Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Thirteen

Mark stood in the doorway. A chambermaid, her back to him, was making one of the beds. The skirt of her yellow uniform was tight on her round little ass.

A Day’s Inn outside of Ardmore, Oklahoma. Not his room, not even his floor.

He said, “Miss?”

She straightened up and whirled around. “Oooh,” she said. “You scared me for a minute.”

“Nothing to be afraid of.”

“I just din hear you come in. I’ll be through in a minute, or did you want me to come back?”

A Mexican girl, Indian planes in her broad face. A fine shape to her. Straight glossy black hair, cut in Egyptian simplicity. A dark red full-lipped mouth.

He said, “I wouldn’t want you to take this the wrong way.” She looked wary. “I’ll give you a hundred dollars just to take off your clothes and let me see you.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I mean it,” he said. “A hundred dollars. I won’t touch you, I won’t come near you. I just want to see you.”

“I never did nothing like that,” she said.

“I just want to look at you,” he said. “You’re beautiful, I want to see you.” He took out his wallet, drew out a hundred-dollar bill. “Here,” he said. “Take it, it’s yours.”

She looked at the money, at him, at the money again. She said, “Close the door. Lock it, push the little button.” She took the money from him, folded it, tucked it into a pocket of her uniform. “This is crazy,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

Because it beats scrubbing out toilets for four dollars an hour, he thought. He watched, delighted, as she reached behind her to grapple with buttons and snaps, then shrugged the garment off her shoulders and stepped out of it. Her white bra and panties contrasted sharply with her rich copper skin. She hesitated for just a moment before uncoupling and removing the bra, then looked questioning at him.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “The panties too.”

She grinned. “Why not?” She wriggled out of her panties and tossed them aside, then stood watching him watching her. She said, “You like me, huh?”

“You’re beautiful.”

“Yeah?” She struck a pose, then another. “Playboy magazine,” she said. “Too bad you din bring your camera.” She posed with her knees together, her hands cupped beneath her breasts as if offering them to him. “Ta-dah,” she said, imitating a drum roll, and put one foot up on the bed, turning to display her private parts.

What a little minx she was! Once he’d given her an excuse to get out of her clothes she was as eager for the game as he was. She gave him good long looks at her firm young flesh from every angle, and before it could occur to her that the show had gone on long enough, he got a second bill from his wallet.

“I’ll give you another hundred dollars for a kiss.”

He could have had the kiss for nothing, and more along with it. She was so hot from the posing that he hadn’t had to offer her more money. Still, she pretended to consider the offer. “For a kiss?” she said. “You want to kiss me?”

“Just a little kiss. I want to hold you in my arms and give you a little kiss.”

“Welllll,” she said, and then grinned saucily, snatching the bill from his fingers. She put it on the table, weighted it down with a glass ashtray, and came into his arms.

She kissed with her mouth open, gave him her tongue almost at once. He tasted her mouth, felt her fine warm body against him, and almost reluctantly settled his hands around her throat.

#72.

He retrieved his two hundred dollars, one bill from her pocket, the other from the table, being careful not to touch the tabletop or the glass ashtray as he did so. He put her shoes and clothing in a lower drawer of the dresser, and he left the little sweetheart wedged into the closet, where she’d be a jolly surprise for the first person to open the door. He wiped his prints from the surfaces he might have touched; outside, he rolled her supply cart down the corridor and left it in front of another room.

He had already put his own bag in the Lincoln’s trunk. Now he went directly to the car, and in minutes he was cruising at speed on the Interstate, headed for Texas.

He was turning into — perhaps had turned into — a machine that killed women. For eight years his pastime was one that occupied him only infrequently. In the first year he had killed only four times, and after that two months was the usual interval between incidents. Gradually the intervals shrank until they ran about a month.

Now the escalation was more than dramatic. He killed just about every day, and sometimes twice a day. The other day he had finished off two women before noon and might easily have gone on killing with no loss of enthusiasm. Instead he had forced himself to make some telephone calls and read a newspaper. Still, he went out hunting that night, and if he’d seen anyone tempting he would very likely have killed again.

Men Who Hate Women. He’d read that book, thinking to find himself in its pages, and instead he read about brutes who beat their wives, psychological sadists who dominated the women who loved them, others with whom he felt not the slightest common bond. He looked within himself, trying to detect hatred, and he couldn’t find it there.

