Velocity (20 page)

Not that she necessarily meant to deceive. Her conversation was frequently more allusive than straightforward, not by intention but because of her nature. Everything she said sounded as limpid as a bell note to the ear—yet was sometimes semiopaque to interpretation.

Often her silences seemed to say more than the words she spoke, as might make sense for a girl raised by the loving deaf.

If he read her half well, Ivy was not deceiving him in any way. But then why had she just suggested that every face, her own included, was a mask?

If Ivy visited Barbara only because Barbara had once been kind to her, and if she took photographs of dead things to Whispering Pines only because she took them everywhere, the photo of the mantis had no relationship to the trap in which Billy found himself, and she had no knowledge of the freak.

In which case, he could get up, go, and do what urgently needed to be done. Yet he remained at the table.

Her eyes had lowered once more to the pistachios, and her hands had returned to the quiet, useful work of shelling.

“My grandmother was deaf from birth,” Ivy said. “She’d never heard a word spoken and didn’t know how to form them.”

Watching her nimble fingers, Billy suspected that Ivy’s days were filled with useful work—tending to her garden, maintaining this fine house in its current state of spotless perfection, cooking—and that she avoided idleness at all costs.

“She’d never heard anyone laugh, either, but she knew how to do that, all right. She had a beautiful and infectious laugh. I never heard her cry until I was eight.”

Billy understood Ivy’s compulsive industry as a reflection of his own, and sympathized. Quite apart from the question of whether or not he could trust her, he liked her.

“When I was much younger,” Ivy said, “I didn’t fully understand what it meant that my mother had died in childbirth. I used to think that somehow I had killed her and was responsible.”

In the window, the raven stretched its wings again, as silently as it had done before.

“I was eight when I realized I had no guilt,” Ivy said. “When I signed my realization to my grandmother, I saw her cry for the first time. This sounds funny, but I had assumed when she cried, it would be the weeping of a perfect mute, nothing but tears and wrenching spasms of silence. But her sobs were as normal as her laugh. As far as those two sounds were concerned, she was not a woman apart from those who could hear and speak; she was one of their community.”

Billy had thought that Ivy mesmerized men with her beauty and sexuality, but the spell she cast had a deeper source.

He knew what he intended to reveal only as he heard the words come forth: “When I was fourteen, I shot my mother and father.”

Without looking up, she said, “I know.”

“Dead.”

“I know. Have you ever thought that one of them might want to speak to you through the wall?”

“No. I never have. And, God, I hope they never do.”

She shelled, he watched, and in time she said, “You need to go.”

By her tone, she meant that he could stay but understood that he needed to leave.

“Yes,” he said, and rose from his chair.

“You’re in trouble, aren’t you, Billy?”

“No.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s as much as you’ll tell me.”

He said nothing.

“You came here looking for something. Did you find it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “you can listen so hard for the faintest of sounds that you don’t even hear the louder ones.”

He thought about that for a moment and then said, “Will you see me to the door?”

“You know the way now.”

“You should lock up behind me.”

“The door latches when you close it.”

“That’s not good enough. Before dark, you should engage the deadbolts. And close those windows.”

“I’m not afraid of anything,” she said. “I never have been.”

“I always have been.”

“I know,” she said. “For twenty years.”

On his way out, Billy made less noise on the hardwood floors than he had done on his way in. He closed the front door, tested the latch, and followed the arbor-shaded walkway to the street, leaving Ivy Elgin with her tea and pistachios, with the watchful raven at her back, in the hush of the kitchen where the clock had no hands.

chapter 44

STEVE ZILLIS RENTED A SINGLE-STORY HOUSE
of no distinguishing architecture on a street where the bonding philosophy among the neighbors seemed to be neglect of property.

The only well-maintained residence was immediately north of Zillis’s place. Jackie O’Hara’s friend, Celia Reynolds, lived there.

She claimed to have seen Zillis in a rage chopping chairs, watermelons, and mannequins in his backyard.

The attached garage stood on the south side of his house, out of Celia Reynolds’s line of sight. Having driven with frequent glances at his mirrors and having seen no tail, Billy parked boldly in the driveway.

Between Zillis and his southern neighbor rose a wall of eighty-foot, untrimmed eucalyptus trees that provided privacy.

When Billy got out of the Explorer, the extent of his disguise was a blue baseball cap. He had pulled it low on his forehead.

His toolbox gave him legitimacy. A man with a toolbox, moving with purpose, is assumed to be a repairman, and excites no suspicion.

As a bartender, Billy had a well-known face in certain circles. But he didn’t expect to be in the open for long.

He walked between the fragrant eucalyptus trees and the garage. As he hoped, he found a man-size side door.

In keeping with the property neglect and the cheap rent, only a simple lockset secured that entrance. No deadbolt.

