Death Mask

by Graham Masterton

  “You think the killer is still here?” asked Sissy.

  “Almost sure of it. The elevator doors opened, and Mr. Kraussman saw the suspect look out. Like he says, though, it was only for a split second. Then the doors closed again, and the elevator went back up and stopped at the seventeenth floor, which is where we found it with the victim’s body inside. No sign of the suspect, of course.

  “No other exits were open at the time. There’s an emergency fire door in back and a service door for laundry and deliveries and such, but at that time of the morning the service door was locked and chained, and the emergency fire door has a seal on it, which you need to break to open it.

  “So the logical conclusion is that the suspect is still hiding on the premises someplace, which is why we’re carrying out a floor-by-floor search. It’s a complicated old building with all kinds of attics and storage spaces and closets and cubbyholes, but we have seventy-seven officers deployed, and two dog handlers, so if he’s here, then we’ll find him.”

  Sissy lifted her head. The lobby was echoing with conversation and footsteps and camera shutters clicking and somebody hammering. Detective Bellman called out, “Mike! Mike, c’mere, would ya?” and another officer said, “You’re breaking up, Stan, I can’t hear you,” as he talked to one of the dog handlers on his radio.

  But Sissy closed her eyes and allowed her sensitivity to rise upward, as if she were asleep and her spirit was rising from her body on a fine golden chain. It rose past the art-deco chandelier with its amber glass diamonds, and up through the combed-plaster ceiling, ascending through the building floor by floor.

  She felt the police officers who were searching the offices, and even saw the flicker of their flashlights. She felt the dogs panting, and the dogs, who were much more sensitive than their handlers, stopped and turned in bewilderment as her presence passed them by.

  She went all the way up to the twenty-fifth floor, and into the roof-space, where the water tanks and the elevator winding gear were housed. She could have risen further, through the coronet-shaped roof, and seen the whole of Cincinnati spread around her, with its water-front office buildings and its giant ballpark, and the wide hazy curve of the Ohio River with all of its bridges. But she allowed herself to sink down again, all the way back to the lobby, and opened her eyes.

  Detective Kunzel had been talking to Detective Bellman. “Are you okay there, Mrs. Sawyer?” he asked her. “Thought you were kind of meditating there, for a moment.”

  “He’s not here,” said Sissy, emphatically.

  “Please?”

  “Red Mask. He’s not here. I would have sensed him, if he was.”

  “With all due respect, ma’am,” Detective Bellman put in. “There’s no way he could have gotten out. He has to be here.”

  “I don’t care what you say. He’s not.”

  “So what makes you so sure about that?” asked Detective Kunzel.

  “Detective Kunzel, I was born with certain sensitivities and certain abilities, and while they’re very difficult to explain to other people, they’re as natural to me as seeing and hearing and smelling. He’s not here anymore. He’s gone. I don’t sense him in the building anywhere.”

  “Whatever—we still have to complete our search. At worst, we can find out how he managed to get out of the building without anybody seeing him.”

  “He’s going to kill again,” Sissy told him. “He has the appetite for it now. And next time, he’s going to kill three or four people, or even more.”

  Detective Kunzel and Detective Bellman exchanged meaningful glances.

  “And, what, your cards told you this?” asked Detective Kunzel. “Or did you use your crystal ball instead?”

  “You can mock me all you like,” said Sissy. “Crystal balls are wonderful for telling the future. They’re very farseeing, much more farseeing than cards or tea leaves.”

  “So what’s his motive?” Detective Bellman put in.

  Detective Kunzel shook his head in exasperation, so that his jowls wobbled, but Detective Bellman said, “No, come on, Mike… . Mrs. Sawyer has taken the trouble to come down here and tell us what she sees. I’d like to hear it. Hey, my grandmother used to read my palm.”

  “Who needs fingerprints and DNA and witness evidence?” asked Detective Kunzel. “Let’s just issue the whole department with Ouija boards.”

