“Impotent! Is Fuller impotent?” The killer was not.
“I meant figuratively, Dave. Fuller did report one instance when he couldn’t get it up with some bimbo he actively didn’t like. Couldn’t do the cold-hearted fucking all macho types are supposed to do. Good for him, I say; got enough cold-hearted fucking in this world. Whyn’t you pour yourself a drink, pull up a chair, and we’ll talk about cold-hearted fucking and how it’s gonna kill half the population of the planet with AIDS.”
“Another time, Al. Stay with Fuller.”
“Not much more to stay with. Except for that one time, he seems to be a young man with average appetites and the ability to satisfy them, except for this one kink.”
“What kink?”
“What we’ve been talking about. The poor schmuck doesn’t feel anything. He has urges, they start to keep him up at night, then he goes to a bar, finds a woman, and fucks her. But he doesn’t feel anything for her, so he throws away her number, goes home, and forgets until the urge comes back. But he can’t call the last one because he probably doesn’t even remember her name by then, so he gets another one, doesn’t feel anything, and so on. It’s a round robin of emotional anesthesia that feeds on itself until life in general and sex in particular are about as exciting and joyous as brushing your teeth. So he went to Bunny.”
“And?”
“And it was slow going, but Bunny thought they were making progress.”
Some progress. If Latovsky was right, Adam Fuller had lured five women into the woods, sliced them open from pubis to rib cage, then shot his doctor in the face. Adam Fuller was doing great.
“Why pick on him?” Cohen asked.
Latovsky couldn’t tell him about a psychic seeing a killer with “doll’s eyes” so he shrugged and said, “Met him here, and he said he was Bunny’s patient, so I got curious.”
It was pitch dark in O.R. 4 and Adam had to feel along the wall for the switch. He found it and light flooded the operating room, hitting the autoclave against the wall.
Adam pressed the old-fashioned foot pedal, the lid swung open, and steam billowed out. He stripped the paper towels off the scalpel and put the gleaming steel instrument on the tray with others beaded with steam. Half an hour in there and they’d need an electron microscope to find a trace of blood or tissue on it and backcountry cops didn’t have electron microscopes.
He raised his foot, the lid closed, cutting off the hypnotic shine of the instruments in a final puff of steam.
It was over.
He couldn’t risk taking another woman into the woods, but it hadn’t worked with five, it wouldn’t with ten, and he didn’t enjoy the killing. It had never been about killing, as he’d tried to explain to Bunner. But poor Bunny had been too terrified to listen.
He had one last thing to do; find her, and thanks to Latovsky, he finally knew where to look.
Raven Lake.
She had seen Abby die across the lake (he’d gotten that at the dance from Bunner) and called the cops. Latovsky showed up, she somehow convinced him she’d seen a murder across that half a mile of black water, and Latovsky had taken her to Bunner for confirmation. Her seeing Ken’s scars was confirmation, Adam thought, and she’d left Bunner in turmoil and gone back to the house on Raven Lake that Adam’s old man had rented for the summer of ’60 because she lived there.
When he found it, he’d find her.
He’d use the Colt one last time, then drop it in one of the twenty or so lakes between Raven Lake and Glenvale. It would sink into the bottom slime and stay there until the lake dried up at the end of some future ice age, and Lieutenant Latovsky could shove his suspicions up his ass.
He wanted to enjoy the huge cop’s imminent defeat, but that was no more possible than pitying the women. All he got for all his trouble was a hatful of rain.
He should get that line out of his head, because it smacked of self-pity and he didn’t pity himself any more than he had Abby or Bunner.
He turned out the lights, left the O.R., and went down the dim, deserted corridor to the elevators. Ellen would be awake by now, but not aware enough to take in what he had to tell her. And he wanted to be sure she understood that the final diagnosis warranted the misery they’d put her through, but was not a death sentence. Far from it and with any luck she’d have her garden this time next year. “Next year,” he whispered to himself as he pushed the down button. “Next year, Ellen.”
“Go on.” Lem Meers put a Labatt’s in front of Latovsky and took one for himself. He sat across from Latovsky at the kitchen table with his storklike legs stretched to the side. Joan Meers was in the den watching the news, and the dinner dishes were done even though it was just six. The Meerses were mountain people and they ate at five and went to bed at nine. “If it ain’t happened by nine, t’ain’t gonna by nine thirty,” Meers liked to twang. The twang was an artifact he reverted to to remind himself and everyone else where he came from.
“It was just a feeling,” Latovsky said, “but it was strong, Lem. Overwhelming. A real case of that good cop instinct you told me never to ignore.”
“And it told you?”
“He killed Bunner.”
“This guy at the funeral.”
Latovsky nodded, and Meers was quiet for a moment. He made the Olympic ring sign on the plastic table cover with the beer bottle, looked at it, then up at Latovsky. “Tell me about him,” he said quietly.
Latovsky did, and Meers looked gaunter than ever and very unhappy by the time Latovsky finished.
“Dave, we can’t do this. You’re talking about a physician, a pillar of the community who’s got the dough and smarts to sue us into the next century.”
“That’s why I’m asking instead of just doing it.”
“And that’s why I’ve got to say no. I can’t go to Linney with ‘cop instinct’ on an M.D. at Glenvale General.” Roger Linney was county prosecutor.
“I don’t want you to go to Linney. Just tell me I can go after Fuller on the sly.”
“Not on the sly or any other way unless you got something that can stretch to probable cause. Do you?”
“No...” Latovsky looked down at the table.
“Then Adam Fuller gets treated exactly like the others on Bunner’s patient list until you do. How many, by the way?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. It’ll take weeks.”
They were quiet. Meers studied the rings on the table cover, Latovsky swigged the beer, then asked, “What if Cohen says Fuller’s the likeliest?”
“Then we’re over the hump of reasonable if not probable cause and can claim good will. Will he say it?”
“Probably not,” Latovsky mumbled.
“Then Fuller’s just one of twenty-six until you do get something and if you spend an extra second on him without justification that sounds vaguely legally plausible, you’ll queer the whole case. You got such a justification?”
A psychic told me, Latovsky thought.
Lem Meers was smart and imaginative, incorruptible and fair; he was the best boss on the troop, the force, maybe in the world, but Latovsky couldn’t expect him to pop for a psychic from Connecticut and he shook his head.
“What about motive?” Meers asked. “Or you think he’s just a nut who had to kill someone and Bunner won the toss.”
“I don’t think he’s a nut, Lem...” Latovsky took a long, shaky breath and said, “I think he confessed to Bunner, then panicked when he realized what he’d done, and killed him.”