"Yes, something like that. Debone, slash, slash, toss it aside into the trash bag. He thinks he's making his work look awkward, but he doesn't realize that by doing it all the time, every time, he's creating just the opposite impression. Those are the only marks on the bones. It's never a slip of the knife, it's always the slash in the same place. If you saw just one body, maybe you'd think it was the work of a butcher.
But if you found all seven bodies..
"And the new girl?"
"Grone will have a report for us tomorrow. We might know who she is by then too."
"Will you ask Stanley to come into the city for a look too? Grone won't mind."
"Sure he will."
"Tell him it's my idea."
"He'll still mind."
"But he'll have sense enough to keep it to himself. Take Stanley, will you?" Becker groaned. "Do I have to take Tovah, too?"
"Tovah is not an expert in that kind of bones."
"What if he wants to have a little heart-to-heart talk again afterwards?"
"You listened to Tee, didn't you?"
"Tee was desperate. He's got his neck in a noose."
"Stanley's desperate too. You were able to help Tee, weren't you?"
"Did I give you that impression? I don't think I helped him at all. How can I help hiw.? He wants to be thirty again. He wants to fall in love and rescue women and feel something again. There's no way I can help him with any of that. All I can do is try to keep him under control when it comes to dealing with McNeil, who might well try to blackmail him, and that's all he wants me to do for him. I don't know what the hell Stanley wants from me."
"He wants some emotional intimacy, if that's not too trite."
"Do I have to be emotionally intimate with everybody who comes along, whether I like it or not? Do I have some kind of obligation there?"
"Do you have that many coming along? If so, you're not telling me about it."
"I'd just like to have something to say about whether I'm on the other end of intimate exchanges or not, that's all. I don't like to have it dumped in my lap like a spilled drink. Stanley's like having a cup of cocoa poured on you, all warm and sweet and sticky."
"Maybe what Stanley needs is not a male friend," Karen offered. "Maybe he needs a woman."
"What is the appeal of the guy?"
"What makes you afraid of him?"
Becker threw his hands in the air. "I'll take him, I'll take him."
"You don't have to." Becker laughed and took Karen in his arms. The embrace turned serious and after a few minutes they sat together on the sofa and made love to each other in a gentle, prefatory way, touching through their clothes. Sweetly, teasingly, they drove each other wild with desire until Jack came in to say good night. They looked at him in parental innocence, beaming with smiles.
Becker rose from bed at t, o a.m., moving silently as he gathered his clothes in his hand and eased toward the bedroom door. Karen lay on her side, facing away from him. She had not moved but he could tell by her breathing that she had awakened. "Be careful," she said, her voice still hoarse with sleep. "Yes. Go back to sleep."
"You're sure you have to go?" Becker stood for a long moment in the dark, his shirt and pants in his hand. "I have to," he said finally.
She rolled over to face him. Her face was a pale shape without features in the darkness. "I knew you would tonight," she said.
"How did you know?"
"You're different when you're fighting it," she said, meaning the urge that she knew was driving him now. "You make love differently."
'Do I?"
"You're even more gentle than usual-and even more intense, somehow. I can't explain it, but I can feel it."
"There was nothing in my mind but making love to you-I don't want you to think it was tainted."
"I don't think that. But it's like… I don't know." She thought it was like making love with a wolf with a human heart, the beast holding its strength and instinct in check, aware what it could do with those powerful jaws, the vicious teeth, the instrument of death caressing her as gently as it would pick up a pup in that mouth. It was frightening and exciting and Karen had come over the years to want it most of all-but she did not tell him that, or any of it. "It's just different," she said.
Becker waited a moment more for her to complete the thought if she would; then he slipped out the door. She scarcely heard him leave.
He wheeled his bicycle from the garage, mounted it, and pedaled swiftly into the night. The moon was more than half full and a strong breeze pushed clouds past it, causing it to wink conspiratorially. He rode the first mile with the headlight on, keeping one eye closed so that it would not adjust to the light. When he was a few minutes away from his destination he turned off the headlight and opened the other eye.
The bike moved almost silently through the Clamden night. The whizzing of the wind in his ears was far more hear of his passage. A low, du]] than anyone else wo hiss of the tires on the asphalt was the only sound, the only sign that he had been and gone. The houses moved quickly past, some dimly lighted, some dark, but mostly he saw trees, upright stalks rushing past like pickets in a fence.
The deeper into the night he rode, the more his civilized self fell away and he became the thing he feared. It was the part he loathed most about himself-the part that gave him the greatest satisfaction. The part of him that Karen knew and didn't want to know. The part he spent his life trying to control-the part that controlled him. The part he tried to deny but could n(-ver refuse.
In his mind the houses that had seemed warm and secure now looked vulnerable and deluded in their sense of security, little more than eggshells, pathetic, contemptible defenses against the creatures of the night that dwelled both within and without them. The veneer of civilization was so thin, so useless against a real assault.
In the clearing in the trees made by the road, a shape was silhouetted against the sky at the top of a rise. Becker was approaching it, pedaling up the hill, and he saw it turn and look at him, the long, canine head turned in threequarter profile. The animal stared at Becker, watched his strange form coming at it, half wheels, half human.
It gauged his speed, his threat, sniffed the air to reaffirm what it thought it saw. Finally, with a casualness born of craft and confidence, the coyote trotted off the road, unhurried, into the surrounding darkness. Becker sped past it, glancing in the direction it had gone. There was nothing to see.
In the far distance he could see a car's headlights brightening the sky as it rounded a curve. Becker waited until he was close to the turn in the road, then pulled softly onto the shoulder on the inside of the bend so the lights would not pick him out, and walked the bike into the cover of the trees, where he watched as the car came around the corner, its lights cutting a fleeting swath through the blackness, illuminating a house, a car in a driveway, toys in a yard, then, squaring itself on the road, the pavement in front of it, a yellow line down the center gleaming dully. He did not recognize the driver, caught just a glimpse of a man, looking tired, driving by rote on the familiar way home. When the car had passed, Becker looked afterit, watching the trees and fences and stone walls being illuminated in turn, a flash of porch rail, the glint of a second-story window, and the distant canopy of leaves all taking brief turns in the spotlight before fading once more into the surrounding black.
He pedaled on until he was within a mile of his destination. He pulled off the road once more and covered the reflectors in the spokes and on the pedals and the front and back of the bike with black electrician's tape before continuing. He would not be betrayed by light now, not picked out by any headlights or flashlight beams or random lights from windows. To be seen he would have to be seen, and that by someone who was looking not only for him but directly at him. His only danger now was being silhouetted as the coyote had been, but from this point on it was all downhill, he would be below a crest all the way. Becker pushed off once more, the wind of his passing sounding to his ears like a scythe through the air.