Mobius.
His name, his mantra, coiling through his mind, a snake swallowing itself in a perpetual act of self-devouring, of unappeasable appetite.
It was a name that signified many things, but above all the loop of time coiling to intersect itself, merging past and future in an endless present, the great now extending forever.
He had killed before and he would kill again, but always it was the same act, the same victim, the same moment in time.
Always he saw there, the gun in her hand, the song playing like background music, the theme song of his life.
She spoke to him, and then there was the gunshot blast, the heat and pain, and the water closing over him like the petals of a flower as he sank into a humming brightness.
He tried to call to her for help, but the water got in the way, the water that flooded his mouth and filled his eyes like tears, and around him slow tendrils of blood unwound in the water, making clouds of red…
And then-and then He was out of the water, he was strong, reanimated, and he was holding her down, taping her wrists to the headboard of the motel bed. A knife was in his hand, and she couldn’t hurt him. He was the one who would do the hurting now, and the bitch couldn’t stop him. The bitch could only writhe and struggle and die.
That was how it had been tonight, in the MiraMist Hotel. That was how it was, every time, always.
Mobius had left the MiraMist at 2:45, taking the stairs to the lobby, exiting via a rear door without being seen by the hotel staff. His car was parked a short distance away. He had driven east on Wilshire Boulevard, into the Westwood district.
At 3:15 A.M. he parked on an elm-shaded side street outside the Life Sciences Center on a university campus. He put on his gloves and took the canister with him when he got out of his car.
The campus was deserted at this hour. The Life Sciences building was situated along one side of a picturesque quadrangle. He was considering the best way to break in when he noticed a light in the basement windows.
Someone was at work in a lab.
This was very convenient. Although he had intended to perform the procedure himself, he knew he would be unfamiliar with the new equipment. Now, by pure good fortune, he had found an assistant.
It took him no time at all to defeat the lock on the front door of the building with a set of tools from his glove compartment. Silently he descended the stairs. A sign with an arrow pointed to ORGANIC CHEMISTRY LAB II. The lab door had a window in it. Looking through, he saw long countertops crowded with Bunsen burners, Pyrex flasks and beakers, test tube racks, and triple-beam balances. This much he’d expected, but what surprised him was the quantity of computer gear in the lab-keyboards and monitors and boxy CPUs.
At the far end of the room stood the lab worker in the white coat, bending over a table. Mobius opened the door and entered, unheard. When he was halfway across the room, he rapped his knuckles on a counter, and the other person turned.
"What the hell? How’d you get in here?"
"The building was unlocked."
"No, it wasn’t."
"It is now."
Mobius looked over his new friend. He was just a kid-early twenties at the oldest. Sandy hair, thin build, hard plastic goggles over his wide, alarmed eyes.
"What are you up to at three-thirty in the morning?" Mobius asked.
The kid took a step forward. "Get the fuck out of here."
"You’re a poor host."
"I’m calling security."
"No, you’re not."
The kid reached for a phone. Mobius closed the distance between them, and in a quick downward arc his knife sliced through the lab coat and incised a shallow wound in the kid’s lower abdomen.
He expected shock and fear to incapacitate his victim immediately, but the kid surprised him, lunging at Mobius in a wild attempt at self-defense. Mobius stepped backward, stumbling, off balance for an instant, and the kid flailed with a looping swing that swept a row of flasks onto the floor with a shattering of glass. Then Mobius steadied himself and caught the kid a second time with the knife, slashing his thigh, and the kid collapsed, a surge of red dyeing his pants.
Mobius stared down. "Don’t be a hero, asshole. It only costs you blood."
The kid touched the two wounds and gasped, shaking all over, then lifted his head to gaze up at Mobius with eyes that were now utterly cowed.
"You plan to cooperate now?"
The kid nodded.
"No more bullshit?"
"No."
"Fair enough. So tell me, son, what’s your name?"
His lips worked for a moment before he answered, "Scott Maple."
"You’re a student, I assume. Too young to be a teacher."
"Grad student." Another shudder worked its way through him as he looked at the widening stain on his clothes, the red pool on the floor. "Christ, it won’t stop bleeding."
