He found himself next to a metal pole that had a large, brass rectangle attached to the top. Words were embossed on the rectangle. The harsh reflection from the emergency vehicles provided just enough illumination for him to be able to read:
Welcome to the Rostov lights. Many people have claimed to see them, but no one has ever been able to explain them. If you’re lucky enough to experience them, decide for yourself what they are.
Footsteps approached. Page turned from the plaque and saw a silhoette of a man in a cowboy hat. As the figure came nearer, he recognized a Highway Patrol captain he’d spoken with earlier. The Hispanic man had a broad face, with prominent cheek- and jaw- bones. The emergency lights revealed his blue tie and tan uniform. His last name was Medrano.
“We finished interviewing your wife,” he announced. “You can take her back to where you’re staying.”
Page didn’t comment on the complexities that lay behind that statement.
“You’re done with me, too?”
“For now. All the survivors tell the same story. The guy went crazy. If not for you and your wife, a lot more people would have been killed. You still don’t have any idea why he did it?” Medrano looked as if he desperately wanted something that would explain what had happened.
“Only that he said the lights were evil.”
“The lights? The way you talk about them… You saw them, too?”
“It took some effort, but yeah. At least, I saw something.”
The captain looked puzzled. “I live in Harrington, about a hundred miles down the road. It’s a big town because of the oil refinery, but there’s not a lot to do. Whenever my wife’s parents or my brother and his family came to visit, we used to drive here to try to see the lights. I bet I made that trip a dozen times. Never saw a thing. Neither did my wife’s parents or my brother and his family, even though strangers standing right next to us claimed they could. We finally gave up and stopped coming. What’d they look like?”
“They seemed miles away, yet I thought they were so close I tried to reach out and touch them. They bobbed and floated, merged and separated, and came together again. They kept changing colors. Once I saw them, I had trouble turning away from them.”
Medrano nodded. “That’s usually the way they’re described.”
“The thing is, I’m beginning to wonder if I just persuaded myself they were out there. It was like mass hysteria, and I might have just been caught up in it.”
“Yeah, that’s one explanation-that people talk each other into seeing them.”
“One explanation? What are the others?”
“Phosphorescent gas that rises from seams in the earth. Another theory suggests that the underground rocks here have a lot of quartz crystals in them. After the heat of the day, the rapid cooling causes the rocks to contract and give off static electricity.”
Page looked past Medrano toward the emergency lights, the smoke rising from the shell of the bus-and the corpses.
“All those people died because of static electricity?” He shook his head. “If so, that makes it even more senseless.”
“Your wife says the killer shouted to the crowd, ‘Don’t you realize what they’re doing to you?’”
“He meant the lights. Then he started shooting at the horizon. He yelled, ‘Go back to hell where you came from.’ Then, ‘You’re all damned.’ I thought he meant the lights again, but it turned out he meant that the crowd was damned because the next thing he opened fire on everyone around him.”
“Some kind of religious lunatic,” Medrano suggested.
“He sure had a fixation on hell. ‘Came from hell.’ ‘Going back to hell.’ He said that a couple of times while he was shooting people.”
“Well, the fire that burned him gave him a taste of where he was going,” Medrano said.
“That thought occurred to me, too. Do you know who he was?”
“Not yet-any ID he had on him was destroyed. By process of elimination, we’ll figure out which car he used and track its registration number.”
“Unless he came on the bus.”
“With an AK-47 that nobody noticed?”
“He could have carried it in something like a guitar case,” Page offered.
“Yeah, that’s possible. You know, you do think like a cop. Well, if the shooter arrived on the bus, any evidence was probably destroyed by the fire. That’ll make our job a lot more difficult.”
Page shivered, perhaps because of the cool breeze or perhaps be- cause he looked toward the corpses again.
“You could use a windbreaker,” Medrano said.
“Chief Costigan told me the same thing. Any word about how he’s doing?”
“An ambulance driver phoned me from the Rostov hospital. He’s in surgery. What about you? How are you holding up?”
Page rubbed his right side, where the gunman had kicked him. “I’m not looking forward to seeing the bruise.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. There’s a lot to sort through. For now, I’m just glad to be alive.”
“Ever been involved in a shooting before?”
“Once. But nobody died. For certain, my wife was never in a shooting before. If it hadn’t been for her, the guy might have reached me.”
“She did an amazing thing. We collected six spent pistol cartridges.”
“Actually, she fired eight times,” Page said.
“And yet she only remembers pulling the triggerfour times. If you and your wife worked for me, tomorrow morning you’d be talking to a counselor, but there’s not much I can do to help outsiders.”
“I understand. Thanks for your concern.”
Medrano turned toward the western sky, where the roar of a helicopter was rapidly approaching. “Good. Another medevac chopper.”
“I’ll drive my wife back to the motel.”
The emergency lights revealed Tori’s silhouette in the front seat of her Saturn. As Page headed in that direction, he heard the helicopter getting louder.
Its lights suddenly blazed, but instead of landing in a nearby field, it hovered over the crime scene-not close enough to the ground to kick up dust or blow objects around and interfere with the investigation, but carefully maintaining a legal altitude.
“What the hell’s going on?” Medrano wondered.
But Page had already figured it out, managing to detect four huge letters on the chopper’s side.
Medrano shook his fist at the sky. “That’s a damned TV news chopper.”
24
For a couple of seconds, Brent glimpsed the lights of a town below him. Then the helicopter roared over it, and all he saw was darkness again. At once a cluster of flashing lights appeared ahead.
A lot of flashing lights.
Through headphones, he heard the pilot’s voice. “There it is.”
Smoke rose from a burned-out shell of a bus. Firefighters, police officers, and medical personnel swarmed everywhere he looked.
“Do you see any bodies on the ground?” Brent asked the pilot. “Yes! There!”
Body bags covered human shapes on a gravel parking lot. Brent counted twelve. Others were being placed in ambulances.
His news producer was waiting back at the station, at the other end of a two-way radio. Brent flicked a switch and spoke into his microphone. “I made it here in time. They’re just starting to remove the bodies.”
“Any other news choppers?”
“None.”
“Good. You know what to do.”
“Did you find the background material I asked for?” Brent asked. “You didn’t give me a chance to do any research. I need to know about this town.”
“There’s not much,” the producer’s voice said through the earphones.