False Memory (27 page)

41

Restlessly circling the room, Ahriman composed a wonderfully poignant farewell to life, which Susan took down in her graceful handwriting. He knew exactly what to put in and what to leave out in order to convince even the most skeptical police detective that the note was authentic.

Handwriting analysis would, of course, leave little or no room for doubt, but the doctor was meticulous.

Composition under these circumstances was not easy. His mouth was sour with the lingering aftertaste of Tsingtao. Weary to the bone, eyes hot and grainy, mind fuzzy from lack of sleep, he mentally polished every sentence before dictating it.

He was distracted by Susan, as well. Perhaps because he would never possess her again, she seemed more beautiful to him than at any previous moment of their relationship.

Banners of gold hair. Egyptian-green firework eyes. Sad, this broken toy.

No. That was a lousy haiku. Embarrassing. It had seventeen syllables, all right, and the ideal five-seven-five pattern, but not much else.

He could occasionally compose a reasonably good verse about a snail on a stair tread, crushed hard underfoot, and stuff like that, but when it came to writing lines to capture the look, the mood, the essence of a girl, any girl, then he floundered.

Some truth in his lousy haiku: She
was
broken, this once-fine toy. Although she still looked great, she was badly damaged, and he couldn’t simply fix her with a little glue, as he might have repaired a plastic figurine from a classic Marx playset like Roy Rogers Rodeo Ranch or Tom Corbett Space Academy.

Girls. They always let you down when you’re counting on them.

Filled with a strange mix of sentimental yearning and sullen resentment, Ahriman finished composing the suicide note. He stood over Susan to watch as she signed her name at the bottom.

Her long-fingered hands. The gracefully looping pen. Last words without tears.

Shit.

Leaving the notepad on the table for now, the doctor led Susan into the kitchen. At his request she produced a spare apartment key from the built-in secretaire where she sat to compose shopping lists and plan menus. He already had a key, but he hadn’t brought it with him. He pocketed this one, and they returned to the bedroom.

The videotape was still playing. At his direction, she used the remote to stop it; then she ejected it from the VCR and put it on the nightstand beside the empty wineglass.

“Tell me where you usually store the camcorder.”

Her eyes jiggled. Then her gaze steadied. “In a box on the top shelf of that closet,” she said, pointing.

“Please pack it up and put it away.”

She had to bring a two-step folding stool from the kitchen to complete the task.

Next, he instructed her to use a hand towel from the bathroom to wipe down the nightstands, the headboard of the bed, and anything else he might have touched while in the bedroom. He monitored her to ensure that she did a thorough job.

Because he was careful to avoid touching most surfaces in the apartment, Ahriman had little concern that his prints would be found anywhere but in Susan’s two most private chambers. When she finished in the bedroom, he stood in the doorway of the bathroom for about ten minutes, watching as she polished tile, glass, brass, and porcelain.

Task completed, she folded the hand towel into perfectly aligned thirds and draped it on a brushed-brass bar beside another hand towel that was folded and hung in precisely the same manner. The doctor valued neatness.

When he saw the folded white cotton panties on the hamper lid, he had almost instructed her to toss them in with the other laundry, but instinct had led him to question her about them. When he learned that they had been set aside to provide a DNA sample to the police, he was shocked.

Girls. Devious. Cunning. More than once, when the doctor was a boy, girls had taunted him into pushing them down a flight of porch steps or shoving them into a thorny rosebush, whereupon they had always run to the nearest adults, claiming that the assault had been unprovoked, that it had been pure meanness. Here, now, these decades later, more treachery.

He could have instructed her to wash the panties in the sink, but he decided that prudence required him to take them when he left, remove them from the apartment altogether.

