by Harker Moore
“You’re telling me to go home, Michael?”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“No, you’re right.” She gave in without a fight. “I am tired, and I’m not doing any good here. But I would like to look at my notes.”
“Sorry. I don’t usually forget things. Here …” He wrote some numbers on Jimmy’s memo pad. “You can stop by my apartment. This is the code for the elevator.” He tore off the paper. “You know where I keep the key.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Call me if you come up with anything … or if you just want to talk. I don’t care how late.”
She reached for the note, felt his fingers wrap around her wrist. He pulled her toward him across the desk. That thrill of fear with his kiss.
The odor of raw wood and stale cigarette smoke assaulted her as soon as she opened the door. In the half darkness, the white walls of the living room seemed unfixed, undulating like sheets of clouded water. She flipped the light switch. Her notes were just where she’d left them on the coffee table. She began to gather up the papers but stopped midway, turning toward the dark eye of the long hallway. Hanae’s words teased. After Margot left, he’d sworn never to go into the room again.
She would have liked to have been above such petty intrigue, yet she wanted to see the room Michael had once shared with his wife. She left the notes with the key on the table and moved in search of a solid face of closed door.
She paused outside his workroom. She could see wood stacked in neat piles, tools shimmering like trophies from shelves on the walls. She’d seen the models, since the room he slept in was next to the workroom. She walked in, pressing the button on a fluorescent lamp on his desk. The cold light fell across an open text, onto a glossy photograph of the French cathedral of Sainte Chapelle. Scattered around the book were bold renderings of the church, notations and measurements scribbled in the margins. On his worktable was the model. A small architectural puzzle. She ran a finger around the curved lip of an arch. For a moment she thought of Michael’s hands working the wood, playing the surfaces like a musical instrument. Then she thought of his hands playing her. What he did to her in bed was something less than making love, but a great deal more than simple fucking. She set the model down and shut off the lamp.
It was the last room on the left. She turned the door’s brass handle. A thin band of urban neon slipped in through a break in the drapes, slashing across one wall, creating a bright green scar on the face of a painting. The walls were the color of ripe eggplant, the wood floors crisscrossed with Orientals. A carved four-poster bed, thick with pillows, stood high off the floor. A brocaded chaise stretched in a corner, an abandoned fashion magazine nearby. Everything had a baroque quality, at odds with the stark simplicity of the rest of the apartment.
On a dressing table perfume bottles glinted. A silver frame stood to one side. Moving closer, she lifted a black-and-white photograph. A younger Michael Darius stared back at her. The smile he wore never reached his eyes. The eyes, ancient even then.
Suddenly she felt uncomfortable, guilty for what she was doing. Unaccountably, the hairs on the back of her neck rose. The hiss caused her to drop the photograph. And in the last moments before the gas filled her lungs, she saw his dark reflection tripled in the panels of the dressing table’s mirror.
She came to, bound and gagged, staring up at him, lying flat against the cushions of Michael’s sofa. He was nude. Tall and lean. But not frail. She remembered the viselike grip of his latexed hand as it had closed over her face.
He appeared to be young, although it was impossible to tell. She could only imagine his human face. Behind the gas mask, he resembled a kamikaze pilot from an old newsreel, the rubber hose curling down like an esophagus from his nose to the tank at his waist.
“Dr. Wilhelmina French.” His voice was hollow sounding, filtered through the tubing.
Her eyes shifted from the mask to her opened wallet in his gloved hands, to the remaining contents of her handbag scattered on the floor.
“I apologize for any discomfort.” Insanely, he sounded sincere. “But some things are unavoidable.” He shrugged his shoulders and touched the valve on the oxygen tank, making a slight adjustment. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
She twisted her head, fighting the tape over her mouth.
“I’m sorry I can’t remove that. Or the restraints. You understand, of course. But, still, I wouldn’t want you to be in pain. Is the sofa comfortable?”
It had been the odor of the leather that had registered first in her reviving consciousness. That, and the strange halting sound of his breathing. She focused on him again. He seemed more humanoid than human.
He set her wallet down, picking up her folder of notes from the coffee table. He glanced at its heading; then with the tip of a finger, he reached and found a spot on her cheek. He bent over. The breathing hose brushed against her shoulder.
He stepped away from the sofa. “You know who I am?” His voice gurgled inside the rubber as he rose to his full height.
She nodded her head.
“I’m an interesting specimen, Dr. French, am I not?” His laugh reverberated inside the mask. He glanced down and began examining her notes. “But you do not understand.” He looked up. “I do not kill them. I release them.”
He came closer and squatted. “I do for them what they are unable to do for themselves. I awaken them to who they are.”
Her eyes widened, asking, Who are they?
She somehow knew he frowned behind the mask. “I know it’s been confusing—five men, one little girl. But they are all the same.” He shook his head. “Human words are so inadequate.”
She raised her brows.
He backed away again, withdrawing a page from the folder. “I see you have made some interesting observations, Dr. French.”
She fixed her eyes on him.
