Shattered

Courtney. And Colin. And now their opinions of him were more important than anything else in the world.
        He heard his own voice as if it had come from someone else. “I guess I better go outside and have a look around. If I can get a glimpse of him, see what he looks like, get the license number for that van of his… Then we'll at least know something about our enemy. He won't be such a cipher - and he'll seem less frightening.”
        “And if he does try anything serious,” Colin said, “we'll have a description to give the cops.”
        Doyle nodded numbly, then went to the closet and took out the rumpled, soiled clothes he had worn the day before. He got dressed.
        At the door a few minutes later, he looked back at Colin. “Will you be all right here by yourself?”
        The boy nodded and drew the blanket tightly around himself.
        “I'll lock the door when I go out-and I won't take a key. Don't open up for anyone but me. And don't even open for me until you're certain that you recognize my voice.”
        “Okay.”
        “I won't be long.”
        Colin nodded again. Then, as frightened as he was for himself and Alex, he managed a bit of gallows humor. “You better be careful. It would be utterly tasteless for an artist to let himself be killed in a cheap, dismal place like this.”
        Doyle smiled grimly. “No chance.” Then he went outside, making sure the door had locked behind him.
        
        Earlier in the evening and fifteen hundred miles to the east, Detective Ernie Hoval opened the front door of a thirty-thousand dollar three-bedroom ranch house in a pleasant middle-class development between Cambridge and Cadiz, Ohio, just off Route 22, and stepped into an entrance foyer which was liberally splashed with blood. Long red stains smeared the walls on both sides where desperate hands had slid down the plaster. Thick droplets of blood spotted the beige carpet and the yellow-brocade loveseat by the coat closet.
        Hoval closed the door and walked into the living room, where a dead woman lay half on the sofa and half on the floor. She had been in her late forties, rather handsome if not pretty, tall and dark. She had taken a shotgun blast in the stomach.
        Newspaper reporters and lab photographers circled her like wolves. Four lab technicians, as silent as a quartet of deaf-mutes, crawled all over the big room on their hands and knees, measuring and charting the spray patterns of the blood, which seemed to have reached into every nook and cranny. They were most likely fighting to keep from being sick.
        “Christ,” Hoval said.
        He went through the living room and down the narrow hall to the first bathroom, where there was an extremely pretty teenage girl sprawled at the foot of a bloodstained commode. She was wearing skimpy blue panties, nothing else, and had been shot once in the back of the head. The bathroom was even bloodier than the foyer and the living room combined.
        In the smallest bedroom, a good-looking, long-haired bearded boy in his early twenties was lying on his back in bed, covers drawn up to his chin, his hands folded peacefully on his chest. The pastel blanket was soaked with blood and shredded in the center by shotgun pellets. The poster of the Rolling Stones stapled to the wall above the bed was streaked with red and curled damply at the edges.
        “I thought you were only working on the Pulham case.”
        Hoval turned to see who had spoken and confronted the ineffectual-looking lab man who had lifted the killer's fingerprints from Rich Pulham's squad car. “I heard the report of the initial find and thought maybe this was tied in. It is kind of similar.”
        “It was a family thing,” the lab man said.
        “They already have a suspect?”
        “They already have a confession ,” the technician said, glancing uninterestedly at the dead boy on the bed.
        “Who?”
        “Husband and father.”
        “He killed his own family?” This was not the first time Hoval had encountered a thing like that, but it never failed to shock him. His own wife and kids meant too much to him, were too intricate a part of his life for him to ever understand how another man could bring himself to slaughter his own flesh and blood.
        “He was waiting for the arresting officers,” the technician said. “He was the one who telephoned for them.”
        Hoval felt