The Edge of Sleep

by Wiltse, David

  Becker came to himself abruptly. “Asphyxiation? Not the beatings?”

  Karen shook her head. “Medical thinks the prolonged and repeated trauma must have brought them pretty close to death, but at the end he smothered them.”

  “Smothered, not strangled?”

  “Medical thinks it was probably a pillow, blanket, something like that. There was no real sign of struggle at the end. But then there wouldn’t have been any hair or skin or blood under the nails, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “They were washed thoroughly after death. ‘Cleansed’ is how Medical put it. Nails cleaned, hair combed, bodies scrubbed. Not a fingerprint on them, not a trace of anything.”

  “Hair combed?”

  Karen nodded. “Parted and combed ... And cut.”

  “Cut? He gave them a haircut after he killed them?”

  “It looks that way.”

  Becker thought for a moment. “He may be saving the hair. We may be looking for someone with a bag full of trimmings.”

  “What does he want with them?”

  “How the hell do I know. They were sexually abused, I assume.”

  Karen shook her head. “It puzzled all of us, but no. No sign of sexual abuse.”

  Becker was silent for a long time. Karen watched his face but could read little there.

  “I assume the Investigative Support Unit is involved? Have they given you a profile of the guy?” he asked finally.

  “Sort of. It isn’t much help yet. They don’t have a lot to work on and they seem to be thrown by the lack of sexual abuse.”

  “Did Gold have anything to offer?”

  “Gold was a bit confused.”

  “Surprise, surprise.”

  “He is a good man, Becker.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “What do you expect from a shrink, after all?”

  “Miracles, mostly. If he’s your own.”

  “He’s helped you, you’ve said so.”

  “Allow me my own twisted response to my shrink, if you don’t mind. What was he confused about?”

  “He thought it was very unclear, he was getting conflicting signals from this guy. At least Gold was frank enough to admit it.”

  “He’s as honest as his profession will allow,” Becker conceded. “So the psychological profile isn’t much use?”

  “As usual. You can give us a better one.”

  Becker looked at her, smiled ruefully.

  “We know why that is, don’t we?”

  She chose to ignore his remark. “I’ll let you see Gold’s profile, of course. I can put everything we have in your hands in less than a day.”

  “How much do you have on the man himself?”

  Karen cleared her throat. She glanced at the pilot and owner, then back to the file on the table in front of her.

  “Nothing,” she said finally.

  “Partial description?”

  “No one has ever seen him.”

  “He took six kids away from public places, once from a schoolyard, once from a school outing at a museum—and no one saw him?”

  “No.”

  “He just walked off with them? No protests from the kids, no foot dragging, no struggles, no tears. Nothing to make anyone notice? Nothing to even make someone imagine they saw something peculiar? There’s always someone around who’s willing to make up something in exchange for attention from us. No lonely clerk who likes having the FBI talk to him as long as he can fantasize what he thinks we want to hear?”

  “Nobody, John.”

  “Who is this guy, the Invisible Man?”

  “The agents are calling him Lamont Cranston. Apparently there was an old radio show called ‘The Shadow’ about this man, Lamont Cranston, who could cloud men’s minds and become invisible ...”

  “I remember,” said Becker.

  “Before my time,” said Karen.

  “Your loss,” said Becker. He fell into a deep announcer’s baritone. “ ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? ... The Shadow knows.’ ”

  “Yeah. I’ve been hearing a lot of that one,” Karen said.

  “Orson Welles did the voice, I think.” Becker said.

  Karen waited impatiently, clearly not interested in nostalgia.

  From the other side of the room she could hear the pilot’s own sotto voce rendition of “The Shadow knows.” It seemed to be a phrase that men of all ages could not resist crooning, whether or not they had even heard of the original radio show.

  “How does he get them to leave so peacefully that no one sees anything?” Becker was musing aloud, not expecting an answer. “As if he had them hypnotized.”

  “We checked hypnosis, actually.”

  “I wasn’t serious,” Becker said.

  “We weren’t either, but we checked it anyway. None of them had ever been previously hypnotized, so there was no posthypnotic suggestion at work.”

  “What physical evidence have the forensic people come up with?”

  Karen shook her head. “Nothing. I know it’s hard to believe, but nothing. I told you, the bodies had been cleansed. There was nothing in the bags except the bodies. No hair samples, no prints, no fibers ... Part of that is the nature of the plastic used in the bags, apparently. It’s chemically inert and very smooth so it won’t pick up fibers from a car’s seat covers, for instance.”

  “No prints on the outside of the bags? That stuff will hold fingerprints.”

  “Only the prints of the people who found the bags along the highway. I don’t know. John. It’s like he killed and cleaned them in a scientific lab.”

  “You’ve checked that?”

  “In every case we investigated every lab within a fifty-mile radius of where the kids were taken. Every medical lab, every scientific research facility, every university with a science department, every place we could think of that keeps a sterile facility.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing. Hundreds of names of people who work there or have access to the facilities. But no connections to the victims, at least none that the computer could find. Maybe you could tell the computer what else to look for.”

