He took a deep breath, trying to find a grip on control. When he spoke again, he realized that in his shock, his voice had grown high-pitched.
“Tell me what you think I’ve done,” he pleaded.
“Why did you call the cops? Give them my name and then my dealer’s name. You know what you’ve done to me?”
Moth forced tightness into every muscle. He tried to will his pounding heart to slow down. He straightened up, tried to look past the barrel of the gun, and replied, “I didn’t do anything like that. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Susan Terry wanted to kill. More than anything, right in that second, she wanted death. But whose death eluded her. She stared at Moth. “Then who did?”
He swallowed hard. “You know.”
She could feel every muscle in her body, and especially the muscles in her hand and finger, tightening on the trigger. The noise around her was roaring, like a jet taking off, and then she realized the room was filled with silence and that the deafening noise was coming from deep inside herself. Someone-it couldn’t possibly be her-screamed from within: Make a choice!
Moth gathered every tactic he’d ever learned at Redeemer One and quietly said, “Susan, do you know what you’re doing?”
It took an immense effort to lower her gun to her side. Choice made.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Pressure.”
This word seemed as good an explanation as any. But what was really true was that cracks and fissures were forming inexorably throughout her life.
In the momentary hesitation in the apartment, Andy Candy told herself, Move! Before she realized it, she’d risen to her feet and stepped in between Moth and Susan Terry.
“What’s going on?” she demanded.
Inwardly, she thought, I’m the one that’s supposed to be terrified. The killer called me! And then he went to my house! What the hell is all this?
Susan Terry leaned back. “I think I need a cold drink,” she said.
“Water,” Moth said. “With ice.” Odd, he thought, how one is able to endow a simple word like water with utter ferocity.
Romance novels with happy endings; Victorian era literature, with bows and curtsies and infinitely intricate emotional back-and-forth. Sweeping Russian novels from the nineteenth century-War and Peace. Hemingway and Faulkner, John Dos Passos and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Novels of manners, novels about spies who came in from the cold, novels about star-crossed lovers. Andy Candy racked her memory, tried to recall all the books she’d read as a literature major, trying to find the one that would steer her toward the right thing to do.
Nothing leapt out to her.
She looked over at Susan Terry. The prosecutor was hunched over at a table, two hands wrapped around a glistening glass of ice water, her weapon in front of her, her eyes staring off into the distance.
The phrase thousand-yard stare-she thought she’d first come across it in a memoir about Vietnam-came to her.
Moth had moved over to his desk and was shuffling through papers. After a moment, he looked up. “I think the problem is-everything we know about him is in the past. Everything he knows about us is in the present.”
Andy nodded, then said, “Not exactly. I mean, we know a little.”
“He knows who we are. Where we live. What we do.”
Susan was still looking off into the distance.
Andy Candy rose, went over, and picked up one of the notepads she used for sorting her way through information. But this was mostly a prop, to help her organize the ideas in her memory. “We have a name-even if it is a phony one-that my mother saw. And she saw his license. Massachusetts.”
Susan finally looked up. “Area code for the phone-413. And a hat with a UMASS logo on it.”
Andy Candy didn’t ask how Susan knew these details.
Andy continued. “The town name my mother saw. It began with Ch.”
Moth had turned to his computer. Chicopee. Cheshire. Chesterfield. Charlemont. He mumbled these town names out loud.
“Charlemont,” Andy said. “Like Charlemagne, only…” She stopped.
Susan shook her head. “Why would you think he’s gone home-even if one of those towns is his home? Why isn’t he right outside, right now? He seems to like killing in Miami.”
The three of them were silent for a moment. Moth spoke first. “Why should we wait around to be killed?”
The others looked at him.
“If we’re going to hunt him down, then shouldn’t we start there? How else can we get ahead of him?”
Susan nodded-but she didn’t really know why.
Andy Candy went over and squeezed Moth’s hand. She didn’t think of him as much of a protector or a hero, but she thought the two of them together had always been a formidable couple. Once upon a time. She hoped she wasn’t deluding herself.
But at the same moment the literature major within her bubbled to the top of her consciousness: Enough of Dumas, Edmond Dantès, and The Count of Monte Cristo. Instead she recalled Beowulf. The hero first lies in wait for Grendel. Though he knows it will cost lives, maybe even his own, he can see no other way to fight. But even after the pitched battle and arm-ripping victory, there is a greater threat he hadn’t foreseen. And he must pursue that threat right into its own lair.
36
He didn’t like to think of himself as an overly cruel person, although in the wake of all that he’d accomplished, he was certain that some hard emotional times had been created for children, relatives, maybe even friends of the people he’d killed. This was rudimentary psychology and he wanted to be empathetic. Nobody suffered too damn much: funerals with tears, fine elegies, and somber black clothes. Not much else.
But when he pictured Timothy Warner, he grew angry-a pulse-accelerating, red-faced, teeth-gritted sort of half-fury. Cold, but in control, while recognizing that he was on the verge of explosion.
He thought: This fucking kid has no right to be putting me in this situation. I should be all finished with killing. Getting on with things.
Stupid boy. If you hadn’t pursued me, you would live.
Stupid boy. You are taking your friends down with you.
Stupid boy. You should have learned to leave well enough alone.
Stupid boy. Pursuing me is like committing suicide.
He did not think he could hate Andrea Martine or Susan Terry in the same way.
But he was more than willing to kill them. Spectacularly.
What does the military call it? Collateral damage.
He busied himself, in a flat-out hurry, collecting items, planning. What he had in mind for The Girlfriend, The Nephew, and The Prosecutor was significantly more elaborate than his usual design. What he expected was closer to art than it was to murder, although he doubted anyone besides another truly sophisticated killer would ever be able to appreciate that distinction-and he had little respect for other killers, who seemed to him to be mostly gangsters, sociopaths, and thugs, and beneath contempt.
Sometimes, when in New York City, he went to late night midnight shows or off-the-beaten path grimy East Village art galleries to watch performances that blended theater with painting, film with sculpture, forms that used all sorts of avenues to create a visual experience. Very trendy stuff, he reminded himself. On other occasions, he drove his old pickup truck to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. There, in faded jeans, uncombed hair, and dirt-encrusted work boots, he examined some of the more exaggerated styles that cutting-edge artists invented.