The Mercy of Snakes
Author: Dean Koontz
Date: 2019-11-12 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Thriller; Mystery; Horror; Suspense; Crime; Fiction; Short Stories; Mystery Thriller; Novella
Description: A series of suspicious deaths in a retirement home draws Nameless into the confidence of a terrified former resident—and into the dark heart of a shocking conspiracy. In part five of the Nameless series, it’s time to hunt. Oakshore Park is Michigan’s most exclusive assisted-living community. Presided over by two killer angels of mercy, it’s also the go-to facility in assisted dying. For a cut, they make impatient heirs happy. Nameless must concoct a scheme just as cunning. But righteous retribution stirs disquiet in the avenger as light starts to shine on the black hole of his past. Should he
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2019 by The Koontz Living Trust

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle
www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

eISBN: 9781542016254

Cover design by Phantom City Creative

1

Driving the ninety-six miles from Traverse City to Cross Village, Michigan, just to get the lay of the land, Nameless marvels that such beautiful country and charming, upscale lakeside towns could produce and nurture and long sustain a serial killer admired by nearly everyone.

By now, he should not be the least surprised by the capacity of evil people to deceive their credulous friends and neighbors—or by the unconscious preference of so many people to be deceived. He has known many murderers.

The Toyota 4Runner handles nicely. Earlier, when he arrived in Traverse City by bus, with no luggage other than his wallet, the vehicle was waiting for him on a nearby street, just where a text from Ace of Diamonds promised it would be found. A suitcase in the cargo area contains items he will need, from a change of clothes to a pistol.

During the first twenty minutes of his three-hour drive, he listens to a recording that sets out his mission and describes his target in detail. This has been provided by Ace, his handler in the mysterious organization that has prepared him for this work and has set him loose to do it. When the recording concludes, the memory chip has self-erased; it can’t be replayed. That’s all right with Nameless, because he has total recall of everything he’s seen and heard for the past two years. However, regarding everything previous to those two years, he remembers zip, zero, nada. He believes that his amnesia has been engineered with his agreement, and he suspects it is a blessing.

For this assignment only, his name will be Charles Parker.

His missions, when accomplished, are nearly always satisfying, sometimes exhilarating. Maybe this one will be, too, but he senses a potential sadness in it that could be overwhelming. This is not a moment of clairvoyance, a vision of things to come. Once in a while, he has a glimpse of the future, but this is only a feeling, a hunch.

Determined to remain positive, he drives on, enjoying the summer lushness of oaks and maples and birches and cedars, with the lake sparkling between the trees. As he cruises, he indulges in some amateur philosophizing, separating humanity into three groups.

First are those for whom the words right and wrong have no meaning other than for such as traffic directions: You turn right at the second stoplight; if you turn left, you’ve gone wrong. They are nihilists, though not all of them know it and though many of them would bristle at the label. All such people are difficult to trust: some are dangerous, and some are lethal sociopaths.

Second are those who recognize right and wrong, a natural tao, and who try to live by what is right, as much as they can. These people are aware that real and implacable evil exists in the world; however, as a psychological defense mechanism, many of them grossly underestimate the prevalence of it.

Third are those who, busy with their lives, haven’t given much thought to right and wrong. When encountering profound evil, they are not sure what to think about it, and they seek to understand it as a complex phenomenon when in fact it’s simple. By imagining evil as infinitely nuanced, they drain all the bloody color out of it, render it in grays, and move on. This is the largest group.

The conclusion he makes regarding the three groups has often kept him alive when he should have ended up bleeding from every orifice and then some.

Members of the second group, who underestimate the prevalence of evil, are those most often targeted by it. They can pretty much be trusted not to do profound evil themselves, but they can’t be counted on to recognize clues that might determine which of their neighbors has ten dismembered bodies buried in his basement.

The third type, those who patiently analyze evil from numerous psychological and sociological perspectives until its sharp shiny edges are dull and blurry, are too indecisive to be allies in any fraught encounter with darkness. In fact, they are often likely to have overanalyzed the situation to such an extent that they have talked themselves into an alliance with monsters.

What this categorizing means to Nameless, aside from helping to keep him alive, is that, given the nature of humanity, he will never be without work.

When he reaches Cross Village, he turns around and heads back the way he came.

The towns along this segment of Lake Michigan’s eastern shore are small and for the most part picturesque. The population doesn’t seem sufficient to support a high-end assisted-living complex like Oakshore Park, where each of the hundred twenty apartments can lease for two or three times the average national income. However, a great deal of old money has settled around Harbor Springs and Petoskey, and especially around Charlevoix, on the outskirts of which Oakshore Park stands on eight majestic acres.

Although his target will be found on that property, Nameless won’t visit there yet. He follows the GPS guidance to a residence a few miles south of Charlevoix.

The small but stately fieldstone house with a black slate roof stands on an acre, shaded by maples and cherry trees.

He parks in the driveway and ascends three steps to the simple portico and rings the bell.

Unlike most people, who are made a mockery by DMV cameras, Brock McCall looks exactly like the photo on his driver’s license, which Nameless received with the recorded case file: seventy-three years old, bald of head, broad of face, with deep-set green eyes, jaws suitable for cracking walnuts, and an air of extreme vitality, as if he’s been struck by lightning that energized rather than destroyed him. He doesn’t just open the door, but flings it aside.

“Charles Parker?” he demands before Nameless can introduce himself.

“Yes, sir. Nifelheim Casualty and Life.” No such company exists, but a business card was left in the 4Runner; he has it in his wallet if McCall asks. “Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

“Come in. Let’s go to the kitchen. I spend most of my time in the damn kitchen these days, reading recipes, pretending I can cook, producing mostly inedible slop, but it’s something to do.”

The kitchen features high-end appliances and a large breakfast table with a white quartzite top ribboned through with golden veins. The air is redolent of fresh-brewed coffee, pineapple, and coconut.

On those countertops that aren’t reserved for cooking and on the table are at least two dozen photos in silver frames, which seem out of place in a kitchen. They are of the same lovely, petite woman taken at different times in her life, from her years of jet-black hair to days of white. In a few, Brock McCall is with her.

Nameless agrees to coffee. McCall fills two large mugs. They take it black. McCall also puts out a basket of miniature muffins, two plates, forks, and napkins, placing everything precisely.

“The muffins are made to Harmony’s recipe. You can trust them. The muffins are one thing I haven’t bungled.”

Indicating the photos, Nameless says, “Harmony was your wife.”

“She was more than my wife. She was half my soul. She’s been gone three years. Sometimes it seems like she left yesterday, and other times it’s like I’ve been alone for decades. I’d give up the ghost myself if I didn’t want to live long enough to see Dr. Murdock Pennyman get it in the neck like he deserves.”

Dr. Murdock Pennyman owns Oakshore Park.

The man who is not Charles Parker quotes from the Oakshore brochure. “An elegant assisted-living residence for active senior citizens who have earned the right to be pampered.”

McCall’s face clenches like that of a pissed-off drill sergeant. “Not a one of those active seniors earned the right to be murdered, but that’s for damn sure what happened to some, the poor bastards. Not that any of them was poor. Otherwise, they’d still be alive. I hate Murdock Pennyman, the sonofabitch. Just the sight of the bugger makes my eyes want to bleed.”

2

On a bluff overlooking Little Traverse Bay, the Victorian house features ornamental cornices, several gables, abundant decorative millwork, and a deep front porch.

Buddy doesn’t need a key because he has a lock-release gun, even though he’s not in law enforcement. He disengages the deadbolt in six seconds. He doesn’t worry about the security system because his client has given him Teresa Garland’s disarming code.

She won’t be home for at least three hours. He has plenty of time to get the job done but also to enjoy sorting through the most intimate apparel of the delicious Miss Garland.

Robert “Buddy” Dufraine isn’t what anyone expects a man in his profession to be.

The most popular image of a licensed private investigator is a good-hearted tough guy who works the mean streets of some city that has almost as many dark places in broad daylight as at night. He ventures into the swanky suburbs when some treacherous upper-class dame or some scheming rich guy has done someone dirty, but he wants none of what they have, neither their wealth nor their power, nor their easy immorality.

Buddy Dufraine is neither good-hearted nor tough; even before he’d been old enough to drive a car, he learned that being selfish and sneaky and vicious is the better way to go. Punch some guy in the face, he’ll punch you in return. Stab him in the back, and he might not even know who did it.

