So he passed the emergency room by, slipping instead into the musty, deserted lobby of the building in which he lived, making his way silently to his studio on the second floor.
In the morning, someone would find the body, and Anne Jeffers would report it in the Herald. This time it was her next-door neighbor he’d killed. This time, the bitch would put it on the front page.
The front page, where he belonged.
He’d stayed up all night, reveling in the remembered ecstasy of the killing. By dawn he knew he would be too tired to go to work. Too tired, and too excited. He waited until precisely six, the time he normally got up, and then called the plant, telling them he was feeling better than yesterday but that he wasn’t well enough yet to come to work. They told him to take as much time as he needed. And why wouldn’t they? After all, he wasn’t like some of the others at work who called in sick every time they wanted to take an extra day off. This was only the second time he’d ever called in sick at all.
The call finished, he left his apartment and went over to the 7-Eleven on Fifteenth to get a cup of coffee and the first edition of the Herald. After all, it was possible that someone — perhaps one of the perverts who hung out in certain parts of the park at night — had found the body even before the joggers were out. He scanned the front page, assuaging his disappointment by telling himself that even if the body had been found right away, they might not have had time to get a story in the earliest edition. Still, he paged quickly through the whole paper, scanning each page.
Nothing.
But by the time he got back to his apartment, he wondered if he might have missed something, so he went through the paper again, this time studying each page carefully. When he turned to the last page, he felt a kind of relief. If he wasn’t going to be on the front page, it was better not to be in the paper at all.
He turned on the television, thinking there might be a story on the morning news, then shut it off, afraid one of his neighbors might hear it and wonder why he was watching the news so early.
He began pacing nervously around the apartment. How soon would the next edition of the paper be out?
What if no one had found the body? If someone had found it and called the police, wouldn’t there have been sirens when the cops went up to the park?
He hadn’t heard any sirens.
When his cheap digital watch — his mother’s lousy Christmas present last year — finally told him it was eight, he turned on the radio, tuning it to KIRO.
Endless talk about a press conference the President was going to be holding later that day.
The man went back to pacing the stained avocado carpeting that covered his floor, and wondered if anybody had found the body yet.
Maybe he should call the police himself.
He reached for the phone, then changed his mind. If he was going to do that, he’d better use a pay phone.
And not one near his house.
Maybe one over on Broadway. Or maybe he should even go downtown.
That was it. A phone down on First Avenue, where no one ever looked at anyone else. He was just about to leave, was just reaching out to switch off the radio, when he finally heard it:
This report just in. A body has been found in the brush near the reservoir in Volunteer Park. In a bizarre coincidence, the nude and mutilated corpse was discovered by Seattle Herald reporter Anne Jeffers, well-known nationally for her coverage of the series of killings reputed to have been committed by Seattleite Richard Kraven. Police are withholding identification of the woman pending notification of relatives. More details at the top of the hour. In other stories …
The man was no longer listening. It was even better than he’d hoped for — Anne Jeffers herself had found the body! Now there was no question it would make the front page. Soon — very soon — he’d be famous. But of course for a while he wouldn’t be able to enjoy seeing his name in the paper. After all, they didn’t yet know who had killed Joyce Cottrell. And for a while — he wasn’t sure yet exactly how long — he’d make sure they didn’t find out who did.
Not until he’d killed at least two more people.
Maybe even three.
The newscaster’s words still echoing in his head, the man thought feverishly. How soon should he strike again?
A month?
A week?
Once again he felt the rush he experienced as he’d ravaged Joyce Cottrell’s body, and now he shivered in anticipation. Perhaps he wouldn’t wait even a week. Perhaps, now that he understood the pure joy and power of the act of killing, he’d strike again within a few days.
If he could find the right victim.
The man was still savoring the feeling, still reveling in the exaltation of what he’d done, when the phone rang. His hand trembling, he picked it up.
“Is that you?” he heard his mother’s voice demand. “Why aren’t you at work?”
The man felt his exhilaration begin to fade. “I called in sick, Mama.”
“Well, I know that,” his mother told him.
Why couldn’t she use his name? Why couldn’t she ever use his name, unless she was criticizing him to someone else?
“They told me that at Boeing,” she went on. “Did you hear the radio this morning? That reporter found a body in Volunteer Park.”
As the man listened numbly, his mother talked on and on. She was talking about his body, the woman he’d killed, but she wasn’t talking about him!
Well, maybe one of these days he’d just stop her from talking about anything at all.
CHAPTER 36
Glen hadn’t intended to waste two hours of the morning gossiping with his neighbors about Joyce Cottrell’s death, but that was the way it turned out. When the first police car arrived to set up the yellow tape around Joyce’s property, only a couple of people crossed the street to watch. Within ten minutes, though — and not merely coincidentally with the arrival of two more blue-and-whites and one unmarked sedan whose very plainness proclaimed it a police vehicle — a dozen people were clustered on the sidewalk. One of them finally came up and knocked on the Jefferses’ front door. It was Marge Hurley, whose family had moved in across the street and three doors down four years ago. Marge had been unsuccessfully attempting to organize block parties ever since, as though operating under the illusion that Capitol Hill was the same kind of cozy cul-de-sac which she claimed to be fleeing when she left the great suburban morass of Lake Washington’s Eastside.
Refusing to accept a simple statement that Anne had found Joyce Cottrell’s body in Volunteer Park that morning, Marge drew Glen first out onto the porch, then into the midst of the crowd on the sidewalk. There, he found himself repeating the tale while his neighbors, having received no information from the police inside the house, proceeded to speculate about what might have happened. That Joyce Cottrell had been the neighborhood’s best-known eccentric for years did not stand her in good stead now that she had been murdered. Her neighbors disassembled her character bit by bit, until soon someone suggested that she’d been dealing in drugs (perhaps stolen from the pharmacy at Group Health?) or perhaps even in pornography — now, that would certainly explain why she kept people out of her house! Once all the permutations of Joyce’s possible venality had been thoroughly explored, speculation turned to the matter of who might have killed her. Immediate neighbors were instantly dismissed: “We all know each other in this neighborhood,” Marge Hurley insisted after introducing herself to the dozen people she’d never met before.