Blood Music (7 page)

Days before the urge to kill came upon him he saw the highway lights behind his eyes, the tunnel lights, the letters on the wall of the tunnel,
NEW JERSEY
/
NEW YORK
, the way he'd seen them the day his uncle drove him from the town to the city after his parents had died.

His uncle had beat him. Not for any offense—for every offense, for the mud on his shoes or the expression on his face. For doing or not doing. The garbage wasn't taken out, the television was on. The whole of his childhood he saw as through a black screen; in some places the screen obscured everything: he did not remember his parents. In some places the screen was relatively light: baseball, his bicycle, anything outside that stucco house. The ceilings there were high, the long windows let in a lot of light. But still in his memory the rooms were dark.

His aunt was a shadow only, a tentative pat, a rare furtive embrace. He saw her always recoiling from words or blows. Even as a child he suspected that she was relieved to see some of the pain deflected from her body to his. That her love and her shame were the same thing.

He had left that house as soon as he could, and when he left he forgot. He remembered almost nothing now of his childhood. The smell of summer, the sound a fist makes. He remembered no love. He remembered only the first love. The first kill.

He was a big boy for thirteen, big hands, long legs. The girl was nine years old. He sometimes played with her in the deserted train yards on the other side of Yellowstone Boulevard in the middle-class neighborhood where he lived with his uncle and aunt. The girl was from some other street, some other neighborhood on the other side of the yards. He didn't have any friends his own age.

He didn't remember her name anymore. They played together through the long summer afternoons; the tracks were live tracks: a train would come. He went with her to everywhere. Trains to Paris, trains to Guadeloupe. They never planned to meet; he found her under the weedy trestle, she discovered him hidden in the brush watching boys his own age play baseball.

One afternoon his uncle beat him again. He never knew why, a rage out of the clear blue sky. His aunt watched. He saw again the near-unconscious relief, the barely perceived, ill-hidden survivor's joy:
it isn't me.
Her hair was mousebrown.

His uncle hit him until he was tired of hitting him. His uncle was not a big man, nor particularly strong; to the boy he seemed strong. The boy did not fight back.

He escaped at last into the summer afternoon, cheekbone bruised and lip bitten in unconscious humiliation. The deserted fields lay hazy under the sun. The girl was under the heavy stone bridge that held the only really live tracks to run through these fields. Sometimes they put nickels and pennies on the tracks and waited for a train to come and transform their offerings into fantastic shapes, currency for a dream world.

The girl had a pocketful of change. She had blond hair; it reminded him of something. He watched her kneeling to place pennies on the gleaming track, and he called her name, the name he had not yet forgotten, called her to come down into the shadow of the waiting bridge.

So far he had only dreamed of sex. A nascent warmth, a suspected pleasure. When she turned her trusting face to his he exploded in a fury wholly unexpected even to himself. While he took her he saw his aunt's face. When he put his hands around her throat he saw his uncle's hands. He did not know whether he was inside or outside. She did not cry out.

At the moment of orgasm he knew that he had pressed too hard: her eyes were pupilless, her lids fluttered and stopped. And the moment was more than the moment, it was a continuation of something long lost, the final piece of a forgotten puzzle.

He looked at the girl's dead face and he felt such love. For a moment there was only the girl's dead face and the unmoving sun and the anonymous buzz of the summer field. Then the enormity of what he had done crashed down around him. He shook her; he could not comprehend his power. She did not move. He had acted, and she did not move.

He left the girl where she lay, in the weeds under the train bridge. As he moved away from the body a train went by overhead, monstrous, a noise without boundaries. It sucked up all thought, like air in the wake behind its echo. He wanted to cry out his power but he only turned away.

A group of teenagers found the body two days later when they went down to the train yards to split a couple of six-packs. Nobody ever found the killer. For days the papers were full of the murder, and for weeks mothers kept their girls close to home. There were no clues. A size-ten sneaker print in the trampled grass. Dark hair on the body. Everyone thought there was a crazed killer on the loose but then he must have moved on.

