He sat behind a one-way gla.s.s with a clipboard, looking into a room which had been outfitted as a nursery. On the far wall, the cow was jumping over the moon and the mouse ran up the clock. Miss Sidley sat in her wheelchair with a story book, surrounded by a group of trusting, drooling, smiling, cataclysmically r.e.t.a.r.ded children. They smiled at her and drooled and touched her with small wet fingers while attendants at the next window watched for the first sign of an aggressive move.

For a time Buddy thought she responded well. She read aloud, stroked a girl's head, consoled a small boy when he fell over a toy block. Then she seemed to see something which disturbed her; a frown creased her brow and she looked away from the children.

'Take me away, please,' Miss Sidley said, softly and tonelessly, to no one in particular.

And so they took her away. Buddy Jenkins watched the children watch her go, their eyes wide and empty, but somehow deep. One smiled, and another put his fingers in his mouth slyly. Two little girls clutched each other and giggled.

That night Miss Sidley cut her throat with a bit of broken mirror-gla.s.s, and after that Buddy Jenkins began to watch the children more and more. In the end, he was hardly able to take his eyes off them.

The Night Flier.

1.

In spite of his pilot's license, Dees didn't really get interested until the murders at the airport in Maryland - the third and fourth murders in the series. Then he smelled that special combination of blood and guts which readers of Inside View had come to expect. Coupled with a good dimestore mystery like this one, you were looking at the likelihood of an explosive circulation boost, and in the tabloid business, increased circulation was more than the name of the game; it was the Holy Grail.

For Dees, however, there was bad news as well as good. The good news was that he had gotten to the story ahead of the rest of the pack; he was still undefeated, still champeen, still top hog in the sty. The bad news was that the roses really belonged to Morrison . . . so far, at least. Morrison, the freshman editor, had gone on picking away at the d.a.m.ned thing even after Dees, the veteran reporter, had a.s.sured him there was nothing there but smoke and echoes. Dees didn't like the idea that Morrison had smelled blood first - hated it, in fact - and this left him with a completely understandable urge to p.i.s.s the man off. And he knew just how to do it.

'Duffrey, Maryland, huh?'

Morrison nodded.

'Anyone in the straight press pick up on it yet?' Dees asked, and was gratified to see Morrison bristle at once.

'If you mean has anyone suggested there's a serial killer out there, the

answer is no,' he said stiffly.

But it won't be long, Dees thought.

'But it won't be long,' Morrison said. 'If there's another one - '

'Gimme the file,' Dees said, pointing to the buff-colored folder lying on Morrison's eerily neat desk.

The balding editor put a hand on it instead, and Dees understood two things: Morrison was going to give it to him, but not until he had been made to pay a little for his initial unbelief . . . and his lofty I'm-the-veteran-around-here att.i.tude. Well, maybe that was all right. Maybe even the top hog in the sty needed to have his curly little tail twisted every now and then, just to refresh his memory on his place in the scheme of things.

'I thought you were supposed to be over at the Museum of Natural History, talking to the penguin guy,' Morrison said. The corners of his mouth curved up in a small but undeniably evil smile. 'The one who thinks they're smarter than people and dolphins.'

Dees pointed to the only other thing on Morrison's desk besides the folder and the pictures of his nerdy-looking wife and three nerdy-looking kids: a large wire basket labelled DAILY BREAD. It currently contained a single thin sheaf of ma.n.u.script, six or eight pages held together with one of Dees's distinctive magenta paper-clips, and an envelope marked CONTACT SHEETS DO NOT BEND.

Morrison took his hand off the folder (looking ready to slap it back on if Dees so much as twitched), opened the envelope, and shook out two sheets covered with black-and-white photos not much bigger than postage stamps. Each photo showed long files of penguins staring silently out at the viewer. There was something undeniably creepy about them - to Merton Morrison they looked like George Romero zombies in tuxedos. He nodded and slipped them back into the envelope. Dees disliked all editors on principle, but he had to admit that this one at least gave credit where credit was due. It was a rare attribute, one Dees suspected would cause the man all sorts of medical problems in later life. Or maybe the problems had already started. There he sat, surely not thirty-five yet, with at least seventy per cent of his skull exposed.

