by Harker Moore
“Don’t jump to conclusions. They’re not lezzies. Oh, I’m not saying they’re not enjoying themselves. But it’s mostly a performance for the guys.” He extended his hand. “Randy Lancaster. Most everybody knows me as Shaman. And you’re . . .”
“Detective Walter Talbot. My partner, Detective Johnny Rozelli.” Talbot watched the disc jockey examine his badge. There were silver rings on each of his fingers.
“A different world, Detective Rozelli.” Lancaster was grinning now, well-defined lips curled over white even teeth.
At last Rozelli turned. “Yeah. . . . How old are those two anyway?”
Lancaster looked back at the crowded dance floor. A strobe had transformed the girls into liquid staccatoed waves. “Eighteen. Maybe younger. A lot get in on fake IDs.”
“You know most of the women who come in?” Talbot asked, noticing that Lancaster’s tongue was pierced. His dark curling hair, pulled back into a ponytail, made his square face squarer, his high cheekbones sharper, a corded gazelle’s neck longer. Thick brows almost met above the bridge of a slightly hooked nose. Hooded eyes gave him a foxy, slightly aroused look. Though the word satyr came to Talbot’s mind, Shaman’s whole package fit his celebrity name. The deejay’s look was nothing if not Native American hippie.
“I know some of the regulars. Girls come up and talk to me on my break. Ask me to play certain songs. Some offer to buy me a drink. Take me home to Mom.” He laughed, the silver ball through his tongue trapping a stray bit of laser light.
“Know this one?” Talbot pulled out a picture of Sarah Laraby. “She probably would have had on heavier makeup, a different hair style. Her roommate said she went in for the club look. Even used a different name. Called herself Selkie Girl.”
Lancaster reached and took the photograph, spent a few seconds examining it. “Good-looking. But can’t say as I do. . . . She missing or something?”
“Or something.” Rozelli took the photo. “She’s dead.”
“That’s rough.” The deejay appeared genuinely upset.
“You don’t much keep up with current events, do you, Lancaster? Laraby’s picture has been all over the newspapers, on TV. Along with these . . .” Rozelli forced photographs of the other victims at the disc jockey.
The deejay went through the pictures one by one, shaking his head, then handed them back. “These girls dead too?”
“Yeah. As you said, you’re a pretty popular guy—know any of these women?”
“No, I don’t. And I don’t think I much like your attitude, Detective Rozelli.”
“You don’t have to like my attitude. Just answer my questions.”
“I don’t have to answer your questions, either. I know my rights.”
“Yeah, yeah, everybody knows his rights.”
“Listen, Mr. Lancaster, we’re not here to hassle you.” Talbot had gone into his good-cop routine. “We’re sorry if we gave you that impression. We’re just trying to find out what happened to these women. They were all known clubbers.”
“There’re a thousand clubs. And a ton of underground shit. They could have gone anywhere.”
“You play any of the underground shit?” Rozelli was close to giving Lancaster the look he saved for the nastiest perps.
Lancaster shook his head. “No, I’m strictly commercial. That’s where the real money is.”
Talbot nodded, handing back the picture of Laraby. “I want you to take another look at this photograph, Mr. Lancaster. It’s very important, because your name was in this one’s diary.”
Lancaster seemed surprised. Then he examined the photograph, rubbing his finger up and down the picture’s edge. “I’m positive, Detective. I never saw this girl in my life.”
Talbot took back the photograph, thinking that for a man who had so many girls coming on to him, he was amazingly decisive. Or lying.
CHAPTER
10
The apartment, which took up the whole of the top floor of the building, floated like an island above the dark urban sprawl. Whatever unwholesomeness the night might contain was for the moment held at bay. In deed, if not in theory. The topic was murder.
“Not budging an inch, are you.” Willie stretched out opposite Michael in the bed as the TV played in the background.
“It’s my Greek Orthodox background. Evil is evil.”
“I’m Roman Catholic, lest you forget.”
