DEAN KOONTZ Originally published under the pseudonym Leigh Nichols BERKLEY BOOKS. NEW YORK If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book." This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. Originally published under the pseudonym Leigh Nichols. THE EYES OF DARKNESS A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Nkui, Inc. PRINTING HISTORY Pocket Books edition / February 1981 Berkley edition /July 1996 All rights reserved. Copyright © 1981 by Leigh Nichols. Copyright © 1996 by Nkui, Inc. Author photo copyright © 1993 by Jerry Bauer. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com ISBN: 0-425-15397-5 BERKLEY® Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. BERKLEY and the "B" design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 15 14 13 This better version is for Gerda, with love. After five years of work, now that I'm nearly finished improving these early novels first published under pen names, I intend to start improving myself. Considering all that needs to he done, this new project will henceforth he known as the hundred-year plan. Tuesday, DECEMBER 30 1 AT SIX MINUTES PAST MIDNIGHT, TUESDAY MORNing, on the way home from a late rehearsal of her new stage show, Tina Evans saw her son, Danny, in a stranger's car. But Danny had been dead more than a year. Two blocks from her house, intending to buy a quart of milk and a loaf of whole-wheat bread, Tina stopped at a twenty-four-hour market and parked in the dry yellow drizzle of a sodium-vapor light, beside a gleaming, cream-colored Chevrolet station wagon. The boy was in the front passenger seat of the wagon, waiting for someone in the store. Tina could see only the side of his face, but she gasped in painful recognition. Danny. The boy was about twelve, Danny's age. He had thick dark hair like Danny's, a nose that resembled Danny's, and a rather delicate jawline like Danny's too. She whispered her son's name, as if she would frighten off this beloved apparition if she spoke any louder. Unaware that she was staring at him, the boy put one hand to his mouth and bit gently on his bent thumb knuckle, which Danny had begun to do a year or so before he died. Without success, Tina had tried to break him of that bad habit. Now, as she watched this boy, his resemblance to Danny seemed to be more than mere coincidence. Suddenly Tina's mouth went dry and sour, and her heart thudded. She still had not adjusted to the loss of her only child, because she'd never wanted—or tried—to adjust to it. Seizing on this boy's resemblance to her Danny, she was too easily able to fantasize that there had been no loss in the first place. Maybe . . . maybe this boy actually was Danny. Why not? The more that she considered it, the less crazy it seemed. After all, she'd never seen Danny's corpse. The police and the morticians had advised her that Danny was so badly torn up, so horribly mangled, that she was better off not looking at him. Sickened, grief-stricken, she had taken their advice, and Danny's funeral had been a closed-coffin service. But perhaps they'd been mistaken when they identified the body. Maybe Danny hadn't been killed in the accident, after all. Maybe he'd only suffered a mild head injury, just severe enough to give him . . . amnesia. Yes. Amnesia. Perhaps he had wandered away from the wrecked bus and had been found miles from the scene of the accident, without identification, unable to tell anyone who he was or where he came from. That was possible, wasn't it? She had seen similar stories in the movies. Sure. Amnesia. And if that were the case, then he might have ended up in a foster home, in a new life. And now here he was sitting in the cream-colored Chevrolet wagon, brought to her by fate and by— The boy became conscious of her gaze and turned toward her. She held her breath as his face came slowly around. As they stared at each other through two windows and through the strange sulphurous light, she had the feeling that they were making contact across an immense gulf of space and time and destiny. But then, inevitably, her fantasy burst, for he wasn't Danny. Pulling her gaze away from his, she studied her hands, which were gripping the steering wheel so fiercely that they ached. "Damn." She was angry with herself. She thought of herself as a tough, competent, levelheaded woman who was able to deal with anything life threw at her, and she was disturbed by her continuing inability to accept Danny's death. After the initial shock, after the funeral, she had begun to cope with the trauma. Gradually, day by day, week by week, she had put Danny behind her, with sorrow, with guilt, with tears and much bitterness, but also with firmness and determination. She had taken several steps up in her career during the past year, and she had relied on hard work as a sort of morphine, using it to dull her pain until the wound fully healed. But then, a few weeks ago, she had begun to slip back into the dreadful condition in which she'd wallowed imme-diately after she'd received news of the accident. Her denial was as resolute as it was irrational. Again, she was pos-sessed by the haunting feeling that her child was alive. Time should have put even more distance between her and the anguish, but instead the passing days were bringing her around full circle in her grief. This boy in the station wagon was not the first that she had imagined was Danny; in recent weeks, she had seen her lost son in other cars, in school-yards past which she had been driving, on public streets, in a movie theater. Also, she'd recently been plagued by a repeating dream in which Danny was alive. Each time, for a few hours after she woke, she could not face reality. She half convinced herself that the dream was a premonition of Danny's eventual return to her, that somehow he had survived and would be coming back into her arms one day soon. This was a warm and wonderful fantasy, but she could not