'Not bad,' Morrison said. 'Who took them?'

'I did,' Dees said. 'I always take the pix that go with my stories. Don't you ever look at the photo credits?'

'Not usually, no,' Morrison said, and glanced at the temp headline Dees had slugged at the top of his penguin story. Libby Grannit in Comp would come up with a punchier, more colorful one, of course - that was, after all, her job - but Dees's instincts were good all the way up to headlines, and he usually found the right street, if not often the actual address and apartment number. ALIEN INTELLIGENCE AT NORTH POLE, this one read. Penguins weren't aliens, of course, and Morrison had an idea that they actually lived at the South Pole, but those things hardly mattered. Inside View readers were crazy about both Aliens and Intelligence (perhaps because a majority of them felt like the former and sensed in themselves a deep deficiency of the latter), and that was what mattered.

'The headline's a little lacking,' Morrison began, 'but - '

' - that's what Libby's for,' Dees finished for him. 'So . . . '

'So?' Morrison asked. His eyes were wide and blue and guileless behind his gold-rimmed gla.s.ses. He put his hand back down on top of the folder, smiled at Dees, and waited.

'So what do you want me to say? That I was wrong?'

Morrison's smile widened a millimeter or two. 'Just that you might have been wrong. That'd do, I guess - you know what a p.u.s.s.ycat I am.'

'Yeah, tell me about it,' Dees said, but he was relieved. He could take a little abas.e.m.e.nt; it was the actual crawling around on his belly that he didn't like.

Morrison sat looking at him, right hand splayed over the file.

'Okay; I might have been wrong.'

'How large-hearted of you to admit it,' Morrison said, and handed the file over.

Dees s.n.a.t.c.hed it greedily, took it over to the chair by the window, and opened it. What he read this time - it was no more than a loose a.s.semblage of wire-service stories and clippings from a few small-town weeklies - blew his mind.

I didn't see this before, he thought, and on the heels of that: Why didn't I see this before?

He didn't know . . . but he did know he might have to rethink that idea of being top hog in the tabloid sty if he missed any more stories like this. He knew something else, as well: if his and Morrison's positions had been reversed (and Dees had turned down the editor's chair at Inside View not once but twice over the last seven years), he would have made Morrison crawl on his belly like a reptile before giving him the file.

f.u.c.k that, he told himself. You would have fired his a.s.s right out the door.

The idea that he might be burning out fluttered through his mind. The burnout rate was pretty high in this business, he knew. Apparently you could spend only so many years writing about flying saucers carrying off whole Brazilian villages (usually ill.u.s.trated by out-of-focus photographs of light-bulbs hanging from strands of thread), dogs that could do calculus, and out-of-work daddies chopping their kids up like kindling wood. Then one day you suddenly snapped. Like Dottie Walsh, who had gone home one night and taken a bath with a dry-cleaning bag wrapped around her head.

Don't be a fool, he told himself, but he was uneasy just the same. The story was sitting there, right there, big as life and twice as ugly. How in the h.e.l.l could he have missed it?

He looked up at Morrison, who was rocked back in his desk chair with his hands laced together over his stomach, watching him. 'Well?' Morrison asked.

'Yeah,' he said. 'This could be big. And that's not all. I think it's the real goods.'

'I don't care if it's the real goods or not,' Morrison said, 'as long as it sells papers. And it's going to sell lots of papers, isn't it, Richard?'

'Yes.' He got to his feet and tucked the folder under his arm. 'I want to run this guy's backtrail, starting with the first one we know about, up in Maine.'

'Richard?'

He turned back at the door and saw Morrison was looking at the contact sheets again. He was smiling.

'What do you think if we run the best of these next to a photo of Danny DeVito in that Batman movie?'

'It works for me,' Dees said, and went out. Questions and self-doubts were suddenly, blessedly set aside; the old smell of blood was back in his nose, strong and bitterly compelling, and for the time being he only wanted to follow it all the way to the end. The end came a week later, not in Maine, not in Maryland, but much farther south, in North Carolina.

2.

