by Dean Koontz
“But he’s got a gun.”
“Doesn’t matter. He can’t shoot through a heavy metal fire door.”
Although she was terrified, at the same time Connie was relieved that Graham had taken charge—for however brief a time—and was functioning in spite of his fear.
The door rattled as Bollinger depressed the bar handle on the far side. The stop caught on the sill; its hinges didn’t fold up; the door refused to open.
“He’ll have to go up or down a floor,” Harris said, “and come at us by the stairs at the other end of the building. Or by the elevator. Which gives us a few minutes.”
Cursing, Bollinger shook the door, putting all his strength into it. It wouldn’t budge.
“What good will a few minutes do us?” Connie asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Graham, are we ever going to get out of here?”
“Probably not.”
25
Dr. Andrew Enderby, the medical examiner on the scene, was suave, even dashing, extremely fit for a man in his fifties. He had thick hair going white at the temples. Clear brown eyes. A long aristocratic nose, generally handsome features. His salt-and-pepper mustache was large but well kept. He was wearing a tailored gray suit with tastefully matched accessories that made Preduski’s sloppiness all the more apparent.
“Hello, Andy,” Preduski said.
“Number eleven,” Enderby said. “Unusual. Like numbers five, seven and eight.” When Enderby was excited, which wasn’t often, he was impatient to express himself. He sometimes spoke in staccato bursts. He pointed at the kitchen table and said, “See it? No butter smears. No jelly stains. No crumbs. Too damned neat. Another fake.”
A lab technician was disconnecting the garbage-disposal unit from the pipes under the sink.
“Why?” Preduski said. “Why does he fake it when he isn’t hungry?”
“I know why. Sure of it.”
“So tell me,” Preduski said.
“First of all, did you know I’m a psychiatrist?”
“You’re a coroner, a pathologist.”
“Psychiatrist too.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Went to medical school. Did my internship. Specialized in otolaryngology. Couldn’t stand it. Hideous way to make a living. My family had money. Didn’t have to work. Went back to medical school. Became a psychiatrist.”
“That must be interesting work.”
“Fascinating. But I couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand associating with the patients.”
“Oh?”
“All day with a bunch of neurotics. Began to feel that half of them should be locked up. Got out of the field fast. Better for me and the patients.”
“I should say so.”
“Kicked around a bit. Twenty years ago, I became a police pathologist.”
“The dead aren’t neurotic.”
“Not even a little bit.”
“And they don’t have ear, nose and throat infections.”
“Which they don’t pass on to me,” Enderby said. “No money in this job, of course. But I’ve got all the money I need. And the work is right for me. I’m perfect for the work, too. My psychiatric training gives me a different perspective. Insights. I have insights that other pathologists might not have. Like the one I had tonight.”
“About why the Butcher sometimes eats a hearty meal and sometimes fakes a hearty meal?”
“Yes,” Enderby said. He took a breath. Then: “It’s because there are two of him.”
Preduski scratched his head. “Schizophrenia?”
“No, no. I mean ... there isn’t just one man running around killing women. There are two.”He smiled triumphantly.
Preduski stared at him.
Slamming his fist into his open hand, Enderby said, “I’m right! I know I am. Butcher number one killed the first four victims. Killing them gave him an appetite. Butcher number two killed the fifth woman. Cut her up as Butcher number one had done. But he was ever so slightly more tender-hearted than the first Butcher. Killing spoiled his appetite. So he faked the meal.”
“Why bother to fake it?”
“Simple. He wanted to leave no doubt about who killed her. Wanted us to think it was the Butcher.”
Preduski was suddenly aware of how precisely Enderby’s necktie had been knotted. He touched his own tie self-consciously. “Pardon me. Excuse me. I don’t quite understand. My fault. God knows. But, you see, we’ve never told the newspapers about the scene in the kitchens. We’ve held that back to check false confessions against real ones. If this guy, Butcher number two, wanted to imitate the real Butcher, how would he know about the kitchen?”
“You’re missing my point.”
“I’m sure I am.”
“Butcher number one and Butcher number two know each other. They’re in this together.”
Amazed, Preduski said, “They’re friends? You mean they go out and murder—like other men go out bowling?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that.”
“They’re killing women, trying to make it look like the work of one man?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know. Maybe they’re creating a composite character in the Butcher. Giving us an image of a killer that isn’t really like either of them. Throw us off the track. Protect themselves.”
Preduski started to pace in front of the littered table. “Two psychopaths meet in a bar—”
“Not necessarily a bar.”
“They get chummy and sign a pact to kill all the women in Manhattan.”
“Not all,” Enderby said. “But enough.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe I’m not very bright. I’m not well educated. Not a doctor like you. But I can’t swallow it. I can’t see psychopaths working together so smoothly and effectively.”
“Why not? Remember the Tate murders in California? There were several psychopaths in the Manson family, yet they all worked smoothly and efficiently together, committing a large number of murders.”
