Free Key to Midnight by Dean Koontz Page B

cops involved. Not yet. Maybe never.
    He went to the door and locked the deadbolt. He also braced the door shut by jamming the straight-backed desk chair at an angle under the knob.
    Hugging himself with his injured arm so the blood would soak into his undershirt instead of dripping on the carpet, he went into the bathroom. He shut off the taps just as the water was about to overflow the tub, and he opened the drain.
    The bastard hadn’t been a burglar. No way. He was someone—or worked for someone—who was worried that Alex would uncover the truth about Joanna, someone who wanted the suite searched for evidence that Alex had already made the link between the singer and the long-lost girl.
    The knife wounds were beginning to burn and throb. He hugged himself harder, attempting to stop or slow the bleeding by applying direct pressure to the cuts. The entire front and side of his undershirt were crimson.
    He sat on the edge of the tub.
    Perspiration seeped into the corners of his eyes, making him blink. He wiped his forehead with a washcloth. He was thirsty. He picked up the bottle of Asahi beer and chugged a third of it.
    The knife man was working for people with good connections. International connections. They might even have a man planted in the Chicago office. How else had they managed to put someone on his ass so soon after he had spoken on the phone with Blankenship?
    The tub was half empty. He turned on the cold water. More likely than a plant in Chicago: His hotel phone must be tapped. He had probably been followed since he’d arrived in Kyoto.
    Gingerly he moved his arm, held it away from his chest. Although the wounds continued to bleed freely, they weren’t serious enough to require a doctor’s attention. He hadn’t any desire to explain the injury to anyone other than Joanna.
    The burning-stinging had grown worse, intolerable. He plunged his arm under the cold water that foamed out of the faucet. Relief was instantaneous, and he sat for a couple of minutes, just thinking.
    The first time he’d seen Joanna Rand at the Moonglow, when he’d first suspected that she might be Lisa Chelgrin, he’d figured that she must have engineered her own kidnapping in Jamaica, twelve years ago. He couldn’t imagine why she would have done such a thing, but his years as a detective had taught him that people committed drastic acts for the thinnest and strangest reasons. Sometimes they hurtled off the rails in a simple quest for freedom or new thrills or self-destruction. They sought change for the sake of change, for better or worse.
    After talking to Joanna, however, he’d known she wasn’t one of those reckless types. Besides, it was ludicrous to suppose that she could have planned her own abduction and confused Bonner-Hunter’s best investigators, especially when, at that time, she had been an inexperienced college girl.
    He considered amnesia again, but that was as unsatisfying as the other explanations. As an amnesiac, she might have forgotten every detail of her previous life, but she would not have fabricated and come to believe a completely false set of memories in order to fill the gap, which was precisely what Joanna seemed to have done.
    Okay, she was not consciously deceiving anyone, and she was not an amnesiac, at least not in the classic sense. What possibilities were left?
    He withdrew his arm from the cold water. The flow of blood had been reduced. He wrapped the arm tightly in a towel. Eventually blood would seep through, but as a temporary bandage, the towel was adequate.
    He returned to the drawing room and telephoned the bell captain in the hotel lobby. He asked for a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a bottle of Mercurochrome, a box of gauze pads, a roll of gauze, and adhesive tape. “If the man who brings it is fast, there’ll be an especially generous tip for him.”
    The bell captain said, “If there’s been an accident, we have a house doctor who—”
    “Only a minor accident. No need for a