“And a psychiatrist. You people find something good in everyone. Or a reason to excuse the bad.” He finished with a smile.
“That’s low, Darius, really low.”
“Jeffrey Dahmer.”
She shook her head and laughed. “I just knew you’d start there. And that’s fine. In fact, more than fine.”
“Okay, make his case. Mentally ill or just plain misunderstood?”
“You’re nasty, you know that, Darius.”
“You’re stalling.”
She sat up. “Dahmer was one of the most pitiful people I ever studied. He didn’t have a clue about what it meant to be human.”
“So he ate his victims.”
“I know it’s difficult for you to understand, but that was his way of experiencing intimacy. To Dahmer, eating the flesh of his victims was an expression of love, a way of making his victims a part of him.”
“Unholy communion?”
“Yes, but still a kind of communion. I’m not condoning what Dahmer did, but I can try to understand it.”
“I understand it plain and simple. The son-of-a-bitch was evil.”
“Not a category for people like Dahmer.”
“He knew what he was doing.”
“This isn’t black-or-white insanity, Michael. You can’t blame someone for not playing the game correctly, if he isn’t given the right equipment. Dahmer’s brain was different.”
“Ted Bundy.”
“Not so sympathetic. But a sociopath is not in the same reality tunnel as the rest of us. Somehow his programming gets skewed. His entire existence is channeled into re-creating a fantasy where humans are objects, not subjects.”
“And he is the deus ex machina.”
“Good.” She smiled at his use of metaphor. “There was one killer who tortured his victims by tying them up and letting rats eat them alive.”
“A real gentleman.”
“I remember he said he watched for hours as the starving rats ran wild over a body, gnawing away at the flesh. He said he wanted to feel something, so he kept watching. Finally, when the rats had finished eating the eyes of one victim, an eleven-year-old girl, so she couldn’t cry anymore because there was nothing left but empty sockets, and all she could do was scream, he said he thought something inside him stirred. Though he could never be sure, he believed what he’d experienced was the beginnings of what most humans would call pity.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better about this animal?”
“No, but it should make you see that these killers are not fully human.”
“And our killer?”
She stretched back down, working her hair into a knot at the back of her head. “The same.”
Michael nodded. “You were right the first time. I’m not giving an inch. They’re all evil.”
“At least you’ll grant me they’re interesting.”
“I can’t be that clinical.” He reached for a cigarette.
“I thought you were giving it up.”
He examined the glowing tip. “I’m allowed one vice.”
She reached up between his legs and squeezed.
“Shit, that hurt.”
“I’m your vice, remember.”
“Come here, you,” he said, crushing out the cigarette.
She straddled him, and let him pull her down. The half-tearing-away of clothes. Hands working. His mouth. Slowly at first, then frantically. Always moving, like there was not enough time, not enough of her to feed him. And his always coming away hungry. Begging for more.
Shadow play from the set on the wall behind them
. But little chance now that they’d catch Kahn’s special.
Zoe preferred doing TV live, winging it, with all her nervousness poured into the effort of the here and now. Sitting in the darkened studio and watching her special unfold on the monitor with the rest of America was way further up there on the anxiety scale.
But she knew that she’d done it, knew the special was good. She just had it, damn it. Whatever it was? What had that one bitch of a critic said about her weekday show? She summoned the words, still dripping with acid. FNC’s latest daytime offering is compulsive watching. An irreverent take on the U. S. justice system, the show has the same flagrant and self-admiring gaucheness that is the hallmark of its host. Zoe Kahn is an acquired taste.
A backhanded compliment if she’d ever heard one. But it was a compliment. She laughed out loud, not caring who heard, and nearly missed herself introducing retired agent Gilbert Watts, formerly with the FBI’s Behavioral Science Division. She would have liked a rematch with Wilhelmina French, but the psychiatrist had not returned her calls. The middle-aged Watts, though far less photogenic, had at least proved easier to manage.
