Clint took hold of her dead hand. His other hand held the.38 revolver.

He turned his head on the pillow to look toward her, and his eyes glistened with what might have been unshed tears. He put the muzzle of the gun under his chin, and annihilated himself.

Candy was so stunned that he was unable to move for a moment or think what to do next. He was jolted out of his paralysis by the ululant sirens, and realized that the trail from Thomas to Bobby and Julie, whoever they were, might end here if he did not discover what link the dead man on the bed shared with them. If he ever hoped to learn who Thomas had been, how Clint had known his name, or how many others knew of him, if he wanted to learn how much danger he was in and how he might slide out of it, he couldn't waste this opportunity.

He hurried to the bed, rolled the dead man onto his side, and withdrew the wallet from his pants pocket. He flipped it open and saw the private investigator's license. Opposite it, in another plastic window, was a business card for Dakota & Dakota.

Candy remembered a vague image of the Dakota & Dakota offices, which had come to him in Thomas's room when he had obtained a vision of Clint from the sc.r.a.pbook. There was an address on the card. And below the name Clint Karaghiosis, in smaller type, were the names Robert and Julia Dakota.

Outside, the sirens had died. Someone was pounding on the front door.

Two voices shouted, "Police!" Candy threw the wallet aside and took the gun out of the dead man's hand. He broke open the cylinder. It was a five shot weapon, and all of the chambers were filled with expended cartridges. Clint had fired four rounds in the kitchen, but even in his moment of vengeful fury, he had possessed enough control to save the last bullet for himself.

"Just because of a woman?" Candy said uncomprehendingly, as if the dead man might answer him.

"Because he couldn't get s.e.x from her any more now? Why does s.e.x matter so much? Couldn't you get s.e.x from another woman? Why was s.e.x with this one so important, you didn't want to live without it?" They were still pounding on the door. Someone spoke through a bullhorn, but Candy didn't pay attention to what was being said.

He dropped the gun and wiped his hand on his pants, cause he suddenly felt unclean. The dead man had handled it, and the dead man seemed to have been obsessed with one question, the world was a cesspool of l.u.s.t and bauchery, and Candy was glad that G.o.d and his mother had spared him from the sick desires that seemed to infect nearly everyone else.

He left that house of sinners.

SLUMPED ON the sofa, Hal Yamataka had a slice of pizza in one hand and the MacDonald novel in the other, when he heard the hollow flowerlike warble. He dropped both to his feet.

the book and the food, and shot "Frank?" The half-open door swung slowly inward, not because it was being pushed open by anyone but because a sudden draft, sweeping in from the reception lounge, was strong enough to move it.

"Frank?" Hal repeated.

As he crossed the room, the sound faded and the draft died. But by the time he reached the doorway, the unmelodiclar could teleport more efficiently and swiftly than Frank, creating less air displacement and less noise from molecular resistance. Nevertheless he was surprised that she had not gotten up to investigate, the sounds he had made during arrival had been only one room away from her and, surely, odd enough to p.r.i.c.k her!" curiosity.

She turned a few more pages, then leaned forward to where He could not see much of her from behind. Her hair thick, l.u.s.trous, and so black it seemed to have been spun from the same loom as the night. Her shoulders and back were muscular. Her legs, which were both to one side of the chair crossed at the ankles, were shapely. If he had been a man with any interest in s.e.x, he Supposed he would have been excited by the curve of her calves.

Wondering what she looked like-and suddenly overwhelmed by a need to know how her blood would taste stepped out of the open doorway and took three steps to her. He made no effort to be silent, but she did not look up.

The first she became aware of him was when he seized a handful of her hair and dragged her, kicking and flailing, out of the chair.

He turned her around and was instantly excited by her.

He was indifferent to her shapely legs, the flare of her hips, trimness of her waist, the fullness of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Though beautiful, it was not even her face that electrified him. Something else. A quality in her gray eyes. Call it vitality. She was more alive than most people, vibrant.

