Mr. Murder (6 page)

When he turned to her, she kissed him lightly, quickly. She laid her head against his chest and hugged him, and he put his arms around her. Because of Marty, she had learned that hugs were as essential to a healthy life as were food, water, sleep.

Earlier, when she had caught him systematically checking window locks, she’d insisted, with only a scowl and a single word
—“Well?”—
that he not hide anything. Now she wished she hadn’t insisted on hearing about his one bad moment in an otherwise fine day.

She looked up and met his eyes at last, still embracing him, and said, “It might be nothing.”

“It’s something.”

“But I mean, nothing physical.”

He smiled ruefully. “It’s so comforting to have a psychologist in the house.”

“Well, it could be psychological.”

“Somehow, it doesn’t help that maybe I’m just crazy.”

“Not crazy. Stressed.”

“Ah, yes, stress.
The
twentieth-century excuse, the favorite of goldbrickers filing fake disability claims, politicians trying to explain why they were drunk in a motel with naked teenage girls—”

She let go of him, turned away, angry. She wasn’t upset with Marty, exactly, but with God or fate or whatever force had suddenly brought turbulent currents into their smoothly flowing lives.

She started toward the desk to get her glass of wine before she remembered she had already drunk it. She turned to Marty again.

“All right . . . except when Charlotte was so sick that time, you’ve always been about as stressed out as a clam. But maybe you’re just a
secret
worrier. And lately, you’ve had a lot of pressures.”

“I have?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“The deadline on this book is tighter than usual.”

“But I’ve still got three months, and I think I’ll need one.”

“All the new career expectations—your publisher and agent and everyone in the business watching you in a different way now.”

The paperback reprints of his two most recent novels had placed on the
New York Times
bestseller list, each for eight weeks. He had not yet enjoyed a hardcover bestseller, but that new level of success seemed imminent with the release of his new novel in January.

The sudden sales growth was exciting but also daunting. Though Marty wanted a larger audience, he also was determined not to tailor his writing to have wider appeal and thereby lose what made his books fresh. He knew he was in danger of
unconsciously
modifying his work, so lately he was being unusually hard on himself, even though he had
always
been his own toughest critic and had always revised each page of a story as many as twenty and thirty times.

“Then there’s
People
magazine,” she said.

“That’s not stressful. It’s over and done with.”

A writer for
People
had come to the house a few weeks ago, and a photographer followed two days later for a ten-hour shoot. Marty being Marty, he liked them and they liked him, although first he had desperately resisted his publisher’s entreaties to do the piece.

Given his friendly relationship with the
People
people, he had no reason to think the article would be negative, but even favorable publicity usually made him feel cheap and grasping. To him, the books were what mattered, not the person who wrote them, and he did not want to be, as he put it, “the Madonna of the mystery novel, posing nude in a library with a snake in my teeth to hype sales.”

“It’s not over and done with,” Paige disagreed. The issue with the article about Marty would not hit the news-stands until Monday. “I know you’re dreading it.”

He sighed. “I don’t want to be—”

“Madonna with a snake in your teeth. I know, baby. What I’m saying is, you’re more stressed about the magazine than you realize.”

“Stressed enough to black out for seven minutes?”

“Sure. Why not? I’ll bet that’s what the doctor will say.”

Marty looked skeptical.

Paige moved into his arms again. “Everything’s been going so well for us lately, almost too well. There’s a tendency to get a little superstitious about it. But we worked hard, we earned all of this. Nothing’s going to go wrong. You hear me?”

“I hear you,” he said, holding her close.

“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” she repeated. “Nothing. ”

After midnight.

The neighborhood boasts big lots, and the large houses are set far back from the front property lines. Huge trees, so ancient they seem almost to have acquired nascent intelligence, stand sentinel along the streets, watching over the prosperous residents, autumn-stripped black limbs bristling like high-tech antennae, gathering information about potential threats to the well-being of those who sleep beyond the brick and stone walls.

The killer parks around the corner from the house in which his work awaits. He walks the rest of the way, softly humming a cheery tune of his own creation, acting as if he has trod these sidewalks ten thousand times before.

Furtive behavior is always noticed and, when noticed, inevitably raises an alarm. On the other hand, a man acting boldly and directly is viewed as honest and harmless, is not remarked upon, and is later forgotten altogether.

A cold northwest breeze.

A moonless sky.

A suspicious owl monotonously repeats his single question.

The house is Georgian, brick with white columns. The property is encircled by a spear-point iron fence.

The driveway gate stands open and appears to have been left in that position for many years. The pace and peaceful quality of life in Kansas City cannot long sustain paranoia.

As if he owns the place, he follows the circular driveway to the portico at the main entrance, climbs the steps, and pauses at the front door to unzip a small breast pocket in his leather jacket. From the pocket he extracts a key.

Until this moment, he was not aware that he was carrying it. He doesn’t know who gave it to him, but at once he knows its purpose. This has happened to him before.

The key fits the dead-bolt lock.

He opens the door on a dark foyer, steps across the threshold into the warm house, and withdraws the key from the lock. He closes the door softly behind him.

After putting the key away, he turns to a lighted alarm-system programming board next to the door. He has sixty seconds from the moment he opened the door to punch in the correct code to disarm the system; otherwise, police will be summoned. He remembers the six-digit disarming sequence just when it’s required, punches it in.

He withdraws another item from his jacket, this time from a deep inside pocket: a pair of extremely compact night-vision goggles of a type manufactured for the military and unavailable for purchase by private citizens. They amplify even the meager available light so efficiently, by a factor of ten thousand, that he is able to move through dark rooms as confidently as if all of the lamps were lit.

