‘Because now there’s possibly a police report indicating you were in Charleston with an old flame of yours. Having a bit of a lover’s quarrel.’
‘But … I haven’t spoken to Trish in twenty years.’
The homeless man kept his gaze on Elizabeth’s wallet.
‘Your wife doesn’t know that,’ she said.
The urge to hurt her flooded over him. ‘Why are you doing this? If this gets back to her she’ll leave me. And I haven’t done anything.’
‘You should understand why I’m doing this, Tommy. It’s not simply to fuck with you. It’s to make you desperate. The more desperate you are, the more willing you will be to do what I want.’
She pulled a bill from her wallet and handed it to the man on the street.
‘Here’s a hundred dollars,’ she said to him. ‘It’s probably pointless to say this, but please don’t spend it on alcohol or drugs. You can still get your life back. I’m sure there’s a shelter nearby. That can be your first step to a better life.’ She leaned down toward him and reached out and stroked his long, gnarled hair. ‘You can change yourself. Anyone can change.’
The man looked up at her but did not smile. He didn’t seem to understand at all.
Elizabeth stood and turned to Tommy.
‘It’s all a game, Tommy. All of this. Can’t you see that? Everything in life is a game. The goal is to see who can play it best.’ She pointed at the homeless man. ‘He’s already lost the game. He’s not having any fun at all.’
Tommy looked down at the homeless man, watching his head roll slowly from side to side.
‘I’ve been having fun for quite some time now,’ she continued, ‘but you don’t see that. You only see a chemically imbalanced sociopath. I need you to open your mind and play the game the way I do.’
Tommy couldn’t reconcile the calmly spoken words with the madness that must be inside of her.
‘Rade Baristow didn’t have any fun,’ he said. ‘Rade Baristow died when he was only ten.’
She shrugged. ‘We can’t all be winners, Tommy, despite what society teaches. Some – most – will be losers. That’s all just part of the game.’
‘So this is fun to you? That’s the whole point? Coming after me, and Mark, after all this time. That’s just more fun for you?’
‘No, Tommy. That’s what you aren’t seeing, and maybe you never will. I’m not here for me.’ Elizabeth walked in a small arc and stood next to the homeless man, who was holding the hundred-dollar bill loose like a napkin. Tommy figured he’d be robbed, and maybe beaten, before he ever got a chance to spend it. ‘I’m here for you,’ she continued. ‘I’m here to teach you how to play the game better.’
‘And from that I’ll understand you better.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And write about you the way you want to be written about. Have a bestseller about you. The world will know about you.’
‘See? Doesn’t that sound like fun?’
‘So what about Mark?’ Tommy asked. ‘Why go to him as well?’
She looked down at the homeless man. ‘We all have something to offer,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Mark has his uses. As did Jason.’
A chill swept under Tommy’s skin, and it wasn’t just the night.
‘What happened to Jason?’ he asked.
‘That’s a story for another day.’
In that moment Tommy realized she had killed Jason. But he wasn’t ready to know about that. Now, he just needed to process what she was telling him.
‘Hannibal Lecter,’ Tommy said.
‘What?’
‘What if Hannibal Lecter wasn’t just a character in a book? What if he were real, and Thomas Harris actually knew him? And everything he wrote actually happened? The world knows Hannibal Lecter, but no one thinks he’s real. And somewhere, the real Hannibal Lecter is laughing, immortalized.’
Elizabeth smiled, and it was the first time the smile seemed genuine, the smile of a child running down a hill, the summer breeze licking her face.
‘Now you’re starting to understand,’ she said.
Against all his better judgment, Tommy felt a little excited at the prospect of writing about the world’s next Hannibal Lecter. He didn’t trust Elizabeth, but if doing what she said helped his career and bought him some time to plan, he would do it.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Teach me the game.’
She laughed. ‘Excellent, Tommy. Excellent.’ Her bright teeth flashed in the dim alley light.
