There was a lull, and Elaine said, “You said five.”
“How’s that?”
“You said five killings,” she said to Wentworth. “Monica is one, and the three boys in Richmond. That makes four. Who’s the fifth?” 242
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“Applegate, except that’s not his name. I said it a minute ago. What the hell is it?”
“Applewhite.”
“There you go. Applewhite got a hot shot from the state of Virginia, but our friend was there to see him get it, and he’s the one who put him on the gurney in the first place. He’s not going to get indicted for that, and there’s plenty of other things to hang him for instead, but wouldn’t you say he was as much the cause of Applewhite’s death as the chemicals they pumped into him? And wouldn’t you call that murder?” If the Richmond cops and the FBI came in, the whole thing turned into a media circus overnight.
“It seems to me we got one big edge right now,” Sussman said. “We know who he is and where he’s coming from, and he doesn’t know we know. We go public with it and that’s out the window.”
“I don’t know,” Wentworth said. “What’s our edge amount to, anyway? First place, he might assume we know. It’s not as though he’s been working all that hard to disguise it. He’s not using the same initials just so he can go on wearing the monogrammed cuff links. Some level, he wants the whole world to know.”
“ ‘Catch me before I kill more.’ ”
“No, I’m not saying he’s itching to get caught. He’s doing everything he can to keep from getting caught, but consciously or unconsciously he damn well wants us to know just who it is we’re not catching.”
“If we go public, what does he do?”
“I know what he did last time,” Wentworth said. “He killed five people and disappeared. Six, counting the crispy critter he left behind in his place. I don’t know that we’d trigger another bloodbath, but I’ll bet he’d decide to get out of Dodge.”
“So what do we do? Besides quietly expanding the task force, putting more bodies on the case. How do we find him?”
“For a starter, we get serious about protecting Matt and Elaine.
Next we get out there and look for him. He’s got to be holed up someplace. Matt, how long did you say he’s been turning up at meetings?”
“At least a month.”
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243
“So he’s living somewhere. Any idea where?”
“Be this neighborhood,” TJ said. “Puts him close to this apartment, close to the meetings, close to Elaine’s shop.”
“Say the West Fifties,” Sussman said, “from Eighth Avenue to the river. Midtown North, in other words. Who do we know there?” I let them toss names back and forth. One of the names they mentioned was Joe Durkin, and I chimed in to tell them he’d retired. They worked out details, figured out how to proceed. There were still quite a number of SRO hotels and rooming houses in the area, and that’s where they thought they should concentrate.
I said, “I don’t think he’ll be in a hotel.”
“No?”
TJ said, “This another one gonna be sleeping in his car?” They didn’t know what he was talking about, and I didn’t bother to enlighten them. “He’ll find an apartment,” I said.
“Then he’s a genius, if he can find an apartment in this city.”
“It doesn’t have to be an empty one,” I said, and reminded them how his neighbors on Central Park West had all been given to understand that he was subletting the apartment of a paleontologist on sabbatical in France. “It was the perfect low-cost open-end sublet,” I said. “All he had to do was kill the paleontologist and sink the body in the Hudson.”
“And you think he’d do it again?”
“The price is right,” I said, “and it’s not as though killing’s a stretch for him.”
“No,” Sussman said. “He seems to be developing a taste for it, doesn’t he?”
When the two cops left, Elaine and TJ and I sat around with nothing much to say. Nobody felt like eating. I put on the TV, changed channels aimlessly for a few minutes, and turned the set off. I sat there and drifted into a curious sort of reverie in which I was trying to get a count of just how many people AB had killed that we knew about. I kept losing track and having to start over.
A few months earlier, when baseball season was just getting under way, I’d driven myself crazy one afternoon trying to remember the 244
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teams in the major leagues when I was a boy, when there were eight teams in each league and no divisions or playoffs, let alone exploding scoreboards and designated hitters. I wasn’t using pencil and paper, I was doing it in my head, and it was harder than you’d think. I got all eight National League teams but only seven in the AL, and I couldn’t seem to come up with the one I was missing. I forgot the whole thing, and then two days later the Yankees had a home stand against Detroit, and that was my answer, and one that raised another question. How the hell could I have forgotten the Detroit Tigers?
It was a very different country then. The westernmost city in the majors was St. Louis, the southernmost Washington, D.C. Chicago had two teams, of course, but so did Boston and Philly and, yes, St.
Louis. New York had three.
Elaine asked me what I was thinking about. “Baseball,” I said.
“See if there’s a game on,” she suggested. “Come on, it’s something to do. I’ll make popcorn.”
The Yankees were in Baltimore, playing a franchise that had once been the St. Louis Browns. The Mets were winding up a three-game series at home with the Braves, who’d moved in my lifetime from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta. But you still get four balls and three strikes, three outs and nine innings, and if the hitters are stronger these days, well, the pitchers throw harder. We sat there on the couch and ate popcorn, the three of us, and watched the young men on the field play the old game.
31
He sits in the coffee shop. He has a table next to the window, and he can sit here and eat his breakfast and keep an eye on the building diagonally across the street. Scudder lives there, Scudder and the fair Elaine, and there is a young black man who seems to spend a lot of time with them.
Ever since he returned to New York he has seen Scudder in the young man’s company, sometimes walking on the street, sometimes having a meal together in this very coffee shop.
Elaine never seems to leave the building. Scudder comes and goes, the black man comes and goes, but he never sees Scudder and the black man together anymore. It is hard to be certain, he doesn’t spend twenty-four hours a day observing the building’s entrance, but it seems to him as though at least one of the two men is always inside the building. Scudder never leaves until the black man has come to take his place at her side.
Which suggests to him that they’re guarding her. Keeping her inside where no one can get at her, and standing by to protect her in the event that he might manage to get inside the building.
And if he were to go away?
The idea intrigues him. He wants to think about it. He pays for his meal, leaves the coffee shop, and walks.
.
.
.
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He could just disappear. That’s what he always does, sooner or later. He walks away from the life he’s been living like a snake shedding its skin. He goes somewhere else, becomes someone else.
And does the things he does.
And if he were to do so now? Not, as he’d planned, after he’d finished his business with Mr. and Mrs. Scudder. Suppose he were to leave his business unfinished and simply vanish? He could go south or west, he could go anywhere, with his darker hair and his reshaped hairline and his eyeglasses, and no one would know him.