He loved women. And loved killing them.

It was a contradiction, and yet it wasn’t. Did any hunter hate the animal he pursued? Not according to anything he’d ever heard or read. The man who went after lion in Kenya respected the lion, admired its strength and courage, and made a robe of its hide and a trophy of its head. The deer hunter loved his quarry for its beauty and nobility, and he sought the most dominant male with the most glorious rack of antlers and pledged his love with a bullet. There were some animals that men hated, and killed out of hatred, but no one displayed a stuffed rat in the trophy room. You didn’t hunt vermin, you just killed them, and took satisfaction but little pleasure in the killing. When you truly hunted, when you killed for pleasure, you killed something beloved.

He drove to Dallas and spent hours at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport watching the stewardesses. You couldn’t do anything in an airport, or at least he had never seen an opportunity, but it was relaxing to sit in air-conditioned comfort and view a steady parade of attractive uniformed young women. There seemed to be nothing he could do that was not connected with his obsession. If he wasn’t killing he was hunting; if he wasn’t hunting he was planning a hunt; if he wasn’t doing that, he was looking at inaccessible women and fueling his fantasies, or sitting back and relishing the memories of past hunts, past kills.

He stayed three days in Dallas, then drove to Abilene. He saw a couple of people he knew and went to a movie, forcing himself to see it all the way through. It was a good enough film but he got restless from time to time, impatient for it to be over, impatient to get out of there. But he made himself stay where he was.

He spent four nights in Abilene at the Kiva Inn. The room was comfortable, the service excellent, and none of the maids he saw was attractive enough to tempt him, which was just as well. He could see that he had run more than a slight risk at the Day’s Inn in Ardmore. There was now an official record that he had stayed at that motel at the same time that a woman had been strangled to death. It was nothing all by itself, but it was a strand connecting him to his victim, and enough little cords could bind a giant.

When it was time to leave the Kiva it struck him that chambermaids were still safe targets; he only needed to hunt them in motels where he was not himself staying. There were any number of motels where you didn’t have to pass the desk to get to the rooms. Most of the chain motels were that way, so that people could park near their rooms and bring their luggage directly there.

Anyone could go there. You couldn’t get into a locked room without a key, unless you had special skills in that area, but you could go up and down the stairs and walk the halls as readily as if you were a registered guest. And if you did just that around the middle of the morning, say, when the maids were making up the rooms of the early departures, you wouldn’t have any trouble, would you?

The hypothesis seemed worth testing. He checked out of the Kiva and drove half a mile to the Lamplighter, parking in the back lot. He climbed the rear stairs and walked the corridors, and it was no more difficult than he’d thought it might be.

But the maids themselves left something to be desired. They all seemed to be bulky thick-bodied older women whom he found quite lacking in appeal. He was all set to move on when he saw a woman emerge from a room down the hall. She got some fresh towels from her cart and slipped back into the room.

A big strapping girl, fresh off the farm from the look of her. Yellow hair. Turned-up nose. A husky corn-fed girl, big all over.

When he entered the room she told him she thought he’d checked out.

“I did,” he said. This was a no-nonsense girl, not the sort to shuck out of her uniform for a hundred-dollar bill, not even the sort to listen to a proposition along those lines. “I left something in the room,” he explained. “My briefcase.”

“Didn’t see a briefcase here, but you can look.”

He went through the motions of looking, opening the closet door, going through the dresser drawers. God, she was a big healthy thing, bigger than he was, probably as strong or stronger. How was he going to manage this? He should have brought something from the car. The only objects in the room he could hit her with were the lamps, and they were bolted to the dresser and tables to discourage theft.

“Maybe it’s under the bed,” he said. He started to bend, then straightened up in apparent pain, his hand in the small of his back. “Could you do me a favor? Could you look for me? My back’s acting up, and—”

“Sure,” she said, stooping down.

#81.

Driving to Wichita Falls, he worried about the risk he had run. The last thing he wanted the world to know was that a single serial killer was at work, and the quickest way to do that was by repeating himself. In the space of a week he had killed two motel chambermaids in cities just a few hundred miles apart. To make matters worse, he had not taken a weapon to the Lamplighter. It would have been safer to stab the girl. In the end he’d broken her neck, which was different from strangulation, but would it look that different in a police report?

