Page 44 (1/2)

"Fantasy World," he said urgently, "where they had the fire years ago, abandoned now, that’s where he’s going Jesus Christ, Lindsey, drive like you’ve never driven in your life, put the pedal to the floor, the son of a bitch, the crazy rotten son of a bitch is taking her down ah she could have no idea what heeastward faster than was safe on that highway, through the last clusters of closely spaced lights, out of civilization into ever darker realerator in the kitchen for the e to liberate a couple of steaks froht in the coolish night air, which he found refreshing He stood for aslow deep breaths to clear his head a little

He had no appetite for anything except perhaps more wine, but he did not want Kari to see hiery scheduled for the following day, he never knehat eht require the skills of the resuscitation team, and he felt a responsibility to those potential patients

In his darkest hours, he so the field of resuscitation ery When he saw a reanimated patient return to a useful life of work and family and service, he knew a reward sweeter than most other men could ever know But in the moment of crisis, when the candidate for resuscitation lay on the table, Jonas rarely knew anything about hi evil back into the world once the world had shed it That was ht upon his conscience Thus far, being a religious h with his share of doubts--he had trusted in God to guide hiiven him his brain and his skills to use, and it was not his place to out-guess God and withhold his services fro new factor in the equation If he had brought Jeremy back, and if Jere about

The cool air no longer see It seeped into the hollows of his spine

Okay, dinner Two steaks Filet rilled, with a little Worcestershire sauce Salads with no dressing but a squirt of lemon and a sprinkle of black pepper Maybe he did have an appetite He didn’t eat eon, after all, and saw firsthand the gruesoh-fat diet

He went to the freezer in the corner He pushed the latch-release and put up the lid

Within lay Morton Redlow, late of the Redlow Detective Agency, pale and gray as if carved from marble but not yet obscured by a layer of frost A smear of blood had frozen into a brittle crust on his face, and there was a terrible vacancy where his nose had been His eyes were open Forever

Jonas did not recoil As a surgeon, he was equally fay, and he was not easily repulsed So in him died His heart turned as cold as that of the detective before him In some fundamental way, he knew that he was finished as a man He didn’t trust God any more Not any more What God? But he was not nauseated or forced to turn away in disgust

He saw the folded note clutched in Redlow’s stiff right hand The deadthe freezing process, shrinking away from the paper around which the killer had pressed thenized his son’s neat penmanship The post-coma aphasia had been faked His retardation was an immensely clever ruse

The note said, Dear Daddy: For a proper burial, they’ll need to knohere to find his nose Look up his back end He stuck it in my business, so I stuck it in his If he’d had any manners, I would have treated him better I’m sorry, sir, if this behavior distresses you

Lindsey drove with ut every planning flaw in a highway not always designed for speed There was little traffic as they moved deeper into the east, which stacked the odds in their favor when once she crossed the center line in thesnapped on his safety harness again, Hatch used the car phone to get Jonas Nyebern’s office number from information, then to call the number itself, which was answered at once by a physician’s-service operator She took his h the operator seemed sincere in her promise to pass it on to the doctor, Hatch was not confident that his definition of "immediately" and hers were materially the same

He saw all the connections so clearly now, but he knew he could not have seen them sooner Jonas’s question in the office on Monday took on a new significance: Did Hatch, he asked, believe that evil was only the result of the acts of men, or did he think that evil was a real force, a presence that walked the world? The story Jonas had told of losing wife and daughter to a homicidal, psychopathic son, and the son himself to suicide, connected now to the vision of the wo The father’s collections And the son’s The Satanic aspects to the visions hat one ainst a father to whoion was a center post of life And finally--he and Jeremy Nyebern shared one obvious link, miraculous resurrection at the hands of the sa?" Lindsey demanded, when he told her only a little more than he had told the physician’s-service operator

"I don’t know"

He couldn’t think about anything except what he had seen in those last visions, less than half of which he understood The part he had comprehended, the nature of Jereina

Without having seen the collection as Hatch had seen it, Lindsey was fixated, instead, on the mystery of the link, which was so the identity of the killer in sunglasses "What about the visions? How do they fit the da to make sense of the supernatural in perhaps not too different a way fro it to ordered ies on Masonite

"I don’t know," he said

"The link that’s letting you follow him--"