by Harker Moore
“Robin took several self-defense classes,” the man seated in front of his desk was saying. “She was very aware. I can’t understand how this could have happened to her.”
“An attack can be very sudden, Mr. Olsen. Your wife may have had very little time to react. . . . I’m sorry.”
“Sorry . . .” Lanny Olsen didn’t finish whatever the word had been meant to start. He just sat there, staring ahead. The identification of his wife’s body had been very difficult.
“I’ll have one of my officers drive you home,” Sakura said. “We can talk again soon. There are still a lot of questions. . . .”
“Ask them now.” The eyes that turned on him were suddenly hard. “I want you to catch this bastard.”
Sakura nodded. “You told me that your wife left very early yesterday to jog her usual route.”
“That’s right.”
“So she had a routine?”
“Robin tried to make it to the park every morning. She was always very conscious of her weight. She said she didn’t want to be one of these women who let themselves go after thirty.” Olsen shook his head, blinked fresh tears, thinking perhaps that these good intentions had resulted in the ultimate futility.
“And it was your wife’s habit to return home before she went to work?” Sakura prompted.
“We live pretty close to the park. She’d shower and dress. Eat something healthy for breakfast.” The head shake again. “And coffee with real sugar. She couldn’t give it up.”
“And she didn’t come home from the park yesterday?”
“We went over this.”
“I want to make sure I have it right.” Sakura thought he understood the man’s sudden impatience. This part was difficult. It touched on what Olsen would perceive as his own culpability.
“I didn’t know yesterday morning that she hadn’t returned from the park,” Olsen had started speaking. “I leave early sometimes myself, before Robin gets back. Yesterday just happened to be one of those days.”
“When did you know that something was wrong?”
“When I came home. There were messages on the machine from her office. Her assistant had been trying to reach her all day.”
“And there was no indication that she had ever returned home?”
“No. Her clothes for work were still on the bed. And the coffeepot was half-full. She liked to have a second cup before she even took her shower.”
“What did you do?”
“Called everyone we knew. Then I called you.”
By “you” Olsen meant the police. At approximately 7:15 last night, he had called Missing Persons.
“It’s the same man, isn’t it?” Olsen broke the latest silence.
“The same man?” Sakura remained noncommittal. They had taken care in the viewing room to reveal little more than Robin Olsen’s face.
“You’re handling the serial case,” Olsen said. “It’s all over television.”
Not much point in hiding the truth—the media were making the same logical jump that Lanny Olsen had. “There are certain things that lead us to believe that your wife’s killer is the same man who murdered these other women,” he said.
“But why?” Olsen demanded. Now that his worst fear had been confirmed, he did not appear to want to believe it. “He’s been killing those girls. Robin was thirty. . . . Didn’t go to clubs.”
“It would help if we understood exactly how your wife was targeted,” Sakura said. “Maybe she was stalked because of her jogging routine, or maybe yesterday morning was simply the wrong time and place. But there could be something else about her life that caused her to cross paths with the killer. We’re going to need your help re-creating the last few weeks of her life in detail, maybe even—”
“She should be here,” Olsen’s words cut in. From his expression, it was apparent that he was no longer listening. His focus had shifted to emotional self-preservation.
Denial. Sorrow. Guilt. In his short time with the man, Sakura had seen these stages of grief. He knew well enough that Olsen would experience them in varying degrees throughout the process of mourning and healing, if ever he did heal. At the moment, the man was beginning to feel the fourth classic emotion.
“Robin should be here,” Olsen repeated. His voice was becoming more certain as the anger revealed itself. “Five women dead and this monster was still out there killing. Why was that, Lieutenant Sakura? You tell me. Five before Robin. If the police were doing everything possible . . . If you had been doing your job, my wife would still be alive.”
“Are you relaxed, Victor?”
“Victor is relaxed, Dr. French.”
“Does it help to keep your eyes closed?”
“Yes.” A slightly giddy laugh.
“Why are you laughing, Victor?”
“My voice . . . is it my voice? I mean does it sound like my voice coming out of my mouth?”
“Yes, Victor, it’s your voice I hear.”
“It’s not my voice I hear.”
“Whose voice do you hear?”
“Not any voice in particular . . . just not my own.”
“Not your own . . .”
“Not the voice I know is my real voice.”
“Are you inside your body, Victor?”
“Yes . . .” Another laugh. “But I don’t feel like ‘Victor.’”
“Who do you feel like?”
“A what more than a who. . . .”
“What, then, Victor?”
“A machine . . . my voice is an electronic recording.”
“Does this make you feel uncomfortable?”
“Not at this moment.”
She wrote in her notebook. Persistent episodes of depersonalization. 300.6 The disorder presents exclusively. Marked and recurrent feelings of detachment. Sensory anesthesia. Displays of derealization. Some appropriate affective responses. Maintains intact reality.
“Are you taking notes?”
“Yes.”
“Writing that I’m crazy, Dr. French?”
“No, Victor, I am not.”
“I feel crazy.”
“What do you mean by crazy?”
“You know . . . feeling like my arms move by gears.”
“But you know your arms don’t move by gears, Victor, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“A crazy person would believe his arms moved by gears.”
