NightScape

by David Morrell

  The published details were sketchy. Chad had grimly imagined teeth impressions on a neck, an arm, a shoulder. But nothing had prepared him for the horrors done to his daughter's corpse, for the killer didn't merely bite his victims. He chewed on them. He gnawed huge pieces from their arms and legs. He chomped holes in their stomachs, bit off their nipples, nipped off their labia. The son of a bitch was a cannibal! Multiple murders and...

  Sweeney Todd.

  Nothing will hurt you.

  Imagining Stephanie's lonely panic, Chad moaned until he screamed.

  In a stupor, he and Linda struggled through the nightmare of arranging for a funeral, waiting for the police to release the body, and collecting their daughter's things from her dormitory room. On her desk, they found a half-finished essay about Shakespeare's sonnets, a page still in the typewriter, a quotation never completed: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's..." On a shelf beside her bed, they picked up textbooks, sections of them underlined in red, that Stephanie had been studying for final exams she would never take. Clothes, keepsakes, her radio, her Winnie-the-Pooh bear. Everything filled a suitcase and three boxes. So little. So easily removed. Now you're here, now you aren't, Chad bitterly thought. Oh, Jesus.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Dolan," Stephanie's roommate said. She had freckles and wore glasses. Her long red hair hung in a ponytail. She looked devastated. "I really am. Stephanie was kind and smart and funny. I liked her. I'm going to miss her. She was special. It just isn't fair. Gosh, I'm so confused. I wish I knew what to say. I've never known anyone close to me who died before."

  "I understand," Chad said bleakly. His father had died from a heart attack at the age of seventy, but that death hadn't struck Chad with the overwhelming shock of this death. After all, his father had battled heart disease for several years, and the massive coronary had been inevitable. He'd passed away, succumbed, joined his Maker, whatever euphemism hid the fact best and gave the most comfort. But what had happened to Stephanie was cruelly, starkly, brutally that she'd been murdered.

  Dear God, it couldn't be!

  Chad and Linda carried Stephanie's things to the car, returned to the police station, and badgered Lieutenant MacKenzie until he finally gave them directions to the road and the ditch where Stephanie had been found.

  "Don't torture yourselves," the lieutenant tried to tell them, but Chad and Linda were already out the door.

  Chad didn't know what he expected to find or feel or achieve by seeing the spot where the killer had parked and dumped Stephanie's body like a sack of garbage. As it turned out, he and Linda weren't able to get close anyhow -a police officer was standing watch over a section of the side of the road and a portion of the ditch, both enclosed by a makeshift fence of stakes linking yellow tape labeled POLICE CRIME SCENE: DO NOT ENTER. On the grass at the bottom of the ditch, the outline of Stephanie's twisted body had been drawn with white spray paint.

  Linda wept.

  Chad felt sick and hollow. At the same time, his heart and profoundly his soul swelled with rage. The bastard. The.. .Whoever did this, when they find him.. .Chad imagined punching him, stabbing him, choking him until his tongue bulged, and at once remembered that Stephanie had been choked. He leaned against the car and couldn't stop sobbing.

  Finally, after seemingly endless bureaucratic delays, they were given their daughter. Following a hearse, they made the solemn drive back to New York for the funeral. Although Stephanie's face had not been mutilated, Chad and Linda refused to allow a public viewing of her remains. Granted, mourning friends and relatives wouldn't be able to see the obscene marks on her body beneath her burial clothes, but Chad and Linda would see those marks - in their minds - as if the burial clothes were transparent. More, Chad and Linda couldn't tolerate inflicting upon Stephanie the indignity of being forced to lie in her grave for all eternity with that monster's filthy marks on her. She had to be cremated. Purified. Made innocent again. Ashes to ashes. Cleansed with fire.

