by Harker Moore
“I’m still in love with your hair.”
She knew it—she should have worn her hair up. And just what in hell was he doing? This chameleon routine was way out of character. “Don’t change the subject. What is important is that you understand I don’t want you gone from our sons’ lives.”
“Isn’t that the reason you left me . . . so I would be gone from their lives?”
“One of them.” She didn’t sound very convincing, and she was ready for anything but his laughter. “Michael, please . . .”
He was watching her now, his eyes sad and hurt and inconsolable.
“I’m sorry . . .” The words had rusted in the intervening years. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, “leaving without telling you I was pregnant.”
Something small and bright seemed to catch fire in his eyes.
“I was wrong”—she was going to finish this—“and I want you in the boys’ lives. No matter what. Connecticut or not. You are their father. I don’t want them to ever forget that. I—”
He stopped her, his fingers touching her lips. And before she could say another word, or breathe, or think, his lips were where his fingers had been. And just as lightly.
CHAPTER
18
Back by five tomorrow . . .” Erica Talise called out, smiling wanly at the sequined Valkyrie who waved to her in acknowledgment from the door. She was tired for midweek, and half-hoped that the woman was going to be their last customer for the evening. The day had been good, even better than last Halloween, which had been the best ever since she’d taken over the shop three years ago.
She headed back to the dressing room to gather up and rehang the piles of try-ons the woman had plowed through while trying to find something “perfect.” Why did the most difficult ones always wait till the last minute?
As she reached the dressing room curtains, the wolf face sprang out at her, hairy and hugely horrific, thick snarling lips curled over yellow canines.
“Damn it, Marcus.” She was not the least fazed. “I could have sold that thing a dozen times in the last two hours.”
“No way. I told you I was wearing it tonight. You can dock me for a rental.”
“We don’t rent those masks. You wear it, you’re going to pay for it.”
“Lighten up, Erica.” Gilly was smiling, emerging like a sprite from the storeroom. “I know it’s been really crazy today, but I thought you agreed that this year we were going to have some fun of our own.”
Looking at her, Erica had to smile too. Her friend always had that effect. Years her junior and thinner than she’d ever been, Gilly had been working with her almost from the beginning. There was something otherworldy about Gilly, with her heart-shaped face and huge gray eyes. Her attitude might be streetwise, but her ballerina delicacy always undercut the effect.
“How do I look?” Gilly pirouetted in the fairy costume that had been part of a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“I thought you were doing vampire.” Marcus didn’t hide his disappointment, but Gilly was no fool. She knew what suited her best.
“You look great, Gilly,” she said, then glanced at the clock. “It’s past seven. I guess we can close up.”
“Do it,” from Marcus.
“What are you going to wear, Erica?” Gilly was asking.
“Do I have to wear a costume?” Was she the only one who was sick of the things?
“Yes, you do.” Gilly was adamant. “That’s what makes Halloween so cool. You get to be something different. And, besides, the Half Moon is having half-price drinks for single women in costume.”
That was Gilly all right, the fanciful dosed with the practical. She smiled again. “We’ll see,” she said. “I just might surprise you. You two go on. I’ll close out the register and meet you there.”
The Half Moon was just around the block. She stood in the doorway and watched them move down the sidewalk, the fairy and the werewolf laughing together. She felt a twinge of jealousy she couldn’t help. Marcus had only been with them part-time for the last few months, hired after she’d improved her stock and had started to get some of the big-time rentals. He was a graduate student and wouldn’t be staying in the city past graduation. It had begun to worry her that his interest in Gilly might be more than a workplace infatuation.
She shut the door and turned the key in the lock, switched off the front lights, and walked back to close out the register. It really was a relic, and she knew she should chuck it for something new and electronic. But she liked the ancient machine, liked the substantial sound of its jingling open, shutting solid. Just as she liked going through the small paper invoices at the end of a day. She reached for them now, impaled like square butterflies on their cast-iron spike.
She was totaling the invoices on the noisy adding machine, so it took a little time for the tapping to penetrate. A man was standing on the stoop. She could see him fairly clearly, his face pressed against the glass insert in the door. He was staring at her while his fingers drummed the surface.
Closed. She mouthed the word, regretting that she had somehow forgotten to flip the sign in the window. “I’m closed,” she said loudly, still exaggerating the word for him to lip-read.
He wasn’t having any of it. He smiled at her cheerfully now, catching her eyes, his fingers still tap-tapping on the glass in the door to beat the goddamned band.
She sighed, and walked over to where they stood divided by the glass, determined on some principle or other to keep the bastard out. “I’m closed,” she said again, this time with her own damn cheerful smile.
He had been leaning against the dusty pane to see in through the glare. Now he stood up straight. He was a well-dressed bastard.
“I’m really sorry to bother you,” his voice diminished by the glass. “But I’ve got to have a costume, and you’re it. Please,” he was begging.
Damn, she was a soft touch. She frowned, but she unlocked the door.
All Hallow’s Eve. Sakura stood at his office window, looking out beyond the plaza. Close to a million revelers were expected to pack the Village, and the traffic was already heavy with the overflow from the parade. He watched the headlights streaming by and tried to imagine them as Toro Nagashi, the floating lanterns of his boyhood, meant to guide the spirits.