The show was moving toward the end now, and Watts was the setup for her much-advertised revelation. She refocused on the screen, where Zoe on the tube was already pressing the agent for his personal take on a profile.
“. . . no longer in the loop.” Watts was playing it modest.
“The young women of this city are under attack.” She was making herself their champion. “Any insight you can give us would be valuable.”
Watts’s smile said he was in on the game. “He’s a white male,” he began. “Twenty-five to thirty-five. Probably attractive. Can interact in social situations . . .”
“A lot of women in Manhattan might suggest that’s a very limited pool”—a bit of humor, cutting through the too familiar litany—“but in reality, Agent Watts, it doesn’t much narrow the field.”
“Hard to be more specific with the little that’s out there,” he countered.
“What if there were more?”
“More?” The question, wary.
“I’ve learned from separate sources”—she was moving in for the kill—“that what we’ve actually got here is a modern-day Ripper. The victims are being slashed open, then stapled back up, as if he’d performed an autopsy.”
Bombshell delivered. And it showed on Watts’s face. This was substantive information that went beyond the mere speculation he’d been prepared for. He had not bargained, apparently, for treading on the toes of former colleagues.
She watched herself enjoying his reaction, her glossed lips gleaming in the studio lights. “There were weeks, months, between the deaths of the first four victims”—she was pushing her advantage, leaning into a close-up—“but only days between Siebrig and Mansour. This New Jack is drugging young women and abducting them, assaulting them sexually. We’ve all heard the rumors that he’s smothering them with plastic bags. Now we know that he’s ripping them open. What does that add up to, Agent Watts? Just what kind of sick . . . guy have we got here?”
Sick fuck was, of course, what she’d meant, and she’d managed to make sure her viewers knew it. A staged pause like a wink.
Watts gave in, beginning a rant on fantasy and mutilation.
It was all interesting stuff—guaranteed to hold the audience through the commercial, after which she’d do the summing up—though she wondered how accurate any of it was. Not that it mattered. Agent Watts had proved the perfect foil for her exclusive. And she trusted that the network gods were just as happy as she was.
Hanae had been waiting when her husband came home, with food and scented candles, with music they both enjoyed. He had lingered in the bath while she made the final preparations for their meal. They had talked together as they ate, a most natural conversation. She spoke of her day, spent buying what she needed at the market, walking to the music store with Taiko to buy a new CD. Jimmy spoke about his case, about the inevitability of leaks, and about what had been revealed tonight on Zoe Kahn’s program.
He had watched the show on the television in the Operations Room, he said. But she did not say that she too had tuned in to the program. She was glad to let him talk, to share his anger over the leak. New Jack. That was what Ms. Kahn was calling the killer now, a name which would surely cause greater fear. At least, Jimmy said, there had been no mention of how this serial was rearranging the organs inside the bodies. It was important to the investigation that at least some part of the killer’s MO remain secret.
He had wondered how soon they might have another victim. He would have been home much earlier, he had admitted, but he had feared the call might come tonight. Might yet come. She had been happy in the comfort of his sharing, and had reached to touch his hand. A reminder that it did not matter. He had done all he could. Home or not home, murder would come when it would. His presence at Police Plaza would not change the heart of a killer.
Jimmy had insisted on cleaning up the dishes. And she sat upon the tatami mat, on her cushion at the low table, listening now to the sounds that came from the kitchen. Water running. The clatter of plates. She sat for a few moments longer, stroking Taiko’s neck as he curled beside her. The candles flickered scent in their little iron lanterns. She blew them out and stood, walking into the bedroom.
He had lit candles. They had seemed to fill the room where he’d held her captive. Their warmth. Their cloying odor. She had refused to let the memory spoil them forever. This much she had accomplished in her parents’ home in Japan. She had unlearned the hatred of candles.