“They were caught,” Preduski said.
“Not for quite some time.”
26
Six business offices occupied the thirty-first floor of the Bowerton Building. Graham and Connie tried a few doors, all of which proved to be locked. They knew the others would be shut tight as well.
However, in the main hall near the elevator alcove, Connie discovered an unmarked, unlocked door. She opened it. Graham felt for the light switch, found it. They went inside.
The room was approximately ten feet deep and six or seven feet wide. On the left was a metal door that had been painted bright red; and to one side of the door, mops and brooms and brushes were racked on the wall. On the right, the wall was lined with metal storage shelves full of bathroom and cleaning supplies.
“It’s a maintenance center,” Graham said.
Connie went to the red door. She took one step out of the room, holding the door behind her. She was surprised and excited by what she saw. “Graham! Hey, look at this.”
He didn’t respond.
She stepped back into the room, turned and said, “Graham, look what—”
He was only a foot away, holding a large pair of scissors up to his face. He gripped the instrument in his fist, in the manner of a man holding a dagger. The blades gleamed; and like polished gems, the sharp points caught the light.
“Graham?” she said.
Lowering the scissors, he said, “I found these on the shelf over there. I can use them as a weapon.”
“Against a gun?”
“Maybe we can set up a trap.”
“What kind of trap?”
“Lure him into a situation where I can surprise him, where he won’t have time enough to use the damned gun.”
“For instance?”
His hand was shaking. Light danced on the blades. “I don’t know,” he said miserably.
“It wouldn’t work,” she said. “Besides, I’ve found a way out of the building.”
He looked up. “You have?”
“Come look. You won’t need the scissors. Put them down.”
“I’ll look,” he said. “But I’ll keep the scissors just in case.”
She was afraid that when he saw the escape route she’d found he would prefer to face the Butcher armed only with the scissors.
He followed her through the red door, onto a railed platform that was only eighteen inches wide and four feet long. A light glowed overhead; and other lights lay some distance away in a peculiar, at first unidentifiable void.
They were suspended on the side of one of the two elevator shafts that went from the ground floor to the roof. It served four cabs, all of which were parked at the bottom. Fat cables dangled in front of Connie and Graham. On this side and on the opposite wall of the cavernous well, from roof to basement at the odd-numbered floors, other doors opened onto other tiny platforms. There was one directly across from Graham and Connie, and the sight of it made them realize the precarious nature of their perch. On both sides of the shaft, metal rungs were bolted to the walls: ladders connecting the doors in each tier to other exits in the same tier.
The system could be used for emergency maintenance work or for moving people off stalled elevators in case of fire, power failure, or other calamity. A small white light burned above each door; otherwise, the shaft would have been in absolute darkness. When Connie looked up, and especially when she looked down from the thirty-first floor, the sets of farther lights appeared to be closer together than the sets of nearer lights. It was a long way to the bottom.
His voice wavered when he said, “This is a way out?”
She hesitated, then said, “We can climb down.”
“No.”
“We can’t use the stairs. He’ll be watching those.”
“Not this.”
“It won’t be like mountain climbing.”
His eyes shifted quickly from left to right and back again. “No.”
“We’ll have the ladder.”
“And we’ll climb down thirty-one floors?” he asked.
“Please, Graham. If we start now, we might make it. Even if he finds that the maintenance room is unlocked, and even if he sees this red door—well, he might not think we’d have enough nerve to climb down the shaft. And if he did see us, we could get off the ladder, leave the shaft at another floor. We’d gain more time.”
“I can’t.” He was gripping the railing with both hands, and with such force that she would not have been surprised if the metal had bent like paper in his hands.
Exasperated, she said, “Graham, what else can we do?”
He stared into the concrete depths.
Worried that he would lose track of his prey, he rushed back to the twenty-sixth floor. That was where he had originally entered the stairwell, where he had left the elevator cab.
As he pulled open the fire door and stepped into the hall, he looked at his watch. 9:15. The time was passing too fast, unnaturally fast, as if the universe had become unbalanced.
Hurrying to the elevator alcove, he fished in his pocket for the dead guard’s keys. They snagged on the lining. When he jerked them loose, they spun out of his hand and fell on the carpet with a sleighbell jingle.
He knelt and felt for them in the darkness. Then he remembered the pencil flashlight, but even with that he needed more than a minute to locate the keys.
As he got up, angry with himself, he wondered if Harris and the woman were waiting here for him. He put away the flashlight and snatched the pistol from his pocket. He stood quite still. He studied the darkness. If they were hiding there, they would have been silhouetted by the bright spot farther along at the alcove.
When he thought about it, he realized that they couldn’t have known on which floor he’d left the elevator. Furthermore, they couldn’t have gotten down here in time to surprise him.
The thirty-first floor was a different story. They might have time to set a trap for him up there. When the elevator doors slid open, they might be waiting for him; he would be most vulnerable at that moment.
