never had
the time or inclination to lie, the computer with its oversize monitor.
But that familiarity was not comforting any more, because now it was
tainted by the strangeness of what had happened minutes ago.
He blotted his damp palms on his jeans.
Having briefly lifted from him, dread settled again in the manner of
Poe’s mysterious raven perching above a chamber door.
Waking from the trance, perceiving danger, he had expected to find the
threat outside in the street or in the form of a burglar roaming through
the rooms below. But it was worse than that. The threat was not
external. Somehow, the wrongness was within him.
The night is deep and free of turbulence.
Below, the clotted clouds are silver with reflected moonlight, and for a
while the shadow of the plane undulates across that vaporous sea.
The killer’s flight from Boston arrives on time in Kansas City,
Missouri. He goes directly to the baggage-claim area.
Thanksgiving holiday travelers will not head home until tomorrow, so the
airport is quiet. His two pieces of luggage–one of which contains a
Heckler & Koch P7 pistol, detachable silencer, and expanded magazines
loaded with 9mm ammunition–are first and second to drop onto the
carrousel.
At the rental-agency counter he discovers that his reservation has not
been misplaced or misrecorded, as often happens. He will receive the
large Ford sedan that he requested, instead of being stuck with a
subcompact.
The credit card in the name of John Larrington is accepted by the clerk
and by the American Express verifying machine with no problem, although
his name is not John Larrington.
When he receives the car, it runs well and smells clean. The heater
actually works.
Everything seems to be going his way.
Within a few miles of the airport he checks into a pleasant if anonymous
four-story motor hotel, where the red-haired clerk at the reception
counter tells him that he may have a complimentary breakfast–pastries,
juice, and coffee delivered in the morning simply by requesting it. His
Visa card in the name of Thomas E. Jukovic is accepted, although Thomas
E. Jukovic is not his name.
His room has burnt-orange carpet and striped blue wallpaper.
However, the mattress is firm, and the towels are fluffy.
The suitcase containing the automatic pistol and ammunition remains
locked in the trunk of the car, where it will offer no temptation to
snooping motel employees.
After sitting in a chair by the window for a while, staring at Kansas