He had spent nearly all of yesterday on the road and had arrived in Los Angeles last night. He’d gone straight to Katherine’s house in Westwood.
She was using the name Hilary Thomas this time, but he knew she was Katherine.
Katherine.
Back from the grave again.
The rotten bitch.
He had broken into the house, but she hadn’t been there. Then she’d finally come home just before dawn, and he’d almost gotten his hands on her. He still couldn’t figure out why the police had shown up.
During the past four hours, he’d driven by her house five times, but he hadn’t seen anything important. He didn’t know if she was there or not.
He was confused. Mixed up. And frightened. He didn’t know what he should do next, didn’t know how he should go about locating her. His thoughts were becoming increasingly strange, fragmented, difficult to control. He felt intoxicated, dizzy, disjointed, even though he hadn’t drunk anything.
He was tired. So very tired. No sleep since Sunday night. And not much then. If he could just get caught up on his sleep, he would be able to think clearly again.
Then he could go after the bitch again.
Cut off her head.
Cut out her heart. Put a stake through it.
Kill her. Kill her once and for all.
But first, sleep.
He stretched out on the floor of the van, thankful for the sunlight that streamed through the windshield, over the front seats, and into the cargo hold. He was scared to sleep in the dark.
A crucifix lay nearby.
And a pair of sharp wooden stakes.
He had filled small linen bags with garlic and had taped one over each door.
Those things might protect him from Katherine, but he knew they would not ward off the nightmare. It would come to him now as it always did when he slept, as it had all his life, and he would wake with a scream caught in the back of his throat. As always, he would not be able to recall what the dream had been about. But upon waking, he would hear the whispers, the loud but unintelligible whispers, and he would feel something moving on his body, all over his body, on his face, trying to get into his mouth and nose, some horrible thing; and during the minute or two that it would take for those sensations to fade away, he would ardently wish that he were dead.
He dreaded sleep, but he needed it.
He closed his eyes.
***
As usual, the lunchtime din in the main dining room at Casey’s Bar was very nearly deafening.
But in the other part of the restaurant, behind the oval bar, there were several sheltered booths, each of which was enclosed on three sides like a big confessional, and in these the distant dining room roar of conversation was tolerable; it acted as a background screen to insure even greater privacy than was afforded by the cozy booths themselves.
Halfway through lunch, Hilary looked up from her food and said, “I’ve got it.”
Tony put down his sandwich. “Got what?”
“Frye must have a brother.”
“A brother?”
“It explains everything.”
“You think you killed Frye last Thursday–and then his brother came after you last night?”
“Such a likeness could only be found in brothers.”
“And the voice?”
“They could have inherited the same voice.”
“Maybe a low-pitched voice could be inherited,” Tony said. “But that special gravelly quality you described? Could that be inherited, too?”
“Why not?”
“Last night you said the only way a person could get such a voice was to suffer a serious throat injury or be born with a deformed larynx.”
“So I was wrong,” she said. “Or maybe both brothers were born with the same deformity.”
“A million-to-one shot.”
“But not impossible.”
Tony sipped his beer, then said, “Maybe brothers could share the same body type, the same facial features, the same color eyes, the same voice. But could they also share precisely the same set of psychotic delusions?”
She took a taste of her own beer while she thought about that. Then: “Severe mental illness is a product of environment.”