It was summertime, which meant the living should have been easy and the cotton high, but nothing was coming easy for Richard Dees as that long day wound its way down toward dark.

The major problem was his inability - at least so far - to get into the small Wilmington airport, which served only one major carrier, a few commuter airlines, and a lot of private planes. There were heavy thunderstorm cells in the area and Dees was circling ninety miles from the airfield, pogoing up and down in the unsteady air and cursing as the last hour of daylight began to slip away. It was 7:45 P.M. by the time he was given landing clearance. That was less than forty minutes before official sundown. He didn't know if the Night Flier stuck to the traditional rules or not, but if he did, it was going to be a close thing.

And the Flier was here; of that Dees was sure. He had found the right place, the right Cessna Skymaster. His quarry could have picked Virginia Beach, or Charlotte, or Birmingham, or some point even farther south, but he hadn't. Dees didn't know where he had hidden between leaving Duffrey, Maryland, and arriving here, and didn't care. It was enough to know that his intuition had been correct - his boy had continued to work the windsock circuit. Dees had spent a good part of the last week calling all the airports south of Duffrey that seemed right for the Flier's MO, making the rounds again and again, using his finger on the Touch-Tone in his Days Inn motel room until it was sore and his contacts on the other end had begun to express their irritation with his persistence. Yet in the end persistence had paid off, as it so often did.

Private planes had landed the night before at all of the most likely airfields, and Cessna Skymaster 3375 at all of them. Not surprising, since they were the Toyotas of private aviation. But the Cessna 337 that had landed last night in Wilmington was the one he was looking for; no question about it. He was on the guy.

Dead on the guy.

'N471B, vector ILS runway 34,' the radio voice drawled laconically into his earphones. 'Fly heading 160. Descend and maintain 3,000.'

'Heading 160. Leaving 6 for 3,000, roger.'

'And be aware we still got some nasty weather down here.'

'Roger,' Dees said, thinking that ole Farmer John, down there in whatever beer-barrel pa.s.sed for Air Traffic Control in Wilmington, was sure one h.e.l.l of a sport to tell him that. He knew there was still nasty weather in the area; he could see the thunderheads, some with lightning still going off inside them like giant fireworks, and he had spent the last forty minutes or so circling and feeling more like a man in a blender than one in a twin-engine Beechcraft.

He flicked off the autopilot, which had been taking him around and around the same stupid patch of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't North Carolina farmland for far too long, and grabbed a handful of wheel. No cotton down there, high or otherwise, that he could see. Just a bunch of used-up tobacco patches now overgrown with kudzu. Dees was happy to point his plane's nose toward Wilmington and start down the ramp, monitored by pilot, ATC, and tower, for the ILS approach.

He picked up the microphone, thought about giving ole Farmer John there a yell, asking him if there happened to be anything weird going on downstairs - the dark-and-stormy-night kind of stuff Inside View readers loved, perhaps - then racked the mike again. It was still awhile until sunset; he had verified the official Wilmington time on his way down from Washington National. No, he thought, maybe he'd just keep his questions to himself for a little while longer.

Dees believed the Night Flier was a real vampire about as much as he believed it was the Tooth Fairy who had put all those quarters under his pillow when he was a kid, but if the guy thought he was a vampire - and this guy, Dees was convinced, really did - that would probably be enough to make him conform to the rules.

Life, after all, imitates art.

Count Dracula with a private pilot's license.

You had to admit, Dees thought, it was a lot better than killer penguins plotting the overthrow of the human race.

The Beech jounced as he pa.s.sed through a thick membrane of c.u.mulus on his steady downward course. Dees cursed and trimmed the plane, which seemed increasingly unhappy with the weather.

You and me both, babes, Dees thought.

When he came into the clear again, he could see the lights of Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach clearly.

Yes, sir, the fatties who shop at 7-Eleven are gonna love this one, he thought as lightning flashed on the port side. They're gonna pick up about seventy zillion copies of this baby when they go out for their nightly ration of Twinkies and beer.

But there was more, and he knew it.

This one could be . . . well . . . just so G.o.ddam good.

This one could be legitimate.

There was a time when a word like that never would have crossed your mind, ole buddy, he thought. Maybe you are burning out.

