“Yes. I do know that,” Louise said. “I’m not thrilled about any of this. I’m talking to lawyers again. Like I told you, my boyfriend lit out for the tall timber when he found out he’d knocked me up.”
“That’s… unfortunate,” Dr. Suzuki said.
“Tell me about it!” Louise exclaimed. “Things might’ve been okay if I’d said right away that I’d get rid of it. When I didn’t, Teo-split. If I dispose of it now, I’m still doing what he’d want. I’ll be damned, if you know what I mean.”
Dr. Suzuki nodded. “I think I do,” he said, and she was inclined to believe him-hers wouldn’t be anything close to the first tale of woe he’d heard. As if to prove as much, he went on, “If you have the baby, will you be able to keep from taking out your resentment about its father on it?”
That was a shrewd question. It was one she’d asked herself more than once. “I hope so,” she said slowly. “It’s not the baby’s fault, after all. I understand that.”
“Okay,” he said, though that was more likely acknowledgment than agreement. Snap! Snap! He donned a pair of thin rubber gloves. “Let me call Terri back into the room, then, and I’ll examine you.”
Terri! That was the nurse’s name. No matter how often Louise had come in here, she never remembered it. She pulled down her panties and put her feet in the stirrups at the end of the table. The underwear was cotton, severely functional but comfortable. For the first time since her early twenties, she’d worn little skimpy transparent nylon things while she was with Teo. He liked them. Well, now she didn’t have to worry about what Teo liked-or about wedgies, either.
Terri came in to preserve propriety. Couldn’t have a male doctor prodding a woman’s private parts with no one around to make sure hanky-panky didn’t ensue, no sir. As Dr. Suzuki started doing what he did, Louise asked him, “Do you get sick and tired of staring at pussy all day?”
He straightened up with a startled laugh. “Nobody ever asked me that before,” he said. “You bet I do. You do it for a while, it’s a job like any other job.”
And maybe that was true, and maybe it wasn’t. More likely, it was true and false at the same time. He wouldn’t care about a little old lady’s twat any more than he cared about her elbow. But if a cute young thing with a cute young thing came in, Louise guessed his interest might be more than strictly professional. She’d heard somewhere that gynecologists had one of the highest divorce rates of any kind of doctor. She couldn’t remember where, and she didn’t know for sure it was so, but she wouldn’t have been surprised.
His fingering of her was nothing but businesslike. Dr. Russell had been the same way, even though she was younger then. Once, when she was pregnant with Rob, Colin had come in with her for an examination. He hadn’t liked watching another man’s fingers probing her. He understood it was in the line of duty. He hadn’t liked it anyway.
Dr. Suzuki finished what he was doing. “You can put your pants on again,” he said as he peeled off the gloves and dropped them into the trash can.
Louise got out of the stirrups and smoothed down her skirt before she reonned her underwear. “Is everything okay?” she asked.
“It certainly seems to be. You’ve taken good care of yourself,” Dr. Suzuki answered, by which he could only mean You’re no spring chicken, sweetheart. Well, that was nothing Louise didn’t already know. Suzuki went on, “If you decide to bring the baby to term, I don’t see any medical reason why you shouldn’t have a successful delivery. I don’t see any reason now, I should say. If your blood pressure rises, if you start showing protein in your urine… That’s a different story.”
“I understand,” Louise said. “If I was going to end the pregnancy, my reasons wouldn’t be medical.”
“Well, yes.” The OB-GYN frowned a little. “I’m not so well equipped to advise you on, uh, personal choices.”
“I understand that, too.” Louise’s mouth twisted, as if she’d just tasted something bitter. “I loved that man, you know. I loved him like I hadn’t loved anybody since I was a kid. And he loved me back. He did-till I got pregnant. He couldn’t handle that, so he split. And so here I am.”
“Here you are,” Dr. Suzuki agreed. “Which brings us back to the question I asked you before.”
“I have been wondering about whether I’d take it out on the baby,” Louise said slowly, “but I really don’t think so. I’d try to remember the good times with Teo, not the bad ones. There were some. There were quite a few, till he bailed on me.”
