And the Scudders could remain here, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Keeping their guard up, with the woman afraid to leave the building and the man afraid to leave her alone, both of them chained by their terror, while he, the cause of that terror, is nowhere to be found. Gone, vanished, absent without leave, but they in their ignorance are unable to relax, unable to live their lives.
Like the whole country, he thinks. They’ll have their own personal equivalent of long lines at airport security, they’ll cower for the blow that never comes, while he’s thousands of miles away.
He has the great advantage of patience. He’s lived for years with unfinished business, ever since Scudder drove him out of this city. It’s never eaten at him, never preyed on his mind. It’s always been an item on the agenda, something to take care of sooner or later, when the time is right.
Suppose he returns it to the back burner. And suppose he’s gone for a few more years, and the Scudders return to their ordinary lives, and time passes. Thoughts of him, unbidden and unwelcome, will trouble them from time to time. They’ll know he’s out there, they’ll be aware that he might come back. But every month will make that threat a little less urgent, and they’ll reach a point where they’ve relaxed entirely.
And then he’ll return. Oh, he won’t have this particular knife in his pocket when he does. He’ll have let it go somewhere, for one reason or another. But he’ll have another knife, and perhaps he’ll like the new one even better.
And when the time is right he’ll get to use it.
But he ought to do something before he goes. So that they don’t forget him too soon.
32
It was late morning when Mark Sussman called. Had I caught the item about the rush-hour subway stabbing in Queens? The victim was a male, sixteen years old, who’d earlier been in a shoving match with two other teenage males on the subway platform. The killing was assumed to have grown out of that argument, although no one had seen it occur; the bodies of the other passengers kept the youth’s body upright until the train reached a station and the crowd thinned enough for him to fall down.
“They figured gang-related,” he said, “but I thought about it, and then I thought about that woman killed a couple of days ago here in Manhattan. Miles apart, but it’s the same train, and both times it’s a stabbing and nobody saw it happen. Two different boroughs and two different medical examiners, so who’s going to look at both of them at once, you know?”
He’d talked to the right people, and he was waiting for them to compare notes and get back to him. “What I want to hear,” he said, “is it’s two different knives, two different kinds of wounds, two different everything. But you know what I think it is.” He said he’d let me know as soon as he heard one way or the other.
An hour or so later the phone rang and I thought it was him, but it wasn’t. It was Mick Ballou.
“That picture you showed me,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you he looked familiar? I’ve tried to place him, and late last night it came to me.” 248
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“You saw him at Grogan’s?”
“I did not. ’Twas years ago I saw him, and then only for a moment.
Do you recall when you had me go to a house on West Seventy-fourth Street? There was a girl there you thought might be in harm’s way.”
“Kristin Hollander.”
“And a very nice young woman she was. He came to the door, your man in the drawing. Of course I’d no idea who he might be. I opened the door and told him to piss off, and he pissed off. I barely looked at him, but I’ve a fine old memory, haven’t I? It was the same man.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “I never even thought of her. I don’t know what the hell’s the matter with me. Listen, I’ll have to get off the line so I can arrange police protection for her. Assuming she’s all right, assuming he hasn’t already paid her a visit. Christ, if he’s got to her, if he’s killed her—”
“No one’s touched a hair on her head.”
“How do you know?”
“How do I know? Why, amn’t I sitting across the table from her even now?”
“He drove over there late last night,” I told Elaine, “but felt it was too late to show up on her doorstep, so he parked across the street and kept his eyes open. Then this morning, as soon as it seemed to him to be a decent hour, he rang her doorbell. He found it remarkable that she remembered him.”
“Has anyone ever forgotten Mick?”
“I asked him that. He said there’ve been some that wished they could.”
“I’ll bet.”
“The house has a burglar alarm and a good set of locks, and she’s got Mick in there with her. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to worry about her before, but now I don’t have to. He killed her parents, you know.”
“I know.”
“She’s still living there. All by herself, in that big house.”
“And now she’s got Mick for company.”
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249
“They’re playing cribbage,” I said. “They played cribbage four years ago, when he went and guarded her.”
I picked up the phone and called Ira Wentworth and told him most of it, although I don’t think I mentioned that they were playing cribbage. “I don’t know how we forgot about her,” I said, “but she’ll be all right now. He’s not going to get in there, and God help him if he does.
Still, it might not be a bad idea to stake the place out.”
“Because he might show up,” he said. “I talked to my captain, and we’re reopening the Lia Parkman file. I can probably spring a couple of plainclothes to sit in a car and watch the block.” I put the phone down, and the next time it rang it was Sussman. The lab evidence was preliminary, and you couldn’t take it to the bank, but every indication was that the teenage male in Queens and the woman in Manhattan had been killed in the same manner—a single thrust from the rear, between two ribs and into the heart. The weapons used in the two homicides were at the very least similar, and probably iden-tical.
“And for now,” he said, “that’s as far as it’s gonna go. I don’t even want to write it up, let alone go and tell somebody. Because God help us all if the media get hold of this. You want to try imagining the subway at rush hour with every passenger trying to watch his back?”
“They’d want metal detectors,” I said.
“At every turnstile. Take the coins out of your pockets, put ’em in the tray, and swipe your Metrocard. Yeah, right. We got to catch this prick in a hurry, that’s all. Because you can only keep a lid on it for so long. If he does it one more time, takes out one more rush-hour straphanger, some media genius is gonna figure it out all by himself.
And there goes the front page in every paper and the lead slot on every TV newscast, and we’ve got panic in the streets. And under them.” That evening I was sitting in a chair with a book, and Elaine came over looking concerned and asked me if I was all right. Evidently I’d set the book down and had been staring off into space for five or ten minutes.
I hadn’t been aware of it.
I said, “I hate not doing anything. I hate waiting for something to 250
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happen and hoping I can react to it properly when it does. I hate feeling helpless and useless and out of the loop.”
“And old?”
“And old,” I said. “I know there’s nothing I can do other than what I’m doing already. I know all that, and I’ll keep on doing it. But I don’t like the way it feels.”
It felt a little better in the morning. Sussman called, and I could hear the change in his voice. “We found him,” he said, and before I could react he corrected himself. “Found where he’s living, I should say. Way the hell west on Fifty-third Street. A woman recognized the sketch, said he was the nice young man come to take care of his Uncle Joe, who had to go to the Veterans Hospital up in the Bronx. Except the people at the VA never heard of Joe Bohan, and my guess is nobody’s ever gonna see poor old Joe again.”