Scavenger
Page 3
Are you interested? I hope so. But, for reasons that should be obvious to you, I can’t simply approach you directly with the information I wish to impart. That is why I have come up with my game, which I have designed along the lines of a scavenger hunt. I will provide you with a series of instructions that will lead you to certain locations, where you will be responsible for finding certain articles. Each instruction will have a time limit for completion. They will eventually lead you to—well, to what you may want to know. Total playing time, if all goes well, will be one week. Today (as you read this) is Saturday: the game will begin at midnight tonight and end next Saturday at midnight. There will be some expense involved, but I am willing to provide for that.
As I cannot approach you, and as you do not know who I am, I realize that there is no way for you to answer me. So here is what I propose we do: I will give you your first clue now. If you wish to play—if you are interested in the “prize” to which I have obliquely referred—simply begin. This will indicate that you are willing, and I will contrive further communication. How does that sound?
Before you begin, I must point out to you that there are three rules in my game that must be followed at all times. Failure to do so will mean you automatically forfeit, and the game will end then and there. And you will never, ever hear from me again. I trust I make myself clear. These are the rules:
1) You must follow my scenario strictly, as it is presented to you. You may not at any time deviate from the order in which the clues arrive and the articles are retrieved.
2) No one else may know about the game. No one. Of course I mean the authorities, but I mean everyone else as well. Your friends, your associates—everyone. This is strictly between you and me.
3) Once you have begun to play, you cannot stop for any reason until the game is over.
So, now you know the rules. I hope I have piqued your interest with this. It will be a most entertaining game, I promise. And your prize for successfully completing it is certainly all that a former journalist such as yourself could want. Without boasting, I can safely say it is one of the truly big “scoops” of the century.
If you choose not to play, I thank you for your time and attention regarding this missive, and I wish you all the best in your future writing career. But I will be presumptuous and assume that you want to continue. If so, your first instruction is quite easy:
YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A NEWSPAPER, AT A PLACE IN NEW YORK CITY THAT WAS DEAR TO THE FAMILY MAN.
You have twenty-four hours, beginning at midnight tonight. Happy hunting!
You may call me:
SCAVENGER
He sat there, stunned, staring at the screen before him. He couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t take it all in. He couldn’t breathe. Nearly ten minutes passed before he snapped out of his trance and summoned the motor skills necessary to scroll the electronic letter back to its beginning and read it again, this time more slowly. No, there was no mistake: it was exactly what he thought it was.
A message from someone who was “obliquely”—to use the person’s own word—hinting that they knew the identity of The Family Man. Someone who was, perhaps, obliquely hinting that they—he? she?—that it was The Family Man.
What else could the letter possibly mean?
He wouldn’t think about that right now, he decided. There was a more immediate mystery, and that, at least, was something he could solve. Ejecting the disk and dropping it on the desk, he stood up and went out to the elevator.
Hector Ramos was not in his apartment. Mrs. Ramos directed Mark to another part of the basement, where he found the superintendent tying stacks of newspapers and flattened cardboard boxes with twine, the usual unlit, half-smoked cigar clenched between his teeth. He was a small, burly man of indeterminate middle age, and he panted with the exertion of his chore. He barely looked up when Mark spoke.
“Hector, that envelope you taped to my door—where did you get it?”
“Que? … oh, yes. Envelope. Man come, ’bout four o’clock.”
“What man?”
A shrug. The super flicked a sharp box cutter across the twine and tied off another bundle. He spoke around the stogie. “Man come. Ring my buzzer. Marisa go up to lobby and he gib her mail for you, ast her to tape it to your door. ‘Urgent,’ he say. She bring it to me and tell me do it. I always do what Marisa say.” Another shrug, accompanied by a man-to-man grin. He reached for another pile of cardboard.
Mark restrained himself from yanking the boxes from the man’s hands. Patiently but firmly, he said, “Please, Hector, this is very important. I have to know who the man was.”
