A master key card.
Mickey slid it through the vertical slot of the lock at room 2240. The security light blinked once yellow, then Mickey heard a click and the light blinked green and he opened the door and slipped inside. The room was dark and empty and cold. He sidestepped into the bathroom to see if the shower had a curtain or a door. It had a frosted-glass door, translucent enough to make for a poor hiding space. He walked back into the room and slid open the mirrored closet. The hangers were bare. The couple must have been vacationing out of their suitcases, or possibly they had hung up their formal wear, the clothes they were wearing tonight, and left bathing suits and blue jeans and golf shirts folded in their bags. They were scheduled to be here for only three days.
Inside the closet, Mickey slid the door shut and scooted to the opposite end, the side least likely to be opened. He grabbed a pillow from a high shelf, placed it between his aching back and a miniature ironing board, and cracked the door a few centimeters in case he had to stay in here for several hours.
Dr. Poonwalla and his wife arrived forty minutes later, announcing themselves with exhausted sighs and loud whispers.
“That Davis Moore is a charmer, isn’t he?” said Mrs. Poonwalla.
Dr. Poonwalla said, “Yes, such a tragedy what has happened to him, although I’d like to know the real story behind that unpleasantness in Chicago. His story about secret experiments was a bit hard to swallow, I’ll admit.”
“Still, a good man.”
“Yes. Yes, he is.”
After washing up, the Poonwallas draped their clothes someplace other than the closet and went to bed with a kiss reaffirming their vows. Mickey waited until he heard snoring, then stepped out of the closet and through the fat extra pillow fired two shots from a pistol at close range, one into each of their foreheads.
– 54 -
When she took time to consider it, Ms. Eberlein thought it an odd and even disturbing subject for a social studies report, but she had to admit it qualified as current events. Off and on for three and a half years, the Wicker Man had been reliable front-page news in the city, a recurring nightmare for six million people. He didn’t strike in a regular pattern – at one time there was a nine-month gap between homicides with the killer’s signature – but every time the city relaxed, every time the nightclubs on the West Side filled up with carefree twenty-somethings, every time folks felt safe alone on the El, every time people stopped calling friends and family to let them know they arrived home safely, another body would appear, a lifeless message breaking across the morning news programs.
News of a fresh killing was particularly stressful for young single females like Ms. Eberlein. All but two of the Wicker Man’s eleven victims had been women, and police suspected the men were not intended targets. In both cases they believed the men had responded to cries for help, or had been killed because they witnessed the crime. Like thousands of other young Chicagoans, Ms. Eberlein had taken a self-defense class at her neighborhood gym and armed herself with pepper spray. After four years of living by herself downtown, Ms. Eberlein sold her condo (paid for by her parents when she received her master’s degree) and moved into an apartment with space enough for a roommate and a rottweiler.
So it wasn’t entirely surprising that one of her juniors wanted to do a report on the Wicker Man murders. What concerned her was the student’s age. Justin Finn had skipped three grades before landing in her class, and he was so bright it was unnerving to think he was only fourteen. When he first came into her classroom last semester, she wondered casually if he had a single hair on his body beyond the long, curly blond mess that sprawled across his head, then she banished the thought with a self-reproaching scowl. It was bad enough when she noticed the emerging sexuality of the older boys in the school. She couldn’t deny that Justin would be a good-looking young man someday, however, probably around the time he got his law degree at nineteen.
“What’s amazing about the Wicker Man is that he hasn’t left any physical evidence,” Justin explained to the class. “Nearly all violent criminals leave something behind – blood, hair, semen” – a boy in the back of the room guffawed, and a girl sitting in front of him rolled her eyes and grinned – “but not the Wicker Man. This has given him an almost supernatural aura in the mind of the public. I’d compare him in some ways to the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco, whose cryptic notes and spooky costume compounded the terror of his killings. The Wicker Man is a real-life bogeyman.”
“How do you think he’s been able to avoid leaving evidence?” Ms. Eberlein asked. Students were encouraged to interrupt the speaker at any time with a relevant question. It made the exercise less boring for her, kept the class engaged, and made it difficult for the presenter to learn only fifteen minutes of facts. Usually she had to ask the first question herself, however.
Justin nodded and held up his bound report as if to say the answer was within. “Clearly he spends a lot of time with the bodies after they’re dead. We know this because of the peculiar pose he leaves them in – the details of which police have managed to keep secret. Obviously this also gives him time to clean up. Some police believe he uses a condom” – another muffled snicker – “and that’s certainly possible, but just about every one of the attacks have taken place on nights when it’s raining. I think that’s deliberate. He lets nature wash away any trace of him. Also, people with their heads hunched under an umbrella or a hood are less likely to be aware of other pedestrians or suspicious activity. His victims can’t see him coming, and potential witnesses are less likely to notice.”
Impressive. Ms. Eberlein hadn’t heard that theory before. She mentally added it to the list of street-smart facts that might someday save her life.
A girl named Lydia raised her hand and Justin nodded at her.
“I remember, like, three months ago, the police said they had a suspect and this guy with a bad mustache was all over the TV, but they never arrested him and then I never heard anything more about it. What happened to him?”
