Although Junior had no hope of sleep now, he concentrated on the  calming mental image 
of gentle waves foaming on moonlit sand. It was  a relaxation technique, not just a sleep 
aid, and he rather desperately  needed to stay relaxed.
  TINK! A harder, sharper snap with the fingernail.
  Not enough people took self-improvement seriously. The human  animal harbored a 
terrible destructive impulse that must always be resisted.
  TINK!
  When people didn't apply themselves to positive goals, to making better lives for 
themselves, they spent their energy in wickedness. Then I got Starkweather, killing all 
those people with no hope of personal gain. You got maniac cops and this new war in 
Vietnam.
  Tink: Junior anticipated the sound, but it didn't come.
  He lay in tense expectation.
  The moonlight had faded and the gentle waves had ebbed out of his mind's eye. He 
concentrated, trying to force the phantom sea to flow back into view, but this was one of 
those rare occasions when a Zedd technique failed him''
  Instead, he imagined Vanadium's blunt fingers moving over the intravenous apparatus 
with surprising delicacy, reading the function of the equipment as a blind man would read 
Braille with swift, sure, gliding fingertips. He imagined the detective finding the 
injection port in the main drip line, pinching it between thumb and forefinger. Saw him 
produce a hypodermic needle as a magician would pluck a silk scarf from the ether. 
Nothing in the syringe except deadly air. The needle sliding into the port ...
  Junior wanted to scream for help, but he dared not.
  He didn't even dare to pretend to wake up now, with a mutter and a yawn because the 
detective would know that he was faking, that he had been awake all along. And if he'd 
been feigning unconsciousness, eaves dropping on the conversation between Dr. Parkhurst 
and Vanadium, and later failing and respond to Vanadium's pointed accusations, his 
deception would inevitably be read as an admission of guilt in the murder  of his wife. 
Then this idiot gumshoe would be indefatigable, relentless.
  As long as Junior continued to fake sleep, the cop couldn't be absolutely sure that any 
deception was taking place.
  He might suspect, but he couldn't know. He would but would be left with at least a 
shred of doubt about Junior's guilt.
  After an interminable silence, the detective said, "Do you know what believe about 
life, Enoch?"
  One stupid damn thing or another.
  I believe the universe is sort of like an unimaginably vast musical with an infinite 
number of strings."
  Right, the universe is a great big enormous ukulele.
  The previously flat, monotonous voice had in it now a subtle but undeniable new 
roundness of tone: "And every human being, every living thing, is a string on that 
instrument."
  And God has four hundred billion billion fingers, and He plays a really hot version of 
"Hawaiian Holiday.
  "The decisions each of us makes and the acts that he commits are like vibrations 
passing through a guitar string."
  In your case a violin, and the tune is the theme from Psycho.
  The quiet passion in Vanadium's voice was genuine, expressed with reason but not 
fervor, not in the least sentimental or unctuous-which made it more disturbing. 
"Vibrations in one string set up soft, sympathetic vibrations in all the other strings, 
through the entire body of the instrument."
  Boing.
  "Sometimes these sympathetic vibrations are very apparent, but alot of the time, 
they're so subtle that you can hear them only if you're unusually perceptive."
  Good grief, shoot me now and spare me the misery of listening to this.
  "When you cut Naomi's string, you put an end to the effects that I her music would have 
on the lives of others and on the shape of the future. YOU struck a discord that can be 
heard, however faintly, all the way to the farthest end of the universe."
  if you're trying to push me into another puke-athon, this is likely to work.
  "That discord sets up lots of other vibrations, some of which will return to you in 
ways you might expect-and some in ways you could never see coming. Of the things you 
couldn't have seen coming, I'm the worst."
  In spite of the bravado of the responses in Junior's unspoken half of the conversation, 
he was increasingly unnerved by Vanadium. The cop was a lunatic, all right, but he was 
something more than a mere nut case.
  "I was once doubting Thomas," said the detective, but not from beside the bed any 
longer. His voice seemed to come from across the room, perhaps near the door, though he 
had made not a sound as he'd moved.
  In spite of his dumpy appearance-and especially in the dark, where appearances didn't 
count-Vanadium had the aura of a mystic. Although Junior didn't believe in mystics or in 
the various unearthly powers they claimed to possess, he knew that mystics who believed 
in themselves were exceptionally dangerous people.
  The detective was driven by this string theory of his, and maybe he also saw visions or 
even heard voices, like Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc with out beauty or grace, Joan of Arc 
with a service revolver and the authority to use it. The cop was no threat to the English 
army, as Joan had been, but as far as Junior was concerned, the creep most definitely 
deserved to be burned at the stake.
  "Now, I'm doubtless," Vanadium said, his voice returning to the uninflected drone that 
Junior had come to loathe but that he now preferred to the unsettling voice of quiet 
passion. "No matter what the situation, no matter how knotty the question, I always know 
what to do.
  And I certainly know what to do about you."
  Weirder and weirder.
  "I've put my hand in the wound."
  "What wound? Junior wanted to ask, but he recognized bait when he heard it, and he did 
not bite.
  After a silence, Vanadium opened the door to the corridor.
  Junior hoped that he hadn't been betrayed by eyeshine in the fraction of a second 
before he closed his eyes to slits.
  A mere silhouette against the fluorescent glare, Vanadium stepped it the hall. The 
bright light seemed to enfold him. The detective shimmered and vanished the way that a 
mirage of a man, on a fiercely hot desert highway, will appear to walk out of this 
dimension into another, slipping between the tremulous curtains of heat as though they 
hang between realities.
  The door swung shut.
  
  Chapter 14
  A SEVERE THIRST INDICATED to Agnes that she wasn't dead. There would be no thirst in 
paradise.
  Of course, she might be making an erroneous assumption about her sentence at Judgment.