He had tried to vary other circumstances. He’d tucked the other one naked into a closet; he left this one clothed, and on the floor between the two beds. Was that enough of a difference?

He wasn’t sure. The two deaths had occurred on opposite sides of a state line, and that might help. Still, some Texan might remember reading a report of the Oklahoma slaying, or some sharp Ardmore cop might spot a story about the murder in Abilene.

But there wouldn’t be any more chambermaids killed, not in this part of the country, not for months.

Not until it was safe again.

In Wichita Falls he took a room at the Holiday Inn. He put on a pair of swim trunks and went out to the pool, and on his way he passed a black chambermaid with velvety skin the color of cafe au lait. She was just wonderful, and she couldn’t have been safer; he enjoyed her attractiveness knowing she was completely out-of-bounds for him.

He swam for a while, lay in the sun awhile longer, then went back to his room. He called a man he knew in town, a fellow named George Kingland who ran a one-man mortgage company. “I’m in town for a day or two, I’m over at the Holiday Inn,” he said. “How does your schedule look for tomorrow? Can I buy you a lunch?”

“Let’s see, what’s today? Today’s Monday. No, tomorrow’s not so good, Mark, not for lunch. And neither’s Wednesday. Hey, I want to see you, though. You say you’re at the Holiday Inn? The one right downtown here?”

“No, the one east of town. Why?”

“No reason. Look, why don’t you come by my office tomorrow around eleven? I got to take an ol’ boy across the river to Tinker’s around noon and buy him a big plate of catfish, but at least we can swap a few lies before then. That suit you?”

“Why not?”

He drove to Tinker’s himself that night and ate catfish and hush puppies and hot apple dumplings. His table was right at the glass wall, and he looked out across the Red River at Texas on the other side. He spent a long time over dinner but it was still light out when he left. He drove straight back to his motel and watched television until he was tired enough to sleep.

There was nothing on the late news about the chambermaid in Abilene. In the morning he checked the Wichita Falls paper and didn’t see anything. On the way to George Kingland’s office he found a bank of newspaper vending machines and bought an Abilene paper in one of them. There was a short story right on the front page reporting the death of Wanda Rae Johnston of Sagerton, Texas, who had been found in a second-floor unit at the Lamplighter Motor Inn with her neck broken. While there was the suspicion of foul play, police had not yet ruled out the possibility of accidental death.

What did they think, he wondered. That she’d climbed onto the dresser and fallen off?

He chucked the paper in a trash can and went to keep his appointment. Kingland Mortgage Corp. had storefront offices in a small shopping plaza not far from the center of town. He parked right in front, walked through the glass door, and his heart leapt in his breast.

There was a girl at the desk and she looked up at his approach. She had a little fox face with high cheekbones and a straight narrow nose and a pointed chin. Her hair was the color of clover honey and her large well-spaced eyes were a light brown with a lot of yellow in it. Her brows were plucked, her cheeks rouged, her mouth full-lipped and red. She was wearing a sunflower-yellow dress that left her arms bare to the shoulder; its scoop neckline exposed the tops of her breasts.

The description might have fit a thousand girls, but there was more to her than the words could convey. A musky sexuality emanated from her in waves. She gave off heat, and when she looked up at him and smiled, the message that radiated forth was one of infinite desirability and infinite desire.

He had never wanted anyone more.

She asked if she could help him. He gave his name and said he was expected. She went through the frosted-glass door to Kingland’s office and he watched her rolling gait as she crossed the room. Either she walked that way on purpose, conscious of its effect, or it was her natural mode. Both possibilities were equally alluring.

She was in there for almost a minute, then emerged to tell him Mr. Kingland would see him. He passed within a foot of her on the way to the office, and he could swear he felt her aura brush him in passing, sending an electric current racing through his body.

George Kingland was in his late forties, tall and well muscled, a-golfer and tennis player. He was mostly bald, and he kept his remaining hair trimmed to short crewcut length. He got up and came around the desk to shake hands with Mark.

“You look good,” he said. “Lost a few pounds since last time, didn’t you?”

“I may have.”

“Well, it looks good on you. Or off you, come to think of it. Sit down, old son. You fixing to buy up some more of Wichita Falls?”

“Just passing through, really.”