sustain it for long. Though she always resisted the grim truth, it gradually exerted itself every time, and she was repeatedly brought down hard, forced to accept that the dream was not a premonition. Nevertheless, she knew that when she had the dream again, she would find new hope in it as she had so many times before. And that was not good. Sick, she berated herself. She glanced at the station wagon and saw that the boy was still staring at her. She glared at her tightly clenched hands again and found the strength to break her grip on the steering wheel. Grief could drive a person crazy. She'd heard that said, and she believed it. But she wasn't going to allow such a thing to happen to her. She would be sufficiently tough on herself to stay in touch with reality—as unpleasant as reality might be. She couldn't allow herself to hope. She had loved Danny with all her heart, but he was gone. Torn and crushed in a bus accident with fourteen other little boys, just one victim of a larger tragedy. Battered beyond recognition. Dead. Cold. Decaying. In a coffin. Under the ground. Forever. Her lower lip trembled. She wanted to cry, needed to cry, but she didn't. The boy in the Chevy had lost interest in her. He was staring at the front of the grocery store again, waiting. Tina got out of her Honda. The night was pleasantly cool and desert-dry. She took a deep breath and went into the market, where the air was so cold that it pierced her bones, and where the harsh fluorescent lighting was too bright and too bleak to encourage fantasies. She bought a quart of nonfat milk and a loaf of whole-wheat bread that was cut thin for dieters, so each serving contained only half the calories of an ordinary slice of bread. She wasn't a dancer anymore; now she worked behind the curtain, in the production end of the show, but she still felt physically and psychologically best when she weighed no more than she had weighed when she'd been a performer. Five minutes later she was home. Hers was a modest ranch house in a quiet neighborhood. The olive trees and lacy melaleucas stirred lazily in a faint Mojave breeze. In the kitchen, she toasted two pieces of bread. She spread a thin skin of peanut butter on them, poured a glass of nonfat milk, and sat at the table. Peanut-butter toast had been one of Danny's favorite foods, even when he was a toddler and was especially picky about what he would eat. When he was very young, he had called it "neenut putter." Closing her eyes now, chewing the toast, Tina could still see him—three years old, peanut butter smeared all over his lips and chin—as he grinned and said, More neenut putter toast, please. She opened her eyes with a start because her mental image of him was too vivid, less like a memory than like a vision. Right now she didn't want to remember so clearly. But it was too late. Her heart knotted in her chest, and her lower lip began to quiver again, and she put her head down on the table. She wept. • • • That night Tina dreamed that Danny was alive again. Somehow. Somewhere. Alive. And he needed her. In the dream, Danny was standing at the edge of a bottomless gorge, and Tina was on the far side, opposite him, looking across the immense gulf. Danny was calling her name. He was lonely and afraid. She was miserable because she couldn't think of a way to reach him. Mean-while, the sky grew darker by the second; massive storm clouds, like the clenched fists of celestial giants, squeezed the last light out of the day. Danny's cries and her response became increasingly shrill and desperate, for they knew that they must reach each other before nightfall or be lost forever; in the oncoming night, something waited for Danny, something fearsome that would seize him if he was alone after dark. Suddenly the sky was shattered by light-ning, then by a hard clap of thunder, and the night imploded into a deeper darkness, into infinite and perfect blackness. Tina Evans sat straight up in bed, certain that she had heard a noise in the house. It hadn't been merely the thunder from the dream. The sound she'd heard had come as she was waking, a real noise, not an imagined one. She listened intently, prepared to throw off the covers and slip out of bed. Silence reigned. Gradually doubt crept over her. She had been jumpy lately. This wasn't the first night she'd been wrongly convinced that an intruder was prowling the house. On four or five occasions during the past two weeks, she had taken the pistol from the nightstand and searched the place, room by room, but she hadn't found anyone. Recently she'd been under a lot of pressure, both personally and professionally. Maybe what she'd heard tonight had been the thunder from the dream. She remained on guard for a few minutes, but the night was so peaceful that at last she had to admit she was alone. As her heartbeat slowed, she eased back onto her pillow. At times like this she wished that she and Michael were still together. She closed her eyes and imagined herself lying beside him, reaching for him in the dark, touching, touch-ing, moving against him, into the shelter of his arms. He would comfort and reassure her, and in time she would sleep again. Of course, if she and Michael were in bed right this minute, it wouldn't be like that at all. They wouldn't make love. They would argue. He'd resist her affection, turn her away by picking a fight. He would begin the battle over a triviality and goad her until the bickering escalated into marital warfare. That was how it had been during the last months of their life together. He had been seething with hostility, always seeking an excuse to vent his anger on her. Because Tina had loved Michael to the end, she'd been hurt and saddened by the dissolution of their relationship. Admittedly, she had also been relieved when it was finally over. She had lost her child and her husband in the same year, the man first, and then the boy, the son to the grave and the