But Halloween had never been his holiday, despite its obvious resonance with O-bon. The American version of the Feast of the Dead had lost nearly all its ancient connection to a reverence for ancestors who had crossed into the shadowland and returned for one night each year to be honored.
Only once had he accompanied Paul and Elizabeth on their Halloween rounds. He could not remember if he’d worn a costume, but his stepbrother had been a pirate, which had not suited his reserved nature at all. Elizabeth had dressed as a princess, with a conical hat dripping netting and sparkles. She had danced from house to house, equally thrilled with each new bounty of candy. He had enjoyed the night through her eyes. But by the next year, he had begun to gain the height that would distinguish him. And Susan, his stepmother, had judged him too old for such things as trick-or-treat.
“Gazing out windows, Jimmy, is not a good sign. You’ll be drinking coffee next.” He turned, glad to find the friend who matched the voice. Willie had come into his office.
“It’s not that bad yet.” He smiled. “You here to meet Michael?”
“We’re supposed to be having dinner.” She sat down. “You want to join us? We could call Hanae.”
“Another time.” He walked back to the chair behind his desk. “I want to stick around here a little longer.”
“Expecting trouble?” She was leaning over, setting down the suitcase she called a purse.
“Something like that,” he admitted. “It’s nearly two weeks since Olsen.”
She sat up. “Anything happening with the deejay and his friend?”
“Lancaster’s not cooperating,” he said, “and so far we’ve had no luck in tracking down Dustin Franks. Neither one of them seems to
have a record, but Talbot and Rozelli are still on it. I want a look at that van.”
“It’s easy enough to imagine that Mr. Lancaster is having kinky sex with women from these clubs,” she said, “but you don’t really like him for our killer, do you?”
“Do you?” he turned it around. “You saw the interview tape.”
“He certainly seems narcissistic enough. And this Lisa says he’s into weird sex. The problem is his style’s so chaotic, though the whole rebel-hipster thing could be a mask. I just have trouble believing that Mr. Lancaster is even half as smart as he thinks he is. And it’s hard to picture him rerigging those organs or scrupulously cleaning bodies.”
“Or taking that much care wrapping the first five,” he added. “The lab found next to nothing on any of the duct tape.”
“What’s really freaking me out,” she said, “is the radical change in the killer’s MO on this last one.”
“The posing . . .”
“Exactly. Posing the body may be more significant than the change in victim type. I frankly don’t have a clue at this point. There’s something important we’re missing.”
“It seems to me we’ve said that before.”
“Last year, yes.” She looked rueful. “It was true then, too. The problem is that no matter how much we study them, no matter how many similarities we manage to find in the patterns of their behavior, the truth is that serial killers are individuals. Each of them is unique, just as each of us is. I’ve said it a million times—profiling is more an art than a science. And right now I’m feeling like a pretty lousy artist.”
“Get in line.”
The children of the night. Out in full force. Shedding urban identities. Wig and wand. Lacquer and lipstick. Jack-o’-lanterns, sitting fat and full, preening on concrete steps. A pregnant moon, flash-dancing on black wings, turning feather to liquid, as autumn crows circle inside bare bones of trees. A stiff breeze, a dry rustling, and leaves tumble to ground.
He moved through the Halloween traffic, chuckling over the idea fermenting in his head. Maybe it was the pot he’d smoked earlier. Or the night. Or the thrill of the risk he was about to take. Though the attack in the park and what had happened in the meatpacking plant had been fairly audacious, they had been predetermined. So it was not unreasonable that he should be amazed by his break with protocol. Though in the selfsame moment he could hear Right-brain arguing why bother; the meat had already been trapped and vanquished.
He peered into the mirror, into the black interior of the van where the Visqueen package lay. If his plan was going to work, the goods would have to be kept nice and cold. Reaching over, he jacked up the air conditioner full throttle. He was fighting time and the natural order of things.
He headed toward the Midtown location. Toward a destiny he alone crafted. With none of Right-brain’s lusty impatience or greedy quick fixes. None of the insatiable passion to move on to the next bit of business. He laughed out loud. God was in the details. And though Right-brain might see the lump in the back as so much baggage, Left-brain fancied one more turn around the dance floor.
Zach Lynch tried to put his arm around Reni’s shoulders, but she pulled away. It was almost one o’clock, and she still hadn’t come around. Why had they even bothered going out?
She just wouldn’t let it go. It had all started when he’d told her to say her good-byes after only one drink at her office’s annual Halloween party. The last thing he’d wanted was to make small talk with some computer geeks from her office. Of course, geeks was the wrong word to use. They were very nice people. He just didn’t relate, she’d said, to anyone who wasn’t a certified asshole. Then he’d nixed her idea of going to the parade in the Village. The last thing he’d wanted was to be pushed and prodded by a million drunken faggots. Of course, faggots was the wrong word to use.