  Each day, Chad and Linda drove out to the cemetery to visit her. The trip became the event around which they scheduled their other activities. Not that they had many other activities. Chad had no interest in reading manuscripts, meeting authors, and dealing with publishers, although his friends said that the thing to do was get back on track, distract himself, immerse himself in his literary agency. But his work didn't matter, and he spent more and more of each day taking long walks through Central Park. He had dizzy spells. He drank too much. For her part, Linda quit teaching piano, sequestered herself in the apartment, studied photographs of Stephanie, stared into space, and slept a great deal. They sold the cottage in Connecticut, which they'd bought and gone to each weekend only so they could be close to Stephanie in New Haven if she had wanted to visit. They sold their Ford, which they'd needed only to get to the cottage.

  Nothing will hurt you. The bittersweet song constantly, faintly, echoed in the darkest chambers of Chad's mind. He thought he'd go crazy as he trembled from stress and obeyed the compulsion to visit places he associated with Stephanie: the playground of the grade school she'd attended, her high school, the zoo at Central Park, the jogging track around the lake. He conjured images of her - different ages, different heights, different hair and clothes styles - ghostly mental photographs, eerie double exposures in which then and now coexisted. A little girl, she giggled on a swing in a neighborhood park that had long ago become an apartment building. I can't stand this! Chad thought in mental rage and imagined the blessed release that he would feel if he hurled himself in front of a speeding subway train.

  What helped him was that Stephanie told him not to. Oh, he knew that her voice was only in his mind. But she sounded so real, and her tender voice made him feel less tormented. He heard her so clearly.

  "Dad, think of Mother. If you kill yourself, you'll cause her twice the pain she has now. She needs you. For my sake, help her."

  Chad's legs felt unsteady. He slumped on a chair in the kitchen, where at three a.m. he'd been pacing.

  Nothing will hurt you.

  "Oh, baby, I'm sorry."

  "You couldn't have saved me, Dad. It's not your fault. You couldn't watch over me all the time. It could have happened differently. I could have been killed in a traffic accident a block from our apartment. There aren't any guarantees."

  "It's just that I miss you so damned much."

  "And I miss you, Dad. I love you. But I'm not really gone. I'm talking to you, aren't I?"

  "Yes.. .At least I think so."

  "I'm far away, but I'm also inside you, and whenever you want to talk, we can. All you have to do is think of me, and I'll be there."

  "But it's not the same!"

  "It's the best we can do, Dad. Where I am is.. .bright! I'm soaring! I'm ecstatic! You mustn't feel sorry for me. You've got to accept that I'm gone. You've got to accept that your life is different now. You've got to become involved once more. Stop drinking. Stop skipping meals. Start reading manuscripts again. Answer your clients' phone calls. Get in touch with publishers. Work."

  "But I don't care!"

  "You've got to! Don't throw your life away just because I lost mine! I'll never forgive you if..."

  "No, please, sweetheart. Please don't get angry. I'll try. I promise. I will. I'll try."

  "For my sake."

  Sobbing, Chad nodded as the speck of light faded.

  But Angela Lansbury's voice continued echoing faintly. Nothing will hurt you. No matter how hard he tried, Chad couldn't get the song from his mind. The more he heard it, the more a lurking implication in the lyrics began to trouble him, a half-sensed deeper meaning, dark and disturbing, felt but not understood, a further horror.

  The Biter's next victim was found by a hiker on the bank of a stream near Princeton. That was three months later. Although the victim, a coed who worked for the university's library during the summer, had been missing for two weeks and exposed to scavenging animals and the blistering sun, her remains were sufficiently intact for the medical examiner to establ
ish the cause of death as strangulation and to distinguish between animal and human bite marks. That information was all the police revealed to the press, but Chad now knew what "bite marks" meant, and he shuddered, remembering the chunks that the killer had gnawed from Stephanie's body.

  By then, Linda had started taking students again. Chad - true to his promise to Stephanie - had forced himself to pay attention to his authors and their publishers. But now the news of the Biter's latest victim threatened to tear away the fragile control that he and Linda had managed to impose on their lives. Compulsively, he wrote a letter to the murdered girl's parents.

  We mourn for your daughter as we mourn for our own.

  We pray that they're at peace and beg God for justice.

  May this monster be caught before he kills again.

  May he be punished to the limits of hell.

