Though at first consideration, their dreams appeared to be utterly different from each other, analysis revealed disturbing similarities.
Increasingly mystified rather than enlightened, Dusty pondered the points of intersection, nightmare to nightmare.
He wondered if Skeet had been dreaming recently.
Still lying on his sheepskin pillow, Valet blew air out of his nostrils, one of those forceful but entirely voluntary quasi-sneezes with which he cleared his nose when preparing to seek the scent of rabbits on a morning walk. This time, with no rabbits in the house, it seemed to be a skeptical judgment of his master’s sudden new obsession with dreams.
“There’s something to it,” Dusty muttered.
Valet blew air again.
Restlessly circling the room, Ahriman composed a wonderfully poignant farewell to life, which Susan took down in her graceful handwriting. He knew exactly what to put in and what to leave out in order to convince even the most skeptical police detective that the note was authentic.
Handwriting analysis would, of course, leave little or no room for doubt, but the doctor was meticulous.
Composition under these circumstances was not easy. His mouth was sour with the lingering aftertaste of Tsingtao. Weary to the bone, eyes hot and grainy, mind fuzzy from lack of sleep, he mentally polished every sentence before dictating it.
He was distracted by Susan, as well. Perhaps because he would never possess her again, she seemed more beautiful to him than at any previous moment of their relationship.
Banners of gold hair. Egyptian-green firework eyes. Sad, this broken toy.
No. That was a lousy haiku. Embarrassing. It had seventeen syllables, all right, and in the ideal five-seven-five pattern, but not much else.
He could occasionally compose a reasonably good verse about a snail on a stair tread, crushed hard underfoot, and stuff like that, but when it came to writing lines to capture the look, the mood, the essence of a girl, any girl, then he floundered.
Some truth in his lousy haiku: She
Girls. They always let you down when you’re counting on them.
Filled with a strange mix of sentimental yearning and sullen resentment, Ahriman finished composing the suicide note. He stood over Susan to watch as she signed her name at the bottom.
Her long-fingered hands. The gracefully looping pen. Last words without tears.
Shit.
Leaving the notepad on the table for now, the doctor led Susan into the kitchen. At his request she produced a spare apartment key from the built-in secretaire where she sat to compose shopping lists and plan menus. He already had a key, but he hadn’t brought it with him. He pocketed this one, and they returned to the bedroom.
The videotape was still playing. At his direction, she used the remote to stop it; then she ejected it from the VCR and put it on the nightstand beside the empty wineglass.
“Tell me where you usually store the camcorder.”
Her eyes jiggled. Then her gaze steadied. “In a box on the top shelf of that closet,” she said, pointing.
“Please pack it up and put it away.”
She had to bring a two-step folding stool from the kitchen to complete the task.
Next, he instructed her to use a hand towel from the bathroom to wipe down the nightstands, the headboard of the bed, and anything else he might have touched while in the bedroom. He monitored her to ensure that she did a thorough job.
Because he was careful to avoid touching most surfaces in the apartment, Ahriman had little concern that his prints would be found anywhere but in Susan’s two most private chambers. When she finished in the bedroom, he stood in the doorway of the bathroom for about ten minutes, watching as she polished tile, glass, brass, and porcelain.
Task completed, she folded the hand towel into perfectly aligned thirds and drapediton a brushed-brass bar beside another hand towel that was folded and hung in precisely the same manner. The doctor valued neatness.
When he saw the folded white cotton panties on the hamper lid, he had almost instructed her to toss them in with the other laundry, but instinct had led him to question her about them. When he learned that they had been set aside to provide a DNA sample to the police, he was shocked.
Girls. Devious. Cunning. More than once, when the doctor was a boy, girls had taunted him into pushing them down a flight of porch steps or shoving them into a thorny rosebush, whereupon they had always run to the nearest adults, claiming that the assault had been unprovoked, that it had been pure meanness. Here, now, these decades later, more treachery.
He could have instructed her to wash the panties in the sink, but he decided that prudence required him to take them when he left, remove them from the apartment altogether.