The doctor wasn’t an expert on the latest forensic techniques of practical homicide investigation, but he was reasonably sure that latent fingerprints on human skin lasted only a few hours or less. They could be lifted with the use of lasers and other sophisticated equipment, but he knew simpler procedures might also be effective. Kromekote cards or unexposed Polaroid film, pressed firmly to the skin, will transfer the incriminating print; when the card or film is dusted with black powder, a mirror image of the latent print appears and must then be reversed through photography. Magnetic powder applied with a Magna Brush directly to the skin is acceptable in a pinch, and the iodine-silver transfer method is an alternative if a fuming gun and silver sheets are close at hand.

He didn’t expect Susan’s body to be found for five or six hours, perhaps much longer. By then, the early stages of decomposition would have eradicated all the latent prints on her skin.

Nevertheless, he had touched virtually every plane and curve of her body—and often. To be a winner at these games, one had to play with energetic enthusiasm but also with a detailed knowledge of the rules and with a talent for strategy.

He suggested that Susan draw a hot bath. Then step by step he walked her through the remaining minutes of her life.

While the tub was filling, she got a safety razor from one of the vanity drawers. She had used it to shave her legs; but now it would serve a more serious purpose.

She twisted open the razor and extracted the single-edge blade. She put the blade on the flat rim of the bathtub.

She undressed for the bath. Naked, she didn’t look broken, and Ahriman wished he could keep her.

Waiting for further instruction, Susan stood beside the bathtub, watching the water gush out of the faucet.

Studying her reflection in the mirror, Ahriman took pride in her tranquility. Intellectually, she was aware that she would soon be dead, but because of the excellent work he’d done with her, she lacked the capacity for genuine and spontaneous emotional response while in this state of total personality submersion.

The doctor regretted that the time inevitably came when each of his acquisitions must be discarded and allowed to go the way of all flesh.

He wished he could preserve each of them in perfect condition and set aside a few rooms of his house to a display of them, just as he currently dedicated space to his Corgi model cars, die-cast banks, playsets, and other enthusiasms. What a delight it would be to walk among them at will, these women and men who had been both his cat’s-paws and his companions over the years. With his own engraving kit, he could lovingly prepare brass plaques featuring their names, vital statistics, and dates of acquisition—just as he did for items in his other collections. His videotapes were splendid mementos, but they were all motion in two dimensions, providing none of the depth or the satisfying tactility that physically preserved playthings could offer.

The problem was rot. The doctor was a perfectionist who would not add an item to one of his collections unless it was in mint or near-mint condition. Not for him the merely excellent or very good example. Because no known form of preservation, from mummification to state-of-the-art embalming, could meet his high standards, he would of necessity continue to rely on his videotapes when overcome by a nostalgic and sentimental mood.

Now, he sent Susan to the dining room to retrieve the notepad on which she had written her farewell to life. She returned with it and placed it on the freshly polished tile top of the vanity, next to the sink, where it would be found simultaneously with her cadaver.

The bath was ready. She turned off both faucets.

She added scented salts to the water.

The doctor was surprised, because he had not instructed her to spice the bath. Evidently, she always did so before stepping into the tub, and this act was essentially a conditioned reflex that required no volitional thinking. Interesting.

Writhing vines of steam, rising from the water, now bloomed with the faint fragrance of roses.

Sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, careful not to touch anything with his hands, Ahriman instructed Susan to enter the bath, to sit, and to bathe herself with special thoroughness. There was no longer any danger that a laser, Kromekote card, Magna Brush, or fuming gun could turn up incriminating fingerprints on her skin. He was counting on the action of her bath to flush out and disperse all of his semen, as well.

No doubt, in the bedroom and elsewhere in the apartment, he had left behind hairs and fibers from his clothing that could be gathered in a police-lab vacuum. Without good fingerprints, however, or other direct evidence that could put him on a list of suspects, they would not be able to trace these scraps of evidence back to him.

Besides, because he had taken such pains to present the police with a convincing tableau and a solid motivation for suicide, they were not likely to pursue even a cursory homicide investigation.

He would have liked to watch Susan bathe a while longer, for she was an enchanting sight; however, he was weary, sleepy. Furthermore, he wanted to leave the apartment well before dawn, when there was only a small chance of encountering witnesses.

