by Harker Moore
Leylah watched Zoe settle behind her desk, adjust the high mandarin collar inside her tailored suit jacket. The light on camera one came on.
“Is he playing it by a script,” Zoe opened, “and is Halloween at last the perfect setting for his ghoulish acts?” She turned to camera two for a close-up. “Is he another player in the game of Murder Most Macabre? Another Dracula? Another Jason? Or Mr. Hyde? . . . Or is New Jack no respecter of the calendar, of the wheel of time, but a monster from Hell, and Halloween just another night?”
A slow pan of a lineup of victim photographs.
“Helena Grady, who wrote song lyrics on the backs of napkins, collected first editions of Nancy Drew mysteries, had two best friends—her mutt Maxi and her brother Charlie . . .
“Ana Phelps, home for the summer, whose favorite color was red, who still loved Dr. Seuss, and whose Taiwanese grandmother she was going to visit for the holidays . . .
“Sarah Laraby, Selkie Girl, Gaelic water sprite, who once won the butterfly in a state swim meet, who still slept with the teddy bear she’d gotten on her fifth birthday . . .
“Leslie Siebrig, whose favorite movie was The Graduate, who collected sea glass and kept a supply of Jolly Ranchers in her purse, who fostered stray cats whenever she could sneak them into her apartment . . .
“Solange Mansour, whose favorite thing was a silver enameled bracelet from her French grand-mère, who ate pita bread sandwiches and drank green tea, who loved algebra best . . .
“Robin Olsen, who read Joyce and Proust, who grew antique roses in clay pots, who leaves behind a husband who adored her, the promise of children . . .
“Erica Talise, who collected vintage clothes, loved Elsa Lanchester and Charlotte Rampling, who would rather wear a hat than show off her thick brown hair, who died doing what she loved best . . .”
Kahn was on a roll.
“Helena, Ana, Sarah, Leslie, Solange—young, at the beginning . . .
“Robin and Erica, women at the summit of their powers . . .”
Leylah realized she was holding her breath. This was it. Even Allen didn’t know the punch line. She watched as camera two moved from the perfection of Zoe’s face to an upper-body shot. Zoe’s French-manicured fingers went to her throat, undoing the first, second, third of the tiny buttons on her blouse. It was mostly shadow, but the camera didn’t miss it, the subtle suggestion of Zoe Kahn’s cleavage.
And her words, underscoring the camera’s intent. “It seems New Jack has switched . . . young girls no more, thin no longer in. Women in the full flower of their femininity is New Jack’s pick.” She’d used a euphemism, but “big tits” was there loud and clear. Her fingers caressed the opening of her blouse.
Leylah had to smile.
“So if that’s what you want, New Jack, here I am. . . .”
Leylah looked around the studio. Zoe Kahn’s challenge to the serial killer had struck like lightning.
The Shaman looked anything but spiritual this cold and dreary Monday, having been hauled from his apartment and dragged to Police Plaza. The self-appointed guru of rock and rave had come in reluctantly, but without the force of an arrest warrant. He definitely appeared to have fallen from grace. His dark hair was in a curling greasy knot at the back of his head. His face was drawn, and his eyes hung deep in dark sockets. Cheekbones jutted out in hard angles from pasty overnight flesh.
“We were finally able to connect with your manager, Mr. Lancaster. Your calendar seems to cover you for most of the dates the women went missing.” Sakura was standing, looked up from notes. “At least for the critical time period for each of the nights in question.”
For the first time since he’d walked into the room, Lancaster seemed alert. The significance of what Sakura had said registered, having the effect of resurrecting some of the deejay’s customary cockiness. The sloping shoulders righted themselves in the trademark buckskin jacket, and for a fraction of a second he allowed himself to smile.
Sakura didn’t smile. “You have been a very busy man since we last spoke.”
“And what the hell does that mean?”
“It seems that you and Dustin Franks have transacted a little business lately.”
