Prodigal Son

times for pasta dinners, and he'd been to her place for takeout, since she didn't cook even pasta. These had been strictly neighborly occasions.
        He didn't want sex from Jenna Parker. He wanted to learn from her the secret of happiness.
        "I told you-it's just you remind me of my sister."
        "Sister. Yeah, right."
        "Anyway, I'm almost old enough to be your father."
        "When has that ever mattered to a man?"
        "We aren't all swine," he said.
        "Oh. Sorry, Johnny. Jeez, I didn't mean to sound… mean. I'm just floatin' so high inside that I'm not always down there where the words come out."
        "I noticed. Why do you ever use drugs, anyway? You're happy when you're sober. You're always happy."
        She grinned, came to him, and pinched his cheek affectionately. "You're right. I love life. I'm always happy. But it's no crime to want to be even happier now and then."
        "Actually" he said, "if I were in Vice instead of Homicide, maybe I'd have to consider it a crime."
        "You'd never arrest me, Johnny. Probably not even if I killed someone."
        "Probably not," he agreed, and squirted her in the mouth and nostrils with chloroform solution.
        Her gasp of surprise did what a blow across the backs of her knees would have done: dropped her to the floor. She sputtered, wheezed, and passed out.
        He had taken the squeeze bottle from Roy Pribeaux's apartment. It was one of three he had found there.
        Later he would leave it with her dead body. Her remains wouldn't be found for months, so their condition wouldn't enable CSI to date her death after Pribeaux's. The bottle would be one of several pieces of evidence identifying her as his final victim.
        Now Jonathan lifted her effortlessly, carried her into his apartment, and kicked the door shut behind them.
        Of the four apartments here on the fourth floor, one stood vacant. Paul Miller, in 4-C, was away at a sales conference in Dallas. Only Jonathan and Jenna were in residence. No one could have witnessed the assault and abduction.
        Jenna wouldn't be missed for a day or two. By then, he would have opened her top to bottom, would have found the special something that she had and that he was missing, and would have disposed of her remains.
        He was taking all these precautions not because he feared going to prison but because he feared that Father would identify him as the renegade.
        In his bedroom, Jonathan had pushed the bed into a corner. He had stacked the other furniture atop it to create sufficient space for the makeshift autopsy table that he had prepared for her.
        Plastic sheeting covered the floor. At the head and foot of the table stood lamps that were bright enough to reveal the source of her happiness whether it was nestled in a tangle of guts or embedded in the cerebellum.
        Putting her on the table, he noticed that she was bleeding from one nostril. She'd cracked her nose against the floor when she had fallen. The bleeding wasn't serious. The nose injury wasn't what would kill her.
        Jonathan checked her pulse. Steady.
        He was relieved. He'd been concerned that she had inhaled too much chloroform, that maybe she'd suffered chemical suffocation or anaphylactic shock.
        He wanted her to be alive through this procedure. For some of it, he needed her to be awake and responsive.

CHAPTER 60
        
        IN THE BASEMENT of Mercy hiding behind a row of file cabinets, Randal Six hears noise from beyond the walls of his world: first, the hollow sound of a door falling shut in another room.
        According to what Randal has overheard while seeming to be lost in his autism, only Father enters and leaves through the outer door of this chamber. Now, after a late dinner, as he often does, Father must be returning with the intention of working through the night.
        Crouched at the end of the cabinet row, Randal cocks his head and listens intently. After a moment, he hears the electronic tones of the numbers being entered in an electric-lock keypad on the far side of the outer file-room door.
        The ten tones that represent numbers-zero through nine-on telephone, security-system, electric-lock, and other keypads are universal. They do not vary from one manufacturer to another.
        He learned this from an educational web site maintained by one of the nation's largest communications