She stepped close, her breasts pushing up against him. Her nose was just inches from his, and though he told himself to pull away, he didn’t. She didn’t lean in closer, nor did she back away. She stood there, pressed up against him, gazing into his eyes, her arms at her side. He stared back at her, trying to understand her, trying to envision what things those blue eyes had seen since they first opened in the world. He tried to think of the horror, because it was the only thing he could do to distract himself from the fact that, indeed, she excited him. How easy it would be to reach up and hold her, pull her harder against him, kiss her.
He felt her fingertips run briefly against his thighs. For a moment he thought she was going for his zipper, but instead her hands reached into her purse. As Tommy glanced down she leaned in and put her mouth on his. His eyes closed, almost involuntarily. Almost. She didn’t kiss him; she just rested her lips on his, breathing lightly inside of him. He accepted this for much longer than he should have. Maybe two seconds. He finally pulled his head back and opened his eyes. Then he took a step away from her.
Tommy looked at her right hand. She was holding a knife. He couldn’t be certain, but it looked a lot like the steak knife from the restaurant.
Tommy’s chest tightened.
There was a tissue around the blade. A tissue separating her fingers from the handle.
Panic seized him. I am going to die, he thought. Right here.
Elizabeth spun from Tommy and knelt on the ground in front of the homeless man. Then she swung her right arm in a beautiful, tight arc, displaying the control and purpose of a golf pro playing the Masters. A fraction of a moment later Tommy heard the sound of a steel blade sinking into a cantaloupe, a tight, wet popping sound. But it wasn’t fruit the serrated blade had penetrated. It was the right side of the man’s neck.
The man’s expression barely changed.
She yanked the knife out and the teeth of the blade must have shredded his carotid artery, because blood launched from the side of his neck. Tommy jumped back, not knowing if it did any good.
The man slumped to the ground.
Elizabeth looked up at Tommy and grinned.
‘Here’s your first lesson.’
EIGHTEEN
In the seconds that followed, Tommy heard everything there was to hear in that alley. Elizabeth panting like a winded jackal after a short chase. Late-night and drunken voices in another world, shouting for attention, rewarded by peals of laughter. And thick liquid gathering in a pool. It seemed impossible that one could hear such a thing, but in those seconds Tommy heard it, that pool of blood, growing by the inch, forming a life of its own, being fed by the thump thump thump of a dying heartbeat, the percussion of the pulse slowly fading out like the last track on the second side of an album.
Elizabeth dropped the knife to the ground. The clanking of the blade against concrete rang in Tommy’s ears like a single, dissonant church bell. Tommy watched as she squeezed her left breast and moaned, the killing clearly exciting her. Tommy’s mind flashed back to the killing of Rade, where the boy’s murder actually brought her to climax.
‘That’s number two for you,’ she sighed. ‘Thirty-nine for me.’
‘What … what did you do?’
Elizabeth took her hand from her breast and radiated feigned surprise. ‘Me? Well, Tommy, I didn’t do anything. After all, those aren’t my fingerprints on the knife.’
‘You … I didn’t …’ Tommy felt the bile surging in the back of his throat.
Befo
re he knew it, Elizabeth was digging back in her purse, this time unearthing a small cell phone. She punched three digits, the electronic tones of those numbers unmistakable in their unique tonal flatness.
Nine-one-one.
‘There’s a man bleeding to death,’ she said calmly into the phone. The Midwest accent Tommy remembered her using back at the Hyatt had returned. ‘He’s located in an alley between Queen and Broad Street. Near the park.’
Tommy watched in disbelief as she calmly disconnected the call and held the phone up to him. ‘Prepaid phone. God’s gift to serial killers.’
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, really meaning What do I do?
‘Teaching you the game,’ she said. ‘Hope you’re a quick learner.’ Elizabeth nodded up and down the alley. ‘You have two choices: stay or run.’ She pointed at the knife on the ground. ‘If you take the knife with you, you risk getting caught with a murder weapon. If you leave it here, you risk your prints being on it. Now, your prints might not be on file anywhere, so you still might be fine. But who knows?’