  In truth, Chad didn't need to pray that Stephanie was at peace. He knew she was. She told him so whenever he stumbled sleeplessly into the kitchen at two or three a.m. and found her speck of light hovering, waiting for him. Nonetheless Chad's rage intensified. Each morning he mustered a motive to get out of bed, hoping that today would be the day when the authorities caught the monster.

  What they found instead, in September, soon after the start of the fall semester, was the Biter's next victim, maggot-ridden, in a storm drain near Vassar College. Chad urgently phoned Lieutenant MacKenzie, demanding to know if the Vassar police had found any clues.

  "Yes." MacKenzie's voice sounded even more gravelly. "It rained again. The Vassar police found the same tire marks." He exhaled wearily. "Mr. Dolan, I understand your despair. Your anger. Your need for revenge. But you have to let go. You have to get on with your life, while we do our job. Every police department involved in these killings has formed a network. I promise you, we're doing everything we can to compare information and - "

  Chad slammed down the phone and scribbled a letter to the parents of the Biter's latest victim.

  We share your loss. We weep as you do. If there's a God in heaven - as opposed to this Devil out of hell - our beautiful children will not have died unatoned. Their brilliantly speeding souls will be granted justice. The desecrations inflicted upon their innocent bodies will be avenged.

  Chad never received responses from those other parents. It didn't matter. He didn't care. He'd done his best to console them, but if they were too overwhelmed by sorrow to muster the strength to comfort him as he strained to comfort them, well, that was all right. He understood. The main thing was, he'd assured them that he wouldn't rest until the monster was punished.

  Each day, he made phone calls to all the police departments in the areas where the Biter had disposed of his victims. Canceling lunches with publishers, postponing meetings with authors, leaving manuscripts unread, Chad concentrated on questioning homicide detectives. He demanded to know why they weren't trying harder, why they hadn't achieved results, why they hadn't tracked down the bastard, allowing his victims to rest with the knowledge that their abuser would be punished, at the same time preventing other potential victims from suffering his brutality.

  Just before Thanksgiving, the Biter's next target - the same profile: female, late teens, Caucasian, blond - was discovered in a Dumpster bin behind a restaurant a mile from Wellesley College. Sure, Chad thought. A Dumpster bin. The monster treated her the same way he did Stephanie and all his other victims. Like garbage.

  He wrote another letter, but again he didn't receive an answer. The parents must be too stunned to react, he concluded. Whatever, it doesn't matter. I did my duty. I shared my grief. I let them realize they're not alone. I'm their and my daughter's advocate.

  New Year's Eve. Another victim. Dartmouth College. More phone calls to detectives. More letters to parents. More visions in Chad's kitchen at three a.m. A speck of brilliant light. A tender voice.

  "You're out of control, Dad! Please! I'm begging you. Get on with your life. Shave! Take a bath! Change your clothes! Most of your authors have left you! Mother's left you! I'm afraid for you."

  Chad shook his head. "Your mother.. .What? She left me?"

  With a shudder, Chad realized that Linda had packed several suitcases and.. .Dear God. He remembered now. Linda had shouted, "It's been too long! It's bad enough to grieve for Stephanie! But to watch you do this to yourself? It's too damned much! Don't destroy my life while you destroy yours."

  Ah.

  Of course.

  So be it, Chad dismally thought. She needs a comfort I can't give her. God willing, she'll find it with someone else.

  Vengeance. Retribution. With greater fury, Chad pursued his mission. More phone calls, more frantic letters.

  And then a breakthrough. What the detectives hadn't told Chad - but what he now learned -was that the tire tracks left by his daughter's desecrater had been identified last year, back in April, as standard equipment on a particular model of American van. Not only Stephanie's corpse near Yale but the later victim near Vassar had been linked with the tire tracks on that year and model of van. Because the Biter's numerous targets had all been students at colleges and universities in New England, the authorities had concentrated their search in that area.

  When a blond, attractive, female student narrowly escaped being dragged inside a van as she strolled toward her dormitory at Brown University, the local police - braced for the threat - ordered roadblocks around the area and stopped the type of van that they'd been seeking.

