by Tom Savage
The man, Scavenger, had killed the Banes family in Brooklyn; Mark was certain. Yet he had insisted that Mark go there and retrieve the first article, the newspaper announcing his handiwork. Why? What was the point? If he wanted to reveal his identity, why do it in such an obscure, roundabout way?
Then, on the plane somewhere over Texas, Mark reread the electronic letter. I have always been a lover of games, Mr. Stevenson.…
Yes, Mark thought. Indeed he is a lover of games.
By the time the plane landed, Mark had actually dozed off. A flight attendant gently woke him, and he stumbled into the terminal. He’d wisely decided to take a cab to the big chain hotel on Sunset where he’d stayed the only other time he’d been in L.A., more than ten years ago. He was too tired to drive; he would rent a car later. He’d looked around the airport, as he’d searched the entire length of the plane, but the tall man with the scar was nowhere to be seen.
During the cab ride, Mark had decided to register as Jared McKinley, and to pay cash, and that is what he did. He got a single room for two nights. He’d called Tracy and spoken to her, but he couldn’t remember one word of the conversation now except the part where she’d suddenly told him she loved him. That had been wonderful. Then he’d eaten in one of the restaurants off the lobby, made his way back to his room on the tenth floor, and fallen, fully clothed, across the bed. He’d slept for nearly twelve hours.
Now, gazing at the construction site before him, Mark remembered the events of this morning. It was now ten-thirty. He’d risen at eight, showered, and gone back to the lobby restaurant for breakfast. As he emerged from the restaurant, Mark was stopped by a bellman who told him there was a message for him at the front desk. He wondered at that for a brief moment. As far as the hotel was concerned, he was Jared McKinley, and nobody could possibly know—
He cast the thought aside. Scavenger. Of course. Scavenger was omnipotent, omnipresent. Like God, only evil. Like Satan. He was here, of course. He was everywhere.
Aware that he was being watched, Mark had gone to the desk and accepted the note addressed to Jared McKinley. It was in a little black envelope with an adhesive label on the front. Neatly printed on the label were the words, Mr. Jared McKinley, Room 1014. The black-bordered note inside read:
Hello, Mark. The WORD you seek is closer than you think. In fact, it’s in your room right now. But first, you must visit the Websters. Have a nice day.
S.
He’d thanked the desk clerk, slipped the note into his jacket pocket, and headed for the elevator.
A quick search of his hotel room revealed nothing out of the ordinary. His suitcase was exactly where he’d placed it in the otherwise empty closet, and it contained nothing new: clothing, the newspaper from Brooklyn, and the Mardi Gras mask. He’d thrown away the now-useless box of .38-caliber bullets in New Orleans, before he’d gone to the airport. In the bathroom were his razor and toothbrush along with the hotel-provided soap, shampoo, conditioner, towels, and washcloths. The desk drawer of the dresser contained the hotel’s complimentary stationery kit, a room-service menu, a pamphlet delineating and extolling the many hotel services available, a Bible placed by the Gideons, and a magazine called L.A. Now, courtesy of the Chamber of Commerce. He flipped through the magazine, the Bible, and the service manual, and he even riffled through the stationery folder, but there was no hidden slip of paper or message of any kind. Everything, as well as Mark could determine, was as it should be.
Then, as abruptly as he had begun the search, he stopped, remembering Scavenger’s original instructions: You must follow my scenario strictly, as it is presented to you. You may not at any time deviate from the order in which the clues arrive and the articles are retrieved.
Of course, he thought. I have to proceed with the steps of this mad game as they arrive. But first, you must visit the Websters.
He’d taken a cab from the hotel to the nearest Hertz outlet and rented a Mustang convertible. This had been risky, because he’d had to do it as Mark Stevenson, and to use a credit card. Car rental companies did not accept cash: you couldn’t steal a hotel room, but you could steal a car. Welcome to the modern world. Then he had driven here, to this empty, or nearly empty, lot.
This site in the Hollywood Hills, with its panoramic view of the city, had once been the address of the big, two-story stucco-and-glass residence of the Webster family, the second group of victims of The Family Man. Ian Webster, the head of the family, was a British-born American television star of long standing, having appeared in not one but two successful series over a quarter of a century, in addition to many plays and films. Mrs. Webster, the former Melinda Logan, had given up her modestly successful acting career to marry the television star and raise their three children, two boys and a girl.
In the early hours of July fourth, thirteen years ago, Ian and Melinda Webster and their three teenage children had been killed in their beds by The Family Man. They had been carried from their beds to the kidney-shaped swimming pool’s redwood sundeck on the cliff overlooking the city. All five of them had been dressed in their bathing suits, over which had been placed matching T-shirts with an American flag pattern. The bodies were arranged on chaises at one end of the deck, their poodle and Siamese cat at their feet. Melinda, the three children, and the animals had their throats cut, and Ian Webster had been decapitated. His head was found floating on an inflatable raft in the center of the pool.
