She looked at her watch. “Oh, heck.”
“What?”
“I wanted to be home in time to watch Oprah. She’s the only one of those talk-show people I can stand. She seems genuinely sincere.” She looked out the gray window at the dripping rain. “But I’ll never make it in time.”
“Tell me where you live. I’ll give you a ride.”
“But don’t you want to go back to your newspaper stacks?”
“Thanks to you, I won’t need to. You told me everything.”
She beamed. “Well, it’s nice to know that somebody finds me useful at my age.”
6
“You lucked out, Robert,” my FBI buddy said on the phone ten minutes after I left the library.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Brooklyn, 1956.”
“All right.”
“Guy was into disemboweling women, but he got so bloody doing it he was afraid somebody’d spot him with blood all over his clothes. Killed four women that way.”
“And then?”
“Then he decided that, rather than kill them in parks or alleys as he’d been doing, he’d knock them out, put them in his car trunk, and take them back to his garage.”
“All right.”
“First of all, he became a much more efficient butcher. He started using a power saw. And second of all, he bought himself a butcher’s rubber apron and gloves, and he started disposing of the bodies by chopping them up in pieces and burying them all over his neighborhood. There was only one problem.”
“Oh?”
“Dogs. He was all right in the winter, burying the meat in the snow, but when he buried it under plain dirt — the neighborhood dogs found it.”
“Wow.”
“But, to answer your question, there are forty-three cases where the killer suddenly changed body-disposal patterns.”
“How often did burying them show up?”
“In twenty-six of the forty-three.”
“So it’s a popular method.”
“It’s popular until they get caught.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.”
“Just send me a new Mercedes.”
“Thanks.”
7
He didn’t want the man at the pet store getting suspicious, so he bought most of the puppies in Cedar Rapids or Iowa City.
Look funny, a guy coming in once a month or so and buying himself a puppy. Month in, month out that way.
But today there wasn’t time.
Had to buy it right here in town.
Ran into the pet store out of the rain; ran out ten minutes later with a plump, cuddly three-month-old Scottie puppy. Black it was, and cute as a button.
Thing yipped all the way out of town, all the way out to its ultimate destination.
He didn’t do this because he hated puppies or because he was sadistic.
No, he just thought that he owed it to those little friends of his.
They pretty much had the same menu all the time. They’d certainly appreciate a change of pace every once in a while.
That’s why he bought the puppies.
He’d tried cats once but they weren’t plump enough if they were still in the pet store.
If there was time, he’d probably go out in the woods and do a little hunting.
Boy, he could bag some things that would really make those little friends of his excited and happy.
Very happy.
The ride wasn’t all that long.
Took the puppy from the backseat, still yipping of course, and carried him in the cardboard container straight down the hill and inside to where the trapdoor was beneath the empty rusty milk cans that still smelled sour from their long-ago milk.
Took the puppy out of the cardboard box.
Aw.
He really was a cute little thing.
Such a sweet face. And those big brown eyes. And that wet black nose.
Knelt down, then, the puppy struggling in his grasp, and yanked the trapdoor open.
The odor nearly knocked him backwards. Always did, right at first.
But then he began inhaling deeply, purposely suffusing himself with it.
God, he loved that smell. Once he got used to it.
Puppy really started squirming, so he really had to belt him hard across the head and pull hard on his floppy black ear.
“You be quiet. You be quiet now. You hear me?”
Then he leaned over the square hole in the floor and peered down into the cold darkness below.
They were down there, oh, yes they were down there, his friends with the red eyes and the fat gray bodies and the knife-sharp teeth that could rip a human body clean to the bone in just a few minutes.
Well, maybe not an adult human body.
He’d never actually pushed one of those down there.
But the little girls, when he was done with them; the little girls he always pushed down there.
And one night, he brought a flashlight along so he could see it, see the dozens of them swarming over the naked little body, rending and ripping and chewing and chittering until their mouths shone with blood and the smell of the kill was enough to make him come without even touching himself.
Oh, yes; oh, yes.
And when there wasn’t a little girl to give to his red-eyed friends, well, that was when he bought them a nice new puppy.
As now.
“Bye-bye, little friend,” he said.
The puppy wrestled, protested, as if it well knew what was about to happen.
“Nothing personal,” he said.
And dropped the sweet little thing through the deep dark opening in the dirt.
There was a distant thwump when the puppy hit the far dark ground. And then there was a curious silence, as if the red-eyed things didn’t know what to make of his gift.
But then reason prevailed.
And they knew very, very well what to make of his gift.
And what to do with his gift.
The puppy yipped and cried as they swarmed over him, and began the frenzied tearing, the frenzied ripping, the frenzied frantic separation of flesh from bone.
And there he knelt, peering down into the darkness; watching, watching.
8
She came up from nowhere, just as I gave the door to my motel room a small push.
I smelled her perfume before I heard her, the cold rain having started again, the six o’clock sky dark as night now.
“I want to show you something,” she said.
I stepped back, letting her walk into the room ahead of me.
She found a lamp, snapped it on, sending faint illumination throughout the shabby room.
“God, this is really a depressing place.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” I said.
“Too bad there isn’t another motel in town.”