Buddy doesn’t work a metropolis and its suburbs. His turf is the east shore of Lake Michigan, the cute tourist towns and the enclaves of the wealthy who have been here for generations or have recently fled the increasingly dysfunctional cities. They and their businesses have need of a discreet investigator, whether it’s to catch a thieving employee or a philandering husband. He doesn’t disdain their wealth and power, and if some of them are immoral, that’s all right with Buddy, who can’t claim to live like a choirboy.

He doesn’t look like a PI, either. He’s not tall and handsome, but he’s also not short or ugly. He’s of medium height, with a small paunch. His best feature is a winning smile, which everyone takes to be sincere.

The current job is peculiar. He’s been told to make it appear as if the house has been carefully searched, as if an intruder has pored through everything but then has taken pains to put all of it back in its place except, here and there, not quite as it should be. The idea is that Teresa Garland will notice a series of small tells and become alarmed. Buddy is not to take anything; this must not be mistaken for a burglary; rather, the idea is to make the woman think that someone suspects her of duplicity and is seeking evidence.

Because the client in this case is his most important, Buddy will scrupulously follow instructions.

Concerned that someone might secretly tape their conversation, Dr. Pennyman never speaks with Buddy about an assignment even when they meet in person. On those occasions, they engage in small talk while Buddy reads a written directive, which he then returns to the doctor, who will destroy it.

Otherwise, Pennyman text messages with a smartphone registered to a nonexistent person, Claude Rains, who is employed by a limited liability company that’s a shell to which the doctor has no easily traced connection.

Buddy sets out now to search the house and put it almost right in his wake, precisely as he has been instructed.

3

The muffins are good. They’re better than good; they’re superb.

In a world sick with envy that leads to coveting that leads to greed that too often results in violence, it wouldn’t seem that something as small as excellent muffins could lift a man’s spirits, even during talk of murder. But that is the way of the world: sadness and delight, anger and forbearance, hatred and love—all woven together in every inch of the tapestry.

Brock McCall is virtually steaming with hatred for Dr. Pennyman at the same time that evidence of his undying love for his late wife is everywhere around him.

“After Harmony passed, I didn’t think I could go on living here. It was too much, the loss, all the memories, the continuous reminders of what had been and what never would be again.”

The old man’s words resonate with Nameless, raise a chill that seems to start in the hollows of his bones. He wonders if somehow his body remembers what his mind has been made to forget, if some terrible loss lies in his erased past.

“I was seventy, so I hiked off to Oakshore Park and rented out this place to a nice young couple.”

“It’s expensive there,” Nameless says.

“Well, they’ve got five-star accommodations. Fabulous food. Nice staff, a few nurses. Pennyman has his office there, a doctor right on the grounds. It’s assisted living, not a nursing home. Most people are ambulatory, more than ambulatory. Some play pickleball and talk TV shows till their brains fry, but there’s also a lot of interesting people. I made friends . . . some good friends . . .”

McCall’s voice trails off, and he stares into his mug as though he can read coffee the way fortune-tellers read tea leaves.

“You made friends,” Nameless presses, “then they began to die.”

When McCall looks up from the brew, something has changed in his face, in his eyes. He didn’t look old before. Now he does.

“When your office called, asked me to meet you, I told them okay, but it has to be off the record. They tell you that was the one condition?”

“Yes.”

“It’s important. You tell anyone we talked, I’ll deny it.”

“I understand.”

McCall is obviously embarrassed. “All my life, nothing ever scared me until Harmony died. It scared me to be alone. Still does. Not like a little kid is scared. Different from that. Not scared that something or someone’s going to get me. It’s the emptiness. The empty rooms, the silence. Sure, I can turn on the TV or music, but even then I can’t turn off the quiet, the emptiness. But there’s something else now scares me more.”

Pausing, McCall looks at the photos in their bright silver frames and takes a deep breath and blows it out.

Nameless waits. He already knows most of what this man can tell him, but there’s one thing he doesn’t know for sure and needs to find out. McCall seems about to reveal it.

“My daughter and her husband live down in Traverse City. Their only child, Toby, is eleven. He’s the sweetest kid. Gentle and innocent and happy. He’ll be gentle, innocent, sweet—and I hope to God happy—all his life because he’s a Down syndrome child. You ever know one, Mr. Parker?” Nameless says that he hasn’t, and McCall continues. “They’re angels on Earth, sir. My daughter and son-in-law say Toby’s a blessing. Parents of Down syndrome kids generally all say the same thing—what a blessing they are. Being around a Down person changes you for the better. Harmony loved Toby, adored him, and so do I. If anything . . .”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. When McCall finally looks away from the photos, unshed tears stand in his eyes.

“But first,” he says, “about those friends of mine at Oakshore Park. They were good people. We had some great times. Then three of them died in eight months. All from the same thing—from strokes, cerebral embolisms.”

“In their seventies, eighties?”

“Seventies. Two guys, Bailey Stern and Frank Venicchi. A woman, Helen Westerly. No cardio conditions, no atrial fibrillation among them. None ever smoked. One medicated for cholesterol, but not the other two. They were damn healthy. Competitive golfers. On a tennis court, Helen and Bailey could still whack a ball pretty damn good. They all still drove, like me. Vigorous people until . . . suddenly.”

“Why were they living at Oakshore?”

“It’s like a five-star hotel, no responsibilities, everything done for you, you can come and go. Swimming pool, gym, spa, theater. People your age, with similar interests, immediate medical care if you need it. But then a week after Helen passed—she was the third—I saw something that made me start thinking.”

He hasn’t eaten a muffin. Now he forks one of the treats from the basket and puts it on his plate, but leaves it there untouched, staring at it as if he’s forgotten the purpose of food.

“I took a drive, way up past Petoskey to Harbor Springs, had lunch in a restaurant where Harmony and I used to go. Sat way in the back, in our favorite booth. I wasn’t facing the front door, but I could see most of the place in this big antique mirror that hangs on the back wall. Which is how I saw Pennyman come in and be given a window table. Ten minutes later, here comes Joseph Westerly, Helen’s son. I’d seen his picture, met him once when he visited his mother. He didn’t visit often. They weren’t estranged, exactly, but there were problems between them. I don’t know what.”

McCall cuts the miniature muffin with his fork, but then he puts the fork aside without eating.

“Anyway, Westerly and Pennyman have lunch together, share a bottle of wine, and they’re all smiles. There’s a lot of laughter. It’s like one week after Helen’s death, and her son’s laughing and joking with her primary physician. It felt weird, wrong. I didn’t want them to see me. I ate slow, had a dessert I didn’t want. Joe Westerly had come with a briefcase. Put it on the floor and never opened it. When they left, Pennyman took Westerly’s briefcase. I couldn’t sleep that night, thinking what must’ve been in the damn briefcase and why.”

“And what do you think was in it?”

“Money. A lot of cash.”

4

Teresa Jean Garland, head of nurses at Oakshore, sits in Dr. Pennyman’s chair, with her feet up on his twenty-thousand-dollar desk, waiting for him to return from a meeting with the grandson of one of Oakshore’s residents, Emma Marie Mulholland, who’s eighty-seven and threatening to live forever.

Of the nurses at Oakshore Park—three on each day shift, one at night—none wear uniforms, only street clothes. Pennyman doesn’t want the place to remind residents of a hospital. He also chooses women who have pleasant faces and soft voices, so none of them will remind the residents of emergency rooms and intensive care units.

Teresa is something else again. She worked her way through nursing school as a pole dancer in a strip club, where she was always the girl with the most tips at the end of the evening. She has no calling to be a nurse; she finds sick people repulsive. She went into the nursing profession with one goal: to marry a rich doctor—a specialist or an internist in a concierge practice.

Her father, Mac, spent so much time drinking that he didn’t have much time for work. His irregular income came from high-end burglaries and defrauding the elderly by way of a real estate investment trust that didn’t exist. He must have said a thousand times that he should have been a doctor, that doctors had it made. He dropped out of high school in tenth grade, had the attention span of an adolescent, and was both a hypochondriac and a germaphobe—an unlikely candidate for medical school. His dream of a future in the healing arts ended when a disgruntled ninety-year-old investor came looking for Mac with a sawed-off shotgun. He died at thirty-four. Teresa was sixteen; but by then Mac had inculcated in her the belief that a life in medicine was the surest route to prosperity.

Where she finds herself, at thirty-six, is even better than she ever envisioned. There were doctors she could have married, but they wanted children. She dislikes children as much as she is disgusted by sick people. From birth to adolescence, she was less of a child than a crocodile masquerading as one, always aware that everyone else was prey. She isn’t married to Murdock Pennyman, but they have a hot sex life, and she’s getting rich as his indispensable conspirator.