  Sissy was unfazed. Frank had been equally skeptical about her psychic sensitivity, even when she had guided him to a hit-and-run suspect who was hiding in a disused laundry in Canaan, and when she had warned him about a fatal shooting at a local store even before it had happened. So if Detective Kunzel didn’t want to believe her, that was his privilege. But she was sure that Red Mask wasn’t here in the Giley Building—just as she was equally sure that he was going to commit more murders.

  “I told Molly, I was very surprised that he killed only one person today. The cards say that he’s going to escalate his attacks very quickly. As for his motive, he’s taking his revenge for something that he perceives to be a serious injustice. He believes that he was taken advantage of and badly wronged. He believes that the fear and suffering that he had to endure entitles him to punish anybody and everybody, even if they weren’t personally involved in this injustice.”

  “Do you have any idea where he’s gone?” asked Detective Bellman. “Like, I know some psychics can see through a suspect’s own eyes and identify the place where they’re hiding out. There was this one movie I saw, the psychic heard bells, and they found the suspect hiding in this church.”

  “That was a movie, Freddie,” said Detective Kunzel, with exaggerated patience. “And it wasn’t bells, it was train whistles, and he was hiding in a barn.”

  “It was bells.”

  “Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass if it was the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. It was fiction and this is r-e-a-l. Mrs. Sawyer here cannot possibly have any idea where Red Mask has gone to.”

  “Well, you’re right,” said Sissy. “I don’t. You know—I’ve never known a subject like him. I can feel his anger. I can feel his need for revenge. But I can’t feel him, not at all. I don’t have any sense of his personality whatsoever.”

  Detective Kunzel laid his hand on Sissy’s shoulder. “Thanks for trying to help, anyhow. I just wish that more of the good people of Cincinnati were as concerned about helping us to catch criminals as you are.”

  “There’s one more thing, Detective,” said Sissy.

  “Hey, call me Mike, please.”

  “Red Mask wants notoriety. He’s probably seen himself on the TV news already, and in the papers. He’s going to be in touch with you, personally. He’s going to start giving you advance notice of what he’s going to do next. He wants to start his own personal reign of terror.”

  “All I can say is, he knows my number.”

  At that moment, Molly came out of Mr. Kraussman’s office with her sketch pad. Without saying a word, she folded it back and showed them her drawing.

  Detective Bellman whistled. “Same guy. Never saw two composites look so much alike.”

  The sketch depicted a red-faced man with bristling hair and a sloping forehead, glaring out of the narrow space between two elevator doors. He had sharp, angular cheekbones and a prominent chin with a sharp cleft in it. The only difference between this sketch and the sketch that Molly had drawn from Jane Becker’s description was that his eyes appeared to glitter, as if he were feeling triumphant.

  “Right,” said Detective Kunzel. “Good job, Molly. Why don’t you take that over to headquarters and have them send it out to the media?”

  Morgan Freeman’s cousin came rustling up to them in his blue Tyvek suit. “Got you some footprints this time, Detective.”

  “Any idea what size?”

  “Ten, I’d say. Very broad foot. But the soles didn’t have no pattern on them, nothing at all. Not even stitching.”

  Detective Bellman said, “Any footprint is better than no footprint. That first stabbing, the
re was all this blood on the floor, and the perpetrator didn’t leave a single footprint, nowhere.”

  “Correction,” said Morgan Freeman’s cousin. “He may have left a footprint, but we were unable to tell if he did or not. Half of the office staff trampled in and out of that elevator, followed by half of the homicide unit. By the time they were through, the whole place looked like one of those Arthur Murray dance lessons.”

  “Bernard here is very hot on crime-scene integrity,” said Detective Bellman.

  Molly said to Sissy, “Are you coming to police headquarters with me, or would you rather go back home? I shouldn’t be longer than an hour.”

  “I’ll go home,” said Sissy. “Victoria will be back at three thirty, won’t she? I can give her some milk and cookies.”

  “Trevor can do that. He can’t cook, but he can pour milk and take cookies out of the cookie jar.”

