A Bat in the Belfry (2 page)

Which it was: What she wrote was never just another hack job on yet another wife-murder, child disappearance, or greed-fueled parent-slaughter, turgid tomes mixing sex, cash, and subnormal IQs to predictably gory effect. Instead, word by word and sentence by carefully crafted sentence, she presented the human elements behind the headlines, delicately and in their subtlest colors.

It was what he’d loved first about her, this freakish genius she had for communicating the emotions and motives of others while—the tragic irony of this did not escape him—possessing almost no insight into her own. But there was more.

Much more. Even now, if he’d been there he’d have gathered her in his arms, brushing aside the jutting knees and the sharp little elbows, and that would’ve been the end of it. For a long time her mercurial side had seemed a small price to pay for the rest of it.

All the rest of it. “You should get some sleep,” he told her gently. “You’re okay? You’re going to be able to?”

Sleep, he meant. She wasn’t any better at that than she was at eating, when he was away.

He heard her put her drink down on the low marble table that had been her only contribution to the room’s decor, the little click of the glass striking stone. Even that had been grudging; if he’d left it to her they’d still be using stacked milk crates.

“I’m okay.” Then: “Chip?”

“Yeah,” he exhaled. All the rest of it … which he’d adored, and still did. The trouble was, something was changing. And in the week since he’d been away from her it had gotten worse, this feeling of not being able to bear the few things he didn’t adore.

A lot worse. “Chip, could you do me a favor? Call up Maury Cahill for me, ask if I could go in and see him for a minute?”

Chip felt his mental eyebrows rising; Cahill was a criminal lawyer specializing in the kinds of scandalously illegal antics rich people’s kids got up to, keeping them out of Rikers and off the front pages of newspapers.

Maury’s son had been Chip’s classmate at prep school; they still got together for a beer once in a while. But why might Carolyn need his old school pal’s dad?

“It’s for a friend,” she assured him hastily but unconvincingly. Still, if she or her “friend” needed a lawyer, she had picked a good one.

And a request from Chip would indeed produce the desired appointment. So he agreed to phone Maury Cahill in the morning, then made a mental note to check in with him again later in the day. The old attorney wouldn’t violate any oaths, but if Carolyn was in real trouble he’d probably give Chip a general heads-up.

“Thanks,” said Carolyn. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you.”

“Right.” He knew she was sorry. That wasn’t the point. “Get some rest. Just … go on to bed. You’ll be all right tomorrow.”

Would he be, though? The trouble was, he was beginning not to be sure how much longer he could take the situation before something bad happened. He drew his gaze from the moonlit rooftops, skeletal tree shapes, and the few warmly lit windows still visible in the village of Eastport at this late hour, and from the metallically gleaming bay. Here in this room the softly hissing radiator and the wallpaper’s faded florals lent the sense that everything might still be fine, that he could get through this somehow.

His shirts and slacks hung on hangers in the tiny closet, but his socks and underwear were still in his suitcase, open on one of the plain pine twin beds. The room-size rug was a threadbare Persian long missing its fringes, indigo and red.

The bedspreads, white chenille, smelled of soap and bleach. “Listen,” he told Carolyn. “Tomorrow you’ll work, and you’ll feel fine. And when I come home, we’ll look at my new research together, all right?”

Across the room on a round wooden table were heaped his open laptop, stacks of papers, and spiral notebooks, preliminary materials having to do with a series of killings in Milwaukee two years earlier. If all went well, the crimes were to be the subject of his and Carolyn’s next book.

Atop the heap lay a photograph of a human torso, or what was left of it after someone got done with the acts he’d committed upon it. All told—if indeed all had been told; the perpetrator had died in jail of a heart attack before he finished confessing—there were a dozen photos like this. All were taken by the killer while committing the crimes, about one per month during the time he had been active.

Which was another thing nobody was sure of:
How long?
And its corollary,
How many?
The accused man had said a year, but his methods were sophisticated. His staging of tableaux, especially, was what the FBI analyst out of Madison had termed “fully developed.”

“Yes, Chip, I’ll sleep,” Carolyn agreed, sounding subdued. “And work sounds good.”

The victims in the dozen photographs had all been young women. These were the only known photographs in the series, but a new cache of them might yet turn up, Chip believed, because the police weren’t the only ones who had seen the pictures. Long before his capture, the killer had also posted them on the Web, in private chat rooms Chip had found while following obscure links the way a hound sniffs scent.

He’d phoned and emailed the Wisconsin authorities in case they didn’t already know about the websites, but hadn’t heard back yet. He’d never have found the sites himself if his own research talents weren’t as prodigious as Carolyn’s writing chops.

But through long practice and stubborn persistence, Chip could click his way unerringly to a needle in an electronic haystack; thus he’d discovered the forums where the gruesome pictures had resided, and since then memories of what else he’d seen and read there clung dankly to the inside of his head.
Chat rooms for killers
, he thought,
what a concept
.

“Good night, Chip,” Carolyn said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he answered, because he did.

He truly did. “Good night,” he added, and hung up.

Only then did he realized that while he and Carolyn were talking, he’d torn off the strip of cuticle he’d been worrying without even feeling it, and now the rabbit’s foot he always carried was smeared with his own bright red blood.

J
ust across the hall in his own room, Chip’s old friend Sam Tiptree was also having problems with women.

Two women, to be precise.

WHERE R U? W8TNG W8TNG W8TNG

The first one, pretty and fun-loving Carol Stedman, had been texting him all evening. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, which under other circumstances he tended to find attractive.

He supposed he should have known that she was going to be a difficult girlfriend; from the start, she had not by any means been a safe bet. He’d met Carol while she and a guy she’d been traveling with were wreaking small-town havoc—no violence, and the money and stolen car were recovered, but still—in Eastport, and this had been an omen of things to come, relationship-wise.

