obfuscation, a talent for deception, and a genius for carefully crafted enigma. He preferred the oblique to the straightforward, the circuitous to the direct.
WHY.
Because I, too, am a fisher of men.
The true, full meaning of that statement could not be surmised let alone ascertained in a hundred readings, nor in the limited time that Billy currently could devote to its analysis.
The second document was labeled HOW. It proved to be no less mysterious than the first:
Cruelty, violence, death.
Movement, velocity, impact.
Flesh, blood, bone.
Although without rhyme or meter, that triad seemed almost to be a stanza of verse. As with the most recondite poetry, the meaning was not on the surface.
Billy had the strange feeling that those three lines were three answers and that if only he knew the questions, he would also know the identity of the killer.
Whether that impression might be reliable intuition or delusion, he had no time just now to consider it. Lanny’s body still awaited final disposition, as did Cottle’s. Billy was half convinced that if he consulted his wristwatch, he would see the minute and hour hands spinning as if they were counting off mere seconds.
The third document on the diskette was labeled WHEN, and as Billy accessed it, the dead man in the knee space seized his foot.
If Billy could have breathed, he would have cried out. By the time the trapped exhalation exploded from his throat, however, he realized that the explanation was less supernatural than it had at first seemed.
The dead man had not seized him; in Billy’s agitation, he had pressed his feet against the corpse. He tucked them under the chair once more.
On the screen, the document labeled WHEN offered a message that required less interpretation than WHY and HOW.
My last killing: midnight Thursday.
Your suicide: soon thereafter.
chapter 32
MY LAST KILLING: MIDNIGHT THURSDAY.
Your suicide: soon thereafter.
Billy Wiles consulted his wristwatch. A few minutes past noon, Wednesday.
If the freak meant what he said, this performance, or whatever it was, would conclude in thirty-six hours. Hell was eternal, but any hell on earth must be by definition finite.
The reference to a “last” killing did not necessarily mean that only one more murder lay ahead. In the past day and a half, the freak had killed three, and in the day and a half ahead, he might be no less murderous.
Cruelty, violence, death. Movement, velocity, impact. Flesh, blood, bone.
Of those nine words in the second document, one struck Billy as more pertinent than the others. Velocity.
The movement had begun when the first note had been left under the windshield wiper on the Explorer. The impact would come with the last killing, the one meant to make him consider suicide.
Meanwhile, at a steadily accelerating pace, new challenges were being thrown at Billy, keeping him off balance. The word velocity seemed to promise him that the longest plunges of this roller coaster were still ahead.
He neither disbelieved the promise of increasing velocity nor dismissed the confident assertion that he would commit suicide.
Suicide was a mortal sin, but Billy knew himself to be a shallow man, weak in some ways, flawed. At this point, he wasn’t capable of self-destruction; but hearts and minds can both be broken.
He had little difficulty imagining what might drive him to such a brink. In fact, no difficulty at all.
Barbara Mandel’s death alone would not drive him to suicide. For almost four years, he had prepared himself for her passing. He had hardened himself to the idea of living without even the hope of her recovery.
The manner of her murder, however, might cause a fatal stress crack in Billy’s mental architecture. In her coma, she might not be aware of much that the killer did to her. Nevertheless, assuming that she would be subjected to pain, to vile abuse, to gross indignities, Billy could imagine a weight of horror so great that he would break under it.
This was a man who beat lovely young schoolteachers to death and peeled off women’s faces.
Furthermore, if the freak intended to engineer circumstances in which it would appear that Billy himself had killed not only Giselle Winslow, Lanny, and Ralph Cottle, but also Barbara, then Billy would not want to endure months of being a media sensation or the spotlight of the trial, or the abiding suspicion with which he’d be regarded even if found innocent in a court of law.
The freak killed for pleasure, but also with a purpose and a plan. Whatever the purpose, the plan might be to convince police that Billy committed the homicides leading to Barbara’s murder in her bed at Whispering Pines, that his intent had been to establish that a brutal serial killer was at work in the county, thereby directing suspicion from himself to the nonexistent psychopath.
If the freak was clever—and he would be—the authorities would swallow that theory as if it were a spoonful of vanilla ice cream. After all, in their eyes, Billy had a strong motive to do away with Barbara.
Her medical care was covered by the investment income earned by a seven-million-dollar trust fund established with a legal settlement from the corporation responsible for her coma. Billy was the primary of three trustees who managed the fund.
If Barbara died while in a coma, Billy was the sole heir to her estate.
He did not want the money, none of it, and would not keep it if it came to him. In that sad event, he had always intended to give the millions away.
No one, of course, would believe that was his intention.
