Page 35 (1/2)

They found the two boys in one of the bedrooe and airy, with bunk beds There were built-in bookshelves full of children’s books On the walls were paintings that Ned had done just for his kids, whimsical fantasy scenes quite unlike the pieces for which he ell known: a pig in a tuxedo, dancing with a cow in an evening gown; the interior of a spaceship command chamber, where all the astronauts were toads; an eerie yet charht of a fullolf having a grand and giddy tis

The boys were in one corner, beyond an array of overturned Tonka Toys The younger boy, Terry, was behind Lee, who seemed to have made a valiant effort to protect his s out into the rooazes still fixed upon whatever had descended upon them yesterday Lee’s muscles had locked, so that his thin arms were in the same position now as they had been in the last seconds of his life: raised in front of hi off blows

Bryce knelt in front of the kids He put one tre to believe that the child was actually dead

Jenny knelt beside him

"Those are the Bischoffs’ two boys," she said, unable to keep her voice fro "So now the whole fa down Bryce’s face

Jenny tried to reht? About the sa in the hospital in Santa Mira this very minute, comatose, just as he had been for the past year He was pretty etable Yes, but even that was better than this Anything was better than this

Eventually, Bryce’s tears dried up There was rage in hiet them for this," he said, "Whoever did this… I’ll make them pay"

Jenny had never th and purpose, but he was also capable of tenderness

She wanted to hold hiuarded about expressing her own emotional state If she had possessed his openness, she would never have becoed froh she wanted to be So, in response to his vow to get the killers of the Bischoffs’ children, she said, "But what if it isn’t anything human that killed them? Not all evil is in men There’s evil in nature The blindevil of cancer This thing here could be like that-re it to court if it isn’t even human What then?"

"Whoever or whatever the hell it is, I’ll get it I’ll stop it I’ll make it pay for what’s been done here," he said stubbornly

Frank Autry’s search tea the Catholic church The fourth house wasn’t eh school teacher orked in Santa Mira but who chose to live here in the ed to his lish class only five years ago The teacher was not swollen or bruised like the other corpses; he had taken his own life Backed into a corner of his bedroom, he had put the barrel of a32 autoer Evidently, death by his own hand had been preferable to whatever it had been about to do to hiroup through a few houses without finding any bodies Then, in the fifth house, they discovered an elderly husband and wife locked in a bathroom, where they had tried to hide from their killer She was sprawled in the tub He was in a heap on the floor

"They were patients of mine," Jenny said, "Nick and Melina Papandrakis"

Tal wrote their names down on a list of the dead

Like Harold Ordnay and his wife in the Candle glow Inn, Nick Papandrakis had atteer at the killer He had taken some iodine from the medicine cabinet and had used it to paint on the wall He hadn’t had a chance to finish even one word There were only two letters and part of a third:

PR(

"Can anyone figure out what he intended to write?" Bryce asked

They all took turns squeezing into the bathroom and stepped over Nick Papandrakis’s corpse to have a look at the orange brown letters on the wall, but none of them had any flashes of inspiration

Bullets

In the house next to the Papandrakis’s, the kitchen floor was littered with expended bullets Not entire cartridges Just dozens of lead slugs, and their brass casings

The fact that there were no ejected casings anywhere in the roounfire had taken place here There was no odor of gunpowder No bullet holes in the walls or cabinets

There were just bullets all over the floor, as if they had rained ically out of thin air

Frank Autry scooped up a handful of the gray lumps of metal He wasn’t a ballistics expert, but, oddly, none of the bullets was fragmented or badly deformed, and that enabled him to see that they had come from a variety of weapons Most of them-scores of them-with caliber of auns hich General Copperfield’s support units were arun? Frank wondered Are these the rounds Harker fired at his killer in the meat locker at Gil Martin’s Market?

He frowned, perplexed

He dropped the bullets, and they clattered on the floor He plucked several other slugs off the tiles There were a22 and a32 and another22 and a38 There were even a lot of shotgun pellets

He picked up a single45-caliber bullet and examined it with special interest It was exactly the aan hunkered down beside him

Frank didn’t look at Gordy He continued to stare intently at the slug He restling with an eerie thought

Gordy scooped a few bullets off the kitchen tiles "-They aren’t deformed at all"

Frank nodded

"They had to’ve hit so," Gordy said, "So they should be deformed Some of them should be, anyway, "He paused, then said" Hey, you’re aabout?"

"Paul Henderson" Frank held the45 slug in front of Gordy’s face, "Paul fired three like this last night, over at the substation"

"At his killer"

"Yeah"

"So?"

"So I have this crazy hunch that if we asked the lab to run ballistics tests on it, they’d find residue from Paul’s revolver"

Gordy blinked at him

"And," Frank said, "I also think that if we searched through all of the slugs on the floor here, we’d find exactly two more like this one Not just one more, mind you And not three s as this one"

"You ht"