Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz
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to see it, to know it.
Beside her, Michael whispered, “Here comes that old witchy vision.”
Her mouth went dry with fear, her hands suddenly icy. She was no stranger to fear. She could be simultaneously afraid but professional, alert and quick. Sometimes fear sharpened her wits, clarified her thinking.
“Looks more,” she said at last, “as if the vic just laid down there and waited to be butchered. Look at his face.”
The eyes were open. The features were relaxed, not contorted by terror, by pain.
“Chloroform,” Michael suggested again.
Carson shook her head. “He was awake. Look at the eyes. The cast of the mouth. He didn’t die unconscious. Look at the hands.”
The security guard’s left hand lay open at his side, palm up, fingers spread. That position suggested sedation before the murder.
The right hand, however, was clenched tight. Chloroformed, he would have relaxed the fist.
She jotted down these observations in her notebook and then said, “So who found the body?”
“A morning-shift librarian,” Harker said. “Nancy Whistler. She’s in the women’s lav. She won’t come out.”
THE WOMEN’S REST ROOM smelled of pine-scented disinfectant and White Diamonds perfume. Regular janitorial service was the source of the former, Nancy Whistler of the latter.
A young, pretty woman who put the lie to the stereotypical image of librarians, she wore a clingy summer dress as yellow as daffodils.
She bent to one of the sinks and splashed cold water in her face from a running faucet. She drank from cupped hands, swished the water around her mouth, and spat it out.
“I’m sorry I’m such a mess,” she said.
“No problem,” Carson assured her.
“I’m afraid to leave here. Every time I think I just can’t puke again, I do.”
“I love this job,” Michael told Carson.
“The officers who did a perimeter check tell me there are no signs of forced entry. So you’re sure the front door was locked when you arrived for work?” Carson pressed.
“Absolutely. Two deadbolts, both engaged.”
“Who else has keys?”
“Ten people. Maybe twelve,” said Nancy Whistler. “I can’t think names right now.”
You could only push a witness so far in the aftermath of her encounter with a bloody corpse. This wasn’t a time to be hard-assed.
Carson said, “E-mail a list of keyholders to me. Soon.”
“All right, sure. I understand.” The librarian grimaced as if she might hurl again. Instead she said, “God, he was such a toad, but he didn’t deserve that.” Michael’s raised eyebrows drew an explanation from her: “Bobby Allwine. The guard.”
“Define toad,” Michael requested.
“He was always … looking at me, saying inappropriate things. He had a way of coming on to me that was … just weird.”
“Harassment?”
“No. Nothing forceful. Just weird. As if he didn’t get a lot of things, the way to act.” She shook her head. “And he went to funeral homes for fun.”
Carson and Michael exchanged a look, and he said, “Well, who doesn’t?”
“Viewings at funeral homes,” Whistler clarified. “Memorial services. For people he didn’t even know. He went two, three times a week.”
“Why?”
“He said he liked to look at dead people in their caskets. Said it … relaxed him.” She cranked off the water faucet. “Bobby was sort of a geek. But … why would someone cut out his heart?”
Michael shrugged. “Souvenir. Sexual gratification. Dinner.”
Appalled, repelled, Nancy Whistler bolted for a toilet stall.
To Michael, Carson said, “Oh, nice. Real nice.”
PEELING PAINT, crumbling stucco, rusting wrought iron, sagging trumpet vines yellowing in the heat, and a pustulant-looking fungus flourishing in the many cracks in the concrete walkway established a design motif carried out in every aspect of the apartment building.
On the patchy lawn, which looked as if someone had salted it, a sign announced APARTMENT AVAILABLE / ONLY LOSERS NEED APPLY.
Actually, only the first two words were on the sign. The other four didn’t have to be spelled out; Carson inferred them from the condition of the place as she parked at the curb.
In addition to the sign, the front lawn actually contained a flock of seven pink flamingos.
“Bet my ass there’s a couple plastic gnomes somewhere around here,” Michael said.
Someone had painted four of the flamingos other tropical hues – mango green, pineapple yellow – perhaps hoping that a color change would render these lawn ornaments less absurd if not less tacky. The new paint had worn off in places; the pink shone through.
Not because of the implication of borderline poverty but because of the weirdness of the place, it was an ideal building for odd ducks and geeks like Bobby Allwine, he of the stolen heart. They would be drawn here, and in the company of their own kind, no one among them would receive particular attention.
A grizzled old man knelt on the front steps, fixing a railing brace.
“Excuse me. You work here?” Michael asked, flashing his ID.
“No more than I have to.” The old man looked Carson up and down appreciatively, but still spoke to Michael. “Who’s she?”
“It’s bring-your-sister-to-work day at the department. Are you the super here?”
“‘Super’ don’t seem to be a word that fits anyone or anything about this dump. I’m just sort of the jack-of-all around here. You come to see Bobby Allwine’s place?”
“News travels fast.”
Putting down his screwdriver, getting to his feet, the jack-of-all said, “Good news does. Follow me.”
Inside, the public stairwell was narrow, dark, peeling, humid, and malodorous.
The old guy didn’t smell so good, either, and as they followed him up to the second floor, Michael said, “I’ll never complain about my apartment again.”
At the door to 2-D, as he fumbled in his pockets for a passkey, the jack-of-all said, “Heard on the news his liver was cut out.”
“It was his heart,” Carson said.
“Even better.”
“You didn’t like Bobby Allwine?”
Unlocking the door, he said, “Hardly knew him. But this makes the apartment worth fifty bucks more.” He read their disbelief and assured them, “There’s people that’ll pay extra.”
“Who,” Michael asked, “the Addams family?”
“Just people who like some history about a place.”
Carson pushed inside the apartment, and when the old man would have followed her, Michael eased him