Mr. Murder

carrot-juice cocktail had been poured, where the first granola bar had been made, and was still the only place where a significant number of people believed that sticks of raw jicama were a satisfactory substitute for french fries, so only certain fanatically dedicated Californians had enough determination to exceed the structural requirements of a temple. Jim Lomar had a neck like a granite column, shoulders like limestone door lintels, a chest that could buttress a nave wall, a stomach as flat as an altar stone, and had pretty much made a great cathedral out of his body.
        Although a storm front had passed through earlier in the night and the air was still damp and chilly, Lomar was wearing just jeans and a T-shirt on which was a photo of Madonna with her breasts bared (the rock singer, not the mother of God), as if the elements affected him as little as they did the quarried walls of any mighty fortress. He virtually strutted instead of walking, performing every task with calculated grace and evident self-consciousness, obviously aware and pleased that people were prone to watch and envy him.
        Oslett suspected Lomar was not merely a proud man but profoundly vain, even narcissistic. The only god worshipped in the cathedral of his body was the ego that inhabited it.
        Nevertheless Oslett liked the guy. The most appealing thing about Lomar was that, in his company, Karl Clocker appeared to be the smaller of the two. In fact it was the only appealing thing about the guy, but it was enough. Actually, Lomar was probably only slightly-if at all-larger than Clocker, but he was harder and better honed. By comparison, Clocker seemed slow, shambling, old, and soft. Because he was sometimes intimidated by Clocker's size, Oslett delighted at the thought of Clocker intimidated by Lomar-though, frustratingly, if the Trekker was at all impressed, he didn't show it.
        Lomar drove. Oslett sat up front, and Clocker slumped in the back seat.
        Leaving the airport, they turned right onto MacArthur Boulevard.
        They were in an area of expensive office towers and complexes, many of which seemed to be the regional or national headquarters of major corporations, set back from the street behind large and meticulously maintained lawns, flowerbeds, swards of shrubbery, and lots of trees, all illuminated by artfully placed landscape lighting.
        "Under your seat," Lomar told Oslett, "you'll find a Xerox of the Mission Viejo Police report on the incident at the Stillwater house.
        Wasn't easy to get hold of. Read it now, 'cause I have to take it with me and destroy it."
        Clipped to the report was a penlight by which to read it. As they followed MacArthur Boulevard south and west into Newport Beach, Oslett studied the document with growing astonishment and dismay.
        They reached the Pacific Coast Highway and turned south, traveling all the way through Corona Del Mar before he finished.
        "This cop, this Lowbock," Oslett said, looking up from the report, "he thinks it's all a publicity stunt, thinks there wasn't even an intruder."
        "That's a break for us," Lomar said. He grinned, which was a mistake, because it made him look like the poster boy for some charity formed to help the willfully stupid.
        Oslett said, "Considering the whole damn Network is maybe being sucked down a drain here, I think we need more than a break.
        We need a miracle."
        "Let me see," Clocker said.
        Oslett passed the report and penlight into the back seat, and then said to Lomar, "How did our bad boy know Stillwater was even out here, how did he find him?"
        Lomar shrugged his limestone-lintel shoulders. "Nobody knows."
        Oslett made a wordless sound of disgust.
        To the right of the highway, they passed a pricey gate-guarded golf-course community, after which the lightless Pacific lay so vast and black to the west that they seemed to be driving along the edge of eternity.
        Lomar said, "We figure if we keep tabs on Stillwater, sooner or later our man will turn up, and we'll recover him."
        "Where's Stillwater now?"
        "We don't know."
        "Terrific."
        "Well, see, not half an hour after the cops left, there was this other thing happened to the Stillwaters, before we got to them, and after that they seemed to… go into hiding, I guess you'd say."
        "What other thing?"
        Lomar frowned.