Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Ten

Hitchhikers were so easy. It seemed to Mark that they were virtually asking to be killed, and he wondered if there wasn’t something fundamentally suicidal about a girl who stood alone by the side of the road, actively seeking rides from passing strangers.

He’d been driving on 1-70, heading toward St. Louis, and at Columbia he’d left the Interstate and drove north on 63. The main campus of the University of Missouri was in Columbia, and there were always students on roads in the area, thumb out, looking for a ride.

Today was no exception. It was right around the end of the term and the highway was full of young people in jeans, most of them with suitcases or duffel bags in tow. There were more boys than girls on the road, and what girls he saw were accompanied, either by other girls or by boys. He slowed once at the sight of two girls. He had never done two at once outside of fantasy, and his pulse quickened at the thought, but he knew the risk was far too great. One of them would stand a very good chance of getting away, and if that happened he would be in trouble.

Still, he braked the car almost to a stop just to let himself get a good look at them. They were both blondes, both clad in jeans and sneakers and school sweatshirts, both round-faced and pug-nosed and plump. And both gave him the finger when, just as they rose to approach the Lincoln, he bore down on the gas pedal and sped away.

He smiled at their reflection in the rearview mirror. He wondered if they were sisters and decided they probably were. He had slowed down to look at them in the expectation that it would fuel his fantasy, and indeed it did. He saw himself with the two of them, making one watch while he did the other, letting her know just what was coming, and then finishing her off.

Oh, nice.

He kept driving, slowing down again at the sight of a woman alone, speeding up angrily when a second glance revealed a slim boy with long hair.

A couple miles farther he found her.

She was perfect. Jeans, UM sweatshirt, Birkenstock sandals on dirty feet. Long dark brown hair in a pony tail secured by a rubber band. An oval face. Pale blue eyes, a short straight nose, pale thin lips, even teeth. Unplucked eyebrows, unpolished nails. No makeup, no lipstick.

Narrow waist, slim hips, nice little ass. Hard to tell about the breasts because the sweatshirt was baggy.

Time would tell.

She had to struggle to get the duffel bag into the backseat. Then she climbed in front, propping her large handbag on her lap, reaching over to fasten her seat belt across her body. She said, “Are you going as far as Kirksville? I live in Edina, that’s down the road from Kirksville.”

“Well, I can run you all the way to Kirksville.”

“Oh, that’s great,” she said. “This is a great car, too. This a Lincoln?” He said it was. “I guess they’re nicer than Cadillacs, aren’t they?” He said it was probably a toss-up. “I’m getting a car in the fall. They didn’t want me to have one my first year, like it’d be too distracting? Like if I had a car I wouldn’t go to my classes, but if I didn’t have a car I’d have to study out of boredom? But, you know, that’s how parents think, isn’t it?”

She chatted and he made conversation, not really paying any mind to the words she spoke. She was just right and he was going to do her and the excitement was absolutely wonderful. On the one hand he wanted to drive forever, putting off the act indefinitely, prolonging the tantalizing feeling that gripped him now. And, at the same time, he wanted to stop the car that instant, to kill her oh God yes before another moment went by.

He waited, and a third impulse came. He had the thought of letting her go, of driving her all the way to Kirksville, even turning there and taking her straight to her home in Edina, and of never touching her, never doing her the slightest injury. She would hop out of the car and drag her duffel bag up the driveway to her house, never knowing how close she had come to death.

He had that urge some of the time. Every now and then he acted on it. Every now and then he would open his hand and release the helpless bird that fluttered within, watching benevolently as she flew away. He entertained the thought, then dismissed it. No, not this one. This bird would not be doing any more flying.

A mile down the road, he braked smoothly and turned onto a gravel road heading east.

“Where are we going?”

“There’s construction up ahead,” he told her.

“I didn’t see a sign.”

“I don’t think there was one. I came down this way this morning and everything was all snarled up. We’ll cut over to the next road going north and miss all that traffic.”

Her eyes were wary. She thought it was going to be okay, she still felt pretty safe, but it had at least occurred to her that it might not be, and it was giving her something to think about.

He slowed, turned left onto a narrower road.

She said, “Are you sure this is a road? It’s just a dirt road, I think it’s just a farm road—”

“It goes through.”

She was fumbling in her purse, and some instinct warned him. He slammed the brake pedal to the floor. She was propelled forward against her seat belt. He held the wheel with his left hand and swung his right, backhanding her full force across the mouth. She cried out.

He took the bag from her lap. Just below the top layer of articles he found a canister of Chemical Mace. She cringed when he displayed it.

“I wasn’t going to do anything,” she said. “I swear I wasn’t.”

He looked at her.

“I just got scared and I wanted to hold it,” she said. “I got frightened, I… please don’t hurt me.”

“Be quiet.”

“I’ll do anything you want. Just don’t hurt me.”

“Be quiet. And sit still.”

It was, as she had guessed, just a farm road. It would probably be safe for the next few minutes. But it would be safer still off the road, and he had her cowed now, she wouldn’t try anything. Off the road, screened from sight by shrubbery, there would be no need to hurry.

He got the car where he wanted it and cut the ignition. She was calmer now, and a little more sure of herself. “I’ll do anything you want,” she said. “Honest, anything. Just so you don’t hurt me.”

He nodded. “What’s your name?”

“Bethany.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“Take off your clothes, Bethany.”

“Here? Or should I get out of the car first?”

