Read Online Phantoms by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online

past twelve months. The doctors didn’t give Timmy much chance of regaining consciousness.
    Bryce had nearly been destroyed by the tragedy. Only recently had Tal Whitman begun to feel that his friend was moving away from the abyss of despair.
    The Kale case had opened Bryce Hammond’s wounds again, but he hadn’t allowed grief to dull his senses; it hadn’t caused him to overlook anything. Tal Whitman had known the precise moment, last Thursday evening, when Bryce had begun to suspect that Fletcher Kale was guilty of two premeditated murders, for suddenly something cold and implacable had come into Bryce’s heavy-lidded eyes.
    Now, doodling on a yellow note pad as if only half his mind was on the interrogation, the sheriff said, “Mr. Kale, rather than ask you a lot of questions that you’ve already answered a dozen times, why don’t I summarize what you’ve told us? If my summary sounds pretty much right to you, then we can get on with these new items I’d like to ask you about.”
    “Sure. Let’s get it over with and get out of here,” Kale said.
    “Okay then,” Bryce said. “Mr. Kale, according to your testimony, your wife, Joanna, felt she was trapped by marriage and motherhood, that she was too young to have so much responsibility. She felt she had made a terrible mistake and was going to have to pay for it for the rest of her life. She wanted some kicks, a way to escape, so she turned to dope. Would you say that’s how you’ve described her state of mind?”
    “Yes,” Kale said. “Exactly.”
    “Good,” Bryce said. “So she started smoking pot. Before long, she was stoned almost continuously. For two and a half years, you lived with a pothead, all the while hoping you could change her. Then a week ago she went berserk, broke a lot of dishes and threw some food around the kitchen, and you had hell’s own time calming her down. That was when you discovered she’d recently begun using PCP—what’s sometimes called ‘angel dust’ on the street. You were shocked. You knew that some people became maniacally violent while under the influence of PCP, so you made her show you where she kept her stash, and you destroyed it. Then you told her that if she ever used drugs around little Danny again, you’d beat her within an inch of her life.”
    Kale cleared his throat. “But she just laughed at me. She said I wasn’t a woman-beater and I shouldn’t pretend to be Mr. Macho. She said, ‘Hell, Fletch, if I kicked you in the balls, you’d thank me for livening up your day.’”
    “And that was when you broke down and cried?” Bryce asked.
    Kale said, “I just... well, I realized I didn’t have any influence with her.”
    From his window seat, Tal Whitman watched Kale’s face twist with grief—or with a reasonable facsimile. The bastard was good.
    “And when she saw you cry,” Bryce said, “that sort of brought her to her senses.”
    “Right,” Kale said. “I guess it... affected her... a big ox like me bawling like a baby. She cried, too, and she promised not to take any more PCP. We talked about the past, about what we had expected from marriage, said a lot of things maybe we should have said before, and we felt closer than we had in a couple of years. At least I felt closer. I thought she did, too. She swore she’d start cutting down on the pot.”
    Still doodling, Bryce said, “Then last Thursday you came home early from work and found your little boy, Danny, dead in the master bedroom. You heard something behind you. It was Joanna, holding a meat cleaver, the one she’d used to kill Danny.”
    “She was stoned,” Kale said. “PCP. I could see it right away. That wildness in her eyes, that animal look.”
    “She screamed at you, a lot of irrational stuff about snakes that lived inside people’s heads, about people being controlled by evil snakes. You circled away from her, and she followed. You didn’t try to take the cleaver away from her—”
    “I figured I’d be killed.