Think, he said to himself, as she had when she came home to find him gone, and after his escape from the restaurant. What would she do? Could anyone arrest her successfully? Could she core a half-dozen cops at once? Would she have fled from panic, and then returned?
He pushed the door open and listened. The apartment was quiet. He went inside, closed the door behind him and checked the four rooms, glancing out the window at the backyard. Then he went out into the hall and crept down the stairs to the cellar.
The door to the dungeon was open. The overhead light was on. He took out his gun and pointed it into each corner, listening carefully. Finally, he went to the far room and peered into the darkened space at the grave she had been digging for him. It was still waiting for him, and he realized that most people had only one grave dug for them in their lifetimes; he would now have at least two, no matter what else happened. But with any luck he would bury Dierdre in the grave she had dug for him. He peered into the bottom and saw that it was not yet deep enough for a body.
He heard a familiar sound in the outer room and tensed, realizing that he would be trapped if she came down the stairs. He would have to shoot quickly.
He took out his gun, cocked it, and crept toward the door to the stairs. It might as well be now as later, he told himself. He would finish digging his own grave to put her in, and take the secret with him to another grave, or to cremation. It would be a cremation; one grave in a lifetime was enough for anyone.
The heater glowed at his feet, and he realized that he had only heard the click of the timer going on. He stood still, listening to the silence. Warm air rose from the glowing dish and caressed his face. Think, he told himself. How could she be found? Something in the apartment might give him a clue.
As he went up the stairs he saw himself in the years after he had killed her, and wondered how he would live with it; never kill anyone unless you can live with it, someone had once said, and he knew that he would be able to live with her death, with the image of the basement grave satisfyingly in his mind, where but for his own efforts he might already be rotting.
There was nothing about Dierdre to love.
He might have to be tested for years. Even if she wasn’t HIV positive, the uncertainty would be a burden. But distant threats could wait, he told himself.
What could have made her leave her door unlocked? Her mind might be on other things—his escape, Gibney’s death, the need to protect herself; she was forgetting simple things. Or maybe she was so confident now that she no longer bothered with precautions, believing that she could act faster than anyone who came against her. Fine, he told himself; arrogance and overconfidence might work in his favor.
Up in the house hallway, he made sure that the door to the street was closed, then went into her apartment and double locked the door behind him. If she returned suddenly, he would hear her in the hallway, and be able to shoot her through the door.
He went and sat down at her business desk and looked through the piles of papers. There was a lone photograph of her near the far right hand corner. At first he didn’t recognize the skinny teenager in the wooden frame, but when he did, a shudder went through him as his body remembered the fearfulness of her riding him, insectlike as she had drawn him into her as a bee would collect pollen. The thought of her being pregnant with his son or daughter filled him with dread of the life that awaited the child that would be raised as a weapon. And what would she do to a child who disappointed her?
He opened a few drawers, looking for photos of parents, relatives, or friends, but there were none.
He noticed some tax papers, recently arrived, sitting on top of their envelope. He peered closer and saw that she owned some property in the Bronx. The address was up by Fordham Road. Her tax balance was current.
She seemed to have left quickly, taking nothing, as if expecting to be back soon. What was she planning? What could he do? If he caught up with her, he would have to risk being cored. If he came after her with other police, she would empty one or two and then be killed, or even escape. But who would believe him about her and shoot at an unarmed woman? Even Gibney had not gotten that far. He saw himself confronting her, arguing that she should restrain herself.
But it would be impossible. He would have to shoot her before she saw him, and get rid of the body, preferably downstairs, which meant he would have to wait for her to come home, or dispose of her body elsewhere if he could not bring it back. She was a menace, and he would be saving lives by killing her. The little places called police precincts, from which white blood cells made ready to destroy invading diseases, would not be enough to stop her, because he would not be able to convince anyone that she was dangerous. It was a case beyond police work, virtually unprovable, for him alone to resolve. Unless she revealed herself consistently, no one would be able even to guess at the truth, and maybe not even then, as she had shown him in the restaurant.
Her big mistake was that she had revealed herself to him, making him the one who could stop her, and that was one too many—if he could find her. She would have to keep after him. Gibney was gone, and he was next. He wondered if Captain Reddy had paid any attention to Gibney’s report on the dead priest. Maybe Reddy could be persuaded to see what was going on. Maybe.
He rummaged through her desk, both fearing and hoping that she might return at any moment. Perhaps she had set a trap for him after all, after concluding that he might not want to make a fool of himself by trying to convince others to help him. She was lucid enough to realize that no one would believe him, that he would have to come after her alone. Or had she been so distraught after the restaurant demonstration that she had fled? What had she been trying to prove to him? Had she wanted only to show off?
He got up and went to the window. She had made mistakes, but she was not stupid, and some of her mistakes might not be mistakes. He lifted a blind slightly and peered out. The street seemed deserted. He looked to his right, toward First Avenue, and caught sight of her as she came around the corner, carrying what seemed to be a bag of groceries. She was dressed in blue jeans, a heavy flannel shirt, and walking shoes, a young woman going about her daily chores. Why, then, had she left all the doors open? An invitation to parley, or a trap? She might have finished him in the restaurant, but for her pride. Is that all it had been? It made no sense, but he knew that he would never debate it with her.
