Free Velocity by Dean Koontz Page A

knob fast and pulled the door with his left hand. No one waited in the pantry.
    From a kitchen drawer, Billy removed a clean dishtowel. After wiping the metal drawer-pull and the knob on the pantry door, he tucked one end of the cloth under his belt and let it hang from his side in the manner of a bar rag.
    On a counter near the cooktop lay Lanny’s wallet, car keys, pocket change, and cell phone. Here, too, was his 9-mm service pistol with the Wilson Combat holster in which he carried it.
    Billy picked up the cell phone, switched it on, and summoned voice mail. The only message in storage was the one that he himself had left for Lanny earlier in the evening. This is Billy. I’m at home. What the hell? What’ve you done? Call me now.
    After listening to his own voice, he deleted the message.
    Maybe that was a mistake, but he didn’t see any way that it could prove his innocence. On the contrary, it would establish that he had expected to see Lanny during the evening just past and that he had been angry with him.
    Which would make him a suspect.
    He had brooded about the voice mail during the drive to the church parking lot and during the walk through the meadow. Deleting it seemed the wisest course if he found what he expected to find on the second floor.
    He switched off the cell phone and used the dishtowel to wipe it clean of prints. He returned it to the counter where he had found it.
    If someone had been watching right then, he would have figured Billy for a calm, cool piece of work. In truth, he was half sick with dread and anxiety.
    An observer might also have thought that Billy, judging by his meticulous attention to detail, had covered up crimes before. That wasn’t the case, but brutal experience had sharpened his imagination and had taught him the dangers of circumstantial evidence.
    An hour previously, at 1:44, the killer had rung Billy from this house. The phone company would have a record of that brief call.
    Perhaps the police would think it proved Billy couldn’t have been here at the time of the murder.
    More likely, they would suspect that Billy himself had placed the call to an accomplice at his house for the misguided purpose of trying to establish his presence elsewhere at the time of the murder.
    Cops always suspected the worst of everyone. Their experience had taught them to do so.
    At the moment, he couldn’t think of anything to be done about the phone-company records. He put it out of his mind.
    More urgent matters required his attention. Like finding the corpse, if one existed.
    He didn’t think he should waste time searching for the killer’s two notes. If they were still intact, he would most likely have found them on the table at which Lanny had been drinking or on the counter with his wallet, pocket change, and cell phone.
    The flames in the den fireplace, on this warm summer night, led to a logical conclusion about the notes.
    Taped to the side of a kitchen cabinet was a cartoon hand that pointed to the swinging door and the downstairs hallway.
    At last Billy was willing to take direction, but a shrinking, anxious fear immobilized him.
    Possession of a firearm and the will to use it did not give him sufficient courage to proceed at once. He did not expect to encounter the freak. In some ways the killer would have been less intimidating than what he did expect to find.
    The bottle of rum tempted him. He had felt no effect from the three bottles of Guinness. His heart had been thundering for most of an hour, his metabolism racing.
    For a man who was not much of a drinker, he’d recently had to remind himself of that fact often enough to suggest that a potential rummy lived inside him, yearning to be free.
    The courage to proceed came from a fear of failing to proceed and from an acute awareness of the consequences of surrendering this hand of cards to the freak.
    He left the kitchen and followed the hall to the foyer. At least the stairs were not dark; there was light here below, at the