Blood Music (20 page)

Zelly would have gone with the curious if she'd been alone. Not to see—someday in a book about the killer there would be a black-and-white picture of the naked back, the matted blond hair. There would be a caption: “Forensic experts examine the remains of—” She wouldn't have a name until the morning papers. But she rippled through the crowd like a dirty joke, titillating and embarrassing. Some of the women in the crowd were crying, it was true—the same women who had earlier laughed and tossed their hair and taken it as a compliment to be offered up as appropriate for sacrifice.

The face on the fliers looked out, implacable. Zelly had looked at Pat's profile against the night sky and known why the boys behind them thought he looked like the killer. Suddenly she had to get out of there: knifed—naked—found by a girl and her boyfriend after they'd sneaked through the police line for a little fun in the woods. The girl was reportedly hysterical; the ambulance that came screaming over the grass at the edge of the woods was for her. The second came quietly and slow, because the dead don't mind waiting.

Pat had been gone all during intermission, even until the Schubert had begun playing. But he had brought back ice cream. He couldn't have had time: men do not rape and murder and buy ice cream sandwiches to bring back to their babies.

In her mind Zelly had kept seeing the hands lifting the body, the sudden insect scurry and the mulch dropping off in little clumps. They would not have moved the body yet, and she wanted to leave before they did. And in the car—the baby's cries a counterpoint to the real and imagined ceaseless murmur of conversation around them in the other cars in the parking lot—or in the closet, the foot pressing down on the brake too sharply, making the van lurch: in her dream Zelly had looked down at his foot on the pedal and there was something on his shoe. There was something like a drumbeat, a heartbeat, but it was becoming fainter and there was something about a boat, an old woman who lived in a boat, she was trying to wash something off the side of the boat, it was creeping in a dark stain up the side of the boat and Zelly was asleep.

H
e was proud; he was so proud. WHEN I LEFT HER SHE WAS RADIANT WITH MOONLIGHT. DID YOU TASTE HER BLOOD? There were newspapers spread out around him on the floor of the van; there was a bucket of bloody water. It was Sunday morning, June twenty-first. He needed a
T.
“Frightened.” WERE THE CHILDREN FRIGHTENED AFTER THEY FOUND HER? The papers would leave out this detail. The bite mark would measure one and three quarter inches. There would be found at the scene various dark brown hairs, both from the head and from the pubic area; there would be footprints, size ten and a half. Probably a tall man. Footprints in big strides led west away from the body, but only a few feet away they mingled with footprints left by Dante and Ariadne, by the police who came when Ariadne screamed, prints from the homicide detectives from the 107th Precinct, from the ambulance attendants. A crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes would be found—impossible to know if that had belonged to the killer—and gray fibers that would be analyzed and categorized as the type used in the kind of rug commonly found in automobiles. There would be blue fibers of the type commonly found in workmen's uniforms—it was all detritus.

KELLY WAS HAPPY TO GO WITH ME, TO BE MINE FOR INTERMISSION.

Her name had been Kelly Dearlove; she had arrived at the concert with her husband and sister-in-law. By a fortunate coincidence she had been one of the young blond women interviewed on-camera for network television news. All three channels played a seemingly endless loop of Kelly's smiling face: “Of course I'm not afraid, I have my husband with me.”

Kelly had gone to buy ice cream, and she didn't come back. No one had seen her near the ice cream truck; after she got ten feet from her husband and sister-in-law (who would have gone with her had she not felt sleepy and chosen instead to doze on the blanket) no one saw her at all. She had been eaten by the crowd and spit up half-naked on her face in the dirt.

So little was known, two days after the concert. Brown hair, crepe-soled shoes, workman's uniform. An ordinary hunting knife, which could have been purchased at one of any number of sporting goods stores. The man was said to be six foot two to six foot four. There was the poster. There was the FBI personality file, printed in the Sunday papers: a loner, probably unable to hold a job; unlikely to have any close familial ties; physically, and probably sexually, abused as a child; may have had abnormally close ties with his mother as a child; may have lost one or both parents in childhood; above-average intelligence; may be a collector of some sort, possibly of stamps or baseball cards; drives a dark van, probably of recent make; unable to form or sustain a relationship with a woman; probably a blue-collar worker, good with his hands—a carpenter, a construction worker; high school education; does not have a true or deep-seated love of classical music; has contempt for authority, probably stemming from childhood; may believe he has musical talent, may in fact at one time have been a member of a rock and roll band.

