by Tim Green
“I liked that, too . . . ,” he said, his voice cracking. “How ’bout that drink?”
Jack took her to a restaurant in a nearby shopping center. A quiet place with soft music and small leather booths. A place where the flicker of candles heightened the dreamy intimacy between two people who had yet to know all there was to know about each other.
When they arrived, a teenage valet took the car from them to a lot out back. When Beth saw a woman in an evening dress on the arm of a man in a suit emerge from the place, she was reluctant to go in dressed in jeans, but Jack insisted that they were fine. The host who greeted them at the door felt otherwise. He was in his midtwenties with a tan face and a strong broad chin. He had greased his shoulder-length hair over his head and wore a large diamond earring. His clothes were completely black.
“We don’t allow jeans at La Maison,’’ he said.
Jack turned on him and his face dropped from a complacent smile into a forbidding frown. His eyes narrowed slightly, the life suddenly draining from them.
“I think you should make an exception for us,” he said.
The man snorted and combed through his greasy locks with his fingers. The stereo above played some horrible jazz fusion. “Sorry,” he said. “There’s an Applebee’s next door.’’
Jack took another step toward the man with his body tense and coiled as if ready to spring. “I’m sure you’ll be heading there after work for some potato skins and a couple of margaritas, jackass, but I think I’m fine right here,” he said. He moved in close, smelling the man’s tangy, overripe cologne. “I’ll be at the bar if you’d like to help yourself to a good old-fashioned ass kicking. Better yet, maybe you want to call the police and have them charge her with wearing denim?’’
The man pressed his lips tightly together, boiling. He continued to sneer, but bowed his head and waved them in with sarcastic assent.
“Good,” Jack said. He turned and took Beth by the arm. The bartender winked at them and nodded appreciatively. Jack smiled back thankfully and ordered their drinks, his voice back to normal.
Jack took two healthy swallows of his vodka tonic while Beth sipped tentatively at a glass of red wine.
“You got quiet,” he said gently.
She had pulled her hair back with a mother-of-pearl-inlaid comb; it fell in two perfect curtains of silk just behind either ear. She was looking down, her eyes hidden by their own long lashes.
After clearing her throat, she said, “Just when I think I’m getting to know you, I realize that I don’t.
“It’s funny,” she said with the whisper of a laugh. “Most people, the more time you spend with them, the better you know them. But it’s the opposite with you. It seems like the more I know you, the more I don’t know you.”
“I’m sorry,’’ he said. His hands quivering around the wet rim of the glass. “I just get angry sometimes.’’
“No,” she said, waving her hand in a dismissive manner. “I don’t care about that. I’m glad you didn’t just let him run us out of here. I would have. No, it’s just that I was surprised you did it.
“I think I’m glad you did,” she added hastily.
Jack considered her for a moment before asking, “Why did that surprise you so much?”
“You’re so . . . quiet, I guess,” she said. “You’re quiet and smart. It’s like you’re shy, but not shy in a bad way. And then you just, like, turned vicious. I don’t think it was so much what you said that made him back down. It was how you said it. All of a sudden, I felt my heart pounding because I knew you meant it. I thought, you know, that you’d really hit him or something.”
“I used to just let things happen to me,” Jack said. He spoke softly, gazing down at his glass as he swirled the melted shapes of ice in his drink. “But lately, I guess since Janet . . .
“Lately I don’t care as much what people think in situations like that. I guess I got pushed around by people, not in an overt way, but subtly—subtly pushed around my whole life. I think I got pushed around at my law firm and probably by my ex-wife. I think maybe I’m just not going to let that happen anymore. That’s all it is . . .”
She reached over and touched his cheek, drawing his lips to hers.
“I don’t want to push you around, Jack,” she whispered. “But I want to know you.”
Jack swallowed and looked into her eyes. He considered her carefully and for some time before he worked up the courage to speak.
“Do you want to . . . I don’t know, do you want to stay at my place tonight?” he asked.
Beth shut her eyes and nodded. “Yes,” she said, “that’s what I want. I want that very much.”
Jack paid the bartender. Outside, there was no sign of the valet. They waited for a few minutes in silence. Impatient, Jack rounded the corner of the building to where he’d seen his car disappear. Still there was no sign of the valet. The Saab sat right there in front of them and on a hunch, Jack slid inside and found the keys stashed above the visor.
“Come on,” he said to Beth as he started the engine.
On the way back to his house they held hands in the front seat and said nothing. Jack felt himself coming back to her, to them, then and there. They had never spent the night together. Even though their age difference wasn’t unusual, he still felt a slight pang of discomfort. He was nearly ten years older than she was.
They drove with the top down and the warm summer air whipped through their hair, cooling them. Beth’s hand, however, was warm so Jack didn’t even bother asking if she wanted the top up. As he pulled into the driveway of what had so recently been his family’s home, Jack’s blood was running too high for him to even think about how strange it was to have this woman by his side.
He led her by the hand into the house and they kissed again just inside the door before he took her up the stairs. Together they stood in the middle of his bedroom. Jack put the radio on next to the bed and he heard a song he knew from his law school days, Bruce Springsteen tenderly on fire. Light fell in from the hallway, and Jack tried to subdue the frantic desire he had to tear the clothes from her body. He ran his trembling hands up under her white top until she stopped him.
