Mr. Murder

"is that you do your best to answer my questions."
        "And all we ask," Paige said, still keeping her back to the man, "is that you find the lunatic who tried to kill Marty."
        "This look-alike." Lowbock spoke the word flatly, without any inflection whatsoever, which seemed more sarcastic than if he had said it with a heavy sneer.
        "Yes," Paige hissed, "this look-alike."
        She didn't doubt Marty's story, as wild as it was, and she knew that somehow the existence of the dead-ringer was tied to-and would ultimately explain-her husband's fugue, bizarre nightmare, and other recent problems.
        Now her fury at the detective faded as she began to accept that the police, for whatever reason, were not going to help them. Anger gave way to fear because she realized they were up against something exceedingly strange and were going to have to deal with it entirely on their own.
        Clocker returned from the front of the Road King to report that the keys were in the ignition in the ON position, but the fuel tank was evidently empty and the battery dead. The cabin lights could not be turned on.
        Worried that the flashlight beam, seen from outside, would look suspicious to anyone pulling into the rest area, Drew Oslett quickly examined the two cadavers in the cramped dining nook. Because the spilled blood was thoroughly dry and caked hard, he knew the man and woman had been dead more than just a few hours. However, although rigor mortis was still present in both bodies, they were no longer entirely stiff, the rigor evidently had peaked and had begun to fade, as it usually did between eighteen and thirty-six hours after death.
        The bodies had not begun to decompose noticeably as yet. The only bad smell came from their open mouths-the sour gases produced by the rotting food in their stomachs.
        "Best guesstimate-they've been dead since sometime yesterday afternoon," he told Clocker.
        The Road King had been sitting in the rest area for more than twenty-four hours, so at least one Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer must have seen it on two separate shifts. State law surely forbade using rest areas as campsites. No electrical connections, water supplies, or sewage-tank pump-outs were provided, which created a potential for health problems. Sometimes cops might be lenient with retirees afraid of driving in weather as inclement as the storm that had assaulted Oklahoma yesterday, the American Association of Retired People bumpersticker on the back of the motorhome might have gained these people some dispensation. But not even a sympathetic cop would let them park two nights. At any moment, a patrol car might pull into the rest area and a knock might come at the door.
        Averse to complicating their already serious problems by killing a highway patrolman, Oslett turned away from the dead couple and hastily proceeded with the search of the motorhome. He was no longer cautious out of fear that Alfie, dysfunctional and disobedient, would put a bullet in his head. Alfie was long gone from here.
        He found the discarded shoes on the kitchen counter. With a large serrated knife, Alfie had sawed at one of the heels until he had exposed the electronic circuitry and the attendant chain of tiny batteries.
        Staring at the Rockports and the pile of rubber shavings, Oslett was chilled by a premonition of disaster. "He never knew about the shoes.
        Why would he get it in his head to cut them open?"
        "Well, he knows what he knows," Clocker said.
        Oslett interpreted Clocker's statement to mean that part of Alfie's training included state-of-the-art electronic surveillance equipment and techniques. Consequently, though he was not told that he was "tagged," he knew that a microminiature transponder could be made small enough to fit in the heel of a shoe and, upon receipt of a remote microwave activating signal, could draw sufficient power from a series of watch batteries to transmit a trackable signal for at least seven two edge of surveillance to his own situation and reach the logical conclusion that his controllers had made prudent provisions for locating and following him in the event he went renegade, even if they had been thoroughly convinced rebellion was not possible.
        Oslett dreaded reporting the bad news to the home office in New York.
        The organization didn't kill the bearer of bad tidings, especially not if his surname