She and Murdock are two of a kind. They know how to use their exceptional good looks to manipulate others; they have no qualms about manipulating the shit out of everyone, and in fact they have no qualms about anything.

Murdock married a rich woman, used her money to build Oakshore Park, disposed of her in a timely manner, and set about developing the operation. Apartment leases are a cash cow, but there are other income streams, including incredible sums of untaxable cash earned by assisting relatives of Oakshore residents who are impatient for beloved patriarchs and matriarchs to croak and thereby hasten the distribution of inheritances.

Because Murdock is so skilled at getting Oakshore residents to share the most personal details of their lives with him, he is able to identify those dysfunctional families in which there is so much intergenerational tension that the heirs are ripe for his subtly implied suggestion that there is a way to end their frustration.

At the age of twenty-five, when she came to work here, Teresa needed only two days to figure out that the pharmacy was ordering maybe four times the drugs it was prescribing to residents and selling the rest to a dealer somewhere. In Motor City, as it turned out. In two weeks, she tumbled to the euthanasia-for-cash business, and by then she was banging Murdock Pennyman’s brains out. Really, when they’re going at it, they’re like two panthers mating; anyone who wanders into their vicinity could be bitten and clawed apart.

His pharmacist was in on the drug business, but Murdock was trying to run the euthanasia end of it himself. He was overworked, taking too many risks, and he saw the wisdom of bringing Teresa in as a partner. She got a pharmacy license, and the pharmacist had an unfortunate accident, after which only she and Murdock knew about the secret income streams.

Now he returns from seeing the grandson, one of two heirs of Emma Mulholland, and Teresa gets up from his chair. “Hook him?”

“And reeled him in.”

“When do we do it?”

“Tonight.”

She presses against him. He grabs her butt with both hands. She unzips his pants, reaches inside. They have a moment, just a little preview of the evening ahead.

With their kisses, they are as aggressive as two fruit bats trying to eat the same plum. Between them, she says, “You stuck the last old bitch . . . I want to stick this one,” and he says, “We’ll go to her apartment tonight . . . after dinner . . . do the job together,” and she says, “You so totally . . . turn me on.”

5

Brock McCall pushes the plate away, the cut muffin untouched.

“So after I see Pennyman and Helen’s son together, I got to thinking about something Bailey Stern and Frank Venicchi had in common. Both had problem children who were their heirs. Bailey had been divorced twenty years. His wife remarried, so she wasn’t in his will. His adopted daughter once had a serious drug problem, but then she shook off the addiction, began to fly straight. Or said she did. Bailey wanted to believe it, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure. Frank, a widower, had twin boys who thought they were entrepreneurs, but neither of them had the nose-to-the-grindstone discipline that makes a business work. Frank bailed them out of debt more than once, but they were always after him to finance their next sure thing.”

He brings the coffeepot and refreshes their mugs.

Nameless senses that McCall is having second thoughts about sharing all of this, that he’s arguing with himself about the wisdom of saying anything further. Pressing him for more will most likely spook him into clamming up. He’s a man of conscience, however, and sooner than later his conscience will get the better of him.

Sooner. When McCall returns to his chair, he continues. “So after I see Pennyman and Helen’s son together, I remembered that news story from years ago, the Menendez brothers in Beverly Hills or Bel Air, they shotgunned their parents to get their inheritance.”

Nameless says, “Your three friends—Bailey, Frank, and Helen—had estates and life-insurance policies with a combined value of forty-six million dollars.”

“That much?” He shook his head. “I should’ve said ‘that’s all?’ That’s all they needed to murder their parents?”

“People kill for less,” says Nameless. “They kill for nothing, just to kill.”

“Or just to shut a person up.”

They were slowly coming to it. The one thing Nameless didn’t know and that might help him if he knew it for sure.

“Next day, after the lunch in Harbor Springs, I start getting myself in trouble, but I don’t know it. I think I’m being subtle, so casual about it, just a guy who’s lost three friends and is worrying about his own mortality, asking other residents of Oakshore about strokes, how many other people that once lived there might have had them and didn’t even linger, just died in their sleep, bang, like Helen, Frank, and Bailey. You know about strokes, Mr. Parker?”

“They don’t always kill in an instant.”

McCall nods solemnly. “Paralysis. Aphasia, when you have trouble reading, writing, speaking. Many people, after a stroke, it’s a long rehab, unless they’re gotten to a stroke treatment center and received the right drugs within three hours, which can undo the damage.”

“Your friends didn’t have that chance.”

McCall grimaces. “There’s two types of strokes—ischemic and hemorrhagic. In a hemorrhagic stroke, a blood vessel in the brain ruptures. With an ischemic, something plugs up a brain artery. The plug is called a cerebral embolism. An embolism is usually a blood clot, but it can also be a piece of detached arterial plaque, bits of tissue from a tumor, a clump of bacteria, a wad of bone marrow from a fractured bone, cholesterol crystals, or an air bubble. Any nurse knows how to give an injection without risking an air-bubble embolism. But any nurse or doctor, having gone to the dark side, can inject an air bubble, a nice big fat one.”

“Did your friends really all die in bed?”

“Helen and Frank did. Housekeepers found them. Bailey died in his favorite armchair, watching TV. Also found by a housekeeper.”

“Why would they let anyone inject them?”

“Helen and Frank had insomnia. A lot of us do past a certain age. They were on sleep medications that put them out. Management has a passkey to every apartment.”

“And Bailey?”

“He swore by this health drink. It came in a Tetra Pak coated-paper container, like a little milk carton. Bailey downed one every evening before bed. Pennyman would know this. Might be easy to use a hypodermic syringe to inject Rohypnol or something through the top of a couple containers, put them up front in his fridge. The tiny hole from the needle would be hard to see. Then Bailey passes out in the chair and someone comes in to tap a vein, put a bubble in it.”

“Hard to prove with an autopsy.”

“For folks our age there wouldn’t likely be any damn autopsies. And since Pennyman keeps residents’ medical records, he could jigger them to show some health problems his patients didn’t really have, certain conditions known to increase their risk of having a stroke.”

Nameless knew that the coroner had looked at just such medical records and had signed off on the deaths as from natural causes. The widely admired Dr. Pennyman was beyond reproach.

Making a fist and shaking it as if he wishes he had someone to punch, McCall says, “The families didn’t demand autopsies. The heirs certainly wouldn’t make a fuss.”

“So you were asking residents of Oakshore for friends they might have known who died of sudden massive strokes, people from before you lived there.”

“Yeah. Making a list of names, dates. I was also researching the families of those people online. I was being discreet. Except I wrote a confidential letter to the state attorney general, urging a quiet investigation. I think that was my mistake. Maybe Pennyman’s got friends in Lansing. Then one day I come back from lunch in Charlevoix, and Pennyman’s in my apartment, at my desk, going through the drawers, as if he’s got the right to do that.”

McCall’s anger tightens his features, clarifies his green eyes.

“My computer is gone,” he continues. “Pennyman’s already had it hauled out, but it’s my property. He says he’s evicting me for gross immoral behavior. Says I’ve exposed myself to female residents, and I’ve got child pornography on my computer.”

McCall is mortified that he even has to report the false child pornography accusation, and a blush warms his face.

“I call him out on that—it’s all a lie. The bastard smirks and tells me I’ll be shocked what’s on the computer if I make him turn it over to the police. Then he gets up from my office chair. He has this manila envelope with him. He takes photographs from it, and I think it’s going to be kiddie porn he planted on me . . . but it’s photographs of my grandson, Toby.”

“Ah,” Nameless says, because this is the one thing he didn’t know, how McCall was silenced, and that might help him.

“The first few were maybe taken with a telephoto lens. Toby on the front porch. Toby playing in the yard. Toby with his mom, coming out of an ice cream shop. The next three are a lot more disturbing. Someone got in the house at night without anyone knowing, got into Toby’s bedroom. One lamp’s aglow. Toby’s asleep on the bed. Pennyman never says a word when he shows me the pictures, not a word.”

“Because the photos are an implicit threat,” Nameless says.

“Explicit, if you ask me. They know it would destroy me if anything happened to the boy. When I curse out Pennyman, he tells me, ‘Some would say I’m an angel of mercy, sparing people from blighted, diminished lives no longer worth living.’ I called him a snake, and he thought it was amusing to hiss at me.”

“You have the photographs of Toby?”

