They shook hands, then Anderson started glancing around the car, as if expecting to see a head, or body parts or something.
Jenner said, “Relax, it’s a rental.”
Anderson seemed a bit disappointed. He leaned toward the windshield and said, “Okay, in about a minute College Drive’ll cross Oak, then Wireless Road. Go past Oak, then take a right on Wireless.”
The college’s buildings were low and nondescript. The dorms were mostly paired semi-detached town houses; in one area, there were three-story apartment-type complexes around a tiny swimming pool, the pool area surrounded by chain-link fence.
Anderson tapped on the window and said, “Two years ago, at Halloween, we had a sexual perversion incident right behind the gazebo over there.”
He sat back in the seat. “Guy completely ass-naked except for a face mask and flippers—you know? For scuba diving?
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to some Chinese exchange students. Girl students.”
They crested a ridge and drove downhill, into a valley; the road ahead, the trees ahead, dissolved into thick fog. Jenner slowed, and turned off his high beams.
They crept forward slowly, the lights carving tunnels into the shifting mist ahead. Anderson put one leg up onto the dashboard and glanced at Jenner.
“You should wear your seat belt—you have to be careful on these roads.”
“I do usually. I had an accident; it hurts to wear the belt.”
Anderson nodded slowly and looked ahead. He started tapping the dashboard rhythmically.
“I bet you see a lot of weird shit.”
Jenner shrugged, keeping his eyes on the road.
“What’s the most messed-up thing you’ve ever seen?”
Jenner looked at him briefly. “A David Hasselhoff music video—apparently he’s huge in Germany.”
Anderson snorted. “No! I meant at your work! I once saw this movie where . . . ,” and he launched into an impenetrable description of a slasher film.
As they neared the bottom of the hill, the fog became paler and paler. They reached a bend at the bottom of the hill, and they were bathed in light; it was like floating inside a big white cloud.
Jenner squinted as Anderson pointed in front of them.
“That’s Bill Johnson’s house. That’s where we’re going.”
Bill Johnson lived in an old Airstream trailer at a sharp bend in Wireless Road at the bottom of the valley of Deene’s Holler. After the second time his trailer was hit by a car, he petitioned the county for road signs. They’d put up a steep incline sign, and a zigzag sign, and Johnson paid for a children playing sign out of his own pocket.
After the third time his home got hit, Johnson bought spotlights from the same company that set up the college 326
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sports field. Now the glare from thousands of watts of bright light irradiating the chrome-bright Airstream trailer was dazzling; had Johnson come out to see who his visitors were, Jenner might have mowed him down without even seeing him.
Jenner parked the Taurus at the foot of the lighting rig and got out, stiffly. He blinked a little, holding his palm like a visor to shield his eyes. Anderson stood there, a little smug in aviator sunglasses.
“Yo, Bill!”
There was no answer.
Tommy walked to the open door of the trailer and rapped his knuckles on the inner screen-door frame.
“Bill!”
Behind the screen, the door opened. A man in a ratty plaid bathrobe stood there, leaning on a walker.
“Heard you the first time.”
“Sorry.” He gestured to Jenner. “This man is an ME from New York City, working on a murder. He wants to know about a valuable book stolen from the college a few years back. Fifteen, was it, sir?”
“Yes, about fifteen. An old manuscript.”
Johnson reached his arm behind the door frame, and the brightness eased. He pushed the screen door half open, then turned and painfully began to push his walker into the dark of the trailer, muttering, “Come in,” as he disappeared.
It was Jenner’s first time in a trailer; it seemed neither smaller nor larger than it had appeared on the outside. The air was heavy with cigarettes, the curtains yellowed from years of smoke.
“Sorry about the light. Idiots take that turn way too fast, and when the fog gets bad, I turn the lights up all the way.
Probably take you five minutes to roast a turkey up there on that main light trestle.”
Johnson eased himself into a lounge chair. Jenner saw that he was wearing a nasal cannula, attached by a thin tube of Precious Blood
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green plastic to a cylinder of oxygen behind the chair.
“So, Bill, this is Mr. Jenner, and—”
“Dr. Jenner. He’s an ME—that means he’s a medical examiner, and that means he’s a doctor.”
He turned to Jenner. “I think I know what you’re talking about. Maybe fourteen or fifteen years, someone stole an Egyptian document from the Parler Collection. That it?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
Johnson leaned back in his chair and began to struggle with the cannula, tugging it awkwardly to get it past his big ears.
“Damn thing keeps getting caught.”
He leaned forward, picked up a Marlboro 100 from a box on the coffee table, flicked open a gray metal Zippo with a sharp snap of his wrist, fired up the cigarette, then leaned back again, inhaling with obvious satisfaction.
His lips were the color of liver, his face bluish. He coughed a little, then put the cigarette down and reached for the cannula. Holding the nasal prongs to his lips, he turned the tap on the canister and sucked down a blast of oxygen.
He looked at the two of them as they watched him.
