by Dean Koontz
She winced. “Sorry.” Then she smiled. He had not seen her smile before, not once in the entire week since he had first seen her. She had stood in that spotlight, moving with the music, shedding her clothes, bumping, grinding, caressing her own bare breasts, observing her audience with the cold eyes and almost lipless expression of a snake. Her smile was dazzling.
“Get your robe, Miss Mowry.”
She closed the door.
Bollinger watched the foyer door at the end of the hall, hoping no one would come in or go out while he was standing there, exposed.
He put away his wallet.
He kept the knife in his left hand.
In less than a minute she returned. She removed the security chain, opened the door and said, “Come in.”
He stepped past her, inside.
She closed the door and put the bolt lock in place and turned to him and said, “Whatever trouble—”
Moving quickly for such a large man he slammed her against the door, brought up the knife, shifted it from his left hand to his right hand, and lightly pricked her throat with the point of the blade.
Her green eyes were very wide. She’d had the breath knocked out of her and could not scream.
“No noise,” Bollinger said fiercely. “If you try to call for help, I’ll push this pig sticker straight into your lovely throat. I’ll ram it right out the back of your neck. Do you understand?”
She stared at him.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said thinly.
“Are you going to cooperate?”
She said nothing. Her gaze traveled down from his eyes, over his proud nose and full lips and strong jaw-line, down to his fist and to the handle of the knife.
“If you aren’t going to cooperate,” he said quietly, “I can skewer you right here. I’ll pin you to the damn door.” He was breathing hard.
A tremor passed through her.
He grinned.
Still trembling, she said, “What do you want?”
“Not much. Not very much at all. Just a little loving.”
She closed her eyes. “Are you—him?”
A slender, all but invisible thread of blood trickled from beneath the needlelike point of the knife, slid along her throat to the neck of her bright red robe. Watching the minuscule flow of blood as if he were a scientist observing an extremely rare bacterium through a microscope, pleased by it, nearly mesmerized by it, he said, “Him? Who is ‘him’? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know,” she said weakly.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Are you him?” she bit her lip. “The one who—who’s cut up all those other women?”
Looking up from her throat, he said, “I see. I see how it is. Of course. You mean the one they call the Butcher. You think I’m the Butcher.”
“Are you?”
“I’ve been reading a great deal about him in the Daily News. He slits their throats, doesn’t he? From one ear to the other. Isn’t that right?” He was teasing her and enjoying himself immensely. “Sometimes he even disembowels them. Doesn’t he? Correct me if I’m wrong. But that’s what he does sometimes, isn’t it?”
She said nothing.
“I believe I read in the News that he sliced the ears off one of them. When the police found her, her ears were on the nightstand beside her bed.”
She shuddered more violently than ever.
“Poor little Edna. You think I’m the Butcher. No wonder you’re so frightened.” He patted her shoulder, smoothed her dark hair as if he were quieting an animal. “I’d be scared too if I were in your shoes right now.
But I’m not. I’m not in your shoes and I’m not this guy they call the Butcher. You can relax.”
She opened her eyes and searched his, trying to tell whether he spoke the truth.
“What kind of man do you think I am, Edna?” he asked, pretending to have been hurt by her suspicion. “I don’t want to harm you. I will if I must. I will cause you a great deal of harm if you don’t cooperate with me. But if you’re docile, if you’re good to me, I’ll be good to you. I’ll make you very happy, and I’ll leave you just like I found you. Flawless. You are flawless, you know. Perfectly beautiful. And your breath smells like strawberries. Isn’t that nice? That’s such a wonderful way for us to begin, such a nice touch, that scent of strawberries on your breath. Were you eating when I knocked?”
“You’re crazy,” she said softly.
“Now, Edna, let’s have cooperation. Were you eating strawberries?”
Tears began to form in the corners of her eyes.
He pressed a bit harder with the knife.
She whimpered.
“Well?” he said.
“Wine.”
“What?”
“It was wine.”
“Strawberry wine?”
“Yes.”
“Is there any left?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to have some.”
“I’ll get it for you.”
“I’ll get it myself,” he said. “But first I’ve got to take you into the bedroom and tie you up. Now, now. Don’t be scared. If I didn’t tie you up, sooner or later you’d try to escape. If you tried to escape, I’d have to kill you. So, you see, I’m going to tie you up for your own good, so that you won’t make it necessary for me to hurt you.”
Still holding the knife at her throat, he kissed her. Her lips were cold and stiff.
“Please don’t,” she said.
“Relax and enjoy yourself, Edna.” He untied the sash at her waist. The robe fell open. Under it, she was naked. He gently squeezed her breasts. “If you cooperate you’ll come out of this just fine. And you’ll have a lot of fun. I’m not going to kill you unless you force me to it. I’m no butcher, Edna. Me ... I’m nothing but your ordinary, everyday rapist.”
2
Graham Harris sensed that there was trouble coming. He shifted in his chair but could not get comfortable. He glanced at the three television cameras and suddenly felt as if he were surrounded by intelligent and hostile robots. He almost laughed at that bizarre image; the tension made him slightly giddy.
