Phantoms

was rage in him now. “I’ll get them for this,” he said. “Whoever did this… I’ll make them pay.”
    Jenny had never met a man quite like him. He had considerable masculine strength and purpose, but he was also capable of tenderness.
    She wanted to hold him. And be held.
    But, as always, she was far too guarded about expressing her own emotional state. If she had possessed his openness, she would never have become estranged from her mother. But she wasn’t that way, not yet, although she wanted to be. So, in response to his vow to get the killers of the Bischoffs’ children, she said, “But what if it isn’t anything human that killed them? Not all evil is in men. There’s evil in nature. The blind maliciousness of earthquakes. The uncaring evil of cancer. This thing here could be like that—remote and unaccountable. There’ll be no taking it to court if it isn’t even human. What then?”
    “Whoever or whatever the hell it is, I’ll get it. I’ll stop it. I’ll make it pay for what’s been done here,” he said stubbornly.
     
    Frank Autry’s search team prowled through three deserted houses after leaving the Catholic church. The fourth house wasn’t empty. They found Wendell Hulbertson, a high school teacher who worked in Santa Mira but who chose to live here in the mountains, in a house that had once belonged to his mother. Gordy had been in Hulbertson’s English class only five years ago. The teacher was not swollen or bruised like the other corpses; he had taken his own life. Backed into a corner of his bedroom, he had put the barrel of a .32 automatic in his mouth and had pulled the trigger. Evidently, death by his own hand had been preferable to whatever it had been about to do to him.
     
    After leaving the Bischoff residence, Bryce led his group through a few houses without finding any bodies. Then, in the fifth house, they discovered an elderly husband and wife locked in a bathroom, where they had tried to hide from their killer. She was sprawled in the tub. He was in a heap on the floor.
    “They were patients of mine,” Jenny said. “Nick and Melina Papandrakis.”
    Tal wrote their names down on a list of the dead.
    Like Harold Ordnay and his wife in the Candleglow Inn, Nick Papandrakis had attempted to leave a message that would point a finger at the killer. He had taken some iodine from the medicine cabinet and had used it to paint on the wall. He hadn’t had a chance to finish even one word. There were only two letters and part of a third:
     
    PR(
     
    “Can anyone figure out what he intended to write?” Bryce asked.
    They all took turns squeezing into the bathroom and stepped over Nick Papandrakis’s corpse to have a look at the orange-brown letters on the wall, but none of them had any flashes of inspiration.
     
    Bullets.
    In the house next to the Papandrakis’s, the kitchen floor was littered with expended bullets. Not entire cartridges. Just dozens of lead slugs, sans their brass casings.
    The fact that there were no ejected casings anywhere in the room indicated that no gunfire had taken place here. There was no odor of gunpowder. No bullet holes in the walls or cabinets.
    There were just bullets all over the floor, as if they had rained magically out of thin air.
    Frank Autry scooped up a handful of the gray lumps of metal. He wasn’t a ballistics expert, but, oddly, none of the bullets was fragmented or badly deformed, and that enabled him to see that they had come from a variety of weapons. Most of them— scores of them—with caliber of ammunition that was spat out by the submachine guns with which General Copperfield’s support units were armed.
    Are these slugs from Sergeant Harker’s gun? Frank wondered. Are these the rounds Harker fired at his killer in the meat locker at Gilmartin’s Market?
    He frowned, perplexed.
    He dropped the bullets, and they clattered on the floor. He plucked several other slugs off the tiles. There were a .22 and a .32 and another .22 and a .38. There were even a lot of shotgun pellets.
    He picked up a single .45-caliber bullet and examined it with special interest. It was exactly the ammunition that his own revolver handled.
    Gordy Brogan hunkered down beside him.
    Frank didn’t look at Gordy. He continued to stare intently at the slug. He was wrestling with an eerie thought.
    Gordy scooped a few bullets off the kitchen tiles. “They aren’t deformed at all.”
    Frank nodded.
    “They had to’ve hit something ,” Gordy