She did not scream but let out a low grunt of fear or an then struck him furiously with both fists. She pounded his chest, battered his face.

Vitality! Yes, this one was full of life, bursting with life, her vitality thrilled him far more than any bounty of s.e.xual charms.

He could still hear the distant splash of water, the rattle-h of the bathroom exhaust fan, and he was confident that he could take her without drawing the attention of the man long as he could prevent her from screaming. He struck her on the side of the head with his fist, hammered her before she could scream. She slumped against him, not unconscious dazed.

Shaking with the antic.i.p.ation of pleasure, Candy placed her on her back, on the table, with her legs trailing over the edge He spread her legs and leaned between them, but not to commit rape, nothing as disgusting as that. As he lowered his face toward hers, she first blinked at him in confusion, still rattlebrained from the blows she had taken. Then her eyes began to clear. He saw horrified comprehension return to her, and he went quickly for her throat, bit deep, and found the blood, which was clean and sweet, intoxicating.

She thrashed beneath him.

She was so alive. So wonderfully alive. For a while.

WHEN THE deliveryman brought the pizza, Lee Chen took it into Bobby and Julie's office and offered some to Hal.

Putting his book aside but not taking his stockinged feet off the coffee table, Hal said, "You know what that stuff does to your arteries?" :'Why's everyone so concerned about my arteries today?"

'You're such a nice young man. We'd hate to see you dead before you're thirty. Besides, we'd always wonder what clothes you might've worn next, if you'd lived."

"Not anything like what you're wearing, I a.s.sure you." Hal leaned over and looked in the box that Lee held down to him.

"Looks pretty good. Rule of thumb-any pizza they'll bring to you, they're selling service instead of good food. But this doesn't look bad at all, you can actually tell where the pizza ends and the cardboard begins." Lee tore the lid off the box, put it on the coffee table, and put two slices of pizza on that makeshift plate.

"There."

"You're not going to give me half',."

"What about the cholesterol?"

"h.e.l.l, cholesterol's just a little animal fat, it isn't a.r.s.enic." WHEN THE woman's strong heart stopped beating, Candy pulled back from her.

Though blood still seeped from her ravaged throat, he did not touch another drop of it. The thought of drinking from a corpse sickened him.

He remembered his sisters' cats, eating their own each time one of the pack died, and he grimaced.

Even as he raised his wet lips from her throat, he heard the door open farther back in the house. Footsteps approached. Candy quickly circled the table, putting it and the woman between himself and the doorway to the dining room From the vision induced by the dummy's sc.r.a.pbook of pictures, Candy knew that Clint would not be as easy to kill as most people were. He preferred to put a little distance between them, give himself time to size up his opponent rather than take the guy by surprise.

Clint appeared in the doorway. Except for his outfit slacks, navy-blue blazer, maroon V-neck, white shirt looked the same as the psychic impression he had left on the book. He had pumped a lot of iron in his time. His hair thick, black, and combed straight back from his forehead.

He had a face like carved granite, and a hard look in his eyes Excited by the recent kill, by the taste of blood still in his mouth, Candy watched the man with interest, wondering what would happen next. There were all sorts of ways it could and not one of them would be dull.

Clint did not react as Candy expected. He did not show surprise when he saw the woman sprawled dead upon the table he did not seem horrified, shattered by the loss of her, or raged. Something major changed in his stony face, though below the surface, like tectonic plates shifting under the earth's crust.

Finally he met Candy's gaze, and said, "You." The note of recognition in that single word was unsettling For a moment. Candy could think of no way this man could know him-then he remembered Thomas.

The possibility that Thomas had told this man-and perhaps others-about Candy was most frightening to Candy since his mother's death. His service in G.o.d's army of avengers was a deeply private matter, a secret should not have been spread beyond the Pollard family.

mother had warned him that it was all right to be proud doing G.o.d's work, but that his pride would lead him to a if he boasted of his divine favor to others.