“No. The bastard took them with him. I left Oakshore that day. Paid the couple who rented this place to terminate their lease. Been here ever since, keeping my head down.” He frowns at his coffee mug. “Keeping my head down. Since the day Toby was born, I’ve worried what could happen to him if he outlives his parents and the money runs out, how he’ll get along in the world alone. I never imagined I’d do anything to make a target of him.” He pushes his chair back, rises from the table. “So now you remember my one condition. Don’t you forget my one condition, Mr. Parker.”

Nameless says, “I was never here. We never spoke.”

Escorting his guest to the door, McCall says, “I’m ashamed to be this way. If it was just me, I’d be different. But the boy . . . I regret my cowardice, Mr. Parker. But we get old, we do get old.”

As his host opens the door, Nameless says, “Not cowardice, Mr. McCall. Prudence. For Toby’s sake. I respect that.”

Those words of reassurance leave McCall no less downcast. As they shake hands, he says, “If it’s insurance fraud you nail him for, I hope it breaks open the whole truth about that rotten place.”

“I think you’ll be pleased.”

As Nameless walks to the 4Runner in the driveway, red-breasted robins hop across the lawn, pecking their dinner from the grass, a lively little flock of feathered wonders.

In the SUV, he glances at his watch—3:08 p.m.

The private investigator, Buddy Dufraine, thinking he’s working for Dr. Pennyman, will be on the job at Teresa Garland’s house for two more hours. Later, she will arrive home, and the fun will start.

Nameless is amused when he considers how they found Dufraine, which the purpose-of-the-mission recording laid out.

6

Here’s how it began.

Ace and team are first alerted to problems at Oakshore Park by the letter Brock McCall wrote to the state attorney general, which is ignored in that office but is eventually passed by divers hands to a member of Ace’s crew.

Subsequently, they hack into Oakshore’s computer system and spend days poring through the company’s records, seeking anything they can use to break open Pennyman’s operation. When they discover repeated payments to something called Dufraine Investigations and learn that Robert Dufraine is a PI, they are interested. The average assisted-living facility doesn’t need a PI any more than it requires the services of a vampire hunter. If the shamus prepares reports on anyone or anything, Oakshore doesn’t keep them and apparently destroys them, which is curious.

For someone who styles himself as a savvy PI, Robert Dufraine has appalling data security. A fishing expedition quickly acquires his password, drowssap, which is password spelled backward. Odds are, the man is not a technological genius. He keeps electronic files of his reports to Dr. Pennyman, and it doesn’t take long to determine that among those are dated profiles of every heir of Oakshore residents who later died from massive strokes.

Dufraine is also writing a memoir in a narrative voice akin to that of Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, though neither as literate nor as coherent as the narrator of Raymond Chandler’s novel. He seems unaware that some of his activities are more incriminating than they are either interesting or self-aggrandizing. He never appears to wonder why Pennyman wants the profiles and definitely doesn’t know that the people of whom he writes are later the beneficiaries of massive inheritances from Oakshore Park residents stricken by sudden death.

From the perspective of Ace’s team, the most useful item in Dufraine’s uncompleted memoir is how Murdock Pennyman insists on communicating with the PI. After their initial face-to-face meeting, they meet only rarely at a drab working-class bar in Petoskey. They never talk on the phone. Pennyman text-messages instructions, using the name—and a phone registered to—Claude Rains, a fictional employee of an LLC, a shell company based in Belize, which he believes can’t be connected to him. (Ace’s crew connects him to it in ninety-six minutes.) Anyway, Dufraine sends reports to Claude. The detective thinks this is all very cool cloak-and-dagger stuff.

Now and then, Buddy wonders if the doctor is engaged in some kind of hanky-panky. But he always decides that, if it’s anything illegal, it’s only about taxes. To Buddy Dufraine’s way of thinking, cheating on exorbitant income taxes is a patriotic duty.

Pennyman has told him that Oakshore Park residents and their families, ranging from rich to wealthy, are so obsessed with privacy that they will be profoundly offended if they learn he’s ordered intimate research on them, even though he is having it done just to ensure that only the best people are accepted as Oakshore residents. Buddy Dufraine largely buys this bushwa. Or pretends to. Such is the power of Dr. Pennyman’s persuasion and charisma.

7

Robert “Buddy” Dufraine maintains an office in Traverse City, above a hair salon and a tanning parlor. He lives in a Craftsman-style bungalow in a neighborhood of tree-lined streets so cozy looking that it would have served well as the location for a 1950s family-friendly sitcom.

Nameless parks in the driveway. On the passenger seat is a bright-yellow file folder that he’s taken from the suitcase Ace’s crew placed in the 4Runner, before leaving the vehicle near the bus station in Traverse City. He takes the file with him.

With a police lock-release gun, he opens the back door of the bungalow. Ace’s crew has penetrated the Vigilant Eagle Security Company’s main computer and invaded their in-residence base computer to obtain Dufraine’s disarming code. In the kitchen, Nameless enters four numbers in the keypad, and the warning tone desists. Since he has no fingerprints, Nameless has no need for latex gloves.

Dufraine lives alone, but the condition of the kitchen suggests this is a fraternity house with an incompetent housekeeper. Things get worse from there. The dining room contains only a foosball game. The living room features a giant TV, two motorized recliners, a sofa, six pinball machines, and a litter of empty beer cans.

If the home office is identifiable by its desk and computer, it is nonetheless also a temple to Victoria’s Secret, the walls papered with posters of the retailer’s most spectacularly endowed models in lingerie that could be folded and tucked into a thimble.

Buddy Dufraine seems to be thirty-eight going on nineteen.

Nameless leaves the bright-yellow file folder on the desk. A large label on the tab is emblazoned with the name TERESA JEAN GARLAND. A photograph of the nurse is taped to the front.

He doesn’t set the alarm or lock the house when he departs. An overcast is beginning to form. Because he wants the visitor who will come later to believe that the place is occupied, he leaves lights on in most rooms.

In the Toyota 4Runner, he sends a text message to Ace, using the smartphone he was given for this mission, which he will later smash. FILE DELIVERED.

Ace will now send a text to Buddy Dufraine, spoofing through Dr. Pennyman’s telecom account.

8

In the walk-in closet off Teresa Garland’s bedroom, Buddy is fingering the soft silkiness of her extensive lingerie collection with considerable delight, burying his face in selected items and inhaling until he almost swoons.

He receives a text message from Claude Rains, alias Murdock Pennyman: DRINKS, 5:30, PETOSKEY. $$$

The dollar signs at the end mean that the doctor has a new job for the detective that will be especially rewarding.

When they meet to discuss an assignment, they always do so at the same workingman’s bar in Petoskey, where no relatives of any Oakshore Park residents or anyone of their class would deign to be seen.

It’s 4:35 p.m., and Teresa won’t return home until at least 5:15, so Buddy resumes fondling her lingerie for ten more minutes. He might even take a pair of her panties with him.

9

Nameless leaves the Toyota 4Runner in one of the parking areas reserved for visitors. He follows a brick pathway flanked by green lawns, admiring the handsome two-story brick-and-limestone apartment buildings in which active senior citizens are being pampered and, in some cases, waiting unaware to be efficiently euthanized.

As Earth rotates away from the sun in its daily pursuit of darkness, the oaks and maples and cedars bleed elongated shadows across the grounds.

Nedra and Rosita, Dr. Pennyman’s two housekeepers, work from eight o’clock in the morning until four thirty in the afternoon. They have been gone for fifteen minutes.

Pennyman’s routine provides an hour for him to visit residents in their apartments, after which he retires to his home shortly after five o’clock.

This gives Nameless a window of opportunity.

The house is a stately Georgian masterpiece on its own secluded acre of Oakshore Park, with a spectacular view of the water and the Charlevoix yacht harbor. At nine thousand square feet, it seems too big for a man living alone, though of course Mrs. Pennyman didn’t meet her tragic death until after construction was complete. Anyway, the doctor is an avid collector of abstract expressionist paintings and sculptures, so he requires space to display his treasures.

The house has no alarm system. Oakshore Park is walled, gated, patrolled by security guards, and everyone there feels safe. Nameless has no worry as he uses his lock-release gun to defeat the deadbolt on the back door.

The kitchen smells of roses. An elaborate arrangement of four or five dozen blooms stands on one of the two kitchen islands. Dr. Pennyman likes red roses. He has four arrangements delivered once a week and places them throughout the residence. His late wife was so allergic to roses that she would go into anaphylactic shock if she were still alive and entered this house.