His distress was noted. Hector straightened up, dropped the twine and the box cutter, and removed the wet cigar butt from his mouth. He regarded Mark a moment, then led the way down the ill-lit basement hallway to his apartment door. He opened it and called, “Marisa!”
Mrs. Ramos appeared in the doorway almost immediately, wiping her wet hands on her apron. Her husband spoke to her in Spanish. She listened, watching Mark all the while, a look of concern on her pretty face. When her husband paused, she said something to him, also in Spanish.
“She say he not the postman or UPS,” Hector translated. “He speak Spanish, but he not Spanish. He offer her money, but she refuse.”
“What did he look like?” Mark asked.
More Spanish.
“Tall,” Hector said. “Very tall.”
Mark looked at the woman. She pointed at Mark, then measured a length of about six inches with her hands. He understood the pantomime: the man was that much taller than he, making him about six feet eight inches in height. Mark searched his mind. No, he didn’t know any basketball players, and Mrs. Ramos knew Jared McKinley, who was nearly that tall.
“What else?” Mark asked.
She thought a moment, then spoke. “Blanco.” She pointed at her own hair. “Negro.” She mimed a mustache, then pointed at her own face and made a very stern expression. She narrated this, and Hector chuckled and said, “She say he scary-looking, like Frankenstein.”
Mark blinked, thinking that this was no time to correct them. Frankenstein was a handsome scientist; she obviously meant his creation. “Boris Karloff?”
“Si!” Marisa Ramos cried. “Borees Karloff!” She fingered the gold cross that rested on her bosom, as if her staunch Catholicism were all that would protect her from such a person. Then she pointed at her eyes and said something Hector translated as, “Very pale gray, almost clear.”
“How old was he?”
She pointed at her husband, then wiggled her right hand in the international sign for “more-or-less.” Mid-fifties.
Mark smiled, thanked her, and turned to go. He was almost to the elevator when she stopped him.
“Meester Stevenson!”
He turned around.
“He hab—” she began. Then she turned to her husband and unleashed a torrent of Spanish, lifting her right index finger to the outside corner of her right eye and drawing it slowly down past her mouth, all the way to her chin.
Hector raised his bushy eyebrows in obvious surprise. “She say he hab a scar. An old scar, very long, thin, whiter than his skin, down the side of his face. Like from a knife.”
Mark stared at them a moment, then smiled again, nodded, and got in the elevator. As he rose to the top floor, he put all the details of the man who had delivered the envelope together in his mind. He went back into his apartment, carefully locking the deadbolt behind him, and inserted the disk in his computer again.
He read and reread the letter long into the night, trying to imagine the scarred face of the tall stranger who had obviously terrified Marisa Ramos. And all the while, he repeated the same three words aloud, over and over.
“Who are you?”
4
A chill wind whipped down the narrow Greenwich Village street, and he felt cold despite the solid thickness of his long black coat. Oh, well, he thought, grinning to himself in the darkness and reaching up to run his fin
ger slowly down the thin white scar on his right cheek, I’ve been in colder places than this. Far, far colder. This is nothing compared to where I’ve been.…
He moved slightly forward out of the doorway of the townhouse just across Bedford Street from the red brick apartment building he had briefly visited this afternoon, and gazed up at the fifth-floor corner window. Yes, the lights were still on there, practically the only lights still on in the building at this late hour. He consulted his watch: three-forty. He wasn’t remotely tired, had never had much use for sleep. And he knew that the man in the apartment on the fifth floor would not be getting much sleep tonight, either.
