Mr. Murder

after him, with no comment about the bloody ice axe on the floor or the two murdered operatives. "Looks like Alfie must've stolen the florist's van for cover. The deliveryman's in the back with the flowers, dead as the moon."
        In spite of the extended wheelbase that added extra room to the interior of the van, the space unoccupied by surveillance equipment and corpses was not large enough to accommodate the three of them comfortably.
        Oslett felt claustrophobic.
        Spicer pulled the seated dead man out of the swivel chair in which he'd died. The corpse tumbled to the floor. Spicer checked the chair for blood before sitting down and turning to the array of monitors and switches, with which he appeared to be familiar.
        Uncomfortably aware of Clocker looming over him, Oslett said, "Is it possible there was a phone call to the house that these guys never got a chance to report to us before Alfie wasted them?"
        Spicer said, "That's what I'm going to find out."
        As Spicer's fingers flew over the programming keyboard, brightly colored graphs and other displays popped onto the half dozen video monitors.
        Contriving, in those tight quarters, to ram his elbow into Clocker's gut, Oslett turned again to the first of the side-by-side view windows.
        He watched the house across the street.
        Clocker stooped to look out the other window. Oslett figured the Trekker was pretending to be at a starship portal, squinting through foot-thick glass at an alien world.
        A couple of cars passed. A pickup truck. A black dog ran along $ the sidewalk, with snow on his paws, he looked as if he was wearing four white socks. The Stillwater house stood silent, serene.
        "Got it," Spicer said, taking off a set of headphones he had put on when Oslett had been staring out the window.
        What he had, as it turned out, was a telephone call monitored, traced, and recorded by the automated equipment perhaps as long as thirty minutes after Alfie killed the surveillance team. In fact, Alfie had been in the Stillwater house when the call came through and had answered it after seven rings. Spicer played it back on a speaker instead of through headphones, so the three of them could listen at the same time.
        "The first voice you hear is the caller," Spicer said, "because the man who picks up the receiver in the Stillwater house doesn't initially say anything."
        "Hello? Mom? Dad?"
        "How did you win them over?"
        Stopping the tape, Spicer said, "That second voice is the receiving phone and it's Alfie."
        "They both sound like Alfie."
        "The other one's Stillwater. Alfie also speaks next."
        "Why would they love you more than me?"
        "Don't touch them, you son of a bitch. Don't you lay one finger on them. "They betrayed me "I want to talk to my mother and father."
      "Put them on the phone." "So you can tell them more lies?"
        They listened to the entire conversation. It was over-the-top creepy because it sounded as if one man was talking to himself, a radically split personality. Worse, their bad boy was obviously not just a renegade but flat-out psychotic.
        When the tape ended, Oslett said, "So Stillwater never stopped at his parents' house."
        "Evidently not."
        "Then how did Alfie find it? And why did he go there? Why was he interested in Stillwater's parents, not just Stillwater himself?"
        Spicer shrugged. "Maybe you'll get a chance to ask the boy if you manage to recover him."
        Oslett didn't like having so many unanswered questions. It made him feel as if he wasn't in control.
        He glanced out the window at the house and at the tire tracks in the snow-covered driveway. "Alfie's probably not over there any more."
        "Went after Stillwater," Spicer agreed.
        "Where was that call placed?"
        "Cellular phone."
        Oslett said, "We can still trace that, can't we?"
        Pointing to three lines of numbers on a display terminal, Spicer said,
        "We've got a satellite triangulation."
        "That's meaningless to me, just numbers."
        "This computer can plot it on a map. To within a hundred feet of the signal source."
        "How long will that take?"
        "Five minutes tops," Spicer said.
        "Good. You work on it. We'll check the house."
        Oslett stepped out of the red van with Clocker close behind.
        As