Especially not after the freak was finished setting him up, if in fact that’s what the freak was doing.
The call to 911 certainly seemed to signify that intention. It had drawn Billy to the attention of the sheriff’s department in a context that they would remember…and wonder about.
Now Billy combined all three documents and printed them on a single sheet of paper:
Because I, too, am a fisher of men.
Cruelty, violence, death.
Movement, velocity, impact.
Flesh, blood, bone.
My last killing: midnight Thursday.
Your suicide: soon thereafter.
With scissors, Billy trimmed out the block of text, intending to fold it and put it in his wallet, where he would have it for easy review.
As he finished, he realized that this paper appeared identical to that on which he had received the first four messages from the killer. If the diskette in Cottle’s hands had been prepared on this computer, perhaps the first four notes had been composed here as well.
He exited Microsoft Word, and then entered the software again. He called up the directory.
The list of documents was not long. He had used this program solely for writing fiction.
He recognized the key words of the titles of his single novel and of the short stories that he had completed, as well as those of stories never finished. Only one document was unfamiliar to him: DEATH.
When he loaded that document, he discovered the text of the first four messages from the freak.
He hesitated, remembering procedures. Then he rattled the keys, summoning the date when the document had been first composed, which turned out to be 10:09 A.M. the previous Friday.
Billy had left for work fifteen minutes earlier than usual that day. He had swung by the post office to mail some bills.
The two notes left on his windshield, the one taped over the Explorer’s ignition, and even the one he’d found on his refrigerator this same morning had been prepared on this computer more than three days before the first had been delivered, before the nightmare had begun Monday evening.
If Lanny had not destroyed the first two notes to save his job, if Billy had offered them to the police as evidence, sooner or later the authorities would have checked this computer. They would have reached the inescapable conclusion that Billy himself had written the notes.
&
nbsp; The freak had prepared for all contingencies. He was nothing if not thorough. And he had been confident his script would play out as he had intended.
Billy deleted the document titled DEATH, which might still be used as evidence against him, depending on how events unfolded from here on.
He suspected that deleting it from the directory did not remove it from the hard disk. He would have to find a way to ask someone who was a computer maven.
When he shut down the computer, he realized that he had still not heard the patrol-car engines start up.
chapter 33
PEELING THE SHADE ASIDE AT A STUDY WINDOW, Billy discovered the driveway empty in the streaming sunshine. He had become so absorbed with the diskette that he had not heard the car engines start. The sergeants had gone.
He had expected to discover another challenge on the diskette: a choice between two innocent victims, a short deadline for making a decision.
No doubt another one would come soon, but for now he was free to deal with other urgent business. He had plenty of it.
He went to the garage and returned with a length of rope and one of the polyurethane drop cloths with which he covered furniture when he had repainted the interior of the house in the spring. He unfolded this tarp on the study floor in front of the desk.
After wrestling Cottle’s body out of the knee space and dragging it around the desk, he rolled it onto the drop cloth.
The prospect of turning out the dead man’s pockets disgusted him. He got on with it, anyway.
Billy wasn’t looking for planted evidence that would incriminate him. If the freak had salted the corpse, he had been subtle about it; Billy would not find everything.
Besides, he intended to dispose of the body in a place where it would never be found. For that reason, he was unconcerned about leaving fingerprints on the plastic sheeting.
The suit coat had two inner pockets. In the first, Cottle had kept the pint of whiskey that he had spilled. From the second, Billy extracted a pint of rum, and returned it.
In the two outer pockets of the coat were cigarettes, a cheap butane lighter, and a roll of butterscotch Life Savers. In the front pants pockets, he found sixty-seven cents in coins, a deck of playing cards, and a whistle in the form of a plastic canary.
Cottle’s wallet contained six one-dollar bills, a five, and fourteen ten-dollar bills. These last must have come from the freak.
Ten dollars for each year of your innocence, Mr. Wiles.
Basically frugal, Billy didn’t want to bury the money with the body. He considered dropping it in the poor box at the church where he had parked—and been assaulted—the previous night.
Squeamishness trumped frugality. Billy left the money in the wallet. As dead pharaohs had been sent to the Other Side with salt, grain, wine, gold, and euthanized servants, so Ralph Cottle would travel across the Styx with spending money.
Among the few other items in the wallet were two of interest, the first a worn and creased snapshot of Cottle as a young man. He looked handsome, virile, radically different from the beaten man of his later years but recognizable. With him was a lovely young woman. They were smiling. They looked happy.
The second item was a 1983 membership card in the American Society of Skeptics. RALPH THURMAN COTTLE, MEMBER SINCE 1978.
Billy kept the snapshot and the membership card and returned everything else to Cottle’s hip pocket.