Still smiling his cold, enigmatic smile, he glided away down the street. There was an all-night delicatessen at the next corner, on Seventh Avenue. He’d noticed it when he’d been studying the neighborhood around the author’s home. He went inside and ordered a large black coffee, taking care not to show his amusement when the man behind the counter, a stocky type of Middle Eastern origin who could probably have gone ten rounds with LaMotta, glanced into his pale gray eyes, blinked, and began instinctively to reach under the counter. There would be a gun there, presumably, or a baseball bat. Something like that. This was New York, and you never knew who was going to walk through the door. He smiled at the man, who paused, considering his options, then withdrew his hands from the hidden shelf and went off to fill the order. He waited patiently for the trembling proprietor to pour the coffee, thinking, If only you knew.…
He was used to this reaction from people, inured to it. He’d noticed it just this afternoon, from the pretty superintendent’s wife to whom he’d handed the first package. He’d spoken to her in her native tongue, Spanish being only one of several languages in which he was fairly fluent, and attempted to mollify her with a smile. It was vital that she—or someone in this place—deliver the envelope. But even the familiar language and the smile had not allayed her obvious discomfort. He had reached out to give her the envelope, and their fingers had briefly touched. She had drawn back her hand with the package as if she had been scalded, and reached absently up with her other hand to grasp the gold crucifix at her neck.
But she had done what he’d asked her to do.
That much, at least, was obvious. He’d manned his post in the doorway of the empty townhouse across the street, holding the tiny earpiece up to his ear, listening to the sounds inside the writer’s rooms. He’d heard the computer keys clacking, and the harsh intakes of breath as the man read the letter he’d so carefully typed on the machine in the crowded coffeehouse on the Upper West Side, constantly consulting the written script in his notebook. Then the man had muttered something and left the apartment. He had not left the building, however, which indicated the logical next move: he’d gone to pump the super’s wife for a description.
Well, that was fine. Now the writer had at least a hazy picture of his opponent, which made the game that much more interesting. Besides, if all went as scheduled—and it would—the two of them would be seeing quite a bit of each other in the next seven days.
He carried the hot coffee back to his post. Yes, the lights were still burning in the fifth-floor apartment. He reached inside his coat and pulled out the listening device again, holding it up to his ear. When he heard what the writer was mumbling over and over, he smiled again.
“Who are you?”
Who am I? he thought. Well, Mark Stevenson, you’ll find out soon enough. And you’ll wish you hadn’t. This I promise you. You’ll wish you had never written that “novel,” Dark Desire. Dark desire, indeed.
He smiled and sipped the coffee. He had killed before, many times, and one more killing would make very little difference to him. But this one was going to be special. This one would be a work of art.
The suitcase was in the trunk of his rented car, which was currently in the parking garage a few blocks from here, on Seventh and Morton. And in that suitcase were the props he would use tomorrow, at a place in New York City that was dear to The Family Man. All the writer had to do was figure it out and go there. Everything would be waiting for him, and the game would truly begin.
The game.…
He smiled again. Because he couldn’t resist, because it pleased him to do so, he raised the device to his ear again and listened. He stood there on dark, chilly Bedford Street for a long time, listening to the writer’s whispered mantra, noting the wonder and undisguised fear in his words.
“Who are you …?”
SUNDAY
5
YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A NEWSPAPER, AT A PLACE IN NEW YORK CITY THAT WAS DEAR TO THE FAMILY MAN.…
The house was in a row of almost identical buildings, brown brick and gleaming windows, on a fashionable street in the westernmost section of Brooklyn. Time and the weather had made no inroads here because the residents of Cobble Hill were, at least in recent decades, an upscale crowd. Everything on this street was well maintained, and shady trees stood at regular intervals along the smooth sidewalks. The block was lined with expensive cars. It was a quiet, clean, relatively safe area, perfect for upper-middle-class urban families with children. Violent crime was a remote consideration here—or, rather, it should have been.
Mark stood on the sidewalk in front of 125 Kane Street, gazing up at the curtained bay window beside the polished, decoratively carved oak front door, thinking, Murder has no business here. Not on this street, not in this neighborhood. Not that sort of murder, at any rate. A crime of passion, perhaps, or a robbery gone awry: these could happen anywhere. But not, no, most definitely not what had happened to the Banes family. That, he knew, was why the crime had been so perfect, and why it was still unsolved. Why they were all unsolved, the five incidents attributed to The Family Man.