“And you thought you’d stop for a visit? Well, it’s good to see you.” He lowered his voice, flashed a shy smile. “Been some changes around here,” he said. “You happen to notice Missy?”

“Is that her name?”

“Uh-huh. What do you think of her?”

“Pretty girl.”

“You’d say so, would you? Is that door closed? Missy Flanders. Twenty-six years old, married to a shop foreman over at Waco-Eggert, lives in a crackerbox tract house over in Archer County. Mark, move your chair closer, I don’t want to shout. Guess who’s fucking her?”

“Her husband?”

Kingland chuckled. “He’s crazy as a shithouse rat if he isn’t, but I guess she needs more than he’s giving her. She’s my lunch date every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And that’s why I’m losing weight, boy, because the only kind of eating we do don’t put weight on you. Three days a week we’re over at the Holiday Inn. I swear they ought to give me a rate.”

“That’s why you wanted to know which one I was staying at.”

“Yeah, I didn’t want to run into you tomorrow. I didn’t know I was gonna say anything, but I had to tell somebody. You know how that is?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s have another look at her.” He picked up the phone, pressed the intercom button. “Say, Missy,” he said, “could you pull the Greystone Estates file folder and bring it to me, please?”

She came in a few moments later carrying a manila folder. Kingland had her wait while he pretended to check something, and she stood alongside him. Mark saw the man’s arm move, and he guessed Kingland was touching Missy’s leg, but her expression never changed.

When she had left, closing the door after her, Kingland let out his breath in a sigh. He said, “Something, ain’t she?”

Mark nodded.

“You couldn’t see from where you’re sitting, but I had my hand up her skirt. She don’t wear panties. She was dripping wet.”

Don’t tell me this, he thought.

There was a photo cube on the big desk, and Kingland picked it up and turned it to look at a picture of his wife. He said, “You’ve met Gwen, haven’t you?”

“Yes, the last time I was in town. You had me over to dinner.”

“Fine woman, beautiful woman. But I have to tell you, Mark, I never been close to anything like this little one out there. There’s nothing she won’t try and nothing she don’t enjoy. You know what we did yesterday?” He didn’t, but he soon learned, and in considerable detail. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” George said.

Neither do I, thought Mark. Neither do I.

One time about four or five years ago a doctor had given him Dexedrine spansules to curb his appetite. He didn’t like them and never had the prescription renewed. But once he had evidently taken one pill before the effects of the last one had entirely worn off, and he’d been speedy and jittery, and he was like that now.

He couldn’t get the damn girl out of his mind. He had never reacted so strongly to a woman, and all of that was made a hundred times worse by the conversation he’d had with George. And there was no way he could lay a hand on her. He knew her, he’d met her in George’s office, and it was a greater risk than he was prepared to take to kill anyone to whom he could be that readily connected.

Even if he was willing to break his own rule, there was no way he could get to the woman. Her husband dropped her off each morning on the way to work. He picked her up each night and drove her home, and according to George he never let her out of his sight. George had her for lunch three times a week, and the rest of the time she was either working or with her husband.

So he couldn’t have her, and he couldn’t stop wanting to. He had never been obsessed like this before, not to anything approaching this extent. Some women had moved him powerfully, so that he could barely resist acting on his urges, but if he did hold himself back, if he did overcome the immediate impulse, then he could remain the master of the desire. That high-yellow chambermaid at the Holiday Inn, for instance; he found her extremely attractive, he would have loved to do her, but once he had placed her firmly out of bounds she remained there, and when he thought of her or even looked at her now, it was with appreciation but with detachment. She was safe, and consequently he was safe.

With Missy Flanders, the hunger wouldn’t go away. And he couldn’t find a way to assuage it.

When he got out of George’s office, when he finally managed to flee from further reports on Missy’s physical excellence and sexual virtuosity, he got into the Lincoln and just drove around without paying any attention to where he was going. He wanted to give himself a chance to calm down, but after half an hour it started to become clear that he wasn’t getting any calmer, that he wasn’t going to get calmer this way.

He hadn’t hunted since Wanda Rae Johnston in Abilene, hadn’t even gone out looking last night or this morning. That hardly constituted a long dry spell, but maybe a quick kill would take some of the pressure off.