“Stay in the car. You’ll have to unhook your seat belt first, though.”

“Oh, right.”

She kicked off the sandals, opened her jeans and raised her hips up off the leather seat to squirm out of them. He took them from her, tossed them into the backseat. She took off the sweatshirt next, and then the T-shirt under it. No bra, and her tits were bigger than he would have guessed, milky white and very nice.

“Very nice,” he said aloud.

She colored, and hesitated, and he said, “Yes, Bethany, the panties too,” and she took those off and he flipped them into the back.

He had been wearing a suit jacket. He got out of it and tossed it in back with the clothes she’d removed. He filled his hands with her flesh. She was, he noticed, not terribly clean about her person. She had a discernible body odor, along with the very palpable smell of her fear.

He made her lie down on the front seat, and he laid his body on top of hers, pressing her down onto the seat. He could feel the heat of her loins through his trousers, he could feel her tits through his shirt, and he took her face in his hands and looked at her sweet young face.

“Just don’t hurt me,” she said.

“Oh, Bethany,” he said. “Oh, you poor darling, it’s no fun if I don’t hurt you.”

He watched her face as she took in what he’d said, and it was lovely, just lovely, and he didn’t want to put her through any more and couldn’t stand any more himself. So he placed the heel of his right hand under her chin, his fingertips just grazing her lip, and he cupped her forehead with his left hand, and he pushed up on her chin and back on her forehead and snapped her neck.

#57.

The first woman he killed, the black prostitute in the downtown motel, had been dispatched in a manner that was unplanned, impulsive, and extremely hazardous. He had left traces of his presence that a police laboratory could have found. And, although the pleasure had been unprecedented in his experience, it had been managed in such a manner as to make the aftermath uncomfortable and awkward.

Since then he had learned how to keep risk to a minimum while maximizing his pleasures; he was, indeed, conditioned to think in those terms, since they were essentially identical to one’s goals in real estate investment.

Almost from the beginning he had stopped having intercourse with his partners. It was a pleasant sensation, certainly, to have one’s sexual organ within a slippery envelope of flesh at the critical moment, but physical sensation of that sort played such a minor role in the excitement of the act as to render it almost irrelevant. And it was virtually impossible to achieve physical intimacy of that sort without leaving traces — pubic hair, semen, each capable of yielding no end of information to a trained forensic pathologist. On top of that, the act left traces upon oneself, and there was always the chance of catching a disease. While there was undeniable poetic justice in the notion of a woman infecting her killer with something at the least loathsome and at the worst life-threatening, he had no desire to afford one of his victims an opportunity for that sort of revenge.

So he tried keeping his clothing on, and the pleasure was no less intense for it. His orgasm came not as a result of friction between his penis and another object but as the pure inevitable response to his mental excitement. He usually pressed against a woman when he killed her, but he didn’t have to in order to reach full release.

But that, too, had a messy aftermath. He’d have to wash his underwear or throw it out, and sometimes his trousers had to make a trip to the dry cleaner. It took a while to hit on the solution, in part because he wasn’t looking for one at first; for the first year or more, each killing was followed by a vow that he would never kill again, and so there seemed little reason to seek a better way to manage it.

He tried putting on a condom first. That worked, certainly, but there was something ridiculous about it, and he hated it. And then, on one occasion when impulse and circumstance provided him with the opportunity to kill a very pretty waitress in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant in Houston (lying on the asphalt between two parked cars, crushing her windpipe with a tire iron), he had used all the strength available to him to hold back his orgasm.

It was enormously frustrating, but the act was thrilling all the same, and he’d simply hurried back to his motel room to stretch naked on his bed, reliving the episode in his mind while he relieved himself manually. He masturbated again the following morning, but this time he held back his ejaculation to defer his pleasure, and in so doing he made an astonishing discovery: it was possible to have an orgasm without ejaculating.

Since then he had learned that he was not the first person to find this out. A whole school of yoga practiced the retention of semen in sexual activity, and it seemed to be a part of various Chinese disciplines as well. Something was released — some kind of energy, something that demanded to be released — but the ejaculation was held back and the semen retained. At first when you did this you wound up with an ache in the pit of your stomach and a feeling of uncomfortable fullness in your loins, but as you became proficient at it and used to it the sensation was diminished, and what ache you did feel was not unpleasant.

And you weren’t scattering your seed that way. Instead your system reabsorbed it, and retained its energy. You were stronger, and you could repeat the sex act almost immediately, and each further repetition, instead of draining you, simply energized you more.

He trained himself, practicing constantly through self-stimulation until he had mastered the new technique. Something he read suggested he could increase his muscular control by an exercise which involved cutting off the flow of urine in midstream. He did this, and developed whatever muscle was involved, but it was mental exercise that played the greater role. You had to build a filter into the mind so that it held back the passage of seed but allowed the spill of orgasmic release. He had some failures along the way, but he had more successes, and eventually he retained his semen as a matter of course, without much conscious effort at all.

Once he was able to do this regularly when he killed women, any thoughts he had about stopping the killings came to a permanent end. Evidently there was something in the passage of seed that engendered depression and remorse, because he felt neither once he ceased to ejaculate. He was still careful not to kill too often, he still sought to minimize risk, and he still had to take pains from time to time to keep his conscience at bay. But he knew he was not going to give all this up, and he didn’t even delude himself that he wanted to.

