Midnight

worse condition, the dead woman lay outside the room, in the second-floor hall, a scarlet heap on the orange carpet.
    The air reeked of blood, bile, feces, urine—a melange of odors with which Loman was becoming increasingly familiar, as the victims of the regressives turned up more frequently week by week and day by day. This time, however, as never before, an alluring sweetness lay under the acrid surface of the stench. He drew deep breaths, unsure why that terrible redolence should have any appeal whatsoever. But he was unable to deny—or resist—its attraction any more than a hound could resist the fox's scent. Though he could not withstand the tempting fragrance, he was frightened by his response to it, and the blood in his veins seemed to grow colder as his pleasure in the biological stirring grew more intense.
    Barry Sholnick, the officer Loman had dispatched to Cove Lodge via computer link to apprehend Samuel Booker, and who had found this death and destruction instead of the Bureau agent, now stood in the corner by the window, staring intently at the dead man. He had been at the motel longer than anyone, almost half an hour, long enough to have begun to regard the victims with the detachment that police had to cultivate, as if dead and ravaged bodies were no more remarkable a part of the scene than the furniture. Yet Sholnick could not shift his gaze from the eviscerated corpse, the gore-spattered wreckage, and the blood-streaked walls. He was clearly electrified by that horrendous detritus and the violence of which it was a remembrance.
    We hate what the regressives have become and what they do, Loman thought, but in some sick way we're also envious of them, of their ultimate freedom.
    Something within him—and, he suspected, in all of the New People—cried out to join the regressives. As at the Foster place, Loman felt the urge to employ his newfound bodily control not to elevate himself, as Shaddack had intended, but to devolve into a wild state. He yearned to descend to a level of consciousness in which thoughts of the purpose and meaning of life would not trouble him, in which intellectual challenge would be nonexistent, in which he would be a creature whose existence was defined almost entirely by sensation , in which every decision was made solely on the basis of what would give him pleasure, a condition untroubled by complex thought. Oh, God, to be freed from the burdens of civilization and higher intelligence!
    Sholnick made a low sound in the back of his throat.
    Loman looked up from the dead man.
    In Sholnick's brown eyes a wild light burned.
    Am I as pale as he? Loman wondered. As sunken-eyed and strange?
    For a moment Sholnick met the chiefs gaze, then looked away as if he had been caught in a shameful act.
    Loman's heart was pounding.
    Sholnick went to the window. He stared out at the lightless sea. His hands were fisted at his sides.
    Loman was trembling.
    The smell, darkly sweet. The smell of the hunt, the kill.
    He turned away from the corpse and walked out of the room, into the hallway, where the sight of the dead woman—half naked, gouged, lacerated—was no relief. Bob Trott, one of several recent additions to the force when it expanded to twelve men last week, stood over the battered body. He was a big man, four inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than Loman, with a face of hard planes and chiseled edges. He looked down at the cadaver with a faint, unholy smile.
    Flushed, his vision beginning to blur, his eyes smarting in the harsh fluorescent glare, Loman spoke sharply "Trott, come with me." He set off along the hall to the other room that had been broken into. With evident reluctance, Trott finally followed him.
    By the time Loman reached the shattered door of that unit, Paul Amberlay, another of his officers, appeared at the head of the north stairs, returning from the motel office where Loman had sent him to check the register.
    "The couple in room twenty-four were named Jenks, Sarah and Charles," Amberlay reported. He was twenty-five, lean and sinewy, intelligent. Perhaps because the young officer's face was slightly pointed, with deep-set eyes, he had always reminded Loman of a fox.
    "They're from Portland."
    "And in thirty-six here?"
    "Tessa Lockland from San Diego."
    Loman blinked.
    "Lockland?"
    Amberlay spelled it.
    "When did she check in?"
    "Just tonight."
    "The minister's widow, Janice Capshaw," Loman said.
    "Her maiden name was Lockland. I had to deal with her