Darkfall by Dean Koontz Page A

closed,” Jack said.
    “And locked,” Goldbloom said.
    Rebecca brushed a shining strand of hair from her forehead. “What about the drains? Could a rat come up through the tub drain?”
    “No,” Goldbloom said. “Not in modern plumbing.”
    “The toilet?”
    “Unlikely.”
    “But possible?”
    “Conceivable, I suppose. But, you see, I’m sure it wasn’t just one animal.”
    “How many?” Rebecca asked.
    “There’s no way I can give you an exact count. But ... I would think, whatever they were, there had to be at least ... a dozen of them.
    “Good heavens,” Jack said.
    “Maybe two dozen. Maybe more.”
    “How do you figure?”
    “Well,” Goldbloom said, “Vastagliano was a big man, a strong man. He’d be able to handle one, two, three rat-size animals, no matter what sort of things they were. In fact, he’d most likely be able to deal with half a dozen of them. Oh, sure, he’d get bitten a few times, but he’d be able to take care of himself. He might not be able to kill all of them, but he’d kill a few and keep the rest at bay. So it looks to me as if there were so many of these things, such a horde of them, that they simply overwhelmed him.”
    With insect-quick feet, a chill skittered the length of Jack’s spine. He thought of Vastagliano being borne down onto the bathroom floor under a tide of screeching rats—or perhaps something even worse than rats. He thought of the man harried at every flank, bitten and torn and ripped and scratched, attacked from all directions, so that he hadn’t the presence of mind to strike back effectively, his arms weighed down by the sheer numbers of his adversaries, his reaction time affected by a numbing horror. A painful, bloody, lonely death. Jack shuddered.
    “And Ross, the bodyguard,” Rebecca said. “You figure he was attacked by a lot of them, too?”
    “Yes,” Goldbloom said. “Same reasoning applies.”
    Rebecca blew air out through clenched teeth in an expression of her frustration. “This just makes the locked bathroom even more difficult to figure. From what I’ve seen, it looks as if Vastagliano and his bodyguard were both in the kitchen, making a late-night snack. The attack started there, evidently. Ross was quickly overwhelmed. Vastagliano ran. He was chased, couldn’t get to the front door because they cut him off, so he ran upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom. Now, the rats—or whatever—weren’t in there when he locked the door, so how did they get in there?”
    “And out again,” Goldbloom reminded her.
    “It almost has to be plumbing, the toilet.”
    “I rejected that because of the numbers involved,” Goldbloom said. “Even if there weren’t any plumbing traps designed to stop a rat, and even if it held its breath and swam through whatever water barriers there were, I just don’t buy that explanation. Because what we’re talking about here is a whole pack of creatures slithering in that way, one behind the other, like a commando team, for God’s sake. Rats just aren’t that smart or that ... determined. No animal is. It doesn’t make sense.”
    The thought of Vastagliano wrapped in a cloak of swarming, biting rats had caused Jack’s mouth to go dry and sour. He had to work up some saliva to unstick his tongue. Finally he said, “Another thing. Even if Vastagliano and his bodyguard were overwhelmed by scores of these ... these things, they’d still have killed a couple—wouldn’t they? But we haven’t found a single dead rat or a single dead anything else—except, of course, dead people.”
    “And no droppings,” Goldbloom said.
    “No what?”
    “Droppings. Feces. If there were dozens of animals involved, you’d find droppings, at least a few, probably piles of droppings.”
    “If you find animal hairs—”
    “We’ll definitely be looking for them,” Goldbloom said. “We’ll vacuum the floor around each body, of course, and analyze the sweepings. If we coulu find a few hairs, that would