‘I didn’t say that would be the end of it, though, did I? In any case, I’m not going to quibble with you about this, Erin. You’re hardly in a position to argue. You want your baby back, then you do as I say.’
‘No. Absolutely not. I have given you all I have to give. I won’t do it. I can’t do it.’
‘You have no choice in the matter. It’s decided. You have to accept it.’
‘No. Fuck you. Give me Georgia. Now!’
A pause. She wonders what he’s thinking. She prays he will see sense. She prays he will be able to see that he can squeeze no more out of her, that she is physically and mentally incapable of giving him what he desires.
‘Oh, Erin, you should see her now. Georgia, I mean. Cute as a button. That soft little face. Those tiny bunched fingers. You should see— Oh, but I’m forgetting. You can’t see her, can you? Pity. You’ll just have to use your imagination. It’s not quite the same, I know. Not the same as holding her and smelling her and hearing her and talking to her. It must be real hard not being able—’
‘STOP IT!’ she yells. She lowers her voice. ‘Please. Don’t do this to me. Don’t hurt me like this. I’m begging you.’
And then she catches sight of herself in the mirror again. Sees that she is slumped again, that her eyes are pleading, her lip quivering, her fingers stretched out like those of a starving street urchin. Look at you, she thinks. This is what you really are. Without strength, without willpower, and therefore without hope. There is no escape. He has won. As long as he has your baby he will always win.
‘I don’t want to hurt you, Erin. I want to help you. I want to give this baby back to you, I really do. But first you have to prove yourself. Believe me, you’ll feel so much better about yourself when we’re done.’
‘When? When will we be done? You could do this to me forever. How many more deaths? One? Five? Twenty? How long do you intend to make me kill for you?’
‘That depends. How many lives do you think your baby is worth?’
She will not answer that question. She would kill a hundred for her child. A thousand. She would go on killing until she died herself. That’s how much she loves her baby. It is infinite. But she cannot tell him that.
‘Enough of the games,’ she says. ‘I need to know when this will be over. No estimates. No holding information back for later. Tell me exactly what you want from me.’
There’s a longer pause now. Surely he can’t be making this up as he goes along? He must have a goal for me in mind. He must have already decided this. And that means he’s merely trying to make me suffer.
‘Midnight,’ he says finally. ‘It’ll be over by midnight.’
She tosses his words over in her mind, examining them for holes.
‘Which midnight? Tonight?’
‘Yes, Erin. Midnight tonight.’
That’s still almost twenty-four hours away. A full, agonizing day without my baby.
‘We had a deal,’ she says, but her delivery is meek. Thrown out almost petulantly.
‘This is the deal. Midnight tonight. That’s assuming you do what needs to be done.’
‘Which is what?’
He makes her wait yet again. Then: ‘Five more lives. You have until midnight to kill five more.’
She shakes her head, trying to agitate some other meaning out of what she has just been told.
Five?
FIVE?
She was expecting maybe one or two, and even then she wasn’t sure she was capable of doing that. But five? In a day? She’s sure that not even the most prolific serial killers took victims at that rate. This is more like – what do they call them? – spree killers, that’s it. The kid who wanders into his high school with a gun. The guy with a machete in the shopping mall. The people who lose it mentally, and then usually end up losing their lives too, either at their own hands or those of the cops.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ she says. ‘You want me to kill a total of six people? In a day? No. No way.’
‘What’s the problem, Erin? Like I say, you’ve done it once already. One down, five to go. Kill another one, and you’ll already be one third of the way there.’
‘Don’t give me the salesman act. A dollar a day is still a lot to pay over a year. We’re talking about people here. I don’t have the strength to kill that many.’
‘Yes you do, Erin. That’s what I’m trying to prove to you.’
‘I don’t want you to prove it. I don’t want to be any different. I just want my baby back. Please. Give her back to me.’
‘I will. At midnight. When you’ve completed your mission. I promise. No catches. No strings attached. Five more deaths by midnight tonight and you get Georgia. Alive and with no further harm.’
She analyzes his words again. They seem so clear, so unambiguous. She cannot find any get-out clause.
But that doesn’t make her task any easier.
‘I’ll get caught. How can I kill six people in a day and get away with it?’
His voice is reassuring. ‘I’ll help you. There will be no connection between your victims. No links with you, either. And at midnight it will stop as suddenly as it began. You’ll get your life back. You’ll get your baby back. You can carry on as normal.’
‘Normal? How could I be normal after something like that? I’m losing it already, after killing that homeless man. What will I be like after the next one, and the one after that?’
‘That’s the deal, Erin. Take it or leave it. Of course, you know what will happen if you leave it.’
She continues to stare into the mirror. She shifts her gaze away from the brooch and locks it onto her own eyes. Tries to see through those eyes and into her own head.
Earlier she told herself she would kill any number of people for the sake of her baby.
Now she is searching her soul to find out how true that was.
Now she is trying to see if she has what it takes to continue her trail of death.