The police and the media and the FBI were building a mighty edifice, one which would stand shining and unshaken for many years to come. The edifice built around the actions of Jack the Ripper, for example, has stood for a hundred years, and sneaking Jack, with his poor draggled backstreet London prostitutes, has been forever buried under a more glamorous Jack, product of movies and articles and books and Hollywood, a society Jack, a Jack who can even claim royal pretensions.

Kelly Dearlove was lucky to be numbered among the onetime loves of the Symphony Slasher. (How he liked that name!) Lucky to be suspended forever in youthful extremis, never to grow old, never, in a sense, to die. Her lovely face (which had in mundane reality been somewhat heavy of jaw and brow) would eternally stare out of books and old newspaper clippings, and actresses would comb her life for clues as to how to portray her going toward the ice cream truck—eager, like a child? Or aimless, watching the crowd, unaware that her life was about to end in pain and terror? He killed them once, for his own untranslatable purposes, and then society would continue to kill them, over and over, for pleasure and instruction.

He was tired. Two in two days. The first one had already faded, even in his own memory—he felt sorry for her. That had been an impulse, a prank, sort of like a bachelor party the day before the wedding. Her picture would always appear next to Kelly's but it was an unglamorous death. Ten thousand people, after all, had seen Kelly die. Only he had seen Leanore die. But their blood was mingled in the dented pail.

He needed an
L.
“Love.”

What if a witness were found? But there would be none. A dark figure, tall, carrying something bulky—who would not have alerted the police at the time they saw it? For he took his own risks, too, and was aware of his own death competing with him, as it were, for the prize of a death, each time—and each time he gave it theirs instead. His own tribulations were of course of no interest to the press. He was tired. His arms hurt. The first one—Leanore—had fought hard. Baseball cards! He snipped out the
B.
She'd practically put his eye out but the next day it wasn't even red. Unusually close to his mother, he didn't remember anything like that. It's remarkable how easy it is to get a person to talk to you, if that person is in what she believes to be a safe place. When there is no safe place.

TRUE RAGE SEEPS THROUGH DOORS AND WINDOWS AND BLUE POLICE LIKE WATER OR FIRE.

That would be good. How easy it is to get a person to take a few steps out of her way, if you are gentle—and have you seen a little boy? About so high. Brown hair. With just the barest level of urgency in your voice. (A rock band!) Over that way, toward the road? I just turned my head for a moment—oh, would you? Thank you. An
O.
So easy. And she will go in the general direction you are going, wanting to help find the child but needing also to keep you in sight in case she does find the child. Asking his name but you are so intent, in your completely understandable distress, that you do not answer, and she follows; you are calling something, softly, she assumes it is your child's name, and then you pause, at a particularly dark spot—you and she have gone rather far from the ice cream truck, which is all the way over to the left, now, and are standing across the narrow road from the shadow of the woods. And she comes up to you—this nice, normal father (the boy is just four, tall for his age, with dark brown hair)—and she stands next to you, panting a little because you have been moving fast, with fatherly concern scanning the crowd and moving toward the periphery of the dark woods. Does she notice all of a sudden that there are no people right here? That out of all the crowded park there are no people standing or sitting just here, where the woods loom dark across the road? And the police are just dark blobs to the right and to the left. And you move toward her as she steps back—but she is not going to be impolite, you have after all just lost your son. So she does not move fast enough, and a man with very strong arms who has done this before can cut the breath from the windpipe in a second, can cut off a scream in the throat in a second.

A
D.
“Blood.” While he was running across the road with her limp body he got hard, instantly, because that was the only moment when he was really naked—not back when he first saw her, not when he spoke, not when she followed him all unsuspecting, because nobody saw any of that—but when he was in the road he was naked, even if the police were woefully understaffed (which of course he knew from reading the newspapers), even if the police were spaced only one every forty yards one of them might have seen him, she was so light, though, and he had a hard-on by the time he got across the road.

