Velocity

concluded his shower without being knifed.
    He wondered how much time would have to pass before he got over the heebie-jeebies. Most likely, the rest of his life.
    After toweling off and dressing, he applied a fresh bandage to the hook wounds in his forehead.
    He went into the kitchen, opened an Elephant beer, and used it to chase a pair of Motrin. The inflammation in his left hand worried him a little.
    At the table with the beer, and with a few first-aid items, he tried to introduce iodine into the nail wound, then applied a fresh liquid bandage.
    Beyond the windows, twilight approached.
    He intended to go to Whispering Pines and spend a few hours. He had arranged to stay throughout the night in a prayer vigil; but in spite of his ten-hour sleep, he didn’t think he would be able to stay that long. With Valis dead, midnight had no meaning.
    When Billy had tended to the nail wound, as he sat at the table finishing the beer, his attention fell on the microwave. The security video.
    All this while, he’d been recording himself at the table. Then he realized that he had caught himself taking the hands out of the freezer. The camera had a wide-angle lens, but he didn’t believe that it could have captured his gruesome work well enough to serve as evidence.
    Nevertheless…
    He got the stepladder from the pantry. He climbed it and opened the cabinet above the microwave.
    Using the reverse-scan mode, he studied the small review screen, watching himself walk backward around the kitchen. The angle had not revealed the severed hands.
    Suddenly wondering whether Valis might have visited the house for some purpose between the time Billy had left the previous day and their meeting in the motor home before dawn, he continued the reverse scan beyond his entrance shortly after six o’clock.
    He didn’t have to go all the way to the previous day. At 3:07 this same day, while Billy had still been asleep at the Olsen place, a man walked backward out of the living room, across the kitchen to the door, and reversed out of the house.
    The intruder was not Valis, of course, because Valis was dead.
     
     
     

Chapter 75
     
    Billy couldn’t remember the number. Using Lanny’s cell phone, he called directory assistance in Denver, and they put him through to Detective Ramsey Ozgard.
    Billy paced while the phone rang out there in the shadow of the Rockies.
    Maybe Valis had been confident of Billy’s conversion because he had previously bent someone else instead of destroying him. None of the sixteen members of his crew was like him, but that didn’t mean the artist was a lone hunter.
    Ramsey Ozgard answered on the fifth ring, and Billy identified himself as Lanny Olsen, and Ozgard said, “I hear blood in your voice, Deputy. Tell me you’ve got your man.”
    “I think I will have shortly,” Billy said. “I’ve got an urgent situation here. I need to know—the year Judith Kesselman vanished, was there a professor at the university, calling himself Valis?”
    “Not a professor,” Ozgard said. “He was the artist in residence for six months. At the end of his time, he did this ridiculous thing he called performance art, wrapped two campus buildings in thousands of yards of blue silk and hung them with—”
    Billy interrupted. “Steve Zillis had a perfect alibi.”
    “It was watertight,” Ozgard assured him. “I can walk you through it if you have ten minutes.”
    “I don’t. But tell me—do you remember—at the university, what was Zillis’s major?”
    “He was an art major.”
    “Sonofabitch.”
    No wonder Zillis hadn’t wanted to talk about the mannequins. They weren’t just expressions of the sick dreams of a sociopathic killer—they were his art.
    At that point, Billy hadn’t yet discovered the key words that would reveal the identity of the freak-performance art. He’d had only performance, and Zillis instinctively hadn’t wanted to give him the rest of it, not when he was doing so well playing a harmless, put-upon pervert.
    “The son of a bitch deserves an Oscar,” Billy said. “I left his place feeling like the world’s worst shit, the way I treated him.”
    “Deputy?”
    “The famous and respected Valis vouched for Steve Zillis—didn’t he?—said that Steve was with him on a retreat or something on the day Judith Kesselman disappeared.”
    “You’re right. But you’d only jump to that if—”
    “Turn on your evening news, Detective Ozgard. By the time Judi Kesselman vanished, Steve and