Tee looked up and down the block as he walked to his car. Lights were on, televisions playing. The excitement of the afternoon with cop cars and flashing sirens was over, and the good citizens had already stopped thinking about the commotion in the Dyce house, whatever it was. He wished he could do the same. Traffic violations and the occasional breaking and entering were all he aspired to. He didn’t want any part of communing with goddamned spirits, and the spirit of a mass murderer at that.
Thinking of Dyce lying on his hospital bed twelve hours ago. Tee still could not picture the innocuous, defeated little guy killing anyone, much less eight or more. It had almost seemed to Tee that they were after the wrong man, that the skeletons had been inherited or had crawled in there on their own to die. Any explanation seemed more likely than thinking it was the man with his face punched in on the hospital bed, the guy with the girlfriend who thought she was his mother-crime in Clamden had not prepared him for this. Everybody cheated a little bit, everybody drove too fast and lied on his taxes, and the sons of the privileged were just as apt to get into drugs as the children of the poor-maybe more likely depending on the price of the drug-but when it came to actual crime, in Tee’s experience that was still done by criminals. The kind who started out bad and stayed bad, and they were easy to recognize. Tee knew who they were and where they worked and where they lived. He wanted his monsters to wear horns and spit fire and felt no remorse about not recognizing the man for what he was, but Becker was furious, berating himself during the whole frantic search of the hospital and the neighborhood and the town.
“I knew,” Becker had said. “I knew but I didn’t say so.”
“Knew? How could you know?”
“I knew.”
“Did you have any proof? Did you even know his crime? What could you have done even if you did know?”
“I knew, and he realized it, and I didn’t act and he did, and that’s why he’s gone.”
“We’ll get him,” Tee had said, wondering how. This was not an isolated town in Nebraska. He could not throw up roadblocks and seal off the city. Given a car and a fifteen minute head start, Dyce could be in any of three adjoining towns or a few miles from Hartford. Given an hour of lead time, he could have vanished as completely as a rat down a sewer. As far as they knew, he had had at least three hours’ head start.
The mess would only get worse, he realized. Tomorrow there would be the press and the Hartford television people, and after that probably the national television as well. Mass murder was good for a minute or two on the evening news. But the actual police-work was already in other hands. Drooden was a bastard and deserved all the trouble he could get. Wherever Dyce was now. Tee was glad it was no longer Clamden.
As he drove off he realized that he could see no light coming from the Dyce house.
Standing in the bedroom, Becker played the beam of the flashlight slowly over the heavy oaken furniture, the thick drapes, the simple, almost monastic bed. Clearly not a room where Dyce spent any time; there were no comforts, no books by the bedside, no television. Becker held the beam on the silver-backed hair brushes atop the dresser. Old, like the furniture. None of it was rare enough to be antique; it was just old. Either he had a taste for it, or he had inherited it, but in either case, it was a link to the past. And what keeps you in the past, Becker wondered. What happened then? Or is still happening? Whatever it was, it would not be in the bedroom.
Becker went cursorily through the kitchen again, but that was simply a workplace, a room in which to butcher and boil and bury, a place of grisly utility, but not the place to catch the spirit of the man.
Dyce dwelt in the living room: Becker could feel it. It was the only room in the house where anyone had actually lived. Was it the room in which they had died? Like all the windows, these were covered and sealed with soundproofing material. That meant there was noise, that meant they were alive when he brought them here. Anesthetic in the syringe, the syringe in the car. So he drugged them when he took them, brought them into the house drugged. The garage was at the back of the house. Becker returned to the kitchen and looked into the backyard, playing the light on the garage and then the driveway. If he parked in the right spot, it was no more than four steps to the kitchen door. The house shielded him from the view of the neighbors on one side, the car on the other. Four steps in the dark of night and into the house with a body, drugged and helpless, into the house, into the kitchen. If he killed them then, while they were still unconscious, there was no need for soundproofing.
But he wouldn’t do it then, Becker knew. There was no sense to it. More to the point, there was no joy to it. Drug them in the car, drag them into the house, and chop them up? Why? What would he get out of it? He was getting something out of it. He’d killed many times; he wouldn’t take the risk if it offered him nothing in return.
So he kept them alive for a while. That’s why he needed the soundproofing, that’s why there was anesthetic in the syringe and not poison.
Becker returned to the living room. And he kept them alive in here. Where he lived.
Switching on the lights for a moment, squinting against the sudden brightness, Becker studied the room. There was only one place where Dyce would have sat. He turned off the lights and sat in the overstuffed chair. It was easier in the dark.
He had told Tee that it was an exercise in imagination, but that was not how Becker thought of it. He had to study his quarry’s lair the way an anthropologist would study the cave paintings of early man. Those paintings went a long way toward explaining the man behind them. Becker hoped to learn as much about Dyce by sitting in his living room and absorbing his presence. He sat in the dark in Dyce’s chair and breathed the air Dyce had breathed. He let the atmosphere sink in. He unleashed his mind and set it free to wander the room, the house, to seek out Dyce and inhabit his soul.
Sitting in the chair, looking straight ahead, Becker turned on the flashlight. It did not hit the screen of the television set. Why would he align the chair so he could not watch the television without twisting his head-unless he didn’t watch TV. When he sat here and rehashed what he did, dreamed what ghoulish fantasies he needed, what did he look at? The light fell on nothing but space from the chair clear across the room to the wall.
With the lights on, Becker studied the room again. A sawhorse sat under the bookshelf People used saw-horses for table legs sometimes, but one sawhorse in a room full of heavy oaken furniture? Why a piece of makeshift furniture in a room already overcrowded, and why just one? What good was one sawhorse? Probing with the beam of his flashlight, Becker looked for another support. The sofa arm was the only other surface of the same height in the room.
There were marks on the floor where the sawhorse had been placed with weight on it. The scratches in the wood were small and only in one spot. Becker put the sawhorse on the scratches and judged the distance to the sofa arm. At eye level, on the wall above the sawhorse, was a mark on the wallpaper, a black horizontal line where something had dug into the wallpaper, the deep, regular mark of something heavy pressing over a period of time. The only structure in the room of the right length was the bookshelf Removing the books, Becker placed the bottom shelf against the mark on the wall. The shelf leaned against the wall at an angle of about ten degrees off the vertical, not quite upright, but close. Easing the shelf horizontally, it fit neatly across the sawhorse and the arm of the sofa.
Becker returned to the chair and looked straight away, then directed the beam the way his gaze fell. The beam hit the bookshelf about a foot away from the sofa arm. Where the head would be, thought Becker. He saw Dyce sitting in his chair, watching his victims. You sat and watched them. How long? How did they die? Were you watching the death? Is that what you needed? You liked to see them die, didn’t you? And in what manner did they die? Slowly? Of course, slowly. That’s why you brought them home. To watch them die. The forensic people would figure out how. Probably. But how was not what really interested Becker. He wanted to know why. He wanted to know what Dyce saw when he saw men dying slowly. He wanted to know what pleasure it gave him, what he thought it meant. There was a wire crossed there, some permanent glitch in the circuitry of the brain. Becker wanted-no, not wanted. Needed. Becker needed to see with Dyce’s eyes and feel with Dyce’s heart-without becoming Dyce. Tee had called it psychic shit. A psychologist might call it extreme empathy. Becker did not have a name for it; he just did it. He did not think of it as anything mystical. It was more a matter of reasoning by analogy. I line my faulty wiring up next to his, Becker thought, and see if any current jumps the gap.