He closed the trunk lid and, as he did, got a sickly, coppery-sweet whiff of rancid blood from the plastic trash bag.
“Gotta get going,” Adam said.
“So soon?” his father said.
“Yeah... got a date.”
That brought them to attention.
“What kind of date?” his father asked.
“With a woman, Pop. A doctor in fact, head of pediatrics at the hospital.”
Claire watched him with her narrow gray eyes.
“Lady doctor’s gotta be over thirty,” his father said disapprovingly.
“So’m I, Pop. Way over. Got the trash ready?”
He took a week’s worth of his father’s trash to the dump on his monthly visits, had been doing it since the first woman, Eileen Hale. It had become, as he’d wanted it to, an established habit no one paid attention to.
“All ready. Over there by the cellar door,” his father said.
“Where’re you taking this lady doctor?” Claire asked.
He was glad he had something impressive to tell her. “To the Spring Fling dance at the Glenvale Country Club. I joined last month.”
Seagulls screamed over the dump, three hundred miles from the ocean. When Adam was a kid, bears used to come here to forage, but they were long gone; nothing left but gulls and rats and the sickening old man with matted hair and one eye with a milky haze over it who guarded the dump.
He watched as Adam put the neatly tied bundles on the conveyor belt sliding toward the maw of the incinerator. Huge stacks that were supposed to keep particulate from falling back on the town belched out black smoke that blew north and east, back to the mountains, where it fell as acid rain and killed the trees and lakes. His clothes, stiff with Abby’s blood, would be part of it.
He watched the bundles. The old man watched him with his good eye.
The gulls screamed. Adam looked up, watched them wheel, then looked back. The bundles entered the incinerator and he nodded at the old man and trudged up the rise from the dump to the car. He opened the trunk. The smell was already fading; a stick of solid air freshener would get rid of it by morning. He took the shoebox out of the trunk and set it on the passenger seat.
5
The message light was on again when Latovsky woke up. He listened, hoping it was Bunner, but Lucci’s voice said despondently, “Meers did it, Dave. He met the press and sounded like a retard on smack. Where the fuck were you?” and the message ended. Poor Meers; he’d call him later, tell him he was sorry.
“S’okay,” Meers would respond. “I should be able to sound coherent in front of those assholes on my own, Dave. Don’t apologize.”
The next message was from George Rule, the circuit medical examiner who did their autopsies.
“Hi, Dave. It’s five thirty and I’m still at Glenvale General. I’m done with Reese and I’ll wait for you to call or the rain to let up, whichever comes first.”
It was after six and still pouring. Rule probably wanted to get home to Glens Falls and salvage something of his Saturday night. Woman-in-the-Woods was screwing up everyone’s weekend.
Lousy label for it. Latovsky thought. He was surprised the press hadn’t come up with something catchier by now.
He called the path lab at Glenvale General and Rule was still there.
“Had my coat on,” he said. “Hope this crap doesn’t turn to sleet.”
“Hope not,” Latovsky said, though it probably would.
“You want highlights, or chapter and verse?”
“Highlights. I’ll read the rest on Monday.”
“There aren’t any highlights,” Rule said morosely. “It’s exactly like the other four, with one possibly notable, possibly meaningful exception.”
Latovsky waited.
“I found more condom lubricant, Dave.” Rule made it sound important.
“So?”
“So, more lubricant suggests more condoms, more condoms suggests more contact. They got it on at least twice, maybe three times. The lady turned him on, Dave. Really turned him on...” Rule choked off, then came back. “How could he? He made love to her, wanted her enough to do it maybe three times in maybe half an hour... you’d think that’d give him pause, make him want to keep her alive to do it again the next day and the next and...” He choked off again. His voice was lower, calmer when he spoke again. “Same brand as before: Trojans—which you can only get in fifty million drug stores. Same kind of instrument, too. Short, extremely sharp, probably excellent steel.”
“Scalpel?”
“Maybe, as I’ve said before. Or maybe a good vegetable knife, or whittler, or hobby blade. And maybe he’s a doctor or a nurse or orderly... or someone who buys good steel knives at Bloomingdales at the mall.”
“Okay, okay. What else?”
“She was healthy, had all her teeth, and gave birth to at least one child. She ate about seven last night, drank several ounces of sour mash and beer from about nine to about ten... then died. I’d say about ten minutes before Lucci got there, from what he found. The slice was good, clean, fast, and precise, just like the others, and it took this one... it took...”
He faltered; they all faltered when it came to this part, because it seemed... it looked... the evidence suggested... that the cuts were deep enough to kill, shallow enough to keep the women alive as long as possible.
Rule collected himself again and went on. “Took this one maybe twenty minutes and she died of shock and loss of blood. Twenty minutes, Dave—for twenty minutes she lay on her back, watching her guts dry out....”
While he watched her face in the moonlight, Bunner had said in his kitchen this morning.
“Twenty fuckin’ minutes!”
“Easy, George,” Latovsky said.
“Sorry. I just can’t get used to it. You’d think I would by the fifth one...”
His voice was high and tight, and Latovsky said firmly, “What else, George?”
“Else? Nothing else. We found polyester fibers from some cheap blue jacket, the kind you buy at K Mart. Meecham’s checking but we both know it’s a dead end. We’ll have tox studies by Tuesday, but she didn’t die of poisoning. Oh, and she was HIV negative.”
“Too bad.”
“Yeah. Be nice if she gave the bastard AIDS. And that is that, David, except...” He hesitated. Latovsky waited again, then Rule said, “I’ve got to say this. It’s not medical or scientific, or even very forensic, I guess, but I’ve got to say it because it might matter.”
“I’m listening.”
“These cuts he makes are very clean, very precise—”
“Like a surgeon,” Latovsky’s voice leaped.
“No. They don’t take special knowledge, just special... coolness. He doesn’t come when he cuts. The cutting’s not the fun, the killing’s not the fun, something else is. He kills coolly, dispassionately, then has his fun, whatever it is.”
“Sex after death?”
“Don’t know, but I don’t think so. And these’re not rapes. All evidence says the sex is totally consensual. There is no violence of any kind, no beating or extra slashing or torture or anything except that single cool, precise, and killing cut. So he’s not killing to get off. Something else is going on.”
Rule’s voice was heavy with significance, but Latovsky knew something else was always going on. Inner motives were crap unless you lucked into one who killed for money or revenge, to relieve a burden... or get her daughter on a Texas cheerleading squad. That one had to take the gold cup.