Photographing the Dead (Nameless: Season One, #2)

by Dean Koontz

Text copyright © 2019 by The Koontz Living Trust All rights reserved.

eISBN: 9781542016223

1

Sometimes a girl who doesn’t like guns is nevertheless obliged to carry one if she’s got any common sense at all.

Mia and Kara Benton are twenty-six, fraternal twins, therefore not identical, but equally attractive and athletic and high-spirited and in love with nature. Mia teaches middle school English; Kara teaches high school English. Both are engaged to be married. They are not just sisters; they are also each other’s best friend.

Once upon a time, the woods were safe.

Both Mia and Kara are licensed to carry.

Over five days, bearing backpacks, they will cover fifty-five miles, for the most part following the course of the San Joaquin River through the Sierra Nevada, past Mammoth Pool Reservoir, to Millerton Lake, where they have rented a cabin for three days.

The possibility that one or both of them will be dead before reaching Millerton Lake does not even occur to them.

2

As he steps onto the arrival platform, his phone alerts him to an incoming text message. It’ll be a heads-up from Ace of Diamonds. No one else texts him.

In the terminal, he checks the message, which says LINCOLN AVIATOR and provides a license plate number.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, he opens the console, where he finds a California driver’s license for Kenton Paul Mallory. It bears his photo.

With the license is a smartphone provided solely for this mission. When he has completed the task before him, he will enter a simple code that will return the phone to its factory setting, erasing the entire history of its use. And then he will smash it.

I-15 NORTH TO US 395 NORTH. LODGING OF YOUR CHOICE.

About thirty-five miles later, he arrives in Victorville, a small city on the edge of the Mojave.

As Kenton Mallory, he pays cash in advance for a room in a two-star motel where the clean and fresh-smelling front office suggests cockroaches aren’t tolerated.

Nameless removes a Samsonite suitcase from the cargo area of the Aviator. The bag was left there by a member of the mysterious team that works with Ace of Diamonds.

In his room, he opens the suitcase on the bed. Three changes of clothes, mostly jeans and T-shirts. A sport coat of a lighter weight than the one he’s wearing, tailored to conceal a shoulder holster. An electric razor and toiletrie...

As usual, there is also a gun, his standard Springfield Armory TRP-Pro .45ACP, with a five-inch barrel. A seven-round magazine, a spare magazine, a sound suppressor. A Galco shoulder sys...

He is surprised by the punishment Ace prescribes for the man who is their target. Should a monster who has no mercy be accorded mercy at his end? Civilized men say yes. But perhaps it’s hard specimens like Ace who make civilization viable in the first place.

During the one minute of wakefulness after his head meets the pillow, he wonders not who he once was, not why that life is behind him and beyond recapture, not what organization finances him and crafts his missions.

He wonders only how he was made into what he has become.

3

He is on the road before sunrise, Wednesday morning, northbound on US 395, into the forbidding wastelands of the Mojave. The declining moon reveals little of the night-shrouded desert, and soon no settlement lights are visible on either side of the highway.

At Emigrant Canyon, he turns right onto an unpaved road. He drives past the long-vanished boomtown of Harrisburg and the once famous Eureka Mine, to Aguereberry Point, which offers a dizzying view of Death Valley, over six thousand feet below. The target’s SUV is parked here.

His name is Palmer Oxenwald, and his SUV is a big white Mercedes GL 550.

Nameless parks his white Aviator on the farther side of the unpaved road from the Mercedes.

Oxenwald has set up a tripod, to which one camera is fixed, and he’s also shooting with a handheld Rolleiflex.

A simple fabric tent, anchored to the GL 550, features a top and three sides. It’s open to the view, a shaded retreat from which he can continue his photography or take a break when he is no longer able to endure the direct sun. Providing privacy from the rare vehicles that might come along the dirt track, the shelter surely also serves as a venue for other activities.

The photographer is made for the cover of GQ. Twenty-nine, about six feet two, handsome in a winsome way, muscular, tan. His blond hair is meticulously cut to appear artlessly chopped, carefully combed to look windblown, as if the current stillness was preceded by a gale. In a white tank top, pale-gray summer pants that might be by Berluti, and white Converse sneakers, he is a striking figure, charismatic but unthreatening.