Justin grimaced. “That’s been a major embarrassment for the police. The suspect’s name was Armand Gutierrez, and he was connected to two of the female victims. One had been in a ballroom-dancing class with him at the Discovery Center and another was a regular customer at the grocery store where he worked. Investigators thought it was just too big a coincidence, and so everything about him seemed suspicious after that. He had some kind of weird porn collection – nothing illegal, but it piqued the interest of the cops who searched his apartment. He was also a butcher in an Italian deli, and one of the male victims had been carved up brutally with a big knife. The police have been under intense pressure from City Hall to solve the case, and they leaked his name to the press last October in order to get some good news out there before the mayoral election. But Gutierrez had alibis for almost every night a body was found, and they just couldn’t make the case. Some cops still think he’s the killer, but the state’s attorney and the FBI have pretty much written Gutierrez off. He’s suing the city, by the way, and will probably make out with a bundle.”
“You mentioned the FBI.” A popular boy the kids all called Foo didn’t wait for Justin to call on him. “Do they have a, you know, what do you call that, where they look at the crime scenes and they write up what they think the killer is like-”
“A profile, ” Justin said. “Yeah, they believe he’s a white male, between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, highly intelligent, if not educated, probably lives in Wicker Park or Ukrainian Village, or at least on the North or Near West Side. He’s shown incredible restraint – being able to go months, it appears, without killing anyone. The FBI believes this means that he is either in a highly supervised situation – that is, he’s institutionalized in some way, perhaps in a treatment facility or a halfway house, and his opportunities are somehow limited – or that he leaves the city for long stretches of time, or that he’s killed many more people than we know and has just done a better job of hiding their bodies.”
Ms. Eberlein, who was sitting in Justin’s usual chair, raised her hand. “You’ve obviously spent some time with this subject. Which of those scenarios do you think is most likely?”
Justin was standing behind a portable lectern that had been set up on Ms. Eberlein’s metal desk and he ducked his head modestly, as if he were looking for something among the notes in front of him. “None of them, actually.” He smiled. “I think he leads a pretty normal life – he might even be very successful, given that everyone agrees he is intelligent – and that he has another way of blowing off steam. Whatever it is that compels him to kill, he has another way of sublimating” – scoffing from somewhere, as if to say no fourteen-year-old would use that word if they weren’t just showing off – “his desire. Maybe he has an aggressive hobby, like boxing. Or maybe he’s into sadomasochism” – outright laughter – “and he’s able to get his kicks in nonlethal ways. But every once in a while, something just builds up inside him and he can’t help himself. He has to kill.”
Ms. Eberlein raised her eyebrows and whistled. “I think you’d make a pretty good FBI profiler yourself, Justin. It sounds like you’ve really gotten inside this guy’s head.” For better or worse, she thought to herself.
The bell rang and the students offered up lazy applause, and Justin smiled at Ms. Eberlein and switched places with her long enough to retrieve his books from under his chair. As the students bottlenecked at the door, she shouted the names of tomorrow’s presenters after their backs and opened her black vinyl grade book, where she wrote next to Justin’s name, “Creepy. A+.”
– 55 -
The panoramic cityscape through the window of Sam Coyne’s apartment was like a Realist painting on the days and nights when fog or rain or snow didn’t entirely obscure the view. However, on blustery days, which were common, even the pleated flannel curtains had more depth than the flat gray haze of the Chicago sky.
This night the air had clarity worthy of the pricey window-washing service Sam hired as a redundancy to his own fastidiousness. The empty skyscrapers glowed at twenty percent of their maximum wattage, lighting floor upon floor of unoccupied space. From thirty-nine stories up, the Lake Michigan shoreline was discernible only as an imaginary line separating the fluorescent city grid from the black void of the water. Sam loved how empty Lake Michigan was at night, loved the depth of its nothingness, and earlier this night, when he’d turned a twenty-six-year-old Leo Burnett art director onto her hands and knees, he made sure with the push of his hips and the pull of his hands that she could see the same blackness in the lake that he saw, and he could tell from her response – her narrow pelvis tight against his thighs, and the base of her skull pressing against the heel of his palm – that she was like him, that she recognized the blackness inside her was the blackness of nature, the blackness inside every one of us.
Sam slid out of bed and the sleeping girl spread her arm dreamily across the sheet to fill the divot in the mattress he’d left behind. He slipped down the hall to a guest room he’d converted into an office and opened his laptop. The screen brightened at his touch, as if it were glad to see him.
He clicked an icon for Shadow World and the game loaded, unspooling copyright notices and legalese and an animated intro, which he skipped after only a few frames. Recognizing him, and noting the time, the screen revealed an aerial shot of Chicago at night, the point of view soaring in off the lake and between buildings heading north. The game was plugged in to the National Weather Service so the Chicago on-screen was enjoying the same cloudless weather as the real city outside. In a matter of seconds Sam could see the steel-and-glass exterior of his own building, and then up, up, up thirty-nine stories to Sam’s home-office window. The on-screen point of view then entered the apartment as if the glass in the window had dissolved like sugar candy.