“Nervous?” Anthony Prine asked.
“A little.”
“No need to be.”
“Maybe not while the commercials are running, but—”
“Not when we’re back on the air again, either,” Prine said. “You’ve handled yourself well so far.” Although he was as American as Harris, Prine managed to look like the stereotypical British gentleman: sophisticated, rather jaded yet just a bit stuffy, completely relaxed, a model of self-confidence. He was sitting in a high-backed leather armchair, an exact copy of the chair in which Graham had suddenly found himself so uncomfortable. “You’re a most interesting guest, Mr. Harris.”
“Thank you. You’re interesting yourself. I don’t see how you can keep your wits about you. I mean, doing this much live television, five nights a week—”
“But the fact that it’s live is what makes it so exciting,” Prine said. “Being on the air live, risking all, taking a chance of making a fool of yourself—that keeps the juices flowing. That’s why I hesitate to accept one of these offers to syndicate the show or to go network with it. They’d want it on tape, all neatly edited down from two hours to ninety minutes. And that wouldn’t be the same.”
The program director, a heavyset man in a white turtleneck sweater and houndstooth-check slacks, said, “Twenty seconds, Tony.”
“Relax,” Prine told Harris. “You’ll be off in fifteen more minutes.”
Harris nodded. Prine seemed friendly—yet he could not shake the feeling that the night was going to go sour for him, and soon.
Anthony Prine was the host of Manhattan at Midnight, an informal two-hour-long interview program that originated from a local New York City station. Manhattan at Midnight provided the same sort of entertainment to be found on all other talk shows—actors and actresses plugging thei
r latest movies, authors plugging their latest books, musicians plugging their latest records, politicians plugging their latest campaigns (as yet unannounced campaigns and thus unfettered by the equal-time provisions of the election laws)—except that it presented a greater number of mind readers and psychics and UFO “experts” than did most talk shows. Prine was a Believer. He was also damned good at his job, so good there were rumors ABC wanted to pick him up for a nationwide audience. He was not so witty as Johnny Carson or so homey as Mike Douglas, but no one asked better or more probing questions than he did. Most of the time he was serene, in lazy command of his show; and when things were going well, he looked somewhat like a slimmed-down Santa Claus: completely white hair, a round face and merry blue eyes. He appeared to be incapable of rudeness. However, there were occasions—no more often than once a night, sometimes only once a week—when he would lash out at a guest, prove him a liar or in some other way thoroughly embarrass and humiliate him with a series of wickedly pointed questions. The attack never lasted more than three or four minutes, but it was as brutal and as relentless as it was surprising.
Manhattan at Midnight commanded a large and faithful audience primarily because of this element of surprise that magnified the ferocity of Prine’s interrogations. If he had subjected every guest to this abuse, he would have been a bore; but his calculated style made him as fascinating as a cobra. Those millions of people who spend most of their leisure hours in front of a television set apparently enjoyed secondhand violence more than they did any other form of entertainment. They watched the police shows to see people beaten, robbed and murdered; they watched Prine for those unexpected moments when he bludgeoned a guest with words that were nearly as devastating as clubs.
He had started twenty-five years earlier as a nightclub comic and impressionist, doing old jokes and mimicking famous voices in cheap lounges. He had come a long way.
The director signaled Prine. A red light shone on one camera.
Addressing his unseen audience, Prine said, “I’m talking with Mr. Graham Harris, a resident of Manhattan who calls himself a ‘clairvoyant,’ a seer of visions. Is that the proper definition of the term, Mr. Harris?”
“It’ll do,” Graham said. “Although when you put it that way, it sounds a bit religious. Which it isn’t. I don’t attribute my extrasensory perception to God—nor to any other supernatural force.”
“As you said earlier, you’re convinced that the clairvoyance is a result of a head injury you received in a rather serious accident. Subsequent to that, you began to have these visions. If that’s God’s work, His methods are even more roundabout than we might have thought.”
Graham smiled. “Precisely.”
“Now, anyone who reads the newspapers knows that you’ve been asked to assist the police in uncovering a clue to the identity of this man they call the Butcher. But what about your last case, the murder of the Havelock sisters in Boston? That was very interesting too. Tell us about that.”
Graham shifted uneasily in his chair. He still sensed trouble coming, but he couldn’t imagine what it might be or how he might avoid it. “The Havelock sisters...”
Nineteen-year-old Paula and twenty-two-year-old Paige Havelock had lived together in a cozy Boston apartment near the university where Paula was an undergraduate student and where Paige was working for her master’s degree in sociology. On the morning of last November second, Michael Shute had stopped by the apartment to take Paige to lunch. The date had been made by telephone the previous evening. Shute and the elder Havelock sister were lovers, and he had a key to the apartment. When no one responded to the bell, he decided to let himself in and wait for them. Inside, however, he discovered that they were at home. Paula and Paige had been awakened in the night by one or more intruders who had stripped them naked; pajamas and robes were strewn on the floor. The women had been tied with a heavy cord, sexually molested and finally shot to death in their own living room.