  “I’d still like to be there,” Sissy told her. Just to make sure that she’s safe. She still didn’t understand the significance of the girl in the white nightgown, floating on the ocean, and the headless fish bleeding in the water, and they worried her.

  “I’ll have an officer take you home,” said Detective Kunzel, and beckoned to one of the uniforms standing by the main doors.

  We’re here, somebody whispered, very close to Sissy’s right ear.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Dying in the Dark

  “What?” she said, turning around. But there was nobody within twenty feet of her.

  “Please?” said Detective Kunzel.

  “I distinctly heard somebody speak. A woman, I think. She said, ‘We’re here.’ ”

  “An echo, I guess. You go with this officer and he’ll take good care of you.”

  Don’t leave us. We’re here.

  Sissy lifted one hand and said, “Ssh! There she was again! She just said, ‘Don’t leave us.’ ”

  Detective Kunzel looked around. “There’s no woman here, Mrs. Sawyer. I think your ears are playing tricks on you.”

  But Sissy could sense the woman now. She could almost feel her breath against the side of her neck. The woman was black, and she was middle-aged, and she wore upswept eyeglasses. Her name began with an M or an N.

  And she was here.

  Sissy began to circle around the lobby, her hand still lifted, listening.

  Don’t leave us. For pity’s sake, please don’t leave us.

  Molly said, “Sissy, what is it? Are you okay?”

  “She’s very close,” said Sissy, distractedly. “She’s trying to tell me where she is.”

  There was a sharp clatter as two crime-scene investigators adjusted the tripods that supported their floodlights. Sissy said, “Ssh!” and Detective Bellman called out, “Hey, people! Can we have a little quiet in here for a moment?”

  We’re here, the woman whispered.

  “Where?” Sissy coaxed her.

  Please don’t leave us. It’s dark and it’s cold and I can’t see nothing. The others I think they both dead, Ronnie and Lindy, or else they real close to it.

  “What’s your name, sweetheart?” Sissy asked her. Detective Kunzel looked at Molly and raised his left eyebrow.

  Mary. Mary Clay.

  “Well, you just hang on there, Mary, because I can hear you and I’m going to find you.”

  “Mary?” said Detective Kunzel. “Who the hell is Mary?”

  “What’s the last thing you remember, Mary?”

  We is all finished up cleaning on the twenty-second floor. We is waiting to go up to Mr. Radcliffe’s. The doors opened up. “I didn’t know this one was working,” says Ronnie.

  “The elevator … you’re talking about the elevator?”

  Detective Kunzel turned to Molly. “Does she always talk to herself like this?”

  But Molly said, “Ssh … I’ve seen her do this before. Whoever she’s talking to, she can hear them and they can hear her, even if we can’t. Astral conversation, that’s what she calls it.”

  “You mean like Patricia Arquette, in Medium? Talking to dead people, and people who aren’t even there?”

  “Well, something like that. More like broadband, only psychic.”

  Sissy stopped circling around now and stayed where she was, in the center of the lobby. “You’re close, Mary, I can feel you.”

  Lindy says it looks like it’s working now. So in we step and the doors close.

  “What then, Mary?”

  Elevator gives a kind of a bang and it scares the daylights out of us. Now it starts to move, but jerky. And it ain’t going up like we want it to. It’s going down. And now there’s another bang, and it’s stopped. Why’s it stopped? Don’t tell me we’re going to be trapped in here. I can’t stand being all closed in like this. I even get the claustrophobia when the church is crowded, and I have to step outside and take in some air.

  Mary was breathing hard now, and her voice began to rise in panic.

  The doors is opening up. Which floor we on? I don’t know which floor we on. But we don’t even get a chance because he comes rushing in like a mad person and he’s stabbing at us with two big knives and Ronnie drops down to his knees with blood spraying out of his neck and Lindy falls backward and then he’s stabbing at me and I can feel the knives chopping into my shoulders and into my arms and then it’s all black.

  Sissy closed her eyes again. She could sense that Mary was very badly hurt, and that she was dying. That was the reason she could hear her. Her spirit was already leaving her—floating away from her material body in skeins of light.

