The Decoy (24 page)

He says, 'I've had lawyers working on this, Claire. Good lawyers. Finding out what was really going on.'

There's a spot on her forehead and she picks at it absently. 'I know all this,' she says. 'They told me that you were the suspect. They told you that J was. They lied to us both.'

He shakes his head. 'There was more to it than that, Claire. Much more.'

Her hand leaves the spot.

'Strictly speaking, Dr Leichtman isn't a forensic psychiatrist at all. She holds some kind of research position at Quantico. It's all pretty murky, but from what I can discover, her job was to find ways of studying killers.'

'You mean, before they'd been caught?'

'Sometimes even before they'd killed. Studying them in the wild, if you like. She lured her subjects into a series of Internet communities that she'd established for just that purpose. Like a series of glass-sided ant farms, with Connie watching everything that went on.'

'Necropolis,' she says.

He spreads his hands. 'It was a crazy idea. You can't police the Internet, much less control it. From what I can gather, instead of just observing killers, her communities were actually helping to create them. The FBI was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work. It's been a mopping-up operation ever since.'

'I should have known she wasn't a shrink,' she says, half to herself. 'She never tried to drug me.'

'They sent you into Necropolis and deliberately dangled you in front of the killer, twitching the line every now and then to maintain his interest. At the same time, they seeded the Internet with enough information to enable him to find you. They already knew he uses the net to track his victims -the prostitute had a web page at an escort agency site and Stella left a trail when she went into Necropolis. There were other killings, too, from what I can discover, murders we never even knew about. An IT worker in Houston. A girl in Denmark who'd set up a webcam in her bathroom. All by the same man.' He wonders how much of this she's taking in. 'Do you see, Claire? We were
bait.
Tethered goats, both of us, to lure the killer into Connie's trap. Everything else was just a pretext to keep us in the right place.'

Claire looks out of the window. A sudden gust of wind shakes the trees on the hospital lawns. A cooking smell drifts through the open door. It's nearly time for lunch. Her mouth waters.

'We'll sue the bastards, of course,' he says. 'It doesn't matter how many forms we signed. They'll pay up just to stop the story getting out.'

'What about Frank? Won't that screw up his career?'

'Hopefully.'

'I can't get my head round this,' she says. She starts to cry again, soundlessly.

'What have they done to you?' he says, his voice harsh with anger.

She dries her eyes on her sleeve. 'Just a chemical tweak, apparently. But I don't want to sue anyone, Christian. I want to get out.'

'Are you sure? Dr Bannerman—'

'I'm an actress. What do I want with Dr Bannerman's idea of sanity?'

'There's also the question of safety. Until they catch this guy, it could be dangerous out there.'

'At the last count,' she says wearily, 'there were three psychos, two schizophrenics, six manic-depressives and half a dozen crackheads in this place. Do you really think I'm in less danger out there? We'll just have to hope they catch him.'

He nods slowly. 'You're a gutsy woman, Claire.'

She digs her fingers into her stomach. 'About fifteen pounds gutsier now than when I came in, unfortunately. And now you have to go. I'm already missing lunch.'

Harold Hopkins has finished his supper and, as is his custom, he sits himself in his favourite armchair and reaches for the newspaper. It's his intention to end the day by reading. He turns first, as he always does, to the announcement of deaths, in case a fatality has occurred which he should know about, and reaches to the arm of his chair, where his spectacle case should be. To his annoyance, though, he recollects that he has left his reading glasses in the little office of the funeral parlour, when he was filling out those burial licences.

'I'm just going to the office, Ellen,' he calls. There's no reply. His wife has the radio on while she does the dishes.

Harold levers himself out of his chair and walks the short distance from his house to the funeral parlour. The key is on his chain, and it's dark, so he fumbles once or twice before he finally gets it into the lock.