1.43 AM
Word gets around fast when there’s a homicide. People abandon their sleep, abandon their lovemaking, abandon their cars – all for the possibility of a glimpse of a corpse. Roll up, roll up, folks – come and marvel at the fascinating spectacle of the man with no heartbeat and no breath. No living person on this earth can replicate what this man is doing. Prepare to be amazed.
The large woman in the belted overcoat and slippers isn’t helping the situation. Marching up and down alongside the yellow cordon tape, she seems to be doing her best to whip the growing throng into a frenzy, despite the attempts of a female police officer to silence her.
‘We found him,’ says the woman to the onlookers. ‘My son and me. He dead. That guy over there, he dead. Blood everywhere. And the way he was looking at me? Oh, Lord, I ain’t never seen nobody stare at me like that before. The devil has been here. This is Satan’s work.’
Doyle and LeBlanc approach the female uniform.
‘What’ve we got?’
The officer points to where the crime scene technicians are working around the body. ‘DOA’s a homeless guy. People around here know him as Vern, but I don’t know if that’s his real name. Looks like he picked the wrong spot to sleep it off tonight.’
Doyle’s grunt is non-committal. He chin-points toward the lady who is still relating her experiences to anyone who will listen. ‘Who’s she?’
The cop curls her lip in disdain. ‘She lives in the building. Her son came home shortly after one, and woke her up. Told her there was a dead guy outside. She came out for a look-see, and now she seems to think it’s her duty to tell the whole fucking world about it.’
Doyle finds the officer’s attitude irritating, and so when he nods, it is more in dismissal than gratitude. He moves toward the woman in the fluffy slippers, then holds up his gold shield in front of her face.
‘Ma’am, we’re detectives from the Eighth Precinct. You mind if we have a word?’
‘A word? I got lots of words. There’s a dead guy over there. Outside my
building. Where I live. I saw him, with my own eyes. The blood. All that blood. It’s the devil’s work.’
‘Okay. I hear your son found the body. Is that right?’
‘Thass right. But he’s only a kid. Only seventeen. I’m trying to bring him up nice. Trying to give him a chance. How am I s’posed to do that when there’s people being mutilated on our doorstep? What kind of world are we living in? Don’t get me wrong, I love my country. But this kind of thing, it ain’t right. The government should do something.’
Doyle wonders why her precious seventeen year old is wandering the streets at one o’clock in the morning, but doesn’t say.
‘Where’s your son now?’
‘Upstairs, in our apartment. I tole him to stay up there. Ain’t no need for him to see something like this more than once.’
‘We’ll need to talk to him later, if that’s okay. What did he tell you when he came into the apartment?’
‘He said there’s a dead guy outside. What else is he gonna say? He said it was the homeless guy, and he was cut bad.’
‘So you came outside to check?’
‘Damn straight. My boy don’t lie to me. If he says something is so, then it’s so. I grabbed my flashlight and I came straight down here. Now I’m wishing I hadn’t seen what I seen. Wishing my boy hadn’t seen it neither. The way he was staring at me. All that blood. Lord, I will have nightmares about that for the rest of my days.’
‘All right. That’s very helpful. You mind giving your details to the officer here? We’ll get back to you.’
Doyle motions the female uniform over, and notices how she rolls her eyes to display her lack of enthusiasm.
Doyle drops his voice when he speaks to the officer, but gives it an edge. ‘From now on, you’re her friend. Get her apartment number, and listen to what she’s got to say. Above all, lose the attitude. She’s loud because she’s scared. She’s trying to help, and we should be grateful for it.’
The officer straightens up in respect, and nods. And because he gets that from her, Doyle repays her with a smile.
He ducks under the cordon tape and heads toward the hubbub around the body. LeBlanc walks at his side.
‘Could be a tricky one,’ says LeBlanc.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Finding the perp. Guy like this is an easy target. Probably no real motive. A couple of crack-heads, maybe. Some gangbangers out to earn a stripe. They come across an old wino, and that’s it.’
Doyle says nothing. He knows LeBlanc is probably right. This city, there are all kinds of drunks, junkies and crazies wandering the streets at night. They get into arguments that would make no sense to the sober or the sane. They pick fights they don’t even know they’re starting. Sometimes they’re just unlucky. They say the wrong thing or look the wrong way at someone, and suddenly a blade or a broken bottle appears. And then it’s game over. And because the victim is what he is, not that many people give a damn.
The sad thing is, the Police Department probably won’t give much of a damn either. This man will be of no interest to the politicians; he will have no city hall muscle pushing for his case to be solved. There probably won’t even be a family or friends wanting to pursue this. Nobody will miss him. Nobody will care if the killer is caught or not. The PD will make all the right noises to begin with, and with any luck they might get a break. If not, well, sorry Vern: you’ve just become a statistic.
The CSU guys have set up lights in the area surrounding the body. It’s as clear as day here now. You could do shadow puppets. You could wait for the fat lady to come on and sing.
You could stare at a dead guy.
