Bright lights. Beep-beep-beeeeeeeeep. Car. Close. Could’ve been dead in a puddle like a bee.
He chases after the bad thing’s scent, moving faster, ears pricked, alert and watchful, but still relying on his nose.
Then he loses the trail.
He stops, turns, sniffs the air this way and that. The breeze hasn’t changed direction, still coming off the sea. But the smell of the bad thing is no longer on it. He waits, sniffs, waits, turns, whines in frustration, and sniffs sniffs sniffs.
The bad thing isn’t out in the night any more. It went in somewhere, maybe into a people place where the breeze doesn’t wash across it. Like a cat going high up a tree, out of reach.
He stands around for a while, panting, not sure what to do, and then the most amazing man comes along the sidewalk, stumbling and weaving back and forth, carrying a funny bottle in one hand, mumbling to himself. The man is putting off more odors than the dog has ever smelled on one people before, most of them bad, like lots of stinky people in one body. Sour wine. Greasy hair, sour sweat, onions, garlic, candle smoke, blueberries. Newspaper ink, oleander. Damp khaki. Damp flannel. Dried blood, faint people pee, peppermint in one coat pocket, an old bit of dried ham and moldy bread forgotten in another pocket, dried mustard, mud, grass, just a little people vomit, stale beer, rotting canvas shoes, rotten teeth. Plus he keeps farting as he weaves along, farting and mumbling, leaning against a tree for a while, farting, then weaving farther and stopping to lean against the wall of a people place and fart some more.
All of this is interesting, very, but the most interesting thing of all is that, among the many other odors, the man is carrying a trace of the bad thing’s smell. He is not the bad thing, no, no, but he knows the bad thing, is coming from a place where he met the bad thing not long ago, has the touch of the bad thing on him.
Without a doubt it is that scent, so strange and eviclass="underline" like the smell of the sea on a cold night, an iron fence on a hot day, dead mice, lightning, thunder, spiders, blood, dark holes in the ground — like all of those things yet not really like any of them.
The man stumbles past him, and he backs off with his tail between his legs. But the man doesn’t even seem to see him, just weaves on and turns the corner into an alley.
Interesting.
He watches.
He waits.
Finally he follows.
12
Harry was uneasy about being in Ordegard’s house. A police notice on the front door had restricted entrance until the criminal investigation had been completed, but he and Connie had not followed proper procedure to get in. She carried a complete set of lock picks in a small leather pouch, and she was able to go through Ordegard’s locks faster than a politician could go through a billion dollars.
Ordinarily, Harry was appalled by such methods, and this was the first time he’d allowed her to use her picks since she’d been his partner. But there just wasn’t enough time to follow the rules; dawn was less than seven hours away, and they were no closer to finding Ticktock than they had been hours ago.
The three-bedroom house was not large, but the space was well designed. Like the exterior, the interior lacked sharp angles. All corners were soft radiuses, and many rooms had at least one curved wall. Radiused, extremely shiny white-lacquered moldings were used throughout. High-gloss white paint had been applied to most walls, too, which lent the rooms a pearly luster, though the dining room had been faux-finished to give the illusion that it was upholstered in plush beige leather.
The place felt like the interior of a cruise ship, and it should have been soothing if not cozy. But Harry was edgy, not just because the moon-faced killer had lived there or because they had entered illegally, but for other reasons that he could not pin down.
Maybe the furnishings had something to do with his apprehension. Every piece was Scandinavian modern, severe, unornamented, in flat-yellow maple veneers, as angular as the house was soft-edged and rounded. The extreme contrast with the architecture made the sharp edges of the chair arms and end tables and sofa frames seem as if they were bristling at him. The carpet was the thinnest Berber with minimal padding; if it gave at all underfoot, the resilience was too minor to be detected.
As they moved through the living room, dining room, den, and kitchen, Harry noted that no artwork adorned the walls. There were no decorative objects of any kind; tables were utterly bare except for plain ceramic lamps in white and black. No books or magazines were to be found anywhere.
The rooms had a monastic feel, as if the person living in them was doing long-term penance for his sins.
Ordegard seemed to be a man of two distinct characters. The organic lines and textures of the house itself described a resident who had a strong sensual nature, who was easy with himself and his emotions, relaxed and self-indulgent to some extent. On the other hand, the relentless sameness of the furniture and utter lack of ornamentation indicated that he was cold, hard on himself and others, introverted, and brooding.
“What do you think?” Connie asked as they entered the hall that served the bedrooms.
“Creepy.”
“I told you. But why exactly?”
“The contrasts are… too extreme.”
“Yeah. And it just doesn’t look lived-in.”
Finally, in the master bedroom, there was a painting on the Wall directly opposite the bed. Ordegard would have seen it first thing upon waking and last thing before falling asleep each night. It was a reproduction of a famous work of art with which Harry was familiar, though he had no idea what the title was. He thought the artist was Francisco de Goya; that much had stuck with him from Art Appreciation 101. The work was menacing, abrasive to the nerves, conveying a sense of horror and despair, not least of all because it included the figure of a giant, demonic ghoul in the act of devouring a bloody and headless human body.
Profoundly disturbing, brilliantly composed and executed, it was without doubt a major work of art — but more suited to the walls of a museum than to a private home. It needed to be dwarfed by a huge exhibition space with vaulted ceiling; here, in this room of ordinary dimensions, the painting was too overpowering, its dark energy almost paralyzing.
Connie said, “Which do you think he identified with?”
“What do you mean?”
“The ghoul or the victim?”
He thought about it. “Both.”
“Devouring himself.”
“Yeah. Being devoured by his own madness.”
“And unable to stop.”
“Maybe worse than unable. Unwilling. Sadist and masochist rolled up in one.”
Connie said, “But how does any of this help us figure out what’s been happening?”
Harry said, “As far as I can see, it doesn’t.”
“Ticktock,” said the hobo.
When they spun around in surprise at hearing the low gravelly voice, the vagrant was only inches away. He could not have crept so close without alerting them, yet there he was.
Ticktock’s right arm slammed across Harry’s chest with what seemed like as much force as the steel boom of a construction crane. He was hurled backward. He crashed into the wall hard enough to make the bedroom windows vibrate in their frames, his teeth snapping together so forcefully that he would have bitten his tongue off if it had been in the way. He collapsed on his face, sucking up dust and carpet fibers, struggling to recapture the breath that had been knocked out of him.