He inhaled. Another laugh. “My lungs . . . well, not lungs really.”
“But they are lungs, Victor. Made of cells, tissue. Filled with blood carrying oxygen.”
“I know . . . but how do I say this. I’m somehow experiencing them as something else. Like metal parts. Made of plates that expand and contract when I breathe.”
“Is that how you’re experiencing your entire physical body now?”
“Yes. Like something mechanical.”
“But you know what your body really is.”
“Yes.”
“And you know where your body is.”
A noise. High-pitched. Like a child would make. “I’m not in a movie. Not this time.”
“Where are you, Victor?”
“With you. In your office.” He took another deep breath. Shook his head. “Smell . . . I can’t smell. I know your smell, Dr. French, a nice smell. But right now I can’t seem . . .” He opened his eyes finally. They were clear. Like after a cry. He stared at her. Then slowly a frown began to grow at the bridge of his nose. “Dr. French . . .”
“Yes, Victor.”
“I don’t feel relaxed anymore.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“Happening . . . ?”
“What, Victor? Talk to me.”
“You, Dr. French.”
“What about me?”
“I can see your gears working.”
The afternoon light annoyed David St Cyr, creating a frame of yellow seams across his drafting table. It was the principal problem with the apartment he’d leased. He closed the blinds and returned
to the Redmond project. He had reworked the floor plan of the twins’ room, dividing the space into two separate areas as Margot Redmond demanded. He hated the result. Architecturally it worked. Even aesthetically it was pleasing. But there was something wrong with the breaking up of the free-flowing space. Something inherently wrong with the division.
After another ten minutes, he dropped his pencil and moved away from the table. He drew up the blinds. The October afternoon was cooling down, and now the sharp sunlight from moments ago was beginning to drown in scudding clouds.
He looked out at the closer, denser panorama, the mid-range buildings surrounding his own, hard-carved against the spiking, less distinct skyline beyond. The city, crusted and weathered in spots, seemed tired even against the sleek alien bright of the new and nearly new. He brought a finger into his mouth, and then ran it across the wide flat of his window. How like the inside of a vagina the slick surface against his wet finger. Except that the smooth glass was cool.
He smiled at the smear of saliva. His comparison was a perfect display of his conflicted energies. Biomorphic forms could be overly sympathetic, if not infused with the cold steel of reason and utility. Yet pure functionality devoid of some canon of aesthetic seemed off-putting. How to render flesh to machine and still weep was the essential question.
Perhaps he was unsettled by Gehry’s Bilbao in Spain because the architect had answered the question. He—St. Cyr—however, was no builder of museums, but of houses, and there seemed implied in Le Corbusier’s intent that “a house be a machine for living” a conviction that machine was the spawn of some lesser creation, something to be endured because its time had come. He could only detest any view that seemingly “forgave” the machine for its existence, for denying its voice, made excuses for its self-revelatory beauty.
But this was mental masturbation and little to do with his displeasure over Margot Redmond’s insistence that he alter the essential integrity of the house. He was to compartmentalize the twins’ living space, separate, split . . . . He laughed. Split. Now that was an intriguing word, in more ways than one. Split. He’d like to split Margot Redmond, divide her pretty pink labia, plunge into the ripe red void of her sac. He was, after all, a sculptor of space. And as dear P.J. had decreed, you only do architecture when you can’t help doing it.
Sakura stood looking down from his office window. With things so unresolved between Hanae and himself, he had made a promise to be home tonight at some more reasonable time. He remained unmoving, watching the shadows taking over the plaza, but it was the face of Lanny Olsen that he saw. And Lanny Olsen’s voice that he heard.
If you had been doing your job, my wife would still be alive. The words had seemed to cycle endlessly at this afternoon’s autopsy, impervious to any reasonable argument he could make in his defense. The abduction and murder of a young wife was not a rational event. His mind might tell him that he was doing everything possible to stop these deaths, but the rest of him remained unconvinced, on Lanny Olsen’s side.
Such an emotional response was seldom useful. Empathy for the victim was a noble virtue, but justice did not require it. And emotion could be hindering baggage when it came to solving a crime.
He walked back to his desk, knowing that his promise to be home earlier would be broken, that there were many more hours here ahead of him this evening. There were no shortcuts in a serial investigation, and everything that was reasonable had to be attempted. It was nearly impossible in the mounting flow of data for one man to absorb every detail of a case. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t try.
He reread reports. Made pages of notes. When he got up to leave, it was late.
I move above earth, above the parquet floor down the great long hall. Gazing upon the walls, I slip into the painting as if into a pair of silk stockings. Settling myself naked upon the bed, milk-white upon my still whiter linen.
Over my shoulder, the aubergine shade of Lacassine, knowing eyes cast down, then darting as a sly smile opens her face, her teeth, fresh as hen eggs. Le Monsieur . . . Lacassine who speaks without speaking.