He read aloud from her transcribed notes. “‘A serial killer seems not to be able to distinguish himself as a separate entity. Cannot distinguish himself from other human beings. Cannot even distinguish himself from things. There are no boundaries. Bodies are objects. The act of murder is the disposition of flesh, not the taking of life.’” He stopped his recitation.
Her eyes remained on him.
“Does not apply, Dr. French.” He allowed the page he’d been holding to slip to the floor.
He moved to stand before the window, where night fell hungrily. The room close to dark. He walked to a bag he’d left near the sofa and reached in for a sealed package. Quickly he tore into the plastic sheathing and pulled out a syringe.
“I meant it when I said I wouldn’t want you to be in pain, Dr. French.”
The office was quiet, and dark with the fluorescents turned off overhead. Darius closed the folder on the file he’d been reading and pushed it out of the yellow circle made by the cantilevered desk lamp. He relaxed against the chair back, tilting it into shadow. His hands rubbed at his eyes, tested the stubble on his cheeks. He was avoiding the squad room, and his coffee mug had been empty for an hour. He didn’t want to see anyone. Didn’t want to talk.
He bent down and pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk. The bottle of whiskey rumbled amid Sakura’s tea things. He set it down with a glass and poured a healthy double, which burned liquid fire all the way down to his stomach. Food was what he needed. Food and sleep. But he didn’t want to stop and break the continuity he’d established. It was a fact that the wide net cast by most serial-murder investigations took in the killer early on. The problem was seeing the important details amidst the sheer mass of data.
He poured another thumb into the glass. That weirdness last night in his apartment was a symptom that he was becoming obsessed. He was in danger of letting this case get to him in the same way that Hudson had, with that sense of something half recognized, some substrata of knowledge that nagged at him.
He sipped on the whiskey—this one had to last—and angled the lamp upward to the blackboard, to the close-ups of the victims tha
t were tacked around the frame. He ignored the faces, permitting himself to see only anonymous white flesh. The glyphlike ash markings, broken bull’s-eyes on the chests, looked like purpling bruises.
The thought was a charge that jerked him around in the chair, to the console that held Jimmy’s books. In moments he had readjusted the light and was rifling through the standard text on forensics for the picture that had finally been triggered like a ticking bomb in his brain.
He almost laughed when he found it.
Darius relived it through the sudden haze. Rushing out of Jimmy’s office, thinking that there was a trail to be followed now. Accident reports to be gathered. Cross-checks to be run with the witness and canvass lists. He had been eager to get home.
He’d wanted to think about it all some more before he talked to Jimmy. And Willie. He’d been hoping she might be waiting in his apartment.
He had known that she was, when the key was not in its place and the knob had turned in his hand. He had seen her almost immediately when he went in, bound and gagged on the sofa, her notes scattered on the rug. Her eyes trying to warn him. But the force of it had hardly registered before the sudden hiss. The gas hitting him full as he’d turned.
He awoke on the sofa, naked and bound. Not gagged. But there was no one else coming for him to warn. No one else on the floor to hear him. No one on any floor who could hear him, thanks to the building’s construction.
Willie was now on the love seat, which had been pushed across the room. He could see only a small part of her. Could discern some bit of motion. He prayed she was still unharmed.
A man stood near him, nude like himself. His fingers, dipped in ash, were busy writing letters on the wall. On the coffee table syringes were neatly arranged.
He had never been afraid to die. Indeed, he had always felt a kind of unacknowledged eagerness that made him physically fearless. What he felt most now was anger for his carelessness. And what it meant for Willie. Lack of food and sleep was not an excuse, nor was the alcohol. These were decisions that he’d made. The sort of bad choices from which he never learned.
Discovering what he had tonight had proved a hollow triumph. Obviously, the killer had long ago discovered him. Had he not sensed a lingering presence in this apartment only last night, but ignored the warning? He had a morbid curiosity as to just how and why he’d been targeted as a victim. But he would hardly give the satisfaction of asking.
As if he’d sensed this, the killer turned to him now. He walked to the sofa and knelt down, taking his head in his hands. The grip was not cruel, but strong. Resistance futile. The man bent down, his eyes inches from Darius’s own. “An interesting face,” he said, letting go. Then, as if in answer to his question, “Your light fills this room.”
Darius threw his head toward Willie, letting go his resolution not to speak. “And her light?” If there were any chance at all for him or Willie, it was to keep this bastard talking. Buy them a little time.
The man’s glance had followed his. “Dr. French is not one of the Fallen.”
“You mean she’s not a fallen angel.”
The killer smiled. “Completely human.”
“So there’s no need for you to hurt her?”
“She’ll wake up in a little while with nothing worse than a headache.”
“And you’ll let her go?”
The smile became brighter. “What happens to her is up to you … if we’re successful.”
He ignored the ambiguity. “Let her go first,” he said. “Once I know she’s safe, I’ll do whatever you want.”
The man rose to his feet. “You still see only the shells,” he said, “… body bags. But you’ll understand soon. I promise.” He reached for the plate of ash, began to draw.
Darius looked down at the pattern taking form on his chest. “Were you the one whose heart stopped … in the car accident?”
