When I got out of the Explorer, I didn’t hurry into the house, though the grizzled morning was now almost fully upon us. The day did little to restore the color that the night had stolen from the world; indeed, the smoky light seemed to deposit an ash-gray residue on everything, muting tones, dulling shiny surfaces. The cumulative UV damage I would sustain in this shineless sunshine was a risk worth taking to spend one minute admiring the two oaks in the front yard.
These California live oaks, beautifully crowned and with great canopies of strong black limbs, tower over the house, shading it in every season, because unlike eastern oaks, they don’t drop their leaves in winter. I have always loved these trees, have climbed high into them on many nights to get closer to the stars, but lately they mean more to me than ever because they remind me of my parents, who had the strength to make the sacrifices in their own lives required to raise a child with my disabilities and who gave me the shade to thrive.
The weight of this leaden dawn had pressed all the wind out of the day. The oaks were as monolithic as sculpture, each leaf like a petal of cast bronze.
After a minute, calmed by the deep stillness of the trees, I crossed the lawn to the house.
This Craftsman-period structure features stacked ledger stone and weather-silvered cedar under a slate roof, with deep eaves and an expansive front porch, all modern lines yet natural and close to the earth. It is the only home I’ve ever known, and considering both the average life span of an XPer and my talent for getting my ass in a sling, it’s no doubt where I’ll live until I die.
Sasha had unlocked the front door by the time I got there, and I followed her into the foyer.
All the windows are covered with pleated shades throughout the daylight hours. Most of the lights feature rheostats, and when we must turn them on, we keep them dim. For the most part, I live here in candlelight filtered through amber or rose glass, in a soft-edged shadowy ambience that would meet with the approval of any medium who claims to be able to channel the spirits of the dead.
Sasha settled in a month previous, after Dad’s death, moving out of the house provided for her as part of her compensation as general manager of KBAY. But already, during daylight hours, she moves from room to room guided largely by the faint sunshine pressing against the lowered window shades.
She thinks my shrouded world calms the soul, that life in the low illumination of Snowland is soothing, even romantic. I agree with her to an extent, though at times a mild claustrophobia overcomes me and these ever-present shadows seem like a chilling preview of the grave.
Without touching a light switch, we went upstairs to my bathroom and took a shower together by the lambent glow of a decorative glass oil lamp. This tandem event wasn’t as much fun as usual, not even as much fun as riding two on a surfboard, because we were physically weary, emotionally exhausted, and worried about Orson and Jimmy; all we did was bathe, while I gave Sasha a seriously condensed version of my pursuit of the kidnapper, the sighting of Big Head, Delacroix, and the events in the egg room.
I phoned Roosevelt Frost, who lives aboard Nostromo, a fifty-six-foot Bluewater coastal cruiser berthed in the Moonlight Bay marina. I got an answering machine and left a message asking him to come to see me as soon after twelve o’clock as was convenient and to bring Mungojerrie if possible.
I also called Manuel Ramirez. The police operator said that he was currently out of the office, and at my request, she switched me to his voice mail.
After reciting the license number of the Suburban, which I had memorized, I said, “That’s what Jimmy Wing’s kidnapper was driving. If you care, give me a call after noon.”
Sasha and I were turning back the covers on the bed in my room when the doorbell rang. Sasha pulled on a robe and went to see who had come calling.
I slipped into a robe, too, and padded barefoot to the head of the stairs to listen.
I took the 9-millimeter Glock with me. Moonlight Bay wasn’t as full of mayhem as Jurassic Park, but I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if the doorbell had been rung by a velociraptor.
Instead, it was Bobby, six hours early. When I heard his voice, I went downstairs.
The foyer was dimly lighted, but above the Stickley-style table, the print of Maxfield Parrish’s Daybreak glowed as though it were a window on a magical and better world.
Bobby looked grim. “I won’t take long. But you have to know about this. After I took Jenna Wing to Lilly’s, I swung by Charlie Dai’s house.”
Charlie Dai—whose birth name in correct Vietnamese order was Dai Tran Gi, before he Americanized it—is the associate editor and senior reporter at the Moonlight Bay Gazette, the newspaper owned by Bobby’s parents. The Halloways are estranged from Bobby, but Charlie remains his friend.