“Bastards should make a mask that gives you oxygen while you smoke, fer chrissakes.”
Tommy Anderson nodded in vague agreement.
“Doc, what you think? Think I should quit?”
Jenner shrugged.
“That’s what I say! I been smoking since I was twelve, I worked in the mines until I was thirty, of course I’m gonna have emphysema! Had it when I was forty! And I’ve almost made it to seventy, so screw all those sanctimonious bastards who told me I had to quit.”
He took another hit of the cigarette, breathed out, then had a coughing fit, the phlegm rattling coarsely in his chest. He was breathless in seconds. He sat there, breathing in short gulps against pursed lips, his eyes watering with effort.
He caught his breath for a few seconds, then began to 328
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speak.
“So, Doctor, sure, I remember that. Not much else happened at the campus in my time there. We knew who did it, too, but they never could arrest him. No proof, no witnesses, no statements, no nothing.”
Jenner sat up a little straighter.
“You knew who did it?”
“Sure. God, I can’t remember the name, but it was a student. Funny kid, some poor orphan kid. Weird kid. I can’t remember how we knew it was him, but we were pretty sure about it. We interviewed him, even called in the state police.
But the kid said it wasn’t him, and we had nothing on him, and we had to let him go. What the hell was his name?”
Jenner said, “Do you have any notes or records from back then?”
“Sure! It should all be on the computer in the security office.”
Anderson said, “No, sir! Computer only goes back, maybe, six years!”
Deep into an inhale, Johnson rolled his eyes. He breathed the smoke out smoothly.
“You ever wonder what that folder labeled ‘Archives’ was for, Tommy? You should click it sometime . . .”
He pushed forward and grasped the walker. He gasped and puffed as he pulled himself to standing.
Jenner stood, ready to help.
“No, Doc, I got it, thanks. I can do this . . .”
The man opened up the screen, then sat down, panting.
“Sir, if you would be so kind as to pass me my gas . . .”
Jenner wheeled the cylinder to the desk and helped Johnson arrange the cannula around his head. Johnson settled the prongs inside his nostrils, then nodded, and Jenner turned the knob to start the flow of oxygen.
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His stubby fingers were surprisingly fast on the keyboard.
Jenner recognized an old-fashioned text-based telecom program in the active window. A speaker turned on with a tinny click, and then there was the very loud sound of a touch-tone phone being dialed. There were a few seconds of shrill electronic honking, and then the connection was established.
The screen displayed an ASCII mosaic banner reading
“deene/admin/database.”
Johnson tapped in his password.
“Now, let’s see . . . I remember the year and the month—
half the student body was still drunk because we beat the Halsford team for the first time ever that weekend.”
He tabbed through a few screens, then stopped.
“Okay. The week before. Nothing much during the week . . .”
He tabbed onto another screen, this one promisingly full of text.
“Okay, here’s the game. Lots of drinking, a little vandalism, and we found out about the theft on Monday morning, I think . . .”
He tabbed to the next screen. The ledger was blank.
“Huh . . .”
He tabbed forward again, followed the ledger down on the screen with a finger, then checked the date and started tabbing back through previous dates.
Then forward again.
He shuttled back and forth for a few minutes before turning to Jenner, drawing a long draft of oxygen before saying,
“So, someone’s deleted the ledger for the week of the incident.”
He smiled weakly up at Jenner.
“Sorry, Doc. Looks like someone’s beat you to it.”
Jenner said, “Is there a hard copy of the ledger?”
“Nope. I don’t think the administration even knows they have this much.”
“Can I look on the original computer?”
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“Don’t see why not. You some kind of computer whiz?”
“No. But this is my only lead.”
Johnson lifted his arm weakly.
“So, Doc—you going to tell us what’s this all about, anyway?”
Jenner glanced at the TV set in the corner. “You been following the Inquisitor case in New York at all?”
“The guy killing those students? Sure—you think it’s connected?”
“Yes. It looks that way.” Jenner looked Johnson in the eye and said, “He’s abducted a student; unless we get to him first, he’s going to kill her on Wednesday.”
Johnson had caught his breath again. His face was set, serious now. He pursed his lips for a few seconds, then exhaled in a weak, breathy whistle.
“Well, I’ll tell you what you’re gonna do. You’re going to help me over to my chair, then you’re going to drive a few miles down to Accident, Maryland; there’s an okay motel about eight miles out of Accident. Tonight, I’ll make some calls, and if there’s a way to get the information, we’ll figure it out.” He breathed in deeply through his nose. “I can’t promise anything, but God, we’ll do our best.”
The man listened, ear pressed against the door. She was finally quiet.
She wasn’t what he’d expected, not by a long shot, not at all what he’d thought she’d be like after seeing her from the window.
He stroked his thigh, the muscles cramped and aching.
Unreliability was a big issue for him. When he selected a target, he stuck to it. You had to commit to a target, always.
His algorithm was specific: select, locate, track, survey, prepare, isolate, access, execute, document, exit.