Nameless goes upstairs to a spare bedroom, where Pennyman is not likely to chance upon him.

10

Emma Marie Mulholland absolutely adores Dr. Pennyman. He is such a caring man. Whether she has an appointment in his office or he pays a casual how-are-you-doing visit to her apartment, as now, he always gives her his undivided attention, as if she’s special to him. He’s quite handsome, with a fit physique for a man of fifty, and a glorious head of salt-and-pepper hair. If Emma were sixty instead of eighty-seven, she might jump his bones, she really might, just be all over him, though that is not the kind of woman she’s ever been. She chides herself for having become such a naughty creature.

However, her Harry has been gone for more than twenty years. No matter how many friends she has—and Emma has many friends here at Oakshore Park—she’s from a generation and a social strata of women who value having a special man, one relationship above all others, a true love. The worst thing about being a widow of an exceptional man like Harry is that, having once had the best, her standards have ever since been too high for another man to meet them.

Until dear Dr. Pennyman. The age difference is too great, of course. She has no illusions. But while he’s paying this visit, sitting here beside her on the sofa, she can drink in the splendid look of him and be soothed by his deep yet gentle voice and admire his strong hands as he shows her what he’s brought that he wants her to add to her daily regimen.

The health drink he has for her is a vitamin-packed smoothie of some kind. He’s brought a box of six. “Refrigerate them,” he tells her. “They taste best when cold. If you like the flavor, I’ll bring a full case of twenty-four. No charge. This isn’t about that. It’s about keeping you well and spry. After you’ve been having one of these every night before bed, for a month, then I want to see how your blood-work numbers improve. I know they will. And as a bonus, you’ll find that your skin will be clearer and firmer. You have remarkable skin for your age, Emma, but of course”—he indicates a nearby photo of her and Harry, when they were achingly young—“you always have had beautiful skin.”

He is the dearest man. She doesn’t feel like a young girl again in his company—she’s not a fool—but she feels sort of middle-aged, which is amazing enough.

“Promise me you’ll have one tonight, Emma, right before bed. What time do you usually go to bed?”

“I’ve got my programs to watch. But I’m usually asleep by nine o’clock.”

“Well, in fact, it’s best if you drink it while in bed, then go to sleep half sitting up with your back against a pile of pillows. I don’t think you’ll have acid reflux from it, but sleeping in that position for the first couple of hours ensures you won’t.”

“I’ll start tonight,” she promises. “I always do exactly what you tell me, Dr. Pennyman. You’ve never had a more devoted patient.”

He smiles at her choice of the word devoted, which Emma uses with calculation, and his smile is almost as beautiful as Harry’s.

11

When Nurse Teresa Garland, whose pole-dancer name had been Fannie Ann Tatas, opens the connecting door between her garage and the laundry room of the house, a shrill electronic tone sounds, a warning from the alarm system.

The control panel is near the door, and as she begins to enter the disarming code, she sees that the indicator light is lit above the word HOME rather than above the word AWAY. When she leaves the house, she never sets the system in the at-home mode, which arms only the perimeter sensors at doors and windows. She always arms the motion detectors and glass-break sensors, as well, and she clearly recalls doing so before departing for Oakshore Park that morning.

Nobody knows the four-number code needed to disarm her alarm system. Even Murdock Pennyman, her lover and co-conspirator, doesn’t know it. Especially not Murdock. Who could sleep at night, alone in a house, knowing that a man who injects air bubbles into people’s veins has the alarm code? Whether they have sex in his home or hers, neither ever sleeps over, even though satisfying their libidos often leaves them physically and mentally exhausted.

Although nobody knows the code, someone has been here, disarmed the system, evidently gone through the house, and reset the alarm in the at-home mode because he forgot it had been set on AWAY. Or maybe he is still in the house and moving around and doesn’t want to be tagged by the motion detectors. Whoever he is, he sure as hell isn’t Santa Claus five months ahead of schedule.

Concerned but not afraid, because she doesn’t fear anyone, Teresa leans over the washing machine, feels for the sleeve attached to the back of it, extracts the 9 mm Colt. She proceeds cautiously into the kitchen.

One drawer is open two inches. She is obsessive-compulsive about everything being neat and orderly. After she opens a drawer, she always fully closes it. Always.

She finds a few golden crumbs on a countertop. She knows beyond doubt what crumbs they are. The intruder has found her stash of St. Michel galettes, delicious French butter cookies, crisp and thin, flavored with sea salt, the best butter cookies in the world, unlike all other butter cookies ever made, as addictive as crack cocaine.

The intruder has stolen only a cookie, not a diamond necklace, but Teresa is angry. What’s hers is hers, and pity the fool who thinks he has any right to the smallest portion of it.

When she had been pole dancing her way through nursing school, this pimp started putting pressure on her to do more than dance. He insisted she work in his stable of high-priced call girls, give him half of what she made, half her strip-club income as well. Every time she refused, he got more aggressive. Most girls were so afraid of him that he didn’t need to use his fists to cow them. He had an ice-cold stare and a vicious motor mouth, an intimidating rap, and could terrify them with words alone. So Teresa did a Sweeney Todd on him with a straight razor. After that he wouldn’t have been able to speak another word if he had survived, which he didn’t.

Armed and angry, then outraged, she proceeds through the house, finding little telltales everywhere that someone less attentive to detail than she is, someone clearly not obsessed with neatness and order, has been in every room, every closet, though he apparently hasn’t stolen anything but the cookie.

The bastard isn’t in the house any longer, but she can still discover who he might have been. The alarm system doesn’t include obvious video surveillance, but she has augmented it with self-installed pinhole cameras secreted in everyday objects like clocks and lamps. They don’t have batteries, are plugged into the house’s electric service, and transmit video via Wi-Fi to her computer.

She returns to the study on the ground floor, where she earlier discovered the office chair wasn’t tucked into the knee space. She always leaves it tucked into the knee space.

Now she sits in the chair and switches on the computer and puts in her password.

Someone has been in her files. The first twelve items on the list have been opened this afternoon, while she was working at Oakshore Park. Then the intruder evidently got bored.

She checks her email. She has received five today. All have been opened while she was still at Oakshore.

He knows her passwords, but how? She never shares them with anyone. She’s committed them to memory. She’s never written them down anywhere, because she has no concern about forgetting them.

Fortunately, he doesn’t spend enough time with her computer or isn’t savvy enough to discover the security video. If he’d found himself captured flagrante delicto during his invasion of the house, he would have deleted the recordings. But here he is on the screen, eating a St. Michel galette in the kitchen—and she knows him.

Robert Dufraine. “Buddy” to his friends and enemies alike. The sleazeball private detective who does work for Murdock Pennyman—and also for her, considering that she is Murdock’s partner. He does background on heirs to help her and Murdock decide which might be amenable to paying a fat fee for the acceleration of an inheritance, and he is too stupid to suspect to what use they are putting the research he provides. Or too fearful of losing their business to care what they’re doing.

So here is Buddy dribbling galette crumbs, and now poking through kitchen cabinets. Buddy in her home office, going through her desk drawers, switching on her computer. Buddy searching her bedroom and walk-in closet, evidently seeking a hidden safe. Buddy having a prolonged romantic interlude with her lingerie, stuffing a pair of her panties into a pocket of his sport coat.

Teresa feels violated. She feels abused, defiled, desecrated, assaulted, as if the pimp she killed so many years ago has been reincarnated in the frumpish body of this disgusting, odious, vile, loathsome, detestable, abhorrent Sam Spade wannabe. Her anger, which had grown to rage as she searched the house and had seen telltales of his snooping, now escalates to fury. He hasn’t come here just to steal from her. He is digging for dirt. Looking for something that he can use for extortion. He must suspect something about her and Murdock’s secret business, after all. What a repugnant, abhorrent, contemptible, deceitful, shifty, treacherous, insidious sonofabitch! She has never before been so full of adjectives. Every muscle in her exquisitely toned body is taut with homicidal passion.

She opens the bottom left-hand drawer on the desk, takes out the contents, removes the false bottom, and retrieves a Sig Sauer P226 and the sound suppressor that it has been threaded to receive. She is a gun-in-every-room girl; but this weapon has been set aside for use outside the home, if that day should ever come. Now it’s here. The 9 mm Sig Sauer features a ten-round magazine, weighs just twenty-six and a half ounces, is easy to handle, and is highly accurate in practiced hands. Stored with it is a loaded spare magazine, which she also takes.

The Colt Pocket Nine has only a six-round magazine, so she puts it in that secret place, reinserts the false bottom, and returns the other contents to the drawer.

