Velocity

finish it. He made himself think about Judith Kesselman, her lively eyes, her elfin smile, and he wondered if Zillis had shoved a spear-point iron stave into her, whether he had cut off the top of her skull while she was alive and handed it to her as a drinking cup.
    Then it was over.
    Sobbing but not for Zillis, he climbed once more behind the steering wheel. He drove onto the highway.
    Two miles from the turnoff to the Olsen place, Billy killed the emergency beacons and the siren. He slowed below the speed limit.
    Because the alarm at Whispering Pines had been false, the fire-department crew would not linger. By the time he eventually returned the ambulance, the staff parking lot would be deserted again.
    He had left his power screwdriver at home. He was pretty sure that Lanny owned one. He would borrow it. Lanny wouldn’t care.
    As he reached the house, he saw the sickle moon, a little thicker this night than last, and the silver blade perhaps somewhat sharper.
     
     
     

Chapter 77
     
    All year, the valley is home to rock doves and to band-tailed pigeons, to the song sparrow and to the even more musical dark-eyed junco.
    The long-winged, long-tailed falcons known as American kestrels also stay the year. Their distinctive plumage is bright and cheerful. Their shrill, clear call sounds like killy-killy-killy-killy, which should not be pleasing to the ear, but is.
    Billy bought a new refrigerator. And a microwave.
    He knocked down a wall, combining his study with the living room because he had plans to use the space differently from the way it had been used before.
    After choosing a cheerful butter-yellow color, he repainted every room.
    He threw out the carpets and furniture, and purchased everything new, because he didn’t know where the redhead might have been sitting or lying when she had been strangled or otherwise dispatched.
    He considered razing the house and rebuilding, but he realized that houses are not haunted. We are haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves, our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.
    When he was not at work on the house or behind the bar at the tavern, he sat in the room at Whispering Pines or on his front porch, reading the novels of Charles Dickens, the better to know where Barbara lived.
    With the coming of autumn, the wood-pewees move on from the valley, and their pee-didip, pee-didip is not heard until spring. Most of the willow flycatchers migrate as well, although a few may adapt and linger.
    By autumn, Valis remained big news, especially in the tabloids and on those TV shows that tricked up carnival-freak show huckstering to pass for investigative journalism. They would feed on him for a year at least, like flickers feed on the larvae in noisy acorns, though Nature had not given them the imperative that she had given to the flickers.
    Steve Zillis had been linked to Valis. Sightings of the pair—disguised but recognizable—were reported in South America, in Asia, in the more ominous regions of the former Soviet Union.
    Lanny Olsen was assumed to be dead but also in some mysterious way a hero. He had not been a detective, merely a deputy, and never before had he been a motivated officer; however, his calls to Ramsey Ozgard, of the Denver PD, indicated that he had reason to suspect Zillis and, in the end, Valis as well.
    No one could explain why Lanny had not taken his suspicions to a superior. Sheriff Palmer said only that Lanny always had been “a lone wolf who did some of his best work outside the usual channels,” and for some reason no one laughed or asked the sheriff what the hell he was talking about.
    One theory—popular at the bar—held that Lanny had shot and wounded Valis, but that Steve Zillis had come on scene and murdered Lanny. Then Steve had driven away with Lanny’s body to dispose of it, and with the wounded artist, as well, to nurse him to health in some hideaway, since all legitimate doctors are required to report gunshot wounds.
    No one knew in what vehicle Steve had fled, as his own car was in the garage at his house; but obviously he had stolen wheels from someone. He hadn’t taken the motor home because he had never before driven it, and no doubt because he feared that it would attract too much attention once Valis had been reported missing.
    Psychologists and criminologists with knowledge of sociopathic behavior argued against the idea that one homicidal psychopath would be inclined selflessly