He left Bethany on the ground, screened from the farm road by a clump of brush. He piled her clothes beside her and weighted them down with her duffel bag. He went through the articles at the top of her handbag, wiping off anything he could have touched that might hold a print. He kept the canister of Mace.

On the way back to Columbia, he stopped for another hitchhiker, another college girl, this one returning for the summer session. She was an open-faced blonde and she reminded him a little of the sisters who’d given him the finger as he drove away from them. She was more solidly built, though, with a sort of bovine cast to her features.

She was silent in the seat beside him, and he didn’t attempt to make conversation with her. He let himself savor the memory of Bethany and enjoyed a few brief fantasies of repeating the act with this blond girl, whose name he did not know. He could drive her up the same farm road, he could leave her dead behind the same clump of brush.

Instead, he drove her all the way into Columbia and dropped her off at her dormitory, then found his way back to I-70 and continued toward St. Louis.

If he’d found her before he found Bethany, he would have done her without a moment’s hesitation. Or, if she’d been irresistibly attractive, he might not have let the episode with Bethany keep him from having her, too. But she just wasn’t that appealing, and he wasn’t that ravenous.

In St. Louis he checked into a motel out toward the airport, unpacked and took a shower. He called a couple of realtors and made appointments for the next several days. He spoke to a man at the firm he used to manage his rental properties in the area, and handled some business over the phone. He relaxed awhile in front of the television set, then put on a tie and jacket and drove downtown for a big meal at Tony’s. He drank a half bottle of wine with his veal and had coffee and a brandy in the lounge. After dinner he walked for a couple of blocks to clear his head before collecting his car from the attendant and driving back to the motel.

In the morning he saw one of the realtors he had called, and then dropped in on his property management people just because he was in the neighborhood. He had a light lunch with the man he’d talked to on the telephone the previous afternoon, learned more than he cared to know about a local political scandal, and didn’t discuss business at all.

In the afternoon he went to a supermarket and pushed a cart up one aisle and down the next. He took something off a shelf every now and then and put it in the cart, but he wasn’t really shopping. He was looking at women. It was a wonderful place to observe them because they were remarkably unselfconscious, totally absorbed in the business of shopping and unaware that anyone might be looking at them. There were several very nice women in the supermarket, and he walked the aisles in a constant state of physical excitement.

When he’d spent as much time there as he wanted he abandoned his cart in the dairy section, picked up a couple of items he needed — a tube of toothpaste, a pack of six disposable razors, a box of Nutter Butter cookies — and hand-carried them to the checkout counter. The girl on the register (Sandy, according to her name tag) had a sunny smile and a pretty face. Her fingertips grazed his palm when she gave him his change.

“Have a nice day,” she said.

He had dinner at a Pizza Hut not far from his motel. His waitress was darling, and so were two or three of the other waitresses, and several of the customers. Afterward he sat in his car for half an hour with the motor off and the lights out, waiting to see if anyone interesting came out alone, but no one did and he tired of the game. He went back to the motel and called Marilee. Both kids were home, and he talked to them, talked some more to Marilee, had another shower and went to sleep.

The following morning he saw another of the realtors he’d spoken to the first day. He wound up going around with her to look at a couple of properties. Her name was Janet, and he had always found her quite attractive, but he knew her professionally and had never allowed himself to entertain fantasies about her. By now he knew her too well; even if there were no risk, he wouldn’t have been interested.

Nor was he much interested in either of the properties she took him to inspect. That was all right, he liked to look at property, you always learned something that way. She drove him back to her office and he picked up the Lincoln.

He drove around. The streets were full of women; the city was full of women. At a stop light, the car next to his was a Dodge convertible with the top down; the driver had a tight sweater and a pouty, sullen mouth. Country music blared on her radio. He let her pull ahead when the light turned and followed her for a dozen blocks until she sailed through an amber light that was red when he reached it. He didn’t want to run the light, and by the time it changed she was gone.

He headed back toward the motel, but stayed on Lindbergh Boulevard past Florissant and parked at the Jamestown Mall. All of the stores were full of women and a remarkable proportion of them looked good to him. It was crowded everywhere, you couldn’t even think about doing anything.

A salesgirl in a gift shop asked if she could help him. “Just looking,” he said.

In the Waldenbooks store, he browsed the shelves and studied the other customers. One book caught his eye, a paperback, and he carried it up front to the register.

The cashier was a woman about his age with a receding chin and a barbed Ozarks twang. She rang the sale and said, “Men Who Hate Women. Well, I met a few of those and I sure hope you’re not one of them.”

“Not me,” he said. “I love women.”

He left the mall and drove into Florissant, cruising up one suburban street and down the next. He stopped on a block of brick-fronted ranch houses set on quarter-acre plots. Each house had a young tree planted on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, and most of the trees still had their trunks wrapped with tape. A large proportion of the cars parked in the driveways were either station wagons or hatchbacks.

He parked his car at the curb, got a clipboard from the trunk, and put a couple of pens into his shirt pocket. He crossed the street and walked up to the door of the first house he came to. He rang the bell.

The woman who answered it was middle-aged. She wore a patterned housedress and was smoking a cigarette.

He said, “Water company. Did you report a drop in pressure?” She said she hadn’t. “Sorry to bother you,” he said, and turned away from her.