She let her jacket slide off her arms to the floor and with both hands pulled the top off up over her head. Half naked, she began to undress him, brushing his warm bare skin with her dampened lips as she worked. When Jack’s clothes were in a pile on the floor, Beth slipped out of her pants and clung to him. Jack kissed her hard. He ran his hands gently over the firm contours beneath her warm skin. Finally he pushed her gently back toward the bed. She stopped to remove the comb and then lay back. Her long silky hair spilled down around her pale shoulders and onto the plush down comforter, black as ink in the dim yellow light from the hall.
CHAPTER 23
Jack awoke with a start. Beth groaned softly, momentarily tightening her grip on his ribs. At the same time she softly pressed her lips into the muscles of his chest. Her hair had somehow fallen across the ridges of his stomach, warming him with its silky touch. Jack breathed deeply, enjoying the naked warmth of her skin. After a while, though, his mind began to tumble upward and he slipped out from underneath her gentle grasp and the warm nest of bedclothes. He pulled on a pair of shorts and walked barefoot into the bathroom.
As he washed his hands he noticed for the first time the toothpaste smeared about the vanity, the tube lying open amid the mess. He hadn’t expected her to spend the night. Dried spatters of soapy water and foam blemished the mirror. He found a relatively clean washcloth in the closet, dampened it, and began to wipe up the worst of it. Then he straightened up, putting his deodorant, his shaving cream, and a bottle of mint Listerine beneath the sink. An armful of towels from the floor went into the bottom of the closet along with a mental note to do some laundry.
He padded back across the cold granite floor and into the bedroom. Beth lay sprawled out amid a wild tangle of covers. He gazed at her with a mixture of pleasure and pain. He slipped out of the bedro
om and into the wide hall. Everything was the same, the wallpaper, the slightly crooked oil painting of an Atlantic seascape in winter, and the occasional muffled thump of the furnace vent as the air-conditioning kicked on. It seemed impossible to him that everything could be the same when nothing really was.
Hatred suddenly boiled up inside of Jack. His wife, Angela, had twisted and stretched him throughout their marriage. That was bad luck or a bad decision by him. But when she blamed him for what happened? Inside, he had already blamed himself.
Jack’s hands clamped instinctively into fists. When he felt this way, his only consolation was the thought of cleansing the world of more human poison. It gave meaning to his life and alleviated at least some of the horrible guilt.
He knew he would never get back to sleep, and lying awake in bed in the state he was in now would only tarnish the brief moments of happiness that he’d experienced with Beth. Instead he went downstairs to the library, where his computer sat atop his massive tiger maple desk. Books lined the shelves, many of them leather collectibles. Jack had read them all, mostly sitting in the overstuffed chair by the big window overlooking the back lawn. Some of them he’d read aloud to Janet when she was young: A Tale of Two Cities, Black Beauty, Treasure Island.
He sat down in the large leather chair at the desk and turned on his machine. Things had changed since Hans Strauss in Oswego. He was getting good. It didn’t make the act of killing any less distasteful, but it certainly made him less apprehensive. It wasn’t unlike the expertise he had acquired in a power-plant acquisition, where once confusing details now read with the simplicity of a road sign.
He had discovered a Web site compiled by volunteers from the families of other victims. It posted the sex offender registry information of nearly every jurisdiction over the Internet. Jack could quickly locate the worst of the scum from different cities or counties. After reflecting, he knew that what he’d done in Pittsburgh had been a mistake. Two similar murders in the same place could arouse suspicion.
Since then he had targeted only one sex offender in any police jurisdiction so that no pattern would emerge for investigators to lock onto. During his last power-plant transaction in Dayton, Ohio, he had chosen second and third victims in nearby Springfield and the outskirts of Cincinnati. Jack knew that police forces rarely communicated among themselves, even regarding the worst crimes. It wasn’t impossible to cross-reference crimes either by e-mails or Teletype, but Jack knew that there were investigations and there were investigations. No cop he ever knew would bust his tail to find the killer of a level-three sex offender.
One thing he had not done was strike within his own geographic area. He wanted to. He wanted to stop at least one predatory criminal from victimizing another teenage girl like his daughter. He had buried six serial rapists so far, none of them from Long Island. Before now, he’d been too cautious. But with his newfound confidence, he presumed that if he did it just once, his own proximity to the crime wouldn’t matter.
In the glow of the computer screen Jack’s face would have looked to anyone who could have seen him like the visage of a dark angel, so grim and full of vengeful determination that he looked like something either more or less than human. He scanned through the files of people who had done unthinkable things. There were so many to choose from that it sickened him. By his means of assessment, all of them deserved to die, but he was only one man and he had to make a choice. He selected Lawrence Brice.