He laughed. “You got my ass in here because I buy a little dope from that moron?”
“That moron has quite a business operating out the back of his van.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“According to Mr. Franks, you borrowed his van on a couple of occasions.”
“To move some sound equipment.”
“He says that you might have used his van for more than moving equipment.”
Shaman stood, his chair tumbling back hard against the floor. “I’m not answering any more of your questions.”
“How well do you know Nicole Hansen?”
Lancaster’s eyes took on their foxy look, daring Sakura to get an answer out of him. “I’m outta here.” He was moving from behind the table. “You asked real polite if I would come by to answer a few more routine questions. Although I couldn’t imagine what routine questions I hadn’t already answered. But I agreed real polite. Now this little meeting all of a sudden doesn’t seem so polite. You got something you want to know, serve me.”
Rozelli had been waiting for this moment. He slid the arrest warrant across the table. “At your service.”
Lancaster glanced down at the paper, picked it up like it was contaminated, and started reading.
“How about the Reader’s Digest version?” Rozelli was smirking. “You’re being arrested for felony sexual battery.”
Sakura took up the dialogue. “The warrant has been issued under the jurisdiction where the alleged offense was committed. However, your relationship with Sarah Laraby is still of particular interest to the Special Homicide Unit, Mr. Lancaster.”
“I never raped that bitch.”
“Who, Mr. Lancaster?”
“I want a lawyer.”
Damn, security should know about the burned-out lights along aisle three. Holding her laptop in one hand, Zoe fumbled in her purse for the keys to the rental car. Owning a car was totally impractical, but she liked to have her own transportation when she made an extended pilgrimage home to Queens. She was thinking maybe she would go to temple with Momma when suddenly the arm went around her neck, and the hand over her mouth.
Strange what one thought when one was going to die. Would Momma bury her next to Papa? In the old Jewish cemetery with the iron fence and the large Star of David on the gate? Then a voice screamed in her head that she wasn’t going to die. At least not like this. She tried to pull something from last month’s program on self-defense as she began struggling against the viselike grip. Kick him in the balls. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do? Hit ’em where it hurt most. She tried to bring up her leg, heel him in the groin. But she couldn’t get an angle the way he was holding her, stomach to back. Eyes. If only she could get at his eyes. Thumb. There had been something about the thumb. And the Adam’s apple.
Breathe. Difficult to breathe with his arm in a choke hold around her neck. But he was breathing. She could feel his breath against the side of her face. And he was whispering, “This what you want, baby girl?” What she wanted? God, he was getting hard. She could feel his erection jammed up against her buttocks.
Suddenly she bucked. Bucked wildly against his chest, all the while fighting for air. Sweet God-delicious air. He seemed to loosen his grip, his hand slipping away from her mouth, freeing her nostrils. She sucked in a deep breath. Fragrance. He was wearing some kind of cologne or aftershave.
“Goddamn your rotten soul to hell, Johnny Rozelli!”
He released her. Even in the dark she could see he was wearing the infamous Rozelli smirk along with his hard-on. “And what the fuck do you think you’re doing? How in hell did you get in here anyway?”
He grabbed her around the waist, slamming her against him. “Showing you any motherfucker determined enough could breach security in this goddamn
parklot. You think the killer could be kept out if he wanted to get in, Zoe?” He pressed her harder against him. “You think you could have fought him off?”
“Let me go, Rozelli.”
He pushed her away. “What are you doing, Zoe? I heard about your little performance this afternoon. Are you crazy? Baiting that psycho? You wanna get yourself killed?”
“My ‘little performance’ was a hell of a lot better than that transparent pussy effort from your Dr. French at the press conference. . . . He’s going after big tits now, Rozelli. As I see it, I qualify.”
He looked at her breasts. “I won’t argue with that. But I think you’re worth a lot more alive than dead.”
“Why, Johnny, you say the sweetest things.” She reached across and stroked his cheek. “I can take care of myself, Rozelli. And if I can get this son-of-a-bitch off the streets . . .”
