"And maybe that goddamn kid is talking to the press-everybody else is blabbing."
Greave punched the tape, and they listened to it again and Greave said, "Yeah, he said Nethinims. N-E-T-H-I-N-I-M-S or N-E-T-H-A-N-I-M-S."
Lucas looked in the phone book, Lester tried directory assistance. "Nothing."
Lucas, walking around, staring at the ceiling, came back to Lester. "Was I on the news? In the paper, about being on the case?"
Lester showed a thin grin: Lucas attracted a lot of publicity over the years. Sometimes it chafed. "No."
"This guy said he knew I was investigating, because he'd seen it in the paper…"
"Well, we got the Pioneer Press around here somewhere, and all kinds of Star-Tribunes, you could look-but I don't think so, I read the stories."
"TV or radio?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe. They know you by sight-they know your car. There were all kinds of reporters around that school. Or maybe somebody interviewed Manette or Dunn and they mentioned something. Or that guy on the radio last night…"
"Huh." And he thought about the kid he'd seen in the game store that morning, sitting down. The kid who'd left so quickly, who looked like the right guy.
"You want me to check out these Nethinims dudes?" Greave asked.
Lucas turned to him, nodded. Greave was okay with books. "Yeah. If you ask around, and nobody knows, check a couple of game stores and see if it's a new game character or set. Then check like, uh, Tolkien's Ring cycle-Lord of the Rings, all that. There're a couple of science fiction stores in town-call and talk to a clerk, see if anybody recognizes the name from a book series… a fantasy series probably."
"The guy sounds like a smart little wiseass," Lester said.
"Yeah." Lucas nodded. "And he can't help proving it. He'll last five days or a week-I just hope somebody's left alive when we get him."
CHAPTER 7
The rape had done something to her, beyond the obvious. Had damaged her.
When Mail had finished with her, she was panicked, injured, in pain-but generally coherent. When Mail had taken Genevieve, she'd argued with him, pleaded.
An hour after that, she began to drift.
She curled on the mattress, stopped talking to Grace, closed her eyes, trembled, shuddered, tightened into a ball. She lost the most elemental sense of what was going on-how much time was passing, where sounds came from, who was in the cell with her.
Grace came to her several times, gave her strawberry soda, tried to get her to eat, took off her own coat and gave it to her mother. This last, the coat, Andi found useful; she huddled under it, away from the naked lightbulb, the Porta-Potti, the stark gray walls. With the coat over her bead, she could almost believe she was at home, dreaming…
She seemed to wake a few times and she spoke with both Grace and Genevieve, and once with George. Sometimes she felt her mind drifting above herself, like a cloud: she watched her body huddled on the mattress, and wondered, why?
But sometimes she felt needle-sharp: she opened her eyes and looked at her knees, pulled up tight to her chin, and felt herself clever not to come out from under the coat.
Beneath it all, she knew her mind simply wasn't functioning correctly. This, she thought during a passing moment of rationality, was insanity. She'd been outside of it for years: this was the first time she'd been inside.
Once she had a dream, or a vision: several men, friendly but hurried, wearing technicians' or scientists' coats, lowered her into a steel cylinder with an interior the size of a phone booth. When she was inside, a steel cap with interlocking flanges was lowered on top of the cylinder, to seal it off. One of the technicians, an intelligent, soft-spoken man with blond hair, glasses, and an easy German accent, said, "You'll only have to last through the heat. If you make it through the heat, you'll be all right…"
Some kind of protection dream, she thought, during one of the lucid moments. The blond man, she thought, she'd seen in a Mercedes-Benz commercial, or a BMW ad. But the man wasn't the thing. The cylinder was: nobody, nothing could get at her in the cylinder.
After a very long time of wandering in and out of consciousness, she closed in on herself. Found a ray of rationality, followed it to a kind of spark, and sat up. Grace was sitting on the concrete floor, facing the computer monitor. The screen was blank.
"Grace, are you all right?"
Andi was whispering. Grace reflexively looked up at the ceiling, as though the whisper might have come from the outside, from God. Then she looked over her shoulder at Andi: "Mom?"
"Yes." Andi rolled up to a sitting position.
"Mom, are you…"
"I'm getting better," Andi said, shaking.
Grace crawled toward her. Her slender daughter looked even thinner, like a winter-hungry fox: "Jeez, Mom, you were arguing with Daddv for a while…"
"John Mail beat me up; he raped me," Andi said. She simply let the word out. Grace had to know what was happening, had to help.
"I know." Grace looked away, tears trickling down her cheek. "But you're better?"
"I think so." Andi pushed herself up to her knees, then stepped off the mattress, shakily, one hand on the wall. Her legs felt like cheese, thick, soft, unreliable, until the blood began to flow again. She pulled her skirt up, pulled her blouse together. He'd taken her bra: she remembered that. The assault was coming back.
She turned her back to her daughter, pulled up her skirt, pulled down her underpants, looked inside: just a spot of blood. She wasn't badly torn.
"Are you okay?" Grace whispered.
"I think so."
"What are we going to do?" Grace asked. "What about Genevieve?"
"Genevieve?" My God. Genevieve. "We've got to think," Andi said, turning around to look at her daughter again. She knelt on the mattress, pulled Grace's head close to her lips and whispered, "The first thing we've got to do is find out if he's listening to us, or if we can talk. We have to keep talking, but I want you to get on my shoulders, and I'm going to try to stand up. Then I want you to look at the ceiling, see if there is anything that might be, you know, a microphone. It probably won't be very sophisticated-he'd just stick a tape recorder microphone in one of the airholes, or something."
Grace nodded, and Andi said, out loud, "I don't think I'm too hurt, but I need some sleep."
"So just lie down for a while," Grace said. Andi squatted, and Grace stepped over her shoulders. She probably weighed eighty pounds, Andi thought. She had to push herself up with help from the wall, but she got straight, and they walked back and forth through the room, Grace's head almost at the ceiling, the girl dragging her fingers across the dark wooden boards, probing into corners, poking her fingers into the airholes in the concrete walls. Finally she whispered, "Okay," and Andi squatted again and Grace got off, shook her head. She'd found nothing.
Andi put her lips close to Grace's ear again. "I'm going to say some things about John Mail. We want to see if he refers to what I say, when he comes down next time. Ask me a question about him. Ask me why he's doing this."
Grace nodded. "Mom, why is Mr. Mail doing this? Why is he hurting you?" The question sounded phony, artificial, but maybe on a crude tape it'd be okay.
Andi counted out a long, thoughtful pause. "I believe he's compensating for sexual problems he had when he was a child. His parents made it worse-he had a stepfather who'd beat him with a club…"
"You mean, he's a sex pervert."
Andi shook her in a warning: don't push it too far…
"There's always the possibility that he has a straight-forward medical problem, a hormone imbalance that we simply don't understand. We did tests, and he seemed normal enough, but we didn't have the tools back then that we do now."
Grace nodded and said, "I hope he doesn't hurt us any more."
Andi said, "So do I. Now try to sleep."
They felt him coming, a sense of impact, a heavy body moving around. Then they heard him on the cellar steps, the footfalls muffled and far away. Grace huddled into her, and Andi felt her mind beginning to slip. No. She had to hold on.