He climbed to the trapdoor. Beyond it, he heard a commotion, hurried footsteps, a gunshot. Frenzied, he knocked twice, three times, once.
No response. What if they think I'm Ronnie? What if they shoot through the trapdoor?
As he knocked again, he heard the lock being freed. The trapdoor was lifted. A headlamp blazed toward his face, stressing the sensor in his goggles, creating a flare that made him temporarily blind. The headlamp jerked away, allowing his night vision to return. He hurried up and locked the trapdoor behind him.
The smell of burnt gunpowder was everywhere. Vinnie stood in the doorway to the surveillance room, aiming toward two jagged holes in the floor. He saw Balenger and retreated to him. "I did what you said. I counted to fifty. Then I turned up the volume on my walkie-talkie and set it on the floor. He blew it apart."
"How many rounds did you fire?" Balenger took the pistol.
"Three. I hope you don't think I wasted-"
"You did your job. You distracted him. Nine rounds left. We'll need to make them last."
"He's been shooting at random through the floors."
"He can't get into Danata's living room and shoot at us from there. We're safe for a moment. Give me your knapsack."
Balenger raised the walkie-talkie to his lips. "Hey, asshole, guess what?"
Static.
"I asked you a question, jerkoff."
"What am I supposed to guess? Are the vulgarities necessary?"
"When it comes to you? Absolutely. I found my wife, you piece of shit."
Static.
"You strangled her. You strangled them all."
Balenger took the knapsack from Vinnie and pulled the police report from the compartment in back. He reached into his pocket for the driver's license from the corpse on the bottom level.
"Candlelight gourmet dinners," Balenger said into the walkie-talkie. "Soothing classical music. Literary reading sessions. Foreign movies with subtitles. All very proper and formal and intellectual. Need to keep it intellectual. Can't let emotions get in the way. Emotions make you weak. Emotions make you lose control-"
He studied the name on the driver's license: Iris McKenzie. When Amanda listed the names of Ronnie's "girlfriends," something had nagged at him. Now he knew what it was. Iris. He flipped through the pages in the police report.
"Found it!" he said to the walkie-talkie. "Iris McKenzie. Age: thirty-three. Residence: Baltimore, Maryland. Occupation: advertising copywriter. Hair: blond. Sound familiar, you bastard? She ought to. If I'm right, she was your first." Balenger scanned the report, which an old man had written with painstaking neatness. "In August of 1968, Iris took a train from Baltimore to New York on business. Coming back, she decided to spend the weekend in Asbury Park at the famous Paragon Hotel. Nobody told her Asbury Park wasn't the jewel it used to be or that the Paragon Hotel was a nightmare. She arrived on Friday. One night in this spooky old pile was enough for her. She checked out the next morning to go to the train station. Nobody saw her again. Except me. I saw her, Ronnie. She's sitting downstairs in a corridor with her purse in her lap, still waiting for her train. It's going to be a long time coming."
His mouth dry, his chest aching, Balenger needed to pause. He felt as if his surging emotions could cause his veins to explode.
He raised the walkie-talkie. "Amanda says you treated her with terrifying politeness. Apart from locking her in the vault, of course. But what the hell, nobody's perfect, right? Then you showed up with a sheer nightgown for her to wear. What happened, Ronnie? Did you decide the courtship was finally over? You fed her. You entertained her. You proved what a prince of a guy you were. Now you wanted something for your efforts. You're a man of the world, after all. You know how the game's played. But all of a sudden you got angry. You called her a whore. Did your sexual needs make you feel weak and resentful? I bet you'd soon have hit her. Then you'd have hated yourself for letting your weakness and needs get the better of you. Maybe you hated yourself for wanting her and hated her for being a woman you wanted. Or here's an opposite possibility. I like this one better. Maybe you hated yourself because you believed you ought to want her but you didn't. Maybe you didn't feel any sexual interest at all, and that really bothered you. You were comfortable cooking gourmet meals, reading Proust, and watching subtitled movies. But when it came to the man-woman stuff, you were numb. 'What's wrong with me?' you wondered. Gotta do something about that. So you made her put on a nightgown. That ought to give you a charge. But it didn't, and now you hated her because she didn't make you feel like a man. You knew where this was going. The same way it went with the others. You couldn't make yourself screw them, so you strangled them to hide your shame and your failure. Maybe the next woman would make you feel like a man. Next time. There was always next time, right?"
Unseen lightning cracked. Amanda and Vinnie watched Balenger, listening in horror.
"So now you're a pop psychologist in addition to being a failed soldier and a mediocre policeman?" the voice asked.
"Detective. I was a detective. And I guess all that research you did about me didn't tell you the crimes I investigated. Or maybe you made yourself ignore that because you didn't want to think about your problem. Sex crimes, Ronnie. I investigated sex crimes. I can see into your head, pal, and it's a sewer."
Ronnie. That name, too, kept nagging at Balenger.
"1968," Balenger said into the walkie-talkie. "There's a photograph of you and Carlisle. It has a date on the back: July 31, 1968. A month later, Iris McKenzie disappeared. By the end of the year, Carlisle closed the hotel, dismissed the staff, and lived here alone. Or maybe he wasn't alone. Ronnie. Ronnie. Why does that name-"
Balenger flipped through the police file, page after page, remembering something, searching for it. Ronnie. Then he found the page, and the name stared up at him. It made him shudder. "Ronald Whitaker."
"What?" the voice asked.
54
"Ronnie. Ronald. The Fourth of July, 1960. Ronald Whitaker."
"Shut up," the voice said.
Thunder rumbled.
"You're Ronald Whitaker."
"Shut up. Shut up."
Amid the din of the rain, Balenger heard pounding from below. Not from the trapdoor. Farther down. Aiming, he unlocked and opened the trapdoor. His goggles revealed the curved, green-tinted stairs.
"Shut up. Shut up," Ronnie yelled.
As the fierce pounding continued, Balenger eased down the stairs and peered through the demolished wall into Danata's ravaged living room.
The pounding came from the barricaded door, powerful enough to jostle the furniture stacked against it.
"Your mother died," Balenger said into the walkie-talkie. "Your father molested you."
"I'll make you hurt so much, you'll beg me to kill you!" Ronnie shouted from outside the door.
Balenger entered Danata's living room and aimed toward the door. Keeping his voice low, trying to make Ronnie think he was still in the penthouse, he continued speaking into the walkie-talkie. "Then your father thought he'd earn a few dollars out of you, so he brought you here to the Paragon Hotel for the Fourth of July, and he rented you to another pervert."
"I won't listen!"
"The guy tried to bribe you with a baseball, a glove, and a bat. I can't imagine how unspeakable it was. Afterward, your father came back to the room with the money. He was drunk. He fell asleep. You bashed his head twenty-two times with the bat. Ronnie, in your place, I'd have hit him fifty times. A hundred. I can't tell you how sorry I feel for that little boy. I'm enraged when I think about what was done to him. My heart breaks for the childhood he lost."
Rain lashed against the building. Thunder shook the walls.
"But I hate everything he became, Ronnie."