The Face

vented. The resultant damage to the ovens might be severe enough to cause a natural-gas leak and a larger blast.
        The utter destruction of the house didn’t require the oven trick to work. The four gallons of high-grade accelerant that he had poured throughout the small structure and the additional gallons pooling on the garage floor would feed the flames and obliterate every source of his DNA, from semen to hairs, and every fingerprint that he’d left behind. Nonetheless, he believed in redundancy whenever possible.
        On the back porch, Corky shrugged into his voluminous yellow slicker. He jammed the droopy rain hat on his head.
        He pushed through the screen door and went down the steps. At the end of the backyard, he passed through a gate into an alleyway and never glanced again at the narrow house.
        He thrived in the rain.
        Cataracts gushed from the sky. The racing torrents in the gutters overflowed the curbs.
        This downpour would not quench the fire that he had engineered. The gasoline-fed flames would thoroughly gut the wooden structure before the walls collapsed and offered admission to the rain.
        [400] Indeed, the storm was his ally. Badly flooded intersections and snarled traffic would delay the fire engines.
        He had just turned a corner and come within sight of his BMW when he heard the first explosion in the distance. The sound was low, flat, muffled, but ugly.
        Soon he would have erased everyone and every clue that might have led the police to him after the assault on Palazzo Rospo.

CHAPTER 59
        
        FROM THE MORE REMOTE ROOMS IN PALAZZO Rospo, Fric gathered earthquake lights in a picnic hamper.
        The mansion and the outlying buildings had been re-engineered for seismic security and retrofitted with structural reinforcements that were supposed to ensure little or no damage even from a two-minute shaker peaking at 8.0 on the Richter scale.
        Generally, 8.0 was considered to be the kiss-your-ass-good-bye number. Earthquakes that big struck only in movies.
        If a humungous killer quake knocked out the city’s power supply, Palazzo Rospo would be able to rely on gasoline-fueled generators in a subterranean vault that had two-foot-thick, poured-in-place, steel-reinforced walls and ceiling. Following a regional catastrophe, the mansion should remain fully lighted, the computers should continue to run, the elevators should still be operating, the refrigerators should remain cold.
        In the rose garden, the carved-granite fountain of urinating cherubs should continue to sprinkle eternally.
        This backup would be less useful if heretofore unknown volcanoes erupted under Los Angeles and disgorged rivers of molten lava that turned hundreds of square miles into a smoldering wasteland or if an [402] asteroid smashed into Bel Air. But even a star as famous and rich as Ghost Dad could not protect himself from cataclysm on a planetary scale.
        If the Swiss-made generators in the bunker were disabled, then Frankenstein-castle banks of twenty-year batteries, each as big as a casket standing on end, instantly came into service. These supported limited emergency lighting, all computers, the security system, and other essential equipment for as long as ninety-six hours.
        Should the city’s electric power fail, should the generators be wrecked, should the giant twenty-year batteries prove useless, there were many earthquake lights distributed throughout the house. Personally, Fric figured such a series of failures was likely only in the event of an invasion of extraterrestrials with magnetic-pulse weapons.
        Anyway, according to Mrs. McBee, there were 214 quake lights, which meant you could safely bet your life that there were not 213 or 215.
        These small but potentially bright, battery-powered flashlights were at all times plugged into electrical outlets in the baseboard, continuously charging. If the power failed, the quake lights at once switched on, providing enough pathway illumination to allow everyone to exit safely from the mansion in the darkest hours of the deepest night. Furthermore, they could be unplugged and carried as though they were ordinary flashlights.
        Like the cover plate on the electrical outlet in which it was seated, the plastic casing of each flashlight matched the color of the baseboard on which it rested: beige against limestone baseboard, dark