"Satan," she told him, "constantly seeks the names of lieutenants in Garrny-which is what you are-and when he finds them, destroys them with worms that eat them alive from wit worms fat as snakes, and he rains fire on them too. If you can't keep the secret, you'll die and go to h.e.l.l for your big mouth."

"Candy," Clint said.

The use of his name erased whatever doubt remained that the secret had been pa.s.sed outside the family and that Candy was in deep trouble, though he had not broken the code of silence himself.

He imagined that even now Satan, in some dark and steaming place, had tilted his head and said, "Who? Who did you say? What was his name? Candy? Candy who?" As furious as he was frightened, Candy started around the kitchen table, wondering if Clint had learned about him from Thomas. He was determined to break the man, make him talk before killing him.

In a move as unexpected as his rock-calm acceptance of the woman's murder, Clint reached inside his jacket, withdrew a revolver, and fired two shots.

He might have fired more than two, but those were the only ones Candy heard. The first round hit him in the stomach, the second in the chest, pitching him backward. Fortunately he sustained no damage to his head or heart. If his brain tissue had been scrambled, disturbing the mysterious and fragile connection between brain and mind, leaving his mind trapped within his ruined brain before he had a chance to separate the two, he would not have possessed the mental ability to teleport, leaving him vulnerable to a coup de grace. And if his heart had been stopped instantaneously by a well-placed bullet, before he could dematerialize, he would have fallen down dead where he'd stood. Those were the only wounds that might finish him. He was many things, but he was not immortal; so he was grateful to G.o.d for letting him get out of that kitchen and back to his mother's house alive.

THE VENTURA FREEWAY. Julie drove fast, though not as fast as she had earlier. On the tapedeck: Artie Shaw's "Night mare." Bobby brooded, staring through the side window at the nightscape. He could not stop thinking about the blare of words that had seared through him, loud as a bomb blast and bright as a blast-furnace fire. He had come to terms with the dream that had frightened him last week; everyone had bad dreams. Thouflown from him, but it had been too short to attract notice. The explosion of the gla.s.s and the tinny clanging of the blinds had been loud enough, but the action had been over before anyone could have located the source of the sound.

A four-lane street encircled the Fashion Island shopping center and also served the office towers that, like this one, stood on the outer rim.

Apparently, however, no cars had been on it when the man had fallen.

Now two appeared to the left, one behind the other. Both pa.s.sed without slowing. A row of shrubberies, between the sidewalk and the street, prevented motorists from seeing the corpse where it lay. The office-tower ring of the sprawling complex was clearly not an area that attracted pedestrians at night, so the dead man might remain undiscovered until morning.

He looked across the street, at the restaurants and stores that were on this flank of the mall, five or six hundred yards away. A few people on foot, shrunken by distance, moved between the parked cars and the entrances to the businesses. No one appeared to have seen anything-and in fact it would not have been that easy to spot a darkly dressed man plunging past a mostly dark building, aloft and visible for only seconds before gravity finished him.

Candy cleared his throat, wincing in pain, and spat toward the dead man below.

He tasted blood. This time it was his own.

Turning away from the window, he surveyed the office, wondering where he would find the answers he sought. If he could locate Bobby and Julie Dakota, they might be able to explain Thomas's telepathy and more important, they might be able to deliver Frank into his hands.

AFTER TWICE responding to an alarm from the radar did and avoiding two speed traps in the west valley, Julie cranked the Toyota back up to eighty-five, and they dusted L.A.

off their heels.

A few raindrops spattered the windshield, but the spring rain did not last. She switched the wipers off moments after turning them on.