Still, big stacked headlines danced in his head like sugarplums. INSIDE VIEW REPORTER APPREHENDS CRAZED NIGHT FLIER. EXCLUSIVE STORY ON HOW BLOOD-DRINKING NIGHT FLIER WAS FINALLY CAUGHT. 'NEEDED TO HAVE IT,' DEADLY DRACULA DECLARES.

It wasn't exactly grand opera - Dees had to admit that - but he thought it sang just the same. He thought it sang like a boid.

He picked up the mike after all and depressed the b.u.t.ton. He knew his blood-buddy was still down there, but he also knew he wasn't going to be comfortable until he had made absolutely sure.

'Wilmington, this is N471B. You still got a Skymaster 337 from Maryland down there on the ramp?'

Through static: 'Looks like it, old hoss. Can't talk just now. I got air traffic.'

'Has it got red piping?' Dees persisted.

For a moment he thought he would get no answer, then: 'Red piping, roger. Kick it off, N471B, if you don't want me to see if I can slap an FCC fine on y'all. I got too many fish to fry tonight and not enough skillets.'

'Thanks, Wilmington,' Dees said in his most courteous voice. He hung up the mike and then gave it the finger, but he was grinning, barely noticing the jolts as he pa.s.sed through another membrane of cloud. Skymaster, red piping, and he was willing to bet next year's salary that if the doofus in the tower hadn't been so busy, he would have been able to confirm the tail-number as well: N101BL.

One week, by Christ, one little week. That was all it had taken. He had found the Night Flier, it wasn't dark yet, and as impossible as it seemed, there were no police on the scene. If there had been cops, and if they had been there concerning the Cessna, Farmer John almost certainly would have said so, sky-jam and bad weather or not. Some things were just too good not to gossip about.

I want your picture, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Dees thought. Now he could see the approach lights, flashing white in the dusk. I'll get your story in time, but first, the picture. Just one, but I gotta have it.

Yes, because it was the picture that made it real. No fuzzy out-of-focus lightbulbs; no 'artist's conception'; a real by-G.o.d photo in living black-and-white. He headed down more steeply, ignoring the descent beep. His face was pale and set. His lips were pulled back slightly, revealing small, gleaming white teeth.

In the combined light of dusk and the instrument panel, Richard Dees looked quite a little bit like a vampire himself.

3.

There were many things Inside View was not - literate, for one, over-concerned with such minor matters as accuracy and ethics, for another - but one thing was undeniable: it was exquisitely attuned to horrors. Merton Morrison was a bit of an a.s.shole (although not as much of one as Dees had thought when he'd first seen the man smoking that dumb f.u.c.king pipe of his), but Dees had to give him one thing - he had remembered the things that had made Inside View a success in the first place: buckets of blood and guts by the handful.

Oh, there were still pictures of cute babies, plenty of psychic predictions, and Wonder Diets featuring such unlikely ingestibles as beer, chocolate, and potato chips, but Morrison had sensed a sea-change in the temper of the times, and had never once questioned his own judgement about the direction the paper should take. Dees supposed that confidence was the main reason Morrison had lasted as long as he had, in spite of his pipe and his tweed jackets from a.s.shole Brothers of London. What Morrison knew was that the flower children of the sixties had grown into the cannibals of the nineties. Huggy therapy, political correctness, and 'the language of feelings' might be big deals among the intellectual upper cla.s.s, but the ever-popular common man was still a lot more interested in ma.s.s murders, buried scandals in the lives of the stars, and just how Magic Johnson had gotten AIDS.

Dees had no doubt there was still an audience for All Things Bright and Beautiful, but the one for All s.h.i.t Grim and Gory had become a growth stock again as the Woodstock Generation began to discover gray in its hair and lines curving down from the corners of its petulant, self-indulgent mouth. Merton Morrison, whom Dees now recognized as a kind of intuitive genius, had made his own inside view clear in a famous memo issued to all staff and stringers less than a week after he and his pipe had taken up residence in the corner office. By all means, stop and smell the roses on your way to work, this memo suggested, but once you get to there, spread those nostrils - spread them wide - and start sniffing for blood and guts.