The Girls He Adored

by Jonathan Nasaw

  “You go to hell.”

  “I come from hell,” he replied, holding his lip.

  From her bedroom window, Julia Miller watched Ulysses and the new one, the psychiatrist, crossing the meadow, both of them stark staring naked. The psychiatrist was stumbling forward, her arms crossed over her breasts; Ulysses was behind her, pinching his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger with one hand and shoving her ahead of him with the other when she faltered. It looked very much as if the honeymoon was over.

  It also looked as if the new one had restored her hair to its original, strawberry blond color.

  Good things come to she who waits, thought Miss Miller, leaving her bedroom for the first time that day. Ulysses would be needing his clippers. She decided to bring him one of his new guns, too. The big one.

  A horizontal trapdoor, flush with the ground. A descent into a dark stairwell. Another door, vertical. A glaring, diffuse white light overhead, a stifling heat. Two women, emaciated as concentration camp survivors, each with a blanket around her shoulders, standing in the center of the room, their arms around each other's waists. The smaller one's skin was stretched tightly over her cheekbones, and her lips had drawn away from her teeth—a death's head surrounded by a nimbus of red-gold stubble. The larger one had a little more flesh on her, and her hair was longer. Same color, though, except for a touch of gray at the temples.

  “Harvest time,” said Maxwell, shoving Irene toward them. “Clean her the fuck up.”

  As Max locked the inner door, the hatch slid open above him. Miss Miller started down the steps with her sewing basket over her forearm. The soundproofed hatch closed automatically above her. Ignoring his nakedness, she handed him the basket containing his battery-powered Panasonic hair clippers, along with his new Glock.

  “Miss Miller, you're a wonder.” Max's lower lip had stopped bleeding, but felt stiff—a crust had formed over the split. “I was just on my way up to fetch these.”

  “I'm not optimistic about that new one's hair,” she said. “I'll try to make it work, but you know I prefer natural color. Which reminds me, Ulysses: did you notice the old one in there is turning gray?”

  “I did. I was planning to take care of her tonight,” Max told her. It was the truth, too. Kinch was extremely disappointed at having been deprived first of Barbara, then Bernadette, and then, most cruelly, just as he was poised to strike, of Irene. And a disappointed Kinch was an angry Kinch, an unmanageable Kinch. Maxwell understood full well that he needed to throw the bloodthirsty alter a bone. And what better bone than Donna Hughes, the once desirable Texan, now only another mouth to feed?

  “Oh, how lovely.” Miss Miller was genuinely pleased. And why not?—things were finally getting back to normal on Scorned Ridge after the disruption of Ulysses's protracted absence, followed by the presence of the meddling psychiatrist. “By the way, sweetheart, I was thinking of steaming some vegetables and rice for supper— how does that sound?”

  “Slice up a couple of those hot sausages I bought yesterday, and you've got a deal.”

  “ Have a deal,” she corrected, then turned and started back up the steps.

  “About tonight,” Maxwell called up to her. “Did you want to watch?”

  “Thank you for asking,” she said, pushing the button that caused the hatch to slide open again. “I'm a little fatigued from all this excitement. Let me see how I feel after a nice long nap.”

  “Whatever you decide—it's up to you.”

  “Of course it is, my sweetness and light. Of course it is.”

  81

  PENDER HAD BEEN A dog owner most of his life. He liked dogs. Lost the last one, a handsome shepherd named Cassidy, in the divorce—the house he didn't mind losing so much, but he was still bitter about the dog and had steadfastly refused to get another, though he understood perfectly well that he was only punishing himself.

  So shooting the Rottweilers would be no cakewalk, either emotionally or physically. Pender was lying on his left side, his right hand under his jacket. Once he'd caught his breath he began drawing the SIG Sauer millimeter by agonizing millimeter, until it was free of the holster but still concealed beneath his coat—most dogs this well trained would have been taught to recognize a weapon and disarm the bearer. Slowly, though his every instinct screamed at him to do the opposite, to protect his underbelly and his manhood by curling up into a fetal ball, he rolled onto his back.

  Warning behavior from the dogs—snarls, a display of incisors.