"Santa Barbara in maybe an hour," she said, "as long cop with a sense of duty doesn't come along." The back of her neck ached, and she was deeply weary, she didn't want to trade places with Bobby; she didn't have the patience to be a pa.s.senger tonight. Her eyes were sore not heavy; she could not possibly have slept. The events of the day had murdered sleep, and alertness was a.s.sured by thinking about what might lie ahead, not just on the highway behind them but in El Encanto Heights.

Ever since he'd been awakened by what he called the "wordburst," Bobby had been moody. She could tell he was worried about something, but he didn't seem to want to talk about it yet.

After a while, in an obvious attempt to take his mind off wordburst and whatever gloomy ruminations it had inspired he tried to strike up a conversation about something different. He lowered the volume on the stereo, thereby trating the intended effect of Glenn Miller's "American trol," and said, "You ever stop to think, four out of our eleven employees are Asian-Americans?" She didn't glance away from the road.

"So?"

"So why is that, do you think?"

"Because we hire only first-rate people, and it so happens that four of the first-rate people who wanted to work for us were Chinese, j.a.panese, and Vietnamese."

"That's part of it."

"Just part?" she said. "So what's the other part? You think maybe the wicked FuManchu turned a mind-control ray us from his secret fortress in the Tibetan mountains and made us hire ''em?"

"That's part of it too," he said. "But another part of it is I'm attracted to the Asian personality. Or to what people think of when they think of the Asian personality: intelligence, a high degree of self-discipline, neatness, a strong sense of tradition and order."

"Those are pretty much traits of everyone who works for us, not just Jamie, Nguyen, Hal, and Lee.

"I know. But what makes me so comfortable with Asian Americans is that I buy into the stereotype of them, I feel everything will go along in an orderly, stable fashion when I'm working with them, and I need to buy into the stereotype because... well, I'm not the kind of guy I've always thought I was. You ready to hear something shocking?"

"Always," Julie said.

OFTEN, WHEN Lee Chen was laboring in the computer room, he popped a CD in his Sony Discman and listened to music through earphones. He always kept the door closed to avoid distraction, and no doubt some of his fellow employees thought he was somewhat antisocial; however, when he was engaged in the penetration of a complex and well-protected data network, like the array of police systems he was still plundering, he needed to concentrate. Occasionally music distracted him as much as anything, depending on his mood, but most of the time it was conducive to his work. The minimalist New Age piano solos of George Winston were sometimes just the thing, but more often he needed rock-'n'-roll.

Tonight it was Huey Lewis and The News: "Hip to Be Square" and "The Power of Love,"

"The Heart of Rock & Roll" and "You Crack Me Up." Focused intently on the terminal screen (his window on the mesmerizing world of cybers.p.a.ce), with "Bad Is Bad" pouring into his ears through the headset, he might not have heard a thing if, in the world outside, G.o.d had peeled back the sky and announced the imminent destruction of the human race.

A COOL DRAFT circulated through the room from the broken window, but growing frustration generated a compensate heat in Candy. He moved slowly around the s.p.a.cious handling various objects, touching the furniture, trying to get a vision that would reveal the whereabouts of Frank. Thus far he'd had no luck.

He could have pored through the contents of the desk drawers and filing cabinets, but that would have taken hours,he didn't know where they might have filed the information he was seeking. He also realized he might not recognize right stuff when he found it, for it might be in a folder ore lope bearing a case name or code that was meaningless to And though his mother had taught him to read and write, though he had been a voracious reader just like her-until lost interest in books upon her death-teaching himself subjects as well as any university could have done, he never less trusted what his special gifts could reveal to him more than anything he might find on paper, Besides, he had already stepped into the lounge, obtain the Dakotas' home address and phone number, and called to see if they were there. An answering machine had picked on the third ring, and he had left no message. He didn't want to know where the Dakotas lived, where they might up in time; he needed to know where they were now, this minute, because he was in a fever to get at them and wring ans from them.

He picked up a third Scotch-and-soda gla.s.s. They were over the room.