“That seems like a commonsense attitude.” Suzuki sounded cautious. Of course he did. What else were doctors for? He had his reasons, too: “Will you be able to keep it up at three in the morning, when the baby’s got you up for the fourth time that night and you still have to go to work in the morning?”
“I don’t know,” Louise said. “But any mom alive is gonna want to punt her kid when something like that happens.”
He smiled. “True. She may want to, but she won’t do it.”
“I don’t think I will, either. I know it’s not the baby’s fault-that’s what babies do. And by then coffee’ll taste good to me again, so that’ll help me keep going.”
“Okay. I can’t tell you what to do, and I won’t try. But I do want to make sure you understand your options.” Plainly, Dr. Suzuki believed she was off her rocker for even thinking about keeping the kid.
“I’d better, by now. I haven’t done much but think about them since I found out I was pregnant.” Louise didn’t tell him she was one of those people who were more likely to do something because all their friends and relations thought they were crazy if they did. Leaving Colin for Teo, for instance.
Yeah, and look how well that turned out, her mind gibed. But she remained convinced she was happier now, in spite of everything, than she would have been had she stayed. Staying would have meant slow death. She’d never felt more vital, more alive, than she had since she walked out of the house.
And now somebody else was alive inside her. She hadn’t expected that when she walked out the door. Did she really have the energy to raise another one? More and more, she leaned toward finding out.
Colin Ferguson sat in an uncomfortable chair in a windowless conference room at Torrance PD headquarters. Torrance was the biggest South Bay city, and had the biggest police department. Said department boasted the biggest buil, and said building boasted the biggest conference room, in the region. Torrance was also centrally located. It was the logical place for cops going after the South Bay Strangler to meet. But Colin had seen interrogation rooms with a warmer human touch.
Beside him, Gabe Sanchez fidgeted in his seat. Colin didn’t figure that was on account of the chair. No-chances were Gabe needed his nicotine fix. Hardly any town in California let you light up in a place like this any more. Colin had never got that particular vice. He didn’t miss the smoke-filled meetings of his earlier days as a cop. Gabe had the jones, though.
Nels Jensen sat at the head of the long table. The Torrance captain had a lacquered mat of silver hair and features that would have seemed distinguished if his eyes weren’t a little too close together. He wore an expensive suit that looked expensive. How he afforded it… was none of Colin’s business.
Jensen glanced around the room. Everybody who should have been here was. Cops were mostly a punctual bunch. As soon as the wall clock showed two straight up, Jensen got to his feet, which naturally made everybody look his way.
He nodded heavily and pawed at some papers on the table in front of him. “Well, gentlemen, I got the DNA reports this morning,” he said. “It’s official, I’m afraid. We can chalk this latest one up to the South Bay Sonofabitch.”
“No big surprise,” Lou Ayers muttered. The Palos Verdes lieutenant sat a few seats up from Colin. And he was right. The murder of Margot Keller matched the Stangler’s MO too well to leave much doubt. The bastard was back in business. Mrs. Keller-she was a widow-was seventy-three, she lived alone, she was throttled and raped, and there wasn’t a fin
gerprint in her neat little tract home that didn’t belong to her.
That little tract home was in Torrance, not far from the big shopping center at the corner of Redondo Beach Boulevard and Hawthorne Boulevard. One more reason for Captain Jensen to hold the meeting here. He went on, “We have got to catch this guy. We’ve got to. Every time he does another one, the media take out their knives and start raking us over the coals.”
Block that metaphor! Colin thought. He had no use for the New Yorker ’s politics, but appreciated the magazine’s wit.
“The Strangler’s made all of us look bad for way too long now,” Jensen said. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t like it when the papers and the TV news calls-uh, call-me a no-good stupid stumblebum.”