“. . . you should be good for at least a five-year extension on your contract. With bonuses.”
“You’re a real shit, you know that. You act like I don’t care about those women who were murdered.”
“I never said that, Zoe.” He was staring at her, smiling.
“You might as well have, asshole.”
“I love it when you talk dirty.”
She reached up and put her arms around his neck. “Really, Johnny, don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.” Then she reached down. “. . . and this.”
He moaned, falling into her, pressing her body against the car. “Here . . . ?” he whispered on her mouth.
“Why not, bad boy, it’s dark. No one can see us since security fell down on its job.”
Hanae had fitted the home she shared with Jimmy with a shelf to the Shinto gods and an altar for Buddha, each receiving offerings on proper occasions. That there were inherent contradictions between the two belief systems—to a Shintoist the present life was the only worthy one, the afterlife beset with evil; to a Buddhist the opposite was truth—was inconsequential, since it was possible for a Japanese to compartmentalize the mind and accept contrary things. Each way had its place.
Hanae had gone to both shelf and altar. But unlike a Christian, she did not pray for relief, did not ask to be granted peace. She accepted her present distress and fear as necessary consequences of living. Yet her heart sought understanding.
She knew that life held uncertainty, that impermanence was of its own necessity, that it effected its own brief beauty. Straw sandals wore out, the kimono was restitched after each washing, shoji frames were repapered twice a year. Cherry blossoms, the most cherished of flowers, lasted but three days.
She sat upon the tatami mat, her eyes closed, sitting now in posture, between Buddha and willful self. Breathing first through one nostril, then the other. Long deep lung-emptying, lung-filling breaths. The troubling dark within her spoke clearly of the certainty of uncertainty. Of the inescapable mutability of the eternal. Of that which was hidden in plain sight.
Last night’s dream still haunted, wrapping its greedy hand around her heart. She had revisited that time that never was, with Mama-san, in the garden of her Kyoto home. Cutting the melon into perfect halves. The knife slipping. Her open palm bleeding. The blood falling to earth, feeding snails gliding in sticky ribbons, beetles burrowing deep.
It was the dark silk of dream-death woven. And the memory of the bloodletting emptied, leaving her as dry and thin as paper. With the knowledge that two were one.
CHAPTER
22
It is the scene for which he has been waiting—this new excursion. Mother Fox, with the kits in the Navigator, drives northward on the parkway.
The van hangs behind, keeping the space of three vehicles. A nondescript phantom in the depths of her rearview mirror. A new haunting amidst the sleepy hollows.
Her destination is a town along the river. She drives through tight streets where clapboard shops cluster together in pastel splendor. Antique shops and restaurants serving sandwiches and tea. Galleries hawking the latest in Hudson River art.
He is close behind her now, but nothing of notice in this sea of commercial perfection. And Mother Fox is intent on her mission. Giving up on the crowded street, she pulls into a small garage that is three storeys of drab concrete, sprouting in the narrow lot like a spore that has blown from the city. He drives in behind her, watching as she secures the SUV in the cave of the ground floor, parking at the far dark end away from the herd. No dings or dents will mar the silver finish.
She has unloaded his treasures and is moving toward him when three women with packages emerge from the sunny world outside. Their laughter is like an explosion in the low-ceilinged space. The trunk of a Lexus yawns hungrily at their approach.
Mother moves past the shoppers, who nod and grin at the redheaded bundles, their energy straining at the tethers of her hands. Mother smiles too, moving the kits in her determined wake. He restarts the engine, swinging the van in an arc toward the Navigator, sliding smoothly into the adjoining slot. He also smiles, who only sits and waits.
The walls of Zoe’s office were bare of mementos. She preferred it that way. Life was what happened next. And her life was good, especially with Johnny back in it, and her show as hot as it got in the afternoon ratings.