husband to the winds of change. During the twelve years of their marriage, Tina had become a different and more complex person than she'd been on their wedding day, but Michael hadn't changed at all—and didn't like the woman that she had become. They began as lovers, sharing every detail of their daily lives—triumphs and failures, joys and frustrations—but by the time the divorce was final, they were strangers. Although Michael was still living in town, less than a mile from her, he was, in some respects, as far away and as unreachable as Danny. She sighed with resignation and opened her eyes. She wasn't sleepy now, but she knew she had to get more rest. She would need to be fresh and alert in the morning. Tomorrow was one of the most important days of her life: December 30. In other years that date had meant nothing special. But for better or worse, this December 30 was the hinge upon which her entire future would swing. For fifteen years, ever since she turned eighteen, two years before she married Michael, Tina Evans had lived and worked in Las Vegas. She began her career as a dancer—not a showgirl but an actual dancer—in the Lido de Paris, a gigantic stage show at the Stardust Hotel. The Lido was one of those incredibly lavish productions that could be seen nowhere in the world but Vegas, for it was only in Las Vegas that a multimillion-dollar show could be staged year after year with little concern for profit; such vast sums were spent on the elaborate sets and costumes, and on the enormous cast and crew, that the hotel was usually happy if the production merely broke even from ticket and drink sales. After all, as fantastic as it was, the show was only a come-on, a draw, with the sole purpose of putting a few thousand people into the hotel every night. Going to and from the showroom, the crowd had to pass all the craps tables and blackjack tables and roulette wheels and glitter-ing ranks of slot machines, and that was where the profit was made. Tina enjoyed dancing in the Lido, and she stayed there for two and a half years, until she learned that she was pregnant. She took time off to carry and give birth to Danny, then to spend uninterrupted days with him during his first few months of life. When Danny was six months old, Tina went into training to get back in shape, and after three arduous months of exercise, she won a place in the chorus line of a new Vegas spectacle. She managed to be both a fine dancer and a good mother, although that was not always easy; she loved Danny, and she enjoyed her work and she thrived on double duty. Five years ago, however, on her twenty-eighth birthday, she began to realize that she had, if she was lucky, ten years left as a show dancer, and she decided to establish herself in the business in another capacity, to avoid being washed up at thirty-eight. She landed a position as choreographer for a two-bit lounge revue, a dismally cheap imitation of the multimillion-dollar Lido, and eventually she took over the costumer's job as well. From that she moved up through a series of similar positions in larger lounges, then in small showrooms that seated four or five hundred in second-rate hotels with limited show budgets. In time she directed a revue, then directed and produced another. She was steadily becoming a respected name in the closely knit Vegas entertainment world, and she believed that she was on the verge of great success. Almost a year ago, shortly after Danny had died, Tina had been offered a directing and co-producing job on a huge ten-million-dollar extravaganza to be staged in the two-thousand-seat main showroom of the Golden Pyramid, one of the largest and plushest hotels on the Strip. At first it had seemed terribly wrong that such a wonderful opportunity should come her way before she'd even had time to mourn her boy, as if the Fates were so shallow and insensitive as to think that they could balance the scales and offset Danny's death merely by presenting her with a chance at her dream job. Although she was bitter and depressed, although—or maybe because—she felt utterly empty and useless, she took the job. The new show was titled Magyck! because the variety acts between the big dance numbers were all magicians and because the production numbers themselves featured elabo-rate special effects and were built around supernatural themes. The tricky spelling of the title was not Tina's idea, but most of the rest of the program was her creation, and she remained pleased with what she had wrought. Exhausted too. This year had passed in a blur of twelve- and fourteen-hour days, with no vacations and rarely a weekend off. Nevertheless, even as preoccupied with Magyck! as she was, she had adjusted to Danny's death only with great difficulty. A month ago, for the first time, she'd thought that at last she had begun to overcome her grief. She was able to think about the boy without crying, to visit his grave without being overcome by grief. All things considered, she felt reasonably good, even cheerful to a degree. She would never forget him, that sweet child who had been such a large part of her, but she would no longer have to live her life around the gaping hole that he had left in it. The wound was achingly tender but healed. That's what she had thought a month ago. For a week or two she had continued to make progress toward acceptance. Then the new dreams began, and they were far worse than the dream that she'd had immediately after Danny had been killed. Perhaps her anxiety about the public's reaction to Magyck! was causing her to recall the greater anxiety she had felt about Danny. In less than seventeen hours—at 8:00 P.M., December 30—the Golden Pyramid Hotel would present a special, invitational, VIP premiere of Magyck!, and the following night, New Year's Eve, the show would open to the general public. If audience reaction was as strong and as positive as Tina hoped, her financial future was