Mr. Murder

deceptive surface, infinitely strange and inimical to human life.
        "I don't think," he said, "that the police would ordinarily have completed their tests on those blood samples so quickly, and I know it's not standard practice to release crime-lab results so casually to the media." He let the draperies fall into place and turned to Paige, whose brow was furrowed with worry. "National news? Live, on the scene?
        I don't know what the hell is happening, Paige, but it's even stranger than I thought it was last night." ' While Paige showered, Marty pulled up a chair in front of the television and channel-hopped, searching for other news programs. He caught the end of a second story about himself on a local channel and then a third piece, complete, on a national show.
        He was trying to guard against paranoia, but he had the distinct impression that both stories suggested, without making accusations, that the falsity of his statement to the Mission Viejo Police was a foregone conclusion and that his real motive was either to sell more books or something darker and weirder than mere career-pumping.
        Both programs made use of the photograph from the current issue of People, in which he resembled a movie zombie with glowing eyes, lurching out of shadows, violent and demented. And both pointedly mentioned the three guns of which he'd been relieved by the police, as if he might be a suburban survivalist living atop a bunker packed solid with arms and ammunition. Toward the end of the third report, he thought an implication was made to the effect that he might even be dangerous, although it was so smooth and so subtly inserted that it was more a matter of the reporter's tone of voice and expressions than any words in the script.
        Rattled, he switched off the television.
        For a while he stared at the blank screen. The gray of the dead monitor matched his mood.
        After everyone was showered and dressed, the girls got in the back seat of the BMW and dutifully put on their seatbelts while their parents stowed the luggage in the trunk.
        When Marty slammed the trunk lid and locked it, Paige spoke to him quietly, so Charlotte and Emily couldn't hear. "You really think we have to go this far, do these things, it's really that bad?"
        "I don't know. Like I told you, I've been brooding about this ever since I woke up, since three o'clock this morning, and I still don't know if I'm over-reacting."
        "These are serious steps to take, even risky."
        "It's just that… as strange as this already is, with The Other and everything he said to me, whatever underlies it all is stranger still.
        More dangerous than one lunatic with a gun. Deadlier and a lot bigger than that. Something so big it'll crush us if we try to stand up to it.
        That's how I felt in the middle of the night, afraid, more scared even than when he had the kids in his car. And after what I saw on TV this morning, I'm more-not less-inclined to go with my gut feelings He realized that his expression of dread was extreme, with an unmistakable flavor of paranoia. But he was no alarmist, and he was confident that his instincts could be trusted. Events had dissolved all of his doubts about his mental well-being.
        He wished he could identify an enemy other than the improbable dead-ringer, for he knew intuitively that there was another enemy, and it would be comforting to have it defined. The Mafia, Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, consortiums of evil bankers, the board of directors of some ferociously greedy international conglomerate, right-wing generals intent on establishing a military dictatorship, a cabal of in sane Mideastern zealots, mad scientists intent on blowing the world to smithereens for the sheer hell of it, or Satan himself in all his horned splendor-any of the standard villains of television dramas and countless novels, regardless of how unlikely and cliched, would be preferable to an adversary without face or form or name.
        Chewing her lower lip, lost in thought, Paige let her gaze travel across the breeze-ruffled trees, other parked cars, and the front of the motel, before tilting her head back and looking up at three shrieking sea gulls that wheeled across the mostly blue and uncaring azure sky.
        "You sense it too," he said.
        "Yes."
        "Oppressive. We're not being watched, but the feeling is almost the same." ' More than that," she said.