Her fury is unabated. Twined with righteous indignation, it has redoubled into wrath. If Dufraine’s game is extortion—And what else can it be?—he wants some of the money that she has worked so hard and taken such risks to acquire. What’s hers is hers; and other than her own sweet ass, money is the only thing she loves with all her heart.

12

In Petoskey, Buddy Dufraine sits alone in a back booth of a bar called The Last Round. The name of the establishment seems ominous. He’s long wanted to ask a waitress or bartender why the place has been given that name out of infinite possibilities, but he doesn’t want to call attention to himself. He comes here rarely, only to meet Murdock Pennyman. The mostly morose customers, grimly drinking themselves into oblivion, have no interest in them and aren’t likely to remember them unless they call attention to themselves.

Pennyman is late. He has never before been late. Buddy got here early and ordered a beer. He is finishing it at five forty-five when he gets a text message from Claude Rains. SORRY. EMERGENCY. I NEED TO POSTPONE UNTIL 5:30 TOMORROW.

This news does not leave Buddy in a good mood. He’ll need an hour and a half to drive home to Traverse City—and he’ll have to pay for his beer. He’ll for damn sure charge it to Pennyman as a case expense.

13

At least an hour of daylight remains. Under a slowly spreading overcast, however, most of the houses on the street have lamplight in some of their windows. Buddy Dufraine’s place is well lighted, not like his black heart, not dark like the inside of his shriveled little brain.

Teresa drives to the end of the block, turns right, cruises three blocks farther, parks on the cross street, and walks briskly back to the bungalow. She’s wearing sneakers, blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a denim jacket, nothing memorable other than sunglasses and a sun hat with slits in the brim for a scarf that ties under her chin. No one can see much of her face.

Tall, dense hedges flank the property where the terminally stupid Buddy Scumbag lives, screening the house from his neighbors and, in the current circumstances, making it highly unlikely that anyone will glimpse her forcing entry.

She goes boldly around to the backyard. Nothing is happening beyond any of the windows she passes.

From her purse she withdraws a pair of thin nitrile gloves and pulls them on. She doesn’t know if she’ll kill Buddy after she gets an explanation from him, but homicide seems more likely than not.

In her purse, she has a glass cutter and duct tape, all she needs to quietly gain access to the house and surprise him.

The bottom half of the kitchen door is solid, but there are four panes in the top half. No one is in the room beyond.

Expecting nothing, she tries the door. It isn’t locked.

She draws the pistol from under her denim jacket. She screws the sound suppressor to the barrel, steps inside, eases the door shut behind her, takes off her sunglasses, puts them in her purse, and leaves the purse on the floor.

For two interminable minutes, she stands listening to the house. The silence in a quiet but occupied house is different from that in an empty house. In spite of all the lights being on, the hollowness that falls on her ears seems to say Nobody home.

Nevertheless, with caution, she clears the place room by room.

Buddy is even more of a pig than she expected, and he is also a serious case of arrested development, with his pinball machines and Victoria’s Secret posters.

In his office, the bright-yellow file folder on the desk is the loudest thing in the quiet house. Her name on the tab. Her photo taped to the file cover.

This feels like bait, a trap.

She circles behind the desk, watching the open door, alert for any sound. The deep silence persists.

If he left the lights on and the door unlocked, maybe he’s stepped out for only a few minutes. Maybe he’s gone to a nearby deli or sandwich shop to pick up takeout that will be his dinner.

With one hand, she pages through the contents of the folder and finds a long typescript with dated headings and photos from her days as a pole dancer. This is like the profiles of the heirs of Oakshore residents that the detective prepares for Murdock. When she looks at the first page, she discovers this:

Dear Mr. Rains, herewith the results of the research you requested. Please rest assured that I conducted this investigation with the utmost discretion and am certain that I never alerted the subject to my interest. She has a past quite different from what she told you, and it is my considered opinion that she is not trustworthy.

Teresa reads no further. For eleven years, she and Murdock have successfully laundered large quantities of drugs through Oakshore’s books and onto the streets of Detroit, have served frustrated heirs when their inconsiderate elders have clung to life with the tenacity of ticks embedded in a dog’s flesh. And only now, after all this time, does he decide to have her investigated. Which can mean only one thing: He wants to know her weaknesses, vulnerabilities. And he can be seeking such information for just one reason: He doesn’t think he needs her anymore, thinks he can run this operation on his own and keep all the money.

He likes the sex, and she’s as hot as a girl gets, but Murdock likes his money more, just as she does. He’s either looking for a way to squeeze her out, or he’s gathering information to use against her subtly, psychologically, until he disarms her enough that he can surprise her with a killing blow of one kind or another.

She knows she’s paranoid, but she’s paranoid in a good way. The world is full of treachery. No one can be trusted except when there is money to be made that can only be made working together. As soon as one partner thinks he doesn’t need the other, it’s time for an accident, an embolism.

She’s always been wary of Murdock Pennyman. Now her wariness proves to be justified. Her anger, which had lost some heat, blazes to rage again, to fury. Murdock is a pig. An execrable, deplorable, vain, hateful, traitorous, obnoxious swine. Really, if he thinks he can get the best of her, take advantage of her like a pimp with his whore, he’s a fatuous, imbecilic, asinine, witless, foolish dumb-ass.

She takes the file, retrieves her purse from the kitchen, and leaves by the back door.

14

Dr. Pennyman’s collection of abstract expressionism extends even into the guest bedroom, where priceless paintings of great ugliness adorn the walls: strange shapes, smudges, whorls, and slashes in the most disturbing combination of colors, as if the chaotic visions of some lunatic have been directly transferred from his deranged mind to the canvas by a psychic process. They are even more unsettling because Nameless has closed the blackout draperies and dared to switch on a bedside lamp at its lowest of three settings, so that the art exists in a gloom that seems to be exuded by the canvases themselves.

At first, as he waits for events to mature, he studies the paintings, trying without success to understand them. However, he soon feels the dislocations in the artwork infecting his mind, disordering his thoughts, disquieting him. When disquiet swiftly grows into dread, he lies on the bed and closes his eyes. Within inches of his right hand is the 9 mm Heckler & Koch USP9 Compact fitted with a sound suppressor, which had been in the suitcase that Ace’s people left in the back of the Toyota 4Runner.

15

Dr. Murdock Pennyman is expecting Teresa Garland at eight o’clock. A quiche prepared by a housekeeper is ready to be warmed in the oven, to be served with cold breast of duck on an asparagus-and-kale salad. A superb pinot grigio is chilling in an ice bucket.

They will dine, repair to Emma Mulholland’s apartment at ten o’clock, where she will be unconscious, courtesy of the spiked health drink he left with her. They’ll enter with a passkey and inject a few cubic centimeters of air into her bloodstream. Shortly thereafter, with whatever further assistance they might need to provide, Emma’s life will have been ended with dignity; she will have been released from the ravages of old age.

Although it is risky, on a few occasions, he and Teresa have incredible sex right there, right then, on the floor by the bed of the deceased. The experience is intense, the orgasm Vesuvian, though by the time they return to his house, they are ready for a much longer round two.

He is in his home office, reviewing prospects for their next act of mercy, which will have to wait until December. To avoid raising suspicion among the few public officials who aren’t in the Friends of Murdock Pennyman Club, who aren’t blinded by his charisma or grateful for his political contributions, it’s best to dispense with only two or three of these overstayers in any one year.

When his landline rings at 7:21 p.m., he recognizes the number as that of Teresa’s cell phone.

“Hello, Nurse Garland. How may I help you?”

“Oh, you know exactly how. I’m coming early—and I mean that in more than one sense. I’ll be there in ten minutes. I’ve got a muscle cramp in the most inconvenient place, and it needs relieved before dinner.”

“I was looking forward to relieving cramps later.”

“Before dinner, after dinner, even also during dinner—you’ve always been a dedicated doctor capable of relieving cramps three times in one evening.”

“I take the Hippocratic oath seriously.”

“I’m wound so tight my mainspring is gonna snap. You know what I mean?”

He knows, all right. She’s always lubricious—always, always, always—but occasionally Teresa’s sexual appetite is especially ravenous, as if she’s the goddess Aphrodite in the throes of a lust binge, sometimes on days when they murder no one, but reliably on an evening when they evict an overstayer from this world.

Now she says, “Be ready. When I walk through the door into the room with the Sam Francis, I want to see that the doctor is ready. Have your instrument out and ready for the procedure.”

