“When people think about their deaths, what do they dread most? Is it death from a lingering disease? No.” She was reading off a transparent TelePrompter that spooled by in front of the camera she was facing, invisible to the people looking in, the same elite device used by presidents of the United States, and why not? She made a lot more money than the president. “Is it death by drowning? No,” she answered herself, just in case the folks at home had gotten it wrong. “According to a Louis Harris poll, it’s death by fire. By flame,” she said. “And that’s how the Incinerator kills his defenseless victims. We have with us today four guests.”
The light on her camera went out, and I saw myself, wearing makeup, on the monitors, looking as if I’d wandered in from the show on transvestites by mistake. “First is a Los Angeles private detective named Simeon Grist.” The words SIMEON GRIST appeared on the screen beneath my face, which had frozen into a sort of muscular death mask. In print, my name seemed foolish and wrong, like an alias assigned by a substandard intelligence service.
“Mr. Grist,” Velez Caputo was saying about the idiotic-looking individual on the monitors, “is the man who broke up a child prostitution ring here in Los Angeles last year. He was retained by the famous heiress Baby Winston when the Incinerator burned her father, and now, as you’ve seen from the letter we just read, the Incinerator has threatened to burn him alive. It took great courage for him to join us today, ladies and gentlemen. Simeon Grist.”
People applauded, and the idiot on the monitors grinned emptily. Hammond clapped, slowly and ironically. Eleanor sat forward, looking concerned. Stillman, behind the cameras in a nautical blazer, made up for my old pal’s lack of joie de vivre by applauding more enthusiastically than anyone. The light on my camera went off, and none too soon.
“Our other guests,” Velez Caputo said, “are a psychologist specializing in serial killers for the Los Angeles Police Department, Dr. Norbert Schultz.”
Schultz smiled in a nervous, yellow fashion, and I thought, Norbert?
“From VICAP, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s central index, where national information on these maniacs is stored,” Velez Caputo continued as the monitors reflected a sallow individual wearing a blue tie with little red fish all over it, “William Stang.”
William Stang didn’t smile. He probably hadn’t smiled since the day his wife fell through the ice.
The man in the farthest chair had gotten up, and a woman took his place. Great, I thought, a surprise.
“And, finally, the woman who’s being called the Homeless Heroine, the woman who fought off the Incinerator to save the life-only temporarily, I’m afraid-of Baby Winston’s father. Ladies and gentlemen, Hermione X.”
Hermione X, not a new hallmark in alias creativity, had been considerably cleaned up. Wearing a mask that made her look like an aged Lone Ranger in drag, she waved at the audience. They applauded. She was a hit. She was also loving it.
I was hating it a lot. “He could kill her,” I said over whatever Velez Caputo was reading off the TelePrompter, a stream of over-written conjecture about what has gone wrong with our society.
“Mr. Grist?” Velez Caputo said, swiveling to face me. It would take a lot to surprise her.
“This isn’t smart,” I said. “She has to go back to the streets when you’ve finished with her, and he saw her. So what if she’s wearing a mask? He knows who she is.”
“We’re paying for her security,” Velez Caputo said smoothly. I saw Norman wince. “Anyway, we’re sending her home.”
“The woman doesn’t know her last name. Should be an interesting passport.”
Caputo frowned at me, but Stillman’s face cleared.
“Don’t worry about me, Ducks,” Hermione said gaily.
“I’d think, Simeon-may I call you Simeon?” Velez Caputo said.
“Call me whatever you want,” I said. I’d been warned that there would be surprises, but I hadn’t figured on Hermione.
“I’d think, Simeon, that you’d be more worried about yourself.” The man with the headset was making frantic signals in the direction of the TelePrompter, his left eye sending out a semaphore of panic. She ignored him.
“Well,” I lied, “you’d think wrong.”
“And yet this lunatic has told you what he’s after. Specifically,” she added. “You.”
“He’s not a lunatic,” I said.
“He’s not,” Schultz said, leaning forward in his chair as he picked up his cue. “Clinically, he’s probably as sane as you and I.”
