“Yes,” Reardon said quickly. He did not need to hear it again.
“Well, we collared him a couple of times for that, but you remember it didn’t stop him. Nothing stopped him until he gave the same bath to a ten-year-old girl.”
Reardon said nothing.
“That’s the way it’ll be with this case,” Mathesson said. “Same thing. He won’t stop with animals. He won’t stop with these deer. Not if I know this guy. He’s really weird, and that means he’ll be hard to catch.”
“Well, anyway, let’s get on it,” Reardon said wearily. “We have to catch him sometime.”
“Sure.” Mathesson nodded toward the covered bodies. “You want to see them?”
“Yes,” Reardon said.
Mathesson lit a cigarette and walked over to one body. “This is the worst one.” With one quick gesture he jerked the covering from the body of the fallow deer.
Reardon was jolted by what he saw. The head had been reduced to a pulpy mass. The partition between the nostrils had been severed with one clean blow. One eyeball had been gouged from the head and now dangled by its distended muscles between the socket and the upper jaw. The neck and upper torso were such a patchwork of cuts and bruises that it would have been difficult to tell the color of the deer without looking at its hindquarters. Both front legs were broken and one was almost severed at the knee joint.
Suddenly Reardon was seized by an almost uncontrollable sadness. He stepped back from the body and took a deep breath to stop the shuddering sensation in his chest.
“You all right?” Mathesson asked.
Reardon pressed his fingernails into his palm. Quickly he looked away from the deer, focusing his attention on the crowd in the distance. He tried to find a face to hold on to but the distance was too great, the features too blurred.
“Reardon?” Mathesson took Reardon by the arm. “Hey, you okay?”
Reardon turned away, gesturing for Mathesson to cover the body again. Mathesson swiftly obeyed and Reardon could hear the brittle sound of the tarpaulin unfolding out again, stretching over the body of the deer.
“You came back on duty too soon, John,” Mathesson said. “You should have taken a little more time off. When a man loses his wife he needs some time to take it easy, to adjust, you know?”
Reardon nodded. “I’ll be all right.”
“Sure you will. But still, maybe you should take some extra time off.”
“No,” Reardon said. “It’s okay.”
“But…”
Reardon looked at him intently. “It’s just a little gruesome after you’ve been away from it for a while.” He could feel himself trembling underneath his topcoat. He thrust his hands into his coat, his fingers searching for something to distract him. He grasped a ballpoint pen in one hand and began clicking the point in and out.
“Sure it is,” Mathesson said sympathetically. He smiled. “Christ, this one is a little gruesome even if you haven’t been away from it.”
“Uncover the other one,” Reardon said.
“Go have a cup of coffee first. There’s no big hurry about this, is there?”
“I want to finish it up now.”
Mathesson shrugged. “Okay, John.”
Slowly Mathesson made his way to the other covered body and bent down to pull the tarpaulin back. He looked at Reardon. “This one’s not so bad. Not like the other one. This one went out fast.”
When Mathesson pulled back the covering, Reardon saw what he meant. The deer’s spine had been severed at the neck in one powerful sweep, and the blood had surged from its throat in a broad, deep wave. As Reardon had suspected, death had come instantaneously to this fallow deer.
Reardon nodded for Mathesson to cover the body and gently released the pen in his pocket.
“Now why don’t you go have a cup of coffee?” Mathesson said. “All the legwork is being done. You can take a break. Nothing’s going to happen in the next few minutes.”
Reardon smiled. “Okay, maybe I will.”
As he left the cage, Reardon’s legs felt unstable under him. He was afraid and he knew that he was afraid of something that did not seem to have anything to do with the fallow deer. He was afraid of a surging feeling that had plagued him during the first years of his career, when he had walked the streets as a young policeman. In the neighborhood where he had grown up, in the destitute tenements and littered streets, there had been three avenues of escape: crime, the priesthood or the police force. He had never considered the first, but the decision to choose the police had had much of the priesthood in it. He had wanted to minister to distress, to protect helplessness and innocence from the abuse that constantly threatened them. It had been a romantic notion and he had quickly discarded its more sentimental aspects. But something of it had always lingered in him; nothing could destroy it altogether, and Reardon sensed that he should not let it be destroyed. He suspected that this sensation of protection and guardianship formed the better part of him, and he did not want to lose it. But now its power seemed to be rising in unpredictable and uncontrollable bursts. And he was afraid.
2
In the coffee shop across from the park Reardon remembered something from his childhood. It seemed to rise like the steam from his cup of coffee. He and his father had been walking back from Sunday morning Mass, his father in the one suit he owned, seemingly for no other reason than to wear it to Mass, when his father had stopped to buy a paper from the blind newsdealer at the corner. They had stopped a few feet beyond the stand and his father had begun to flip through the paper when two men stepped up to the newsstand. The man closest to the stand asked for a Times and put a one-dollar bill in the blind man’s hand.
“A single, sir?” the blind man asked.
“No,” the man said, “a ten.”
The owner smiled. “Excuse me, sir,” he said and called out into the street. “Could someone passing step over here a minute, please?”
When the second man stepped forward and asked what the problem was the blind man said, “Sorry to trouble you, but could you tell me the denomination of this bill?”
The two men looked at each other and one of them, Reardon remembered, grinned.
“It’s a ten,” the second man said.
“Thank you,” the blind man said and started counting out change for a ten.
Reardon thought that he alone had seen the exchange. But suddenly his father dropped his newspaper and wheeled around. “Just a minute there,” he said, and as the first man, startled, turned to run, Reardon saw his father pitch abruptly forward and seize the man by his coat collar.
The second man bolted and was quickly gone from sight, but Reardon’s father slammed the first one up against the side wall of the newsstand and, holding him half suspended by his coat collar, stared coldly into his face. “You’re a filthy pig,” he said, and Reardon had been shocked by the contempt in his voice. “Only the lowest of the low would stoop to robbing a blind man.” He slammed the man’s head back against the wall. “Where do you live?”
Head forced back by the fists gripping the coat together under his chin, eyes bulging, the man struggled to free himself but said nothing.
Reardon’s father slammed him against the newsstand wall again. “Where do you live?”
When the man didn’t answer, Reardon’s father suddenly released him and backhanded him across the face. Caught unprepared, the man staggered and went down on one knee, and Reardon’s father seized him by the hair and, placing a knee in the small of his back, yanked his head back.
“Tell me where you live,” he said contemptuously.
“110th Street,” the man whimpered. “212 110th Street.”
Reardon’s father released his grip on the man’s hair and sent him sprawling with a shove of his knee. “Get up,” he said and without waiting for compliance reached down and yanked the man erect by his coat collar. “Now I know where you live,” he said, “and I’ll tell you something. If I ever see you around this neighborhood again, I’m going to put your little prick in a door and slam it shut.” He flung the man away from him. “Now get out of here.”