from view as the meatless ribs under Death's voluminous black robe.
  From the comer armchair, as if he could see so well in the dark that he knew Junior's 
eyes were open, Detective Thomas Vanadium said, "Did you hear my entire conversation with 
Dr. Parkhurst?"
  Junior's heart knocked so hard and fast that he wouldn't have been surprised if 
Vanadium, at the far end of the room, had begun to tap his foot in time with it.
  Although Junior had not answered, Vanadium said, "Yes, I thought you heard it."
  A trickster, this detective. Full of taunts and feints and sly stratagems. 
PsychologIcal-warfare artist.
  Perhaps a lot of suspects were rattled and ultimately unnerved by this behavior. Junior 
wouldn't be easily trapped. He was smart.
  Applying his intelligence now, he employed simple meditation techniques to calm himself 
and to slow his heartbeat. The cop was trying to rattle him into making a mistake, but 
calm men did not incriminate themselves.
  "What was it like, Enoch? Did you look into her eyes when you pushed her?" Vanadium's 
uninflected monologue was like the voice of a conscience that preferred to torture by 
droning rather than by nagging. "Or doesn't a woman-killing coward like you have the guts 
for that? "
  Pan-faced, double-chinned, half-bald, puke-collecting asshole, Junior thought.
  No. Wrong attitude. Be calm. Be indifferent to insult.
  "Did you wait until her back was turned, too gutless even to meet her eyes?"
  This was pathetic. Only thickheaded fools, unschooled and unworldly, would be shaken 
into confession by ham-handed tactics like these.
  Junior was educated. He wasn't merely a masseur with a fancy title; he had earned a 
hill bachelor of science degree with a major in rehabilitation therapy. When he watched 
television, which he never did to excess, he rarely settled for frivolous game shows or 
sitcoms like Gomer Pyle or The Beverly Hillbillies, or even I Dream of Jeannie, but 
committed himself to serious dramas that required intellectual involvement-Gunsmoke, 
Bonanza, and The Fugitive. He preferred Scrabble to all other board games, because it 
expanded one's vocabulary. As a member in good standing of the Book-of-the-Month Club, 
he'd already acquired nearly thirty volumes of the finest in contemporary literature, and 
thus far he'd read or skim-read more than six of them. He would have read all of them if 
he had not been a busy man with such varied interests; his cultural aspirations were 
greater than the time he was able to devote to them.
  Vanadium said, "Do you know who I am, Enoch?"
  Thomas Big Butt Vanadium.
  "Do you know what I am?"
  Pimple on the ass of humanity.
  "No," said Vanadium, "you only think you know who I am and what I am, but you don't 
know anything. That's all right. You'll learn."
  This guy was spooky. Junior was beginning to think that the detective's unorthodox 
behavior wasn't a carefully crafted strategy, as it had first seemed, but that Vanadium 
was a little wacky.
  Whether the cop was unhinged or not, Junior had nothing to gain by talking to him, 
especially in this disorienting darkness. He was exhausted, achy, with a sore throat, and 
he couldn't trust himself to be as self-controlled as he would need to be in any 
interrogation conducted by this brush-cut, thick-necked toad.
  He stopped straining to see through the black room to the corner armchair. He closed 
his eyes and tried to lull himself to sleep by summoning into his mind's eye a lovely but 
calculatedly monotonous scene of gentle waves breaking on a moonlit shore.
  This was a relaxation technique that had worked often before. He had teamed it from a 
brilliant book, How to Have a Healthier Life through Autohypnosis.
  Junior Cain was committed to continuous self-improvement. He believed in the need 
constantly to expand his knowledge and horizons order to better understand himself and 
the world. The quality of life was solely the responsibility of oneself he author of How 
to Have a Healthier Life through Autohypnosis was Dr. Caesar Zedd, a renowned 
psychologist and best-selling author of a dozen self-help texts, all of which Junior 
owned in addition to the literature that he had acquired from the book club. When he had 
been only fourteen, he'd begun buying Dr. Zedd's titles in paperback, and by the time he 
was eighteen, when he could afford to do so, he'd replaced the paperbacks with hardcovers 
and thereafter bought all the doctor's new books in the higher-priced editions. The 
collected works  of Zedd constituted the most thoughtful, most rewarding, most reliable 
guide to life to be found anywhere. When Junior was Confused or troubled, he turned to 
Caesar Zedd and never failed to find enlightenment, guidance. When he was happy, he found 
in Zedd the welcome reassurance that it was all right to be successful and to love 
oneself Dr. Zedd's death, just last Thanksgiving, had been a blow to Junior, a loss to 
the nation, to the entire world. He considered it a tragedy equal to the Kennedy 
assassination one year previous.
  And like John Kennedy's death, Zedd's passing was cloaked in mystery, inspiring 
widespread suspicion of conspiracy. Only a few believed that he had committed suicide, 
and Junior was certainly not one of those gullible fools. Caesar Zedd, author of You Have 
a Right to Be Happy, would never have blown his brains out with a shotgun, as the 
authorities preferred the public to believe.
  "Would you pretend to wake up if I tried to smother you?" asked Detective Vanadium.
  The voice had come not from the armchair in the corner, but from immediately beside the 
bed.
  If Junior had not been so deeply relaxed by the soothing waves breaking on the moonlit 
beach in his mind, he might have cried out in surprise, might have bolted upright in bed, 
betraying himself and confirming Vanadium's suspicion that he was conscious.
  He hadn't heard the cop get out of the chair and cross the dark room. Difficult to 
believe that any man with such a hard gut slung over his belt, with a bull neck folded 
over his too-tight shirt collar, and with a second chin more prominent than the first 
could be capable of such supernatural stealth.
  "I could introduce a bubble of air into your IV needle," the detective  said quietly, 
"kill you with an embolism, and they would never know.
  Lunatic. No doubt about it now: Thomas Vanadium was crazier  than old Charlie 
Starkweather and Caril Fugate, the teenage thrill  killers who had murdered eleven people 
in Nebraska and Wyoming a  few years back.
  Something was going wrong in America lately. The country wasn't level and steady 
anymore. It was tipped. This society was slowly sliding  toward an abyss. First, teenage 
thrill killers. Now maniac cops. Worse  to come, no doubt. Once a decline set in, halting 
or reversing the negative momentum was difficult if not impossible.
  Tink.
  The sound was odd, but Junior was almost able to identify it.
  Tink.
  Whatever the source of the noise, he was sure Vanadium was the  cause of it.
  Tink.
  Ah. Yes, he knew the source. The detective was snapping one finger  against the bottle 
of solution that was suspended from the IV rack be  side the bed.
  Tink.