Now the van was full of whispers again, sibilant voices, haunting susurrations.
Bruno cried out in fear and rocked back and forth on the floor.
Strange things were crawling on him again. They were trying to climb up his arms and chest and back. Trying to get to his face. Trying to squeeze between his lips and teeth. Trying to scurry up his nostrils.
Squealing, writhing, Bruno brushed them away, slapped at them, flailed at himself.
But the illusion was fed by darkness, and there was too much light in the van for the grotesque hallucinations to hold their substance. He could see there was nothing on him, and gradually the panic drained away, leaving him limp.
For several minutes, he just sat there, his back against the wall of the van, patting his sweaty face with a handkerchief, listening to his ragged breathing grow softer and softer.
Finally, he decided it was time to start looking for the bitch again. She was out there–waiting, hiding, somewhere in the city. He had to locate her and kill her before she found a way to kill him first.
The brief moment of mental clarity, the lightning flash of lucidity was gone as if it had never existed. He had forgotten the questions, the doubts. Once again, he was absolutely certain that Katherine had come back from the dead and that she must be stopped.
Later, after a quick lunch, he drove to Westwood and parked up the street from Hilary Thomas’s house. He climbed into the cargo hold again and watched her place from a small, decorative porthole on the side of the Dodge.
A commercial van was parked in the circular driveway at the Thomas house. It was painted white with blue and gold lettering on the sides:
MAIDS UNLIMITED
WEEKLY CLEANING, SPRING CLEANING
& PARTIES
WE EVEN DO WINDOWS
Three women in white uniforms were at work in the house. They made a number of trips from the house to the van and back, carrying mops and brooms and vacuum sweepers and buckets and bundles of rags, bringing out plastic bags full of trash, taking in a machine for steam-cleaning carpets, bringing out fragments of the furniture that Frye had broken during his rampage in the pre-dawn hours of yesterday morning.
Although he watched all afternoon, he didn’t get even one quick glimpse of Hilary Thomas, and he was convinced that she was not in the house. In fact, he figured that she wouldn’t come back until she was positive that it was safe, until she knew he was dead.
“But I’m not the one who’s going to die,” he said aloud as he studied the house. “Do you hear me, bitch? I’ll nail you first. I’ll get you before you have a chance to get me. I’ll cut off your fucking head.”
At last, shortly after five o’clock, the maids brought out their equipment and loaded it into the back of their van. They locked up the house and drove away.
He followed them.
They were his only lead to Hilary Thomas. The bitch had hired them. They must know where she was. If he could get one of the maids alone and force her to talk, he would find out where Katherine was hiding.
Maids Unlimited was headquartered in a single-story stucco structure on a grubby side street, half a block off Pico. The van that Frye was following pulled into a lot beside the building and parked in a row of eight other vans that bore the company name in blue and gold lettering.
Frye drove past the line of identical white vans, went to the end of the block, swung around at the deserted intersection, and headed back the way he had come. He got there in time to see the three women going into the stucco building. None of them appeared to notice him or to realize that the Dodge was the same van that had been within sight of the Thomas house all day. He parked at the curb, across the street from the housecleaning service, under the rustling fronds of a windstirred date palm, and he waited for one of those women to reappear.