What the Night Knows: A Novel by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz [Koontz, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-553-90753-7
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 2010-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

33

ALTHOUGH HE COULD DO NOTHING TO IDENTIFY AND PROTECT the family at risk, indeed because of his helplessness, John Calvino knew sleep would elude him. He sat in a library armchair, trying to lose himself in the latest book by one of his favorite authors, but his mind would not relent from its obsession. He read page after page, turned from chapter to chapter, but the story failed to become as vivid to him as the memory of what Alton Blackwood had done to the Sollenburgs, the homicides that might this night be repeated.

At eleven-thirty, he put the book aside and phoned the Robbery-Homicide watch commander to learn if anyone had been called out on an unusual 187—murder—during the evening. He seldom checked in like this, but his call was not entirely out of character, either. Only anxiety, not intuition, compelled him to pick up the phone.

The thirty-third day did not begin for another half an hour, but Blackwood’s crimes two decades earlier twice bridged the midnight hour. For whatever reason he kept to a thirty-three-day schedule, the killer sometimes failed to wait for that magic day to arrive. His desire, his need, his hunger for violence could drive him to an early start, though he always finished his work according to his sacred calendar.

When John learned from the watch commander about the shootings at the Woburn house hours earlier, he knew this could be the one, must be the one, even if it seemed to have gone wrong for Blackwood. The Sollenburgs and the Woburns were both families of four; in each instance, the parents were shot; and the Woburns had one son and one daughter, just like the Sollenburgs.

He turned off the lights in the library and hurried upstairs to tell Nicky that he was going out on a case, which was not a lie even if it might not be strictly the truth. This case was not his, but it was Lionel’s case, according to the watch commander. And John had a legitimate—if personal—interest in it even if he had completed little more than half of his thirty-day leave, about which he had also managed to tell Nicky neither the truth nor a lie.

Her studio was dark, and in the master bedroom, John found her sound asleep in the soft light of her bedside lamp. On her nightstand stood an empty brandy snifter beside a copy of the complete poems of T. S. Eliot, which she had read often.

She failed to stir when he whispered her name. He wrote a note and placed it in the empty brandy glass.

Sleeping, Nicolette looked as innocent as a child, and if the only transgressions that counted were those done with the intent to transgress, then she was perhaps as blameless as the children she had brought into the world.

At half past midnight, when John arrived in the ICU visitors’ lounge at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Jack Woburn’s sister Lois was text-messaging a status report to relatives. The exhausted boy slept on a thinly padded three-seat couch.

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