There was no one home at the house next door. The woman at the third house was pregnant, and carrying a whining infant. He asked her the same question, and she too denied having reported problems with the water pressure, and he thanked her and left. The woman in the fourth house was pretty — light brown hair, dark brown eyes. He said, “Water company. We’ve been having problems with the water pressure in your area. Have you had any difficulty?”

“No,” she said. “It seems okay.” She turned from him, called back into the house. “Adam, you stop your fussing. I’ll just be a minute.”

He thanked her and left. At the house after hers, he waited a long time before the door was answered. The woman was in her late twenties, and the minute Mark saw her he was glad her neighbor had had a child in the other room. Otherwise he’d have missed out on this one, and she was much too good to miss. She was just a little thing, barely over five feet tall, with a lovely figure and deep dark blue eyes. Oh, wonderful, just wonderful.

“Water company,” he said. “We’ve been having some problems in your area. Have you had any difficulties with the pressure?”

She thought about it. “Uh, no,” she said. “Not really.”

“How about the appearance and flavor of the water?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The coffee was all right this morning. I don’t know as I drank any water, not just plain by itself.”

“I see,” he said. “Is it all right if I come in? I’m not interrupting anything?”

She shook her head. “I was just watching TV is all.”

“You’re not busy with the kids then?”

She shook her head. “Still in school.”

Wonderful. He drew the door shut after him. “Now if I could just check the water in the kitchen taps first,” he said. “Which way’s the kitchen, if you don’t mind?”

She led the way. She was wearing khaki slacks and he watched her rear as she walked. He caught up with her at the threshold to the kitchen, clapped a hand over her mouth and wrapped her in a choke hold, her throat caught in the crook of his arm. She struggled, but she was just a little thing and he was much too strong for her. Her struggles ceased and she slumped unconscious, limp in his grasp.

He undressed her there in the kitchen. He used a paper towel to protect his hand and went through drawers until one yielded an electrical extension cord. He cut it in half and used one piece to tie her ankles together and the other to bind her wrists behind her back. He stripped to the waist and picked her up in his arms and carried her through the house until he found the bathroom.

He set her down on the tile floor, stopped the bathtub drain and ran a lukewarm tub of water. The tub was still running when she groaned and opened her eyes.

She looked at him. Her mouth opened but she didn’t make a sound. It didn’t too much matter if she did; the window was closed, and he had drawn the bathroom door shut. No one could hear any sound she could make.

When the tub was as deep as he wanted it he shut off the water and turned to her. “Now I’m just going to give you a nice bath,” he said. “That’s all.” And he picked her up in his arms — she had luxuriously soft skin, she was wonderful to touch — and placed her on her back in the tub.

He used his hands and ran the soap over her teacup breasts, down over her belly, lathered her pubic hair. He put the soap back in the dish and sluiced water over her to rinse her. Her eyes were wide, rolling in terror, but she still hadn’t uttered a sound since regaining consciousness.

“You’re so sweet,” he said, bending to kiss her on the lips. He took hold of the hair at the back of her neck and drew her head down under the water, pinning her down with his other hand on her breast. She tried to struggle, and he could feel her heart hammering. He looked down at her face, just an inch or so below the water surface. Her huge eyes stared at him. She held her breath until she couldn’t hold it anymore, and bubbles issued from her nose and mouth. He pressed down on her chest and her lungs emptied, spewing forth more bubbles. He took his hand away and her lungs filled with water. Her eyes still stared up at him from under the water, but the life was gone from them now.

#58.

When he was breathing normally again himself he unfastened the electrical cord from her wrists and ankles, dried off both pieces, put them in his pocket. He used a washcloth to remove his prints from the edge of the tub, and he dropped the soap into the water; if it held any of his prints, they would soon melt away.

He got his shirt from the kitchen and put it on. He picked up all of her clothing and left it folded on a chair in the master bedroom. By the time he left the house, clipboard in hand, he had erased every trace of his presence in it. With any luck at all, she’d go in the record books as a victim of accidental drowning.

He walked back to his car and drove away. For a few minutes he was lost in the suburban maze of Florissant, but then he got his bearings and found his way to the motel. He parked, but before getting out of the car he took the two lengths of electrical cord from his pockets.

They triggered a sense memory — the girl rolled onto her side while he drew her wrists together behind her back — and he followed the memory all the way to the end, with the blue eyes staring up at him from underwater, the lips parted, the life gone from her, his now, part of him. His body thrilled with an electric sensation not much reduced from the orgasm that had transported him as he drowned the darling little bitch.

Without thinking much about it, he fashioned a loop at either end of the piece of cord he was holding. The loops were large enough to admit his hands, and the length of cord between the loops was about eighteen inches. He flexed his fingers and felt the muscles working in his forearms.

Why not?

He started up the car, drove out of the motel lot and took the belt-way around to Webster Groves, a suburb not unlike Florissant but southwest of the city. He drove around until he found a neighborhood substantially identical to the one where he’d left the girl floating in her bathtub, and he parked the car at the curb and walked up to the first house he came to, clipboard in hand, and the woman who opened the door was a willowy brunette in her mid-thirties, and he just could not wait to kill her.

He said, “Electric company. I’m afraid we’ve got a problem. Could you show me where your fuse box is?”

It was in the basement, but he never did see it. He let her get to the bottom of the cellar stairs, and there he clubbed her on the nape of her neck with his closed fist. The blow drove her to her knees, and before she could recover he had his own knee planted in the small of her back for leverage. He dropped the wire around her throat, and an instant later she was dead.

Oh, heaven!