Then again, he was the one with the pistol. So what if they were waiting with makeshift weapons? They didn’t stand a chance of overpowering him.
At the elevator he put the key in the control board and activated the circuit.
He looked at his watch. 9:19.
If there were no more delays, he could kill Harris and still have twenty minutes or half an hour with the woman.
Whistling again, he pushed one of the buttons: 31.
27
The lab technician disconnected the garbage disposal, wrapped it in a heavy white plastic sheet, and carried it out of the apartment.
Preduski and Enderby were left alone in the kitchen.
In the foyer, a grandfather clock struck the quarter hour: two soft chimes, running five minutes late. In accompaniment, the wind fluted musically through the eaves just above the kitchen windows.
“If you find it hard to accept the idea of two psychopaths working so smoothly together,” Enderby said, “then consider the possibility that they aren’t psychopaths of any sort we’ve seen before.”
“Now you sound like Graham Harris.”
“I know.”
“The Butcher is mentally ill, Harris says. But you wouldn’t know it to look at him, Harris says. Either the symptoms of his mania don’t show, or he knows how to conceal them. He’d pass any psychiatric exam, Harris says.”
“I’m beginning to agree with him.”
“Except you say there are two Butchers.”
Enderby nodded.
Preduski sighed. He went to the nearest window and drew the outline of a knife in the thin gray-white film of moisture that coated the glass. “If you’re right, I can’t hold onto my theory. That he’s just your ordinary paranoid schizophrenic. Maybe a lone killer could be operating in a psychotic fugue. But not two of them simultaneously.”
“They’re not suffering any psychotic fugue,” Enderby agreed. “Both of these men know precisely what they’re doing. Neither of them suffers from amnesia.”
Turning from the window, from the drawing of the knife which had begun to streak as droplets of water slid down the pane, Preduski said, “Whether this is a new type of psychotic or not, the crime is familiar. Sex murders are—”
“These aren’t sex murders,” Enderby said.
Preduski cocked his head. “Come again?”
“These aren’t sex murders.”
“They only kill women.”
“Yes, but—”
“And they rape them first.”
“Yes. It’s murder with sex associated. But these aren’t sex murders.”
“I’m sorry. I’m lost. My fault. Not yours.”
“Sex isn’t the motivating force. Sex isn’t the whole or even the primary reason they have for attacking these women. The opportunity for rape is there. So they take it. Going to kill the women anyway. They aren’t adding to their legal risks by raping them first. Sex is secondary. They aren’t killing out of some psychosexual impulse.”
Shaking his head, Preduski said, “I don’t see how you can say that. You’ve never met them. What evidence do you have that their motives aren’t basically sexual?”
“Circumstantial,” Enderby said. “For instance, the way they mutilate the corpses.”
“What about it?”
“Have you studied the mutilations carefully?”
“I had no choice.”
“All right. Found any sign of anal mutilation?”
“No.”
“Mutilation of the genitalia?”
“No.”
“Mutilation of the breasts?”
“In some cases he’s cut open the abdomen and chest cavity.”
“Mutilation of the breasts alone?”
“When he opens the chest—”
“I mean has he ever cut off a woman’s nipples, or perhaps her entire breasts, as Jack the Ripper did?”
A look of loathi
ng came over his face. “No.”
“Has he ever mutilated the mouth of a victim?”
“The mouth?”
“Has he ever cut off the lips?”
“No. Never.”
“Has he ever cut out a tongue?”
“God, no! Andy, do we have to go on like this? It’s morbid. And I don’t see where it’s leading.”
“If they were manical sex killers with a desire to cut their victims,” Enderby said, “they’d have disfigured one of those areas.”
“Anus, breasts, genitalia or mouth?”
“Unquestionably. At least one of them. Probably all of them. But they didn’t. So the mutilation is an afterthought. Not a sexual compulsion. Window dressing.”
Preduski closed his eyes, pressed his fingertips to them, as if he were trying to suppress unpleasant images.“Window dressing? I’m afraid I don’t understand.
“To impress us.”
“The police?”
“Yes. And the newspapers.”
Preduski went to the window where he had drawn the knife. He wiped away the film of moisture and stared at the snow sheeting through the glow around the street lamp. “Why would he want to impress us?”
“I don’t know. Whatever the reason, whatever the need behind his desire to impress—that is the true motivation.”
“If we knew what it was, we might be able to see a pattern in the killings. We might be able to anticipate him.”
Suddenly excited, Enderby said, “Wait a minute. Another case. Two killers. Working together. Chicago. Nineteen twenty-four. Two young men were the murders. Both sons of millionaires. In their late teens.”
“Leopold and Loeb.”
“You know the case?”
“Slightly.”
“They killed a boy, Bobby Franks. Fourteen years old. Son of another rich man. They had nothing against him. None of the usual reasons. No classic motive. Newspapers said it was for kicks. For thrills. Very bloody murder. But they killed Franks for other reasons. For more than kicks. For a philosophical ideal.”