I won’t make chief if they keep calling me names like that, at least not in any town around here. Those were the words behind the words. Colin heard them loud and clear. He suspected the other officers in the conference room did, too. Roy Schurz was happy as a clam being the boss cop in Orofino, Idaho. Colin was mighty glad that made Roy happy; otherwise, Kelly might still be stuck in Missoula. Even before the supervolcano went off, though, he wouldn’t have wanted to live in Orofino himself-not for all the plastic junk in China, he wouldn’t. There, if nowhere else, he sympathized with Nels Jensen.
“One of these days, the asshole’s got to slip up,” Jensen continued plaintively, a sad song Colin-and everybody else here-had also sung. “Someone will see something, or hear something, or he’ll pick a cop’s widow to go after and she’ll blow his head off with her husband’s service revolver. Something.”
That was what you called whistling in the dark. None of the cops seemed to want to meet his colleagues’ eyes. But it sparked a thought in Colin. He stuck up his hand, the way he would have in school. Jensen nodded at him.
“Have we got any idea at all how the guy picks his victims?” Colin said. “He doesn’t cruise the streets till he sees a little old lady walking along. No way-he scopes things out before he breaks in and kills ’em. So how does he find ’em? Churches? Senior centers? Facebook, for cryin’ out loud? If we can get a handle on that, we’re a step closer to psyching out what makes him tick. It’s something we haven’t tried up till now, far as I know.”
He waited to see what the other cops would think. Slow nods went up and down the table. “Gives us something to do besides cussing at the bastard, anyhow,” Lieutenant Ayers said. More nods followed.
“We can follow it up.” Captain Jensen sounded like the Pope approving something a cardinal had said in an ecumenical council. If he thinks I’m gonna kiss his ring, he can kiss my ass, Colin thought. “No way to know if we’ll get any leads from it, but I can’t see how it’d hurt.”
The first thing Gabe did when they got outside after the meeting finally broke up was light a cigarette. The next thing he did was say, “You had a good idea there. Mr. High and Mighty shoulda got more turned on about it.”
“Nah.” Colin shook his head. “The only ideas that turn him on are the ones he gets himself.” Then a reporter bore down on him-the press knew the South Bay Strangler had struck again. Since the Strangler had struck in Torrance this time, Colin could convincingly plead ignorance. He not only could, he did. He and Gabe got to their car more or less unscathed.
He turned on the news while he was eating dinner after he got home. There was Nels Jensen, telling a TV reporter, “It seems like a good idea to me to see if we can determine how the perpetrator targets his victims. Does he search for them in houses of worship, or at gatherings of senior citizens, or perhaps even by utilizing social-networking technology? We are actively pursuing several of these possibilities at this point in time.”
Colin didn’t Frisbee his dinner plate through the TV screen. The damn set was expensive. But he almost gagged at hearing Jensen not only lift his notion but turn it into mind-numbing bureaucratese. Was it really true that no good idea went unpunished? It sure seemed to be.
He was glad when Kelly called half an hour later. She let him vent about all the different kinds of chickenshit chicken thief Captain Jensen was. She sympathized: “He’s a lousy plagiarist, is what he is.”
“Lousy is right,” Colin agreed. “It sounded a lot better when I said it.”
“I believe you,” she said. “You aren’t into bureaucratic BS.”
That was true. It was one more thing that went some way towards explaining why Colin had probably come as far as he could in policework. Every once in a while, he wished he could quit calling a spade a spade, or even a goddamn shovel. Like kidney stones, those moments soon passed.
Kelly went on, “I’ve got news, too.”
“Oh, yeah? What is it? Better’n mine, I hope, whatever it is,” Colin said.
“Well, I think so. I picked out my dress today,” she told him.
“All right!” he said. “What’s it look like?”
Her reply got more technical than he was ready for. He d the dress was long and white and had a veil. He could have guessed that much without fancy explanations. He didn’t worry about it. This was Kelly’s first marriage, after all. She was more excited about tying the knot than he was. He’d put on a tux, march down the aisle, and say Yes or I do when that was called for. Then he’d hope for the best. With her, he thought-yes, he hoped-he had a fighting chance of getting it. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t march down the aisle.