assured, for her contract gave her two and one-half percent of the gross receipts, minus liquor sales, after the first five million. If Magyck! was a hit and packed the showroom for four or five years, as sometimes happened with successful Vegas shows, she'd be a multimillionaire by the end of the run. Of course, if the production was a flop, if it failed to please the audience, she might be back working the small lounges again, on her way down. Show business, in any form, was a merciless enterprise. She had good reason to be suffering from anxiety attacks. Her obsessive fear of intruders in the house, her disquieting dreams about Danny, her renewed grief—all of those things might grow from her concern about Magyck! If that were the case, then those symptoms would disappear as soon as the fate of the show was evident. She needed only to ride out the next few days, and in the relative calm that would follow, she might be able to get on with healing herself. In the meantime she absolutely had to get some sleep. At ten o'clock in the morning, she was scheduled to meet with two tour-booking agents who were considering reserving eight thousand tickets to Magyck! during the first three months of its run. Then at one o'clock the entire cast and the crew would assemble for the final dress rehearsal. She fluffed her pillows, rearranged the covers, and tugged at the short nightgown in which she slept. She tried to relax by closing her eyes and envisioning a gentle night tide lapping at a silvery beach. Thump! She sat straight up in bed. Something had fallen over in another part of the house. It must have been a large object because, though muffled by the intervening walls, the sound was loud enough to rouse her. Whatever it had been . . . it hadn't simply fallen. It had been knocked over. Heavy objects didn't just fall of their own accord in deserted rooms. She cocked her head, listening closely. Another and softer sound followed the first. It didn't last long enough for Tina to identify the source, but there was a stealthiness about it. This time she hadn't been imagining a threat. Someone actually was in the house. As she sat up in bed, she switched on the lamp. She pulled open the nightstand drawer. The pistol was loaded. She flicked off the two safety catches. For a while she listened. In the brittle silence of the desert night, she imagined that she could sense an intruder listening too, listening for her. She got out of bed and stepped into her slippers. Holding the gun in her right hand, she went quietly to the bedroom door. She considered calling the police, but she was afraid of making a fool of herself. What if they came, lights flashing and sirens screaming—and found no one? If she had summoned the police every time that she imagined hearing a prowler in the house during the past two weeks, they would have decided long ago that she was scramble-brained. She was proud, unable to bear the thought of appearing to be hysterical to a couple of macho cops who would grin at her and, later over doughnuts and coffee, make jokes about her. She would search the house herself, alone. Pointing the pistol at the ceiling, she jacked a bullet into the chamber. Taking a deep breath, she unlocked the bedroom door and eased into the hall. 2 TINA SEARCHED THE ENTIRE HOUSE, EXCEPT FOR Danny's old room, but she didn't find an intruder. She almost would have preferred to discover someone lurking in the kitchen or crouching in a closet rather than be forced to look, at last, in that final space where sadness seemed to dwell like a tenant. Now she had no choice. A little more than a year before he had died, Danny had begun sleeping at the opposite end of the small house from the master bedroom, in what had once been the den. Not long after his tenth birthday, the boy had asked for more space and privacy than was provided by his original, tiny quarters. Michael and Tina had helped him move his belongings to the den, then had shifted the couch, armchair, coffee table, and television from the den into the quarters the boy had previously occupied. At the time, Tina was certain that Danny was aware of the nightly arguments she and Michael were having in their own bedroom, which was next to his, and that he wanted to move into the den so he wouldn't be able to hear them bickering. She and Michael hadn't yet begun to raise their voices to each other; their disagreements had been con-ducted in normal tones, sometimes even in whispers, yet Danny probably had heard enough to know they were having problems. She had been sorry that he'd had to know, but she hadn't said a word to him; she'd offered no explanations, no reassurances. For one thing, she hadn't known what she could say. She certainly couldn't share with him her appraisal of the situation: Danny, sweetheart, don't worry about anything you might have heard through the wall. Your father is only suffering an identity crisis. He's been acting like an ass lately, but he'll get over it. And that was another reason she didn't attempt to explain her and Michael's problems to Danny—she thought that their estrangement was only temporary. She loved her husband, and she was sure that the sheer power of her love would restore the luster to their marriage. Six months later she and Michael sepa-rated, and less than five months after the separation, they were divorced. Now, anxious to complete her search for the burglar— who was beginning to look as imaginary as all the other burglars she had stalked on other nights—she opened the door to Danny's bedroom. She switched on the lights and stepped inside. No one. Holding the pistol in front of her, she approached the closet, hesitated, then slid the door back. No one was hiding there, either. In spite of what she had heard, she was alone in the house. As she stared at the contents of the musky closet—the boy's shoes, his jeans, dress slacks, shirts, sweaters, his blue Dodgers' baseball