  “Good dogs. Aren't you good dogs?” Pender crooned to them in his soulful tenor. Though the muzzle of the SIG pointed to the left, he'd have to begin shooting from right to left, before the dogs on the right side got to his shooting arm. The dogs to the left he figured he could fend off with his left arm until he could swing the gun around. “Calm down, now. Nice and easy. See, I'm not gonna—”

  BLAM. BLAM. BLAM. He dropped the first three with head shots, and the other three turned tail and ran whimpering for the kennel. Apparently they weren't that well trained after all, thought Pender, climbing to his feet and mentally thanking SIG Sauer for the dual-action firing mechanism. Then he smelled something burning. He looked down, saw the smoldering bullet holes riddling his new jacket: the blood-spattered fabric had been ignited by the muzzle flash.

  After slapping the fire out with his bare hands, Pender raced around the sally port, hurriedly gathering up the ID, receipts, credit cards, scraps of notes, ticket stubs, and business cards that had fallen from his wallet when the dogs hit him, then looked around the sally port, trying to work out his next move.

  In one direction, an unlocked gate leading to safety; in the opposite direction, a locked gate leading to Maxwell. Pender knew what the smart move was, but once again he was blinded by his secret vision of the strawberry blonds waiting in the darkness. And even if they were a fantasy, he told himself, Dr. Cogan wasn't. If Pender left now, what was to prevent Maxwell from executing her, then fleeing? He had cash and cunning—how many more would die before they ran him to ground?

  With no time to waste, Pender had already wasted precious seconds. He ran toward the inner fence and fired a fourth round into the lock—he figured the element of surprise was pretty much lost anyway. Then he crashed through the gate shoulder first and hurriedly left the blacktop, cutting to his right, into the relative safety of the woods.

  The first structure Pender came upon was a weathered shack six feet square. A pumphouse; he could hear the high thin whine of a motor and smell the water in the deep covered well.

  He ducked inside and waited, listening. Nothing out there—no barking, shouting, no gunshots, no footsteps. Where the hell is Maxwell? He's not deaf—is he gone? It was tempting to rest there in the cool darkness for a few minutes; instead he closed the door behind him quietly and moved on, following the ridge.

  Pender almost missed the house at first. What caught his eye was the dark triangle of the roofline glimpsed from behind through the sweeping, upturned boughs of the firs. It was a dense geometric shape floating high in the trees where everything else was airy grace and flickering light, where the only other straight lines were the soaring verticals of the tree trunks.

  He began moving toward the house, walking quietly on his rubber-soled shoes, keeping to the cover of the trees, and came upon the damnedest sight. A rustic-looking wooden chair and a slatted chaise had been placed at forty-five-degree angles to each other, with a three-legged table in the angle between them holding a pitcher of water, two plastic drinking glasses, an ashtray full of unfiltered butts, and a box of pop-up lilac-colored tissues.

  Despite the oddness of the setting, Pender recognized the simulacrum of a psychiatrist's office. A good omen, an excellent omen: it almost certainly meant that Dr. Cogan was alive. Or had been, fairly recently. He picked up one of the butts—a Camel—then tossed it back down and followed the path through the woods to the house, a high, narrow dwelling of dark-stained, weatherwarped deal.

  He entered through the back
door, found himself in the kitchen. Bread, baggies, a knife with damp traces of mayonnaise and mustard on the counter. It looked like someone had packed a lunch here—not long ago, either.

  A picnic or outing of some kind? Was that why no one heard the shots?

  There were two doors ahead of him, the open door to the hallway and a closed door to the right of the hallway door. Again the vision of the strawberry blonds waiting in a cellar appeared to Pender: apparently his subconscious mind had grasped where the closed door led before his conscious mind could reason it out.

  He switched the gun to his left hand, opened the door, felt around for the light switch, started down the open-treaded stairs. At the bottom of the stairs he looked left—laundry room—then turned right, rounded a corner, and came upon the glass-fronted display case containing four shelves, each with three featureless white mannequin heads, all but two wearing wigs of human hair.