#59.

Hitchhikers were so easy. It seemed to Mark that they were virtually asking to be killed, and he wondered if there wasn’t something fundamentally suicidal about a girl who stood alone by the side of the road, actively seeking rides from passing strangers.

He’d been driving on 1-70, heading toward St. Louis, and at Columbia he’d left the Interstate and drove north on 63. The main campus of the University of Missouri was in Columbia, and there were always students on roads in the area, thumb out, looking for a ride.

Today was no exception. It was right around the end of the term and the highway was full of young people in jeans, most of them with suitcases or duffel bags in tow. There were more boys than girls on the road, and what girls he saw were accompanied, either by other girls or by boys. He slowed once at the sight of two girls. He had never done two at once outside of fantasy, and his pulse quickened at the thought, but he knew the risk was far too great. One of them would stand a very good chance of getting away, and if that happened he would be in trouble.

Still, he braked the car almost to a stop just to let himself get a good look at them. They were both blondes, both clad in jeans and sneakers and school sweatshirts, both round-faced and pug-nosed and plump. And both gave him the finger when, just as they rose to approach the Lincoln, he bore down on the gas pedal and sped away.

He smiled at their reflection in the rearview mirror. He wondered if they were sisters and decided they probably were. He had slowed down to look at them in the expectation that it would fuel his fantasy, and indeed it did. He saw himself with the two of them, making one watch while he did the other, letting her know just what was coming, and then finishing her off.

Oh, nice.

He kept driving, slowing down again at the sight of a woman alone, speeding up angrily when a second glance revealed a slim boy with long hair.

A couple miles farther he found her.

She was perfect. Jeans, UM sweatshirt, Birkenstock sandals on dirty feet. Long dark brown hair in a pony tail secured by a rubber band. An oval face. Pale blue eyes, a short straight nose, pale thin lips, even teeth. Unplucked eyebrows, unpolished nails. No makeup, no lipstick.

Narrow waist, slim hips, nice little ass. Hard to tell about the breasts because the sweatshirt was baggy.

Time would tell.

She had to struggle to get the duffel bag into the backseat. Then she climbed in front, propping her large handbag on her lap, reaching over to fasten her seat belt across her body. She said, “Are you going as far as Kirksville? I live in Edina, that’s down the road from Kirksville.”

“Well, I can run you all the way to Kirksville.”

“Oh, that’s great,” she said. “This is a great car, too. This a Lincoln?” He said it was. “I guess they’re nicer than Cadillacs, aren’t they?” He said it was probably a toss-up. “I’m getting a car in the fall. They didn’t want me to have one my first year, like it’d be too distracting? Like if I had a car I wouldn’t go to my classes, but if I didn’t have a car I’d have to study out of boredom? But, you know, that’s how parents think, isn’t it?”

She chatted and he made conversation, not really paying any mind to the words she spoke. She was just right and he was going to do her and the excitement was absolutely wonderful. On the one hand he wanted to drive forever, putting off the act indefinitely, prolonging the tantalizing feeling that gripped him now. And, at the same time, he wanted to stop the car that instant, to kill her oh God yes before another moment went by.

He waited, and a third impulse came. He had the thought of letting her go, of driving her all the way to Kirksville, even turning there and taking her straight to her home in Edina, and of never touching her, never doing her the slightest injury. She would hop out of the car and drag her duffel bag up the driveway to her house, never knowing how close she had come to death.

He had that urge some of the time. Every now and then he acted on it. Every now and then he would open his hand and release the helpless bird that fluttered within, watching benevolently as she flew away. He entertained the thought, then dismissed it. No, not this one. This bird would not be doing any more flying.

A mile down the road, he braked smoothly and turned onto a gravel road heading east.

“Where are we going?”

“There’s construction up ahead,” he told her.

“I didn’t see a sign.”

“I don’t think there was one. I came down this way this morning and everything was all snarled up. We’ll cut over to the next road going north and miss all that traffic.”

Her eyes were wary. She thought it was going to be okay, she still felt pretty safe, but it had at least occurred to her that it might not be, and it was giving her something to think about.

He slowed, turned left onto a narrower road.

She said, “Are you sure this is a road? It’s just a dirt road, I think it’s just a farm road—”

“It goes through.”

She was fumbling in her purse, and some instinct warned him. He slammed the brake pedal to the floor. She was propelled forward against her seat belt. He held the wheel with his left hand and swung his right, backhanding her full force across the mouth. She cried out.

He took the bag from her lap. Just below the top layer of articles he found a canister of Chemical Mace. She cringed when he displayed it.

“I wasn’t going to do anything,” she said. “I swear I wasn’t.”

He looked at her.

“I just got scared and I wanted to hold it,” she said. “I got frightened, I… please don’t hurt me.”

“Be quiet.”

“I’ll do anything you want. Just don’t hurt me.”

“Be quiet. And sit still.”

It was, as she had guessed, just a farm road. It would probably be safe for the next few minutes. But it would be safer still off the road, and he had her cowed now, she wouldn’t try anything. Off the road, screened from sight by shrubbery, there would be no need to hurry.

He got the car where he wanted it and cut the ignition. She was calmer now, and a little more sure of herself. “I’ll do anything you want,” she said. “Honest, anything. Just so you don’t hurt me.”

He nodded. “What’s your name?”

“Bethany.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“Take off your clothes, Bethany.”

“Here? Or should I get out of the car first?”