cap, the small blue suit he had worn on special occasions—a lump rose in her throat. She quickly slid the door shut and put her back against it. Although the funeral had been more than a year ago, she had not yet been able to dispose of Danny's belongings. Somehow, the act of giving away his clothes would be even sadder and more final than watching his casket being lowered into the ground. His clothes weren't the only things that she had kept: His entire room was exactly as he had left it. The bed was properly made, and several science-fiction-movie action figures were posed on the deep headboard. More than a hundred paperbacks were ranked alphabetically on a five-shelf bookcase. His desk occupied one corner; tubes of glue, miniature bottles of enamel in every color, and a variety of model-crafting tools stood in soldierly ranks on one half of the desk, and the other half was bare, waiting for him to begin work. Nine model airplanes filled a display case, and three others hung on wires from the ceiling. The walls were decorated with evenly spaced posters—three baseball stars, five hideous monsters from horror movies—that Danny had carefully arranged. Unlike many boys his age, he'd been concerned about orderliness and cleanliness. Respecting his preference for neatness, Tina had instructed Mrs. Neddler, the cleaning lady who came in twice a week, to vacuum and dust his unused bedroom as if nothing had happened to him. The place was as spotless as ever. Gazing at the dead boy's toys and pathetic treasures, Tina realized, not for the first time, that it wasn't healthy for her to maintain this place as if it were a museum. Or a shrine. As long as she left his things undisturbed, she could continue to entertain the hope that Danny was not dead, that he was just away somewhere for a while, and that he would shortly pick up his life where he had left off. Her inability to clean out his room suddenly frightened her; for the first time it seemed like more than just a weakness of spirit but an indication of serious mental illness. She had to let the dead rest in peace. If she was ever to stop dreaming about the boy, if she were to get control of her grief, she must begin her recovery here, in this room, by conquering her irrational need to preserve his possessions in situ. She resolved to clean this place out on Thursday, New Year's Day. Both the VIP premiere and the opening night of Magyck! would be behind her by then. She'd be able to relax and take a few days off. She would start by spending Thursday afternoon here, boxing the clothes and toys and posters. As soon as she made that decision, most of her nervous energy dissipated. She sagged, limp and weary and ready to return to bed. As she started toward the door, she caught sight of the easel, stopped, and turned. Danny had liked to draw, and the easel, complete with a box of pencils and pens and paints, had been a birthday gift when he was nine. It was an easel on one side and a chalkboard on the other. Danny had left it at the far end of the room, beyond the bed, against the wall, and that was where it had stood the last time that Tina had been here. But now it lay at an angle, the base against the wall, the easel itself slanted, chalkboard-down, across a game table. An Electronic Battleship game had stood on that table, as Danny had left it, ready for play, but the easel had toppled into it and knocked it to the floor. Apparently, that was the noise she had heard. But she couldn't imagine what had knocked the easel over. It couldn't have fallen by itself. She put her gun down, went around the foot of the bed, and stood the easel on its legs, as it belonged. She stooped, retrieved the pieces of the Electronic Battleship game, and returned them to the table. When she picked up the scattered sticks of chalk and the felt eraser, turning again to the chalkboard, she realized that two words were crudely printed on the black surface: NOT DEAD She scowled at the message. She was positive that nothing had been written on the board when Danny had gone away on that scouting trip. And it had been blank the last time she'd been in this room. Belatedly, as she pressed her fingertips to the words on the chalkboard, the possible meaning of them struck her. As a sponge soaked up water, she took a chill from the surface of the slate. Not dead. It was a denial of Danny's death. An angry refusal to accept the awful truth. A challenge to reality. In one of her terrible seizures of grief, in a moment of crazy dark despair, had she come into this room and unknowingly printed those words on Danny's chalkboard? She didn't remember doing it. If she had left this message, she must be having blackouts, temporary amnesia of which she was totally unaware. Or she was walking in her sleep. Either possibility was unacceptable. Dear God, unthinkable. Therefore, the words must have been here all along. Danny must have left them before he died. His printing was neat, like everything else about him, not sloppy like this scrawled message. Nevertheless, he must have done it. Must have. And the obvious reference that those two words made to the bus accident in which he had perished? Coincidence. Danny, of course, had been writing about something else, and the dark interpretation that could be drawn from those two words now, after his death, was just a macabre coincidence. She refused to consider any other possibility because the alternatives were too frightening. She hugged herself. Her hands were icy; they chilled her sides even through her nightgown. Shivering, she thoroughly erased the words on the chalk-board, retrieved her handgun, and left the room, pulling the door shut behind her. She was wide awake, but she had to get some sleep. There was so much to do in the morning. Big day. In the kitchen, she withdrew a bottle of Wild Turkey from the cupboard by the sink. It was Michael's favorite bourbon. She poured two ounces into a water