Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz

and Michael were on his trail, figured he was a dead man walking.”

      “Do homicidal sociopaths commit suicide?” Carson wondered.

      “Rarely,” Kathy said. “But it’s not unheard of.”

      “Ears,” said one of the CSI techs, removing a small container from the freezer, and his partner read the label on another: “Lips.”

      “I disappointed my mother,” Emery said. “She wanted me to be an airline pilot like my dad. At times like this, I think maybe I would be better off high in the night, up where the sky is clean, flying San Francisco to Tokyo.”

      “Yeah,” Carson said, “but then what airline pilot is ever going to have stories like this to tell his grandkids when he tucks them into bed? Where’s the suicide note?”

      Kathy said, “I’ll show you.”

      In the living room, a computer stood on a corner desk. White letters on a field of blue offered a peculiar farewell:

      Killed what I wanted. Took what I needed. Now

      I leave when I want, how I want, and go where

      I want – one level below Hell.

      “The taunting tone is typical for a sociopath,” Kathy said. “The suggestion that he’s earned a princely place in Hell isn’t unique, either, but usually if he’s playing out a satanic fantasy, you find occult literature, posters. We haven’t come across any of that yet.”

      Only half listening, chilled by a sense of déjà vu, of having seen this message before, Carson stared at the screen, reading the words twice, three times, four.

      As she read, she extracted a latex glove from a jacket pocket, pulled it on her right hand, and then keyed in a print request.

      “There was a time,” Kathy said, “if a suicide note wasn’t handwritten, it was suspicious. But these days, they often use their computers. In some cases they e-mail suicide notes to friends and relatives just before offing themselves. Progress.”

      Stripping off the glove, waiting impatiently for the printer to produce a hard copy, Carson said, “Down there in the alley, is there enough left of his face to get a good photograph?”

      “No,” Kathy said. “But his bedroom’s full of them.”

      Was it ever. On both nightstands and on the dresser were a dozen or more photos of Roy Pribeaux, mostly glamour shots by professional photographers, each in an expensive, ornamental silver frame.

      “He doesn’t seem to have been lacking in self-esteem,” Kathy said drily.

       CHAPTER 59

      JENNA PARKER, TWENTY-FIVE, lived for parties. She seemed to be invited to one every night.

      This evening, she obviously had taken a few pre-party toots of something, getting primed for a late-night bash, for she was buzzed when she came out of her apartment, singing tunelessly.

      With or without drugs, Jenna was perpetually happy, walking on sunshine even when the day offered only rain.

      On this rainless night, she seemed to float a quarter inch off the floor as she tried to lock her door. The proper relationship of a key to a keyhole seemed to elude her, and she giggled when, three times in a row, she failed the simple insertion test.

      Maybe she wasn’t merely buzzed but fully stung.

      She succeeded on the fourth try, and the deadbolt snapped shut with a solid clack.

      “Sheryl Crowe,” Jonathan Harker said from the doorway of his apartment, across the hall from hers.

      She turned, saw him for the first time, and broke into a sunny grin. “Johnny!”

      “You sound like Sheryl Crowe when you sing.”

      “Do I really?”

      “Would I lie?”

      “Depends on what you want,” she said coyly.

      “Now, Jen, have I ever come on to you?”

      “No. But you will.”

      “When will I?”

      “Later. Sooner. Maybe now.”

      She’d been to his apartment a couple times for pasta dinners, and he’d been to her place for takeout, since she didn’t cook even pasta. These had been strictly neighborly occasions.

      He didn’t want sex from Jenna Parker. He wanted to learn from her the secret of happiness.

      “I told you – it’s just you remind me of my sister.”

      “Sister. Yeah, right.”

      “Anyway, I’m almost old enough to be your father.”

      “When has that ever mattered to a man?”

      “We aren’t all swine,” he said.

      “Oh. Sorry, Johnny. Jeez, I didn’t mean to sound … mean. I’m just floatin’ so high inside that I’m not always down there where the words come out.”

      “I noticed. Why do you ever use drugs, anyway? You’re happy when you’re sober. You’re always happy.”

      She grinned, came to him, and pinched his cheek affectionately. “You’re right. I love life. I’m always happy. But it’s no crime to want to be even happier now and then.”

      “Actually,” he said, “if I were in Vice instead of Homicide, maybe I’d have to consider it a crime.”

      “You’d never arrest me, Johnny. Probably not even if I killed someone.”

      “Probably not,” he agreed, and squirted her in the mouth and nostrils with chloroform solution.

      Her gasp of surprise did what a blow across the backs of her knees would have done: dropped her to the floor. She sputtered, wheezed, and passed out.

      He had taken the squeeze bottle from Roy Pribeaux’s apartment. It was one of three he had found there.

      Later he would leave it with her dead body. Her remains wouldn’t be found for months, so their condition wouldn’t enable CSI to date her death after Pribeaux’s. The bottle would be one of several pieces of evidence identifying her as his final victim.

      Now Jonathan lifted her effortlessly, carried her into his apartment, and kicked the door shut behind them.

      Of the four apartments here on the fourth floor, one stood vacant. Paul Miller, in 4-C, was away at a sales conference in Dallas. Only Jonathan and Jenna were in residence. No one could have witnessed the assault and abduction.

      Jenna wouldn’t be missed for a day or two. By then, he would have opened her top to bottom, would have found the special something that she had and that he was missing, and would have disposed of her remains.

      He was taking all these precautions not because he feared going to prison but because he feared that Father would identify him as the renegade.

      In his bedroom, Jonathan had pushed the bed into a corner. He had stacked the other furniture atop it to create sufficient space for the makeshift autopsy table that he had prepared for her.

      Plastic sheeting covered the floor. At the head and foot of the table stood lamps that were bright enough to reveal the source of her happiness whether it was nestled in a tangle of guts or embedded in the cerebellum.

      Putting her on the table, he noticed that she was bleeding from one nostril. She’d cracked her nose against the floor when she had fallen. The bleeding wasn’t serious. The nose injury wasn’t what would kill her.

      Jonathan checked her pulse. Steady.

      He