  Pender groaned softly to see his secret hope, his secret vision, so cruelly, surrealistically parodied. Here were his strawberry blonds—he even recognized a few. That one with the bangs on the second shelf from the bottom, that was Gloria Whitworth, wearing her hair the way she wore it in the photo her roommate snapped a week before she left Reeford. This darker one on the top shelf, with the reddish highlights, that was Donna Hughes. And there on the bottom shelf was Sandra Faircloth—her long straight hair had faded badly in the ten years since she'd disappeared from Eugene, Oregon, shortly after meeting the man of her dreams.

  So much for hopes and visions. In a career spent hunting serial killers, many of them of the type known as collectors, Pender had seen far more obscene and gruesome displays. This one was pretty tame in comparison. Why then was he so badly shaken, he wondered? Because he had come to believe in his hopeful vision?

  Let that be a lesson to you, Edgar Lee, he told himself. Now get your fat ass out of this house and back down that hill and get some real cops in here, clear-eyed, clearheaded young ones who'll shoot first and have visions later.

  Then he remembered that Dr. Cogan might still be alive. He tiptoed back up the stairs, switched off the light, closed the cellar door behind him, sidled around the doorway into the hall. His steps were noiseless, Hush Puppies on hardwood, as he started up the stairs.

  When he reached the second-floor landing, Pender heard someone moving in one of the rooms. He tiptoed toward the open doorway, peeked around the jamb just as a woman in a long green dress emerged from an adjoining room and crossed to the bed, her back toward Pender. Her strawberry blond hair was short and curly. Dolores Moon, he thought, taking a step forward.

  Miss Miller turned; her green eyes started to widen over the mask, but the surgically repaired lids couldn't go any higher. She tried to scream—Pender closed the gap between them in two strides and clapped his hand over her mask. A disconcerting sensation—there didn't seem to be any nose under there.

  “It's all right, I'm with the FBI,” he whispered. “Don't make a sound. Do you understand me?”

  A nod. He loosened his grip. She tried to scream again; again he closed his hand over the mask, this time covering both her mouth and the hole where her nose would have been, denying her air. She clawed at his arm, tried to kick him. He bent backward far enough to lift her off the ground and held her dangling there, legs kicking and arms flailing, chest heaving, until her body went limp. He dropped her onto the bed, turned her over.

  Please let her be breathing, he thought to himself—he didn't want to have to perform mouth-to-mouth on whatever was under that surgical mask. But the green bodice rose, fell; the silk mask fluttered. And as Pender looked around for something to stuff into her mouth to prevent her from screaming again when she regained consciousness, it occurred to him that he still didn't know whether he'd rescued a victim or captured an accomplice.

  82

  IT'S OVER, IRENE TOLD herself. The chase, the capture, the glimpse of her own death in that frozen moment when the rock was poised in Kinch's upraised hand, then the ordeal of being halfpushed, half-dragged up the ravine and across the meadow, followed by the stumbling descent into this glaring white hell with its two damned souls, had left her beyond exhaustion, beyond hope, even beyond terror—or so she thought.

  The room was ten feet high, twelve paces wide, and thirty paces long, with cement walls, a musty green indoor-outdoor carpet over the cement floor, and an elongated, opaque, thermoplastic bubble for a ceiling. Electric fans, one to suck air in and another to draw it out, were set into the walls at either end of the room, just under the ceiling.

  A single tap eighteen inches above floor level in one corner supplied water for drinking and, apparently, washing hair, because lined up against the wall nearby were at least a dozen bottles of shampoo and creme rinse. No soap, just lots of shampoo. The only other amenity in the room, the privy, was a doorless four-by-four alcove, with a wood-grained plastic toilet seat mounted on a hollow platform over a deep pit.

  “Over here,” whispered the taller of the two women, seizing Irene by the elbow, attempting to pull her toward the tap. “Please, it's best to do as he says.”

  “Why?”

  “To avoid unnecessary pain,” the smaller woman explained patiently, taking Irene's other elbow. “He's very good at pain.”

  And what Irene saw in their eyes, glancing from one woman to the other as they gently tugged her toward the corner of the room, sent the terror welling up inside her again. Because what she saw was pity—for some reason too frightening even to contemplate, these two walking cadavers felt sorry for her.

