No cute crap, though. No blood smears on the walls, no lipstick marks on the dead woman’s forehead. He was not playing a game with the police. The thrill was not in tempting fate, in almost getting caught. The thrill — and God knew it was thrill enough — the thrill was in the doing.
Mrs. Minnick, whose round plumpness had inspired him in Denver, had never been at risk. He had been careful from the beginning never to select a woman whom he knew personally, or one who could be connected with him in any conceivable way. The simple act of murder was the only tie between him and his victims.
That was his rule, but he had broken it once. One afternoon he’d been showing a house in Kansas City. The prospective tenant was a divorced woman, new in town; her children were in school and she was looking at houses and apartments, and oh, she was just too delicious to resist, with thin wrists and ankles and lank blond hair and librarian’s glasses and rabbity front teeth, not traditionally pretty but wonderfully desirable.
He asked her enough questions to determine that no one knew where she was. And it was still impossibly risky, because anyone in the neighborhood might have noticed her car parked in the driveway, but he weighed the risks and decided she was worth it. God, she was nice!
He picked up a heavy glass ashtray and knocked her unconscious with a series of blows to the back of the head. He used a cord from one of the floor lamps to tie her hands and feet, and gagged her with her own pantyhose. He hurried down to his own car and fetched a large screwdriver from the trunk. She was conscious by the time he got back, flopping around on the carpet like a beached fish.
He talked to her for a while, and he felt her tits through her clothes and reached up under her skirt to fondle her. Then, when he just couldn’t stand it another minute, he thrust the blade of the screwdriver up one of her nostrils and into her brain.
Afterward, in the quietest part of the night, he carried her out of the house and loaded her into the trunk of her car. He drove to Crown Center and left the car at a municipal parking ramp. He took a cab back to his rental house and drove his own car home. He threw the screwdriver down a storm sewer, and he tossed the pantyhose and the lamp cord into a trash can. A day later he vacuumed the carpet where she’d flopped about and put a new cord on the lamp.
Now, while Marilee slept, he made himself a cup of tea with milk and sugar and took it to his den. He put the TV on but devoted most of his attention to the newspaper, giving the real estate listings and the financial pages a thorough review.
His daughter came home around ten-thirty. He heard her and called to her, and she came in and sat with him for a few minutes before going upstairs. After she’d kissed him and left he remembered he hadn’t said anything to her about missing her graduation.
Well, he’d tell her the next day. Or leave it for Marilee to handle. Anyway, he didn’t think Jennifer would be all that torn up about it.
She’d get a good present, and that ought to take some of the sting out of his absence.
He put the paper aside and thought, by no means for the first time, of the clashing inconsistency of his life. He loved his wife and daughter, was indeed devoted to them, and at the very same time he was passionately addicted to the sport of killing women for pleasure. For that was what he did; he hunted them down and killed them with the same delight that some other men killed deer — not for the chase or for the venison, but for the unutterable joy of killing.
The women he preyed on were other men’s wives, other men’s daughters. How would he feel if someone else used Jennifer as he had used Cindi in Denver? How would he feel if some other man gazed greedily into Marilee’s eyes while she died?
He forced the thoughts aside. They had come before, they would come again. He forced them aside.
And thought instead about some of the things he had done over the past eight years and some of the women he had done them to. He gave himself up to his memories and let himself be stirred by them.
A shame he hadn’t had more time in Denver. She was nice, Cindi, and he would have liked taking his time with her. And yet there was something especially exciting about the speed of it. Just a couple of minutes and she was gone, almost before she knew what was happening to her.
He got up, paced back and forth across the oriental carpet. Jesus, he’d done Cindi just a week ago and he was ready to go again. Usually it was a month or more before he felt this agitated, but he felt like going out right this minute.
He wouldn’t, of course. But neither would he wait a month. There was no real need to space his killings, so long as he didn’t do anything to attract attention. It was not as though there was an annual bag limit for hunters. Women were not an endangered species. They were all over the place; the country was teeming with them.
The summer stretched out before him, warmly inviting. There was no reason he couldn’t make himself a gift of the next three months. His business dealings would largely run themselves. At the same time, the prospect of business would justify extended absences; all he had to do was announce that he had a big deal taking shape, and he could be out of town for the whole summer without ruffling anyone’s feathers. He need only call home a few times a week, and drop in once or twice to take care of business locally, and he could have the whole summer to himself.
And it was still two weeks until Midsummer Eve. His count stood at fifty-three now. By the first day of autumn, how great a string might he have?
Seventy? Eighty? A hundred?
He remembered John Randall Spears thundering at them during the real estate seminar. “If your properties yield up a positive cash flow, there is nothing in the world to prevent you from acquiring more of them. If you can own one house you can own a hundred houses, you can own a thousand houses. There is no limit to the amount of wealth you can create. There is no limit to the amount of property you can own!”
No limit.
Eight
There was A unit vacant at the Pine Haven, over near the southern tip of the U, and Guthrie and Jody took it for the night. Jody sprawled on his bed, eating Wendy’s french fries and sipping a cold one from the 7-Eleven. The CNN announcer was telling of an earthquake in Guatemala, a drought-induced famine in Africa, a terrorist bombing in the north of Ireland. When they cut to a correspondent for a report on acid rain, Guthrie asked him if he minded if he turned it off.
“Hell, go right ahead,” he said. “Who wants to listen to all that shit?” He yawned, scratched himself. “Get me some clothes tomorrow. Nothing like taking a good shower and putting on shorts you been wearing three days straight. Or is it four?” He yawned again. “Pick up some clothes and a sack to haul ’em in. These boots worked out better than I was afraid they might, but I’ll get me some soft shoes, too, so I can change if I want. And I got to tell you, hoss, these socks are ripe.”
“You didn’t have to tell me.”
“Already got the word, huh? Sorry about that. Sara and Thom’ll need knapsacks, too, instead of those suitcases they brought. I’d think we’ll be able to find whatever we need here in Bend.”
“I would think so.”
“Canteens for everybody, too. A little ways east of here it starts getting dry, and it might be pushing it to have two people sharing a canteen like you and I been doing. Guthrie? How you feel about all this, boss?”
“About all what?”
“Everybody invitin’ theirselves to your party.”
He thought about it. At length he said, “She’s special. Sara.”
“Yeah. Guthrie, she don’t appear blind. When she looks at you—”
“I know.”
“The boy’s all right, too. Thom. Thom with an H — he’s right particular about that H.”