“Hey,” he said when she slowed down. “One thing I’m sure of. Whatever you’re wearing, you’ll look great. And when you aren’t wearing anything, you’ll look even better.”
“You’re impossible,” Kelly said. “Or else you’re just male. I’m not sure which.” She didn’t say I’m not sure which is worse, but Colin didn’t need to be a practiced interrogator to hear it anyhow.
“Guilty on both counts,” he said. “I throw myself on the mercy of the court-splat!”
“Splat is right. Not even married yet, and you’re already henpecked.” Kelly sounded proud of it.
“Worse things to worry about.” For Colin, that was nothing but the truth. He could worry about Margot Keller, her body used, crumpled, and discarded like a paper towel. He could think about all the other old women killed before her, and about the guy out there living what looked like a normal life till he got the urge to add one more to his list. Next to that, imperfect married bliss was no big deal. “Somehow or other, we’ll make it work. What do the Brits say? We’ll muddle through-that’s it.”
“There’s what I like: confidence,” Kelly said. “Won’t be long now, Mister.”
“Good,” Colin answered, and she purred at him over the phone.
XXII
The Piscataquis chuckled through Guilford. In the western part of the little town, it powered the mill. Farther east, its northern bank turned into a park that would no doubt be pretty when the grass was green and the trees had leaves on them. Eyeing the bare branches of those trees and the snow that was burying the river-view benches, Rob Ferguson wondered whether Guilford would ever see days like that again.
A monument, also splotched with snow, listed Guilford’s war dead from a history longer than towns on the other coast knew. The letters on one of those names were still bright and shiny and new. Sooner or later, they would mellow to match the others. By then, though, chances were newer names would have gone up on the monument.
Rob was getting used to wearing too many clothes all the time, and to being cold anyway. What heat there was in the Trebor Mansion Inn rose to his little tower room-where it leaked out through the walls and windows. The glass in the windows was double, with an insulating air space between the panes. They routinely did such things here. Heat leaked out all the same.
Kids in the park slid down slopes toward the river on sleds. They flung snowballs at one another. They thought a winter with all this snow in it was fun. Rob might have felt the same way if he hadn’t wondered when-or whether-the weather would let up.
One of the books in his tower room was a sort of in
formal history of Maine. It told him more about the Year without a Summer after Mt. Tambora erupted than he’d found out online. Quebec City had got a foot of snow in June 1816. Ice stayed on the lakes and rivers th long as far south as Pennsylvania. Crops were ruined in North America and Europe: ruined to the point of widespread hunger. The haze was so thick, you could look at the sun with your naked eye and see sunspots. And Mt. Tambora was just one of these kids banging on a toy drum next to Charlie’s fancy amplified kit when you compared it to the Yellowstone supervolcano.
Shaking his head at such gloomy reflections, Rob trudged up Library Street toward the Trebor Mansion Inn. The library was another historic building. Books in there would no doubt have even more to say about that summer that wasn’t. He didn’t stop in to go look for those books. Why bother reading about it when he’d be living through it-and then some-before long?
Both SUVs from the band remained in front of the inn, along with the Barber family’s cars. Nobody was going anywhere. The Shell station still hadn’t got more gas. All the stations in Dover-Foxcroft were dry, too. Tankers weren’t even trying to come up here any more. North and west of the Interstate, Maine was on its own: the big part of the state, if not the populous part.
But something new had been added. Out there next to the nearly useless motor vehicles stood a one-horse open sleigh straight out of “Jingle Bells.” In lieu of a hitching post or rail, the horse-a well-curried bay-was tied to a doorknob. It munched contentedly from a feed bag.
When Rob went inside, he took off his hat and his overshoes, and that was about it. With even firewood in short supply, the place stayed cold. Dick Barber greeted him with, “Come into the parlor, why don’t you? Someone here I’d like you to meet.”
“Whoever’s in charge of the sleigh there?” Rob asked.
“That’s right. Your cohorts have already made his acquaintance.” Barber sometimes had an old-fashioned turn of phrase. He could use it or not, as he chose, which made Rob classify it as a special effect.
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