glass. Although she wasn't much of a drinker, indulging in nothing more than a glass of wine now and then, with no capacity whatsoever for hard liquor, she finished the bourbon in two swallows. Grimacing at the bitterness of the spirits, wondering why Michael had extolled this brand's smoothness, she hesitated, then poured another ounce. She finished it quickly, as though she were a child taking medicine, and then put the bottle away. In bed again she snuggled in the covers and closed her eyes and tried not to think about the chalkboard. But an image of it appeared behind her eyes. When she couldn't banish that image, she attempted to alter it, mentally wiping the words away. But in her mind's eye, the seven letters reappeared on the chalkboard: NOT DEAD. Although she repeatedly erased them, they stubbornly returned. She grew dizzy from the bourbon and finally slipped into welcome oblivion. 3 TUESDAY AFTERNOON TLNA WATCHED THE FINAL dress rehearsal of Magyck! from a seat in the middle of the Golden Pyramid showroom. The theater was shaped like an enormous fan, spreading under a high domed ceiling. The room stepped down toward the stage in alternating wide and narrow galleries. On the wider levels, long dinner tables, covered with white linen, were set at right angles to the stage. Each narrow gallery consisted of a three-foot-wide aisle with a low railing on one side and a curving row of raised, plushly padded booths on the other side. The focus of all the seats was the immense stage, a marvel of the size required for a Las Vegas spectacular, more than half again as large as the largest stage on Broadway. It was so huge that a DC-9 airliner could be rolled onto it without using half the space available—a feat that had been accomplished as part of a production number on a similar stage at a hotel in Reno several years ago. A lavish use of blue velvet, dark leather, crystal chandeliers, and thick blue carpet, plus an excellent sense of dramatic lighting, gave the mammoth chamber some of the feeling of a cozy cabaret in spite of its size. Tina sat in one of the third-tier booths, nervously sipping ice water as she watched her show. The dress rehearsal ran without a problem. With seven massive production numbers, five major variety acts, forty-two girl dancers, forty-two boy dancers, fifteen showgirls, two boy singers, two girl singers (one temperamental), forty-seven crewmen and technicians, a twenty-piece or-chestra, one elephant, one lion, two black panthers, six golden retrievers, and twelve white doves, the logistics were mind-numbingly complicated, but a year of arduous labor was evident in the slick and faultless unfolding of the program. At the end, the cast and crew gathered onstage and applauded themselves, hugged and kissed one another. There was electricity in the air, a feeling of triumph, a nervous expectation of success. Joel Bandiri, Tina's co-producer, had watched the show from a booth in the first tier, the VIP row, where high rollers and other friends of the hotel would be seated every night of the run. As soon as the rehearsal ended, Joel sprang out of his seat, raced to the aisle, climbed the steps to the third tier, and hurried to Tina. "We did it!" Joel shouted as he approached her. "We made the damn thing work!" Tina slid out of her booth to meet him. "We got a hit, kid!" Joel said, and he hugged her fiercely, planting a wet kiss on her cheek. She hugged him enthusiastically. "You think so? Really?" "Think? I know! A giant. That's what we've got. A real giant! A gargantua!" 'Thank you, Joel. Thank you, thank you, thank you." "Me? What are you thanking me for?" "For giving me a chance to prove myself." "Hey, I did you no favors, kid. You worked your butt off. You earned every penny you're gonna make out of this baby, just like I knew you would. We're a great team. Anybody else tried to handle all this, they'd just end up with one goddamn big mishkadenze on their hands. But you and me, we made it into a hit." Joel was an odd little man: five-feet-four, slightly chubby but not fat, with curly brown hair that appeared to have frizzed and kinked in response to a jolt of electricity. His face, which was as broad and comic as that of a clown, could stretch into an endless series of rubbery expressions. He wore blue jeans, a cheap blue workshirt—and about two hundred thousand dollars' worth of rings. Six rings be-decked each of his hands, some with diamonds, some with emeralds, one with a large ruby, one with an even larger opal. As always, he seemed to be high on something, bursting with energy. When he finally stopped hugging Tina, he could not stand still. He shifted from foot to foot as he talked about Magyck!, turned this way and that, gestured expansively with his quick, gem-speckled hands, virtually doing a jig. At forty-six he was the most successful producer in Las Vegas, with twenty years of hit shows behind him. The words "Joel Bandiri Presents" on a marquee were a guar-antee of first-rate entertainment. He had plowed some of his substantial earnings into Las Vegas real estate, parts of two hotels, an automobile dealership, and a slot-machine casino downtown. He was so rich that he could retire and live the rest of his life in the high style and splendor for which he had a taste. But Joel would never stop willingly. He loved his work. He would most likely die on the stage, in the middle of puzzling out a tricky production problem. He had seen Tina's work in some lounges around town, and he had surprised her when he'd offered her the chance to co-produce Magyck! At first she hadn't been sure if she should take the job. She was aware of his reputation as a perfectionist who demanded superhuman efforts from his people. She was also worried about being responsible for a ten-million-dollar budget. Working with that kind of money wasn't merely a step up for her; it was a giant leap. Joel had convinced her that she'd have no