Billy used his laminated driver’s license to loid the latch bolt. He took his toolbox into the hot garage and turned on a light.

On his way from Whispering Pines to Ivy Elgin’s house, he had driven past the tavern. Steve’s car had been parked in the lot.

Zillis lived alone. The way was clear.

Billy opened the garage, drove the SUV inside, closed the door. He proceeded casually, not as if in a hurry to get out of sight.

Wednesday nights were usually busy at the tavern. Steve wouldn’t be home until after two o’clock Thursday morning.

Nevertheless, Billy couldn’t afford to take seven hours to get into the house and search it. Elsewhere, two dead bodies salted with evidence against him needed to be disposed of long before dawn.

Festooned with webs and dust, the garage was free of clutter. In ten minutes, he found spiders but no spare key to the inner door.

He wanted to avoid signs of forced entry; however, picking a lock isn’t as easy as it appears to be in movies. Neither is seducing a woman or killing a man, or anything else.

Having installed new locks in his house, Billy had not only learned to do the work correctly but also learned how often it is done badly. He hoped for sloppy workmanship—and found it.

Perhaps the door had been hung to swing from the wrong side. Rather than rehang it to match the lockset, they had installed the lockset in reverse, with the interior face turned to the garage.

Instead of an unremovable escutcheon, he was offered one with two spanner screws. The keyhole plug had a grip ring for extraction.

In less time than he had spent searching for a spare key, he opened the door. Before proceeding, he put the lock back together. He cleaned up all evidence of what he had done and wiped all his prints off the door hardware.

He returned the tools to the box—and took from it his revolver. To facilitate a hasty exit, he put the tools in the Explorer.

In addition to the toolbox, he had brought a box of disposable latex gloves. He slipped his hands into a pair.

Now, with an hour of daylight remaining, he toured the house, switching on lamps and ceiling fixtures as he went.

Many of the shelves in the pantry were bare. Steve’s provisions were a cliché of bachelorhood: canned soups, canned stews, potato chips, corn chips, Cheez Doodles.

The dirty dishes and pots heaped in the sink outnumbered clean items in the cabinets, most of which were empty.

In a drawer, he found a collection of spare keys for a car, for padlocks, perhaps for the house. He tried a few in the back door and found one that worked. He pocketed that spare before returning the other keys to the drawer.

Steve Zillis scorned furniture. In the dinette off the kitchen, the single chair did not match the scarred Formica table.

The living room contained only a lumpy sofa, a cracked-leather ottoman, and a TV with DVD player on a wheeled stand. Magazines were stacked on the floor, and near them were a discarded pair of dirty socks.

Except for the lack of posters, the decor was that of a dorm room. Enduring adolescence was pathetic but not criminal.

If a woman ever visited, she wouldn’t return—or sleep over. Being able to tie knots in a cherry stem with your tongue was not enough to ensure a life of torrid romance.

The spare bedroom contained no furniture, but four mannequins. They were all female, naked, wigless, bald. Three had been altered.

One lay on its back, on the floor, in the center of the room. It gripped two steak knives. Each knife had been driven into its throat, as if it had twice stabbed itself.

A hole had been drilled between its legs. Also between its legs was a spear-point stave from a wrought-iron fence. The sharp end of the stave had been inserted in the crudely formed vagina.

Instead of feet, the mannequin had another pair of hands at the ends of its legs. Both legs were bent to allow the additional hands to grip the iron stave.

A third pair of hands grew by the wrists from the breasts. They grasped at the air, seeking and eager, as though the mannequin were insatiable.

chapter 45

IN MORE THAN A FEW HOUSES, IF YOU COULD
prowl at leisure, you might discover evidence of perversity, kinky secrets.

Because such care had been taken in their alteration, so much time expended, these mannequins seemed to represent more than that. This was an expression not of desire but of a ravenous craving, of a rapacious
need
that could never be fully satisfied.

A second mannequin sat with its back to a wall, legs splayed. Its eyes had been cut out. Teeth had been inserted in their place.

These appeared to be animal teeth, perhaps those of reptiles and perhaps real. Hooked fangs and snaggled incisors.

Each tooth had been meticulously glued in the rim of the socket. Each cluster appeared to have been designed with much thought as to the most fearsome, bristling arrangement.

The mouth had been cut open, carved wide. Wicked, inhuman teeth filled the mannequin’s maw.

Like the petals of a Venus flytrap, the ears were rimmed with poised teeth.

Teeth sprouted from the nipples and from the navel. A crafted vagina featured more fangs than the other orifices.

Whether this macabre figure represented a fear of all-devouring womanhood, whether instead it was being devoured by its own hunger, Billy didn’t know, didn’t care.

He just wanted to get out of here. He had seen enough. Yet he continued to look.

The third mannequin also sat with its back to a wall. Its hands rested in its lap, holding a bowl. The bowl was actually the top of its skull, which had been sawn off.

