much trouble getting an image of a killer."
"You sensed his name."
"Maybe. Dwight.... I'm not entirely sure."
You've given the police a fairly good description of him "But I can't
pick up much more about him," he said. "When the visions come and I try
to force an image of this man, this Butcher, to the center of them, all
I get are waves of ... evil. Not illness, not an impression of a sick
mind. just overwhelming evil. I don't know how to explain this-but the
Butcher isn't a lunatic. At least not in the classical sense. He
doesn't kill in a maniacal frenzy.
"He's chopped up nine innocent women," Connie said. "Ten if you count
the one they haven't found yet. He cuts off their ears and fingers
sometimes. Sometimes he disembowels them. And you say he isn't crazy?"
"He's not a lunatic, not by any definition we have of the word.
I'd stake my life on it."
"Maybe you don't sense mental illness because he doesn't know he's sick.
Amnesia-"
"No. No amnesia. No schizophrenia. He's very aware of his murders.
He's no Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I'll bet he'd pass any psychiatric
examination you'd care to give him, and with flying colors.
This isn't easy to explain. But I have the feeling that if he is a
lunatic, he's a whole new breed. No one's ever encountered anything
like him before. I think-dammit, I know he's not even angry or
particularly excited when he kills these women. He's just-methodical."
"You're giving me the shivers."
"You? I feel as if I've been inside his head. I've got a chronic case
of shivers."
A coal popped in the fireplace.
She took hold of his free hand. "Let's not talk about Prine or the
killings."
"After tonight, how can I not talk about them?"
"You looked wonderful on television," she said, working him away from
the subject.
"Oh, yeah. Wonderful. Sweating, pale, shaking" Not during the visions.
Before them. You're a natural for television. Even for movies.
Leading-man type."
Graham Harris was handsome. Thick reddish-blond hair. Blue eyes,
heavily crinkled at the corners. Leathery skin with sharply carved
lines from all the years he had spent in an outdoor life. Five-ten; not
tall, but lean and hard. He was thirty-eight, yet he still had a trace
of boyish vulnerability about him.
"Leading-man type?" he said. He smiled at her. "Maybe you're right.
I'll give up the publishing business and all this messy psychic stuff.
I'll go into the movies."
"The next Robert Redford."
"Robert Redford? I was thinking maybe the next Boris Karloff."
"Redford," Connie insisted.
"Come to think of it, Karloff was a rather elegant looking man out of
makeup. Perhaps I'll try for being the next Wallace Beery."
"if you're Wallace Beery, then I'm Marie Dressier."
"Hi, Marie."
"Do you really have an inferiority complex, or do you cultivate it as
part of your charm?"
He grinned, then sipped the brandy. "Remember that Tughoat Annie movie
with Beery and Dressler? Do you think Annie ever went to bed with her
husband?"
"Sure! "
"They were always fighting. He lied to her every chance he got-and most
of the time he was drunk."
"But in their own way they loved each other," Connie said. "They
couldn't have been married to anyone else."
"I wonder what it was like for them. He was such a weak man, and she
was such a strong woman."
"Remember, though, he was always strong when the chips were down: right
near the end of the picture, for example.
"Some good in all of us, huh?"
"He could have been strong from the start. He just didn't respect
himself enough."
Graham stared at the fire. He turned the brandy snifter around and
around in his hand.
"What about William Powell and Myrna Loy?" she asked. -"The Thin Man
movies."
"Both of them were strong," she said. "That's who we could be.
Nick and Nora Charles."
"I always liked their dog. Asta. Now that was a good part.
"How do you think Nick and Nora made love?"
she asked.
"Passionately."
"But with a lot of fun."
"Little jokes."
"That's it." She took the brandy glass out of his hand and put it on
the hearth with her own snifter. She kissed him lightly, teasing his
lips with her tongue. "I bet we could play Nick and Nora."
"I don't know. It's such a strain making love and being witty at the
same time."
She sat in his lap. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him
more fully this time and drew back and smiled when he slid a hand
beneath her sweater.
"Nora?" he said.
"Yes, Nicky?"
"Where's Asta?"
"I put him to bed."
"We wouldn't want him interrupting."
"He's asleep."
"Might traumatize the little fella if he saw-"
"I made sure he'd be asleep."
"Oh?"
"I drugged his Alpo."
"Such a smart girl."
"And now we belong in bed."
"Such a very smart girl."
"With a lovely body," she said.
"Yes, you're ravishing."
"Am I?"
"Oh, yes."
"Ravish me, then."
"With pleasure."
"I would hope so."
An hour later he was asleep, but Connie was not.
She lay on her side, studying his face in the soft glow of the bedside
lamp.
His experience and attitudes were stamped on his features. His
toughness shone through clearly, yet there was the boyish quality too.
Kindness. Intelligence. Humor. Sensitivity. He was a deep-down good
man. But the fear shone through as well, the fear of falling, and all
of the ugly things that had grown from it.
During his twenties and early thirties, Graham had been one of the best
mountain climbers in the world. He lived for the vertical trek, for the
risk and the triumph. Nothing else in his life mattered half so much as
that. He had been an active climber from the age of thirteen, year by
year setting higher and more difficult goals for himself. At twenty-six
he was organizing parties to scale the most taxing peaks in Europe, Asia
and South America. When he was thirty he led an expedition up the South
Col route of Everest, climbed the West Ridge to traverse the mountain,
and returned down the South Col.
At thirty-one he tackled the Eiger Direct with an Alpine-style single
push up the hideously sheer face without using fixed ropes.
Accomplishments such as these, his good looks, his wit, and his
reputation as a Casanova (exaggerated by both his friends and the press)
made him the most colorful and popular figure in mountaineering at that
time.
Five years ago, with only a few challenging climbs remaining, he put
together a team to assault the most dangerous wall of rock known to man,
the Southwest Face of Everest, a route that had never been taken to the
top. Two-thirds of the way through the climb, he fell, breaking sixteen
bones and suffering internal injuries. He was given first aid in Nepal,
then flown to Europe with a doctor and two friends at his side in what
everyone assumed would conclude as a death watch. Instead of adding one
more outstanding achievement to his record, he spent seven months in a
private Swiss clinic. However, the ordeal was not at an end when he
left the hospital. This Goliath had not been beaten, and had left this
David with a warning: Graham limped.
The doctors told him he could still scale easy cliffs and ridges as a
weekend sport if he wished. With sufficient practice he might even
learn to compensate for his partially game right leg and move on to more
ambitious climbs. Not Eiger. Not Everest, by any route. But there
were hundreds of lesser palisades that should interest him.