Tommy felt his eyes water as the nausea welled within him. His body shook as if ravaged by fever.
‘Don’t puke,’ she said. ‘That’s a lot of DNA to leave behind. Now, I was a bit vague in my location to the nine-one-one operator, so you should have at least three minutes. I’m leaving now, and will be in touch soon. Unless, of course, you’re in prison, in which case I’ll become a ghost to you again, probably forever.’ She walked up to him and kissed him on the cheek. Tommy was too stunned to pull away.
‘Ciao, baby,’ she said.
Elizabeth plucked the hundred-dollar bill from the dead man’s dirty fingers and walked down the alley, disappearing around the nearest corner.
He looked down at the body. The Seagram’s bottle was motionless.
Laughter somewhere in the night. A group of women. Somewhere out there, someone was still having a good time. No sirens to be heard. Yet.
One minute, Tommy told himself. You can take one minute to make a decision, and then you have to choose.
Tommy closed his eyes, and the first thing he saw was his little girl. Evie was smiling at him. She asked him to watch her do a cartwheel. She barely made it though, her legs bent and flailing, but she landed on her feet, beaming with pride. Want to see me do it again, Daddy?
If he was blamed for this man’s death, he would never see Evie do a cartwheel again. Right now, remaining free to see her do cartwheels suddenly became the most important thing in the world.
Tommy opened his eyes to the world around him. He reached down and snatched the knife, bending the blade back against the ground, folding it against the handle, making it smaller and easier to conceal.
Then, movement. Down the alley, maybe fifty feet away. He heard the sound of shoes against concrete and Tommy twisted his head. There. A man – it was a man, wasn’t it? Running, not toward Tommy but away. The figure sped along the side of the alley, skimming the sides of the ancient buildings, avoiding the few shafts of light there were. Tommy could make out little except that the man was in a hurry and wanted to get the hell out of the alley. In fact, he couldn’t even be sure it was a man, but the footfalls sounded heavy, hard soles slapping out a rhythm of panic.
Oh my God, Tommy thought. Someone else was here. Did they see what happened? If not, why were they running? If so, how much did they see?
Think, he told himself. Does this change your decision? I couldn’t make out anything about that person, which means they probably couldn’t see me, either. But what did they hear? Did Elizabeth say my name out loud?
His decision had already been made. He wasn’t changing his mind now.
Tommy put the bent knife in his suit pocket and checked the bottom of his shoes, making sure he hadn’t stepped in the blood. No footprints. Then he turned and walked back in the direction from which he’d come, his pace brisk but not hurried, his chest pounding, heading away from the sound of the siren, away from the sound of laughing women, away from the figure that disappeared deep in the night, and into the longest walk of his life.
NINETEEN
With each footstep Tommy felt the panic grow inside him. All he could think of was the cop who took his ID earlier. The darkness worked to Tommy’s advantage, but in his mind it was daytime, the sun shining brightly down on the guilt and the panic that surely riddled Tommy’s face.
But he ran into no one. Not a soul.
When he was one house away from Mark’s, Tommy quickened his pace. He had to get inside, away from the light, away from any eyes peering at him through pulled-back curtains. Safe harbor. Tommy’s fingers shook as he tried to put the key in the front door lock, and only on his third attempt was he finally able to unlock and open the door. He shut the door and leaned against it, halfway slumped to the floor.
The house held the dense silence of an empty stadium, the kind of silence that told him he was utterly alone in the world. Tommy suddenly needed light, and he raced around the house, stumbling down unfamiliar halls, flipping on switches.
The lights made it worse.
He went into the study, where he and Mark earlier that evening had shared cocktails, and poured himself three fingers of Scotch. He put his messenger bag on the hardwood floor and reached into his coat pocket, finding the knife. Tommy turned it over in his hands, examining it for the first time under the glare of the incandescent bulbs overhead. The blood left dull, faded streaks on his hand.