"Yes, it will. The first cut is barely more than a scratch. The second one’s a little more serious, but you have only yourself to blame for that. You never answered my first question. What are you up to?"
"Research project. For my Ph. D. thesis."
"On Easter weekend, in the middle of the night?"
"Deadline."
"What’s the nature of this all-important project?"
"Analysis of carcinogenic environmental contaminants." He spoke in a dull monotone, as if reciting a memorized lesson. "Pesticide concentrations, industrial residue, vapor discharged from burning fossil fuels. I’m using bomb calorimetry-"
"Bomb what?"
"Calorimetry."
"You make bombs?"
"Not exactly. I mean, it is a kind of bomb, but…Look, what the hell do you care?"
"Bombs interest me." Mobius looked Scott Maple up and down. "So are you calmer now? Are you lucid?"
"Guess so."
"Good. Because I’ve got a job for you. I found this item." He held up the canister in a gloved hand. "There’s liquid in it. I want to know what kind."
"Is it…something dangerous?"
"Probably. But you handle toxic substances all the time, don’t you? Pesticides, industrial residue. You just told me so."
"I…yeah, that’s what I told you."
"You have a gas chromatograph in here, I’m sure."
Maple jerked his head in the direction of an oven-size box hooked up to a computer. "There."
"Okay, then." Mobius tossed him the canister, and Maple caught it reflexively. "Get to work."
The kid struggled upright, holding on to a counter for support. By now the bright flush of blood on his lab coat and pants was fading. The flow had ebbed.
"You have safety masks available?" Mobius asked.
"Sure."
"Give me one. You put one on, too. And put on gloves."
Mobius donned his mask, then stood back, careful to keep his distance from the canister. Scott Maple kept talking nervously, aimlessly, as he started a software program on the computer linked to the gas chromatograph.
"Okay, okay. The chromatograph is a Hewlett-Packard 5890. The PC maintains a stable environment for the chemical separation process. Okay, so first I turn on the FID air and hydrogen. FID, that’s-"
"Flame ionization detection," Mobius said.
Maple glanced up, startled. "Uh, that’s right. Sensitive to zero point four five parts per million. Next we ignite the flame." He pressed the ignition button on the chromatograph. "It ought to register at least fifteen on the screen. Okay, there it is."
"Stop saying, ‘Okay.’"
"Am I doing that?"
"You are."
"Okay. I mean-I’ll stop. Now we just, uh, set the appropriate values." On the computer, he chose Set Method, then set the temperatures of the injector, oven, and detector to their defaults. "Check the status. Then we…we have to wait. Till it warms up, basically. Shouldn’t take long."
"While you’re waiting, prepare the sample."
"Right. The sample." He studied the canister. "How do I extract the contents if I don’t know what I’m dealing with?"
"How would you handle the pollutants you’re cataloging?"
"Use a pipette to siphon out a few drops…"
"There you go. And by the way, it would be a good idea to stop trembling. If this stuff is what I think it may be, you can’t afford to make any stupid mistakes."
Maple drew a quick, shallow breath that pulled the face mask tight against his nostrils. His goggles were steaming up with sweat.
He opened the canister and transferred a few drops of clear liquid into an Erlenmeyer flask. When the gas chromatograph’s temperature reached 325 degrees Centigrade, he fed the sample into the injection port and initiated the run.
The details of gas chromatography had changed in the twenty years since Mobius had attended college, but the basic science was the same. The sample, heated to a gas, would travel into a column lined with silicone grease. The grease would absorb the gas molecules and release them at varying intervals, known as exit rates. Every compound had its own unique exit rate, a chemical fingerprint. When the exit rates of the molecules were registered by the flame ionization detector, the exact chemical composition of the vapor would be known.
He and Scott Maple waited until a readout appeared on the PC’s screen.
"Exit rate of forty-five point three seconds," Maple said.
"What is it?"
"Not sure. Almost like a pesticide, maybe. I’m running it through the database now. We ought to-Oh, shit."
His voice had dropped an octave with the last word. Mobius took a step closer, and on the monitor he saw a long chemical name beginning with O-ethyl-S.
"Tell me," he said.
"It says here this is…this is…"
Maple turned toward him. Above the antiseptic mask, his eyes were wide and helpless.