All five crimes had occurred in just such neighborhoods as this, to upscale, Caucasian, Christian families of identical makeup: father, mother, two young adult sons, one young adult daughter. All five families had owned at least one pet, also dispatched, and in two of the five cases a live-in housekeeper had died, as well. Only three people had survived, not having been with their families at the times of the attacks: the daughter in the first incident, the elder son in the third, and the younger son in the fourth. And all five crimes had occurred on national and/or religious holidays.
The Banes family had been killed on Easter Sunday, eleven years ago, the last of the five incidents. Dr. George Banes had been a well-known surgeon, and his wife, Alma, had been active in the Catholic church the family attended. Their friends, the Rosses, who were perplexed when they didn’t show up in church for the Easter mass, had tried calling them, to no avail, and finally had driven to the house. Mr. Ross remained in the car while his wife went up to the front door, which was uncustomarily unlocked. When there was no reply to her repeated ringing and knocking, she went inside. The overwhelming stench and the sight of the drying blood in the living room and on the stairs sent her immediately outside to fetch her husband. As she called the police from the pay phone at the next corner, he took the tire iron from the trunk and, thus armed, went into the house.
He found them in the dining room. All of them, including the cocker spaniel. George and Alma were seated at either end of the table, dressed in their Easter Sunday best. The three children—Joel, twenty; Brad, eighteen; and Heidi, seventeen—were in their usual places at the sides, and the dog lay underneath it. The table was covered with a brightly printed paper tablecloth, white and yellow and lavender, with the words HAPPY EASTER! splashed rampantly among the comical pictures of eggs and fuzzy chicks and Easter bunnies with baskets. Matching paper plates, drinking cups, and napkins were set at each place before the bodies, along with pink plastic cutlery. In the middle of the table was a big, multicolored basket overflowing with purple plastic grass and plastic Easter eggs. George Banes’s severed head rested in the center of the basket, a macabre centerpiece for the macabre tableau vivant—or tableau mort, depending on how one looked at it. A happy family celebrating the holiday together around their
dining room table, one of them headless and all the others with their throats slashed.…
Now, eleven years later, a chill breeze whipped down Kane Street, and Mark shivered and pulled up the collar of his leather jacket. He knew that his shivering was not caused by the wind, but by the cold fury that suffused him as he stared up at this house. The fury that had prompted him, after all these years, to write Dark Desire. The fury he felt when he thought of the diskette that had arrived at his home last night. The fury that brought him here now, today.
He was here, as instructed. A PLACE IN NEW YORK CITY THAT WAS DEAR TO THE FAMILY MAN. That could only be 125 Kane Street. But it wasn’t the same house that had made the headlines. The same building, but changed, as such a crime would inevitably change anything. Some subsequent owner had evidently split up the three floors of the building into separate floor-through apartments: there were now three mailboxes and three intercom buttons beside the big oak door. He had no idea what he was supposed to do now.
YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A NEWSPAPER …
The curtain in the bay window before him moved aside, and a pretty young woman peered out at him. He caught her eye and she frowned, and then the face disappeared and the curtain fell back in place. Two women walked by on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, glancing over at him as they passed. He couldn’t stay here much longer, he knew. He’d been standing here for nearly twenty minutes already, and the natives were getting suspicious. But what was he supposed to do?
A newspaper …
He had just decided to give up and retrace his steps to the Borough Hall subway station two blocks away when the man with the newspaper arrived from the direction of Smith Street. He was extremely tall and muscular, white, and black-haired, and he had a mustache—but he was in his mid-twenties, not his mid-fifties, and his face was unscarred. He was wearing a football jersey, jeans, and sneakers, and he was balancing a cardboard tray from Starbucks on his upheld right hand, two large coffees and various expensive pastries.