Like Eugene Tupp, Brice had a long list of prior incidents that began at an early age. He was eighteen when he kidnapped, beat, and raped a high school classmate. He served less than two years. Within eight months of his release he dragged a pregnant woman bound and gagged into some woods. She was miraculously rescued by a passing off-duty police officer. Brice was found guilty not of assault, or kidnapping, but for something called unlawful retention, a relatively minor infraction. Despite his previous record, he served just six months. Two years later he was charged with the rape and assault of a coed from Hofstra University. But like Eugene Tupp, Brice had escaped conviction. At trial, the pipe Brice had used to beat the girl was excluded from evidence, also because of an unlawful-search-and-seizure ruling. Given the chance, he was the kind of man who would do something similar to what Eugene Tupp had done to Janet. Probably he already had.
Brice lived on Longcut Road, out where Long Island actually became somewhat rural. It was near the Brookhaven National Laboratory and not far from where Beth had her apartment in Medford. It would be convenient for him to scope out Brice, either before or after picking up Beth for a date. While he recognized the efficiency of the location on the surface, deep down it made him uneasy, dropping off Beth and then reconnoitering a victim just a few minutes away.
A noise by the door yanked him back from his dark reverie. Beth stood there, the tails of one of his dress shirts hanging to her knees. The shirt’s white cuffs had fallen down over her hands, but as she reached up to sweep her hair back from her face one of them fell free, revealing her long elegant fingers.
“Beth,” he said, standing up and coming out from behind his desk. Instead of crossing the room to embrace her, he stood awkwardly on the rug in the center of the library and shifted uneasily in his shorts from one foot to the other.
“What are you doing?” she asked sleepily, peering at the computer.
“Nothing,” he said. The word snapped in the space between them.
“Oh come on,” she said. With a playful expression she moved toward his desk, craning her neck. “I gotta see whatever it is that could get you out of bed in the middle of the night. I gotta know what my competition is. Not some weakness in the intellectual armor like a video game . . .”
“No!” Jack yelled, cutting her off.
CHAPTER 24
Beth stopped and looked at him with disbelief.
“That’s my work,” he said.
“Whatever,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He crossed the room and tried to touch her shoulder. Beth shook free and stepped back.
“Will you please take me home?” she asked, looking away.
“Beth, I . . .”
“Now,” she said, looking at the floor. She had her arms folded tightly in front of her, and her mouth was closed tight.
“Yes,” he said. He looked up at the antique clock on one of the bookshelves. It was just past five. “Yes, of course.”
Dawn was beginning to seep in through the tall mullioned windows. While Beth changed upstairs, Jack scribbled down Brice’s address and turned off the computer. Upstairs, he pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. With a grim frown he removed the locked silver metal briefcase from his closet and put it in the trunk of the car. Beth climbed into the front seat without comment.
They rode in a painful silence. When he got off the expressway exit for Medford, Jack said he was sorry again.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. Her tone and her distant gaze said much more than her words.
Jack noticed that he was clenching the steering wheel. He sighed, and then let go. He knew there was something powerful he should say, something clever and romantic. He was forty-two years old and all he could think of was the same old losing strategy that he had seen his own father employ: to say that he was sorry and wait.
He pulled up in front of her apartment, a gray New England-style three-story complex with white railings and shutters. The sun was nearly up by now and the nearby expressway had already come to life with the steady hum of traffic, although there was no other sign of life in the parking lot itself.
Jack hesitated, then he leaned over to kiss Beth’s cheek. It was too late. She was already out of the car.
“Beth,” he said, but she shut the door in his face.
Jack put down the window.
“I’m . . .” he said, and then stopped, his mouth half open. It was there, just beyond his reach like a forgotten name on the tip of his tongue.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Beth, I
’m sorry.”
She kept walking. He watched her back as she disappeared into her apartment.
Jack held his breath for a minute, waiting to see if she’d come back out. She didn’t. He looked at his watch and slammed the Saab into gear, driving out through the parking lot and onto the open highway.
Fifteen minutes later he was driving slowly down a rural road with sandy brown shoulders and thick-needled pine trees. After passing by a couple of ranch houses, Jack came to an opening where an old gray house sat alone with its naked wood decaying among a tangle of weeds, tall grass, and brambles. The only sign of life was an old brown utility van that had been run up the two sandy ruts and rested next to the weather-beaten house. Paint on the clapboard siding hadn’t been a concern for decades; the few patches that remained were so grimy that they served only to enhance the overall sense of blight.
The windows were intact except for one, which was miraculous considering the pile of corroded junk that was stacked up on the porch beside a broken refrigerator. The rusted bodies of three cars lurked in the weeds. The blood in Jack’s temples began to thump. His mind reached a clarity that seemed almost drug-induced. The trees and the freshly laid blacktop on the road, even his car bathed in the brightening sky, were like the shiny silver images seen in a mirror.
Jack drove a little farther down the road, discovering nothing but the dirt access road for a gas distribution pumphouse. He pulled off the pavement and tucked his car under the eaves of some trees. With his shirt untucked and his gun stuck into the waist of his jeans, Jack walked back down the road toward the sagging gray house. At the mailbox he looked either way before pulling on his leather driving gloves and starting up the sandy ruts toward the house. He climbed onto the porch, stepping up on an upside-down bucket. Two cats leapt from their resting places in the junk and disappeared from sight. A fetid odor seeped up from underneath the porch. Jack felt his stomach tighten.