For years that single act served as the basis for a thousand fantasies. It was so easy to kill. He felt the equal of his uncle at last; he alone knew what he was capable of. A week later when his uncle hit him he saw something in the boy's eyes that made him never hit him again.

He didn't understand how this one could have gotten away. They lay still, they waited to be killed, immobilized by his power.

For the first time his rage was unextinguished. His love had been denied.

When she ran screaming he did not follow her. Better to fade into the shadows up on Little West Twelfth Street, the scream like a single note from a violin string reverberating in his head.

S
LASHER VICTIM LIVES
! Zelly sat at the table with the New York papers spread out in front of her. The
Times,
the
Post, Newsday,
and the
Daily News.
Whenever she looked up she could see Mary napping like a cat in the puddle of sun that came into her playpen through the late-afternoon windows.

This was Zelly's quiet time. Pat had worked late last night, and he'd taken off again very early in the morning; he hadn't spoken a word. There were always jobs, jobs that took him away all hours of the day and night, but payment was slow, and equipment and supplies ate up every bit of the potential profits. Zelly'd had to ask her mother for a four-thousand-dollar loan just to make ends meet for another three or four months.

Zelly read all four accounts. Raped and strangled but she struggled free: Zelly felt a thrill of empathetic horror. Why had she been walking alone on Washington Street? Zelly didn't even walk on her own safe Washington Street by herself after ten at night; when he was home she had Pat go out for anything they needed.

Of course there was some doubt. The woman had been strangled, not slashed. The
Post
said there was a knife, the
Times
didn't mention a knife. The
Daily News
screamed knife.
Newsday
was noncommittal. A flash of steel, a possible knife.

The paper listed the characteristics of serial killers. Zelly had read them a hundred places:
The Only Living Witness, The Green River Killer, The Stranger Beside Me, The Shoemaker, Killer Clown, The Man with the Candy.
But she read them again now.

He was a loner, probably divorced, if he'd ever been married at all. A man like that would never be able to sustain a relationship. But Zelly had read about one in England who was married, and Ted Bundy had a girlfriend until she called the police.

Marginally employed, meaning that he couldn't hold a job; serial killers are generally so involved in their fantasies, and so busy driving from place to place looking for victims, that they're unable to hold down a full-time job. But John Wayne Gacy in Chicago headed a thriving construction business while he tortured and killed thirty-four young men, and Dean Corll in Houston had a candy factory.

Has an excessive love of pornography, particularly violent pornography, which he uses to fuel his murderous fantasies. But all men liked pornography, Zelly suspected, and all of it looked violent to her.

There was a strong possibility that the killer was someone marginally involved with police work: a security guard, someone who had tried and failed to become a policeman. But the police always said that, invariably, as though they couldn't believe that anyone could elude them without the benefit of their own training.

The killer was a victim of severe childhood abuse, physical and probably sexual in nature. It was a given that sexually abused boys grew up to be abusive, possibly murderous, men. But every woman Zelly had ever asked—every woman—had a story about childhood sexual abuse, from a relative or a stranger, one time or a thousand times.
Every
woman. We should be killing them faster than they can kill us, she thought.

The killer wanted to make a statement to the world with these murders: that was why he left the bodies naked, or half-naked, on the street to be found. But what was the statement? It was one of the tragedies of these cases that no one but the killer ever really understood the killings.

There were footsteps coming up the stairs. The thin sound of whistling, just three notes:
da-da-de.
That would be Pat. He wasn't usually home in the afternoon. Suddenly she felt as if she were doing something wrong, like a child caught reading by flashlight after lights out. She pushed the papers into a nervous pile as the door swung open.

The baby started to cry as Pat came in the door. It was always that way. Zelly kept telling Pat it wasn't him, and it wasn't, he just woke up the baby and the baby woke up crabby.

“I wasn't expecting you,” she said as he came in the door. “Is everything okay?”

