After relocking the medicine cabinet he returns to the bedroom and sits on the edge of his coffin-like bed. He nurses the hand and checks the bandage, then turns on a small portable television beside him. The set crackles into life but there's no picture on the screen, just a fog of sizzling grey static.
The first channel he tunes to throws up a black-and-white picture of the road outside his house. The screen is split into four. The top two shots show wide-angle views of all approach roads to the house, coming from east and west. The lower two pictures feature tighter shots of the outside of the garage and the front door. The framing has been precisely calculated to capture the head and shoulders of any callers and the cameras have fully remote tilt, pan and zoom facilities to track any movements. Spider presses the remote control again, and once more, four quarter-frame black-and-white pictures fill the screen. Camera One shows the basement in an extra-wide shot. The black plastic on the walls, ceiling and floor have lowered the light level so much that it's impossible to see where one surface ends and another begins. The result is that the prostrate body of Lu Zagalsky appears to be floating in the middle of space. Of all the camera shots, it's this one that Spider loves most. He imagines her in the total, never-ending darkness of afterlife, suspended there for ever – eternally his. The next shot comes from an overhead camera, fixed to a 'hothead', a special device that allows the lens to rotate 360 degrees as well as zoom in and out. The third and fourth cameras are set at much lower angles. Camera Three is fixed behind Lu's head and looks down her body. Camera Four is a reverse angle, positioned at the same height as Camera Three but looking up her body from a line along her left foot. From his remote control, Spider is able to direct his own deathly video show, pulling in every imaginable combination of wide shots, close-ups, zooms, pans and tilts of his victim.
He creeps in on Lu's face.
The picture goes soft as the auto-focus kicks in and takes a second to get the correct focal length and exposure rates. The remote-control box also has a digi-pic facility which allows him to freeze-frame shots and download them to store or make digital printouts.
Spider watches her for a minute or two, his eyes locked on hers. He tries to get inside her mind, tries to imagine what is going on in her head as she lies there, naked and vulnerable in almost virtual darkness. He notices that she doesn't blink, that her body is no longer riddled with fear. He suspects that mentally she is removing herself from the scene, using some form of crude meditation to block out the reality of what is happening to her.
Or what is going to happen to her.
Spider fires off a couple of digi-pics that he thinks will at a later date be both pleasurable and useful for him, and then he switches the screen view to his favourite shot on Camera One.
The Lidocaine is making him feel groggy. He knows it'll last two to three hours before wearing off. He cradles his injured hand and lies down on his side in the coffin bed. The bed feels good, he is ready to rest. He reaches out his undamaged hand and strokes the glass of the TV screen next to him.
She looks so beautiful down there.
So wonderfully peaceful.
So nearly dead.
33
West Village, SoHo, New York Howie Baumguard's all-time favourite movie scene was in Pulp Fiction: the part when Vincent goes to the toilet during a stakeout at the apartment of runaway boxer Butch and then Butch unexpectedly appears in the doorway with a Mac-10 and blows the hitman away while his pants are still around his ankles. Like most boys, even those in their mid-thirties, Howie is hooked on toilet humour. But what he told people killed him most about this scene was the sheer realism of it. As a cop who had found people dead on the pan (one heavy drug-user and one geriatric Mafioso with a heart condition), he loved the fact that Tarantino 'has the balls to tell it how it is'. Fittingly, Howie was taking his regula-as-clockwork morning dump, just as his cell phone rang. Now usually Howie would take one peek at the user display and forget about it until a more opportune moment. But as this call showed an Italian prefix, he automatically jammed the phone to his ear.
'Baumguard residence, how the fuck can I help you?'
Jack's laugh rolled down the line before he answered. 'Well, Mr B, glad to find you're up bright and early. How're you doing?'
'Early bird gets to bite the head off the friggin' worm, you know me, boss.'
Jack let the 'boss' remark slide. He guessed the big guy had been saying it for so long that he still hadn't managed to kick the habit. 'Well, when you've finished your bowl of worms and Cheerios, maybe you can let me in on why you've been calling my beloved wife? You and she got some kind of thing going? Maybe she found a way into your heart at last?'
'Right through my ribcage, that's the only way your wife would like to get into my heart.'
They both laughed. Then Jack hit a more sombre tone. 'Seriously, buddy. I got told a bit about your call. Nancy said it was serious.'
Howie swallowed his last chuckle. 'Yeah, it is. Man, we've been through some weird stuff together, but what I'm about to pitch is going to stump even you.'
'Hang on,' said Jack, as Nancy entered the bedroom with a silver tray of food covered with a crisp cotton napkin. Jack looked up and instinctively put a hand over the mouthpiece. 'Thanks,' he said, and his mind flashed back to their row.
Nancy said nothing, but as she put the tray on the bed she managed a half-smile before leaving.
'Jack, you still there?' shouted Howie, from thousands of miles away.
'Yeah,' said Jack. 'I'm sorry about that; Nancy's just brought me some food. Where were we?'
'Remember Sarah Kearney, the BRK victim buried back in Georgetown?'
'Yeah, sure do,' said Jack, pulling off the napkin and looking at the salad bowl of rocket, sliced tomatoes and succulent mozzarella fior di latte that Paolo had probably made only a few hours ago. 'She was a local girl, wasn't she? No kin, but I think I read that the local community took care of her service and buried her?'
'That's right, they did,' said Howie. 'And now it damned well looks like they could have saved their money. Some sick fuck, maybe BRK, has been back and dug her up.'
The blood froze in Jack's veins. 'You sure? You don't think it's vandals, some local crackheads?'
'No. You can't take enough crack to make you do what this sicko did. He dug up the coffin, got out the poor kid's bones and then sat her up against the headstone.'
'Posed it?' asked Jack, wondering whether BRK was taunting the FBI by the way he had left the skeleton, knowing the press would soon be around to take photographs.
'Looks that way. Some kids going fishing found her.'
Jack pushed a cherry tomato around the bowl with his fork but he was already losing his appetite. 'What the fuck would he want to do that for?'
Howie shrugged. He'd asked himself the same question. 'Beats me. We know these fucks get off by revisiting their crime scenes, sitting by their victims' graves and stuff, but digging up bones, well, that's in a different league to the one I'm used to.'
Jack wasn't convinced that it had been done for sexual kicks. 'Maybe he's trying to attract our attention?'
'Then he's doing a fucking good job,' Howie scoffed.
'You remember Massimo Albonetti?' asked Jack, deciding he should introduce the Italian case he'd been asked to help with.
Howie had to think for a second. 'Yeah. Cop from Rome, went on to head up their profiling unit. Weren't you and he tight for a while?'
'We were. I like him, he's a good guy, and he's just asked for some help on a case that has much more than a passing similarity to BRK's handiwork.'
'I hope you're kidding me,' said Howie.