She terminates the call, and Murdock springs up from his office chair. This is much more exciting than quiche with duck breast on a salad.

I want to see that the doctor is ready.

They have played this game before. Men are aroused by visual stimuli far more than are women, except in the case of Teresa, who can be, in the right mood, wildly aroused by the sight of the male body.

The “room with the Sam Francis” is his bedroom, where a splatter painting by that artist, above the headboard of the bed, suggests a violent explosion of biological fluids and substances.

The doctor strips naked, hurries into the bathroom, dabs the barest trace of verbena-scented cologne behind each ear, and stands before a full-length mirror, admiring his splendid physique. Self-admiration is one of the most reliable ways he can make himself ready. Sure enough, he rises to the occasion as he hears the double-wide garage door rumbling up at the far end of the residence.

He has left the door between garage and house unlocked. In a moment, she will be ascending the front stairs.

Returning from the bathroom to the bedroom, he is ready. He is steel. He is magnificent.

16

Climbing the stairs, she calls out, “Are you ready, Mr. Big?” He loves that Mr. Big business. In her experience, when it comes to sex, all men are adolescent idiots, regardless of their age, eager to be assured they measure up. “You better be ready,” she continues. “I am so totally ready. I want it so bad, I need it, Doctor, I’m gonna die if I don’t get it.”

Murdock is an intelligent man, but when he thinks with his little head instead of his big one, he’s got the IQ of a rabbit.

Entering the bedroom, she finds him stark naked, facing her, a stupid grin on his face, as ready as the Washington Monument.

She drops the yellow file on the floor. “You’ve been a naughty boy. Makes me sick, how naughty you’ve been.”

He grins at the file, at her again. He’s confused but prepared to do some role-playing if she wants. “Whatever I’ve done, I’ll make up for it. Take my medicine, and you won’t be sick anymore.”

“Buddy Dufraine gets into my house, goes through everything, nearly suffocates when he inhales my lingerie. So I go to his place for some answers, find my profile that he put together for you.”

Still smiling, trying to figure out what sexy little game she wants to play, he glances again at the yellow file.

She says, “You want to call Buddy to come over, make this a threesome? You both were planning to screw me, weren’t you?”

He’s pretending to be clueless, his smile faltering but not fading altogether. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He looks stupid. Suddenly he looks exactly like the stupid pimp she had to slash out of her life all those years ago, standing there naked, still rampant, as if by remaining ready he can inspire such desire in her that she’ll forgive his treachery and do him until he’s too weak to walk.

She does him, all right. She draws the pistol from under her denim jacket and shoots him four times.

She puts her gun on the dresser. From her belt, she unhooks the bolt cutter that she took from the tool cabinet in the garage. In one swift pincering of the blades, she cuts off his right thumb.

17

Inside the guest room, standing with his back to the wall beside the open door, Nameless listens to Teresa Garland sex-talking her way up the stairs.

When he hears two voices, he knows she’s in the master bedroom with Pennyman. He eases into the hall, the better to hear what is being said.

A pistol with a sound suppressor is not silent, as it is in movies; it’s merely less loud than it otherwise would be. The four shots make a distinctive, unmistakable sound, but they won’t be heard beyond the walls of this house.

When dealing with people whose connections have in the past put them above the law and seemingly beyond the reach of justice, Ace and crew design these last scenes of a mission so that the targets might take each other out, but it doesn’t always work as hoped.

Nameless reaches the open door to the master suite. He stands listening for a minute, just this side of the jamb. Slowly he brings his head forward to peer into the room.

Naked, Pennyman lies on the floor, having been euthanized in the prime of his life. He’s missing his right thumb. Evidently, it was quickly severed with the bolt cutter lying on the carpet.

18

Although he died naked, Murdock Pennyman revered the magazine GQ as a priest might revere the Bible, and he always wore the latest fashions. His walk-in closet is enormous and filled with clothes.

Along the back wall, a full-length mirror separates two banks of cabinets. Other such mirrors can be found in the bathroom, the main-floor foyer, and his study. He never tired of the sight of himself.

When Teresa presses a hidden switch in the frame, this mirror whisks out of the way, revealing the steel door to a walk-in safe. There is no combination dial or keypad, only the inset screen of a scanner. She presses the severed thumb to the screen. The system reads the print, and the door swings open, and she steps across the threshold.

Those who are agreeable to the merciful removal of a relative who has overstayed his or her welcome pay for that service with a variety of instruments: bearer bonds, cashier’s checks, rare coins, diamonds, cold cash . . . Their commissions have ranged from a million dollars to four million. Murdock and Teresa split the take—70 percent to him, 30 percent to her—launder it in the process of turning it all into currency, and deposit most of it in their separate offshore accounts. Each of them has a home safe, his larger than hers, in which a portion of this money-for-mercy income is stowed away as a run-for-it fund in case their luck sours and the bottom falls out of their operation. Murdock’s stash is in two small suitcases, each weighing about thirty pounds and containing a hundred banded packets of hundred-dollar bills: two million dollars.

She carries both bags out of the safe, out of the closet, and halts when she finds herself confronted by a tall man with eyes as icy blue as a winter sky. She drops the suitcases, turns to the dresser, but her pistol isn’t where she left it.

The stranger is holding her missing weapon at his side. He raises it to give her a good look at the muzzle.

“Whoever the hell you are,” she says, not daring to glance at the suitcases, “I know where Pennyman has two million bucks in cash. We can make a deal.”

Whatever this guy might be, he’s not a cop. He doesn’t have the look. He’s not spouting the usual you-have-a-right-to-an-attorney shit. If she can help him get his head around the idea that ignoring the murder of the doctor in return for a million dollars is a viable option, if then he lowers the gun, she will sooner than later get closer to him. In a pocket of her jacket, she has a straight razor as sharp as the one with which she did a Sweeney Todd on that pimp back in the day.

“This is for Helen Westerly and all the others,” he says, as if he means to squeeze the trigger. Which he does.

19

No matter who they are and what atrocities they have committed, Nameless regrets the need to kill a target himself, and he avoids doing so whenever possible. Regret is a kind of sorrow, but he feels no remorse, which is a kind of gnawing guilt. Sorrow, but no guilt.

Teresa is beautiful even in death. Unlike a rattlesnake, she can’t still bite reflexively, and there is no need to cut off her head to ensure she won’t lash out postmortem.

He unscrews the sound suppressor from the Sig Sauer and puts it in a sport-coat pocket. He tucks the pistol under his belt, in the small of his back.

This is one of those occasions when having had his fingerprints erased with repeated acid and CO_2 laser treatments gives him peace.

After fishing in the dead woman’s pockets for the electronic key to her Porsche Carrera, he carries the suitcases downstairs and to the back of the house, passing grotesque paintings that seem to be screaming at him.

In the garage he opens the Porsche’s tailgate, loads the bags.

Convinced that Pennyman would have kept the photos of McCall’s grandson, Toby, in his home study, rather than in his office, he returns to the house to search that room. In less than ten minutes, he finds the photographs in a file drawer, in a manila envelope.

He drives to the visitors’ parking area where he left his Toyota 4Runner.

The sky is deep purple in the east, red in the west, fading into a pleasant summer night. The moon hasn’t risen, but it will as it has for billions of years, and the stars shine on forever.

He scans the area for security patrols. None. He transfers the suitcases to the Toyota.

When he gets behind the wheel, he doesn’t at once drive away, but texts Ace of Diamonds. LEAVING OAKSHORE PARK.

A few minutes from now, Ace’s hackers, who have a back door to the facility’s security computer, will wipe all video archives for the past twelve hours, eliminating any evidence that the Toyota—or Nameless—was ever there.

20

Nameless, known here as Charles Parker of Nifelheim Casualty and Life, stands in Brock McCall’s kitchen with his host. The photos of Toby and the open suitcase are on the breakfast table between them.

At first speechless, McCall stares at the banded packets of hundred-dollar bills as Nameless says, “One million dollars. You’re an honest but experienced man, nobody’s fool. I’m sure you can find ways to launder this patiently, chunk by chunk, so that it can be put away to ensure Toby’s future, in case something happens to his mom and dad one day.”

McCall’s green eyes seem like lasers, bright and piercing. “This much, it’s got to be dirty money.”

“It’s a small part of what Murdock Pennyman and Teresa Garland received for killing their patients. It can’t be returned to the dead, and it should never be given back to the creeps who paid for the murders. You’re right, it’s dirty, but using it for Toby will clean it up.”

