Only when she was gone did the Experimenter finally turn away and start once more back toward the house from which he’d emerged only a few moments ago.
The razor was already forgotten.
Now he was thinking about the woman next door, and an idea was beginning to form in his mind.
But was it really time to begin again?
And was the woman truly a proper subject?
He would have to think about it.
Think about it, and make preparations.
CHAPTER 25
… the police are “satisfied” that Richard Kraven was solely responsible for the series of murders that seemingly came to a halt when he was arrested and charged in another state. But the detective also pointedly repeated that “it has yet to be fully proven that all the victims attributed to Kraven have been discovered.” Nor would Blakemoor go so far as to absolutely rule out the possibility that Kraven did not act alone in the crimes attributed to him.
Sheila Harrar gazed at the paragraph through bleary eyes, the hangover from last night’s party making her feel as if someone were pounding spikes through her skull. Squinting even against the gray daylight in Pioneer Square, Sheila tried to concentrate on the rest of the words in the stained piece of the morning paper she’d found abandoned on the bench along with almost half a cup of not-quite-cold coffee. But it didn’t matter if she finished the article or not — she’d already read enough.
There was at least one body they hadn’t found yet — Danny’s. And now it wasn’t just the police who didn’t care — it was the paper, too. Sheila had waited all day for that woman to call back. What was her name? Then she remembered that she’d saved the other article, stuffing it into the canvas bag with the rest of her important papers. Still clutching the remainder of the cup of tepid coffee in one hand, Sheila burrowed deep into the tote bag with the other, feeling around until her fingers finally closed on the crumpled scrap of newspaper. Spreading it out flat on the wooden bench, she forced her eyes to focus on the print.
Anne Jeffers. Yeah, that was the name of the woman she’d left a message for. When had it been? Sheila wasn’t sure, but she knew she’d waited all day long for the woman to call back, only going out when she had to scrounge up something to eat. But the woman had never called back, and Sheila knew why.
It was because she was an Indian.
A drunken Indian.
Sheila’s fist closed on the paper cup, crumpling it. She hadn’t felt very good that morning when she called the newspaper. Not as bad as this morning, but not good, either. Maybe the woman had tried to call her back, but she hadn’t been there to answer the pay phone in the hall. And if someone else had answered it, they sure wouldn’t have bothered to give her the message.
Nobody who lived in the hotel gave a damn about anybody else.
Suddenly Sheila wanted a drink. She heaved herself to her feet and immediately a wave of dizziness and nausea struck her. Gripping the back of the bench with both hands, she bent over and retched onto the bricks of the square.
Not much came up, and she was left feeling just as bad as she had before, except now her mouth was filled with the sour taste of vomit. Wishing she could sink through the bricks and disappear into the ground, but knowing it wouldn’t happen, Sheila Harrar shuffled over to the drinking fountain at the corner and filled her mouth with water, swirled it around, then spit it out. This time, though, she spit carefully into the catch basin around the fountain’s mouthpiece rather than spew more of her expectoration onto the sidewalk.
What the hell good was she like this? If she was ever going to find out what had happened to Danny, she had to pull herself together.
She burrowed into her tote bag again, this time finding a few stray coins hidden among the odds and ends that had gathered in its corners. She gazed at the money, automatically calculating how much wine she could buy with it.
An image of Danny came into her mind, and she determinedly ignored her body’s craving for alcohol. Making her way down to First Avenue, she went into one of the cafés that catered to the neighborhood derelicts as long as they had the price of one of its cheap meals, and ordered a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Though her stomach threatened to rebel once again at the unaccustomed intrusion of food so early in the day, she consumed the entire pastry, washing it down with two cups of coffee. As she ate she had a long talk with Danny, even though he wasn’t really there to talk to her:
Maybe she never got the message, Danny’s voice suggested. Or maybe you didn’t wait by the phone as long as you think.
“I waited,” Sheila muttered, then made herself stop talking out loud, as the person two stools away glanced at her.
Maybe you only waited a couple of minutes, then went out and got drunk, Danny’s implacable voice went on.
Sheila didn’t try to argue with him — she knew he was right. In fact, she might not even have left the right number for Anne Jeffers to call her at.
Better call her again. She got off the stool and started toward the rest rooms at the back of the café, where she knew there was a pay phone. Leafing through the phone book in search of the number of the Herald, she suddenly had an idea.
What if Anne Jeffers had never even gotten her message at all? What if it had just gone into one of those machines, and no one had ever listened to it? Dropping the yellow pages, Sheila picked up the white pages and began thumbing through them. A minute later she found it. “Jeffers, Glen & Anne,” were listed, up at the fancy end of Capitol Hill.
Dropping a quarter into the slot, Sheila dialed the number. On the eighth ring, just as she was about to hang up, someone answered.
“Hello?”
“Is Anne Jeffers there? The one who works for the paper?”
“This is her residence, but she’s at work now. May I take a message?”
Sheila hesitated, but then made up her mind. At least this time she was talking to a real person, and if it was Anne Jeffers’s house, then she’d probably get the message. “I left a message at the paper, but she didn’t call me back,” Sheila said, pronouncing each word very carefully in the hope that whoever she was talking to wouldn’t know how drunk she’d been last night. “Are you her husband?”
Sheila didn’t notice the slight hesitation before the voice replied with a single terse word: “Yes.”
“It’s my son,” Sheila went on. “Danny Harrar. That man Richard Kraven killed him, but the police didn’t do anything. They said he was just a drunken Indian, but that isn’t true. Danny was a good boy. He worked, and he went to school, and he never drank at all.” Sheila felt her eyes sting with tears, but she wiped them away with her sleeve, determined not to let her emotions get the better of her. Not this time. “All I want is to find my boy. All I want is to find my son so I can bury him.”
Sheila heard a silence. Then the man spoke again. “And you want Anne to help you find him?”
Sheila’s breath caught in her throat. He hadn’t hung up! “Do you think she would?” she asked, her voice trembling with anxiety. It had been so long since anyone had even listened to her that she could barely believe this man’s wife might actually be willing to help her.
“Why don’t you tell me about it?” the man asked. “Just tell me what you think happened to your son, and how my wife can get in touch with you.”
Suddenly, Sheila Harrar’s hands were shaking and a sheen of sweat covered her skin. Where should she start? What should she say? “He was going fishing,” she began. “With that man, Richard Kraven. I told the police, but they didn’t believe me, because I’m an In—” She hesitated, then took a deep breath. “The police never believe Native Americans,” she went on. “They say we’re all drunks, but that isn’t true. Danny wasn’t a drunk, and neither was I, not back then. But they didn’t believe me anyway.”