“Stay in the car. You’ll have to unhook your seat belt first, though.”

“Oh, right.”

She kicked off the sandals, opened her jeans and raised her hips up off the leather seat to squirm out of them. He took them from her, tossed them into the backseat. She took off the sweatshirt next, and then the T-shirt under it. No bra, and her tits were bigger than he would have guessed, milky white and very nice.

“Very nice,” he said aloud.

She colored, and hesitated, and he said, “Yes, Bethany, the panties too,” and she took those off and he flipped them into the back.

He had been wearing a suit jacket. He got out of it and tossed it in back with the clothes she’d removed. He filled his hands with her flesh. She was, he noticed, not terribly clean about her person. She had a discernible body odor, along with the very palpable smell of her fear.

He made her lie down on the front seat, and he laid his body on top of hers, pressing her down onto the seat. He could feel the heat of her loins through his trousers, he could feel her tits through his shirt, and he took her face in his hands and looked at her sweet young face.

“Just don’t hurt me,” she said.

“Oh, Bethany,” he said. “Oh, you poor darling, it’s no fun if I don’t hurt you.”

He watched her face as she took in what he’d said, and it was lovely, just lovely, and he didn’t want to put her through any more and couldn’t stand any more himself. So he placed the heel of his right hand under her chin, his fingertips just grazing her lip, and he cupped her forehead with his left hand, and he pushed up on her chin and back on her forehead and snapped her neck.

#57.

The first woman he killed, the black prostitute in the downtown motel, had been dispatched in a manner that was unplanned, impulsive, and extremely hazardous. He had left traces of his presence that a police laboratory could have found. And, although the pleasure had been unprecedented in his experience, it had been managed in such a manner as to make the aftermath uncomfortable and awkward.

Since then he had learned how to keep risk to a minimum while maximizing his pleasures; he was, indeed, conditioned to think in those terms, since they were essentially identical to one’s goals in real estate investment.

Almost from the beginning he had stopped having intercourse with his partners. It was a pleasant sensation, certainly, to have one’s sexual organ within a slippery envelope of flesh at the critical moment, but physical sensation of that sort played such a minor role in the excitement of the act as to render it almost irrelevant. And it was virtually impossible to achieve physical intimacy of that sort without leaving traces — pubic hair, semen, each capable of yielding no end of information to a trained forensic pathologist. On top of that, the act left traces upon oneself, and there was always the chance of catching a disease. While there was undeniable poetic justice in the notion of a woman infecting her killer with something at the least loathsome and at the worst life-threatening, he had no desire to afford one of his victims an opportunity for that sort of revenge.

So he tried keeping his clothing on, and the pleasure was no less intense for it. His orgasm came not as a result of friction between his penis and another object but as the pure inevitable response to his mental excitement. He usually pressed against a woman when he killed her, but he didn’t have to in order to reach full release.

But that, too, had a messy aftermath. He’d have to wash his underwear or throw it out, and sometimes his trousers had to make a trip to the dry cleaner. It took a while to hit on the solution, in part because he wasn’t looking for one at first; for the first year or more, each killing was followed by a vow that he would never kill again, and so there seemed little reason to seek a better way to manage it.

He tried putting on a condom first. That worked, certainly, but there was something ridiculous about it, and he hated it. And then, on one occasion when impulse and circumstance provided him with the opportunity to kill a very pretty waitress in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant in Houston (lying on the asphalt between two parked cars, crushing her windpipe with a tire iron), he had used all the strength available to him to hold back his orgasm.

It was enormously frustrating, but the act was thrilling all the same, and he’d simply hurried back to his motel room to stretch naked on his bed, reliving the episode in his mind while he relieved himself manually. He masturbated again the following morning, but this time he held back his ejaculation to defer his pleasure, and in so doing he made an astonishing discovery: it was possible to have an orgasm without ejaculating.

Since then he had learned that he was not the first person to find this out. A whole school of yoga practiced the retention of semen in sexual activity, and it seemed to be a part of various Chinese disciplines as well. Something was released — some kind of energy, something that demanded to be released — but the ejaculation was held back and the semen retained. At first when you did this you wound up with an ache in the pit of your stomach and a feeling of uncomfortable fullness in your loins, but as you became proficient at it and used to it the sensation was diminished, and what ache you did feel was not unpleasant.

And you weren’t scattering your seed that way. Instead your system reabsorbed it, and retained its energy. You were stronger, and you could repeat the sex act almost immediately, and each further repetition, instead of draining you, simply energized you more.

He trained himself, practicing constantly through self-stimulation until he had mastered the new technique. Something he read suggested he could increase his muscular control by an exercise which involved cutting off the flow of urine in midstream. He did this, and developed whatever muscle was involved, but it was mental exercise that played the greater role. You had to build a filter into the mind so that it held back the passage of seed but allowed the spill of orgasmic release. He had some failures along the way, but he had more successes, and eventually he retained his semen as a matter of course, without much conscious effort at all.

Once he was able to do this regularly when he killed women, any thoughts he had about stopping the killings came to a permanent end. Evidently there was something in the passage of seed that engendered depression and remorse, because he felt neither once he ceased to ejaculate. He was still careful not to kill too often, he still sought to minimize risk, and he still had to take pains from time to time to keep his conscience at bay. But he knew he was not going to give all this up, and he didn’t even delude himself that he wanted to.

