Blind Lake

“I met your daughter here the other day,” Charlie said.

Ray cocked his head like a hunting animal catching a scent. “Tessa was here?”

“Well, she — yeah, she came by and wanted to see the works.”

“By herself?”

“Her mom picked her up afterward.”

Ray grimaced. “I wish I could tell you I’m proud of my daughter, Charlie. Unfortunately I can’t. In many ways she’s her mother’s child. You always take that chance when you spin the genetic roulette wheel. You have any kids?”

“No,” Charlie said.

“Good for you. Never unwind your base pairs. It’s a sucker’s bet.”

“Sir,” Charlie said, trying not to stare.

“What did she want, Charlie?”

“Your daughter? Just to look around.”

“Tess has had some emotional problems. Sometimes madness is contagious.”

If it’s catching, Charlie thought, then you’re overdue for a checkup. “Strange things happen,” he said, trying to make himself sound amicable. “Why don’t you take off your shoes and put on a pair of these disposables. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Where are you going?”

“See a man about the plumbing,” Charlie said.

He walked far enough down the main corridor to make it look convincing. As soon as he turned a corner he thumbed his pocket server and asked for Tabby Menkowitz in Security. She picked up a moment later.

“Charlie? It’s an hour to dawn — what are you doing here?”

“I think we might have a problem, Tab.”

“We’ve got lots of problems. What’s your flavor?”

“Ray Scutter’s in my office and he wants a tour of the plant.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I wish I was.”

“Tell him to make an appointment. We’re busy.”

“Tabby, I can’t just tell him—” He thought about what she’d said. “Busy with what?”

“You don’t know? Talk to A

“I don’t think he’s in a mood to wait. He—”

“Charlie! I’m busy, okay? Handle it!”

Charlie hurried back to his office. Something major was happening with the O/BECs, and he wanted to get downstairs and look into it. But first things first. See Ray out the door, if possible, or put him on the phone to Tabby if he had a problem with that.

But the office was empty.

Ray was missing. Also missing, Charlie realized, was his own all-pass card, plucked off the lapel of the jacket he had hung up on the hook by the door.

“Shit,” Charlie said.

He called Tabby Menkowitz again, but this time he couldn’t get through. Something wrong with his pocket server. It chimed once and went blue-screen.

He was still fiddling with it when the floor began to move under his feet.

Twenty-Seven

Chris came out of a black and dreamless sleep to the chirping of his pocket server, which he had left on the bedside table and which glowed there like a luminous pencil. He checked the inset clock before he thumbed the answer button. Four in the morning. He’d had about an hour of real sleep. The storm was still gnawing at the skin of the house.

It was Elaine Coster calling. She was at the Blind Lake clinic, she said, with Sebastian Vogel and Sue Sampel. Sue had been stabbed. Stabbed by Ray Scutter. “Maybe you guys ought to get down here, if you can make it in this weather. I mean, it’s not totally dire; Sue’s going to live and everything — in fact, she was asking after you — but I keep thinking it would be wise for the bunch of us to stay together for a while.”

Chris watched Marguerite turn uneasily under the blankets. “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

He woke her and told her what had happened.

Marguerite let Chris drive through the snow. She sat in the back of the car with Tess, who was only grudgingly awake and still ignorant of what her father had done. Marguerite meant to keep it that way, at least for now. Tess was under more than enough stress.

For the duration of the drive, with Tessa’s head cradled in her lap, and snow clinging to the windows of the car, and the whole of Blind Lake wrapped in a gelid, bitter darkness, Marguerite thought about Ray.

She had misjudged him.

She had never believed Ray would let himself be reduced to physical violence. Even now, she had a hard time picturing it. Ray with a knife. It had been a knife, Chris had said. Ray with a knife, using it. Ray putting the knife into Sue Sampel’s body.

“You know,” she said to Chris, “I only fainted once in my life. It was because of a snake.”

Chris wrestled the steering wheel as they turned a corner toward the mallway. The car fishtailed, microprocessors blinking loss-of-traction alerts before it straightened out. But he had time to shoot her a curious look.

“I was seven years old,” Marguerite said. “I walked out of the house one summer morning and there was a snake curled up on the porch stairs, basking in the sun. A big snake, bright and shiny against the old wood step. Too big and too shiny to be real. I assumed it was fake — that one of the neighbor kids had left it there to tease me. So I jumped over it. Three times. Three separate times. In case anyone was looking, just to prove I couldn’t be fooled. The snake never moved, and I went off to the library without giving it a second thought. But when I came home my father told me he’d killed a rattler that morning. It had come up on the porch and he’d used a shovel to cut it in half. The snake was lethargic in the cool air, he said, but he had to be careful. A snake like that can strike faster than lightning and carries enough venom to kill a horse.” She looked at Chris. “That’s when I fainted.”

They reached the Blind Lake clinic twenty minutes later. Chris parked the car under the shelter of a concrete overhang, its passenger-side wheels straddling the sidewalk. Elaine Coster met them in the lobby. Sebastian Vogel was there, too, slumped in a chair, his head in his hands.

Elaine gave Marguerite a hard look. “Sue wants to see you.”

“Wants to see me?”

“The wound is more or less superficial. She’s been stitched and drugged. The nurse says she ought to be sleeping, but she was wide awake a few minutes ago, and when I mentioned you guys were coming in she said, ‘I want to talk to Marguerite.’”

Oh, God, Marguerite thought. “I guess if she’s still awake—”

“I’ll show you the way.”

Chris promised to look after Tess, who was taking a sleepy interest in the waiting-room toys.

“Come on in, hon,” Sue said. “I’m too feeble to bite.”

Marguerite edged inside the room.

Sue’s room was just down the hall from the room where Adam Sandoval lay comatose — the man who had dropped into Blind Lake in a damaged aircraft. Sue definitely wasn’t comatose, but she looked dismayingly weak. She was propped in a semireclined position, a saline drip plugged into the crook of her elbow. Her face was pale. She seemed much older than her forty-something years. But she managed to smile. “Honest,” she said, “it’s not as bad as it looks. I lost some blood, but the knife didn’t cut anything more important than what Dr. Goldhar calls ‘adispose tissue.’ Fat, in other words. I guess I was rescued by every dessert I’ve ever eaten. Like the guy in the movies who would’ve been shot through the heart if not for the Bible in his pocket. There’s a chair by the bed, Marguerite. Don’t you want to sit down? It makes me tired to see you standing there.”

Dutifully, Marguerite sat. “You must be having a lot of pain.”

“Not anymore. They pumped me full of morphine. Or something like it. The nurse says it usually makes people sleepy, but I’m an ‘idiosyncratic responder.’ I think that means it made me want to sit up and talk. Do you suppose this is how drug addicts feel? On a good day?”