He rolled the cadaver tightly in the tarp. He folded the ends down and secured the bundle with yards of strapping tape.
His expectation had been that, inside multiple layers of opaque polyurethane, the body might pass for a rug wrapped in protective plastic. It looked like a corpse in a tarp.
Using the rope, he fashioned a tightly knotted handle to one end of the packaged cadaver, by which it could be dragged.
He did not intend to dispose of Cottle until after dark. The cargo space in his Explorer was encircled by windows. SUVs were useful vehicles, but if you were going to be transporting corpses in broad daylight, you better have a car with a roomy trunk.
Because he’d begun to feel that his house was being as freely traveled as a public bus terminal, Billy hauled the body out of the study, to the living room, where he left it behind the sofa. It could not be seen from the front door or from the doorway to the kitchen.
At the kitchen sink, he vigorously scrubbed his hands with multiple applications of liquid soap, in near-scalding water.
Then he made a ham sandwich. Ravenous, he wondered how he could have an appetite after the gruesome business he had just concluded.
He would not have thought that his will to survive had remained this strong during his years of retreat. He wondered what other qualities, good and bad, he would rediscover or discover in himself during the thirty-six hours ahead.
There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
chapter 34
AS BILLY FINISHED THE HAM SANDWICH, THE telephone rang.
He didn’t want to answer it. He didn’t receive a lot of calls from friends, and Lanny was dead. He knew who this must be. Enough was enough.
On the twelfth ring, he pushed his chair back from the table.
The freak had never said anything on the phone. He didn’t want to reveal his voice. He would do nothing but listen to Billy in mocking silence.
On the sixteenth ring, Billy got up from the table.
These calls had no purpose but to intimidate. Taking them made no sense.
Billy stood by the phone, staring at it. On the twenty-sixth ring, he lifted the handset.
The digital readout revealed no caller ID.
Billy didn’t say hello. He listened.
After a few seconds of silence on the other end, a mechanical click was followed by a hiss. Pops and scratches punctuated the hiss: the sound of blank audio tape passing over a playback head.
When the words came, they were in a series of voices, some men, some women. No individual spoke more than three words, often just one.
Judging by the inconstant volume levels and other tells, the freak had constructed the message by sampling existing audio, perhaps books on tape by different readers.
“I will…kill a…pretty redhead. If you…say…waste the bitch…I will…kill…her…quickly. Otherwise…she will…suffer…much…torture. You…have…one minute…to…say…waste the bitch. The choice…is…yours.”
Again, the hiss and pop and scratch of blank tape…
The conundrum had been perfectly constructed. It allowed an evasive man no room for further evasion.
Previously, Billy had been morally co-opted only to the extent that the choice of the victims had been made because of his inaction, and in Cottle’s case because of the refusal to act.
In the choice between a lovely schoolteacher and a charitable old woman, the deaths seemed equally tragic unless you were biased toward the beautiful and against the aged. Making an active decision resulted in neither less nor greater tragedy than did inaction.
When the possible victims had been an unmarried man “who won’t much be missed by the world” or a young mother of two, the greater tragedy had seemed to be the death of the mother. In that case, the choice had been constructed so that Billy’s failure to go to the police ensured the mother’s survival, rewarding inaction and playing to his weakness.
Once again, he was being asked to choose between two evils, and thereby become the freak’s collaborator. But this time, inaction was not a viable option. By saying nothing, he would be sentencing the redhead to torture, to a protracted and hideous death. By responding, he would be granting her a degree of mercy.
He could not save her.
In either case, death.
But one death would be cleaner than the other.
The running audio tape produced two more words: “…thirty seconds…”
Billy felt as though he couldn’t breathe, but he could. He felt as though he would choke if he tried to swallow, but
he didn’t choke.
“…fifteen seconds…”
His mouth was dry. His tongue grew thick. He didn’t believe that he could speak, but he did: “Waste the bitch.”
The freak hung up. So did Billy.
Collaborators.
The masticated ham and the bread and the mayonnaise turned in his stomach.
If he had suspected that the freak might actually communicate by telephone, he could have been prepared to record the message. Too late.
Such a recording of a recording wouldn’t be persuasive to the cops, anyway, unless the body of a redhead turned up. And if such a corpse was found, planted evidence would most likely tie it to Billy.
The air conditioner worked well, yet the kitchen air seemed to be sweltering, stifling, and it cloyed in his throat, and lay heavy in his lungs.
Waste the bitch.
Without any memory of having left the house, Billy found himself descending the back-porch steps. He didn’t know where he was going.
He sat on the steps.
He stared at the sky, at the trees, at the backyard.
He looked at his hands. He didn’t recognize them.
chapter 35