“Sane?” Velez Caputo said, arching an eyebrow that probably required its own gardening staff. “He’s torching defenseless people!”
“Precisely,” Schultz said. “They’re defenseless. He’s got a plan. He’s got rules. We’ve all got rules. Don’t cross on the red, don’t cheat on the wife, don’t do anything that might make you lose the job. Well, he’s got rules, too, and he followed them for a long time. They’re not our rules, but they’re rules. And insofar as the legal definition of sanity is concerned-whether he can distinguish between right and wrong-well, of course he can. And he’s proceeding anyway, in accordance with a program he’s created. He’s completely in control of himself.”
“He’s very much in control,” Stang said. He’d interrupted a sentence fragment from Velez Caputo, but she looked at him as gratefully as though he’d just offered her the names and addresses of seventy Nielson families. “Your mass murderer, the guy who shows up at McDonald’s with an AK-47 and shoots thirty people, he’s maybe crazy. He kisses the wife and kiddies good-bye and slips a clip into the magazine and blows people away until the cops put a couple through his skull. He knows he’s going to die, and he doesn’t care. That’s crazy. But your serial murderer, he’s careful. He chooses one kind of victim exclusively, and one way to kill them, and he makes sure that no one will catch him. He looks both ways, so to speak, and when the field is clear, he slits the throat…”
“Or throws the match,” Schultz said.
“Or throws the match,” Stang said crankily. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Velez Caputo said, smelling a fight.
“Well, it matters to the victim, I suppose,” Stang said. “But, you know, when you’re about to die, there isn’t time to decide that you’d prefer a different form of murder.”
“Mr. Grist?” Velez Caputo said. Hermione cawed something, but Caputo ignored her.
“He’s sane,” I said, “whatever sane means.”
“He’s bloody crackers,” Hermione said. “You should have heard him laugh.”
“Hermione,” I said, “can it.”
“Time for a break,” Velez Caputo said to the camera, and the lights went down.
“You,” she hissed to me, “don’t interrupt. We have to get a flow going here.”
“Would you prefer that I leave?” I asked. “Want to fill some time?”
“Norman,” she said, but she didn’t have to. Stillman was already there, standing over me and looking down with fatherly concern.
“Simeon,” he said, “you haven’t said it yet.”
“If I leave,” I said, “you’ve got an awful long time in front of you.” The computer behind Velez Caputo’s eyes began to click.
“Fifty minutes,” she said to Stillman. “I told you live was a mistake.”
“Thirty seconds,” said the man with the headset.
“This is national?” Velez Caputo said.
“You wanted it to be,” Stillman replied, demonstrating an Olympian mastery of the sidestep.
“Can I interrupt?” I said as the man with the headset told us that twenty seconds remained. Velez Caputo looked from Norman to me. “Leave us alone,” I said.
Velez Caputo gave me a stare packed with the kind of loathing I usually reserve for the poetry written by characters in novels. “That’s not how it works, sonny,” she said.
“Five,” said the man with the headset, over the strident tones of a commercial for laundry
detergent. “Four, three,” and he held up the fingers for two, one. He pointed vaguely in Velez Caputo’s direction.
“We’re back,” she said, sounding very glad to be back. Stillman had retreated behind the cameras. “We were talking to Dr. Stang,” she said, making her first mistake.
“Mr. Stang,” Stang said.
“Of course,” Velez Caputo said, coloring beneath her makeup. “Mr. Stang of the FBI. We were talking about why you’re so sure that the killer is in control of himself.”
“These people,” Stang said sourly, “serial killers, I mean, decide consciously to give up their own lives to take the lives of others. They exert enormous control to do so.”
“Surely that’s insane,” Velez Caputo said. Stang shook his head.
“Painters,” Schultz interrupted, following the script we’d developed, “give up their lives-normal, secure, middle-class lives, I mean-to paint. Writers decide to write, no matter what. This man is following a kind of creative urge. It’s a twisted kind of creativity-
“I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” Velez Caputo said.
