Devoted(100)
107
Kipp knew they were entering a period of great danger.
The lives of those in this house were at risk.
But not just their lives.
He had smelled the scent of Shacket on the things the man had touched in Woody’s room and elsewhere.
It was the scent of a man but also not the scent of a man.
It was the scent of something new and terrible. The odor sickened Kipp.
The Shacket thing was out there somewhere.
The science that had made him would not be abandoned.
More death would come of it in the years ahead.
The killers from the Dark Web were out there, too.
Nevertheless, Kipp was in an olfactory ecstasy in the Bookman kitchen.
Much cooking was underway. All of it delicious.
Although his nose was a blessing, it complicated his life.
A dog’s nose had forty-four muscles.
The human nose had just four.
The number of scent receptors in a canine nose might not exceed the number of stars in the sky, but sometimes it seemed that way.
Humans had less than 1 percent as many scent receptors.
However poor their sense of smell might be, their compensation was that they had thumbs.
Amazing, really, that Kipp could endure beef chili simmering in a pot on the stove, a potato casserole baking in one oven, a cake in another—
—and still be alert for a fresh whiff of the Shacket thing—
—and smell the Dark Web killers if they got out of a car on Greenbriar Road—
—and know that Ben was still sleeping upstairs, know it by the rhythm of his uniquely scented exhalations—
—and detect the pheromones of happiness that beclouded the air around Woody—
—at the same time receiving the psychic blast of a Bellagram about the contact, minutes earlier, with a community of sixty-four in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
Something was happening out there.
And something was happening here.
Kipp smelled the exhaust of the motor home turning into the driveway.
He raced—and Woody raced—to the living room in time to see the big vehicle cruise slowly past, toward the rear of the house.
They sprinted to the kitchen, to the back door.
Megan said, “Wait. Let’s do this in an orderly fashion.”
The Fleetwood Southwind pulled off the driveway, into the backyard, out of sight of the county road.
So much hung in the balance now.
108
At one o’clock Thursday afternoon, four hours ahead of the usual quitting time, Amory Cromwell, the estate manager for the Purcell residence in Tiburon, released the house and landscaping staff of fourteen until 8:00 a.m. Monday.
The Great Man had decided at the last minute to come here for the weekend and to arrive early. Everyone must do what the Great Man wanted, and without complaint, even though it upended half a day’s scheduled work. Cromwell had harried the employees into their cars and away, as if chasing out a pack of uninvited feral cats, because the Great Man did not like having to greet or even acknowledge with a glance anyone who worked here other than his estate manager.
Cromwell used the sobriquet “Great Man” only in his thoughts, never with the staff, who must not be encouraged to mock their employer. Born in London, educated in Britain, having worked on some of the finest estates in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, where there were different antique silver services for breakfast and lunch and dinner, where his employers came from old money and spoke fluent French as a second language and were steeped in the myriad rules of etiquette, Cromwell felt that he was not only entitled but obligated to mock a poseur like Dorian Purcell. So what if the Great Man had more money than the combined wealth of all the families for whom Cromwell had worked heretofore?
Two years previously, Cromwell had given his notice in Boston, in order to accept this position at $350,000 per year plus benefits, twice what he’d been paid before. Unfortunately, he hadn’t foreseen that a man worth as many billions and as acclaimed for tech wizardry as Purcell could be both a case of arrested development and a boor. In Tiburon, the Great Man never threw parties, never entertained house guests. He wanted nothing to eat but frozen pizzas, frozen waffles, and ice cream, in addition to an entire delicatessen’s worth of lunch meats, cheeses, and sandwich fixings left for him in a Sub-Zero. There were so many big-screen TVs that the house felt like an extremely elegant Best Buy store. Twenty video-game consoles were distributed through the thirty-four rooms. An arcade contained forty-six pinball machines. Nearly one thousand hard-core porno DVDs were stored in a walk-in safe, which Cromwell had discovered only because Purcell accidentally left that vault open when he’d departed hastily one Sunday.
Cromwell’s current intention was to stay here three years before seeking another job. He was only forty-eight, and he could not possibly endure Purcell until retirement.
Now, he hurried through the ground floor of the sprawling residence, checking to be sure that all the doors were locked. He could have engaged them all from the house computer, except that some on the staff broke the rules and overrode the automatic-lock system while working, propping open a door here and there with a wedge, because they had too often been locked out of the house and refused reentry by a facial-recognition system that stubbornly refused to recognize them. Sometimes the through-house music system turned itself on, always blasting forth Taylor Swift, of all things. Now and then, in the garage, the carousels of collectible cars—none of which Purcell ever drove—began to turn of their own accord, as if the vehicles were bored, just sitting there day after day. On occasion, the charming female voice of the house-management program reacted to the sound of a vacuum cleaner by inquiring over and over again, “Do you need medical assistance?” None of these systems was a product of Parable or one of its subsidiaries, but Cromwell wondered if the manufacturers, knowing where the equipment was destined, had fiddled with them to mock the Great Man. He was pleased to think that might be the case.