She undressed and got into bed, pulling up the wedding quilt, waiting for Jimmy. She heard his step as he came into the room. He said nothing, perhaps believing her already asleep. Her heart jumped to her throat as he climbed into the bed, and it beat there like the wounded wing of a bird. So careful they had been not to quarrel tonight. But things could not go on as they had. Softly, as a leaf falling, a matter of gravity, she slipped beneath the covers. She felt her husband’s body as a pressure next to hers, a hard smooth length beside her. Her lips were on his skin, the muscle of his thigh. Her fingers found him. Her mouth.
“Hanae . . .” So much in the simple speaking of her name. He had reached for her. His hand locking on her shoulder, he drew her up beside him. Out from beneath the marriage quilt.
He was leaning over her; she could feel his stare, hear his troubled breathing. His hand caressed her face. “I want you here with me,” he said. “I need . . .”
“I am not ready.” She was shocked by the misery in her voice. “Can you not accept what pleasure I can give?”
“There is no pleasure for me in this act. A wife may play at concubine. But you are not at play here. I will wait.”
She felt her tears, a purifying rain. Would there ever be enough?
He kissed her, pulling her close. Held her. “Aishiteru yo,” he whispered into her hair.
“Watashi mo,” she answered. I love you too. But the words, like the tears, did not suffice.
The night belonged to Right-brain. He loved the dark. Loved the smell of it. The black-blanket feel of it. He opened his mouth and tasted the night—air, cool and damp, full of foreign molecules, waiting to tease his olfactory nerves.
He restricted himself to Flatiron tonight, though his night journeys could take him deep into Soho, or upward toward the Theater District. He welcomed the press of flesh of theater-goers going into or coming out of a performance, offering him a heady mix of sight, smell, and sound. A night in the rain was particularly intoxicating—dampened skin, cooking in the moisture, releasing the scent of fermented perfume secreted behind an ear, or the stale stink of cigar smoke incubated in the palate hours before. And then there might be the unexpected puncture of an umbrella against a bare arm, drawing blood. Salt to the taste.
But the bodies themselves, passing him tonight as he walked Twenty-third Street toward Fifth, were not so much bodies as collections of organs, a kind of corporeal geog
raphy, suspended in time and space.
The parts greater than the whole: Aortic isthmus, canal of Nuck, pyramids of Ferrein, rima of Glottis, Jelly of Wharton, nodes of Ranvier, Opercula of the insula, Papilla lacrimalis, Utricle of vestibule . . .
A woman smiled as she bumped against his shoulder, though he did not smile back. Rather, he allowed his eyes to quickly calculate the capacity of her abdomen, flashing flat between the flaps of her coat, to accommodate Douglas’s pouch. Excessively long limbs violated the prescribed space. By his estimate it would be a tight fit—mons Veneris, labia majora, nymphae, clitoris, vestibule with meatus urinarius, Glands of Bartholin, Bulbi vestibuli, vagina, uterus—fundus and cervix, Fallopian tubes, ovaries. He turned too late, and had to be satisfied with the flip-flap of her coat moving away from him. So much for that.
He laughed now, a giddy kind of laugh, though he was not particularly happy or amused. In fact, he was annoyed. He should have smiled when the woman smiled. What would have been the harm in that? He buttoned up his coat and shoved his hands into the pockets. It wasn’t perfect, he thought, but it would just have to do, as his fingers slipped through the hole in the lining of the right pocket and found the zipper of his jeans, releasing his erection.
Just have to make do . . . he rubbed the underside of his shaft . . . until something better comes along.
Jimmy slept. Hanae could hear the regular sound of his breathing. Slowly she lifted the marriage quilt and, leaving the bed, moved toward the bath. Closing the door, she waited a moment as though she might have disturbed him, and he would follow. But he slept.
She folded into herself, slowly dropping to the floor. Rocking on her knees, she let the tears come again, heavy and silent now. Swallowing the sound. Releasing the long-pent-up pain and shame. Her mind searched for the old prayer, willing her lips to form the words. Reaching behind, she loosened the gown she’d worn to bed. She was loath to touch her own body, and for one moment she wished to take up something with which to strike, to beat from her flesh the defilement that too long had festered there.