“I can see the whole family is happy I'm home,” he said. He pulled off his black leather driver's gloves, which he wore even in warm weather, and put them down on the table next to the newspapers. Something was wrong. Zelly got up to go to the baby but he blocked her way.

“Let her cry,” he said.

“Pat, I have to go to her.”

“What about me?”

“Would you like me to get you some coffee? She's just crabby, you know she cries when she's woken up. I'll get your coffee in a minute.”

“I don't want a cup of coffee. Come into the bedroom.”

“The baby—”

“Fuck the baby.” He grabbed her arm, up and painfully away from her body, and pushed her toward the bed. Zelly could see the baby sagged crying against the playpen netting as Pat threw her on the bed.

She was not afraid. She was extremely shocked—“Fuck the baby”—but she was not afraid. He threw her down and unzipped the pants of his blue workman's uniform and he seemed almost unaware of her. She wanted to say,
the baby,
but she knew he wouldn't hear her. He didn't hear the baby crying. He was smiling.

He didn't ask her to take off her clothes, and he didn't help her take them off. He stood there smiling. Zelly pulled her sweatpants down over her hips; there was a baby screaming inside her head. It was another woman here pulling down her pants, another woman listening to another woman's baby screaming. My husband is raping me, she thought incoherently.

But he reached down and ran his finger along the ridge of her cheekbone. “Zelly,” he said: and she thought he was reassuring himself of her name.

“The baby—” she said, and he was upon her. He looked at her eyes; he hypnotized to silence the cry in her throat.

When he put his hands around her throat she felt, as if from outside herself, the voluptuousness of his pleasure. Mary's screaming had become a single blind furious note. Zelly could see her standing in her playpen, holding on to the top bar, her face contorted—but she had not stopped looking into Pat's eyes, could not stop looking. Brown and expressionless, like button eyes on a toy.

With no more conscious thought than a trapped animal she flung her neck to the side and broke his grip. At the same moment he collapsed on top of her.

There was not enough air in the world, there would never be enough air. The weight of Pat's head on her breast was intolerable; she pushed him away and breathed in great gasps that sounded like crying.

The baby was sobbing quietly now. Zelly pushed Pat the rest of the way off her and got up. The room rocked, once, to nearly vertical.

The baby had screamed herself sick. Zelly went and held her and she screamed again, and then suddenly she was quiet, and Zelly's shirt was soaked with milky vomit. Every couple of seconds the baby was convulsed with sobs that sounded as though she were trying to get a breath of air.

“There, there, lamb, it's okay, it's okay, lamb,” Zelly said over and over. Pat lay on the bed with his eyes closed. Zelly looked at him until he opened his eyes (“It's okay, lamby, it's okay now”), and then she looked at the floor.

“Is the kid okay?” Pat asked gently; he came and stood next to her, his head bowed to look into the baby's purple face.

“What the hell's the matter with you? You could have waited. You made the baby cry.” Somehow that was what mattered, that he had made the baby cry.

“I'm sorry, Mary. I'm sorry, Zel. I just—that was pretty wild, wasn't it?” He was embarrassed.

“I suppose that was something you read about in your—” But she stopped; her throat hurt when she talked. She looked away from him, down to Mary clinging wet to the front of her shirt. If she looked at Mary she could force away the memory of incomprehension, of what she'd thought she'd seen behind his eyes.

“Did I hurt you?” His touch was gentle on her neck.

“No.” She moved away. If she screamed at him it would hurt her throat. And it would make the baby cry again. “You scared the hell out of me, though.” Petulance was easier than fear or rage; and it was surprisingly easy just to be irritated.

“I'm really sorry about Mary. It's just—I guess you bring out the beast in me.”

Zelly wasn't shaking—she
wasn't
—she was just annoyed. “Well, come on, beast, and help me clean up this throw-up.” She dared look into her husband's eyes and they were gentle, and his mouth was rueful. “I'm really sorry.”