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After locking the house, he returned the spare key to the hole in the tree stuate of the Explorer and checked the floor of the cargo space for Valis’s blood None had soaked through the one into the lava pipe with the corpse

He drove away from the Olsen house with relief, with a cautious opti sense of triumph

The site of the Valis project looked like an auto dealership that sold only police vehicles

Lots of uniforms milled around the motor home, the tent, the mural Sheriff John Palmer would be one of the buhway Billy realized that he was still wearing latex gloves All right No problele available space re lot at the tavern The news of Valis and his grisly collection would bring out all the regulars as well as new custos with human brains Good for Jackie

When Billy’s house caht of it warmed him Home With the artist dead, the locks would not have to be rekeyed Security was his again, and privacy

In the garage, he cleaned out the Explorer, bagged the trash, put away the power screwdriver and other tools

So souvenirs, a last bit of cleanup to be done

When he stepped across the kitchen threshold, he allowed his instinct to guide hiht Giselle Winslow’s hand here in a jar full of formaldehyde Such a container would have been too aard and fragile to allow quick work on the sly Instinct suggested the sierator and opened the freezer drawer at the bottoes of leftovers were two foilwrapped objects that he did not recognize He opened them on the floor Two hands, each froed to the redhead

Valis had used the new non-stick foil The manufacturer would be pleased to hear that it worked as advertised

Billy couldn’t stop treht that he had become inured to horror He had not Before the day was done, he would have to throw out all the contents of the freezer No contaht of contaerator itself He wanted the hands out of the house He didn’t expect the police to knock on the door with a search warrant, but he wanted the hands gone, anyway Burying them somewhere on the property seemed like a bad idea At the very least, he would have drea into the house at night

Until he could decide what to do with them, he put the frozen hands in a sht to extract the folded snapshot of Ralph Cottle as a young man, Cottle’s membership card in the American Society of Skeptics, and the photo of the redhead He had kept these with the vague idea of turning the tables on the freak and planting bits of evidence on him He tossed them in the cooler with the hands

He had Lanny’s cell phone, which he hesitated to add to the cooler As if the hands would strip off their foil shrouds and call 911 He put the cell phone on the kitchen table

To get the hands out of the house, he took the cooler to the garage and put it in the Explorer, on the floor in front of the passenger’s seat He locked the garage after hih overhead, a hawk conducted its last hunt of the day

Billy stood watching as the bird described a widening gyre

Then he went inside, eager to take a long shower as hot as he could tolerate

The business with the women’s hands had suppressed his appetite He didn’t think he would feel co at home

Maybe he would return to the truck stop for dinner He felt as if he owed the waitress, Jaser tip than the one he had previously left her In the hallway, heading for the bathrooh the doorway, he found the shades drawn, as he had left the the desk laer to dispose of Cottle Without going around the desk, he switched off the la on the toilet, Billy could too easily remember him there This was his only bathrooreater than his squearadually lorious

A couple of tirew claustrophobic behind the shower curtain and becah role in a gender-reversal version of Psycho

Happily, hethe curtain open He concluded his shoithout being knifed

He wondered how ot over the heebie-jeebies Most likely, the rest of his life

After toweling off and dressing, he applied a fresh bandage to the hook wounds in his forehead

He went into the kitchen, opened an Elephant beer, and used it to chase a pair of Motrin The inflammation in his left hand worried him a little At the table with the beer, and with a few first-aid items, he tried to introduce iodine into the nail wound, then applied a fresh liquid bandage Beyond the ilight approached

He intended to go to Whispering Pines and spend a few hours He had arranged to stay throughout the night in a prayer vigil; but in spite of his tenhour sleep, he didn’t think he would be able to stay that long With Valis dead,

When Billy had tended to the nail wound, as he sat at the table finishing the beer, his attention fell on the microwave The security video All this while, he’d been recording hiht hi the hands out of the freezer The cale lens, but he didn’t believe that it could have captured his gruesoh to serve as evidence

Nevertheless…

He got the stepladder from the pantry He cli the reverse-scanhile had not revealed the severed hands

Suddenly wondering whether Valis ht have visited the house for some purpose between the ti in the motor home before dawn, he continued the reverse scan beyond his entrance shortly after six o’clock

He didn’t have to go all the way to the previous day At 3:07 this same day, while Billy had still been asleep at the Olsen place, aroom, across the kitchen to the door, and reversed out of the house

The intruder was not Valis, of course, because Valis was dead

Chapter 75

Billy couldn’t re Lanny’s cell phone, he called directory assistance in Denver, and they put hiard

Billy paced while the phone rang out there in the shadow of the Rockies Maybe Valis had been confident of Billy’s conversion because he had previously bent so him None of the sixteen members of his creas like him, but that didn’t ard answered on the fifth ring, and Billy identified hiard said, "I hear blood in your voice, Deputy Tell ot your ot an urgent situation here I need to know--the year Judith Kessel hiard said "He was the artist in residence for sixhe called perfors in thousands of yards of blue silk and hung them with--"

Billy interrupted "Steve Zillis had a perfect alibi"

"It atertight," Ozgard assured hih it if you have ten minutes"

"I don’t But tell me--do you remember--at the university, as Zillis’s major?"

"He was an art major"

"Sonofabitch"

No wonder Zillis hadn’t wanted to talk about the mannequins They weren’t just expressions of the sick dreams of a sociopathic killer--they were his art

At that point, Billy hadn’t yet discovered the key words that would reveal the identity of the freak-performance art He’d had only perforive hi a harmless, put-upon pervert