"Don't forget to—" she started to warn Lee, but she was too late, and it was too late, for when she reached the hall Lee's hand had already released the bolt, and in the slow motion of horror Kate saw the door explode inward, sending Lee staggering back against the wall, and the figure that stepped in looked for an instant like Lee's client with his snug trousers and neatly clipped moustache, but it was not Jon Samson, it was Andy Lewis, Andy Lewis with a .45 automatic in his right hand, Andy Lewis with the eyes and stance of a pit bull zeroing in on his victim, Andy Lewis looking past Kate to where Vaun stood waiting.
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Kate's first frozen thought was that he was smaller than she remembered, shorter perhaps than Vaun, certainly more compact and concentrated than the hairy mountain man she had seen at Vaun's door.
His eyes and the gun stayed rock steady on Vaun where she stood behind Kate's right shoulder, not moving a millimeter as his left hand pushed the door shut, found the bolt, slid it home. For the space of five heartbeats nobody moved, or breathed, until finally his lips curled.
"Hello, Vaunie."
The quiet, sure menace in his voice washed like ice through Kate's veins and sent her mind yammering like a mad monkey against the bars of its cage, screaming at her to run, fly, dive for cover, leap for the drawer three feet away and get her hands on the gun there because that is the voice of a goddamned poisonous snake of a crazy man, Kate! But other than one all-over jerk of her muscles she stayed quite still and watched the hand on the gun.
At his words Lee, staring horrified from where she had fetched up against the wall, shifted her gaze from the gun to his face, but Vaun seemed not to see the gun or hear the menace. Neither of them made a move to touch the forgotten alarm buttons they wore. At his greeting she seemed to relax, and Kate heard her exhale in what sounded like a happy little sigh.
"Hello, Andy." Her voice was calm, even warm, a simple greeting at the mildly surprising appearance of an old friend. His smile deepened and Kate saw the face that Vaun had described when he walked out of her studio three weeks before Jemma Brand had died—amused, cruel, and utterly sure of himself.
"Good of you all to wait up for me like this. Damn stupid time for an appointment with a shrink, but I couldn't very well change it, could I?"
"What—" Lee shrank back under the stab of his eyes, but the gun did not waver, and she pushed the words out. "What happened to Jon?"
To Kate's surprise he laughed, a hearty sound, full of amusement, incongruous from a tidy man with murder in his eyes.
"I used some of his own toys on him. He'll be all right, unless he struggles too much. In fact, he's probably having a fine time, all trussed up like a pig. And speaking of which," he said, and looked at Kate, all his humor instantly gone, "you'll have a gun. Where is it?"
"Upstairs," she lied automatically. There was a chance that in moving them around he would leave himself vulnerable for an instant. He studied her, eyes narrowed, and seemed to hear her thoughts, for he smiled again, as if at the feeble efforts of a child.
"No, it isn't. Well it doesn't matter, so long as it's not on you." He ran his eyes over her T-shirt and jeans, which could hardly conceal a penknife, much less a police revolver. "Still, I'd better have a check. Vaun, you come on out into the hall. That's right, by that table. And you, next to her." He nodded curtly to Lee, who obeyed. "Now you, come here, hands against the wall. Get your feet further back. That's better." Kate felt a sudden sharp pressure against her spine, and he spoke past her. "Now, if you two don't want your cop friend to have a big hole in her, you'll stay very still."
Kate braced herself, but the search was impersonal, if thorough. In a minute he stood back, satisfied, and looked down the hallway toward the opening and the expanse of drapery.
"That's the living room?" he asked Vaun, and she nodded. "Right. You first, Vaunie, then you. Now you, cop."
Vaun turned smoothly to the door, the glass of ice water still tinkling gently in her hand. Lee followed with a curiously old-maidish stance, her hands clasped together between her breasts, hunched over in feeble defense or fear or cold. Kate moved down the hall, feeling the tingle in her back where the cold metal of the gun had pressed, and took great care not to stumble. She did not glance at what Lewis had referred to as a table, a decorative Indian apothecary's chest with a telephone and address book on top and her own familiar gun yearning from the top right-hand drawer, as useless to her as if it were on the bottom of the Bay. With a wrench she pulled her mind off the gun and off regrets and demanded that it get to work.
In the living room she moved directly to the first sofa and sat with her back to the dining area. Lewis hesitated, his instincts against allowing her any choice or independent move, but he studied the room and realized that there was no place she could have hidden a gun and that her position would put him with his back in the corner, away from the room's only internal entrance, the long windows, tightly draped, and two small, high windows that obviously looked into nothing but the neighbor's trees. He subsided, told Lee to take the other sofa and sat Vaun in the chair between them, facing the fireplace. Good, thought Kate. Now to get him talking.
"How did you find her?" she asked, and was pleased to hear just the right shade of querulous amazement in her voice.
Lewis preened. "It wasn't that difficult. I had a friend pretend to be a newsman willing to pay a lot, even for rumors. He found an orderly who said Vaun was being released to a therapist who specialized in artists. I figured it would be either here or in Berkeley, and since the police here were in on the case, I started here. I went into the kinds of bars and coffeehouses that artists go to, in the Haight and Polk and south of Market to begin with, and everywhere I went I talked about crazy artists and that woman down on Tyler's Road." Here he paused and reached out to run the tip of his left forefinger along Vaun's ear. She did not react. "Took me about eighty gallons of coffee and a hundred and fifty beers, but I finally got lucky—a tight-ass little jerk in a silk shirt practically drooling to tell me all about how he knew the policewoman who'd been on the TV down on Tyler's Road, oh yeah, knew her personally, well, no, not well, you know, but he'd once seen her, with a lady shrink who'd come to the hospital to see an artist friend of his who was dying a year or so back, lady shrink name of Cooper. That was noon on Wednesday. Took me until midnight to track down one of Dr. Cooper's regulars, and when I found out when his next scheduled appointment was, I just arranged that he'd be too, uh, tied up to keep it. And here I am."
"Can I ask you something that puzzled us? Inspector Hawkin and me, that is?" Kate continued, not giving him a chance to find his own topic of conversation. He looked irritated, then nodded magnanimously.
"The names. You are Andrew Lewis?" She made it a question, hinting uncertainty. "Without the beard… Where did you get the name Dodson?" She held her breath, playing for time, skirting the revelation of how much they knew about Lewis and Dodson, hoping he might relax into scorn at their ignorance but not wanting to give him the impression of incompetence—that could only arouse his suspicions. Keep him talking, keep him relaxed. However, she was startled at his response.
"You know my middle name?"
"Uh, no. There was an initial…"
"It's Carroll."
"Carol?"
"Two r's, two l's, like in Lewis Carroll. You know his real name?"
"I don't think—"
"Dodgson. The Reverend Charles L. Dodgson. With a g. So when I came across someone who looked like me, with a name so close, well, I just had to be him, didn't I?" He was grinning, daring Kate to ask what had happened to the real Dodson, but that was not the direction she wanted to go in, not yet. She desperately cast around for another topic.