The question worked to catch the man off guard. He rocked back on his heels. “Yes.” He was smiling again. “That was the moment of my awakening. …You know a lot,” he said. He made a larger circle in ash around the smaller center. “But you know nothing.” He stared into his eyes.
His own temper flared. “Goddamn you.”
Laughter. “He already has.”
The world was cold outside her window. Hanae could feel the chill beating like a bird at the glass, could imagine the snow. The phone was still in her hand. She returned it to its cradle and leaned back into the pillows on her bed. She had enjoyed talking to Vicky for as long as the call had lasted. Now it felt like nothing at all had been said, that the bonds between them had only further loosened.
And the restlessness that had prompted the call had not at all decreased. She picked up the phone again, dialing Willie’s number. The machine answered with Dr. Jamili’s voice, inviting her to leave a message. Willie was no doubt still at work, as consumed with this case as Jimmy. She did not want to disturb her friend at the office.
She hung up the phone. It seemed she had been fidgeting since yesterday, attempting to fill the hours since Jimmy had left with household chores. With books and music. Nothing held her attention. She might have tried again to work the clay, but she did not want to think about the bust. Or her call from Adrian Lovett.
But she had thought about it all day. His wanting to give her a present. She had not known what to say. She had felt a guilty awkwardness, the shame for allowing that kiss. She could avoid class next Monday, only a week before Christmas. But she must not be a coward. She must face Adrian and make it clear in the kindest way that there could be nothing between them.
She got up from the bed and went into the kitchen to fix the meal she did not want, hoping that Jimmy would call tonight, wondering what he might be doing at this moment.
A few days ago she had been at the point of telling him about the baby when the call had come about the priest’s suicide. A sad death. But at least it had seemed the investigation was over, that she need be patient but a few days more. Jimmy would be winding down the task force, would at last be free of the pressures that had claimed so much of his attention.
But that had all changed with yesterday’s press conference. She had listened to it on TV. She had realized from the moment that the woman reporter spoke about the locket that the case was not over at all and that her husband would be held responsible for what must seem incompetence.
A few hours later, Jimmy had come home, saying little as he packed for Baltimore. She had stood in the door of their bedroom as he’d moved to and from the closet, willing him to share with her something of what he was feeling. She longed for words, though the tenor of his silence was completely comprehensible. They were not to acknowledge that he could be hurt. She was not to bear any part of his burden. Such a hateful strength.
He had kissed her before he’d left. A real kiss that had softened her pain and kindled the hope she cherished even now, that on his return they would yet walk backward together to the place where their paths had been one.
The cloying incense woke her. Willie smelled it before she heard the voices. As wan and feeble as the light was, it had started pain throbbing in her head. She was lying under a blanket, still bound by tape— stiff and sore in the places where she wasn’t numb. Whatever drug she’d been given had certainly knocked her out.
She squeezed her lids shut, resisting the urge to slip back into unconsciousness. The dull thudding in her skull had an edge of razor sharpness that shifted as she tried to change position. She reopened her eyes slowly, letting the pain stabilize in a tight band that anchored itself in her temples. Slowly, by degrees, she turned her head. Her arms were useless. She dug her heels into the leather, pushing herself upward, propping herself against the love seat’s padded frame.
The killer was still in the room, bending over the sofa, yards away. The words she’d heard spoken had not been meant for her. Her brain registered that another nude man, his wrists and ankles bound, was lying on the sofa. Registered what her mind continued to deny
, until the killer stepped away and forced her eyes to acknowledge—that Michael was the man on the sofa. She could see his face in profile and the dark sooty circles moving on his chest with his breathing. She wondered if he knew that she was here.
The man straightened, turning to the coffee table. For the first time she could see something of his face. It appeared an ordinary, even handsome, face. Composed and focused. On the wall above the sofa, foot-high letters spelled out SAMYAZA in ash.
She fell flat into the cushions.
I wasn’t expecting you. The killer’s words came back to her. He’d been hiding in the apartment, even before she’d arrived, lying in wait for Michael. Question on question crowded in her brain. Too many to sort out, and they weren’t what was important now. She did not want to just lie here and wait for both of them to die. She fought against the restraints that bound her wrists and ankles, her hands searching over their short range for something, anything, that she might use to cut through the tape. But there was nothing.
She dug her heels again into the frame of the love seat, lifting herself, her head throbbing sullenly with the effort. The killer, with a syringe in his hand, was turning back to the sofa. She saw Darius stiffen and fought reflexively against the tape that held her wrists. She wanted to cry out, but even without the gag, any protest would be worse than ineffective. It could only add to Michael’s pain.
The man began to speak, his voice entirely calm and reasonable. He was beginning the programming. It was the LSD that he had injected into Darius. Terrified as she was, she could not help her fascination. She listened as the killer droned patiently on, constructing the reality he wanted Michael to share, his belief that fallen angels were trapped in human bodies. Angels who must be awakened.
It seemed to go on for hours, but she had no real sense of time. Darius remained quiet, and she wondered what he was feeling. LSD could magnify every paranoid fear that floated in a subject’s brain. He had to know, as she did, that he was going to die. The drug could only amplify that horror.