“So what am I supposed to do?” he said. “Climb up the lamppost?”
“I told you we shoulda cut her down,” Monoghan said.
“We’d better wait for the lab boys,” Carella said.
“What for?”
“They’ll want to look at the rope.”
“You ever get a case where there was fingerprints on a rope?” Monoghan said.
“No, but...”
“So let’s cut her down.”
Blaney looked uncertain. He glanced up at the dead girl. He looked at Carella.
“They may know what kind of knot it is,” Carella said.
“It’s a hangman’s knot,” Monoghan said. “Anybody can see it’s a hangman’s knot. Don’t you ever go to the movies? Don’t you ever watch television?”
“I meant the one around the post. The one tied around the post. The other end of the rope.”
Blaney looked at his watch.
“I was playing poker,” he said to no one.
The Mobile Crime Unit arrived some ten minutes later. By that time, there were three more radio motor patrol cars at the scene, and the ambulance had arrived from Mercy General. The crowd had swelled behind the barricades. Everybody was waiting for them to cut the dead girl down. They wanted to see if she was really dead or if this was a movie they were shooting here. None of the people in the crowd had ever seen a person hanging from a lamppost before. Most of them had never seen a person hanging anywhere before. The girl just kept hanging there, it sure looked as if she was real, and it also looked as if she was dead. The boys from the PU took pictures of the hanging girl and the area around the lamppost and the rope tied and knotted around the post. The lab technicians held a brief consultation with Carella, and it was thought advisable to preserve the knot as it was tied, rather than untying it to lower the girl; they would want to look over the knot more carefully at the lab. It was decided that they would cut the girl down, after all.
Monoghan walked around nodding righteously, his hands in his pockets; it was what he’d suggested all along. The Emergency Service truck had arrived by then, and a sergeant unhooked a ladder from the side of the truck and asked one of the lab technicians where he wanted the rope cut, and the technician indicated a place about midway between the hangman’s knot behind the girl’s neck and the knot where the rope had been fastened to the post. The Emergency Service cops spread a safety net under the hanging girl, and the sergeant went up the ladder and cut the rope with a bolt cutter.
The girl dropped into the net.
A cheer went up from the crowd behind the barricades.
Blaney examined the girl, pronounced her dead, and ventured the opinion that the cause of death — pending autopsy — was fracture of the cervical vertebrae.
It was a little after 4:00 A.M. when the ambulance carried her off to the morgue.
The first time was always easiest.
There was an element of complete surprise involved, none of these women ever thought anything like this would happen to them, even here in this city where surely they knew it was a common occurrence. All he had to do was ambush them, show them the knife, and they turned to jelly.
The other times were difficult, very difficult.
A lot of patience was involved.
Some of them wouldn’t even budge from their apartments after the first time, so terrified were they of what had happened to them, so fearful that it might happen again. After a few weeks, though sometimes a month, they’d come outside again, usually accompanied by a husband or a boyfriend, and never at night, they were still afraid of going out at night. You had to be patient.
And you had to check the calendar.
Eventually, after that first time, they got over the trauma, and they ventured out into the nighttime city alone again, and he was waiting, of course, he was waiting for them, and the surprise was even more total this time, lightning couldn’t strike twice, could it? Ah, but it could. And it did. And the second time, if they recognized him, and some of them did, they usually pleaded that he not do it to them again, they who would impose their will on everyone if they had their way, begging him not to impose his will on them, the irony of it. None of them knew he was watching the calendar, or that his attacks were precisely timed.
After the second time, they became trembling wrecks. Some of them moved to other neighborhoods, or left the city entirely. Others went on long vacations. Still others jumped out of their shoes if an automobile horn sounded three blocks away. They began to think of themselves as helpless victims of something inexplicably evil that had chosen them as targets out of all the women in this city. One of them hired a bodyguard. But the others — well, you get over things, you go on with your life. You spend a few hours out of your apartment in the daytime, never wandering too far from home, and eventually you extend your time outdoors and you expand the range of your excursions, and before long you were back to what you supposed was normal, though you were still fearful of the night, and always accompanied by friends or relatives after dark. Until, eventually, you began to think you were safe again, it was all behind you, and the first few times you went out alone at night and nothing happened to you, you figured it was all a thing of the past, it had happened twice, yes, but it could never in a million years happen again. But what you did not know was that he was watching the calendar, and it would happen again because he was very patient, he had all the time in the world.
The third time — one of them had fought him as if her very life depended on not being violated again. He had cut that one. Cut her on the face, and her screaming had stopped, and she had submitted to him, whimpering and bleeding. The third time — one of them had promised him extravagant sums of money if only he’d leave her alone. He had done to her what he wished to do, and then had come after her a week later, into her apartment this time, he knew she lived alone, and had done it to her a fourth time, she was the one he’d caught a total of four times. It became almost impossible to carry out the plan after the third time because by then they knew they weren’t being chosen as random victims, they knew that somebody was after them specifically, and that if it had happened three times it could happen four or five or a dozen times, there was no stopping him from doing whatever he wanted whenever he chose.
All he had to do was keep patient.
Keep watching the calendar.
Keep ticking off the dates.
Only once had he been entirely successful the first time out.
He’d followed her afterward. He knew where she went. He knew he’d succeeded. He’d left her alone after that, except for watching her, and he knew for certain later that she’d been forced to do exactly what he’d planned for her to do all along, and there was such a sweet rush of triumph when he saw her again a month later, watching from a distance, and knew that his plan was viable and sound, and that it could succeed again and again.
The woman tonight was named Mary Hollings.
He had raped her twice.
He had raped her the first time in June. June tenth, to be exact, a Friday night, he had marked the date on his calendar. She’d been out late shopping, and she was carrying a department store shopping bag full of wrapped boxes when he yanked her off the sidewalk and into the alleyway. He’d shown her the knife, held it to her throat, and she’d submitted without a sound, the wrapped boxes lying scattered on the pavement beside the torn shopping bag. She was one of the few who refused to be cowed by the first experience. She was out on the street again, alone, at night, a week later. Cautious, yes, she was not a fool. But fighting her fear with a show of bravado, squarely facing what had happened, refusing to be dominated by it, determined to live her life as she had before he’d entered it.