The man knew how to commit.
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on Seventh, gasping and trying to stand after falling off the trellis, like a pretty little kitten stunned from its first big fall, he’d found her terribly appealing.
He knew now that a lot of that had been the situation.
She’d seen him at his peak, ecstatic, exhilarated, wrapped in a crusting carapace of her friend’s blood. She’d seen him as no other soul still living had, seen his true self revealed.
And, naturally, it had made him imagine certain . . . possibilities. Now he felt a little foolish.
In taking her, he’d also wanted to show them what he could do, show the world his strength, his courage, his resolve. The newspapers were turning him into a cartoon—that name
“the Inquisitor” was a joke! What if it stuck? What did “Inquisitor” even mean?
Well, they knew about his power now. He’d read an interview where the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association said that the dead cop “fought like a lion”; he’d laughed out loud at that. The man just lay there and gasped like a pig while he got stabbed! It had taken, what—twelve, thirteen seconds to kill him? He was a big guy, he went down hard, he bled quick, and he died fast. End of story. Some lion!
It had been easy for him to take her. And that was why he took her. And he took her because he found her intriguing.
And he took her because he wanted Jenner to suffer.
Jenner! No matter how much a mess the girl was, she was too much woman for Jenner. The man clearly didn’t know what to do with her. And he might be a doctor, and he might have book smarts, but Jesus! The man couldn’t take a punch!
He thought of Jenner lying there helplessly, wriggling a little in his friend’s blood, staying down when told to stay down, just like a dog. Like a pussy.
He sat there, grinning now, in the dark outside the girl’s room.
But she didn’t behave like he thought she would. She’d been docile and obedient, but not terrified of him, of what 332
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he could—probably would—do. He’d hoped that that situation might have emerged—what was it, Copenhagen syn-drome?— where she developed a fondness for her captor. He felt himself blush.
She wasn’t like that. She played it safe, did just as she was told, didn’t resist his anger. And then, once he had her in the room, and everything had calmed down and the situation was established and it was time to get to know her, she had been sick. Retching and puking, sweating and moaning.
At first he thought it was because she knew he was going to kill her, but it got worse, and he realized it wasn’t fear at all. It was drugs. She was coming down from drugs. Heroin, he was pretty sure.
He had no respect for people who did drugs. If you cannot master your urges, if you cannot respect the temple of the body, you forfeit your humanity, you become the beast that has somehow wandered into the cathedral.
That boy he killed had been that way. Peddling his ass to buy drugs, trying to drag the man down with him, trying to make him wade in that stinking pit of degradation that was his faggot life. He’d killed the boy out of anger—no, outrage.
Outrage that the boy could even have dreamed that someone like him would do the things he was proposing.
It had been an act of kindness, releasing the boy from the moral and physical squalor that was his earthly life. And now again, this girl, again the drugs.
He pressed his ear to the door again, and heard nothing.
The crying had stopped, the moaning was over. He imagined her lying there in the blanket, her breathing slow and even, her body calm, her mind at peace.
She was quiet now because the drugs were out of her body.
The process had been hard on him, but it was finished now.
She was hersel
f again. But what self was that? At what level did she understand what he was doing?
He knew a way to find out.
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When he opened the wooden box of mementos he kept under his desk, he was impressed by how full it was. On top was some sentimental stuff he’d been looking at the day before—a certificate for good drawing he got in the fifth grade, and a couple of photographs of the set he’d designed for the drama club production of Our Town when he was at Deene’s. Underneath that layer, the old papyrus sheets had crumbled so badly that they now lay like a low stack of leathery yellow cards in the vellum he folded around it. He put the parchment to one side to remove his trove of Polaroids, as many as fourteen or fifteen from each Saint.
He spread them on the table, as if playing solitaire. He loved the photos, loved being able to fold the entire little scene into his palm—setup, execution, final image. It was like being dealt a good hand in poker.
He chose four or five of the most spectacular—pictures where the participants’ reactions were really clear, final photos of each tableau so you could really see what was going on. He swept them up into a little deck, then looked for something to hang them with. He didn’t have any thumb-tacks; nails would have to do. Besides, nails were symbolic.
He lit a hurricane lamp and walked back down the corridor to her door. He slid the bolts one by one, then stepped inside. She was lying where she always lay.
He didn’t care if she could see now. She was weak—she’d been ill for a day and a half, and hadn’t eaten much since, and had thrown up what she’d tried to eat. He looked at the loaf; black and gray mold spread across the corner where she had nibbled it—if it was, indeed, her eating it and not the rats. She was weak, and no threat.
If she joined him, she joined him, and if she didn’t, she would die, so either way, it wasn’t an issue.
She didn’t move. In the shaky yellow light, he could tell she was awake, but she stayed turned away from him.
Good enough.
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He put the lamp down on the floor. He held nails between his lips as he worked, the Polaroids in his hip pocket. He kept half an eye on her: as he began to hammer the first into the door, she stiffened, but did not turn.
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