  Becker fell into a deep silence. When Karen started to speak to him he lifted one hand, stopping her. After a moment she slid out of her chair and crossed the room to join the pilot and the airport owner. Instinctively, they all spoke in hushed tones.

  “Is he going to help find Lamont?” the pilot asked.

  Karen arched her eyebrows, cocked her head slightly. Becker was not a man to make predictions about.

  “He’s helped already,” she said.

  “Did he come up with something?”

  “No. But he’s confirmed that we’ve done all the right things.”

  The owner craned his head to look past Karen, studying Becker as if seeing him for the first time.

  “Is this guy really all that bright?” the owner asked. Karen shot the pilot a hard glance. She did not like the idea of discussing Bureau business with a civilian.

  “I just mentioned that he’s someone special,” the pilot said shamefacedly.

  “Doesn’t look it,” said the owner.

  “That depends what part of him you’re looking at,” Karen said.

  The owner looked at the pilot, suppressing a smile. The woman wasn’t his boss, after all. He had no reason to be afraid of her.

  “What part are you looking at?” he asked.

  “The part that’s looking at you,” she said.

  Becker was still staring blankly at the table.

  “He’s not looking at me,” the owner said, puzzled.

  “Which ought to tell you something,” Karen said. To the pilot she said, “We’ll be leaving in fifteen minutes. Are you ready?”

  “She’s ready when you are.”

  “Go to the bathroom first,” she said. “It’s a long flight.”

  Karen walked back to Becker.

  “I have a bladder infection,” the pilot told the owner sheepishly.


  “He wasn’t looking at me at all, was he?” the owner demanded, still puzzled.

  The pilot looked at Becker. If one hadn’t heard the stories they told about him, Becker would appear to be a fairly rugged man, no longer young but certainly not old, an ex-athlete perhaps, who still stayed in shape, still had his hair. Presentable but nothing remarkable. But if the viewer had heard the stories; if even half of what they said about him was true ...

  “From what I hear,” the pilot said, “you’d better be grateful he isn’t looking directly at you. They say he sees everything, anyway. But what he looks at, he hits.” The pilot knew that was not what Deputy Assistant Director Crist had meant, but then she had actually worked with Becker. Humped him, too, apparently. The pilot was not certain just what sort of insight that gave her into Becker’s heart and head. He himself had certainly slept with many women without revealing a damned thing about himself except his sexual preferences, which was just the way he wanted it. How these things worked with Becker, he had no idea and no real desire to know.

  Karen sat down at the table again and waited for Becker to return from wherever he had wandered in his mind. She remembered having found him in the middle of the night in the living room of the hotel suite they had shared in New York on the Bahoud case. He had been sitting with the lights out and when she asked him why, he had said because he was afraid of the dark. His face was wet with tears. She had thought he was the strangest, most exciting man she had ever met. That night she had comforted him with her body, and the next day he had killed the murderous Bahoud in a prolonged struggle in the pitch-black subbasement of the apartment building where he had been hiding. Becker had killed the man—who was armed with two weapons—with his bare hands in utter blackness, and Hatcher had said they had located Becker at last only by the screams he emitted. Yet he had wept again when he sat beside her hospital bed and she knew that he was crying as much for himself as for her.

  She had lied earlier when she told Becker she had been half in love with him. She had been totally in love with him, and just about as frightened of all that he represented and of the great danger he posed to her control of herself. Ten years later, she still could not look at his hands without wanting to feel them on her body.

  “This is going to hurt,” he said, jolting her out of her reverie as he came out of his own.

  She understood that he was talking about himself.

  “I don’t think I can do it without you,” she said. “He’ll keep on doing this until we get dumb lucky. We don’t have much time.”

  “You don’t have any,” Becker said. “He’s snatched another kid already.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Becker shrugged. He wasn’t certain, but it made no difference. If Lamont hadn’t struck again, he would at any moment.

  “Why shouldn’t he? He’s hungry, he’ll eat.”

  He looked directly at her for the first time in several minutes.

  “It’s going to hurt a lot,” he said.

  “I know.” She touched his hand with hers. “I do know, John.”

  Karen paused, realizing that it was not enough. “I have sole custody of my son,” she said at last.

  “Your husband fought it.” It was not a question.

  “Bitterly,” she said.

  “And?”

  She knew he was way ahead of her already, but there was sometimes a necessity to go through the formalities.

  “And I wasn’t sure I should have custody at all. I’m not sure I deserve it ... I’m not sure I want it ...”

  Becker waited, looking at her.

  After a moment she said, “It scares me, John. Having complete control over him. I’m ... I’m sometimes afraid of what I might do.”

  Becker nodded slowly. He gripped her hand with his own, squeezing briefly.

  “You won’t,” he said. Becker pulled the file toward himself. “I’ll need to look at everything as soon as you can get it to me,” he said. “But first I need to be alone with these.”

  She knew he meant the photographs of the dead boys and she thought she saw him shudder.

  Chapter 4

  DEE WAS FEELING GOOD; she couldn’t remember when she’d been in such good spirits. She felt so good she didn’t even object to the sight of Ash eating tacos.