WHEN I LEFT HER SHE WAS RADIANT WITH MOONLIGHT. DID YOU TASTE HER BLOOD? WERE THE CHILDREN FRIGHTENED AFTER THEY FOUND HER? KELLY WAS HAPPY TO GO WITH ME, TO BE MINE FOR INTERMISSION. MY SON IS NOT MISSING BUT THE POLICE WERE. I LEFT MY RIGHT INCISOR CHISELED INTO HER NECK. I LOVED THEM ALL. I LOVE THEM ALL. THE PEOPLE WILL KNOW ME, FOREVER, LIKE JACK. I DO NOT COLLECT CARDS BUT HEARTS, I STOP THEIR FOOLISH BLOODY BEATING. YOU CANNOT STOP ME, THEY DO NOT WANT YOU TO TRY THEY ARE MINE. WE WILL MEET AGAIN BUT NOT WHEN THE MOON IS FULL. I AM NOT SO SHALLOW WHY A VAN? WE WILL MEET AGAIN.

“W
hat more have you got on that guy in Queens?” Blackman asked Scottie.

“Right age, right race, right height, right coloring. Wrong car.”

“But he could be driving something other than a van. The van that couple saw the night Madeleine Levy was attacked—”

“Could have been anybody's,” Scottie finished. “I know. He looks good. Hasn't held a job longer than four months in the last two years. As far as the girlfriend knows, unemployed now. Has a history of altercations with women, threatened to kill his girlfriend that night outside a restaurant, according to the woman and six witnesses. Called her a ‘blonde ball-cutter' several times.”

“You think he's the one?”

“I can't hope. He looks good, that's certain. But we still haven't talked to him. That's been set up for Thursday.”

“Three days from now.”

“Listen, I got something for you on our mystery caller.”

“God, yes.”

“I talked to Elizabeth Moscineska's boyfriend,” Scottie said. “He's got a Brooklyn accent you could spread on rye bread with pastrami. He didn't sound like your guy. And he didn't fit the type. He kept pounding his fist. And he kept saying, ‘What was she doing out so late by herself, anyway?' Like she was two-timing him. He's not our boy.”

“Scottie, the reactions of the nearest and dearest always amaze me.”

“After I went through all the files I had,” Scottie went on, “I talked to one of the husbands—Ken Swados. Basso profundo. And the other guy—Belinda Boston's husband—you're going to love this, he already knew Levy's name. Seems he gets the
Post
delivered. You ever hear of anybody getting the
Post
delivered?” Blackman shrugged and took a sip of his coffee. His expression didn't change but his tongue moved a little in his mouth and then his lips pursed. “We're going to have to keep digging,” he said.

“I've got one left. I've been checking brothers. Belinda Boston had one, Elizabeth Moscineska had two, and Cheryl Nassent had one. John Nassent. So far it's a big nothing.”

“Did you contact Madeleine Levy?”

“Yeah. She had her phone number changed but she'll contact us if anybody gets through to her.”

“You know the lieutenant told me not to pursue this lead.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he didn't give a flying rat's ass whether some nut job wanted to talk to Madeleine Levy. But I know there's something hinkey about this. I know that bastard killed two more girls just last week, and there isn't a man on the force that wants him more than I do, but I want you to follow up on this. Check out John Nassent. It might not seem like much, but there's something going on here and I have a very strong feeling that somebody's going to get hurt.”

T
he young woman hesitated before opening the door. There was a clink, and one brown eye looked out from under a loop of chain.

“The electrician?”

“Yes, ma'am.” And the door opened and he was inside. The woman was nervous. In an instant he knew her life. The kitchen floor was not clean, and the living room table was cluttered with magazines; the woman lived alone. She had stayed home from work today because the electrician was coming. There was a half-full coffee cup on the kitchen counter, another on the table in the living room. As she walked ahead of him he looked at the nape of her neck under the red elastic band in her dark hair.