Ascending the stairs, he removes the Heckler & Koch P7 from the oversize shoulder holster under his jacket. The extended magazine contains eighteen cartridges.

A silencer is tucked into a smaller sleeve of the holster. He frees it, and then quietly screws it onto the muzzle of the pistol. It will guarantee eight to twelve relatively quiet shots, but it will deteriorate too fast to allow him to expend the entire magazine without waking others in the house and neighborhood.

Eight shots should be more than he needs.

The house is large, and ten rooms open off the T-shaped second-floor hall, but he does not have to search for his targets. He is as familiar with this floor plan as with the street layout of the city.

Through the goggles, everything has a greenish cast, and white objects seem to glow with a ghostly inner light. He feels as if he is in a science-fiction movie, an intrepid hero exploring another dimension or an alternate earth that is identical to ours in all but a few crucial respects.

He eases open the master-bedroom door, enters. He approaches the king-size bed with its elaborate Georgian headboard.

Two people are asleep under the glowing greenish blankets, a man and woman in their forties. The husband lies on his back, snoring. His face is easily identifiable as that of the primary target. The wife is on her side, face half buried in her pillow, but the killer can see enough to ascertain that she is the secondary target.

He puts the muzzle of the P7 against the husband’s throat.

The cold steel wakes the man, and his eyes pop open as if they have the counterbalanced lids of a doll’s eyes.

The killer pulls the trigger, blowing out the man’s throat, raises the muzzle, and fires two rounds point-blank in his face. The gunfire sounds like the soft spitting of a cobra.

He walks around the bed, making no sound on the plush carpet.

Two bullets in the wife’s exposed left temple complete his assignment, and she never wakes at all.

For a while he stands by the bed, enjoying the incomparable tenderness of the moment. Being present at a death is to share one of the most intimate experiences anyone will ever know in this world. After all, no one except treasured family members and beloved friends are welcome at a deathbed, to witness a dying person’s final breath. Therefore, the killer is able to rise above his gray and miserable existence only in the act of execution, for then he has the honor of sharing that most profound of all experiences, more solemn and significant than birth. In those precious magic moments when his targets perish, he establishes relationships, meaningful bonds with other human beings,
connections
that briefly banish his alienation and make him feel included, needed, loved.

Although these victims are always strangers to him—and in this case, he does not even know their names—the experience can be so poignant that tears fill his eyes. Tonight he manages to remain in complete control of himself.

Reluctant to let the brief connection end, he places one hand tenderly against the woman’s left cheek, which is unsoiled by blood and still pleasantly warm. He walks around the bed again and gives the dead man’s shoulder a gentle squeeze, as if to say,
Goodbye, old friend, goodbye.

He wonders who they were. And why they had to die.

Down he goes through the ghostly green house full of green shadows and radiant green forms. In the foyer he pauses to unscrew the silencer from the weapon and to holster both pieces.

He removes the goggles with dismay. Without the lenses, he is transported from that magical alternate earth, where for a brief while he felt a kinship with other human beings, to this world in which he strives so hard to belong but remains forever a man apart.

Exiting the house, he closes the door but doesn’t bother locking it. He doesn’t wipe off the brass knob, for he isn’t concerned about leaving fingerprints.

The cold breeze soughs and whistles through the portico.

With ratlike scraping and rustling, crisp dead leaves scurry in packs along the driveway.

The sentinel trees now seem to be asleep at their posts. The killer senses that no one watches him from any of the blank black windows along the street. And even the interrogatory voice of the owl is silenced.

Still moved by what he has shared, he does not hum his little nonsense tune on the return trip to the car.

By the time he drives to the motor hotel where he is staying, he feels once more the weight of the oppressive apartheid in which he exists. Separate. Shunned. A solitary man.

In his room he slips off the shoulder holster and puts it on the nightstand. The pistol is still in the clasp of that nylon-lined leather sleeve. He stares at the weapon for a while.

In the bathroom he takes a pair of scissors from his shaving kit, closes the lid on the toilet, sits in the harsh fluorescent glare, and meticulously destroys the two bogus credit cards that he has used thus far on the assignment. He will fly out of Kansas City in the morning, employing yet another name, and on the drive to the airport he will scatter the tiny fragments of the cards along a few miles of highway.

He returns to the nightstand.

Stares at the pistol.

After leaving the dead bodies at the job site, he should have broken the weapon down into as many pieces as possible. He should have disposed of its parts in widely separated locations: the barrel in a storm drain perhaps, half the frame in a creek, the other half in a Dumpster ... until nothing was left. That is standard procedure, and he is at a loss to understand why he disregarded it this time.

A low-grade guilt attends this deviation from routine, but he is not going to go out again and dispose of the weapon. In addition to the guilt, he feels . . . rebellious.

He undresses and lies down. He turns off the bedside lamp and stares at the layered shadows on the ceiling.

He is not sleepy. His mind is restless, and his thoughts jump from subject to subject with such unnerving rapidity that his hyperactive mental state soon translates into physical agitation. He fidgets, pulling at the sheets, readjusting blankets, pillows.

Out on the interstate highway, large trucks roll ceaselessly toward far destinations. The singing of their tires, the grumble of their engines, and the
whoosh
of the air displaced by their passage form a background white noise that is usually soothing. He has often been lulled to sleep by this Gypsy music of the open road.

Tonight, however, a strange thing happens. For reasons he can’t understand, this familiar mosaic of sound isn’t a lullaby but a siren song. He cannot resist it.

He gets out of bed and crosses the dark room to the only window. He has an obscure night view of a weedy hillside and above it a slab of sky—like the halves of an abstract painting. Atop the slope, separating sky and hill, the sturdy pickets of a highway guardrail are flickeringly illuminated by passing headlights.