Sole Survivor by Dean Koontz Page A

about sharing anything he had learned. Rose Tucker's note said that her life depended on his discretion.
        Besides, he had the crazy notion, somehow more powerfully convincing because of its irrationality, that if he shared the note with others, it would prove to be blank, that if he pressed Blick's driver's license into their hands, it would turn out to be his own license, that if he took someone with him to the cemetery, there would be no spent cartridges in the grass and no skid marks from the tyres of the white van and no one there who had ever seen the vehicle or heard the gunshots.
        This was a mystery delivered to him, to no one else but him, and he suddenly perceived that pursuing answers was not merely his duty but his sacred duty. In the resolution of this mystery was his mission, his purpose, and perhaps an unknowable redemption.
        He didn't even understand precisely what he meant by any of that. He simply felt the truth of it bone-deep.
        Trembling, he returned to the chair.
        He wondered if he was entirely sane.

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    6
        
        Joe called downstairs to the reception desk and asked Dewey Beemis about the woman who had left the envelope.
        “Little bit of a lady,” said Dewey.
        He was a giant, however, and even a six-foot-tall Amazon might seem petite to him.
        “Would you say five six, shorter?” Joe asked.
        “Maybe five one, five two. But mighty. One of those ladies looks like a girl all her life but been a mountain-mover since she graduated grade school.”
        “Black woman?” Joe asked.
        “Yeah, she was a sister.”
        “How old?”
        “Maybe early forties. Pretty. Hair like raven wings. You upset about something, Joe?”
        “No. No, I'm okay.”
        “You sound upset. This lady some kind of trouble?”
        “No, she's okay, she's legit. Thanks, Dewey.”
        Joe put down the phone.
        The nape of his neck was acrawl with gooseflesh. He rubbed it with one hand.
        His palms were clammy. He blotted them on his jeans.
        Nervously, he picked up the printout of the passenger manifest from Flight 353. Using a ruler to keep his place, he went down the list of the deceased, line by line, until he came to Dr. Rose Marie Tucker .
        Doctor.
        She might be a doctor of medicine or of literature, biologist or sociologist, musicologist or dentist, but in Joe's eyes, her credibility was enhanced by the mere fact that she had earned the honorific. The troubled people who believed the mayor to be a robot were more likely to be patients than doctors of any kind.
        According to the manifest, Rose Tucker was forty-three years old, and her home was in Manassas, Virginia. Joe had never been in Manassas, but he had driven past it a few times, because it was an outer suburb of Washington, near the town where Michelle's parents lived.
        Swiveling to the computer once more, he scrolled through the crash stories, seeking the thirty or more photographs of passengers, hoping hers would be among them. It was not.
        Judging by Dewey's description, the woman who had written this note and the woman in the cemetery-whom Blick had called Rose -were the same person. If this Rose was truly Dr. Rose Marie Tucker of Manassas, Virginia-which couldn't be confirmed without a photo-then she had indeed been aboard Flight 353.
        And had survived.
        Reluctantly, Joe returned to the two largest accident-scene photographs. The first was the eerie shot with the stormy sky, the scorched-black trees, the debris pulverized and twisted into surreal sculpture, where the NTSB investigators, faceless in bio-hazard suits and hoods, seemed to drift like praying monks or like ominous spirits in a cold and flameless chamber in some forgotten level of Hell. The second was an aerial shot revealing wreckage so shattered and so widely strewn that the term “catastrophic accident” was a