"Tell me," Mobius repeated.
The kid told him.
And Mobius smiled.
When he was finished at the lab, Mobius visited Tess.
He knew where she was staying, of course. He had even sat in the motel parking lot and watched her enter and leave on a few occasions. It had occurred to him that it would not be difficult to kill her whenever he wished. So far he had felt no particular urgency about it. But now the time had come.
He guided his car into the motel parking lot and brought it to rest under a dead street lamp. The time was 4:45, still too early for any activity around the motel. The windows were unlighted, the drapes shut.
Canister in hand, he crossed the parking lot to the door of room 14. It would be locked, naturally-he didn’t even bother testing the knob. He had no need to get inside the room.
He cast a long, cautious look around, then crouched near the air conditioner.
It was a large unit installed under the window, and it was off now. He didn’t know if Tess had left it off when she’d gone to sleep, or if it had clicked off automatically during the coolest part of the night. But this March was unseasonably warm, with near-record highs forecast for Saturday. She would turn it on eventually.
He put on his gloves and the mask from the lab. Averting his face, he opened the canister and dribbled a few drops of its contents into the AC unit’s air-intake duct. When the air conditioner started running, the liquid would be aerosolized and dispersed as a mist throughout the room.
"No more postcards, Tess," he whispered behind the mask. "I’m sending you a message of a different kind."
Now he was home in his private room, his special sanctuary, staring at a wall covered with a collage of newspaper clippings, photos, and yellowed archival documents. One of the smallest items in the display was the one he most cherished-a black-and-white photo of his mother that he’d found in her high school yearbook. She had attended a small, private, fancy school for girls, a school catering to debutantes and heiresses. His mother had been both, until the first fruits of her germinating insanity had gotten her disinherited.
He had tracked down the yearbook in the school library and ripped out the crucial page, using exactly the same ruse Jack Nicholson had employed in Chinatown, a phony sneeze to cover the sound of tearing paper. Now she was on his wall of memories, or perhaps he should call it his wailing wall, a place to mourn the dead. Only in this case, it was his own death he came to mourn.
His mother had been just nineteen, a graduating senior, when the photo was taken. Melinda Davenport, later to be Mrs. Harrison Beckett. A pretty girl, austere and fine-featured and smooth-skinned. Looking at her, no one could guess that less than ten years later, in 1968, she would go insane.
After his mother had stopped living with them, his dad had warned him that someday she might try to get him to go with her, and that it would be dangerous to go. But when she’d visited him at recess, she hadn’t seemed dangerous. And he hated school, which was boring, and he hated recess even more, because he was never picked for any games. So when she’d asked if he wanted to go to the rodeo, he’d said yes.
But there hadn’t been any rodeo. There had been only miles of blurry back roads and the crazed repetition of a single song on an eight-track player, and she had hummed along with it in a furious nasal monotone.
"Na na na na na na na, na na na na na na naaa…"
By the time they reached the Howard Johnson’s in Alcomita, New Mexico, he hated her. He knew this one thing with certainty. He didn’t like to be scared, and she was scaring him very badly. If he’d had a gun, he would have shot her- bang, dead-and she wouldn’t have scared him anymore. When her back was turned, he even pretended to have a gun, and he pantomimed pulling the trigger and making his mother go away.
Bang.
Dead.
Sometime in late morning, while a policeman talked through a bullhorn outside and the crazy song played on the portable phonograph, his mother filled the bathtub.
"You’re dirty," she said. "You need to be clean. You’re a very dirty boy, and you’ve caused me a lot of trouble."
He didn’t think he had caused any trouble. He had been quiet and good. But he did not protest, because he liked baths.
"Can I play with my submarine?" he asked. The submarine was a plastic model he had taken to school for show-and-tell and had brought with him in the car.
She didn’t answer, just went on filling the tub.
When the bath was ready, he slipped out of his day-old clothes and eased into the hot water, taking his submarine with him. Outside, the policeman was saying something, but over the blare of the record player he couldn’t hear it. When the music started to bother him, he submerged, holding his breath, moving the toy sub underwater and imagining nautical adventures.
Needing air, he surfaced, and his mother was there.