Because the proper authorities were unable to come up with a single major lead in the case, the parents of the dead girls got in touch with Graham on the tenth of November and asked for his assistance. He arrived in Boston two days later. Although the police were skeptical of his talents—a number of them were downright hostile toward him—they were anxious to placate the Havelocks, who had some political influence in the city. He was taken to the sealed apartment and permitted to examine the scene of the crime. But he got absolutely nothing from that: no emanations, no psychic visions—just a chill that slithered down his spine and coiled in his stomach. Later, under the suspicious gaze of a police property officer, he was allowed to handle the pillow that the killer had used to muffle the gunshots—and then the pajamas and the robes that had been found next to the bodies. As he caressed the blood-stiffened fabric, his paranormal talent abruptly blossomed; his mind was inundated with clairvoyant images like a series of choppy, frothing waves breaking on a beach.
Anthony Prine interrupted Graham. “Wait a minute. I think we need some elaboration on this point. We need to make it much clearer. Do you mean that the simple act of touching the bloodstained pajamas caused your clairvoyant visions?”
“No. It didn’t cause them. It freed them. The pajamas were like a key that unlocked the clairvoyant part of my mind. That’s a quality common to nearly all murder weapons and to the last garments worn by the victims.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know,” Graham said.
“You’ve never thought about it?”
“I’ve thought about it endlessly,” Graham said. “But I’ve never reached any conclusions.”
Although Prine’s voice held not even the slightest note of hostility, Graham was almost certain that the man was searching for an opening to launch one of his famous attacks.
For a moment he thought that might be the oncoming trouble which he had known about, in a somewhat psychic fashion, for the past quarter of an hour. Then he suddenly understood, through the powers of his sixth sense, that the trouble would happen to someone else, beyond the walls of this studio.
“When you touched the pajamas,” Prine said, “did you see the murders as if they were actually taking place in front of you at that very moment?”
“Not exactly. I saw it all take place—well, behind my eyes.”
“What do you mean by that? Are your visions sort of like daydreams?”
“In a way. But much more vivid than daydreams. Full of color and sound and texture.”
“Did you see the Havelocks’ killer in this vision?”
“Yes. Quite clearly.”
“Did you also intuit his name?”
“No,” Graham said. “But I was able to give the police a thorough description of him. He was in his early thirties, not shorter than five-ten or taller than six feet. Slightly heavy. Receding hairline. Blue eyes. A thin nose, generally sharp features. A small strawberry birth-mark on his chin.... As it turned out, that was a perfect description of the building superintendent.”
“And you’d never seen him?”
“My first glimpse of him was in that vision.”
“You’d never seen a photograph of him?”
“No.”
“Had he been a suspect before you gave the police this description?” Prine asked.
“Yes. But the murders took place in the early morning hours of his day off. He swore that he had gone to his sister’s house to spend the night, hours before the Havelock girls were killed; and his sister supported his story. Since she lived over eighty miles away, he seemed out of the running.”
“Was his sister lying?”
“Yes.”
“How did you prove it?”
While handling the dead girls’ clothing, Graham sensed that the killer had gone to his sister’s house a full two hours after the murder had taken place—not early the previous evening as she insisted. He also sensed that the weapon—a Smith & Wesson Terrier .32—was hidden in the sister’s house, in the bottom drawer of a c
hina closet.
He accompanied a Boston city detective and two state troopers to the sister’s place. Arriving unannounced and uninvited, they told her they wanted to question her on some new evidence in the case. Ten seconds after he stepped into her house, while the woman was still surprised at the sight of them, Graham asked her why she had said that her brother had come to stay on the evening of November first when in fact he actually had not arrived until well after dawn on November second. Before she could answer that, before she could get her wits about her, he asked her why she was hiding the murder weapon in the bottom drawer of her china closet. Shocked by his knowledge, she withstood only half a dozen questions from the detective before she finally admitted the truth.
“Amazing,” Prine said. “And you had never seen the inside of her house before you had that vision?”
“I’d never even seen the outside of it,” Graham said.
“Why would she protect her brother when she knew he was guilty of such a horrible crime?”
“I don’t know. I can see things that have happened—and very occasionally, things that soon will happen—in places where I’ve never been. But I can’t read minds. I can’t explain human motivations.”
The program director signaled Prine: five minutes until they broke for the commercials.
Leaning toward Harris, Prine said, “Who asked you to help catch this man they’re calling the Butcher? Parents of one of the murdered women?”
“No. One of the detectives assigned to the case isn’t as skeptical as most policemen. He believes that I can do what I say I can do. He wants to give me a chance.”
“Have you gone to the scenes of the nine murders?”
“I’ve seen five of them.”
“And handled the clothes of the victims?”
“Some of them.”
Prine slid forward on his chair, leaning conspiratorially toward Harris. “What can you tell us about the Butcher?”
“Not much,” Graham Harris said, and he frowned, because that bothered him. He was having more trouble than usual on this case. “He’s a big man. Good-looking. Young. Very sure of himself and sure of the—”