“Susan, please pick up the razor blade.”

For a moment, the steel blade stuck to the wet rim of the tub. Then she got it between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand.

The doctor preferred flamboyant destruction. Easily bored, he saw no thrill in a poisoned cup of tea, in a simple hangman’s noose—or, in this case, in the severance of a radial artery or two. The real fun was in shotguns, large-caliber handguns, axes, chain saws, and explosives.

Her pistol had interested him. But a gunshot would wake the retirees downstairs, even if they had gone to bed martini-sotted, as usual.

Disappointed but determined not to surrender to his taste for the theatrical, Ahriman told Susan how to grip the blade, precisely where to cut on her left wrist, and how hard to press. Before the mortal slice, she scored her flesh lightly, and then lightly again, producing the hesitation marks that the police were accustomed to seeing in more than half of such suicides. Then, with no expression on her face and with only pure green beauty in her eyes, she made a third cut, much deeper than the first two.

Because some tendon damage was unavoidably sustained in addition to the severing of the radial artery, she couldn’t hold the blade as firmly in her left hand as she had held it in her right. The wound in her right wrist was comparatively shallow and bled less heartily than the wound in her left; but that, too, would be consistent with police expectations.

She dropped the blade. Lowered her arms into the water.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

The doctor waited with her for the end. He could have walked out, confident that in this obedient state, even unchaperoned, she would sit calmly in the tub until she died. Already in this game, however, fate had thrown him a couple of change-up pitches, and he was going to remain alert for another.

Far less steam arose from the water now, and attar of roses was not the only scent it carried anymore.

Yearning for greater drama, Ahriman considered bringing Susan out of the mind chapel and up a flight or two of stairs, nearer to full consciousness, where she could better appreciate her plight. Although he could control her at higher levels of awareness, there was a slim but real chance that an involuntary cry of terror or despair would escape her, just loud enough to wake pensioners and parakeets downstairs.

He waited.

The bathwater grew darker as it cooled, though the color that Susan lent to it was hot.

She sat in silence, no more touched by emotion than the tub that contained her, and the doctor was, therefore, shocked to see a single tear track down her face.

He leaned forward, disbelieving, certain that it must be mere water or perspiration.

When the drop had descended the length of her face, another—larger than the first, enormous—welled from the same eye, and there could be no question that this was the genuine article.

Here was more entertainment than he had expected. Fascinated, he monitored the descent of the tear over the elegant swell of her high cheekbone, into the pocket of her cheek, to the corner of her ripe mouth, and then toward the line of her jaw, where it arrived diminished but large enough to quiver like a pendulous jewel.

This second tear was not followed by a third. The dry lips of Death had kissed away the excess moisture in her eyes.

When Susan’s mouth sagged open, as though with awe, the second—and last—tear trembled and fell from her delicate jaw into the bathwater, with the faintest detectable
plink
like a note struck from the highest octave on a piano keyboard rooms and rooms away.

Green eyes growing gray. Rosy skin borrows color…from the razor blade.

He rather liked that one.

Leaving the lights on, of course, Ahriman picked up her soiled underwear from the hamper lid and stepped out of the bathroom, into the bedroom, where he retrieved the videotape.

In the living room, he paused to enjoy the subtle scent of citrus potpourri seeping from the ceramic jars. He had always meant to ask Susan where she’d purchased this particular melange, so that he could acquire some for his own home. Too late.

At the kitchen door, fingers safely wrapped in Kleenex, he twisted the thumbturn on the only lock that she had engaged following his arrival. Outside, after quietly pulling the door shut, he used the spare key from the secretaire to engage both dead bolts.

He could do nothing about the security chain. This one detail should not make the authorities unduly suspicious.

The night and the fog, his conspirators, still waited for him, and the surf had grown louder since last he’d heard it, masking what little noise his shoes made on the rubber treads of the stairs.