  When she understood that they meant for her to kneel naked on the steel grate set into the concrete floor under the tap, Irene balked. Even together, they weren't strong enough to force her down; as they urged her, their eyes kept glancing back to the door in the opposite corner of the room. When it opened, they stepped away from Irene.

  “Kneel,” called Maxwell, striding across the room naked, with the sewing basket over one arm, and gesturing to Irene with the barrel of his pistol. She knelt.

  “You two, over there.” He waved the gun in the direction of the door; they obeyed, but instead of crossing the room directly, they scuttled sideways around the perimeter, blankets drawn around their throats, giving him as wide a berth as possible without turning their backs on him.

  “Get your head under the faucet, close your eyes.”

  After the fear, and the shock of the cold water, came the humiliation. Kneeling naked and powerless left Irene feeling not so much angry, or even despairing, as defeated. No more praying, no more bargaining, no more affirmations, no more scheming. She closed her eyes and let her head loll while Maxwell, his touch as sure and gentle as her own hairdresser, lifted and separated the strands of her hair, parting and sifting them with his fingers to rinse out the mud and leaves from the riverbank, the pale green clinging seeds of meadow grass.

  Under the rushing water, a sort of peace came over Irene. And although the pychiatrist in her couldn't help putting a name to it— traumatic dissociation—Irene knew that what she was experiencing was beyond classifying, beyond analyzing. How presumptuous of her, she thought, to insist on dragging her patients back to reality all these years. Because in the not-here, not-now, she had somehow managed to distance herself from the pain and the unbearable fear. The once overwhelming emotions were still there, but at a remove; hers, but not her.

  And not even the gentle tugging at her scalp as Max gathered her twice-washed, creme-rinsed, strawberry blond hair in one hand, or the annoying buzz of the portable clippers as he harvested it, reached Irene in the no-place to which she had retreated.

  83

  AFTER POPPING DOWN TO the basement to switch the power to the perimeter fence back on, Maxwell hurried upstairs to deliver the sewing basket with its precious cargo of human hair. Miss Miller's bedroom door was closed; he tapped lightly.

  “Woman of the house!” John Wayne to Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man, one of their favorites.

  “ Man of the house, M
iss Miller was supposed to respond. Instead, silence. He opened the door and saw she wasn't there, that the bed was barely rumpled. Max crossed the hall to his bedroom, slipped on a pair of shorts and a fresh hula shirt, and went to look for her.

  But Miss Miller wasn't up by the chicken coop. Maybe the kennel—she might have gone for her minimum daily requirement of hugs. Her lovies, as she called them—how Miss Miller loved to get her lovies from her doggies. And they loved her too. Somehow they knew to be patient and gentle with her—they never roughhoused the way they did with him, but absorbed her endless caresses with wiggly-assed delight.

  Max knew Miss Miller wasn't there long before he reached the kennel next to the sally port. Something was seriously amiss. None of the dogs came rushing to the fence to meet him, not even Lizzie with her waggling tail. He opened the kennel gate, saw three dogs whimpering in the shed, crossed the kennel yard, stepped into the sally port through the side door, and stared dumbfounded at a dismal sight.

  His three senior dogs, Jack, Lizzie, and Dr. Cream, lay in pools of blood on the blacktop, the backs of their heads gone, blown off, exploded from the inside out. He stooped next to Lizzie's body, stroked her short, greasy coat. His hand came away covered with blood and white flecks of bone and brain matter. He wiped his palm on her tail, which would never waggle again, then lifted what was left of her head and saw that she'd been shot through the underside of her muzzle. The top of her skull had been carried away, practically atomized by the exit wound of what must have been a hollow-point round fired from extremely close range.

  But what sort of monster would do such a thing, slaughter three dogs in cold blood? Although Maxwell knew that law enforcement often carried hollow-point man-stopper rounds, Black Talons, Gold Dots, that sort of thing, it didn't occur to him that this was the work of cops. Cops didn't pick a man's lock, sneak onto his property, shoot his dogs, and carry off his teacher.