difficulty matching his pace or meeting his standards, and that she was equal to the challenge. He helped her to discover new reserves of energy, new areas of competence in herself. He had become not just a valued business associate, but a good friend as well, a big brother. Now they seemed to have shaped a hit show together. As Tina stood in this beautiful theater, glancing down at the colorfully costumed people milling about on the stage, then looking at Joel's rubbery face, listening as her co-producer unblushingly raved about their handiwork, she was happier than she had been in a long time. If the audience at this evening's VIP premiere reacted enthusias-tically, she might have to buy lead weights to keep herself from floating off the floor when she walked. Twenty minutes later, at 3:45, she stepped onto the smooth cobblestones in front of the hotel's main entrance and handed her claim check to the valet parking attendant. While he went to fetch her Honda, she stood in the warm late-afternoon sunshine, unable to stop grinning. She turned and looked back at the Golden Pyramid Hotel-Casino. Her future was inextricably linked to that gaudy but undeniably impressive pile of concrete and steel. The heavy bronze and glass revolving doors glittered as they spun with a steady flow of people. Ramparts of pale pink stone stretched hundreds of feet on both sides of the entrance; those walls were windowless and garishly deco-rated with giant stone coins, a gushing torrent of coins flooding from a stone cornucopia. Directly overhead, the ceiling of the immense porte cochere was lined with hundreds of lights; none of the bulbs were burning now, but after nightfall they would rain dazzling, golden luminosity upon the glossy cobblestones below. The Pyramid had been built at a cost in excess of four hundred million dollars, and the owners had made certain that every last dime showed. Tina supposed that some people would say this hotel was gross, crass, tasteless, ugly—but she loved the place be-cause it was here that she had been given her big chance. Thus far, the thirtieth of December had been a busy, noisy, exciting day at the Pyramid. After the relative quiet of Christmas week, an uninterrupted stream of guests was pouring through the front doors. Advance bookings indi-cated a record New Year's holiday crowd for Las Vegas. The Pyramid, with almost three thousand rooms, was booked to capacity, as was every hotel in the city. At a few minutes past eleven o'clock, a secretary from San Diego put five dollars in a slot machine and hit a jackpot worth $495,000; word of that even reached backstage in the showroom. Shortly before noon, two high rollers from Dallas sat down at a blackjack table and, in three hours, lost a quarter of a million bucks; they were laughing and joking when they left the table to try another game. Carol Hirson, a cocktail waitress who was a friend of Tina's, had told her about the unlucky Texans a few minutes ago. Carol had been shiny-eyed and breathless because the high rollers had tipped her with green chips, as if they'd been winning instead of losing; for bringing them half a dozen drinks, she had collected twelve hundred dollars. Sinatra was in town, at Caesar's Palace, perhaps for the last time, and even at eighty years of age, he generated more excitement in Vegas than any other famous name. Along the entire Strip and in the less posh but nonetheless jammed casinos downtown, things were jumping, sparking. And in just four hours Magyck! would premiere. The valet brought Tina's car, and she tipped him. He said, "Break a leg tonight, Tina." "God, I hope so." She was home by 4:15. She had two and a half hours to fill before she had to leave for the hotel again. She didn't need that much time to shower, apply her makeup, and dress, so she decided to pack some of Danny's belongings. Now was the right time to begin the unpleasant chore. She was in such an excellent mood that she didn't think even the sight of his room would be able to bring her down, as it usually did. No use putting it off until Thursday, as she had planned. She had at least enough time to make a start, box up the boy's clothes, if nothing else. When she went into Danny's bedroom, she saw at once that the easel-chalkboard had been knocked over again. She put it right. Two words were printed on the slate: NOT DEAD A chill swept down her back. Last night, after drinking the bourbon, had she come back here in some kind of fugue and . . . ? No. She hadn't blacked out. She had not printed those words. She wasn't going crazy. She wasn't the sort of person who would snap over a thing like this. Not even a thing like this. She was tough. She had always prided herself on her toughness and her resiliency. Snatching up the felt eraser, she vigorously wiped the slate clean. Someone was playing a sick, nasty trick on her. Someone had come into the house while she was out and had printed those two words on the chalkboard again. Whoever it was, he wanted to rub her face in the tragedy that she was trying so hard to forget. The only other person who had a right to be in the house was the cleaning woman, Vivienne Neddler. Vivienne had been scheduled to work this afternoon, but she'd canceled. Instead, she was coming in for a few hours this evening, while Tina was at the premiere. But even if Vivienne had kept her scheduled appoint-ment, she never would have written those words on the chalkboard. She was a sweet old woman, feisty and independent-minded but not the type to play cruel pranks. For a moment Tina racked her mind, searching for someone to blame, and then a name occurred to her. It was the only possible suspect. Michael. Her ex-husband. There was no sign that anyone had broken into the house, no obvious evidence of forced entry, and Michael was the only other person with a key. She hadn't changed the locks after the divorce. Shattered by the loss of his son, Michael had been