“But it’s probably not anything like that, not anything we could figure, something different.”
“If such a man exists, can he be stopped?”
“He’s not God. No matter what powers he has, he’s still a man— and a deeply disturbed one at that. He’ll have weaknesses, points of vulnerability.”
He still crouched beside her chair, and she put one hand against the side of his face. The tender gesture surprised him. She smiled. “You’ve got one hell of a wild imagination, Harry Lyon.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve always liked fairy tales.”
Frowning again, she took her hand away as if chagrined to have been caught in a moment of tenderness. “Even if he’s vulnerable, he can’t be dealt with if he can’t be found. How will we track down this Ticktock?”
“Ticktock?”
“We don’t know his real name,” she said, “so Ticktock seems as good as any for the time being.”
Ticktock. It was a fairy-tale villain’s name if he had ever heard one. Rumpelstiltskin, Mother Gothel, Knucklebone — and Ticktock.
“All right.” Harry stood. He paced again. “Ticktock.”
“How do we find him?”
“I don’t know for sure. But I know where I want to start. The Laguna Beach city morgue.”
She twitched at that. “Ordegard?”
“Yeah. I want to see the autopsy report if they’ve done one yet, talk to the coroner if possible. I want to know if they found anything strange.”
“Strange? Like what?”
“Damned if I know. Anything out of the ordinary.”
“But Ordegard’s dead. He wasn’t just a… a projection. He was real, and now he’s dead. He can’t be Ticktock.”
Countless fairy tales, legends, myths, and fantasy novels gave Harry a vast store of incredible concepts from which to draw. “So maybe Ticktock has the power to take over other people, slip into their minds, control their bodies, use them as if they were puppets, then dispose of them when he wants, or slip out again when they die. Maybe he was controlling Ordegard, then he moved on to the hobo, and now maybe the hobo is dead, really dead, his bones in my burned-out living room, and Ticktock will turn up in some other body next time.”
“Possession?”
“Something like it.”
“You’re beginning to scare me,” she said.
“Beginning? You are a tough broad. Listen, Connie, just before he trashed my condo, Ticktock said something like… ‘You think you can shoot anyone you like, and that’s the end of it, but not with me, shooting me isn’t the end of it.’” Harry tapped the butt of the gun in his shoulder holster. “So who’d I shoot today? Ordegard. And this Ticktock is telling me that’s not the end of it. So I want to find out if there’s anything odd about Ordegard’s corpse.”
She was amazed but not disbelieving. She was getting in the swing of it. “You want to know if there were signs of possession.”
“Yeah.”
“Exactly what are the signs of possession?”
“Anything odd.”
“Like the corpse’s skull is empty, no brain, just ashes in there? Or maybe the number 666 burnt into the back of his neck?”
“I wish it would be something that obvious, but I doubt it.”
Connie laughed. A nervous laugh. Shaky. Brief.
She got up from the chair. “Okay, let’s go to the morgue.”
Harry hoped that a talk with the coroner or a quick reading of the autopsy report would tell him what he needed to know, and that it would not be necessary to view the corpse. He didn’t want to have to look at that moon face again.
14
The large institutional kitchen at Pacific View Care Home in Laguna Beach was all white tile and stainless steel, as clean as a hospital.
Any rats or roaches creep in here, Janet Marco thought, they better be able to live on scouring powder, ammonia water, and wax.
Though antiseptic, the kitchen did not smell like a hospital.
Lingering aromas of ham, roast turkey, herb stuffing, and scalloped potatoes were overlaid by the yeasty, cinnamon fragrance of the sweetrolls that they were baking for breakfast in the morning. It was a warm place, too, and the warmth was welcome after the chill that the recent storm had brought to the March air.
Janet and Danny were having dinner at one end of a long table in the southeast corner of the kitchen. They were in no one’s way but enjoyed a vantage point from which they could watch the busy staff.
Janet was fascinated by the operation of the big kitchen, which ticked along like clockwork. The workers were industrious and seemed happy in their busyness. She envied them. She wished she could get a job at Pacific View, in the kitchen or any other department. But she didn’t know what skills were required. And she doubted that even the owner, good man that he was, would hire anyone who lived in a car, washed in public lavatories, and had no permanent address.
Though she liked watching the kitchen staff, the sight of them sometimes frustrated the devil out of her.
But she couldn’t blame Mr. Ishigura, the owner and operator of Pacific View, because he was a godsend on nights like this. Both thrifty and kind, he was dismayed by waste and by the thought of anyone going hungry in such a prosperous country. Invariably, after almost a hundred patients and the staff had eaten dinner, enough food remained to provide for ten or twelve people, because recipes could not be refined to produce precisely the number of portions needed. Mr. Ishigura provided these meals free to certain of the homeless.
The food was good, too, really good. Pacific View was not an ordinary nursing home. It was classy. The patients were rich, or had relatives who were rich.
Mr. Ishigura did not advertise his generosity, and his door was not open to everyone. When he saw street people who seemed, to him, to have fallen to their fate not entirely by their own doing, he approached them about the free lunches and dinners at Pacific View. Because he was selective, it was possible to eat there without having to share the table with some of the moody and dangerous alcoholics and addicts who made many of the church and mission kitchens so unappealing.
Janet didn’t take advantage of Mr. Ishigura’s hospitality nearly as often as it was available. Of the seven lunches and seven dinners she might have eaten at Pacific View each week, she limited herself to no more than two of each. Otherwise, she was able to provide for herself and Danny, and she took pride in every meal that was bought with her own earnings.
That Tuesday night, she and Danny shared the facilities with three elderly men, one aged woman whose face was as wrinkled as a crumpled paper bag but who wore a gaily colored scarf and bright red beret, and an unfortunately ugly young man with a deformed face. They were all ragged but not filthy, unbarbered but clean-smelling enough.
She didn’t speak to any of them, although she would have enjoyed conversation. It had been so long since she had spoken at any length to anyone but Danny that she was not confident of making chit-chat with another adult.
Besides, she was leery of encountering someone with a keen curiosity. She did not want to have to answer questions about herself, her past. She was, after all, a murderer. And if Vince’s body had been found in the Arizona desert, she might also be wanted by the police.
She didn’t even speak to Danny, who needed no encouragement either to eat or to mind his manners. Though he was only five, the boy was well-behaved and knew how to conduct himself at the table.
Janet was fiercely proud of him. From time to time, as they ate, she smoothed his hair or touched the back of his neck or patted his shoulder, so he would know that she was proud.