He had bought a hunting knife somewhere in Arkansas or Oklahoma, and he got it out and took it from its sheath, slipping it into the map compartment in the door with its butt protruding. He drove around but couldn’t find a suitable hitchhiker anywhere. He parked at a shopping plaza and sat in his car watching women pushing shopping carts out of the Winn-Dixie. Within ten minutes he settled on one. He slipped the knife under his belt, got out of the car and went after her.

She was a little older than he preferred but still attractive, still lively. She was loading bags of groceries into her blue Subaru hatchback when he caught up with her. He said, “Miss? I think you dropped this.”

She turned. He had his hand behind his back, his fingers curled around the butt of the knife. Before she knew what was happening the blade was in her chest.

He stuffed her into the back of the Subaru, slammed the hatch shut, rolled the empty cart away. The knife, its blade wiped clean on the hem of her dress, went back in the map compartment, to be discarded at the first convenient opportunity. He drove out of the plaza parking lot and away.

#82

Except it didn’t help at all.

It had thrilled him, of course. Overstimulated as he was, it could hardly have done otherwise. But it was like scratching one leg when the other one itched. It did nothing to relieve the real source of his torment.

He still saw Missy’s face every time he closed his eyes. He saw her with George, doing all the things George had insisted upon talking about. He saw her licking her red lips and squirming on a mattress. He saw her tied up, eyes rolling in terror. He saw her with her throat slashed, with her breasts chewed off, with her flesh pierced by a dozen arrows. Christ, he wanted to do everything to her, he wanted to kill her a hundred different ways, he wanted to drink her blood, he wanted to cut off her head and use her bleached skull for a paperweight.

Maybe he had acted too quickly. Maybe he had settled for too ordinary a woman and dispatched her with too little ceremony to satisfy the blood lust Missy Flanders had provoked in him.

He didn’t think that was it, but all the same he drove around and found another supermarket, and this time he picked his victim with care. He wandered through the aisles until he found a lovely little thing with a beauty mark on her cheek and a saucy bottom that was wonderfully snug in her straw-colored jeans. He cleared the checkout counter ahead of her, and he was in his car with the motor running as she walked to hers.

He followed her home. He gave her a few minutes to get settled. Then, clipboard in hand, he walked up to her door and rang her bell.

She was all alone in the house, and she agreed with some reluctance to answer a few questions on her views of foreign policy, brightening considerably when he told her she would receive a twenty-dollar honorarium for her trouble. He caught her off-guard, put her to sleep with a choke hold, stripped her naked and immobilized her arms and legs with picture wire, then gagged her with her own panties. He spent a full thirty minutes with her before he finished her off with another length of picture wire.

#83.

He went back to the motel and took a shower. He sat in a chair, got up, threw himself down on the bed, returned to the chair, and realized he was too restless to stay in the room. He went down to the pool and tried swimming laps to work off some of the energy in his body, but it didn’t really help. He got dressed and took himself out to dinner but had no appetite. He picked at his salad, drank two cups of coffee even though he was too tightly wired to begin with, and returned to the Holiday Inn.

He still couldn’t get that fox-faced little bitch out of his mind.

The second one that day had been wonderful, one of the best he’d had, and it didn’t seem to make any difference. He could go out again. He could work his way through the female population of Wichita Falls. It wouldn’t change a thing.

He had to have her, and there was no way he could see to get her.

The next morning he drove to her house.

It wasn’t easy. He remembered that her name was Flanders, and that George had said she lived in Archer County. There were a couple of possible listings. George had mentioned where her husband worked, but he couldn’t remember.

Waco-Eggert. He called their personnel office. He was doing a credit check, he explained; did they employ a man named Alvin Flanders? They did not, but they did have a man in their employ by the name of J. T. Flanders. That was one of the Archer County listings in the phone book, with an address on Caperwood Court.

He didn’t want to ask directions, so he bought a map and drove there. The area where she lived was new, and the map was not entirely accurate. On top of that, the subdivision had been laid out by one of those planners who liked to talk about escaping from the tyranny of the grid, and as a result all the streets made strange turns and looped around in unfathomable directions, and it was impossible to keep your bearings.

Eventually, of course, he found her house. There was no one home — no lights on inside, no car in the garage. And you could tell she and her husband had no children. There was no swing set or jungle gym in the backyard, no toys in the garage.

