“Nick still hadn’t let on he knew I was there. He ambled around with his hands stuck in his pockets and stooped every now and then to pat little mounds of dirt. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing. The mounds looked a lot like red ant hills, but no one would go around patting anthills. I tried to figure out what they might be and what they meant to him, but it didn’t make sense.
“Then…” Eileen drew in her breath sharply and Jack tensed. “Then all of a sudden Nick turned right around, facing where I was hidden behind a pine and stared my way. I froze. My knees locked and I couldn’t even blink. I knew he had seen me, and I wanted to run out of the woods and onto the road away from him, but I was hypnotized. Before I had time to run he crossed the space between us, ran the last few yards, and caught hold of my arm, squeezing it tightly until I cried.
“‘What do you want?’ he said. ‘What do you want to know about me, Eileen?’
“I couldn’t speak. I was too shocked that he’d caught me. At that moment I could see that he hated me—really hated me.
“I tried to jerk away from him, but he held on, his fingers pinching me to the bone. I stopped struggling and tried to get mad. I knew if I could get mad enough I’d stop being scared, but it was the look on his face that made me most afraid. No one had ever looked at me that way before, and I was paralyzed.
“‘I want to show you something, Eileen,’ he said, dragging me behind him into the open. ‘You followed me to learn my secrets, so I’ll show you a secret. You came here to see something so I’ll show you something worth the trip.’”
Eileen broke into a sob and buried her head in Jack’s shoulder. “Oh God, Jack, it was horrible! He dragged me to the fence line at the back of the property. It was a weedy place, but a path had been trampled through it to where the fence turned at a right angle to cross the back of the land. The weeds were brown and dead and some of them were as high as my head. I didn’t know where he was taking me or what it was he wanted to show me.
“When we got through the path and to the fence corner, Nick pushed me forward. I couldn’t see where I was going, and I stumbled across something. When I saw what it was, I started to gag.”
Eileen turned her face from Jack, but not before he saw the revulsion etched on her delicate features. “It was a cat. A dead cat with a rope around its neck. I didn’t recognize it from our neighborhood so it must have been a stray he’d killed. It was stiff and dried looking. Nick pushed me down onto my knees and wrapped both of his hands in my pigtails to force me to look at it. I clenched my eyes shut, but he shook my head until my scalp hurt and I looked. That’s when I saw a small hatchet resting near the cat’s head.
“’Know what I’m gonna do now?’ he whispered in my ear. ‘I’m going to chop it into pieces. I’m going to cut off its legs and its head and then I’m going to bury it here,’ he said, pointing out to the clear space where we’d come from.
“I started screaming at him. I don’t remember what all I said, but I did tell him I was going to tell his mother. I was going to tell everyone what he was doing. Do you know what he said then? He said go ahead, tell on him, who cared? He said it was his word against mine and who cared what kids did? He asked me if I hadn’t ever wanted to see what a cat looked like all cut up into bits. Then he said that if he got into trouble and was found out, he’d make it look like I was involved too. People would believe anything bad about kids and he’d make them believe that I was just the same as he was. He’d tell them we did it together and that it was my idea, kind of an experiment, a nasty little experiment.” Eileen shuddered and Jack held her close stroking her long hair.
“I never did tell,” she concluded weakly. “I was afraid to tell. What he was doing was obscene and cruel, but who would believe me? It was too insane to believe. My mother would have laughed at my vivid imagination. Nick’s mom couldn’t handle him and didn’t have the power to stop him. Then there was Nick’s threat to think about. I felt guilty. Although Nick was the one doing these awful things, because I knew about it and had seen the corpse of the cat, in some crazy way I felt responsible for what he did. By following him that day I’d entangled myself in his nightmare world.”
“You don’t have to feel gui1ty,” Jack soothed softly. “He was a warped little kid, and it wasn’t your fault.”
“I realize that now, but when I was ten I believed Nick Ringer had the power to show me up as his accomplice. I took the blame for his secrets upon myself. It terrifies me that he’s in Houston, a grown man now.”
“It’s all right, Eileen, try not to think about him. I’ll never let anything happen to you.” Jack slowly rocked her back and forth.
“Do you think he might be…?” Eileen’s voice trailed away.
Jack’s mind shrieked, Yes, yes, he’s the most likely suspect I know about. But he answered, “We can’t know yet. They have a psychological profile worked up on the killer downtown, but I haven’t seen it. I don’t know what kind of a man would kill…” His voice broke.
“With a wire,” Eileen finished.
“Yes,” Jack echoed, “with a wire.”
CHAPTER 24
NICK LOUNGED in a chair in Sidney Rubens’s office thinking about the Italian sausage sandwich he had gulped on his way to see the psychiatrist.
“How have you been sleeping?” Rubens asked.
“So, so. The Valium helps.”
Rubens re-lit the cigar lying in his McDonald’s ashtray and leaned back in his chair.
“What do we have to go through to get me a refill?” Nick asked.
“Not much, Nick. A little chat, that’s all. You’re not exactly under treatment. We’re just trying to get to the root cause of your insomnia and attacks of nerves.”
“So shoot your best shot,” Nick said, very composed. “You tell me why I can’t sleep.”
Rubens smiled slightly before putting on his cigar. “I thought you might tell me.”
Nick shrugged his shoulders and slipped down in the chair until his legs reached to the psychiatrist’s desk.
“It’s your time we’re wasting,” he said sullenly. “I personally don’t think there’s any problem here.” Rubens tapped a folder next to his ashtray. “They say in Tacoma you had a problem.”
“Fuck Tacoma.” Nick said it very calmly.
Rubens tried another tack. “You said the killing you did in the war bothered your conscience.”
Nick snorted and laced his fingers together. He twiddled his thumbs idly and refused to meet the gaze of the man behind the desk.
“Didn’t you say that, Nick?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. That was nearly three years ago. The past is dead far as I’m concerned. You shouldn’t take everything I say too literally, and for that matter, you shouldn’t take what Tacoma said without a grain of salt either. They were all a bunch of jerk-offs.”
“Do you still have nightmares?” Rubens asked.
“I told you I did, but everybody has a nightmare now and then. It’s no big deal.” Nick began getting more anxious as the psychiatrist continued talking about nightmares.