irrationally vicious with Tina for months after the funeral, accusing her of being responsible for Danny's death. She had given Danny permission to go on the field trip, and as far as Michael was concerned, that had been equivalent to driving the bus off the cliff. But Danny had wanted to go to the mountains more than anything else in the world. Besides, Mr. Jaborski, the scoutmaster, had taken other groups of scouts on winter survival hikes every year for sixteen years, and no one had been even slightly injured. They didn't hike all the way into the true wilderness, just a reasonable distance off the beaten path, and they planned for every contingency. The experience was supposed to be good for a boy. Safe. Carefully managed. Everyone assured her there was no chance of trouble. She'd had no way of knowing that Jaborski's seventeenth trip would end in disaster, yet Michael blamed her. She'd thought he had regained his perspective during the last few months, but evidently not. She stared at the chalkboard, thought of the two words that had been printed there, and anger swelled in her. Michael was behaving like a spiteful child. Didn't he realize that her grief was as difficult to bear as his? What was he trying to prove? Furious, she went into the kitchen, picked up the tele-phone, and dialed Michael's number. After five rings she realized that he was at work, and she hung up. In her mind the two words burned, white on black: NOT DEAD. This evening she would call Michael, when she got home from the premiere and the party afterward. She was certain to be quite late, but she wasn't going to worry about waking him. She stood indecisively in the center of the small kitchen, trying to find the willpower to go to Danny's room and box his clothes, as she had planned. But she had lost her nerve. She couldn't go in there again. Not today. Maybe not for a few days. Damn Michael. In the refrigerator was a half-empty bottle of white wine. She poured a glassful and carried it into the master bath. She was drinking too much. Bourbon last night. Wine now. Until recently, she had rarely used alcohol to calm her nerves—but now it was her cure of first resort. Once she had gotten through the premiere of Magyck!, she'd better start cutting back on the booze. Now she desperately needed it. She took a long shower. She let the hot water beat down on her neck for several minutes, until the stiffness in her muscles melted and flowed away. After the shower, the chilled wine further relaxed her body, although it did little to calm her mind and allay her anxiety. She kept thinking of the chalkboard. NOT DEAD. 4 AT 6:50 TINA WAS AGAIN BACKSTAGE IN THE showroom. The place was relatively quiet, except for the muffled oceanic roar of the VIP crowd that waited in the main showroom, beyond the velvet curtains. Eighteen hundred guests had been invited—Las Vegas movers and shakers, plus high rollers from out of town. More than fifteen hundred had returned their RSVP cards. Already, a platoon of white-coated waiters, waitresses in crisp blue uniforms, and scurrying busboys had begun serving the dinners. The choice was filet mignon with Bernaise sauce or lobster in butter sauce, because Las Vegas was the one place in the United States where people at least temporarily set aside concerns about cholesterol. In the health-obsessed final decade of the century, eating fatty foods was widely regarded as a far more delicious—and more damning—sin than envy, sloth, thievery, and adultery. By seven-thirty the backstage area was bustling. Techni-cians double-checked the motorized sets, the electrical connections, and the hydraulic pumps that raised and lowered portions of the stage. Stagehands counted and arranged props. Wardrobe women mended tears and sewed up unraveled hems that had been discovered at the last minute. Hairdressers and lighting technicians rushed about on urgent tasks. Male dancers, wearing black tuxedos for the opening number, stood tensely, an eye-pleasing collec-tion of lean, handsome types. Dozens of beautiful dancers and showgirls were back-stage too. Some wore satin and lace. Others wore velvet and rhinestones—or feathers or sequins or furs, and a few were topless. Many were still in the communal dressing rooms, while other girls, already costumed, waited in the halls or at the edge of the big stage, talking about children and husbands and boyfriends and recipes, as if they were secretaries on a coffee break and not some of the most beautiful women in the world. Tina wanted to stay in the wings throughout the perfor-mance, but she could do nothing more behind the curtains. Magyck! was now in the hands of the performers and technicians. Twenty-five minutes before showtime Tina left the stage and went into the noisy showroom. She headed toward the center booth in the VIP row, where Charles Mainway, general manager and principal stockholder of the Golden Pyramid Hotel, waited for her. She stopped first at the booth next to Mainway's. Joel Bandiri was with Eva, his wife of eight years, and two of their friends. Eva was twenty-nine, seventeen years younger than Joel, and at five foot eight, she was also four inches taller than he was. She was an ex-showgirl, blond, willowy, delicately beautiful. She gently squeezed Tina's hand. "Don't worry. You're too good to fail." "We got a hit, kid," Joel assured Tina once more. In the next semicircular booth, Charles Mainway greeted Tina with a warm smile. Mainway carried and held himself as if he were an aristocrat, and his mane of silver hair and his clear blue eyes contributed to the image he wished to project. However, his features were large, square, and utterly without evidence of patrician blood, and even after the mellowing influences of elocution teachers, his naturally low, gravelly voice belied his origins in a rough Brooklyn neighborhood. As Tina slid into the booth beside Mainway, a tuxedoed captain appeared and filled her gl...