He left Bethany on the ground, screened from the farm road by a clump of brush. He piled her clothes beside her and weighted them down with her duffel bag. He went through the articles at the top of her handbag, wiping off anything he could have touched that might hold a print. He kept the canister of Mace.

On the way back to Columbia, he stopped for another hitchhiker, another college girl, this one returning for the summer session. She was an open-faced blonde and she reminded him a little of the sisters who’d given him the finger as he drove away from them. She was more solidly built, though, with a sort of bovine cast to her features.

She was silent in the seat beside him, and he didn’t attempt to make conversation with her. He let himself savor the memory of Bethany and enjoyed a few brief fantasies of repeating the act with this blond girl, whose name he did not know. He could drive her up the same farm road, he could leave her dead behind the same clump of brush.

Instead, he drove her all the way into Columbia and dropped her off at her dormitory, then found his way back to I-70 and continued toward St. Louis.

If he’d found her before he found Bethany, he would have done her without a moment’s hesitation. Or, if she’d been irresistibly attractive, he might not have let the episode with Bethany keep him from having her, too. But she just wasn’t that appealing, and he wasn’t that ravenous.

In St. Louis he checked into a motel out toward the airport, unpacked and took a shower. He called a couple of realtors and made appointments for the next several days. He spoke to a man at the firm he used to manage his rental properties in the area, and handled some business over the phone. He relaxed awhile in front of the television set, then put on a tie and jacket and drove downtown for a big meal at Tony’s. He drank a half bottle of wine with his veal and had coffee and a brandy in the lounge. After dinner he walked for a couple of blocks to clear his head before collecting his car from the attendant and driving back to the motel.

In the morning he saw one of the realtors he had called, and then dropped in on his property management people just because he was in the neighborhood. He had a light lunch with the man he’d talked to on the telephone the previous afternoon, learned more than he cared to know about a local political scandal, and didn’t discuss business at all.

In the afternoon he went to a supermarket and pushed a cart up one aisle and down the next. He took something off a shelf every now and then and put it in the cart, but he wasn’t really shopping. He was looking at women. It was a wonderful place to observe them because they were remarkably unselfconscious, totally absorbed in the business of shopping and unaware that anyone might be looking at them. There were several very nice women in the supermarket, and he walked the aisles in a constant state of physical excitement.

When he’d spent as much time there as he wanted he abandoned his cart in the dairy section, picked up a couple of items he needed — a tube of toothpaste, a pack of six disposable razors, a box of Nutter Butter cookies — and hand-carried them to the checkout counter. The girl on the register (Sandy, according to her name tag) had a sunny smile and a pretty face. Her fingertips grazed his palm when she gave him his change.

“Have a nice day,” she said.

He had dinner at a Pizza Hut not far from his motel. His waitress was darling, and so were two or three of the other waitresses, and several of the customers. Afterward he sat in his car for half an hour with the motor off and the lights out, waiting to see if anyone interesting came out alone, but no one did and he tired of the game. He went back to the motel and called Marilee. Both kids were home, and he talked to them, talked some more to Marilee, had another shower and went to sleep.

The following morning he saw another of the realtors he’d spoken to the first day. He wound up going around with her to look at a couple of properties. Her name was Janet, and he had always found her quite attractive, but he knew her professionally and had never allowed himself to entertain fantasies about her. By now he knew her too well; even if there were no risk, he wouldn’t have been interested.

Nor was he much interested in either of the properties she took him to inspect. That was all right, he liked to look at property, you always learned something that way. She drove him back to her office and he picked up the Lincoln.

He drove around. The streets were full of women; the city was full of women. At a stop light, the car next to his was a Dodge convertible with the top down; the driver had a tight sweater and a pouty, sullen mouth. Country music blared on her radio. He let her pull ahead when the light turned and followed her for a dozen blocks until she sailed through an amber light that was red when he reached it. He didn’t want to run the light, and by the time it changed she was gone.

He headed back toward the motel, but stayed on Lindbergh Boulevard past Florissant and parked at the Jamestown Mall. All of the stores were full of women and a remarkable proportion of them looked good to him. It was crowded everywhere, you couldn’t even think about doing anything.

A salesgirl in a gift shop asked if she could help him. “Just looking,” he said.

In the Waldenbooks store, he browsed the shelves and studied the other customers. One book caught his eye, a paperback, and he carried it up front to the register.

The cashier was a woman about his age with a receding chin and a barbed Ozarks twang. She rang the sale and said, “Men Who Hate Women. Well, I met a few of those and I sure hope you’re not one of them.”

“Not me,” he said. “I love women.”

He left the mall and drove into Florissant, cruising up one suburban street and down the next. He stopped on a block of brick-fronted ranch houses set on quarter-acre plots. Each house had a young tree planted on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, and most of the trees still had their trunks wrapped with tape. A large proportion of the cars parked in the driveways were either station wagons or hatchbacks.

He parked his car at the curb, got a clipboard from the trunk, and put a couple of pens into his shirt pocket. He crossed the street and walked up to the door of the first house he came to. He rang the bell.

The woman who answered it was middle-aged. She wore a patterned housedress and was smoking a cigarette.

He said, “Water company. Did you report a drop in pressure?” She said she hadn’t. “Sorry to bother you,” he said, and turned away from her.

There was no one home at the house next door. The woman at the third house was pregnant, and carrying a whining infant. He asked her the same question, and she too denied having reported problems with the water pressure, and he thanked her and left. The woman in the fourth house was pretty — light brown hair, dark brown eyes. He said, “Water company. We’ve been having problems with the water pressure in your area. Have you had any difficulty?”