  She saw the man watching her from his solitary table in the corner where he sat nursing a cigarette and a cup of coffee. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her. She knew she was fascinating. A vibrant, attractive woman, full of energy and high spirits. Who wouldn’t watch her? Who wouldn’t want her?

  She said something to Ash and then laughed, tossing her head back, filling the place with her ringing merriment. Dee loved her laugh; it was so free, so honest. She hated people who tittered behind their hands. Dee let the whole world know she was amused, god damn it, and if it was too loud for some people, then to hell with them. They didn’t know how to have a good time. If there was anything Dee did know, it was how to have a good time. She was even having a good time right this minute, watching Ash spill taco and salsa on himself. She knew the secret of joy. Some book had come out with a title like that The Secret of Joy. and Dee had read it to see if the author was someone like herself. But she hadn’t known what she was talking about, and after a few pages Dee had thrown the book across the room in disgust. The real secret, the only secret, was to just let yourself. If you wanted to laugh, then laugh, god damn it. Laugh as if you meant it and screw all the poker-faced killjoys like that toad of a cashier who was looking at Dee as if she had her tit caught in the cash register. The man in the corner knew what she was laughing about. She could see him smiling from the corner of her eye. She could tell he was caught and mesmerized by her.

  “Dee,” Ash said, sounding worried again. He looked at her with concern, bits of tomato and shredded lettuce spilling from the taco.

  There was a bar at the restaurant just a few doors down. Dee had made note of it as soon as they entered the mall.

  “Ash, I want you to walk home,” she said.

  His eyes went wide.

  “You work your face like a clown,” she said lightly.

  “Sorry,” Ash said.

  “Don’t apologize. I like it; it makes you easy to read.” She patted him on the cheek.

  “Walk home?”

  “Don’t act like you’ve never done it before. You know how to do it. Go out of the mall and turn left.”

  “Left,” he said, concentrating.

  “Turn left and just keep walking until you get to the motel. You know the name of our motel, don’t you?”

  “Okay,” said Ash.

  “Okay nothing. What is it?”

  Ash furrowed his brow and she laughed again. “You wouldn’t even have to paint the creases and lines on the way clowns do,” she said merrily. She glanced to see if the man in the corner was appreciating her good humor. He smiled and inclined his head slightly. Dee looked at him as if he had startled her with his familiarity, as if she had only now become aware of him and wasn’t at all certain how to take such boldness.

  Ash saw the exchange and knew why he was walking home. He would be spending another night outside the room, listening to Dee and some stranger. But mostly to Dee, her laughter, her shouts of exuberance, her ecstatic screams at the end. It hurt him so much to listen to her, to see her behaving this way for the benefit of the strange man in the corner, to know she was giving herself to someone else.

  “What is it?” she was saying.

  “Nothing,” he said, thinking she was inquiring about his thoughts. She would figure it out on her own soon enough. She always did, but it hurt him even more to tell her how much it hurt.

  “Nothing? That’s a strange name for a motel.”

  “Oh.” So she was not reading his mind. That happened sometimes when she was this happy. She seemed to lose her magical wisdom when she was this way.

  “Days Inn?” he guessed.

  “Daybreak,” she corrected him. “Daybreak Motel.
Got it?”

  Ash nodded.

  “Say it.”

  “Daybreak Motel. Daybreak. I turn left and stay on the highway till I get to Daybreak Motel.”

  “That a boy. You’ll do just fine. Now pop the rest of that muck into your mouth and off you go.”

  Ash rose dutifully and let her swipe once at his face with a napkin.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Never better,” she said. “Don’t worry about a thing; we’ve got the world by its ying-yang.”

  Ash smiled. He thought the word was funny even if her mood frightened him.

  “Now scoot,” she said.

  “Daybreak?”

  “Stop stalling and go on.”

  Ash shambled out the door, looking back at her once with that face of a mourner, and Dee waved goodbye to make sure the man in the corner understood that she was now alone.

  She stayed at the table for a few minutes more to emphasize the separation. She opened her compact and checked her makeup, holding the mirror at an angle so that she could see the man’s reflection. He was still studying her, of course. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her. Now he raised his hand and wiggled his fingers in a greeting. The gesture looked silly in the mirror, weak, feminine. Dee hoped he wasn’t one of those, but if he was, there were lots more fish in the sea and she was just about the best bait they were likely to come across.

  Dee started out of the taco shop and paused once to look back at the man. She held his eyes fully and smiled. He smiled back. Dee saw no point in being too subtle about these matters. It just wasted time.

  The bar portion of the restaurant was noisy and she could hear the music and the sound of voices spilling out as soon as she stepped from the Mexican place. At this time of night most of the shops were closed except for the food pavilion and the individual restaurants, so a little more noise would get no complaint from neighboring merchants.

  Dee had time to order a white wine and study the men on either side of her before the man from the restaurant showed up. The other men looked passable enough, provided they were in proper working order—so many men were not these days—but she still preferred her friend from the restaurant. He was a little younger than the other two, a little cuter, and he did not sport a gold chain. Dee had long since despaired of men who wore gold chains as hopeless to talk to and useless in bed.