blending right in with your decent average citizens.” He was impatient
with the sallow man and did not want to pursue the subject; quite
obviously, they were not on the same wavelength. He leaned away from
the wall and looked once more into the bloody bedroom. “Why?”
“Why this? Why’d he kill his own family?
“Yes.”
“He’s very religious,” the technician said, smiling again.
Hoval didn’t get it. He said so.
“He’s a lay preacher. Very dedicated to Christ, you know.
Spreads the Good Word as much as he can, reads the Bible for an hour
every night . . . Then he sees his boy going off the deep end with
drugs-or at least pot. He thinks his daughter’s got loose morals or
maybe no morals at all, because she won’t tell him who she’s dating or
why she stays out so late. And the mother took up for both the kids a
little too much. She was encouraging them to sin, as it were.”
“And what finally set him off?” Hoval asked.
“Nothing much. He says that all the little day-to-day things mounted up
until he couldn’t stand it any longer.”
“And the solution was murder.”
“For him, anyway.”
Hoval shook his head sadly, thinking of the pretty girl lying on the
bathroom floor. “What’s the world coming to these days?”
“Not the world,” the slim man said. “Not the whole world.”
Eleven It was a hard rain, a downpour, a seemingly perpetual
cloudburst. The wind from the east pushed it across high Denver in
vicious, eroding sheets. It streamed off the peaked black-slate roofs
of the four motel wings, chuckled rather pleasantly along the horizontal
sections of spouting, roared down the wide vertical spouts, and gushed
noisily into the drainage gratings in the ground.
Everywhere, trees dripped, shrubs dripped, and flat surfaces glistened
darkly. Dirty water collected in depressions in the courtyard lawn.
The hard-driven droplets shattered the crystalline tranquillity of the
swimming pool, danced on the flagstones laid around the pool, flattened
the tough grass that encircled the flagstones.
The gusting wind brought the rain under the awning and into the
second-level promenade outside of Doyle’s room. The moment he closed
the door, locking Colin inside, a whirlwind of cold water raced along
the walkway and spun over him, soaking his right side. His blue work
shirt and one leg of his well-worn jeans clung uncomfortably to his
skin.
Shivering, he looked southward, down the longest stretch of the walkway,
to the courtyard steps at the far end. The shadows were deep.
None of the rooms had light in them; and the weak night lights on the
promenade were spaced fifty or sixty feet apart. The night mist
complicated the picture, curling around the iron awning supports and
eddying in the recessed entrances to the rooms. Nevertheless, Doyle was
fairly sure that there was no one prowling about in that direction.
Thirty feet to the north, two rooms beyond their own, another wing of
the motel grid intersected this one, forming the northeast corner of the
courtyard overlook. Whoever had been at their door might have run up
there in a second, might have ducked quickly out of sight Alex tucked
his head down to keep the rain out of his face, ‘ hurried up that way
and peered cautiously around the corner.
There was nothing down the short arm of that corridor except more red
doors, the night mist, darkness, and wet concrete. A blue safety bulb
burning behind a protective wire cage marked another set of open steps
that led down to the first level, this time to the parking lot which
completely ringed the complex.
The last segment of his own walkway, running off to the north, was
equally deserted, as was the remainder of the secondlevel east-west
wing.
He walked back to the wrought-iron railing and looked down into the
courtyard at the pool and the landscaped grounds around it. The only
things that moved down there were those stirred by the wind and the
rain.
Suddenly Alex had the eerie notion that he was not merely alone out
here-but that he was the only living soul in the entire motel. He felt