She stood over the tub, and her face…her face was strange. It was not his mother’s face at all. There was no love in her eyes, not even any recognition. She looked at him as if he were a stranger.
"Mommy?" he whispered.
She did not move, did not blink.
"Wipe out," she said, and the gun bucked in her hand.
Mobius blinked, reliving it-the impact, the sudden inexplicable numbness. He touched his chest. Through the thin fabric of his shirt, he could feel the lump of scar tissue in the shape of a starfish, where the. 38-caliber round had entered, and where the long ribbons of blood had come out.
His gaze switched from his mother’s photo to the central item in the collage-the entire front page, both above and below the fold, of the Albuquerque Tribune ’s September 21, 1968, edition. A huge headline stretched over the multicolumn story.
"WIPE-OUT" IN ALCOMITA HOJO’S
A tense, hours-long standoff at the Howard Johnson’s motor inn in Alcomita came to an abrupt and tragic end at 12:20 P.M. when sheriff’s deputies heard two shots discharged inside the room where alleged kidnapper and former mental patient Melinda Ellen Beckett was holding her eight-year-old son…
Melinda Beckett had lost custody of the boy after her third hospitalization for mental illness. She was recently separated from her husband, Mr. Harrison Beckett, who had been raising their son alone. Mrs. Beckett is said to have become obsessed with violent, paranoid thoughts, and had twice been placed in restraints while institutionalized.
Sheriff’s deputies report that throughout the standoff Mrs. Beckett played the song "Wipe Out," an early 1960s hit for the Surfaris, on a portable phonograph. Deputies also found an eight-track tape containing the song in the dashboard tape player of Mrs. Beckett’s 1964 Buick Grand Sport.
Harrison Beckett, who arrived at the scene only minutes after the twin shootings, is described as being in a state of shock and is currently under medical care…
He would never leave medical care. Harrison Beckett was still in a hospital somewhere-Mobius had long since lost track of his father’s whereabouts, as the Wyoming bureaucracy shuttled him from one institution to another. He was an incurable patient, one who-in the quaint parlance of 1968-had suffered a "nervous breakdown." Quite simply, he had lost all contact with the outside world on that day in New Mexico.
Two parents, both crippled by mental illness. It was almost enough to make him doubt his own sanity.
The other items on his wall were less sensational. There was his birth certificate, obtained from a Casper, Wyoming, hospital. Some of the medical records compiled during his long recuperation from the gunshot, the months of physical and psychological therapy. A snapshot of his triumphant release from the hospital at the age of nine. Nurses and doctors were all gathered, grinning at the camera, and in the middle of this crowd stood a wan little boy with a pinched face and cool, untrusting eyes. He remembered exactly what he had been thinking as the photo was snapped.
Bang. Dead.
It was too late to make his mother dead for what she had done to him. The psychologists had worked long and hard to make him understand this. And he did understand. But what the psychologists didn’t realize was that there was a whole world of other people out there, and he hated them all. He hated the doctors who had brought him back to life. He hated the deputies who had cornered his mother and provoked her. He hated the social workers who had put her in a mental hospital in the first place. And the new family that had adopted him-he hated them too, hated their frozen smiles and evasive eyes and the way they touched him like glass.
He hated the entire world, and he wished he could make it all go away with one pull of a trigger, one clap of his hands.
He wished he had a way to do it. A weapon to kill them all.
And now, perhaps, he did.
He was cleaning out his pockets, disposing of evidence, when he realized he was missing something.
The tape player.
Maybe it had fallen out in the car. He went into the garage and checked under the driver’s seat. Not there.
Then he understood.
When Scott Maple had knocked him off balance, the player must have slipped out of his pocket. In the clatter of breaking glass he’d never heard it drop.
He had left it in the lab. The player itself was of no importance, a mass-produced item that could never be traced to him. But the tape inside…it was just possible that they could find him though the tape…
No way. He was just getting paranoid.
Anyway, the incident at the chemistry lab would not be connected with the serial killings. And the tape player and the cassette inside would never be recovered in any identifiable form.
He had made a small slip, uncharacteristic of him, but everything was fine.
He was in no danger. Of course he wasn’t.
Of course.