  “Mary?” she said. “Mary, can you hear me?”

  Please come find us, Mary whispered. Don’t let me die in the dark. My kids. My mother.

  Sissy walked slowly toward the center elevator, the one with the OUT OF ORDER sign. She pressed both hands against the doors and took a deep breath, and held it, and then another. She heard somebody say, Mary? Is that you, Mary? A different woman, older. Without turning around, she called out, “Mike!”

  Detective Kunzel hurried up to her and jabbed at the elevator button. The doors refused to open, but he shouted out, “Kraussman! Hey, Kraussman! Somebody get that goddamned super for me!”

  Mr. Kraussman came out of his office, blinking.

  “Get these elevator doors open, and get them open now!”

  “Okay, for sure. I got a key.”

  He came hurrying across with his bunch of keys jingling, knelt down in front of the elevator. He unlocked the hoistway doors and wound them open, but the doors to the elevator car were still firmly closed.

  “You wait, I bring crowbar!”

  He returned to his office and came back with a crowbar and a tire iron. He handed the tire iron to the burliest of the uniformed officers, and between them, inch by inch, they forced the elevator doors apart.

  As they were opened wider and wider, the doors gave out intermittent groans, as if they were in pain. A little at a time, the floodlights began to illuminate the interior of the elevator car. It was wall-to-wall red.

  Three people were huddled on the floor—two women and a man. All three of them were wearing pale blue coveralls, but they were soaked and spattered in so much blood that they looked as if they had been attacked by an action painter with a bucket of scarlet paint.

  “Gott im Himmel,” coughed Mr. Kraussman. “It’s the cleaning crew.”

  “Paramedics!” bellowed Detective Kunzel. “Paramedics, and quick!”

  Mr. Kraussman swayed and stumbled as if somebody had pushed him. “I thought they finish up hours ago. Most nights, they’re all through by two. I thought they went home. I swear it.”

  “Hey, steady,” said Detective Bellman. “This wasn’t your fault.”

  Detective Kunzel hunkered down beside the elevator and pressed his fingertips against the victims’ carotid arteries, one after the other.

  “That’s Mary,” said Sissy, trying to stop her voice from trembling. “The one in the middle, with the eyeglasses. Is she still alive?”


  Detective Kunzel felt for Mary’s pulse a second time, but then he shook his head. “They’re all deceased, all three of them. I’m sorry.”

  “Just before she passed over, do you know what Mary told me? She said that she didn’t want to die in the dark.”

  Molly put her arm around Sissy’s shoulders and gave her a sympathetic squeeze. “At least you found them.”

  Detective Kunzel stood up. “I don’t know how you did that, Mrs. Sawyer, but I have to admit that I’m impressed.”

  “If only I’d heard her sooner.”

  “By the look of her injuries, Mrs. Sawyer, I don’t think she could have survived, even if you had.”

  Detective Bellman was clearly upset and kept blowing out his cheeks. “Guy’s a total maniac. I never saw anybody with so many stab wounds, ever.”

  “You know what nice people these were?” said Mr. Kraussman. “Always smiling. Always got time for laughing. What kind of person would want to hurt them so bad?”

  “You were right about one thing, Mrs. Sawyer,” said Detective Kunzel. “Red Mask did kill more people this time. Molly—how about you take that composite over to headquarters pronto? The sooner we get it out to the media the better. We have to nail this bastard before he attacks anybody else.”

  “I just wish I could sense where he went,” said Sissy. “I’ve tried and I’ve tried—but nothing.”

  “Come on, Sissy,” Molly told her. “You’re in shock. We all are. Why don’t you let the officer drive you home? Make yourself some of that chamomile tea.”

  Sissy nodded. She was more frustrated than distressed. Usually, she could feel where somebody had gone, because everybody left a psychic wake behind them—a shivering in the air, a refraction in the daylight—in the same way that everybody left their scent or their footprints behind them. Sometimes, if a person was very angry, or agitated, they left a trembling in the air that could persist for hours.