He didn’t even know how to think about bizarre crap like this. Deductive reasoning, every detective’s most useful tool, was not adequate to deal with the supernatural. He’d been trying inductive reasoning, which was how he’d come up with the theory of a sociopath with paranormal powers. But he wasn’t good at it because inductive reasoning seemed, to him, the next thing to intuition, and intuition was so illogical. He liked hard evidence, sound premises, logical deductions, and neat conclusions tied up in ribbons and bows.
As they turned the corner into Ricky’s street, Connie said, “What the hell?”
Harry glanced at her.
She was staring into her cupped hand.
“What?” he asked.
Something was cradled in her palm. Voice quavering, she said, “I didn’t have this a second ago, where the hell did it come from?”
“What is it?”
She held it up for him to see as he pulled under the streetlamp in front of Ricky’s house. The head of a ceramic figurine. Broken off at the neck.
Scraping the tires against the curb, he braked to a hard stop, and his safety harness jerked tight across his chest.
She said, “It was like my hand snapped shut, spasmed shut, and this was in it, out of nowhere, for God’s sake.”
Harry recognized it. The head of the Virgin Mary that had been at the center of the shrine on Ricky Estefan’s hall table.
Overcome by dark expectations, Harry threw open the door and got out of the car. He pulled his gun.
The street was peaceful. Lights glowed warmly in most of the houses, including Ricky’s. Music from a neighbor’s stereo drifted on the cool air, so faint he could not quite identify the tune. The breeze whispered and softly clattered in the fronds of the big date palms in Ricky’s front yard.
Nothing to worry about, the breeze seemed to say, all is calm here, all is right with this place.
Nevertheless, he kept his revolver in hand.
He hurried up the front walk, through the night shadows of the palm trees, onto the bougainvillaea-draped porch. He was aware that Connie was right behind him and that she also had drawn her weapon.
Let Ricky be alive, he thought fervently, please let him be alive.
That was as close to prayer as he had gotten in many years.
Behind the screen door, the front door was ajar. A narrow wedge of light projected the pattern of the screen onto the porch floor.
Although he thought no one noticed and would have been mortified to know that his fear was obvious, Ricky had been obsessive about security ever since he’d been shot. He kept everything locked tight. A door standing open even an inch or two was a bad sign.
Harry tried to survey the foyer through the gap between the door and the jamb. With the screen door in the way, he couldn’t get close enough to the crack to see anything.
Drapes blocked the windows flanking the door. They were tightly drawn, overlapping at the center.
Harry glanced at Connie.
With her revolver she indicated the front entrance.
Ordinarily they might have split up, Connie going around to cover the back while Harry took the front. But they weren’t trying to keep the perp from getting away, because this was one bastard who couldn’t be cornered, subdued, and cuffed. They were just trying to stay alive, and to keep Ricky alive if it was not already too late for him.
Harry nodded and cautiously eased open the screen door. Hinges squeaked. The closure spring sang a long, low swamp-insect note.
He hoped to be silent, but when the outer door defeated him, he put one hand on the inner door and pushed it, intending to go in low and fast. It swung to the right, and he shouldered through the widening gap. The door bumped against something and stopped before there was enough of an opening. He shoved it. Cracking. Scraping. A hard clatter. The door swung all the way open, pushing debris of some nature out of the way, and Harry burst inside so aggressively that he almost plunged through the hole in the hallway floor.
He was reminded of the shattered corridor in the building in Laguna, above the restaurant. If a grenade had done this damage, however, it had exploded in the crawlspace under the bungalow. The blast had driven joists, insulation, and floorboards upward into the hallway. But he could detect none of the charred, chemical odor of a bomb.
The overhead foyer light shone down onto the bare earth below the smashed oak flooring and sub-flooring. Standing perilously near the edge of the shrine table, the votive candle in the squat red glass threw off fluttering pennants of light and shadow.
Halfway back the hall, the left-hand wall was spattered with blood, not buckets of it but enough to signify mortal combat. On the floor under the bloodstains, close against the wall, lay the body of a man, twisted into such an unnatural posture that the fact of death was grimly obvious at a glance.
Harry could see just enough of the corpse to know beyond a doubt that it was Ricky. Never had he felt so sick at heart. A coldness rose in the pit of his stomach, and his legs grew weak.
As Harry moved around the hole in the floor, Connie entered the house after him. She saw the body, said nothing, but gestured toward the living-room arch.
Habitual police procedure had tremendous appeal for Harry at the moment, even if it was pointless to search for the killer in this instance. Ticktock, whatever manner of creature he was, would not be cowering in a corner or clambering out a back window, not when he could vanish in a whirlwind or a pillar of fire. And what good were guns against him, even if he could be found? Nonetheless, it was calming to proceed as if they were the first to arrive at an ordinary crime scene; order was imposed on chaos through policy, method, custom, and ritual.
Just inside the living-room archway and to the left lay a pile of dark mud, an eighth of a ton if there was an ounce. He would have thought that it had come from under the house, geysering up with the explosion, except that no mud was splattered in the foyer or hallway. It was as if someone had carefully carried the mud into the house in buckets and heaped it on the living-room carpet.
Curious as it was, Harry gave the mud only a cursory glance before continuing across the living room. Later there would be time to ponder it at length.
They searched the two baths and bedrooms, but found only a fat tarantula. Harry was so startled by the spider, he almost squeezed off a shot. If it had run toward him instead of out of sight under a dresser, he might have blown it to bits before realizing what it was.
Southern California, a desert before man had brought in water and made larger areas of it habitable, was a perfect breeding ground for tarantulas, but they kept to undeveloped canyons and scrublands. Though fearsome in appearance, they were shy creatures, living most of their lives underground, rarely surfacing outside of the mating season. Dana Point, or this part of it at least, was too civilized to be of interest to tarantulas, and Harry wondered how one had found its way into the heart of the town, where it was as out of place as a tiger would have been.
Silently they retraced their route through the house, into the foyer, the hall, then moved past the body. A quick glance confirmed that Ricky was far beyond help. Fragments of the ceramic religious statue clinked underfoot.
The kitchen was full of snakes.
“Oh shit,” Connie said.
One snake was just inside the archway. Two more were questing among the chair and table legs. Most were at the far side of the room, a tangled mass of squirming, serpentine coils, no fewer than thirty or forty, perhaps half again as many. Several seemed to be feeding on something.