The cleaning woman, a Mrs. Ruiz, had found them at nine o’clock the next morning, July fifth. They had been sitting there, frozen in their bizarre family tableau, for more than twenty-four hours. Everywhere around them, on the deck and floating in the pool, were hundreds of little American flags and firecrackers. Washing over the awful scene was the music that emanated from the home entertainment center in the living room just beyond the open glass doors to the sundeck, a rousing recording of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” After fainting, regaining consciousness, and being violently sick, Mrs. Ruiz had called the police.
It was with this crime that the legend of The Family Man was born. The Tennant murders four months earlier had been investigated by the New Orleans police, but the Webster murders brought the killer to the attention of everyone in America. The LAPD called in the FBI when it became clear that the same modus operandi had been utilized in two states, presumably by the same person or persons. The bizarre nature of the crimes put it on the front pages, and Mr. Webster’s star status helped to keep it there for weeks. It was generally believed that the crimes were committed by a lone killer, presumably male, and one reporter dubbed him “The Family Man.” The nickname immediately spread throughout America.
Even with the added federal help—and the first appearance of Special Agent Ronald O’Hara—the investigators were stymied in their meticulous search for leads. There were no unusual fingerprints or footprints, and no fibers, blood, semen, or other indications of a human presence that couldn’t be explained. The little flags and firecrackers were so common as to be generic, and the T-shirts were sold in every department store, gift shop, and mall in America. Even so, O’Hara’s team slavishly tracked down every outlet of every store that sold that particular lot of that particular brand of T-shirt. Hundreds of hours were spent in this endeavor, with no positive result. Whoever had bought the shirts had presumably bought them one at a time in various locations, paying cash. A virtual army of salespersons was interviewed, but not one of them could remember anything remotely helpful.
This eventually proved to be the pattern in all five cases. The Mardi Gras masks were purchased separately, from various New Orleans stores. The Christmas decorations at the Chicago scene, the Halloween trimmings in upstate New York, and the Easter things in Brooklyn were always the biggest, most widely available brands, and no amount of searching could trace them to a specific store, to say nothing of a specific customer. The federal agents couldn’t even pin them down to a specific state. The main weapon in all five cases was apparently a hunting knife of some
kind, with a sharp blade that was somewhere between six and nine inches long. A thin, serrated, sawlike implement was used to decapitate the men in the first three cases, but something thicker and smoother was used in the final two. The inference here was that The Family Man was improving with practice.
As for any possible eyewitnesses, or witnesses of any kind, there were none. The first four murder sites were remote, so much so that it was determined that The Family Man had chosen them mainly for this reason. Only the fifth place, the townhouse on Kane Street in Brooklyn, was near the rest of humanity, in a row of identical townhouses. Still, none of the immediate neighbors had seen or heard anything on that Easter morning.
Everyone who had known the five families—however intimately or slightly—was investigated, and many were interviewed. In the cases of the L.A. star, the Brooklyn doctor, the musicians in upstate New York, and Mark’s own father, this ran to hundreds, even thousands of people in show business, the New York medical community, the international classical music scene, and the widespread network of religious evangelism.
There was the usual assortment of jealous actors, former lovers, and one particularly unpleasant television executive connected to Ian Webster, but everyone was accounted for on that Fourth of July. Similarly, a couple of rival surgeons of Dr. Banes in New York were inspected, along with a rival conductor of Michael Carlin and several rival evangelical ministers of Jacob Farmer and their minions. There were even a few horrified families of runaways who had joined Jacob Farmer’s church. But with the brief exception of Mark himself, no one connected to the five families had proved to be suspicious in any way. It was, for O’Hara and his people, the biggest dead end of all. The Family Man had apparently had no contact with his victims before the crimes.
Later, when Mark had been able to bring himself to write about these things, even though he couched them in the guise of fiction, he dutifully recorded every detail of the unsuccessful investigation. He mentioned every detail of the crime scenes: the garish holiday trimmings, the music, the positioning of the bodies in an obvious attempt to create harmonious domestic pictures. Everything.
And now, in Los Angeles, he was standing on a cliff overlooking the city under a darkening sky, staring at an empty lot. A flash of light in the distance was quickly followed by a low rumble of thunder: yes, it was going to rain soon. There was nothing here for him. He would have to search elsewhere.
He was in the act of turning around to go back to the rental car when he heard the sudden burst of music, the familiar flourish followed by the familiar, stirring anthem. He had used it in Dark Desire, as opposed to the Sousa march that had actually been playing at the Webster house.
“The Star-Spangled Banner.”
He froze, glancing around, trying to determine the source of the recording. It was coming from the billboard. He walked over to it and looked down. There was a portable cassette recorder in the grass at the base of the sign. He looked around the lot and up and down the road, searching for a car or a human figure: the recorder must have been activated by some remote means, so the person activating it would have to be nearby. But there was no one, anywhere, as far as he could see.
He looked up at the big billboard sign again, and that was when he noticed the little slip of black-bordered white paper taped to the lower left corner. He knew what it was, even before he went over to the sign and ripped it down. The big red Magic Marker capitals were unmistakably the work of his opponent. The note read:
WRONG!!
TRY AGAIN.