“Charlie can’t write about Lilly’s boy,” Bobby continued, “at least not until he gets clearance, but I thought he ought to know. In fact…I figured he might already know.”
Charlie is among the handful in Moonlight Bay—a few hundred out of twelve thousand—who know that a biological catastrophe occurred at Wyvern. His wife, Dr. Nora Dai—formerly Dai Minh Thu-Ha—is now a retired colonel; while in the army medical corps, she commanded all medical services at Fort Wyvern for six years, a position of great responsibility on a base with more than fifty thousand population. Her medical team had treated the wounded and the dying on the night when some researchers in the genetics lab, having reached a crisis in the secret process of becoming, surprised their associates by savagely assaulting them. Nora Dai knew too much, and within hours of those strange events, she and Charlie were confronted with accusations that their immigration documents, filed twenty-six years ago, were forged. This was a lie, but unless they assisted in suppressing the truth of the Wyvern disaster and its aftermath, they would be deported without notice, and without standard legal procedures, to Vietnam, from which they would never be able to return. Threats were also made against the lives of their children and grandchildren, because those who have orchestrated this cover-up do not believe in half measures.
Bobby and I don’t know why his parents have allowed the Gazette to be corrupted, publishing a carefully managed version of the local news. Perhaps they believe in the rightness of the secrecy. Perhaps they don’t understand the true horror of what’s happened. Or maybe they’re just scared.
“Charlie’s been muffled,” Bobby said, “but he’s still got ink in his veins, you know, he still hears things, gathers news whether he’s allowed to write all of it up or not.”
“He’s as stoked on the page as you are on the board,” I said.
“He’s a total news rat,” Bobby agreed.
He was standing near one of the sidelights that flank the front door: rectangular geometric stained-glass windows with red, amber, green, and clear elements. No blinds cover these panes, because the deep overhang of the porch and the giant oaks prevent direct sunlight from reaching them. Bobby glanced through one of the clearer pieces of glass in the mosaic, as if he expected to see an unwelcome visitor on the front porch.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I figured if Charlie had heard about Jimmy, he might know something we don’t, might’ve picked up something from Manuel or someone, somewhere. But I wasn’t ready for what the dude told me. Jimmy was one of three last night.”
My stomach clenched with dread.
“Three children kidnapped?” Sasha asked.
Bobby nodded. “Del and Judy Stuart’s twins.”
Del Stuart has an office at Ashdon College, is for the record an employee of the Department of Education but is rumored to work for an obscure arm of the Department of Defense or the Environmental Protection Agency, or the Federal Office of Doughnut Management, and he probably spreads the rumors himself to deflect speculation from possibilities closer to the truth. He refers to himself as a grant facilitator, a term that feels as deceptive as calling a hit man an organic waste disposal specialist. Officially, his job is to keep outgoing paperwork and incoming funds flowing for those professors who are engaged in federally financed research. There is reason to believe that most such research at Ashdon involves the development of unconventional weapons, that the college has become the summer home of Mars, the god of war, and that Del is the liaison between the discreet funding sources of black-budget weapons projects and the academics who thrive on their dole. Like Mom.
I had no doubt that Del and Judy Stuart were devastated by the disappearance of their twins, but unlike poor Lilly Wing, who was an innocent and unaware of the dark side of Moonlight Bay, the Stuarts were self-committed residents of Satan’s pocket and understood that the bargain they had made required them to suffer even this terror in silence. Consequently, I was amazed that Charlie had learned of these abductions.
“Charlie and Nora Dai live next door to them,” Bobby explained, “though I don’t think they barbecue a lot together. The twins are six years old. Around nine o’clock last night, Judy is tucking the weeds in for the night, she hears a noise, and when she turns around, there’s a stranger right behind her.”
“Stocky, close-cropped black hair, yellow eyes, thick lips, seed-corn teeth,” I said, describing the kidnapper I’d encountered under the warehouse.
“Tall, athletic, blond, green eyes, puckered scar on his left cheek.”
“New guy,” Sasha said.
“Totally new guy. He’s got a chloroform-soaked rag in one hand, and before Judy realizes what’s happening, the dude is all over her like fat on cheese.”
“Fat on cheese?” I asked.
“That was Charlie’s expression.”