He moved back from the window, knowing that he had to leave at once. Her power was not like a gun, but some strange entanglement of human minds. It could not miss. Once she saw him, he was finished. He had to keep behind her. Even facing her in a mirror might not protect him.
He went back to the front window and looked down in time to see her enter the tailor shop to the right of the stairs. He would have just enough time to go out the front door.
He waited, then heard a door open, and realized that she had gone through the shop to her back door. He went to the front door, opened it, and hurried out into the hall, stopping before the outer door. Maybe she had sent someone to the back door with her groceries, and was waiting for him on the stairs outside.
He peered out through the long, white-curtained window of the door and saw no one. He opened the door and rushed down the stairs into the street, turning left and walking away quickly, as close to the houses as possible, so she could not see him from her window. The back of his neck tingled, as if she was watching him and about to strike. Hurrying up the street, he felt the sickeningly urgent need to shield his head from the blow that was somehow being delayed, but which he knew he would not feel if it felled him. Somehow, it seemed to him, human minds were
one
at some level, and there was no escape...
She was not a medusa who could be made harmless by approaching her with a mirrored shield. Only a large group of armed police might have a chance of bringing her down, but how would he explain to Reddy afterward, after the inevitable deaths, that she had been better armed? With what, where? All the evidence would die with her...
He would have to shoot her from behind, or from a distance with a high-powered rifle, and take the secret to his grave. It still seemed to him that she had to see her victim, and perhaps make eye contact, before coring. Or did she? Could she simply stand outside his apartment building and discreetly remove his brain? Could she simply visualize her victims? Perhaps not, but maybe she did not yet know what she could do.
He paused at the corner of Second Avenue and Tenth Street. A long line of people was forming at the St. Mark’s Place movie theater. He looked back and saw that he wasn’t being followed, then looked back to the theater. The line was getting shorter, and he had the sudden impulse to get on it and hide in the theater. He stood there, searching his thoughts—and realized that he was trying to remember the address of Dierdre’s property up in the Bronx.
Miraculously, the address was in his head as if he could see it, and he knew that he could wait for her there, if she panicked and fled.
He found a phone inside the theater and dialed the number on her card. She picked up on the third ring.
“Hello?”
He said, “A dozen police are coming to arrest you. You can’t get them all.”
“What... do you mean?” she asked, sounding shaken.
“Just that,” he replied angrily. “They’ll get you. You may core one or two, but they’ll finish you. You do know I’m telling the truth, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, “I’m sure you are. But what will you do with me after I’m arrested? Hold me?”
She laughed suddenly, and hung up on him, leaving him with a sickening feeling that he had overlooked something, but that killing her was still the only solution. What had he expected her to say when he called, that she would surrender?
He left the theater, went to the corner and peered down the block toward her house. She came down the stairs quickly, carrying a small suitcase in one hand and her bag of groceries in the other, hurried to the corner of First Avenue, waved down a cab and got in, slamming the door hard. As the cab pulled away, he took out his notebook and wrote down her Bronx address before it faded from his memory, suspecting now that she had tried to trap him in her apartment by leaving the doors open, hoping that he would think she had fled. He considered waiting for her where she would not expect it, which would give him a chance.
He found his car and drove back toward his apartment, suddenly imagining that she had been clever enough to leave the Bronx address for him to find, to lure him out there, and that was why she had given him time alone in the apartment. The cab might even be taking her to his apartment, with the suitcase being a ruse; she couldn’t get into his place without setting off an alarm, but she didn’t have to; a moment of eye contact on the street, in the lobby or the elevator, was all she needed.
Suddenly, he realized that he couldn’t be sure of anything. Fear had twisted his reason to the point where any possible course of action, hers or his own, would immediately summon up its own opposite. Objections hid within larger ones; simple practicalities and solutions became delusions and proliferated beyond probability. Pure possibilities branched into an infinity of confusions.
A red light stopped him just before Central Park, and he longed to think clearly again. It was a prayer.
16
The taxi driver was reluctant to take her out to the Bronx. She offered him fifty dollars, but he said it was too risky and had to be seventy-five. She gave it to him, but he took it as if he had no choice. She had him pull up at a bodega, where she bought a box of tampons and some more provisions. She saw him glance at the gun inside his open glove compartment as they crossed over the bridge into the Bronx and went up the Grand Concourse. It was the safest way to go, turning right at Fordham Road and heading down into the South Bronx by way of Webster Avenue.
Luring Benek to her was now the only way to have a chance of killing him. Her open-door ploy had failed, but it was unlikely that he had gone through her desk and not found the Bronx address. He might go there with backup, but she doubted it, because that meant convincing his superiors of an incredible story. No, with Gibney dead, he would act alone because he had no choice; and his male pride demanded that he settle his score with her. All she had to do was wait for him to come to her, and that would be the end of her problem. If he came with help, she would see it and leave.
Yet still, she told herself, he might be able to tell his superiors some kind of story, enough to bring a few police with him. Could she bring them all down? One or two efforts in rapid succession tired her dreadfully. Maybe if she practiced and got a lot of sleep before the encounter, she might be able to core them all, and then no one would be left who knew enough to pursue her. What could the evidence of several brainless bodies tell them? Even with careful autopsies, what could any coroner conclude? Cause of death: sudden removal of brain? Absurd. No, if he came at all, Benek would come alone.