Читать книгу Dean Koontz 2-Book Thriller Collection: Innocence, The City - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 41

THE POND IN RIVERSIDE COMMONS WAS ONLY minutes from Gwyneth’s apartment, but apparently she needed an hour to get there, which left me with time to do something useful. After turning on the lights and closing the bedroom window that I had left open, I began work in the living room, picking up the books that Ryan Telford had thrown on the floor. I smoothed rumpled dust jackets and returned the volumes to the shelves in alphabetical order by the authors’ names.

When that task was completed, I intended to gather up the broken plates and glasses in the kitchen. Instead I went to the window at which Gwyneth must have been standing when she saw Telford get out of his car.

The snow had not yet begun to fall. On the farther side of the street, Riverside Commons looked darker from here than it had seemed when I’d been within its boundaries, the low path lights now mostly screened by trees. It wasn’t the biggest park in the city or even the second biggest, but at that moment the Commons looked like a place in which you could easily become lost, wandering into territory that had never before presented itself to park visitors, where the trees were mutant and the grass as gray as an old man’s hair.

One summer morning two and a half years earlier, they had found a woman floating dead and naked in the pond, pale and facedown among the koi, her clothes scattered carelessly on the shore as though, in the grip of some pagan impulse, she had undressed there for a swim. She proved to have been a nurse, a wife, a mother of two, and she lived close enough to the hospital to walk home from work in the early evening. Before long they found the three young men—Orcott, Clerkman, and Sabbateau—who used her like a toy, broke her, and threw her away in a quickly and ineptly staged fake drowning. Orcott had a doting uncle, Benton Orcott, who owned three flower shops and from whom they had borrowed a delivery van. They put an old mattress in the back and called the van their pussy wagon. The crimes were committed on the move, while they took turns driving and riding shotgun, one of them always with the woman. The wife of Benton Orcott, Verbina, despised her nephew, whom she regarded as a useless, depraved doper. Certain that he would damage the van, she inspected it the next morning. Although Verbina was unable to find a dent or scratch, she discovered a nurse’s cap under the front passenger seat and in the cap a pair of panties, which one of the rapists had kept for a souvenir but had forgotten to retrieve. She called the police. Two days later, they found the mattress stored for future use in an abandoned building across the street from the nephew’s apartment house. The three were high-school graduates who had been unable to find employment in the perpetually bad economy. Their defense attorney lamented that society had failed them. The nurse’s name was Claire. The name comes from the Latin clarus, which means “clear, bright, shining.” In his confession, Sabbateau said that they had chosen her because she “was so pretty that she seemed to shine.”

I had not come to the window to wait for the snow or to dwell upon the more depressing moments of the park’s history. I disengaged the latch, raised the lower sash, and discovered upon the sill the same Greek-like letters, printed with a felt-tip marker, that were on the sill of the bedroom window. No doubt they were at every window in the apartment. As a cur of cold wind snuffled and licked at my hands, I closed the sash and engaged the latch.

In the small vestibule, I peered through the fish-eye lens to be sure that no one lurked on the fourth-floor landing. When I opened the door, the felt-tip inscription graced the threshold. I closed the door, locked it, and stood there for a moment, wondering.

Those symbols—or most likely words—seemed to be meant to ward off some enemy. They had not stopped Ryan Telford; and they would not have kept out men like the three who had murdered the nurse. Whatever Gwyneth feared most, it had not been born of man and woman.