McCall gets two Heinekens from the refrigerator, pops off the caps, and hands one bottle to Nameless. “You look like you need it.”

“It’s been a hard day,” Nameless admits, and he takes a long swallow of beer.

“Pennyman?” McCall asks.

“Teresa Garland shot him a little while ago, although that’s not how the media will report it.”

“And what about her?”

“I don’t have time to explain. I’ve still got work to do tonight. But it’ll all be in the news tomorrow.”

They finish their beers, and McCall says, “I’ll never be able to thank you adequately.”

“There’s nothing to thank me for. It’s not my money. I only delivered it.”

At the front door, after they shake hands, McCall says, “Who are you really, Mr. Parker?”

“God’s honest truth, Mr. McCall—I don’t know.”

21

In Traverse City, at ten fifteen, lights are aglow throughout the bungalow, and the back door is still unlocked, as Nameless left it earlier. He steps into the messy kitchen. He stands for a moment, listening to the spooky music and whispered dialogue from what might be a horror movie playing on the TV in the living room. He quietly puts everything he’s brought on the table.

He withdraws a small spray bottle of chloroform from an inner pocket of his sport coat and makes his way to the living room.

Buddy Dufraine, bargain-basement Sam Spade, is asleep in one of the motorized lounge chairs, murmuring in a dream that is apparently more pleasant than the monster movie on TV. On the table next to him rests an open box containing the last two soggy slices of a large pepperoni pizza. The collection of empty beer cans on the floor has grown.

Judging by the look of the detective, he won’t wake anytime soon, but Nameless takes no chances. He sprays chloroform on the dreamer’s nose and mouth.

Dufraine’s eyes pop open, blink twice, and fall shut as he drops into a deeper sleep than the one in which he left his dream.

In the kitchen again, Nameless places the murder weapon—Teresa Garland’s 9 mm Sig Sauer, with silencer—on a shelf in the pantry, behind bags of potato chips and cheese puffs.

He opens the suitcase, removes four packets of cash, closes the bag, and carries it into the living room. He puts one of the four packets in the open pizza box, two others on Dufraine’s lap. He rips the band off the fourth packet and scatters hundred-dollar bills on the floor around the big chair.

In the bedroom, the bed appears to have been unmade since time immemorial. The TV is even bigger than the one in the living room. On the nightstand are more empty beer cans and several porno DVDs.

He puts the suitcase full of money in the closet.

When Ace’s hacker crew erased twelve hours of security-video archives in the Oakshore Park computer, they ensured that Nameless’s presence at the time of the murders was not verifiable. But they also made it more difficult for Dufraine to prove that he hadn’t been there.

The chain of evidence against the detective has missing links. However, the small-town police and the county sheriff’s department and the district attorney’s office, stressed in the best of times, will be under tremendous pressure to arrest and convict someone for the murder of the esteemed—though not for long—Dr. Pennyman and the head of his nursing staff.

Nameless sprays Dufraine with chloroform again before leaving the bungalow. He returns to his Toyota 4Runner and sends a text message to Ace. SAM SPADE SLEEPS IN MONEYED SPLENDOR.

Shortly, an anonymous caller to the police will advise that Dr. Pennyman and Nurse Garland lie dead in the physician’s house on the grounds of Oakshore Park. The call will be spoofed through Buddy Dufraine’s telecom account.

Why would the killer report the crime from a phone that can be traced to him?

No doubt, the prosecutor will explain that when the suspect was found sleeping as if drugged in his motorized reclining lounge chair, surrounded by empty beer cans, the responding officers required a few minutes to wake him, after which he wasn’t fully coherent for several minutes more. Eaten by guilt, inebriated to such an extent that he wasn’t capable of grasping the consequences of using his phone for that fateful anonymous call, the suspect stupidly incriminated himself.

Any jury of Dufraine’s peers, regarding him as he sits at the defendant’s table, will surely decide that he is beyond doubt the stupid, self-incriminating type.

A prepaid room in a three-star motel awaits Charles Parker in the port town of Ludington, approximately eighty miles south of Traverse City. Before setting out for a rest well earned, he stops at a restaurant, where he buys two takeout sandwiches and a large Coke to have as his dinner during the drive.

US Highway 31 takes him through the forests and farmlands of the night, where at this hour most of the local citizens are asleep, where the animals that wake and live in the absence of the sun are going about their business more peacefully than does humanity. There is violence even among their kind, pain and death, but they do not lie to one another. They know nothing of the numerous varieties of deception to which the human race is heir, nor are they infected with the envy that drives men and women to destroy themselves and others—and frequently even empires.

He is still far from Ludington when the headlights reveal the trio standing alongside the highway: a lovely woman of about thirty, a ponytailed girl of perhaps nine, and a boy of five. They are not hitchhikers. In fact, they are not real. Or if real, they are not flesh and blood.

Neither are they figures in a clairvoyant vision. He has seen the ponytailed girl in such a vision twice. And once before he saw her with this woman and boy in circumstances similar to these, not clairvoyantly in some distant place and time, but in the here-and-now where he lives moment to moment.

He slows as he approaches them. He could be hallucinating, but he thinks that he is not. Whatever was done to him to make him a strangely gifted hunter of the guilty has perhaps inadvertently sensitized him to those mysteries that abound in this world but are seldom seen by others—that, if seen, are either misunderstood or, out of fear, repressed in memory. Call these three individuals revenants, ghosts, restless spirits.

As he drifts past them, they meet his eyes. He believes he knew this woman and girl in his previous life. The boy is a stranger to him . . . and yet familiar. He wonders if these people were close to him. He wonders if he loved them. He wonders if he failed them.

They fade away as he passes, but ten miles farther, when he rounds a bend, they stand witness to his journey. He pulls to a stop on the highway, directly parallel to them.

He powers down the window in the front passenger door. “Come with me.”

They only stare at him, for they have no voices. They are not capable of boarding the vehicle, and they have nowhere to go in this world.

Brock McCall’s words echo in memory: After Harmony passed, I didn’t think I could go on living here. It was too much, the loss, all the memories, the continuous reminders of what had been and what never would be again.

In a state of disquiet that rapidly grows into dread, Nameless continues on to Ludington. Recently, he’s had reason to suspect that cracks are developing in his engineered amnesia and that memories unwanted might abruptly cascade upon him in drowning torrents.

He will soon have to text Ace of Diamonds and request that the wall between his past and present be rebuilt, doubled in thickness.

No, not request. Demand it.

He has missions to undertake, truth to serve. Ironically, he might be unable to undertake this work if the truth of his own past is revealed to him. Then what will he do with his life? What purpose will he have? What hope, if any?

The night is deep, and the vast lake to his right is as dark as the waters over which Death poles the gondola carrying passengers who sit in breathless silence, their hearts forever stilled.

The story continues . . .

Check out the final episode of Dean Koontz’s NAMELESS, Memories of Tomorrow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dean Koontz is the author of more than a dozen New York Times number one bestsellers. His books have sold over five hundred million copies worldwide, and his work is published in thirty-eight languages. He was born and raised in Pennsylvania and lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Elsa, in Southern California.

ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ

Ashley Bell

The City

Innocence

77 Shadow Street

What the Night Knows

Breathless

Relentless

Your Heart Belongs to Me

The Darkest Evening of the Year

The Good Guy

The Husband

Velocity

Life Expectancy

The Taking

The Face

By the Light of the Moon

One Door Away from Heaven

From the Corner of His Eye

False Memory

Seize the Night

Fear Nothing

Mr. Murder

Dragon Tears

Hideaway

Cold Fire

The Bad Place

Midnight

Lightning

Watchers

Strangers

Twilight Eyes

Darkfall

Phantoms

Whispers

The Mask

The Vision

The Face of Fear

Night Chills

Shattered

The Voice of the Night

The Servants of Twilight

The House of Thunder

The Key to Midnight

The Eyes of Darkness

Shadowfires

Winter Moon

The Door to December

Dark Rivers of the Heart

Icebound

Strange Highways

Intensity

Sole Survivor

Ticktock

The Funhouse

Demon Seed

Jane Hawk

The Silent Corner

The Whispering Room

The Crooked Staircase

The Forbidden Door

The Night Window

Odd Thomas

Odd Thomas

Forever Odd

Brother Odd

Odd Hours

Odd Interlude

Odd Apocalypse

Deeply Odd

Saint Odd

Frankenstein

Prodigal Son

City of Night

Dead and Alive

Lost Souls

The Dead Town

Nonfiction

A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- The story continues . . .
- About the Author
- Also by Dean Koontz