Tommy looked up from the blade and realized the curtains were still open, the windows black against the vast night. He dropped the knife on the floor and bounded to the windows, yanking the curtains closed.
For all that Tommy had researched murder and murderers in his life, he had no idea what to do. So he simply stood in the study, the weight of time settling upon him, staring at walls that threatened to swallow him.
Your phone, he thought. Check your phone.
He pulled his phone from his pocket. One missed call from home. He listened to the voicemail.
‘Hi, daddy. I just wanted to tell you that I woke up because I had a bad dream, and mommy said I could call you. Well, I love you. Good night.’
Evie. Her voice was perfectly monotone and achingly beautiful on the message. He looked at the time stamp of the voicemail. Just about the same time the homeless man was bleeding out near Tommy’s feet.
He couldn’t call back. Even if she was still awake, he couldn’t talk to her. Not now. He would lose his mind.
Tommy focused on his breathing, in and out. He closed his eyes and closed out everything that was around him. Tommy became an island, if only for a few seconds. In those seconds, a question came to him.
Why?
Why would Elizabeth put him in danger if she needed him so much? If she needed him to write a bestseller about her, he certainly wasn’t going to do that from prison.
Maybe she was lying about needing him. Maybe, to her, this was all part of her fucked-up game, watching Tommy dance like the puppet she had turned him into. She was just enjoying the show.
Or …
Tommy’s gaze swept vacantly over the rows of books in the study, seeing all of them. Seeing none of them.
Or maybe she hadn’t called nine-one-one at all.
He considered both possibilities and determined that there wasn’t any evidence to sway him in either direction. Even if she hadn’t called the police there was still a very real and very dead man in that alley, and the knife used to kill him was on the floor near his feet.
Tommy looked at the knife. It seemed so harmless there, misshapen. As he gazed upon it, Tommy realized that sleep this night would be unlikely, if not impossible. He needed to get rid of the knife, but he didn’t want to go back outside with it. Not at this hour. He was safe inside this house, and he was certain things would remain that way at least until daylight.
He went back to the window and pulled the curtain to the side, staring into the darkness at the rough direction from which he’d come. The alley
was, what, maybe ten or twelve blocks away? Too far for him to see the pulsing strobes of emergency vehicle flashers, but the lack of sirens did bring him some comfort. He was certain he would hear those from this distance. So the body hadn’t been discovered yet. Which meant Tommy was safe for now.
Except for the man in the alley. The runner.
Tommy couldn’t dismiss the potential impact of that person in his near future, but neither could he do anything about it. That person either saw something or he didn’t. He could either identify Tommy or he couldn’t.
Faced with the idea of lying awake in bed all night, frantically thinking about the million different ways the next day’s direction would take, Tommy decided to do something else. He would write. Write it all down, just like she said. For better or for worse, he had to press on. Right now. Tonight. He now understood what it felt like, to be fresh in the aftermath of a murder, and he knew this was the essence Elizabeth commanded him to capture. Capture the essence, write the book, be free.
Tommy grabbed the tumbler of Scotch and drank from it like a dying soldier sucking on a canteen. Then he sat down at the desk, positioned his hands over the keyboard, and let his fingers lead him where they wanted. Perhaps the words that formed on the screen would reveal the nature of Elizabeth’s mind, arming Tommy with a knowledge he could use to drive her out of his life forever.
Or maybe the words would tell him something else entirely.
TWENTY
Dusty sunlight penetrated the curtains of the old office, crawling along the hardwood floor and creeping up the side of the leather couch until finally, as the morning wore on, it found Tommy’s face.
He stirred, letting out a small moan as he felt the massive knot that had formed in his neck during the night.
Tommy lifted his arm and looked at his watch. Just after ten. He hadn’t gotten to sleep until sometime after four, collapsing on the couch in the office after being hunched over his laptop for three hours.
He wiped a thin film of drool from the side of his cheek and sat up. The laptop was at the desk where he had left it, the empty tumbler sitting next to it assuredly holding the residual smell of Scotch.
The Boy in the Woods Page 10