Mark stared at the note, thinking, Yes. Of course. I knew that. But where on earth am I supposed to …
But first, you must visit the Websters.
Visit.
The Websters …
That was when he figured it out.
He stood staring at the empty lot, nodding to himself, when the first big, heavy drops of rain began to pelt him. He turned around immediately and headed for the car at the side of the road a few yards away.
Visit the Websters.…
He would have to find out how to visit them, but for that he would need information. He didn’t know anyone on the L.A. Times anymore, and he’d never known anyone on the other local newspapers. His best bet was a library. Yes.…
He looked back down at the recorder. In a sudden, swift move, he pulled back his right leg and kicked it. It cracked and broke apart against the wood column, and the anthem abruptly stopped. Silence. Mark looked down at the broken plastic, a smile slowly forming on his lips.
By the time he got in the car, put the top up, and drove away down the hillside road, the skies had opened up in earnest. The heavy torrent smashed down on the windshield as he moved inexorably toward his next destination.
31
He stood in a doorway across from the Central Library on West Fifth Street, waiting for Mark Stevenson to come out. The writer had been in the library for nearly an hour now, but there was no reason to observe him inside and risk being seen by him; he knew what the man was doing in there. He smiled. Yes, the former journalist would certainly be able to figure out the next move, visiting the Webster family.
And he had done so.
Two women with shopping bags and a man in a gray suit stood near him under the awning, waiting out the rain, so there was no fear of his being conspicuous, of anyone wondering if he was loitering. The weather had, oddly enough, given him a quite legitimate reason to be standing here. Even so, he had bought a large container of coffee from a nearby shop, and he sipped it as he listened to the heavy barrage pelting the canvas above his head and peered through the rain at the library entrance. In his mind’s eye, he saw Mark—harried and dripping wet, but galvanized by a sense of purpose—approaching the front desk and inquiring, then marching off to find the appropriate section of the appropriate floor. He saw him waiting, patiently or impatiently, for a free terminal before sitting down before it and reading the instructions. Then would come the requests, the typing in of key words that would result in the information he sought.
Ian Webster had been a star, and his wife had briefly been a starlet. These facts, coupled with the sensational nature of their deaths, would result in mountains of print, all meticulously recorded in the library’s electronic data banks. It was the third largest library in America, and the periodical morgue would be comprehensive. Every word about every film and every television show; every review; every premiere, publicity junket, talk show, and charity appearance; the award ceremonies; the births of the three children—all of it would be there, with thousands of pictures.
And then there would be the murders. The Family Man. The bloody Fourth of July thirteen years ago, with the flags and the firecrackers and the star’s head floating on the raft in the swimming pool. There would be no mention of the Sousa march, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The music was the only detail withheld from the press, as it was at the other scenes where it had been playing. It was the single thing only The Family Man could know about, the noose with which the police and the FBI had hoped to hang him when he was apprehended. But The Family Man had never been caught.
He smiled now, under the awning, as he imagined Mark Stevenson confronting the photographs, many of them quite graphic, on the computer screen before him. He was beginning to feel exquisite pleasure at the other man’s discomfort, and he would have given much to be able to be there, beside Mark Stevenson, watching him. He tried to picture the expression on the man’s face.…
No. That would have to wait for later. He would see that expression, or something very like it, and soon. Later this afternoon, if all went well. And all would go well: he would see to that. He would presently see Mark Stevenson’s look of utter shock and fear. Of horror. It would crown the next sequence, the next move in the game. And that sequence would begin as soon as Mark came out of the library.
But first…
With a quick, surreptitious glance over at his fellow refugees under the awning, the big man with the scar on his face reached inside
his duster coat and produced his portable telephone. He punched in the appropriate speed-dial sequence and raised the instrument to his face, turning slightly away from the man and the two women so as not to be overheard. Not that they could possibly hear anything, he mused, with the pounding rain a few feet above their heads, but better safe than sorry. Almost immediately, the ring was answered.
“Yes?”
“He’s in the library.”
“Good. Is everything in place?”
“It will be.”
“The hotel?”
“No problem.”
“How about Barton?”
“Ready. All systems are go.”
“Good.”
The big man under the awning smiled at the compliment. Then he said, “How’s New York?”
“Ready.”
“Okay. It’s raining here at the moment, but that may actually be good for us.”
“Yes. Slow him down a little.”
“Uh-huh.” He reached up absently and ran a finger down the length of the white scar on his face before adding, “When does New York happen?”
“Tonight.”
“Okay.” He watched through the downpour as the door of the library across the street opened and Mark Stevenson emerged. “Here he comes. Gotta go. I’ll call you when it’s done.”
“You do that.” This comment was followed by the sound of a low, throaty giggle.
The tall man smiled. “You sound happy.”
“Well, this is fun, isn’t it? The suspense is killing me.”
He nodded. “As long as it kills him. ’Bye.”
He returned the cell phone to the inside pocket, looking over once more to be sure the others were not noticing. No fear of that: the two women were chatting animatedly and the businessman was already gone, hurrying off down the wet street. No one was paying the slightest attention to the tall man in black.