Harold has never found the funeral parlour a spooky place at night. The dead, in his opinion, are the least spooky people of all, not least because they lose any mystique they might once have had when you are constantly purging and aspirating them. He thinks of them much as a child nurse might think of babies: messy, slightly wayward critters, always vomiting or defecating or generally causing trouble. Consequently, Harold doesn't turn on the main lights; he can see well enough by the light in the yard. He goes into the office to collect his reading spectacles, which are on his desk. As he turns to go, he notices, with a tut of annoyance, that someone has left the pump table light on in the prep room.

The pump table has a powerful but highly directional light attached to it, like the light on a dentist's chair. Harold guesses that someone must have left it on when they went home; an easy thing to do, since the directional beam is hard to spot from the side. He goes to turn it off. There are three cadavers in the prep room at present, about as many as the funeral parlour gets at any one time. One is from the retirement home, another is Peggy Watts' old mother, struck down by a heart attack at the age of eighty-two, while the third is a young girl, an assistant at the big store on the way into town. Marianne Collins, that was her name. The poor girl had been electrocuted in her own yard by a faulty mower lead.

As he reaches for the light, Harold hears a sound, a sort of scurrying noise. For a moment he wonders if it might be a scavenger come out of the woods, a rat or a feral cat. Then he hears it again, and this time he's pretty sure it's human.

The living, Harold Hopkins does get spooked by, particularly the living who have broken in where they shouldn't. He turns the pump light back on, reaches for the nearest heavy object — a putty gun — and edges through the room. Holding the steel putty gun upended, like a bottle, he makes his way through to the hall.

There's no one there. Maybe he was just imagining it. But, being a careful man, Harold turns to have one last check. And that's when he sees a leg — a man's leg — behind one of the caskets that are stored on their ends all along the hallway. He starts to say something, and then the casket is pushed and topples down on him. There was a time when Harold could have dodged a falling casket, but that time is long past. It catches him across the shoulders as he turns, sending him sprawling across the floor. He dimly hears the sound of running feet, then breaking glass, then nothing.

'Thing is,' says Dan Etheridge, 'nothing's been stolen and nothing's been broke. Apart from the window and the casket, of course.'

'That's right,' Harold agrees. He's tired now. The patrolman has come as quickly as he was able, but he lives on the far side of the valley, and then they had to make a careful inspection of the woods all around, and check the verges beside the road for tyre tracks, and see if anything had been taken. The broken glass he had heard was quickly explained: the intruder smashed the window beside the back door as he escaped.

'And that's what's puzzling me,' Dan says. 'Look, I can see where he busted out, but I can't see where he busted in. That's not to say he didn't, of course, only that I can't say with any exactness how.'

The wound on Harold's temple is hurting, and he takes out a folded handkerchief and holds it to the spot. 'Must have been the same place he got out, then,' he suggests.

'And then there's the question of what he was doing here,' Dan continues. 'Now, Harold, it's possible that this was a burglary and you disturbed him before he could find anything of value. That's one possibility.'

'What are the others?' Harold says, more to hurry the policeman up than because he can't think of any other possibilities himself. Indeed, one such possibility has been troubling Harold greatly ever since it occurred to him, half an hour ago.

'Well,' Dan says. 'You've got the body of a young woman here, an attractive young woman. I don't like to say this, Harold, but there are sick people out there. I think we've got to consider the possibility that someone was trying to interfere with her. Which means we should really get the funeral postponed and have her shipped to Longbay for them to run some forensic tests. See if they can find any physical evidence of that kind of thing.'

'Dan,' Harold says, 'you and I know that if we postpone the funeral for that reason it will be the end of my livelihood. No-one will ever entrust their dear departed to me again. If anything of that kind did happen to that poor girl — God rest her soul — this evening, it isn't going to change things for her. She's dead. But speculating about what might have happened will surely make things a whole lot worse for her family, as well as for me. Now, what say you and I take a look at her together, and if there's any physical evidence, any shred at all, that your speculation may be right, we'll ship her off to Longbay. But if we can't find anything, we'll just let the poor girl rest in peace.'

Dan Etheridge chews his moustache. 'I guess taking a look's not such a bad idea,' he says at last. 'Then we'll have a notion what we're dealing with.'

