Blood Music (27 page)

“That's him,” she said. He moved to take her shoulders but she stiffened and he stood awkwardly, his hands halfway to prayer. They stood for a frozen second watching the man walk toward the van, but as he disappeared inside, Madeleine grabbed John's arm. He tried to pull free but her grip was barbed wire. “I don't think we can do it ourselves,” she said. “I can see the license plate.” H4J 180 winked under the streetlight. “I'm going to call the police.”

They were alone now on the street. There was a little dark spot where Angel's blood was, but he and everybody else had melted into the factory walls and the dark loading docks. John's rage had been knocked away by pure surprise. The man belonged to him, he knew that, in the way that Cheryl belonged now to the man, and would until the man was dead. The man belonged to him but could he kill him? There was a doubt—he had not in fact killed him, although they had been standing with mingled breath and there had been time enough and opportunity to kill him. He wanted the man dead, but he didn't want the police there, with cars and lights and guns and authority. He wanted the man dead. But there was the doubt, and because of the doubt he had done nothing.

“He said something,” Madeleine said, walking backward toward the telephone booth, which stood with shining incongruity right behind her. “I think he said, ‘Help me.' ” There was no sound or movement from the van, which stood poised like high explosives across the street. Help me. Madeleine had a quarter in her pocket. John thought that the image of the van would be fixed forever behind his eyes, he would see that van, and that light across the cobblestones, when he was seventy years old. Madeleine's fingers didn't fumble. She didn't wait for long, and she didn't talk for long. By the time he had reached the car she was done, running on light, silent feet, the van revving its engine as John slammed his door and drove the key into the lock, her feet running around the back of the car as the engine caught, the van sliding silently out from under the streetlight as she flung herself into the front seat and slammed her door, he could hear her loud shallow breathing, and he pressed the gas pedal and the car and the van moved forward in perfect synchronicity and there was nothing but the black van ahead of them and the beating of two hearts in his ears.

D
iapers and wipes and talcum powder and zinc ointment. Zelly's eyes were dry. It was ten o'clock at night. For fifteen hours she had been afraid to take a deep breath, because she knew she would cry, and Pat would see her cry.

She hadn't run. She could have run, her heart had been beating like a wing. The police station was six blocks away from the van, she could have gotten there in five minutes. But what about Mary sleeping in her crib?
He is
—yes, undoubtedly so; she had stood gasping for breath to feed her fluttering heart and known there was no more deluding herself.
He is
—but there was no guarantee that the New York police would even believe her. Washcloths and Onesies and Anbesol.

But the talisman of Cheryl Nassent's earring lay cold in her fanny pack: they would believe her.

And the wheels of the justice system would creak and turn and begin to roll; the whole strength of the Slasher Task Force would roar into action. The policemen would discuss and calculate and aim, and all power would pass from her hands. She could imagine it easily enough: The turn of her key in the lock as twenty policemen stood at firing stance behind her on the stairwell, their weapons drawn. How could Pat fail to hear their footsteps? Or the banal assurances—“Go home and act as though nothing's happened and we'll have a team in there in no time.” But how could she not run straight to Mary's crib to protect her from the guns she knew were coming? He was home tonight; no one would die tonight, and she would not put her baby in danger while she knew he was home, his rage quiescent, watching the Yankees lose the baseball game.

When she got home she had met his eyes, and they were unchanged. Fear lay in a film on her vision; a dog would have smelled it on her. The baby was sleeping; she would have known it and cried. Extra sheets for the crib and socks and Mary's stuffed pink poodle. Knowing how thoroughly he'd been able to hide it from her made it easier. The world cannot read your face. The world had not read in his face even the smallest clue.

Until last night Pat had not raped and murdered six women—seven dead in all—and then he had. The worm in the apple had become the apple. Hysteria and strained nerves and unwarranted suspicion had become shrewdness and perspicacity.

Because Pat didn't know she knew, she didn't know. It wasn't that hard, after the first moment. Blankets and eye-makeup remover and underwear. All the baby's dirty clothes out of the hamper, because this time she knew for certain she was never coming back.

She had been forced to wait. The night had been the worst. As she slid toward unexpected sleep he moved over her; she had never refused him; she was afraid to refuse him now. He thrust into her without foreplay, and he didn't touch her neck. It was over soon. When he finished she could taste her own blood on her lip where she had bitten it.

At seven-thirty in the morning Zelly had lain in bed next to Pat, scanning the front page of each section of the
Times.
Pat sat next to her in bed and drank his coffee. Her skin was screaming.

“You want another cup of coffee?” she asked him, calculating how to get out of the house. “Honey—” she said, then she almost said it: I'm going to take Mary out for a walk this morning. But she never took Mary out in the morning, and he knew it. There must be no deviation from ordinary routine.

How he must have enjoyed watching her these past months! How he must have loved listening to her speculate on the characteristics of the Slasher, the likelihood of his making a fatal mistake, all the thousand little details about which she'd had an opinion. She hated him next to her the way a woman would hate any lover who had made a fool of her. As though her mind couldn't accept the full depth of horror offered up to it and had to grab and react to the one aspect of the truth that it could easily understand: he has been laughing at me.

In the middle of the night she had been certain she would call the police the minute Pat left the house. But by morning she knew what would happen if she did that. The police would stake out her apartment, waiting for Pat to come home. She would go to her mother's house (“Just act as though nothing's happened”), but she was pretty sure they would stake that out too, knowing that eventually he would go there. For where else did he go? Home, his mother-in-law's, and out to kill. And Pat would come home and see that the police were staking out his house. And he would know who had told them.

Pat would go to her mother's house. And he would see the stakeout there and then where would he go? How could she put her face outside the door if he were free? She and the baby and her mother would be prisoners in that house. How could she take her baby for a walk, or to the doctor? And her mother—how could she let her mother leave the house if he were out there somewhere? Because he would know who had told the police, and he would kill them all.