Roll up, roll up…
Doyle and LeBlanc step into the brightness and take stock of their work for the night. There’s not much to see – certainly nothing to suggest this was the work of anything unearthly, as the loud woman was claiming. A figure curled into a fetal position at the base of a brick column. A tattered gray coat, brown corduroy pants, scuffed leather boots. A length of some kind of electrical cord used as a belt. The front of the coat carries large dark stains – presumably the victim’s blood. Doyle can clearly see the holes that have been punched through the coat and into the flesh beneath. The man’s face is hidden behind a peaked cap that has either slipped or has been pulled down. Doyle wants to see this man’s face. He wants to know—
Wait a minute.
Doyle moves away from the scene. Starts retracing his steps.
‘Where you going, Cal?’ says LeBlanc.
Doyle doesn’t answer. He sees the female police officer. She has her notebook out and is talking to the large woman Doyle spoke to earlier.
‘Excuse me,’ he says. ‘Ma’am?’
The large woman turns fearful eyes on him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I just wanna check on something you said earlier. The man back there, the homeless guy – you said he was staring at you. Isn’t that what you said?’
‘Uh-huh. Lord, I’ll never forget those eyes. All that blood.’
Suddenly Doyle’s neck-hairs are bristling.
‘So was it you who pulled his cap down over his face?’
‘Yessir, it was. I couldn’t close his eyes. Couldn’t bear to go near them. The hat was the next best thing. People should not have to look at—’
But Doyle has stopped listening. He’s jogging back to the where the body lies. LeBlanc looks at him quizzically.
‘Cal?’
Doyle offers no explanation, because he doesn’t know what this is yet. That woman saw something nobody else gathered here has seen. The devil’s work, she called it. Something that got her real scared.
He turns to the CSU gang. ‘You done here? You mind giving us a look at the guy?’
One of the techs moves closer to the body, reaches out a gloved hand. Takes hold of the very edge of the cap’s peak. Gingerly lifts it away from Vern’s face.
‘Jeez,’ says LeBlanc.
They are all looking, all staring. A crime scene photographer moves in for some close-up shots.
What they see, carved deep into the man’s forehead, is this:
Doyle is certain he has the same thing on his mind as everybody else:
Shit, our killer thinks he’s Zorro.
2.25 AM
He has given her until two-thirty.
She told him she needed to rest, to recuperate. To gather her strength for what’s to come.
Since then she has just been lying here on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Wondering what the hell she can do to extricate herself from this living hell.
Questions have been bouncing endlessly around her skull. Why me? Why choose me, of all people? Lots of people have babies. He could have picked any one of them. Did it even have to be a baby? Why not an older child, a wife, a husband? Hell, some people would kill just to get material things back. Others would do it for money. Some would probably do it for the sheer adrenalin rush.
So why me?
And why six people? Six victims. Not five or seven, but six. Is there a significance to that number? That might make some kind of sense if he were selecting the targets – the six people in his life who most pissed him off, say – but he’s not. He’s leaving it up to her. He’s not guiding her to those people in any way.
And then there’s the biggest question of all: Just who is this guy?
Every time she hears his voice she tries to put a face to it. She has spent much of the last hour putting people she knows or has met in front of a microphone, speaking those words. None of them seems right.
Has she met him, in the flesh? How does he know so much about her? Where does he get his information?
More questions.
She wonders about the technology she has been made to wear. Just how far can equipment like this transmit sound and images? It can’t be miles, surely? Is he just outside her apartment? Perhaps parked up in a van on her street? Could he be that close?
The thought makes her shiver. Shiver with the fear that th
is monster could be so near, but also with the realization that perhaps, just perhaps, this could be the first glimmer of hope. If he is there, outside… If she can catch a glimpse of him, maybe even seize an opportunity to—
‘It’s time, Erin.’
She looks across at the clock. Two-thirty in the morning. It has come so quickly.
She feels her heart rate step up again. She sits up, swings her legs over the side of the bed. She stands up, and the sudden elevation causes her to feel nauseous.
‘I don’t suppose…’ she begins.
‘What?’
‘That you’d reconsider? That you’d see how unnecessary this is?’
‘It’s necessary, Erin. Later, you’ll understand.’
Understand what? What is this supposed to teach me, other than how to become a murderer?
She puts her hands in her pockets. Finds the knife. She pulls it out, and sees that it is still stained with the old man’s blood.
‘Wait,’ she says.
She goes into the bathroom again. Washes the knife in the sink, then dries it on a towel. As she does so, her eyes alight on all the baby things here. The bath bubbles, the rubber ducks, the talc, the musical plastic boat. Her eyes sting. She would give anything to be able to bathe her little girl again. To hear her giggle. To watch her kick and splash in the foamy water.
And then her eyes move back to the knife.
The contrast hits her hard. The early stages of precious life versus the build-up to early death. The thought of what she is about to do seems even more ugly, more inexcusable.
Then I’ll go to hell, she thinks. If that’s what it takes to save Georgia, I’ll pay that price. I’ll accept the eternal damnation. Maybe the cops will track me down. Maybe they’ll stick me in prison for the rest of my life. Whatever this guy in my ear tells me about keeping me safe, he can’t give me any guarantees. Something could go wrong. Once the police realize what they’re facing, they’ll concentrate all their efforts on stopping me. How could I possibly hope to retain my freedom when every cop in the city will be looking for me? When all the technical resources they possess are devoted to finding me?
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