The Devil's bed

“David’s an orphan. He spent some time in St. Jerome’s Home for Children in the Twin Cities. He didn’t graduate from high school but joined the military instead at seventeen. He was discharged eight years later. He appears to have no other criminal record.”

Bo waited. When she didn’t go on, he asked, “That’s it?”

“In terms of facts.”

“Nothing after his discharge?”

“Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, his life is a blank. Or at least as far as any official records are concerned.”

“He never gave you a clue about that time in his life?” Coyote asked.

“Yes. Only now we leave the realm of fact and we enter the Twilight Zone of David Moses.” She hadn’t touched her coffee, but now she took a sip. “Over the course of my treatment of David, I sifted through the notes and put bits and pieces together, and finally constructed the skeleton of a story. It’s a chilling one if it’s true. Do you have time?”

“As much as you need,” Bo said.

Coyote held up his cup. “Got any cream for this coffee?”

chapter eighteen

Sixty miles north of the State Security Hospital, in the small maze of St. Paul city streets known as Tangletown, Nightmare parked along the curb two houses away from the duplex where Bo Thorsen lived. The side of the white van he drove carried an antenna logo and below it the words METROCABLECOMMUNICATIONS. He wore sunglasses, a gray uniform with the nameD. Solomonsewn onto the shirt pocket, a gray cap that matched the uniform, and he carried a small toolbox. He whistled his way through the shafts of morning sunlight that slanted among the big American elms in the yard, and he climbed the front steps of the duplex. Through a curtained front window on the ground floor came the sound of a television tuned toThe Price Is Right. He quietly turned the knob on the front door, but the door was locked. He set his toolbox down, glanced at the empty street, took a lock pick from his pocket, and in a few seconds was inside the house. To his right stood the door of the first-floor unit, to his left the stairway that led upward. Nightmare silently mounted the stairs. The door of the upstairs unit had only a knob lock and a dead bolt. Child’s play. Less than two minutes from the time he’d left his van, Nightmare was inside Thorsen’s apartment.

He paused and took in the feel of the place. The most imposing item in the living room was a massive bookcase that took up nearly all of one wall. The shelves were full. The other walls were sparsely decorated with small watercolors matted and delicately framed. The furniture was tasteful and spare, all light tones. The whole place felt clean and uncluttered.

Nightmare went to the bookcase and scrutinized Thorsen’s taste in reading. The shelves were nearly equally divided between classic nonfiction texts that covered a lot of territory-Bronowski, LeviStrauss, Chomsky, Jung, Heilbroner, Galbraith, Campbell-and fiction and poetry, almost entirely American-Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wharton, Dos Passos, Sandburg, Frost, Angelou, Mailer, Dove. Thorsen had a signed first edition in excellent condition of Tom Jorgenson’s autobiographyThe Testament of Time. Years ago when the book had first been released, Nightmare had read it and thought that, except for hiding the fact that he was a liar and a betrayer, Jorgenson told a pretty good tale. The worn covers seemed to indicate that many of the books had been well read, although they may simply have come used from secondhand bookstores. Nightmare couldn’t be certain yet. He was just getting to know Thorsen. The agent subscribed to several magazines. Time, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and one of Nightmare’s favorites since childhood, National Geographic. A television with a thirteen-inch screen sat like a forgotten child on a small table in one corner of the living room. There was also a sound system and a carousel of CDs that contained mostly jazz.

In the kitchen, the refrigerator was adequately stocked, though nothing in quantity. Fruit, yogurt, cheese, bagels, milk, juice. No leftovers. There were half a dozen chilled cans of beer, something called Pig’s Eye. The cupboards contained a modest supply of dishware, the basics. The small dining room table had only two chairs.

In the bathroom, clean matching towels hung on the racks. The medicine cabinet held no prescription drugs.