“-but it’s a kind of creativity,” Schultz said doggedly. “As in any art form, he’s decided to accept the limitations imposed by his materials-in this case, gasoline and matches-and he’s trying-”
“You’re a doctor” Velez Caputo accused him.
“-he’s trying to take it to the ultimate, trying to do something that no one else has ever done with those materials, all the while facing the challenge of capture.” He sat back, having done that bit. Velez Caputo’s face filled the screen, and Schultz gave me the high sign.
“You sound as though you admire him,” Velez Caputo said. “What about the deaths? What about the agony of the victims?”
“No one’s forgetting about the victims,” I said. “All Dr. Schultz is saying is that it’s a mistake to imagine him as a drooling maniac, hovering in doorways waiting for someone to fall asleep. He’s got a highly developed set of criteria, and he’s almost certainly a very intelligent man. Probably a brilliant man.” Point two.
“So what’s phlogiston?” Velez Caputo said, retreating to consult the TelePrompter at last. “What’s calx?”
“Phlogiston,” I said, glad to get to an easy part, “is a bad idea from the early nineteenth century. It was a principle, sort of like an element, and it was proposed by a German chemist named G. E. Stahl as the thing that actually burned when anything caught fire. Calx was whatever was left over.”
“So he’s saying,” Velez Caputo said, cutting through the history of science with a straight razor, “that he intends to burn you to a crisp.”
“That’s what he’s saying,” I said.
“Because he thinks you betrayed him. I should explain,” she said, turning to the cameras, “some of the background here.” The TelePrompter was whirring again, and she explained it in about forty compact seconds. Finishing, she turned to me. “So how do you feel about that, Mr. Grist?”
It wasn’t time for that yet.
“Miss Caputo,” I said.
“Velez,” she said. “Call me Velez.” Off camera, nobody called her Velez.
“How would you feel if he were after you? And who knows? He may decide to go after you next,” I said. “Surely, he’s watching us now.”
Caputo said, “Well, I don’t-”
“He might like to burn a celebrity,” I said maliciously. Schultz was making frantic hand signals. “Think of the media coverage.”
“And yet,” Velez Caputo said, a trifle grimly as the man with the tic made frantic adjustments in the TelePrompter, “up until a few days ago, this Incinerator specialized, as you say, in men. Then he apparently decided to kill women as well.” She paused and licked her lips again, and this time the gesture looked functional rather than cosmetic. “Why?” she asked. “Why do you suppose he changed course?” The man with the tic pointed at Schultz, and Caputo turned toward him. “Dr. Schultz?”
Schultz was sitting taller than a man who suspected the presence of a whoopee cushion. He hadn’t wanted to do this part. He’d asked me repeatedly to do it myself, but I’d refused. If he did it, it meant that he hadn’t talked to Finch.
“He feels that the rules were broken in the, um”-he looked at me, and I returned his gaze, feeling my heart pound against the walls of my jugular vein-“in the, in the…”
“Police action,” Velez Caputo said.
“Yes,” Schultz said, and his Adam’s apple did a little swan dive. “In the police action last Sunday evening.” Hammond, in the back of the room, glared first at me and then at Schultz. “He feels that Mr. Grist betrayed his trust by talking to the police, and he broke his own rules in return. So he burned his first woman.”
“We have a picture of her,” Velez Caputo said, and Schultz sagged back into his chair as a photograph flashed onto the monitors. It might have been the woman I talked to, but the photo had been taken in a different life, a life when she shopped and went home and went to the beauty parlor, and there she was with a matronly smile on her face, a woman living safely within the walls of a world that shut out rain and cold and Thunderbird and bottles of gasoline and Incinerators.
“Helena Troy,” Caputo said. The name sounded like a sick joke.
“Mrs. Troy,” Schultz acknowledged.
“A woman deserted by her husband in Boston less than a year ago,” Velez Caputo said. “Left with nothing, not even the rent for her apartment. Mr. Troy, wherever you are, I hope you’re watching. She was the first woman he killed,” she said to Schultz.