Photographs of male genitalia overflowed the bowl. Billy did not touch them, but he could see enough to suspect that every picture featured the same genitalia.

A bouquet of similar photos, scores of them, bloomed from the top of the open skull. Still more blossomed from the mannequin’s mouth.

Evidently Steve Zillis had spent a lot of time taking snapshots of himself from various angles, in various states of arousal.

Billy’s latex gloves served a purpose besides guarding against leaving fingerprints. Without them, he would have been sickened by the need to touch doorknobs, light switches, anything in the house.

The fourth mannequin had not yet been mutilated. Zillis probably hungered to get at her.

During his shift at the tavern, drawing beers from the tap, telling jokes, doing his tricks,
these
were the thoughts behind the radiant smile.

Steve’s bedroom proved to be as sparsely furnished as the rest of the house. The bed, a nightstand, a lamp, a clock. No art on the walls, no knickknacks, no memorabilia.

The bedclothes were in disarray. One pillow lay on the floor.

A corner of the room evidently served in place of a laundry hamper. Rumpled shirts, khakis, jeans, and dirty underwear were heaped as Steve had tossed them.

A search of the bedroom and closet turned up another disturbing discovery. Under the bed were a dozen pornographic videos, the covers of which depicted naked women in handcuffs, in chains, some gagged, some blindfolded, cowering women threatened by sadistic men.

These weren’t homemade videos. They were professionally packaged and probably available in any adult-video shop, whether brick-and-mortar or on-line.

Billy put them back where he had found them, and he considered whether he had discovered enough to warrant calling the police.

No. Neither the mannequins nor the pornography proved that Steve Zillis had ever harmed a real human being, only that he nurtured a sick and vivid fantasy life.

Meanwhile, a dead man was wrapped for disposal and stowed behind the sofa in Billy’s house.

If he became a suspect in the murder of Giselle Winslow in Napa or if Lanny Olsen’s body was found and Billy became a suspect in that murder, he would at the very least be put under surveillance. He would lose his freedom of action.

If they found Cottle’s body, he would be arrested.

No one would understand or believe the threat against Barbara. They would not take his warnings seriously. When you were a prime suspect, what the police wanted to hear from you was what they
expected
to hear from you, which was a confession.

He knew how it worked. He knew exactly how it worked.

During the twenty-four hours or the forty-eight hours—or the week, the month, the year—that it took to establish his innocence, if he ever could establish it, Barbara would be vulnerable, without a guardian.

He had been drawn in too deep. Nobody could save him except he himself.

If he found the face in a jar of formaldehyde and other grisly souvenirs, he might be able to nail Zillis for the authorities. But nothing less would convince them.

Like most California houses, this one didn’t have a basement, but it did have an attic. The hall ceiling featured a trapdoor with a dangling rope handle.

When he pulled the trap down, an accordion ladder unfolded from the back of it.

He heard something behind him. In his mind, he saw a mannequin with teeth in its eye sockets, reaching toward him.

He pivoted, clawing for the gun under his belt. He was alone. He had probably heard just a settling noise, an old house easing itself at the insistence of gravity.

At the top of the ladder, he found a light switch set in the frame of the trap. Two bare bulbs, dimmed by dust, illuminated a raftered space empty of everything except the smell of wood rot.

Evidently the freak was canny enough to keep his incriminating souvenirs elsewhere.

Billy suspected that Zillis stayed in this rental house but did not in the truest sense
live
here. With its minimum of furniture and utter lack of decorative items, the place had the feeling of a way station. Steve Zillis had no roots here. He was just passing through.

He had worked at the tavern for five months. Where had he been between the University of Colorado at Denver, five and a half years ago, when Judith Kesselman had disappeared, and this place?

Across the World Wide Web, his name had been linked to only one disappearance, and to no murders at all. Googled, Billy himself would not appear that clean.

But if you had a list of the towns in which Steve Zillis had settled for a while, if you researched murders and disappearances that occurred in those communities, the truth might be clearer.

The most successful serial killers were the vagabonds, roamers who covered a lot of ground between their homicidal frenzies. When clusters of killings were separated by hundreds of miles and scores of jurisdictions, they were less likely to be connected; patterns in landscape, visible from an airplane, are seldom discernible to a man on foot.

An itinerant bartender who’s a good mixologist, who’s outgoing and able to charm the customers, can get work anywhere. If he applies to the right places, he won’t often be asked for a formal employment history, only for a social-security card, a driver’s license, and an all-clean report from the state liquor-control board. Jackie O’Hara, typical of his breed, didn’t phone an applicant’s former employers; he made hiring decisions based on gut instinct.

Billy turned out the lights as he left the house. He used the spare key to lock up after himself, and he pocketed it again because he expected to return.