Free Phantoms by Dean Koontz Page A

got the notion he’d laundered everything he was wearing and just hadn’t left his clothes in the dryer quite long enough. So I had a look in the laundry room, and I found something interesting. In the cupboard right there beside the washer, where Mrs. Kale kept all of her soaps and detergents and fabric softeners, there were two bloody fingerprints on the big box of Cheer. One was smeared, but the other was clear. The lab says it’s Mr. Kale’s print.”
    “Whose blood was on the box?” Robine asked sharply.
    “Both Mrs. Kale and Danny were type O. So is Mr. Kale. That makes it a little more difficult for us to—”
    “The blood on the box of detergent?” Robine interrupted.
    “Type O.”
    “Then it could have been my client’s own blood! He could have gotten it on the box on a previous occasion, maybe after he cut himself gardening last week.”
    Bryce shook his head. “As you know, Bob, what with DNA analysis, this whole business is getting highly sophisticated these days. Why, they can break down a sample into so many signatures that a person’s blood is almost as unique as his fingerprints. So they could tell us unequivocally that the blood on the box of Cheer—the blood on Mr. Kale’s hand when he made those two prints—was little Danny Kale’s blood.”
    Fletcher Kale’s gray eyes remained flat and unexpressive, but he turned quite pale. “I can explain,” he said.
    “Hold it!” Robine said. “Explain it to me first—in private.” The attorney led his client to the farthest corner of the room.
    Bryce slouched in his chair. He felt gray. Washed out. He’d been that way since Thursday, since seeing Danny Kale’s pathetic, crumpled body.
    He had expected to take considerable pleasure in watching Kale squirm. But there was no pleasure in it.
    Robine and Kale returned. “Sheriff, I’m afraid my client did a stupid thing.”
    Kale tried to look properly abashed.
    “He did something that could be misinterpreted—just as you have misinterpreted it. Mr. Kale was frightened, confused, and grief-stricken. He wasn’t thinking clearly. I’m sure any jury would sympathize with him. You see, when he found the body of his little boy, he picked it up—”
    “He told us he never touched it.”
    Kale met Bryce’s gaze forthrightly and said, “When I first saw Danny lying on the floor. . . I couldn’t really believe that he was . . . dead. I picked him up . . . thinking I should rush him to the hospital . . . Later, after I’d shot Joanna, I looked down and saw that I was covered with . . . with Danny’s blood. I had shot my wife, but suddenly I realized it might look as if I’d killed my own son, too.”
    “There was still the meat cleaver in your wife’s hand,” Bryce said. “And Danny’s blood was all over her, too. And you could’ve figured the coroner would find PCP in her bloodstream.”
    “I realize that now,” Kale said, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and wiping his eyes. “But at the time, I was afraid I’d be accused of something I’d never done.”
    The word “psychopath” wasn’t exactly right for Fletcher Kale, Bryce decided. He wasn’t crazy. Nor was he a sociopath, exactly. There wasn’t a word that described him properly. However, a good cop would recognize the type and see the potential for criminal activity and, perhaps, the talent for brute violence, as well. There is a certain kind of man who has a lot of vitality and likes plenty of action, a man who has more than his share of shallow charm, whose clothes are more expensive than he can afford, who owns not a single book (as Kale did not), who seems to have no well-thought-out opinions about politics or art or economics or any issue of real substance, who is not religious except when misfortune befalls him or when he wishes to impress someone with his piety (as Kale, member of no church, now read the Bible in his cell for at least four hours every day), who has an athletic build but who seems to loathe