“Anyway,” Nameless says, “the reason I stopped was I saw you moving along the drop-off there, the camera up to your face, and it gave me the chills.” “I’m as sure-footed as a mule.” “Maybe so, but this spot right here . . . I don’t mean to sound superstitious, but this place has major bad mojo.” Oxenwald cocks his head. “How so?” “Nine years ago, a young couple on their honeymoon came up here in their Ford Explorer to enjoy the view. Maybe a tire blew, maybe they lost control, nobody knows, but they went over the edge. What was left six thousand feet below wasn’t enough for the authorities to puzzle out why.” The photographer’s face clouds with dismay. “Grim. But nine years . . . the beat goes on. You can hardly say the place is cursed.” “Except it happened again four years ago. A retired couple in their late sixties. Same spot. Coroner said the impact was so great, they and their Mercury Mountaineer were combined like one machine-human organism.”

Oxenwald nods in agreement. “The light and the shadow.”

4

Sitting at a table by the window, after charging the smartphone, he employs one of its functions programmed especially for this mission. A map of Death Valley appears on the screen. He scrolls to the middle third of the display and finds the red indicator that is the GPS signal from Palmer Oxenwald’s Mercedes SUV. The vehicle is still at Aguereberry Point, no doubt because the photographer needs time to fold his tent and pack his gear away. Soon Oxenwald is on the move. North on the unpaved road to State Route 190 and Stovepipe Wells, a tiny tourist-supported resort village. He drives through Stovepipe and takes another unpaved road almost two and a half miles before he stops. He is parked near Mosaic Canyon, which offers intrepid hikers many dramatic, winding corridors that, over tens of thousands of years, rushing water carved through breccia and white marble. The water is long gone, and this is another isolated, lonely location where naive people, who feel safe in the arms of Mother Nature, can be surprised by a sociopath spawned by decadent civilization but entirely at home in the barrens and the wilds.

When Nameless is sure of his target’s destination, he closes the current application and opens another, which taps into the computer in mission headquarters—wherever that may be—providing 24/7 access to the inn’s security cameras. This was designed and achieved by one of Ace’s primo hackers. He selects the exterior camera at the front entrance to the Furnace Creek Inn. He observes the scene until a white GL 550 arrives and the valet takes possession of it. Carrying two camera bags, Oxenwald returns to the inn, where he is a guest.

Nameless takes a nap to be refreshed for their next encounter.

Later, he uses his phone to consult the inn’s security cameras again and watches until he sees Oxenwald following the corridor to the stairs, going to the ground floor, evidently for dinner. Given this opportunity, Nameless goes to the photographer’s room, picks the lock, and spends a few minutes inside.

5

By late afternoon on the third day of their five-day hike, the Benton twins cross South Mono Creek and arrive at a campsite north of Mammoth Pool Reservoir, which is not as civilized a place as it sounds. The grassy clearing is surrounded by towering pines.

When their laughter isn’t echoing back to them, the humbling and vast silence all around is broken only occasionally by the call of an owl or other night bird. There are countless stars and the moonglow is magical.

6

Prior to dinner, Palmer Oxenwald is sitting at the bar.

Nameless sits at the bar, leaving an empty stool between him and his quarry.

Nameless asks the bartender for a Scotch on the rocks and then says to Oxenwald, “You should give it a look. Hud. I know you’ll like Hud. You’ll identify. Get any good shots today?” “Maybe. I need to print them and evaluate. I never know at the time if they’re good or not. I need distance.”

“The light and the shadow. You know, you might get some dramatic shots in Mosaic Canyon. Have you heard of it?” Oxenwald’s amiable expression stiffens. For whatever reason, he doesn’t say that, earlier today, he went to Mosaic Canyon directly from Aguereberry Point. “It’s on my list.”

“It’s a strange place, alien,” Nameless says. “Lonely. I’ve always thought something terrible could happen to someone in the Devil’s Golf Course and no one would ever know. But then, Death Valley’s full of lonely places.”

“Surely you don’t travel all the time, continuously. Where do you call home?” Nameless puts down cash for his drink plus a pair of twenty-dollar bills as a gratuity. “I don’t have a home, only a mission.” He gets up from his stool. “Nice chatting with you, Palmer. Maybe we’ll run into each other tomorrow.”

Ace believes that the photographer has bolt-holes prepared against the day when his crimes are discovered. They hope to encourage him to break for one of those, where they can deal with him in the most satisfying fashion.

Earlier it had been reported that Oxenwald owns a Heckler & Koch P7M8, and Nameless’s visit to the man’s room had confirmed the existence of that weapon.