Since then he had learned how to keep risk to a minimum while maximizing his pleasures; he was, indeed, conditioned to think in those terms, since they were essentially identical to one’s goals in real estate investment.
Almost from the beginning he had stopped having intercourse with his partners. It was a pleasant sensation, certainly, to have one’s sexual organ within a slippery envelope of flesh at the critical moment, but physical sensation of that sort played such a minor role in the excitement of the act as to render it almost irrelevant. And it was virtually impossible to achieve physical intimacy of that sort without leaving traces — pubic hair, semen, each capable of yielding no end of information to a trained forensic pathologist. On top of that, the act left traces upon oneself, and there was always the chance of catching a disease. While there was undeniable poetic justice in the notion of a woman infecting her killer with something at the least loathsome and at the worst life-threatening, he had no desire to afford one of his victims an opportunity for that sort of revenge.
So he tried keeping his clothing on, and the pleasure was no less intense for it. His orgasm came not as a result of friction between his penis and another object but as the pure inevitable response to his mental excitement. He usually pressed against a woman when he killed her, but he didn’t have to in order to reach full release.
But that, too, had a messy aftermath. He’d have to wash his underwear or throw it out, and sometimes his trousers had to make a trip to the dry cleaner. It took a while to hit on the solution, in part because he wasn’t looking for one at first; for the first year or more, each killing was followed by a vow that he would never kill again, and so there seemed little reason to seek a better way to manage it.
He tried putting on a condom first. That worked, certainly, but there was something ridiculous about it, and he hated it. And then, on one occasion when impulse and circumstance provided him with the opportunity to kill a very pretty waitress in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant in Houston (lying on the asphalt between two parked cars, crushing her windpipe with a tire iron), he had used all the strength available to him to hold back his orgasm.
It was enormously frustrating, but the act was thrilling all the same, and he’d simply hurried back to his motel room to stretch naked on his bed, reliving the episode in his mind while he relieved himself manually. He masturbated again the following morning, but this time he held back his ejaculation to defer his pleasure, and in so doing he made an astonishing discovery: it was possible to have an orgasm without ejaculating.
Since then he had learned that he was not the first person to find this out. A whole school of yoga practiced the retention of semen in sexual activity, and it seemed to be a part of various Chinese disciplines as well. Something was released — some kind of energy, something that demanded to be released — but the ejaculation was held back and the semen retained. At first when you did this you wound up with an ache in the pit of your stomach and a feeling of uncomfortable fullness in your loins, but as you became proficient at it and used to it the sensation was diminished, and what ache you did feel was not unpleasant.
And you weren’t scattering your seed that way. Instead your system reabsorbed it, and retained its energy. You were stronger, and you could repeat the sex act almost immediately, and each further repetition, instead of draining you, simply energized you more.
He trained himself, practicing constantly through self-stimulation until he had mastered the new technique. Something he read suggested he could increase his muscular control by an exercise which involved cutting off the flow of urine in midstream. He did this, and developed whatever muscle was involved, but it was mental exercise that played the greater role. You had to build a filter into the mind so that it held back the passage of seed but allowed the spill of orgasmic release. He had some failures along the way, but he had more successes, and eventually he retained his semen as a matter of course, without much conscious effort at all.
Once he was able to do this regularly when he killed women, any thoughts he had about stopping the killings came to a permanent end. Evidently there was something in the passage of seed that engendered depression and remorse, because he felt neither once he ceased to ejaculate. He was still careful not to kill too often, he still sought to minimize risk, and he still had to take pains from time to time to keep his conscience at bay. But he knew he was not going to give all this up, and he didn’t even delude himself that he wanted to.
He left Bethany on the ground, screened from the farm road by a clump of brush. He piled her clothes beside her and weighted them down with her duffel bag. He went through the articles at the top of her handbag, wiping off anything he could have touched that might hold a print. He kept the canister of Mace.
On the way back to Columbia, he stopped for another hitchhiker, another college girl, this one returning for the summer session. She was an open-faced blonde and she reminded him a little of the sisters who’d given him the finger as he drove away from them. She was more solidly built, though, with a sort of bovine cast to her features.
She was silent in the seat beside him, and he didn’t attempt to make conversation with her. He let himself savor the memory of Bethany and enjoyed a few brief fantasies of repeating the act with this blond girl, whose name he did not know. He could drive her up the same farm road, he could leave her dead behind the same clump of brush.
Instead, he drove her all the way into Columbia and dropped her off at her dormitory, then found his way back to I-70 and continued toward St. Louis.
If he’d found her before he found Bethany, he would have done her without a moment’s hesitation. Or, if she’d been irresistibly attractive, he might not have let the episode with Bethany keep him from having her, too. But she just wasn’t that appealing, and he wasn’t that ravenous.
In St. Louis he checked into a motel out toward the airport, unpacked and took a shower. He called a couple of realtors and made appointments for the next several days. He spoke to a man at the firm he used to manage his rental properties in the area, and handled some business over the phone. He relaxed awhile in front of the television set, then put on a tie and jacket and drove downtown for a big meal at Tony’s. He drank a half bottle of wine with his veal and had coffee and a brandy in the lounge. After dinner he walked for a couple of blocks to clear his head before collecting his car from the attendant and driving back to the motel.
In the morning he saw one of the realtors he had called, and then dropped in on his property management people just because he was in the neighborhood. He had a light lunch with the man he’d talked to on the telephone the previous afternoon, learned more than he cared to know about a local political scandal, and didn’t discuss business at all.
In the afternoon he went to a supermarket and pushed a cart up one aisle and down the next. He took something off a shelf every now and then and put it in the cart, but he wasn’t really shopping. He was looking at women. It was a wonderful place to observe them because they were remarkably unselfconscious, totally absorbed in the business of shopping and unaware that anyone might be looking at them. There were several very nice women in the supermarket, and he walked the aisles in a constant state of physical excitement.