The psychic residue on the tumbler gave an instant, vivid image of a man named Jackie Jaxx, and pitched it waside in anger. It bounced off the sofa, onto the carpet, without shattering.

This Jaxx person left a colorful and noisy psychic impress everywhere in his wake, the way a dog with poor bladder control would mark each step on his route with a dribble of stiing urine. Candy sensed that Jaxx was currently with a large number of people, at a party in Newport Beach, and he sensed that trying to find Frank or the Dakotas through i would be wasted effort. Even so, if Jaxx had been alone easily taken, Candy would have gone straight to him slaughtered him, just because the guy's lingering aura was bra.s.sy and annoying.

Either he had not yet found an object that one of the Dakotas had touched long enough to leave an imprint, or neither of them was the type who left a rich, lingering psychic residue in his wake. For reasons Candy could not fathom, some people were harder to trace than others.

He had always found tracing Frank to be of medium difficulty, but tonight catching that scent was harder than usual. Repeatedly he sensed that Frank had been in the room, but at first he could locate nothing in which the aura of his brother was coagulated.

Next he turned to the four chairs, beginning with the largest. When he skimmed his sensitive fingertips lightly over the upholstery, he quivered with excitement, for he knew at once that Frank had sat there recently. A small tear marred the vinyl on one arm, and when Candy put his thumb upon the rent, particularly vivid visions of Frank a.s.saulted him.

Too many visions. He was rewarded with a whole series of place images, where Frank had traveled after rising from the chair: the High Sierras; the apartment in San Diego in which he had lived briefly four years ago; the rusted front gate of their mother's house on Pacific Hill Road; a graveyard; a book-lined study in which he'd stayed such a short time that Candy could get only the vaguest impression of it; Punaluu Beach, where Candy had nearly caught him.... There were so many images, from so many travels, layered one atop another, that he could not clearly see the later stops.

Disgusted, he pushed the chair out of his way and turned to the coffee table, where two more tumblers stood. Both contained melted ice and Scotch. He picked one up and, had a vision of Julie Dakota.

WHILE JULIE drove toward Santa Barbara as if they were competing in time trials for the Indianapolis 500, Bobby told her the shocking thing: that he was not, at heart, the laid-back guy he appeared to be on the surface; that during his hectic travels with Frank-especially during the moments when he had been reduced to a disembodied mind and a frantic whirl of disconnected atoms-he'd discovered within himself a rich vein of love for stability and order that ran deeper than he could ever have imagined, a motherlode of stick-in-the-mudness; than delight in swing music arose more from an appreciation the meticulosity of its structures than from the dizzyingcal freedom embodied in jazz; that he was not half the spirited man he'd thought he was... and far more of a conservative embracer of tradition that he would have hoped.

"In short," he said, "all this time when you thought were married to an easy-going young-James-Gamer you've actually been wed to an any-age-Charles-Bronson type.

"I can live with you anyway, Charlie."

"This is serious. Sort of I've tipped into my late thirties, no child.

I should've known this about myself a long time a "You!" I id."

"Huh?'

"You love order, reason, logic-that's why you got in line.of work where you could right wrongs, help the innoc punish the bad. That's why you share The Dream withso we can get our little family in order, step out of the!" of the world as it is these days and buy into some peace quiet. That's why you won't let me have the Wurlitzer 95 those bubble tubes and leaping gazelles are just a little too otic for you." He was silent a moment, surprised by her answer.

The lightless vastness of the sea lay to the west.

He said, "Maybe you're right. Maybe I've always knew what I am, deep down. But then isn't it unnerving that fooled myself with my own act for so long?"

"You haven't. You're easy-going and a bit of Charles Bronson, which is a good thing. Otherwise we probably could communicate at all, since I've got more Bronson in meanyone but Bronson."

"G.o.d, that's true!"

he said, and they both laughed.

The Toyota's speed had declined to under seventy. She it UP to eighty and said, "BObby... what's really onmind?"