“Yes,” he said, looking like someone whose shoes were wet.
“And you think this is significant.”
“We think, that is I think,” Schultz said, “as a trained psychologist with some experience with this kind of mentality, that he’s been keeping himself from burning women, that, in fact, women have been his real target all along. He’s been denying himself that target-”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Velez Caputo said, on behalf of the folks at home.
“Remember the note,” Schultz said. The camera had had enough of the note, and it remained on him. “Remember the control in that note. He talks about the rules. The rules protect people, he says. Remember his behavior. Always the homeless, always within a certain area, until after the, um, police and Mr. Grist broke the rules. He could have killed elsewhere, someplace the police weren’t looking for him. He didn’t, until the, ah, police action Sunday night.” Dr. Schultz was sweating like a waterfall. He was a police psychologist, and he’d just suggested police culpability not only in the shooting of Dennis Thorpe, but also in the deaths of three women. I felt sorry for him, but I also felt a small thrill of victory at recognizing an ally. He hadn’t consulted with Finch.
“So he felt Mr. Grist had broken the rules,” Velez Caputo said. “Why did he react by burning women?”
“Because,” Schultz said, advancing the theory we’d spent two days arguing over, “he’d always meant to burn women.”
“Please,” she said. “Can you be more specific?”
“With considerable effort,” Schultz said.
“Male serial killers always kill women, unless they’re homosexuals who derive sexual pleasure from killing men,” Stang broke in. “That’s been the problem from the beginning. There didn’t seem to be any sexual element. Put him into a whole new category. He was just burning them and going away. What was he getting out of it?”
“He was deriving the same kind of enjoyment,” Schultz said, literally shutting his eyes so he could plow ahead with a theory he hadn’t shared with the LAPD, “that an artist gets by not putting real wood, say, into his paintings but rather facing the challenge of painting wood. Wood has a very difficult texture. To paint wood in its natural state, wood that’s full of whorls and loops and seemingly random patterns, well, that’s very difficult indeed. Why not just put a piece of wood into the picture and paint around it?”
“You keep comparing this man to an artis
t,” Velez Caputo said.
“He is an artist,” Schultz said. “He’s an artist of death. Death is his area of creativity,” he said, word for word from the script, “and, like all great artists, he set down rules, limitations for himself.” Schultz drew a deep breath. “And the primary limitation he established, I believe, was that he would only burn men, even though his hatred, the spark that ignited his rage, was women. When Mr. Grist broke the, um, when the…” he faltered. “Oh, hell,” he said, settling into his chair at last, “when the LAPD broke the rules he had set down for talking to Mr. Grist, he threw out his own rules and started to burn women instead.”
“Women,” Velez Caputo said neutrally.
“Women were always his main target,” Schultz bravely reiterated, risking his professional reputation. “It’s women he hates.”
“We’ll be back with Mr. Grist’s reactions-and a very personal plea to the killer,” Velez Caputo said into the camera, “after this.”
Things went dark. “And keep it short,” Velez Caputo said to me as a squadron of makeup women rushed to repair the damages of whatever real emotions she might have endured while we were on the air. They were finishing when the tic with the headset said, “Fifteen.”
Two men were hustling Hermione out of Seat Number Four, and she was cawing protest.
Three, two, one, the man with the tic counted with his fingers. The lights had come on.
“Mr. Grist,” Caputo said, and then she looked at Stillman and fought down a rebellious grin. “We’ve heard from Dr. Schultz that the Incinerator may concentrate on female victims from now on, and yet this note was addressed to you. We promised that we’d get your feelings about all this, but before we do”-she glanced to her right, where a woman was being seated in Hermione’s place in Seat Number Four-“we want to focus on that note. In fact, on all the notes.”
I glanced wildly toward Schultz, who looked like he’d just been hit by a train.
“Hold on,” he shouted.
“There have been three,” Velez Caputo said, as though Schultz hadn’t spoken. He got up, but the first note was already on the screen, pictures and all, in glorious color.
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