in the bath of radiation. As the filet begins to weep a watery serum tinted with blood, Shacket hears himself making a thin keening sound similar to one of the many voices of the wind.
Taken from the microwave, the meat is cool but no longer icy, malleable in his eager hands, wet and tender between his teeth. The taste does not offend, the texture is not repulsive, but it also is not what he hoped it would be, what he needs. The limp mass of beef doesn’t struggle in his hands, nor does it cry out as it is torn, nor does it satisfy as did Justine in the meadow grass.
He wanders the house again, window to window, coveting the wind and the dark, wanting to be out there in the tumult, which speaks to him, excites him. His heart races. His pulse pounds in his temples.
He finds himself in the kitchen again, staring at the steaks that are defrosting on the floor.
He finds himself at the front door, staring at the word under the tiny red indicator light: Home.
He turns away from the keypad, from the door.
He ascends the stairs.
In the upstairs hall, following the Persian runner, he arrives at the master suite. A blade of light slices through the quarter inch between the door and mahogany floor. The bitch is still awake, reading. He wants to take her while she sleeps. While she sleeps.
He stands there for a while, staring down at the light that shines like a razor’s edge, his thoughts urgent and lustful and chaotic. With one hand, he rubs the crotch of his jeans. His other hand pulls at his face as though it’s a mask he feels compelled to strip off, clamps over his trembling mouth to repress a cry that he yearns to let out. The wind that harrows the night encourages him to join it in a rampage, and multiple hungers besiege him.
He turns from her suite and retreats toward the front stairs.
He halts at the door to the boy’s room, where only a strip of pale light purls on the polished mahogany floor. If any sound rises from within, it is too faint to be heard above the wind.
Change of plans. The boy first. Shacket opens the door. He steps inside. He quietly closes the door behind him.
49
The Four Square Diner stood directly across the town square park from the Pinehaven County courthouse, sheriff’s department HQ, and morgue. At peak business hours, the mélange of aromas could make anyone on a strict diet weep, but at this late hour, the air was redolent of only bacon and coffee.
A sheriff’s deputy, Bern Holland, who was on duty from 8:00 p.m. until 5:00 a.m. and therefore ate according to a contrarian schedule, sat at the counter, having a lunch of bacon-and-egg sandwiches with fries. The other two men at the counter were here for the coffee.
Carson Conroy sat in a window booth with black coffee and a wide slice of raisin-and-plum pie.
By the time he’d finished the autopsies of Painton Spader and Justine Klineman, the dinner hour had long since come and gone—as had his appetite. Over the years, the condition of people killed in accidents or murdered had ceased to sicken him or to have any effect on him other than sometimes to elicit pity. The morgue was a world of the dead, who were beyond help and hope, as segregated from the world of the living as any dream was separate from reality. When he left work, he did so as if arising from a sleeper’s phantasms, and in his busy after-work life, Carson usually didn’t dwell on what he’d seen on the autopsy table any more than he would repeatedly rerun a dream in memory after waking from it. Usually. But this one was far from an ordinary case. He had no appetite for his long-delayed dinner, certainly not for meat of any kind or for anything savory, only for coffee and the sweetness of fruit pie.
With the wind gibbering and howling past the windows and the park trees shaking their shaggy shadows in the frosty light of the tall lampposts, Halloween seemed to have come six weeks early. When a van-type morgue wagon, a converted ambulance with roof-mounted lightbar, cruised past the diner, bearing on its door the seal of the attorney general’s office of the State of California, the sip of coffee Carson was just then taking seemed to go from hot to cold in an instant.