I HV SMTHNG 4 U …

I’ll bet
, Sam thought. He’d never been convinced by the new leaf Carol had sworn she’d turned over.

Still, she was lively and irreverent and game for all kinds of delightful adventures. Tall and athletic, she’d even sampled new-to-her activities like kayaking and camping, things that involved getting dirty, wearing clunky boots, or carrying your toilet paper along with you into the woods (or all three), and she had ended up really liking the outdoorsy stuff.

Or at least she did as long as it was liberally diluted by weekends in downtown Portland, on tours of bars, clubs, films, concerts by bands he’d never heard of, and plenty of time in bed.

“Sam? Are you still there?” The voice, not Carol’s, came from the phone he held to his ear, the landline handset because his cell was being occupied by Carol’s messages.

“Are you
texting
someone while I’m talking to you?”

This voice belonged to Maggie, the other young woman in Sam’s life. A longtime friend, she had gradually turned into much more; for a while there’d been a clear, unspoken sense between them that they would marry, sooner or later.

That it was inevitable, which was what had spooked him, he guessed. “Uh, no,” he managed while his thumbs moved deftly. “Why would you think that?”

TOLD U NOT COMING SORRY
. He pressed Send.

“The way you breathe when you’re texting. And I can hear it, the way your sleeves rustle a certain way or something. So stop it. What’s she trying to do, anyway, get you to go out?”

Carol was at a party on the mainland, on the Golding Road near Boyden Lake in Perry. She’d been cajoling him to join her since nine-thirty. But he had early plans tomorrow, with Chip.

“She just wants somebody to drive her home,” he told Maggie, thus leaving himself an out in case he changed his mind, decided he did want to go. After all, as a recovering alcoholic himself, he couldn’t refuse a designated-driver request, could he?

“Uh-huh,” said Maggie skeptically. “She wants somebody to do something, all right. You’re just the handiest doer.”

Sam laughed. “You’re bad.” But he liked it. No one else he knew talked that way. Maggie was smart, way smarter than he was, and so thoroughly down-to-earth, her sense of humor embarrassed even him sometimes.

“No, just accurate,” she shot back. She took no guff, and she was talented, too, at the violin as well as at a number of other activities he very much enjoyed.

“Yeah, well,” was all he could muster. He never could win a verbal jousting match with Maggie, which was relaxing, actually, once he’d gotten used to it. And on top of all that, she was no-kidding gorgeous, a big, red-cheeked, luscious-lipped brunette with so many curves, he still hadn’t managed to find them all.

And he didn’t want to stop trying. “You’re not going to go, though, right?” she asked.

A tearful emoticon popped up in the text message box on his phone.
R U COMING? MISS U
.

Unfortunately, this time Maggie heard the small
bloop
sound his cell made, notifying him of the new message.

“I thought you said you weren’t texting.” In the background at her place, a jazz violin CD was playing.

“But I can’t stop people from sending texts, can I?” he asked, realizing too late what the answer to that was.

“You could shut your cell off.”
Genius
, she didn’t add. “But I have to go now, I’ve still got some practicing to do.”

“Oh,” he said. He’d been about to suggest that he come over to her place. Just talking to her had reminded him pleasantly of all those curves, whose mysteries he now felt inspired to have another go at solving. His own room, with its plaid-covered twin beds and clutter of electronic gadgets looked down on by posters of sports heroes, seemed all at once unbearably male.

Maggie’s place was a lush cave of velvet upholstery, soft rugs, and the smell of Constant Comment tea. She kept apples in a bowl on her table, and a clean white terrycloth bathrobe in her bedroom closet especially for him.

R U COMING W8NG 4 U ??? NOT DOING GR8 PLZ

Also, as Carol’s tipsy-sounding new text message reminded him, Maggie didn’t drink. That wasn’t a biggie for Sam, whose taste for alcohol nowadays was (
thankyouthankyou
) just about nonexistent.

“Sam?” Maggie’s voice was gentle. “I’m hanging up now.”

Refusing to drive him into Carol’s arms by nagging him was what Maggie called this tactic—she was perfectly open with him about it—and he had to admit that so far tonight it had worked.

Unfortunately, it also meant that there was no chance of his getting to wear that white terrycloth bathrobe this evening, or pursuing activities that usually preceded his wearing of it, either. The sports heroes on his posters seemed to smirk down at him knowingly.

Chump
, their looks seemed to say.
This Maggie, she’s a line drive, right down the middle. So whatchoo want with a pop fly?

Easy for you to say
, he thought at the poster athletes for whom pop flies were no doubt a regular occurrence. “Okay,” he said aloud, but once he’d hung up, he felt ridiculously lonely and unsettled. His phone blooped again; without looking at the text box, he shut the thing off.

The room was suddenly very quiet, and the big old house all around him was, also; in another hour, it would be midnight. Carol was still waiting, probably, but the idea of giving Maggie the idea that he was staying home, then going out to some party the minute he’d hung up, just didn’t hit him right.

Which was how Maggie had planned it, of course, but that didn’t change the fact: he was in for the evening. Idly snapping his penlight on and off—the blue plastic promotional item bore the name of his employer, Eastport Sailyard & Marina, Ltd.—as he leaned back in his office chair, propped his sneakered feet on the door-atop-two-filing-cabinets he used for a desk, and stared at the long crack in the plaster ceiling above him.

So. Here he was, all woken up and nowhere to go, or at any rate nowhere that he wanted to. In the bad old days, he could’ve solved this problem, toot sweet: fire up a joint, break out the Bushmills, and have himself a nice, companionable little party of one. But not anymore.