Even if he ran she could never feel safe. How long had it taken to catch Ted Bundy after he escaped from jail in Utah? Two years? What would Zelly and her mother do for two years, watching the television to hear the latest news of a killing in Omaha, in Chattahoochee, knowing he could be just around the corner? She could not call the police while Pat was out of the house.

“What are you doing today, honey?” she'd asked behind the movie pages, staring at the grainy newspaper image of a man grabbing a lingerie-clad woman by the arm, the leg—an advertisement for a murder mystery. “She Has to Make the Ultimate Sacrifice,” the caption read. Zelly had waited for Pat's reply and wondered what that sacrifice was: was she going to sleep with him or was the man going to kill her? Pat was reading the sports pages.

Her shoes wouldn't fit in the bag. She didn't want to take these shoes anyway. She went to the closet and knelt, and memory rose abruptly. Pat's shoes. She'd had a dream about Pat's shoes.

They stood in a row, inspection-perfect, but in the next instant they would explode into action and fly out of the closet around her head like bats from a cave and she would lose her mind. Zelly reached for a shoe and was surprised when it felt like nothing more than leather.

There was something brown down the outside, possibly dung. Something that had been sticky. Ketchup, or mud. Little flakes fell in a red dust on the floor. Zelly inserted her fingernail under a flake and pulled it away. She touched her thumb to the flake and it disintegrated into a thousand red specks. Suddenly there was a noise outside the door. Zelly turned her head and her whole consciousness was in her ears. She would not be able to move away from the closet in time.

The footsteps halted and then began again. Away from the door and across the landing to the next flight. Zelly stared at the dried blood on her thumb and realized that she had begun to cry.

The letter she left just said, “I can't make it work. I'm sorry. I'm at my mother's. Call me.” He would think she was leaving him, but he wouldn't think she was running away from the Symphony Slasher. He would call her mother's, the way he did last time, but now she would put him off. Say anything to keep him there. And the moment he hung up the phone she would call the police.

“T
hese lights drive me crazy, you know that?”

“I didn't notice,” said Blackman. There wasn't a lot of traffic in the tunnel. A few cars had gone by in the opposite direction, and far ahead Blackman could see two sets of lights. One car was red, one was just a dark blur far up ahead. Blackman reached for the Styrofoam cup balanced on the gear shift without taking his eyes off the road. He knew Scottie's hand would reach the cup an instant before his own, knew that Scottie would hand him the cup. “You're better than having a wife.”

“You always say that. When are you going to just break down and propose?”

The lights went by for a moment in silence.

Blackman's lips were pushed tightly together. His hands on the steering wheel were drained of blood; it had been pushed away by the force of his grip.

“What do you suppose Levy was doing in the meat-packing district at ten o'clock on a Monday night?” Scottie asked.

“She said she was leaving the scene. Nassent had to be with her. The dispatcher said she was in an awful hurry.”

“She'd have to be out of her mind.”

“I'd do it. You weren't at Levy's original questioning,” Blackman said. “She was the angriest rape victim I've ever seen. And I have seen angry ones. I should have known. Listen,” abruptly changing the subject as the car came out of the tunnel into the sudden night, “it adds up that our man would live in New Jersey.”

“Patrick Wyche,” Scottie said.

“Patrick Wyche. Patrick Wyche. No better or worse than any other name.” The highway outside the tunnel was eight lanes wide, with overhead signs and bright streetlights and arrows pointing in different directions.

“I hate New Jersey,” Scottie said. There wasn't a lot of traffic, just a pair of taillights on a red Camry swinging around a corner. “The guy the Hoboken Police are sending is supposed to have all the info on Wyche, when we meet him at the house.”

“This could be a one-way ticket to where the sun don't shine, going to this man's house.”

“Where are we going to look?” Scottie snapped. “They sent Chen down to where Levy said she was calling from. And we got O'Donnell going over to her place to talk to her when she gets in.”

“Don't blame yourself. This Nassent thing has been a long shot all along.”

“Not anymore.”

“No. Not anymore.” They were silent as the patrol car passed a sign that read
NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE
¼
MILE
.

“Shit,” said Blackman suddenly, “I think I overshot my mark.”

“Second corner by the gas station?”

“Damn, I overshot.
Damn,
” slamming his palm against the steering wheel, “God
fucking
damn. Motherfucking New Jersey highway. We blew it.”

I
n the tunnel John and Madeleine did not dare say anything. They sat silently and the tunnel lights beat a tattoo across their faces.

John looked furtively at Madeleine and her face was closed. He was shut out—or she was shut in with the memory of the man walking toward her. When she said, “That's him,” her voice had been small, like a child's; and now she faced her future with a child's irresolute grace.

Suddenly she turned to him and said, “I love you.” Before he could answer she said, “I'm not frightened,” and he understood that she didn't want him to answer.

“I am,” he said.

The tunnel ended abruptly and the air on their faces felt like hope, cool and dark and sheltering and open to the sky.

“Do you think the cops'll come?”

“I don't know. Do you think they believed you?”

“If you listen to calamity for hours and hours every night, how do you sound? I think I was interesting to them.”

“Then maybe they'll send somebody.” The street was industrial, fantastic; they were passing train yards, endless shiny-dull tracks in all directions and hulking empty carcasses of trains. The van's taillights shone on the pocked asphalt. They were about five blocks behind the van; when it pulled into the station John slowed his car, but in a few moments, before they reached it, the van pulled away, and when it turned right up ahead of them John noticed Madeleine's hand tense on the door handle. But when they got to where the van had turned they saw that the street ended and there was no place to go but right, and the taillights were still there ahead of them. They were the only two cars on the road.