At first he was convinced that he would be back on Everest within a
year. Three times he tried to climb, and three times he was reduced to
panic in the first hundred feet of the ascent.
Forced to retreat from even the simplest climbs, he quickly saw that
Everest or anything remotely like it would most likely scare him to
death.
Over the years, that fear had undergone a metamorphosis- had grown and
spread like a fungus. His fear of climbing had become a generalized
fear that affected every aspect of his life. He was convinced that his
inheritance would be lost in bad investments, and he began following the
stock market with a nervous interest that made him the bane of his
broker. He started his three low-circulation, high-priced
mountainclimbing magazines as a hedge against a collapse of the market;
and although they were quite profitable, he periodically predicted their
demise. He began to see the dread specter of cancer in every cold, case
of flu, headache and bout with acid indigestion. His clairvoyance
frightened him, and he attempted to deal with it only because he could
not run from it. At times the fear intruded between him and Connie in
the most intimate moments, leaving him impotent.
Recently he had sunk into a depression far deeper than any that had come
before it, and for several days he had seemed unable and unwilling to
claw his way out of it. Two weeks ago he had witnessed a mugging, heard
the victim's cries for help-and walked away. Five years ago he would
have waded into the fight without hesitation. He came home and told
Connie about the mugging, belittled himself, called himself names and
argued with her when she tried to defend him. She was afraid that he
had come to loathe himself, and she knew that for a man like Graham such
an attitude would lead inevitably to some form of madness.
She knew that she was not particularly qualified to put him back
together again. Because of her strong will, because of her competitive
and fiercely self-sufficient nature, she felt that she had done more
harm than good to her previous lovers. She had never thought of herself
as a women's liberationist and certainly not as a ball breaker; she
simply had been, from the age of consent, sharper and tougher and more
self-reliant than most men of her acquaintance. In the past her lovers
had been emotionally and intellectually weaker than she. Few men seemed
able to accept a woman as anything but an inferior. She had nearly
destroyed the man she lived with before Graham, merely by assuming her
equality and-in his mind, at least-invalidating the male role he needed
to sustain himself.
With Graham's ego in a fragile state, she had to modify her basic
personality to an extent she would have thought impossible. It was
worth the strain, because she saw the man he had been prior to the
accident. She wanted to break his shell of fear and let out the old
Graham Harris. What he had once been was what she had hoped for so long
to find: a man who was her equal and who would not feel threatened by a
woman who was his match. However, while trying to bring that Graham
back to life, she had to be cautious and patient, for this Graham could
be shattered so very easily.
A gust of wind rattled the window.
Although she was warm under the covers, she shivered.
The telephone rang.
Startled, she rolled away from Graham.
The phone was strident. Like the cry of a halidon, it echoed eerily in
the room.
She snatched up the receiver to stop the ringing before it woke him.
"Hello?" she said softly.
"Mr. Harris, please."
"Who's calling?"
"Ira Preduski."
"I'm sorry, but I-"
"Detective Preduski."
"It's four in the morning," she said.
"I apologize. Really. I'm sorry. Sincerely. If I've wakened you ...
terrible of me. But, you see, he wanted me to call him immediately if
we had any-major developments in the Butcher case."
"Just a minute." She looked at Graham.
He was awake, watching her.
She said, "Preduski."
He took the receiver. "Harris speaking."
A minute later, when he was finished, she hung up for him. "They found
number ten?"
"Yeah.
"What's her name?" Connie asked.
"Edna. Edna Mowry."
The bedclothes were sodden with blood. The carpet at the right of the
bed was marred by a dark stain like a Rorschach blot. Dried blood
spotted the wall behind the brass headboard.
Three police lab technicians were working in the room under the
direction of the coroner. Two of them were on their hands and knees
beside the bed. One man was dusting the nightstand for fingerprints,
although he must have known that he would not find any. This was the
work of the Butcher, and the Butcher always wore gloves. The coroner
was plotting the trajectory of the blood on the wall in order to
establish whether the killer was left-handed or right-handed.
"Where's the body?" Graham asked.
"I'm sorry, but they took it to the morgue ten minutes ago," Detective
Preduski said, as if he felt responsible for some inexcusable breach of
manners. Graham wondered if Preduski's entire life was an apologia. The
detective was quick to take the blame for everything and to find fault
with himself even when he behaved impeccably. He was a nondescript man
with a pale complexion and watery brown eyes. In spite of his
appearance and his apparent inferiority complex, he was a highly
respected member of the Manhattan homicide detail. More than one of the
detective's associates had made it clear to Graham that he was working
with the best, that Ira Preduski was the top man in the department. "I
held the ambulance as long as I could.
You took so much time to get here. Of course I woke you in the dead of
night. I shouldn't have done that. And then you probably had to call a
cab and wait around for it. I'm so sorry. Now I've probably ruined
everything for you. I should have tried to keep the body here just a
bit longer. I knew you'd want to see it where it was found."
"That doesn't matter," Graham said. "In a sense, I've already had a
firsthand look at her."
"Of course you have," Preduski said. "I saw you on the Prine show
earlier."
"Her eyes were green, weren't they?"
"Just as you said."
"She was found nude?"
"Yes.
"Stabbed many times?"
"Yes."
"With a particularly brutal wound in the throat?"
"That's right."
"He mutilated her, didn't he?"
"Yes."
"How?"
Awful thing," Preduski said. "I wish I didn't have to tell you.
Nobody should have to hear it." Preduski seemed about to wring his
hands. "He cut a plug of flesh out of her stomach. It's almost like a
cork, with her navel in the center of it. Terrible."
Graham closed his eyes and shuddered. "This ...
cork . . ." He was beginning to perspire. He felt ill. He wasn't
receiving a vision, just a strong sense of what had happened, a hunch
that was difficult to ignore. "He put this cork ... in her right hand
and closed her fingers around it. That's where you found it."
"Yes." The coroner turned away from the blood-spattered wall and stared
curiously at Graham.
Don't look at me that way, Graham thought. I don't want to know these
things.
He would have been delighted if his clairvoyance had allowed him to
predict sharp rises in the stock market rather than isolated pockets of
maniacal violence. He Would have preferred to see the names of winning
horses in races not yet run rather than the names of victims in murders