She was at work now. In a couple of hours she would go out for lunch, and George Kingland, the son of a bitch, would do whatever he wanted with her.

God, it was maddening!

He was parked in front of George’s office at noon when the two of them left for their tryst. They rode in George’s car — evidently she didn’t have a car of her own, George had said something about her husband driving her to and from work. He followed them to the downtown Holiday Inn at Eighth and Scott. She stayed in the car while George went to the desk. Then they drove around back and parked.

What was the point of this? What was he going to do, follow them to their room and listen at the keyhole?

He got out of there. Back at the other Holiday Inn he packed quickly and checked out. He had missed the official checkout time but the girl at the desk winked and told him it was okay. He got on the highway, set the cruise control at sixty-five, and drove to Amarillo.

He thought about her all the way.

He checked into a Ramada, took his bag to the room and unpacked. He fixed himself a weak scotch and water but left half of it unfinished. He picked up the phone. There was no one he knew in Amarillo, and he didn’t feel like calling Marilee and the kids.

He called George. “I left there before I got a chance to say goodbye,” he said. “Give my love to Gwen, will you?”

“I sure will. We were hoping to have you to dinner, but I just got through talking to the Holiday Inn and they said you’d checked out.”

“Well, they wouldn’t lie to you. Incidentally, that file you had your girl bring in yesterday—”

“Greystone Estates.”

“That’s the one. Is that something I should know about?”

“Oh, shit, no, Mark. Fake Tudor semi-detached townhouses for upscale wetbacks. We’re just writing short-term paper on ’em because we don’t want ’em falling down before they’re paid off.”

“I just thought I’d check.”

“Well, it don’t never hurt.” His voice dropped and deepened. “Kid, I had some kind of a lunch hour today. You’re not gonna believe this.”

Then don’t tell me, you bastard, he thought. But he listened, knowing that was why he’d made the call in the first place.

He didn’t hunt in Amarillo. He didn’t have to struggle with temptation. There was no temptation. When his eyes fell on other women, at poolside, on the street, in a restaurant, he barely noticed them.

He spent the night in his room, touching himself, killing Missy in his mind. He would leave in the morning, he told himself, and he would drive a long ways away. He could go into New Mexico, he could set the cruise control and never stop for anything but gas straight through to Los Angeles. Once he’d put distance between himself and that little bitch, maybe he could get her out of his mind.

But God, it galled him to leave her alive.

That was it, he realized. It wasn’t just that he wasn’t getting the pleasure of killing her. It was that it actually infuriated him that she went on living, that George went on having her. Deprivation was one thing, he could probably live with that, but this other thing that he felt — was it as simple as jealousy? — was eating him alive.

He didn’t just want to kill her. He actively wanted her to be dead. He would even be willing to have someone else kill her, to have her die in a train wreck or a flash flood, just so he could be free of her.

Sometimes, John Randall Spears had written, you had to walk away from a deal. Sometimes, no matter how many incentives you offered, the seller wouldn’t go the necessary distance to meet you halfway. Sometimes, as much as you might want to buy a property and as much as the seller might want to do business with you, the numbers couldn’t be made to work out. When that happened you shook hands and wished each other well, and you walked off into the sunset with no regrets, because there were always plenty of other properties out there for you to purchase.

But, Spears had said, when you really wanted something, you could usually get it. If you looked at it from enough angles, there was almost always a way for all concerned to win.

In the morning he told them at the desk that he would be keeping the room for at least one more night. He left his clothes in the drawers and closet, his bag on the luggage stand, his razor and toothbrush in the bathroom. He had breakfast, signed for it, and drove back to Wichita Falls.

It wasn’t much easier finding the Flanders house the second time, but he managed it, pulling the Lincoln right into the garage. The door leading from the garage to the house was locked, as was the house’s front door. He forced a basement window and got in that way.

The door at the top of the cellar stairs was locked, but the lock was like a bathroom door, a button that you pushed, and he was able to open it. He went through the house, committing the floor plan to memory, finding out where everything was. He touched the clothes in her closet, studied what must have been the couple’s wedding picture. Her husband looked like the sort of man who got in fights at country-and-western bars.

When he left, the button lock on the basement door was fixed so that it would open at a touch. The window through which he’d made his entrance and exit was unlocked, needing only to be shoved open.