To make matters worse, he hadn’t worn the costume she’d put together for him. It wasn’t as though she’d gotten him a Spider-Man outfit, she’d said, or expected him to wear fangs and a cape and go around saying, “I want a bite of your neck.” It was just a pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt. And the leather jacket she’d found at a secondhand clothing store. They would have made the perfect fifties couple, she said. Crap, if she wanted James Dean, why didn’t she just go out with that jerk Mervin, who couldn’t seem to get it through his thick skull that she had a boyfriend and that he should quit already with the cute messages on her machine.
“Are you ready to go home?” he asked for the umpteenth time since their big blowout hours ago.
She shook her head, her long blond ponytail flapping against her back. He had to admit she looked adorable in the poodle skirt and fuzzy sweater with the tiny collar she’d worn in spite of him.
“You hardly ate anything at the restaurant.”
She wasn’t taking the bait.
“Or drank any of the wine you ordered.”
Nothing.
“And you might have spoken a half dozen words to me all evening.”
This time she favored him with a look. A look that reduced him to something less than pond scum.
“Come on, Reni, what the fuck are we doing walking around like this?”
She seemed to pick up her pace.
He shook his head and tramped after her just like he’d been doing all night. Around midnight it seemed a reasonable penance. Now . . . he was getting pissed off. Still, he figured, in the grand scope of things he was getting just about what an ugly man with a beautiful girlfriend deserved. Though he wasn’t actually ugly. It was just that Reni was god-almighty beautiful. Maybe that was the real reason he’d cut short their appearance at her office party and vetoed the parade. He was jealous.
Shit, what he wanted more than anything right now was to go back to the apartment, smoke a little dope, and make love till the wolves howled. But clearly that wasn’t going to happen.
“I wasn’t hungry,” she said finally, turning to look at him, but still walking. “And I don’t like to drink when I’m upset. You know that.”
He smiled. “Finished punishing me?”
“You can call it anything you want.”
“Torture is what I’d call it.”
She stopped. “Zach, this is not the major argument of our lives. I still love you. I still want to be with you. But I’m still kind of pissed. So give me a couple more blocks to cool off, and we can do anything you want.”
He watched her walk away, down a short side street toward a small collection of retail stores, her poodle skirt bouncing to the beat of her ponytail. He followed her, thinking that she was an absolute sweetheart, and that he was one lucky son-of-a-bitch.
“Reni, baby . . .” She was standing now, in a pool of yellow light, focusing on something in a shop window.
“Reni?” This time she turned at the sound of her name, her head moving in a kind of stop-animation rhythm. Her expression fixed like it too was being manipulated. Eyes too large for her face. Mouth moving as if blowing air.
“Reni?” He was next to her now, and his eyes followed her pointing finger.
Inside the window the figure was seated. A leg draped over one of the chair’s arms. The hat on her head was wide-brimmed and black, with large red roses. There was an acid-green boa wrapped once around her neck in a kind of stranglehold. And she wore fishnet stockings on her fleshy legs, bright red high-heeled pumps on her feet. She fit in perfectly with the macabre cast of characters decked out in Halloween finery in the window, except this mannequin oozed real blood from a Y-track of staples running between her heavy naked breasts, down her rounded belly, and into the exposed thatch of dark pubic hair between her thighs.
It was the easiest break-in she’d ever pulled off. No prying some cheap lock with her fingernail file. No crying to the building’s super that she was some Joe’s, or in this case Johnny’s, long-lost sister or cousin. Nope, just a simple matter of inserting a key. Johnny Rozelli had returned hers last year the night of their breakup, but she still had his. And he had
n’t changed the lock.
Zoe walked into the familiar mess. The place was not exactly a dump, but Johnny wasn’t here that much except to sleep, and he spent every extra penny on clothes. She could identify with that. It was only since getting her program that she’d begun the hunt for a nicer apartment herself.
She went straight to the bedroom. It was already really late, and if Johnny was going to come home at all tonight, he would be here soon. She freshened her makeup and started to strip. She enjoyed a good disguise, and had given a lot of thought to her Halloween costume. In the end she’d decided to keep it simple. Tonight’s strategy was direct frontal assault. The trick was not to give him time to think.
She turned out the light and arranged herself in the bed, certain that this was going to work. Johnny had once compared her to the ice cream sundaes that his uncle had bought him on Saturday afternoons. Tonight, she would be his treat again. His Halloween treat. It was perfect.
The minutes passed slowly with no distractions in the dark, and the smell of him from the sheets was driving her crazy. But finally she heard him in the living room. And at last the bedroom light went on.
Her first impression was how tired he looked. But then he laughed. Taking in the cellophane. The wide orange satin ribbon snaking across her body from ankles to neck. The huge floppy bow tied at her throat, holding it all together.
“Unwrap your candy, baby.” She smiled at him from the pillow.
“You are too fuckin’ much, Zoe.”
“Wrong, sweetie. There hasn’t been near enough fucking lately.”
“Guess we’ll have to fix that.” He was already pulling off his clothes, leaving a trail of Calvin and Armani.
The sex was every bit as good as she knew it would be. And good for him too—coming over and over, holding to her shoulders like a drowning man.
“What if I’d brought back some broad?” he’d said to her at one point.
“Then we’d just have kicked her ass out.” They’d laughed together like kids, and screwed some more.