He loved women. And loved killing them.
It was a contradiction, and yet it wasn’t. Did any hunter hate the animal he pursued? Not according to anything he’d ever heard or read. The man who went after lion in Kenya respected the lion, admired its strength and courage, and made a robe of its hide and a trophy of its head. The deer hunter loved his quarry for its beauty and nobility, and he sought the most dominant male with the most glorious rack of antlers and pledged his love with a bullet. There were some animals that men hated, and killed out of hatred, but no one displayed a stuffed rat in the trophy room. You didn’t hunt vermin, you just killed them, and took satisfaction but little pleasure in the killing. When you truly hunted, when you killed for pleasure, you killed something beloved.
He drove to Dallas and spent hours at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport watching the stewardesses. You couldn’t do anything in an airport, or at least he had never seen an opportunity, but it was relaxing to sit in air-conditioned comfort and view a steady parade of attractive uniformed young women. There seemed to be nothing he could do that was not connected with his obsession. If he wasn’t killing he was hunting; if he wasn’t hunting he was planning a hunt; if he wasn’t doing that, he was looking at inaccessible women and fueling his fantasies, or sitting back and relishing the memories of past hunts, past kills.
He stayed three days in Dallas, then drove to Abilene. He saw a couple of people he knew and went to a movie, forcing himself to see it all the way through. It was a good enough film but he got restless from time to time, impatient for it to be over, impatient to get out of there. But he made himself stay where he was.
He spent four nights in Abilene at the Kiva Inn. The room was comfortable, the service excellent, and none of the maids he saw was attractive enough to tempt him, which was just as well. He could see that he had run more than a slight risk at the Day’s Inn in Ardmore. There was now an official record that he had stayed at that motel at the same time that a woman had been strangled to death. It was nothing all by itself, but it was a strand connecting him to his victim, and enough little cords could bind a giant.
When it was time to leave the Kiva it struck him that chambermaids were still safe targets; he only needed to hunt them in motels where he was not himself staying. There were any number of motels where you didn’t have to pass the desk to get to the rooms. Most of the chain motels were that way, so that people could park near their rooms and bring their luggage directly there.
Anyone could go there. You couldn’t get into a locked room without a key, unless you had special skills in that area, but you could go up and down the stairs and walk the halls as readily as if you were a registered guest. And if you did just that around the middle of the morning, say, when the maids were making up the rooms of the early departures, you wouldn’t have any trouble, would you?
The hypothesis seemed worth testing. He checked out of the Kiva and drove half a mile to the Lamplighter, parking in the back lot. He climbed the rear stairs and walked the corridors, and it was no more difficult than he’d thought it might be.
But the maids themselves left something to be desired. They all seemed to be bulky thick-bodied older women whom he found quite lacking in appeal. He was all set to move on when he saw a woman emerge from a room down the hall. She got some fresh towels from her cart and slipped back into the room.
A big strapping girl, fresh off the farm from the look of her. Yellow hair. Turned-up nose. A husky corn-fed girl, big all over.
When he entered the room she told him she thought he’d checked out.
“I did,” he said. This was a no-nonsense girl, not the sort to shuck out of her uniform for a hundred-dollar bill, not even the sort to listen to a proposition along those lines. “I left something in the room,” he explained. “My briefcase.”
“Didn’t see a briefcase here, but you can look.”
He went through the motions of looking, opening the closet door, going through the dresser drawers. God, she was a big healthy thing, bigger than he was, probably as strong or stronger. How was he going to manage this? He should have brought something from the car. The only objects in the room he could hit her with were the lamps, and they were bolted to the dresser and tables to discourage theft.
“Maybe it’s under the bed,” he said. He started to bend, then straightened up in apparent pain, his hand in the small of his back. “Could you do me a favor? Could you look for me? My back’s acting up, and—”
“Sure,” she said, stooping down.
#81.
Driving to Wichita Falls, he worried about the risk he had run. The last thing he wanted the world to know was that a single serial killer was at work, and the quickest way to do that was by repeating himself. In the space of a week he had killed two motel chambermaids in cities just a few hundred miles apart. To make matters worse, he had not taken a weapon to the Lamplighter. It would have been safer to stab the girl. In the end he’d broken her neck, which was different from strangulation, but would it look that different in a police report?
He had tried to vary other circumstances. He’d tucked the other one naked into a closet; he left this one clothed, and on the floor between the two beds. Was that enough of a difference?
He wasn’t sure. The two deaths had occurred on opposite sides of a state line, and that might help. Still, some Texan might remember reading a report of the Oklahoma slaying, or some sharp Ardmore cop might spot a story about the murder in Abilene.
But there wouldn’t be any more chambermaids killed, not in this part of the country, not for months.
Not until it was safe again.
In Wichita Falls he took a room at the Holiday Inn. He put on a pair of swim trunks and went out to the pool, and on his way he passed a black chambermaid with velvety skin the color of cafe au lait. She was just wonderful, and she couldn’t have been safer; he enjoyed her attractiveness knowing she was completely out-of-bounds for him.
He swam for a while, lay in the sun awhile longer, then went back to his room. He called a man he knew in town, a fellow named George Kingland who ran a one-man mortgage company. “I’m in town for a day or two, I’m over at the Holiday Inn,” he said. “How does your schedule look for tomorrow? Can I buy you a lunch?”
“Let’s see, what’s today? Today’s Monday. No, tomorrow’s not so good, Mark, not for lunch. And neither’s Wednesday. Hey, I want to see you, though. You say you’re at the Holiday Inn? The one right downtown here?”
“No, the one east of town. Why?”
“No reason. Look, why don’t you come by my office tomorrow around eleven? I got to take an ol’ boy across the river to Tinker’s around noon and buy him a big plate of catfish, but at least we can swap a few lies before then. That suit you?”
“Why not?”
He drove to Tinker’s himself that night and ate catfish and hush puppies and hot apple dumplings. His table was right at the glass wall, and he looked out across the Red River at Texas on the other side. He spent a long time over dinner but it was still light out when he left. He drove straight back to his motel and watched television until he was tired enough to sleep.
There was nothing on the late news about the chambermaid in Abilene. In the morning he checked the Wichita Falls paper and didn’t see anything. On the way to George Kingland’s office he found a bank of newspaper vending machines and bought an Abilene paper in one of them. There was a short story right on the front page reporting the death of Wanda Rae Johnston of Sagerton, Texas, who had been found in a second-floor unit at the Lamplighter Motor Inn with her neck broken. While there was the suspicion of foul play, police had not yet ruled out the possibility of accidental death.