And almost exploded with rage.
They’d buried it!
Bad enough they hadn’t put it on the front page, or even the second page of the first section!
He began reading the article, and with every word his rage increased.
Woman Found Slain Near Volunteer
Park Reservoir
The nude body of a woman was found in Volunteer Park early this morning. The victim, identified as Ms. Joyce Cottrell, 57, was a receptionist in the emergency room at the Group Health facility on Capitol Hill.
According to police sources, the victim, who was single and lived alone, was slain in her Capitol Hill home sometime between 11:00 P.M. and 4:00 A.M. yesterday morning. The body appears to have been placed near the reservoir in Volunteer Park shortly before dawn, where it was discovered by jogger Anne Jeffers (a staff reporter for this paper).
While the investigation is not yet complete, police sources stressed that there appears to be no connection between the deaths of Ms. Cottrell and of Shawnelle Davis, whose body was discovered last week in her rented apartment.
As he finished the article, the Butcher’s fingers tightened on the flimsy paper until it was crumpled into a wad.
No connection?
How could they say that? Hadn’t they even looked at what he’d done?
The two killings had been alike! Exactly alike! And he’d done it even better on Joyce Cottrell than he had on Shawnelle Davis!
Well, next time it wouldn’t be like this. Next time they would know what they were dealing with.
His anger erupting, he hurled the ruined newspaper to the floor. Maybe he should go out right now and do it again! That would show them — maybe he should just go out and find someone, and follow her home, and—
No!
That wasn’t the way to do it at all! He had to be smart! He had to be careful, and calm.
No matter what happened, he couldn’t let himself get angry.
Breathing deeply, he struggled to get himself under control. He reached down and picked up the crumpled newspaper. Spreading it out again, he smoothed the pages as best he could, then carefully tore out the article that had so offended him. Taking it to the dresser that served not only to hold his clothes, but to support his television as well, he opened the top drawer and added the article to the folder in which he’d already placed everything that had been written about Shawnelle Davis.
Tomorrow, or maybe even later on today, he’d buy an album and start putting the clippings in order.
And the next time he killed, it wouldn’t be a woman, even though murdering Joyce Cottrell had given him more pleasure than he’d ever felt before in his life.
He couldn’t let himself give in to the lure of that pleasure.
After all, that wasn’t why he was killing.
He was killing to please his mother.
It was the killing that counted, not the pleasure.
So better not to let himself be tempted. Next time he killed, it wouldn’t be a woman at all.
It would be some other kind of person.
In fact, from now on he’d kill all kinds of people.
Maybe later on, when he went out to buy an album, that wouldn’t be all he did.
Maybe he would go hunting, too.
CHAPTER 42
Anne had no memory of having slept at all the night before, though she knew she must have since her eyes didn’t have the awful gritty feel that had always resulted from her staying awake all night. But she had clear memories of lying in bed, wide-awake, staring at the ceiling as she tried to figure out the source of the briefly flashing note that had appeared on her computer when she’d turned it on.
The mechanics of it hadn’t taken her long to unraveclass="underline" a simple macro file would have done it, triggered by practically anything:
A line in the autoexec.bat file, for instance.
The macro could easily have brought up a file, displayed it for a few seconds, then closed it, immediately erased it, wiped all traces of it from her hard drive with one of the utilities she herself used to make sure certain files could never be recovered, then erased itself as well.
Or it could have arrived as a virus, coming into her computer through the modem anytime she’d left the machine on, but unattended. It would have sat dormant on her hard drive, set to attack the first time the computer was turned on after a specific date and time.
And attack it had. But not her computer. No, this was much more invidious. This virus had attacked her, rising up out of the guts of the machine to lash out at her, filling her with a terror she hadn’t been able to talk about at all, lest it spread from her into her whole family.
Bad enough they had been frightened by someone killing their pet and leaving it in their own backyard. How would they cope if they knew the unseen enemy had penetrated into the house itself?
She had searched the house, using the pretext of hunting for a misplaced box of old clippings on Richard Kraven. In both the attic and the basement she had searched for signs of a stranger’s presence, but had found nothing.
On the kitchen table she had found the fishing fly, and for a moment thought she recognized fragments of one of Hector’s feathers and a tuft of fur that could have come from Kumquat. But who could have made the fly? Certainly not Glen — he was notoriously clumsy with his hands, which was why the ship model downstairs had never been finished; Glen had proved even more awkward than Kevin at attaching the planks to the framework of the hull. Still, just before Glen had turned off the light to go to sleep, she’d asked him about the fly. He’d told her he bought it at the same time he bought the fishing rod, but something in his voice had struck her wrong.
When she’d pressed him, though, his mood had instantly blackened, and they’d almost had a fight.
He had gone to sleep while she stared at the ceiling, remembering the look of suspicion Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly had cast in her husband’s direction after they’d pulled poor Kumquat’s body from beneath the low deck behind the garage.
No! Glen couldn’t have killed Kumquat — he just couldn’t have!
And so she’d lain awake, stewing, trying to find answers, trying to make sense out of senseless horrors.
In the morning, tired, but knowing she must have slept at least a few hours, she’d gotten up and once again concealed her fear from her family, contenting herself with instructing Heather to make certain she walked Kevin to his school before going on to her own, and extracting a promise from Kevin that he wouldn’t leave school until Heather arrived to escort him home.
He argued, but she stood firm.
Then, after reading Vivian Andrews’s essentially fictional account of the Joyce Cottrell story with growing anger, she went to the office.
When no silence fell over the city room of the Herald as she walked in, Anne felt something that she wasn’t willing to admit even to herself: disappointment. But what had she expected? This wasn’t a ladies afternoon card club — this was a big city newspaper, whose staff wasn’t about to express public shock over much less than mass murder. Still, she would have thought someone would ask her how she was doing and if her family was all right. There wasn’t even so much as a momentary drop in the decibel level as she threaded her way toward her desk. Perhaps it was that simple fact — that practiced callousness that she knew perfectly well was not only a tool of a reporter’s trade, but practically a badge of honor as well — that stopped her from sitting down at her desk. But it wasn’t just that, of course.
It was the note that had appeared on her computer last night. Not telling her family about it was one thing. Not telling Vivian Andrews was another. Picking up all her notes from her research on the rapid transit issue, she headed for Vivian Andrews’s office, pushed the door open, stepped through it, and closed it behind her before the editor could possibly object.