  The handsome, ingratiating male driver complied too calmly. His responses were too respectful, not at all curious. On a hunch, an officer asked the driver to open the back of the van.

  The driver's eyes narrowed.

  Chilled by the intensity of his gaze, the policeman grasped his revolver and repeated his request. What he and his team discovered... after the driver hesitated, after they took his keys... were stacks of boxes in the rear of the van.

  And behind the boxes, a bound, gagged, unconscious co-ed.

  That night, the police announced the suspected Biter's arrest, and Chad shouted in triumph.

  Finally! A textbook salesman. The bastard's district was New England colleges. He stalked each campus. He studied his variety of quarry, reduced his choices, selected his final target, and...

  Chad imagined the Biter's enticement. "These boxes of books. They're too heavy. I've sprained my left wrist. Would you mind? Could you help me? I'd really appreciate.. .Thank you. By the way, what's your major? No kidding? English? What a coincidence. That's my major. Here. In the back. Help me with this final box. You won't believe the first editions I've got in there."

  Rape, torture, cannibalism, and murder were what he had in there.

  Step in farther. Nothing's going to hurt you.

  But now the bastard had finally been caught. His name was Richard Putnam. The alleged Biter, the media carefully called him, although Chad had no doubt of Putnam's guilt as he studied the television images of the monster. The unafraid expression. The unemotional eyes. The handsome suspect should have been sweating with fear, blustering with indignation, but instead he gazed directly at the cameras, disturbingly confident. A sociopath.

  Chad phoned policemen and district attorneys to warn them not to be fooled by Putnam's calm manner. He wrote letters to the parents of every victim, urging them to make similar calls. Each night at three a.m. as he wandered through his cluttered apartment, he always found Stephanie's brilliant light hovering in the kitchen.

  "At last they found him," she said. "At last you can give up your anger. Sleep. Eat. Rest. Distract yourself. Work. It's over."

  "No, it won't be over until the son of a bitch is punished! I want him to suffer! To feel the terror you did!"

  "But he can't feel terror. He can't feel anything. Except when he kills."

  "Believe me, sweetheart, when the court finds him guilty, when the judge pronounces his sentence, that sociopath will suddenly find he can definitely feel emotion!"

  "That's what I'm afraid of!"


  "I don't understand! Don't you want revenge?"

  "I'm speeding so brilliantly. I don't have time to.. .I'm afraid."

  "Afraid about what?"

  Stephanie's radiant light faded.

  "What are you afraid of?"

  Nothing will hurt you. The song kept echoing in Chad's mind. While he hadn't been able to protect his daughter as he had promised when she was a child, he could do his utmost to guarantee he was there to make sure that the monster suffered. Calls to police departments revealed that the various states in which the murders had occurred were each demanding to put the Biter on trial. The result was bureaucratic chaos, arguments about which city would have the first chance to prosecute.

  As the authorities persisted in quarreling, Chad's frustration compelled him to visit the parents of each victim, to convince them to form a group, to conduct news conferences, to insist that jurisdictional egos be ignored in favor of the strongest evidence in any one city, to plead for justice.

  It gave Chad intense satisfaction to believe that his efforts produced results - and even greater satisfaction that New Haven was selected as the site of the trial, that Stephanie's murder would be the crime against which the Biter was initially prosecuted. By then, a year had passed. As part of his divorce settlement, Chad had sold his co-op apartment in Manhattan, splitting the proceeds with Linda. He moved to cheaper lodgings in New Haven, relying on the income he received from his ten percent of royalties that his former authors were required to pay him for contracts that he'd negotiated.

  Successful.

  Sure.

  Before Stephanie was...

  Nothing will hurt you?

  Wrong! It hurts like hell!

  Each day at the trial, Chad sat in the front row, far to the side so he could have a direct view of Putnam's unemotional, this-is-all-a-mistake, confident profile. Damn you, show fear, show remorse, show anything, Chad thought. But even when the district attorney presented photographs of the horrors done to Stephanie, the monster did not react. Chad wanted to leap across the courtroom's railing and claw Putnam's eyes out. It took all his self-control not to scream his litany of mental curses.