Charlie Dai, God love him, writes excellent newspaper copy, but though English has been his first language for twenty-five years, he has not fully gotten a grip on conversational usage to the degree that he has mastered formal prose. Idiom and metaphor often defeat him. He once told me that an August evening was “as hot as three toads in a Cuisinart,” a comparison that left me blinking two days later.
Bobby peered through the stained-glass window once more, gave the day world a longer look than he had before, then returned his attention to us: “When Judy recovers from the chloroform, Aaron and Anson—the twins—are gone.”
“Two abbs suddenly start snatching kids on the same night?” I said skeptically.
“There’s no coincidence in Moonlight Bay,” Sasha said.
“Bad for us, worse for Jimmy,” I said. “If we’re not dealing with typical pervs, then these geeks are acting out twisted needs that might have nothing to do with any abnormal psychology on the books, because they’re way beyond abnormal. They’re becoming, and whatever it is they’re becoming is driving them to commit the same atrocities.”
“Or,” Bobby said, “it’s even stranger than two dudes regressing to swamp monsters. The abb left a drawing on the twins’ bed.”
“A crow?” Sasha guessed.
“Charlie called it a raven. Same difference. A raven sitting on a stone, spreading its wings as if to take flight. Not the same pose as in the first drawing. But the message was pretty much the same. ‘Del Stuart will be my servant in Hell.’”
“Does Del have any idea what it means?” I asked.
“Charlie Dai says no. But he thinks that Del recognized Judy’s description of the kidnapper. Maybe that’s why the guy let her get a look at him. He wanted Del to know.”
“But if Del knows,” I said, “he’ll tell the cops, and the abb is finished.”
“Charlie says he didn’t tell them.”
Sasha’s voice was laden with equal measures of disbelief and disgust. “His kids are abducted, and he hides information from the cops?”
“Del’s deep in the Wyvern mess,” I said. “Maybe he has to keep his mouth shut about the abb’s identity until he gets permission from his boss to tell the cops.”
“If they were my kids, I’d kick over the rules,” she said.
I asked Bobby if Jenna Wing had been able to make anything of the crow and the message left under Jimmy’s pillow, but she had been clueless.
“I’ve heard something else, though,” Bobby said, “and it makes this whole thing even more of a mind-bender.”
“Like?”
“Charlie says, about two weeks ago, school nurses and county health officials conducted an annual checkup on every kid in every school and preschool in town. The usual eye exams, hearing tests, chest X-rays for tuberculosis. But this time they took blood samples, too.”
Sasha frowned. “Drew blood from all those kids?”
“A couple school nurses felt parents ought to give permission before blood samples were taken, but the county official overseeing the program flushed them away with a load of woofy about there’s been a low-level hepatitis outbreak in the area that could become epidemic, so they need to do preventive screening.”
As I did, Sasha knew what inference Bobby had drawn from this news, and she wrapped her arms around herself as if chilled. “They weren’t screening those kids for hepatitis. They were screening them for the retrovirus.”
“To see how widely distributed the problem is in the community,” I added.
Bobby had arrived at a further and more disturbing inference: “We know the big brains are burning up gray cells around the clock, searching for a cure, right?”
“Ears smoking,” I agreed.
“What if they’ve discovered that a tiny percentage of infected people have a natural defense against the retrovirus?”
“Maybe in some people the bug isn’t able to unload the genetic material it’s carrying,” Sasha said.
Bobby shrugged. “Or whatever. Wouldn’t they want to study those who’re immune?”
I was sickened by where this was leading. “Jimmy Wing, the Stuart twins…maybe their blood samples revealed they have this antibody, enzyme, mechanism, whatever it is.”
Sasha didn’t want to go where we were going. “For research, they wouldn’t need the kids. Just tissue samples, blood samples, every few weeks.”
Reluctantly, remembering these were people who had once worked with Mom, I said, “But if you have no moral compunctions, if you used human subjects before, like they used condemned prisoners, then it’s a lot easier just to snatch the kids.”
“Less to explain,” Bobby agreed. “No chance the parents won’t cooperate.”
Sasha spat out a word I’d never heard her use before.
“Bro,” Bobby said, “you know, in car-engine design, in airplane-engine design, there’s this engineering term, something called test to destruction.”