He drove to a shopping mall that housed a triplex cinema. He sat through a movie, ate a burrito, saw a second movie. From there he drove to a budget motel, where he paid cash for one night. On the registration card he gave his name as James Miller of Roswell, New Mexico. He listed his car as a Plymouth sedan and made up a license number. He hung the Do Not Disturb sign on his door and went to bed.

When he woke up it was past midnight. He showered and dressed, wiped away any fingerprints he might have left, and went to his car. He drove directly to the Flanders house. It was hard to see street signs in the dark, but he had learned the route by now.

The lights were off, and Flanders’s car was in the garage. He parked the Lincoln on the street around the corner and walked back. He slipped quietly up the driveway, opened the basement window he’d forced earlier, and lowered himself into the basement.

He had picked up a pair of rubber gloves in the shopping mall, and he put them on now. He took his time climbing the cellar stairs — he remembered which steps creaked, and avoided them. At the top of the stairs he manipulated the lock and eased the door open.

And heard something. He stayed perfectly still, listening, and identified the sound as a television set. He checked his watch. It was twenty to one. He eased the door shut and sat down on the steps and waited. A little after one he opened the door again and listened, and the television was off.

He waited another half hour, his whole body tingling with anticipation now. He had reached a point where he didn’t mind the wait. It was important, to assure the affair’s success, but it was also part of the excitement. The more he drew things out, the more satisfying they were.

At length he opened the door a third time and moved through it, finding his way to the kitchen. His eyes had long since accustomed themselves to the dark, and he moved across the linoleum tile floor and picked the knife he had selected earlier from the chunk of slotted butcher block. He carried it at his side and glided silently through the carpeted hallway to the bedroom.

The bedroom door was open. He stood outside, listening. The closer he got to her, the more intense his excitement became, as if she was at the center of a magnetic field to which he was relentlessly drawn.

He let himself be drawn into the bedroom. He had already determined, from the contents of the bedside tables, which side of the bed was hers, but the room was light enough so that he could see the two of them, lying on their backs, covered only by the top sheet.

He went to her side and stood there. He could hear her breathing, softer than her husband, and he could smell her scent. He thought of all the things he would have gladly done to her, given world enough and time, and he did them quickly in his mind.

He crouched beside the bed. He wanted to draw this out but he didn’t dare, he was already risking too much. At any moment either of them could sense his presence and stir, and he could not allow that. So he readied the knife, and then he settled his left hand palm-down over her mouth.

Before she could react, before she could open her light brown eyes, before she could even stir beneath his hand, he killed her with a single thrust into her heart.

#84.

The orgasm was unprecedented. It was hardly identifiable as having anything to do with sex. It did not seem to be centered in his loins, but involved every cell of his body in equal measure. It shook him, it dizzied him, and he decided afterward that he had probably lost consciousness for an indeterminate period of time, that his spirit had separated from his body for a moment even as hers was taking permanent leave of her body.

Reviewing it later, he couldn’t even say to what extent it had been pleasurable. Pleasure in this instance had been somehow beside the point.

When he recovered his senses, he stayed where he was, crouching at her bedside. His hand, encased in the rubber glove, still gripped the knife. Her life had passed through the knife and up his arm, and in so doing had fused his hand and the knife into a single unit. He had to will his fingers to let go.

He leaned over her, pressed his lips to hers. He did not want to leave her, it felt curiously like an act of abandonment, but it was suicidal to stay where he was. She had ceased to breathe, her energy had departed from the room, and at any moment her husband might sense the change and open his eyes.

Slowly, as silently as he came, he stole out of the bedroom and back out of the house the way he’d entered it. He stayed in shadows as he glided down the driveway and around the corner. Every house on the block was still and dark. He got into his car and drove for a few hundred yards before switching on the headlights. Then he drove out of the neighborhood, negotiating the maze of twisting streets like an old hand, and on out of Archer County altogether.

In five or six hours, if nothing woke him before then, J. T. Flanders would wake up next to his dead wife, with one of their knives in her chest and no explanation of how it got there. He might even grab the knife’s handle without thinking what he was doing, obligingly getting his prints on it. Even if he didn’t, he’d probably get to tell his story over and over, to a lot of people. Whether or not he ever served a day for her murder, or even stood trial, it seemed unlikely in the extreme that the Archer County Sheriff’s Office would look elsewhere for her killer.

