Mutation

Glancing back to his car where he could see the silhouettes of VJ and Philip, Victor struggled with an urge to go back and drive away. There was something wrong. He could sense it. He looked back at the broken bay window, then up the front steps at the door. The place was too quiet, too dark. But then Victor wondered what he’d tell VJ: he was too scared? Having come that far, Victor forced himself to continue.

Going up the front steps, he saw that the door was not completely shut.

“Hello!” Victor called. “Anybody home?” He pushed the door open wider and stepped inside.

Victor’s scream died on his lips. The bloody scene in Gephardt’s living room was worse than anything he’d ever seen, even during his internship at Boston City Hospital.

Seven corpses, including Gephardt’s, were strewn grotesquely around the living room. The bodies were riddled with bullets and the smell of cordite hung heavily in the air.

The killer must have only just left because blood was still oozing from the wounds. Besides Gephardt, there was a woman about Gephardt’s age who Victor guessed was his wife, an older couple, and three children. The youngest looked about five. Gephardt had been shot so many times that the top part of his head was gone.

Victor straightened up from checking the last body for signs of life. Weak and dizzy, he walked to the phone wondering if he should be touching anything. He didn’t bother with an ambulance, but dialed the police, who said a car would be there right away.

Victor decided to wait in the car. He was afraid if he stayed in the house any longer he’d be sick.

“We’re going to be here for a little while,” Victor shouted as he slid in behind the wheel. He turned the radio down. The image of all the dead people was etched in his mind. “There’s a little trouble inside the house and the police are on their way.”

“How long?” VJ asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe an hour or so.”

“Any fire trucks coming?” Philip asked eagerly.

The police arrived in force with four squad cars, probably the entire Lawrence PD fleet. Victor did not go back inside but hung around on the front steps. After about a half hour one of the plainclothesmen came out to talk to him.

“I’m Lieutenant Mark Scudder,” he said. “They got your name and address, I presume.”

Victor told him they had.

“Bad business,” Scudder said. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match out onto the lawn. “Looks like some drug-related vendetta—the kind of scene you expect to see south of Boston, but not up here.”

“Did you find drugs?” Victor asked.

“Not yet,” Scudder said, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “But this sure wasn’t any crime of passion. Not with the artillery they used. There must have been two or three people shooting in there.”

“Are you people going to need me much longer?” Victor asked.

Scudder shook his head. “If they got your name and number, you can go whenever you want.”

Upset as she was, Marsha could hardly focus on her afternoon patients and needed all her forbearance to appear interested in the last, a narcissistic twenty-year-old with a borderline personality disorder. The moment the girl left, Marsha picked up her purse and went out to her car, for once letting her correspondence go to the following day.

All the way home she kept going over her conversation with Remington. Either Victor had been lying about the amount of time VJ was spending at the lab or VJ had been forging his excuses. Both possibilities were equally upsetting, and Marsha realized that she couldn’t even begin dealing with her feelings about Victor and his unconscionable experiment until she had found out how badly VJ had been harmed. The discovery of his truancy added to her worries; it was such a classic symptom of a conduct disorder that could lead to an antisocial personality.

Marsha turned into their driveway and accelerated up the slight incline. It was almost dark and she had on her headlights. She rounded the house and was reaching for the automatic garage opener when the headlights caught something on the garage door. She couldn’t see what it was and as she pulled up to the door, the headlights reflected back off the white surface, creating a glare. Shielding her eyes, Marsha got out of the car and came around the front. Squinting, she looked up at the object, which looked like a ball of rags.

“Oh, my God!” she cried when she saw what it was. Shaking off a wave of nausea, she ventured another look. The cat had been strangled and nailed against the door as if crucified.

Trying not to look at the bulging eyes and protruding tongue, she read the typed note secured to the tail: YOU’D

BETTER MAKE THINGS RIGHT.

Leaving her car where it was but turning off the headlights and the engine, Marsha hurried inside the house and bolted the door. Trembling with a mixture of revulsion, anger, and fear, she took off her coat and went to find the maid, Ramona, who was tidying up in the living room. Marsha asked whether she’d heard any strange noises.