Free Darkfall by Dean Koontz Page B

here—didn’t it?
    Yes. She was sure of it. The thing was still here.
    She had the eerie feeling that she was being watched.

3
    The assistant medical examiner on the case was Ira Goldbloom, who looked more Swedish than Jewish. He was tall, fair-skinned, with hair so blond it was almost white; his eyes were blue with a lot of gray speckled through them.
    Jack and Rebecca found him on the second floor, in the master bedroom. He had completed his examination of the bodyguard’s corpse in the kitchen, had taken a look at Vince Vastagliano, and was getting several instruments out of his black leather case.
    “For a man with a weak stomach,” he said, “I’m in the wrong line of work.”
    Jack saw that Goldbloom did appear paler than usual.
    Rebecca said, “We figure these two are connected with the Charlie Novello homicide on Sunday and the Coleson murder yesterday. Can you make the link for us?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Only maybe?”
    “Well, yeah, there’s a chance we can tie them together,” Goldbloom said. “The number of wounds ... the mutilation factor ... there are several similarities. But let’s wait for the autopsy report.”
    Jack was surprised. “But what about the wounds? Don’t they establish a link?”
    “The number, yes. Not the type. Have you looked at these wounds?”
    “At a glance,” Jack said, “they appear to be bites of some kind. Rat bites, we thought.”
    “But we figured they were just obscuring the real wounds, the stab wounds,” Rebecca said.
    Jack said, “Obviously, the rats came along after the men were already dead. Right?”
    “Wrong,” Goldbloom said. “So far as I can tell from a preliminary examination, there aren’t any stab wounds in either victim. Maybe tissue bisections will reveal wounds of that nature underneath some of the bites, but I doubt it. Vastagliano and his bodyguard were savagely bitten. They bled to death from those bites. The bodyguard suffered at least three torn arteries, major vessels: the external carotid, the left brachial, and the femoral artery in the left thigh. Vastagliano looks like he was chewed up even worse.”
    Jack said, “But rats aren’t that aggressive, damnit. You just don’t get attacked by packs of rats in your own home.”
    “I don’t think these were rats,” Goldbloom said. “I mean, I’ve seen rat bites before. Every now and then, a wino will be drinking in an alley, have a heart attack or a stroke, right there behind the garbage bin, where nobody finds him for maybe two days. Meanwhile, the rats get at him. So I know what a rat bite looks like, and this just doesn’t seem to match up on a number of points.”
    “Could it have been ... dogs?” Rebecca asked.
    “No. For one thing, the bites are too small. I think we can rule out cats, too.”
    “Any ideas?” Jack asked.
    “No. It’s weird. Maybe the autopsy will pin it down for us.”
    Rebecca said, “Did you know the bathroom door was locked when the uniforms got here? They had to break it down.”
    “So I heard. A locked room mystery,” Goldbloom said.
    “Maybe there’s not much of a mystery to it,” Rebecca said thoughtfully. “If Vastagliano was killed by some kind of animal, then maybe the thing was small enough to get under the door.”
    Goldbloom shook his head. “It would’ve had to’ve been real small to manage that. No. It was bigger. A good deal bigger than the crack under the door.”
    “About what size would you say?”
    “As big as a large rat.”
    Rebecca thought for a moment. Then: “There’s an outlet from a heating duct in there. Maybe the thing came through the duct.”
    “But there’s a grille over the duct,” Jack said. “And the vents in the grille are narrower than the space under the door.”
    Rebecca took two steps to the bathroom, leaned through the doorway, looked around, craning her neck. She came back and said, “You’re right. And the grille’s firmly in place.”
    “And the little window is closed,” Jack