He liked the thought of Flanders going to jail for Missy’s death. The man had kept her on a short leash, probably knowing he couldn’t hold her, and now he’d lost her and the leash was fastening itself around his own neck. Mark hated Flanders, he was just beginning to realize that now. He hadn’t hated Missy, but he’d hated the men in her life, the men who had her when he didn’t.

Like George. In the same five or six hours George would be getting up, singing in the shower; it was Friday, and he’d be looking forward to lunch. Planning the menu, say.

Forget about lunch, George. Pack a sandwich and eat at your desk. Or be a good boy, run on home to Gwen.

A thought came to him. He drove around, exploring it, studying it like the numbers on a real estate deal. The more he looked at it, the more he found himself smiling.

He drove back to the motel where he’d caught a few hours’ sleep earlier. He hadn’t planned to return but he still had the key and it was safer than registering anew somewhere else. He parked in front of his unit and got out of his clothes and into bed. He didn’t sleep, he couldn’t possibly have slept, but he rested.

At eight-thirty he was parked three doors down from George Kingland’s house. He was gazing steadily at the house ten minutes later when the garage door opened at the touch of a button and George backed his Cadillac out of the driveway. The garage door swung shut after him.

Mark waited five minutes. Then he pulled the Lincoln into George’s driveway, checked his tie in the mirror, and went up to the front door to ring the bell.

When she opened the door he said, “Hi, Gwen. Mark Adlon. It’s great to see you. Is George ready?”

“Why, Mark,” she said. “We thought you’d left town. You just missed him, he left here not five minutes ago.”

“I was supposed to meet him here,” he said. “He said a quarter to nine.” He looked at his watch. “A quarter to nine. Unless this thing’s on strike.”

“It must have slipped his mind,” she said. “Well, come in, Mark. We’ll give him a few minutes to get downtown and then call him, that’s if he doesn’t remember on his own and drive back for you.”

She was a fine-looking woman, tall, aristocratic in her bearing. Her hair was dark brown frosted with silver, her skin just a little crepey around the eyes.

“I swear George never said a word,” she said. “He said something about having you over for dinner, and then he called to say you’d left town.”

“I did but I came back. I called him yesterday and we made a date to meet here. He was going to take me out to look at some new town-houses, but I guess he forgot.”

“It’s not like him,” she said fondly, “but I guess it can happen to anyone. And he’s had things on his mind lately. Well, Mark, you’re looking well, I must say. Would you like some coffee?”

“Love some.”

Sitting across the table from her, sipping at his coffee, he prepared to violate one of his most basic rules. He had always hunted strangers, had always shied away from women he knew, women with whom he had any connection whatsoever. That principle should have kept him from touching Missy Flanders, George’s secretary, but that had been a tenuous connection and the desire had anyway been irresistible.

But Gwen Kingland was a woman he knew socially, the wife of a business acquaintance. He was sitting with her, he was making conversation with her, and in a moment he was going to kill her.

But did he have any choice? None, as far as he could see. Now that she had seen him, his alibi depended upon her death. If he left her alive, he would inevitably become a prime suspect in Missy Flanders’s murder. He shouldn’t have come to Gwen’s house, that had probably been a mistake, but it would be a greater mistake to leave without finishing her off.

And she was attractive, no question about it. Older than he usually chose, but not too old. And, looking at her and knowing he was going to do her, he felt his excitement mounting.

“Something I want to show you,” he said, getting up from the table. Then, standing alongside her, he swung his forearm like a club against the side of her neck. She reeled and he struck her a second time, and the second blow rendered her unconscious.

She was naked under the robe. He stretched her out on the living room carpet with the robe open and lay on top of her. When she came to he had one hand under her chin and the other gripping her frosted hair.

He talked to her. He told her about George and Missy, and he told her what he had done to Missy. He felt her struggling beneath him, and he listened as she begged, and he let it go on until he couldn’t stand it anymore. And then his hands moved and her neck snapped and the life slipped out of her.

When he left she was lying at the bottom of the cellar stairs. One of her slippers was on a top step, as if she’d caught it on something, lost her balance, and fell.

George, he thought, driving out of town, George, you just got nobody left, you poor bastard. You better get used to jerking off.

#85.