And life could stay good, as long as your determination never let up and you remembered to stay behind . . . the glass, was how she always thought of it. You watched it all through the glass—the crap that people did to one another, the crap that just happened for no reason at all. So close that you could see it all, the broken bodies and broken lives. So close you could pity it, could almost, but not quite, touch it. Just the thickness of the glass marking the division between you and some shitload of disaster.
Fucking sick bitch . . . fucking vulture. She could still hear his voice, though it was years ago now. The husband, young and good-looking . . . her own age.His finger jabbing the air in front of her nose. His face twisted in an expression of hate. All his rage at the viciousness of his wife’s pointless death directed at her.
It had been one of her first assignments for the Post, her chance to prove herself. She’d posed as a hospital grief counselor. She just couldn’t think of any other way to get “the story behind the story” that her editor was demanding. And the truth was, it had been doing the husband some good to open up to her, to tell someone how it felt to have the heart ripped out of you. But the damn nurse had come demanding to know who she was. And that was that. Suddenly she was just this sick bitch with no letters behind her name.
The truth was that a grief counselor was exactly what she was. Not just to some poor schmuck whose wife had just become a victim of the latest horror, but to the public at large. The world was a very nasty place where a lot of bad things happened. Exposing it all made that somehow easier to live with. And as her editor had always pointed out when defending the Post’s tactics, the victims deserved acknowledgment too, deserved to be something more than anonymous statistics. Sterilizing pain, Murphy said, was not what gave it dignity.
If she made her living off tragedy, well, the same could be said for doctors. Life was tragedy unless you somehow managed to stay behind the glass. And it wasn’t like she didn’t know what it was like on the other side of that window—the little girl thrown clear in the accident that had killed her schoolmates.
She shook away the memory. What had started this bout of introspection? Satisfaction with her ratings? You were only as good as your last outing, and she had a show to do this afternoon, a show with nothing new or exclusive on the Ripper Murders.
The problem was that her regular sources didn’t have anything that was new. And though she’d tried to call Johnny, she hadn’t seen or talked to him since that little stunt in the parking lot. Not that she’d expected he could or would tell her much. Boundaries had been set on Halloween night. She had stuck around in his apartment even after she’d found the key to the cuffs where he’d hidden it, barely within reach on the bedside table. He’d woken her when he’d returned
from the Talise crime scene, and kept his promise to share with her what he could, which wasn’t really any more than was authorized for the general media. But it was a firsthand account, which at least felt like an edge. And there were other rewards for playing it straight with Johnny. She had to smile thinking about what had happened on the hood of her rented car. Hadn’t that been some send-off for her visit with Momma in Queens?
“Ms. Kahn . . . Zoe?” The boy from the mailroom had interrupted her thoughts. He was standing outside her office, wearing his goofball smile. Lester was one of her admirers.
“Is that for me?” She was looking at the package in his hands.
“You said you wanted special delivery on anything that looked interesting.”
“You’re a sweetie for bringing it.”
“No return address,” he said, looking down at the brown paper wrapping. “That freaked out the screeners.” He hung back in the doorway, prolonging the contact. “Not a bomb, though. Too light. . . . And they ran it through X ray.”
“Could I have the package, Lester?”
“Sure.” He came forward, handing it to her. “Mind if I stay and watch?”
She nodded. This might not be what she hoped. But it wouldn’t be bad to have a witness. Just in case.
She was opening a drawer for the cutters when a sudden intuition hit that this might really be it, her dreamed-for contact with the killer of no fewer than seven women. For seconds while she cut carefully through the wrapping, she considered that the glass might be growing thin. In seconds more she didn’t care.
Rozelli walked to the rear of the Operations Room and switched on the television. He picked up the remote, punched in the channel. Pushing over a box of half-eaten pizza, he slumped against the desk.
“Hey, Leopold, take a look. It’s Johnny. Wanna guess what he’s doing?”
“No clue, Vince. Watchin’ something on the Arts and Entertainment network?”