“No,” she said. “It seems okay.” She turned from him, called back into the house. “Adam, you stop your fussing. I’ll just be a minute.”

He thanked her and left. At the house after hers, he waited a long time before the door was answered. The woman was in her late twenties, and the minute Mark saw her he was glad her neighbor had had a child in the other room. Otherwise he’d have missed out on this one, and she was much too good to miss. She was just a little thing, barely over five feet tall, with a lovely figure and deep dark blue eyes. Oh, wonderful, just wonderful.

“Water company,” he said. “We’ve been having some problems in your area. Have you had any difficulties with the pressure?”

She thought about it. “Uh, no,” she said. “Not really.”

“How about the appearance and flavor of the water?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The coffee was all right this morning. I don’t know as I drank any water, not just plain by itself.”

“I see,” he said. “Is it all right if I come in? I’m not interrupting anything?”

She shook her head. “I was just watching TV is all.”

“You’re not busy with the kids then?”

She shook her head. “Still in school.”

Wonderful. He drew the door shut after him. “Now if I could just check the water in the kitchen taps first,” he said. “Which way’s the kitchen, if you don’t mind?”

She led the way. She was wearing khaki slacks and he watched her rear as she walked. He caught up with her at the threshold to the kitchen, clapped a hand over her mouth and wrapped her in a choke hold, her throat caught in the crook of his arm. She struggled, but she was just a little thing and he was much too strong for her. Her struggles ceased and she slumped unconscious, limp in his grasp.

He undressed her there in the kitchen. He used a paper towel to protect his hand and went through drawers until one yielded an electrical extension cord. He cut it in half and used one piece to tie her ankles together and the other to bind her wrists behind her back. He stripped to the waist and picked her up in his arms and carried her through the house until he found the bathroom.

He set her down on the tile floor, stopped the bathtub drain and ran a lukewarm tub of water. The tub was still running when she groaned and opened her eyes.

She looked at him. Her mouth opened but she didn’t make a sound. It didn’t too much matter if she did; the window was closed, and he had drawn the bathroom door shut. No one could hear any sound she could make.

When the tub was as deep as he wanted it he shut off the water and turned to her. “Now I’m just going to give you a nice bath,” he said. “That’s all.” And he picked her up in his arms — she had luxuriously soft skin, she was wonderful to touch — and placed her on her back in the tub.

He used his hands and ran the soap over her teacup breasts, down over her belly, lathered her pubic hair. He put the soap back in the dish and sluiced water over her to rinse her. Her eyes were wide, rolling in terror, but she still hadn’t uttered a sound since regaining consciousness.

“You’re so sweet,” he said, bending to kiss her on the lips. He took hold of the hair at the back of her neck and drew her head down under the water, pinning her down with his other hand on her breast. She tried to struggle, and he could feel her heart hammering. He looked down at her face, just an inch or so below the water surface. Her huge eyes stared at him. She held her breath until she couldn’t hold it anymore, and bubbles issued from her nose and mouth. He pressed down on her chest and her lungs emptied, spewing forth more bubbles. He took his hand away and her lungs filled with water. Her eyes still stared up at him from under the water, but the life was gone from them now.

#58.

When he was breathing normally again himself he unfastened the electrical cord from her wrists and ankles, dried off both pieces, put them in his pocket. He used a washcloth to remove his prints from the edge of the tub, and he dropped the soap into the water; if it held any of his prints, they would soon melt away.

He got his shirt from the kitchen and put it on. He picked up all of her clothing and left it folded on a chair in the master bedroom. By the time he left the house, clipboard in hand, he had erased every trace of his presence in it. With any luck at all, she’d go in the record books as a victim of accidental drowning.

He walked back to his car and drove away. For a few minutes he was lost in the suburban maze of Florissant, but then he got his bearings and found his way to the motel. He parked, but before getting out of the car he took the two lengths of electrical cord from his pockets.

They triggered a sense memory — the girl rolled onto her side while he drew her wrists together behind her back — and he followed the memory all the way to the end, with the blue eyes staring up at him from underwater, the lips parted, the life gone from her, his now, part of him. His body thrilled with an electric sensation not much reduced from the orgasm that had transported him as he drowned the darling little bitch.

Without thinking much about it, he fashioned a loop at either end of the piece of cord he was holding. The loops were large enough to admit his hands, and the length of cord between the loops was about eighteen inches. He flexed his fingers and felt the muscles working in his forearms.

Why not?

He started up the car, drove out of the motel lot and took the belt-way around to Webster Groves, a suburb not unlike Florissant but southwest of the city. He drove around until he found a neighborhood substantially identical to the one where he’d left the girl floating in her bathtub, and he parked the car at the curb and walked up to the first house he came to, clipboard in hand, and the woman who opened the door was a willowy brunette in her mid-thirties, and he just could not wait to kill her.

He said, “Electric company. I’m afraid we’ve got a problem. Could you show me where your fuse box is?”

It was in the basement, but he never did see it. He let her get to the bottom of the cellar stairs, and there he clubbed her on the nape of her neck with his closed fist. The blow drove her to her knees, and before she could recover he had his own knee planted in the small of her back for leverage. He dropped the wire around her throat, and an instant later she was dead.

Oh, heaven!

#59.