What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz Page B

ever walked away from here, and I’d bet a year’s wages nobody ever will.”
    “I assumed he didn’t have a phone. But I got a call from him.”
    “Phone in his room? Of course he doesn’t.”
    “If legal counsel wants to talk to him without coming out there, how is it done?”
    “He’s fitted with restraints and taken to an obcon room that has a no-hands phone.”
    “What’s obcon?”
    “Observed-conference room. We watch him through a window, but it’s a privileged conversation, so we can’t hear what he’s saying. He’s in restraints and he’s watched to be sure he doesn’t pry anything out of the phone, anything sharp that might be a weapon.”
    “He called me a little more than ten minutes ago,” John said. “On my home-office line. He must have gotten possession of a phone.”
    Mummers was silent for a moment. Then: “What’s your number?”
    John gave it to him.
    “We’ll have to toss his room,” Mummers said. “Can I get back to you in half an hour?”
    “I’ll be here.”
    While he waited to hear from Dennis Mummers, John went online to a series of dot-gov sites, accessing information available to the public, but also restricted information that he could view only with his police pass code.
    The need had arisen to confirm that Coleman Hanes was the man he appeared to be. John had given the state-hospital orderly the unlistednumber that Billy Lucas had called, and he could think of no other way that the killer could have obtained it.
    In minutes, he ascertained that the Marine Corps emblem tattooed on the palm of Hanes’s right hand was not in support of a fraudulent persona. The orderly served admirably in the Marine Corps, was decorated and honorably discharged.
    Hanes had no criminal history in this state or in any state with which it shared information. Even his driving record was without a blemish.
    The truth of military service and the lack of a police record did not clear him of having colluded with Billy Lucas, but it made the possibility less likely than it otherwise might have been.
    When Dennis Mummers called back, he said, “Billy doesn’t have a phone. Are you certain it was him?”
    “His voice was unmistakable.”
    “It is distinct,” Mummers acknowledged. “But how often have you spoken with him before your visit here?”
    Deflecting the question, John said, “He mentioned something to me that only he could know, related to my interview with him.”
    “Did he threaten you?”
    If John confirmed the threat, they would expect him to file a report, and if he did so, they would learn that he had no authority to involve himself in the Lucas case.
    “No,” he lied. “No threat. What did Billy say when you searched his room for a phone?”
    “He didn’t say anything. Something’s happened to him. He kind of cratered. He’s funked out, withdrawn, not talking at all to anyone.”
    “Is there a chance maybe someone on the staff might have allowed him to use their cell phone?”
    “Depending on the circumstances,” Dennis Mummers said, “that could be a reason for dismissal. No one would risk it.”
    “In this work, Officer Mummers, I’ve learned some people will risk everything, everything , for the most trivial of reasons. But thank you for your assistance.”
    After he hung up, John went to the kitchen, where he turned on just the light in the exhaust hood over the cooktop.
    Most of their friends drank wine, but for the few with a taste for something stronger, they kept a small bar in a kitchen cabinet. Certain that he could get back to sleep only with assistance, he poured a double Scotch over ice.
    He was disturbed less by the threat Billy Lucas had made than by the last words the murderous boy had spoken on the phone.
    To the best of his recollection, John had never shared with the police any of what the murderer of his parents and sisters, Alton Turner Blackwood, had said before he died. John had been mute with grief and terror, but Blackwood had tried to