Together, the two men undress the body and inspect it carefully.

'I can't see anything untoward,' Harold says. 'I think we may have been lucky. Either I disturbed him, or else it really was a thief.'

'Hold up,' Dan says. 'Turn the light that way, will you? Over there.'

Harold turns the pump table light towards the corner of the room. 'What is it?'

Dan peers at something on the floor. It's a small black disc, a little bigger than a coin. 'I'd say it's a lens cap,' he says at last.

'Looks a little small to be a lens cap,' Harold says.

'From one of those digital cameras. My brother Ed has one. They take a smaller lens.' He looks around. 'You got any plastic gloves, Harold?'

'Sure.' Harold pulls a pair of Nitriles out of the dispenser. The policeman pulls one on and picks up the disc.

'Looks like he might just have been taking some photographs. Might have been a college kid doing it for a dare, for all we know. So we'll say no more for the moment, Harold. But I'd better hang on to this, in case it happens again.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

When Christian returns to the hospital two days later he brings someone with him, a doctor, whom Claire understands works for Christian in some way. This man, who is called Dr Felix, asks her some questions in a thin, high voice, and takes her over to the window so that he can examine her in the light. Then, his lips set, he tells the orderly at the door that he wishes to see Dr Bannerman. The orderly mumbles something about Dr Bannerman not being on call, and she sees Dr Felix's lips set even thinner. He talks to the orderly for a long time in a low voice. Soon Bannerman turns up, visibly flustered, and Dr Felix takes him aside. Dr Bannerman hasn't changed into his hospital uniform and Claire can see that he's breaking into a sweat. Then Dr Felix returns and tells Christian quietly, 'We can go. It's all taken care of.'

'It was nice of you to come,' Claire says. 'Will you come back?'

'Would you give us a minute?' Christian says to Dr Felix.

'Of course,' the doctor replies, with the graciousness of a man who knows that every minute he gives them is being handsomely paid for.

When they're alone, Christian says gently, 'You're coming with us, Claire. Dr Bannerman has agreed that you're not in need of his services after all. You'll stay with me until you're better. That way the police will only have one address to watch — if that's all right by you.'

'Of course it is.'

'Good. We'll talk some more in a few days, when you've got these drugs out of your system.'

Glenn Furnish leans over Ellen Vortenssen and looks into the girl's deep blue eyes. Tenderly, almost reverently, he squeezes a drop of superglue into the exact centre of her iris. Then he thumbs the eyelid shut, holding it for a moment for the glue to take effect.

It's two days since the pregnant teenager was cut down from the beam of an outhouse behind her parents' farm, and her eyes have turned milky now, a film of decomposition as pale as cataracts over the bloodshot corneas.

Bloodshot, because the fall had not been long enough to break the girl's neck. Attempting to hang herself, she had actually suffocated instead. Blood vessels all around her eyes and behind the delicate skin of her cheek have burst, giving her the appearance of a sixty-year-old derelict.

With her eyes sealed, she looks better already. Almost, Glenn thinks, as if she has just come in from riding her horse on a cold winter morning. A little flushed. But soon, when he has got to work with his SkinTone, there'll be no sign even of that.

Glenn leans over her once more to hold the other eye closed. And — he can't help himself — seeing the girl's lips, pale and drained as a statue's, just below his own, he delicately touches his mouth to hers, taking her dry bottom lip between his own wet lips, pulling it into his mouth and inhaling the gamey, ripe scent — 'Hey, Glenn.'

He jumps back, startled. He had forgotten that he wasn't alone, that this was not his private time, but an ordinary working day in the prep room. Alicia is standing at the door.

He stares at her, waiting for her to scream, to make the first move. He already knows that he will have to kill her.

Then she smiles. 'I won't tell if you don't.'

'You aren't… upset?' he says.

'Fuck, no,' she says. 'You think when I was younger I never took the chance to take a good look at some of the young guys who came in here? I guess all us morgue rats are the same.'

'I guess,' he says uneasily.

'Besides, you know what they say about working with the dead,' she says, coming closer to him.