Sam donned a headset and manipulated the POV until it was identical to the one from his desk. He walked his avatar down the hall and looked in on the sleeping woman in his bed, his gaming persona, naturally, being as promiscuous as he was in real life. He had Shadow Sam go to the walk-in closet and put on a pair of khaki cargo pants and a black turtleneck. Shadow Sam walked quietly from the bedroom to the kitchen. He opened a drawer and removed a long knife, which he wrapped in a dish towel and placed in one of his roomy side pockets. He left the apartment and took the elevator to the garage and found his BMW in its assigned spot (his Shadow car had been stolen once, but it had been insured). He drove north along Shadow Lake Shore Drive. There was little traffic and he rolled the top back. The speedometer on his dash was frozen at sixty miles per hour, about fifteen over the speed limit. In his earpiece, the car hummed through the whistling night air. An old pink eyesore of a building appeared on the horizon and as he passed it he remembered reading that its real owners had managed to have its landmark status revoked and planned its demolition for later in the week. Sam wondered how up to speed the Shadow World coders could be and made a note to have Shadow Sam drive this way on Friday to see if the pink building were still part of the game.
He exited LSD at Fullerton and drove west, away from the lake. The white moon disappeared into the canopy of tall buildings and trees in Lincoln Park. He turned northwest on Lincoln and passed a bar called the York, which had a 4 a.m. license. He circled, found a parking spot, and walked back to the bar. The inventory panel on his screen reminded him of the contents of his pocket: one wallet, $300, one knife, one dish towel.
The York was crowded but a couple abandoned their seats at the bar, and Shadow Sam took one. He ordered a beer, left a fifty on the counter, and turned around to scope the room. Youngsters, hipsters, a desegregated mix of straight and gay. A pair of girls danced together to the jukebox Rolling Stones. They were both blonde and shapely and pretty in a cartoon way, as most everyone was in the game, save the True-to-Lifers. Sam took pride in the fact that his icon looked a lot like him. In fact, last year, when he was stuck in a gymless Saint Louis hotel and gained five pounds in a week, he updated his avatar with the extra weight. That kind of honesty was unusual among gamers.
He watched the girls dance for a while, their hips swaying and arms lifting in a repeatable programmed loop based loosely on the hustle, and then he asked if he could buy them drinks. He stood up and offered them his chair as well as the stool next to it. The bartender made more change from what remained of the fifty.
Their names were Donna and Lindsay. No one handed out his or her last name in Shadow World, except the hard-core True-to-Lifers or people looking to start a relationship. He said he was Sam.
“Lindsay, that’s a nice dress,” he said into the headset microphone. According to conversation protocol, gamers used the name of the person being addressed when there was more than one person within listening distance, or in the “halo of conversation.”
“Sam, thanks. I bought it at Saks.” That is, she bought it with Shadow dollars at the Shadow Saks Fifth Avenue. Lindsay put her hand on Sam’s leg just above the pocket where he’d put the knife.
“Lindsay, you have pretty hair. Is it real?” Sam was asking if the actual Lindsay looked anything like this or if she had created a sexy avatar through which she could live the virtual life of a prettier woman. He didn’t care one way or the other, but these were the flirty and inane conversations one had in Shadow World just to advance the time, to get to the next, better thing.
“Sam, it’s real,” she said. “Dyed, but real.” In his earpiece, he heard her giggle.
“Lindsay, Sam, bye,” Donna said. She already saw where this was going and moved down the bar to play with someone else.
“Lindsay, do you want to go for a walk?” Sam’s avatar asked.
“Sure!” Lindsay replied.
They walked outside and turned right on the sidewalk and had more ridiculous conversation of the real world rather than Shadow World kind. Sam turned down an alley and Lindsay followed. There was a car parked under a broken light, thirty or so feet from the street. Sam pressed Lindsay against
it and started kissing her.
In Shadow World, players were constantly pairing off with strangers and having sex in public places. Countless magazine articles on the subject quoted psychologists who explained this was a common fantasy for both men and women, and it made sense that people would use the game to act it out in a world with no lasting consequences (venereal disease should have been more widespread in the game, but Shadow World public officials had taken the threat seriously and infection rates were only slightly higher than in the real world). If Shadow Sam spotted a woman alone in a bar, he could usually get her to an alley in even shorter time than this.
Shadow sex wasn’t the most visually stimulating thing. Programmers hadn’t yet mastered the code to make on-screen characters seem realistic or sexy. The naked icons appeared as textureless flesh-colored versions of their clothed selves, and the same visuals (her with mouth open, him with eyes closed, hips thrusting together in mechanical rhythm) looped and repeated again and again. Online sex was a big draw of the game, however, so the makers were working on a more explicit, adults-only plug-in for version 5.0.
Shadow World sex was similar to a dirty two-person (or sometimes three- or four- or seven-person) chat. As player icons mashed together on-screen, the players would shout and moan and call each other filthy names and describe how close they were to climaxing and what unexpected things they were going to do next to please their partners. Voyeurs, mostly kids whose parents had never bothered to activate parental controls, scanned the back streets at night looking to spy on illicit couplings like this one and record them to their hard drives. There were several Web sites devoted to the playback of amateur Shadow World pornos.
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