I touch the pale pink flower at my ear—the ear, sweet friend to his tongue. My nipples constrict with the heel-toe roll of his bare feet, the soft crush of his clothes against polished wood. For a moment I want to cover myself with the shawl at my side. No, not coyness, but something more surely honest. I hear his breathing, feel his knee come down into the soft of my bed. I close my eyes. His lips pull on the ribbon at my neck, drawing the bow undone, letting the pendant slip down between my breasts like a tear, to rest hidden in the curve of my hip.
Say it, say it, say it. “I want him . . .” Margot spoke to the dark, letting go at last the hot tears building behind her lids.
There was never a cure for it, not her life as Reese’s wife, not her neatly packaged New York matron’s life, not even her life as Mother, with the twins who resulted not from any sort of civilized planning but from the insanity they’d done in bed every night.
It had been her choice to leave. She laughed. There was never any choice. Stay with him or go crazy. Stay and live with being afraid all the time, and feeding off the fear like some starving mongrel. But the pregnancy had really done it, given her the courage to run away.
And run away she had. Running with her secret in her belly. Running like a thief in the night. Before she lost the will.
Talk. She turned in the big bed. Maybe that was the cure for the disease. Talk.
Inside the dark she was his. Lying on the remnant of carpet she was his. In the small empty closet she was his. And she was his by choice. That she wanted to be humiliated and beaten and brought to the edge, she no longer questioned. At the age of sixteen, she knew her pyramid was inverted when she preferred Ryan’s slaps to his kisses. That pain, not pleasure, transported her to a space which exploded like nuclear fission inside her. That pain was her pleasure had been firmly established over the next two years in the small cigarette burns, in the bruises around her nipples, and now with him, in the collar that rubbed raw her thin neck. And he was the best pain-giver of all.
KitKat had no idea where he had learned the art of exquisite detail, or from whom he had acquired the finely articulated strokes that brought her to the threshold. But Shaman was the Master. Her Master. She crouched near the litter box that held her excrements, and waited.
She had no real sense of time. He had locked her in the closet. How many hours ago? She lifted the litter box. It felt slightly heavier, denser. That meant something. Time measured in the dark, not by a clock, but by the weight of piss and shit. The smell was a measure too. The air had thickened with ammonia. But she was content. Almost giddy, like she was high on something. A litter box, a roll of toilet paper, in the dark with her own waste. Not dripping or caked to the walls of her anus, but excreted in a small pile and a spread of wet. Safe-kept in a receptacle, so that what came out of her was still part of her.
She reached in now, her hand pawing the soiled grit. She purred. She was his precious pretty kitty. She was his pussycat. His pussy. She laughed at the double meaning. Somewhere she had learned what such phrases were called, but that bit of literary minutia was long forgotten, along with her knowledge of similes, and metaphors, and iambic pentameter. She had been brighter than most in that high school she had attended a thousand years ago. A thousand years ago? That was another figure of speech, wasn’t it? Hyperbole? Where did she pull that from?
A key clicking in the lock. A door opening and shutting. Purr. Purr. Her throat rumbled in anticipation. She crouched on all fours, her fingernails plucking at the loose yarns of the carpet remnant. Daddy Cat is home.
When the door opened, she put one of her paws in front of her eyes, a reflex that blocked the fresh hard light coming into the closet from the strobe. “Meow, meow,” she mewed, arching her elegant back. The shiny chain attached to her collar jangled.
He was nude. And her tongue stroked his toes. Sandpaper licks, he called them. Then his hand was yanking her chain, pu
lling her up to her feet .
“Lick me,” he hissed. And her tongue went over his face. “Good pussy.” He smiled, moaning with each pink lick. Then his hand released her. The chain tumbling to the rug like a heavy snake. “You belong to me,” his voice harder now. “Every part of you. Your eyes. Your teeth. Your legs and arms. Your breasts . . .” Then Randy “Daddy Cat” Lancaster reached and twisted both nipples between his silver-ringed fingers. “All parts are mine. Together. And . . . one . . . by . . . one.”
CHAPTER
15
Zoe Kahn was enjoying the jog, not so much for the physical activity as for the sweet way her new shorts and T-shirt clung to her curves. Normally her workouts took place in a health club, where floor-to-ceiling mirrors could confirm that the effort to keep her natural voluptuousness within fashionable limits was worth it. Out here in the real world she simply felt fit and alive—a young and healthy female animal, not some anorexic’s idea of a goddess.
She had never been in the park before sunrise, and was surprised by a looming stillness that seemed to heal with her passage, as if her presence and the activity she supported was an irritant to be isolated and diminished. She felt an irrational urge to shout, to poke a hole much larger in all this damn tranquillity.
She was coming to the curve now, and she tossed her ponytailed hair, conscious of her form, the controlled jiggle of her hips and breasts as the dark-clothed man sprang from the bushes to grab her. In an instant he was holding her with an arm across her chest. The other hand over her mouth.
She bit hard at the skin of his palm.
“Shit, Zoe!” He was jerking away from her, inspecting his wounded hand. “. . . What’s so fucking funny?” He had turned on the laughing cameraman.
“Don’t give up your day job, Allen,” Zoe was saying. “You’re a lousy serial killer. You’ve got to grab me like you mean it.”
“I’m your producer, Zoe, not your stuntman. You drag us out here in the middle of the night—”