He hesitated. Tell her the truth? It would only increase her anxiety, and he did not want her to know he was anywhere near Rakubian or Rakubian’s house today. “No. On my way to Paloma for a meeting with one of the Larkfield people. Nick Jackson.”
“Can’t you get out of it?”
“I can if there’s any real need. I don’t think there is, Cass. Eric’s impulsive, but he knows better than to start any kind of trouble with Rakubian.”
“I’m not so sure...”
“I am,” he lied. “Stop worrying, everything’s going to be all right.”
Fog crawled over the city, turning the sky west of Twin Peaks the color of dirty silver. He turned up Sloat, then up St. Francis to Monterey, slowing to a near crawl as he approached Rakubian’s property. Cars were parked at the curbs along there, but none was Eric’s bright red Miata. He’d have been even more alarmed if he had spotted it; it was after four now.
He crept past the Spanish stucco. Nothing to see in the jungly front yard or on the visible part of the porch; driveway empty, garage door shut. He drove another block, made a U-turn, and parked on the downhill curve just out of sight of the house. He was on his way out of the car before he remembered the Woodsman. Not thinking clearly; the sense of fragmentation was acute, as if he were starting to come apart inside. His carefully engineered plan had already come apart but he could still put it back together and himself back together with it. If Rakubian was home...
He unwrapped the .22, slipped it into his jacket pocket. Out then and downhill through the blowing fog. No cars moving, nobody in the neighboring yards or in the nearby park. He crossed the street, forcing himself to take a casual pace, and went up Rakubian’s walk and rang the doorbell. Chimes, and another sound audible to him: heavy, atonal music playing somewhere inside. He strained to hear footsteps, his right hand on the gun in his pocket.
All he heard was the faint percussive music.
He rang the bell again, waited, rang it a third time. The chimes, the music, the wind. Now what? First thing: check the garage, see if Rakubian’s car was there. He left the porch, followed the path around to the driveway. No windows on either side of the garage; he went to the door on the near side, tried it. Unlocked. He put his head inside.
The silver BMW was a gleaming hulk in the shadows.
Oh, God, he thought.
He tried the side door to the house, found it locked. Went back to the front, half running. At the door he did what he hadn’t done before — depressed the old-fashioned latch. And it clicked and the door creaked inward.
His heart hammering, he stepped into the darkened foyer and shut the door behind him.
The music was loud enough here to be identifiable: classical, atonal, oppressive. Mussorgsky. Boris Godunov. Rakubian’s favorite, played it over and over, wouldn’t shut the damn piece off any of the times Hollis and Cassie had visited Angela. Coming from the combination library and office that opened off the central hall.
“Rakubian?” Shouting it above the pound of the music.
No response.
He moved ahead, his footsteps making little clicks on the terra-cotta floor. A light burned in the library; he saw the pale glow as he neared the archway. “Rakubian?” Through the arch, one pace into the library. And his stomach heaved, his legs jellied; blindly he clutched and hung on to the jamb to steady himself.
Rakubian was there. On the dark-patterned Sarouk carpet in front of his desk, sprawled on his back with arms outflung and one leg bent under him, and his head—
Blood, brain matter. Streaked and spattered over his white shirt and blue tie, his face, his shattered skull, the carpet, a black raven statuette on the floor close by. A real-life horrorscape sprinkled with blood.
I hate that crazy son of a bitch. I’d like to smash his fucking head in.
Eric, Eric, what have you done!
8
Early Saturday Evening
For a minute, two minutes, Hollis was incapable of movement. His mind worked now, but in a stuttery, off-center way: piecemeal thoughts, disoriented perceptions. Everything in the room — Rakubian lying there dead, all the gore, the pale light and shadows, the oppressive symphony, the dark furnishings and dark-spined books and ugly statuary and bleak wall hangings — seemed to lose reality in his eyes and ears, to blur and distort. It was as if he had suddenly become trapped in one of Rakubian’s paintings — a Goya “black” of screaming souls in torment, a surrealist interpretation of a scene from Dante’s Inferno.
Paralysis and disorientation ended at the same time, in an abrupt convulsive tremor that tore him loose from the archway and carried him two steps into the library. He saw clearly again: the room, the body, all of it just as it was. His thoughts were clear but fast-running, like a ticker tape unwinding at accelerated speed across a screen. The music beat at him in thudding waves; he detoured around the dead man to the old-fashioned record player, found the reject switch and the off button. The sudden silence seemed to carry dissonant echoes in a long diminuendo.
Up close, then, to where Rakubian lay, careful to avoid the blood spatters. He’d thought that when he stood looking down into that dead face he would feel relief, vindication, even a kind of terrible elation. He felt nothing except revulsion. No, another emotion, too. Fear. The enemy was dead, Angela and Kenny were safe... but now Eric was in jeopardy. Crazy, bitter irony: his son had switched places with him and with his daughter, become both avenger and victim. Even dead, David Rakubian was a threat to them all.
He squatted, forced himself to touch and then lift one wrist, using his thumb and forefinger. Cool flesh. Stiffening. Dead at least three hours, lying here all that time with Boris Godunov playing over and over like a funeral dirge. With rigor mortis setting in, it would be difficult to move him before long. Hollis felt his gorge rising; he tightened the muscles in his jaw and throat, released the dead wrist, stood again, and hurried back through the archway into the hall.
The guest bathroom, he remembered, was at the end of the hall on the left. He made it there just in time to drop to one knee in front of the toilet. Dry heaves, mostly; all that came up was a thin stream of the whiskey he’d drunk at the cottage. When the spasms ended he flushed the toilet, pulled himself upright over the sink. He splashed his face with cold water, made a cup of laced fingers and rinsed the sick taste from his mouth. An inadvertent glance at the mirror showed him an old man’s face: hollowed cheeks, grayish skin, eyes with too much white glistening like curdled milk.
He found his way to the utility porch at the rear. Rakubian had been as much of a control freak in his home as anywhere else: a place for everything and everything in its proper place. That made it easy to locate the items he would need. Heavy-duty trash bags, the big 33-gallon kind. A spool of strong twine. A roll of paper towels. All of these he carried back into the library.
Except for one leg, Rakubian’s body was full on the Sarouk rug. Six feet by four feet, that rug, the nap thick and tightly woven; much of the residue from the shattered skull had soaked into a portion of the design that was the color of burgundy wine, so that there did not seem to be much of it until you looked closely. Seeped through to the tiles? He prodded the one leg onto the carpet, bent to pick up the lower end, and then dragged rug and body a few feet toward the arch. None of the blood had leaked through; the tiles where Rakubian’s head had lain looked dry and were dry to the touch.
Hollis shook two of the garbage bags open. He could not stand to look any longer at that broken, red-streaked face. As much as he’d hated the man in life, there was something almost pathetic about him in violent death. Shrunken, a crude and empty shell, with all the obsessive craziness reduced to coagulating red and gray fluids. How could you hate a broken shell, a clotted stain on a fine old carpet? Even if he’d done this himself, he would not have been able to go on hating what the husk had contained.