“She knew the line test?” Bunner said.
“She mentioned light tackle. Like a true sportsman, she said.”
They were in the kitchen of Terence Bun-ner’s quasi-mansion on the outskirts of Glenvale. Bunner and Al Cohen were the only two M.D. shrinks within two hundred square miles and they split the patients by age. Bunner got them over eighteen, Cohen under. They joked that they’d made the split at voting age. Bunner had a waiting list but never put off bad cases. The enemies up here were pretty impersonal, mostly the weather, and “bad cases” were rare. He did not treat alkies, figured AA could do a better job. Mostly they were alkies because their fathers or mothers were and they’d gotten the genes or the habit, and when they broke the habit, overcame the propensity, whatever term you wanted to use, the problem ended. Mostly.
He said, “So she knew you fished with five-pound test line, and that makes her psychic?”
“Sounds nuts put like that,” Latovsky said, running his fingers through his hair.
“It is nuts, Dave. And you wouldn’t say it or think it if you weren’t exhausted. It’s five a.m., and you’re positively green. How about some coffee?”
Latovsky nodded, and Bunner got up from the table, wrapped his Indian-blanket robe tightly around his long, thin body, and went to the refrigerator, a huge new state-of-the-art thing with an ice-maker in the door. He opened it and peered inside. “We got decaf or regular.”
“Make it regular.”
Bunner took the can out and started spooning coffee into the drip maker on the counter. His wife had just finished remodeling the kitchen from a warm, cozy, slightly tacky fifties room with green linoleum and cedar cabinets to a space-age module with white tile floor, white composition cabinets, and pale gray polished-stone counters.
“Christ,” he cried, lifting one slippered foot after the other. “Floor’s like fucking ice. So’s the goddamn counter. Can you imagine what it’s going to be like in here when it’s ten below out?”
“Cold,” Latovsky said, grinning.
They were old friends, had grown up a block apart in the blue-collar section of Glenvale, had become buddies in kindergarten and stayed that way. They’d roomed together at SUNY at Albany; then Latovsky met Allison the end of his senior year and moved in with her. And Bunner went to medical school.
“Anything from the M.E. yet?” Bunner asked, pouring water into the coffee maker.
“No. But I don’t need anything. Lucci was there first, got to look around before the troopers could screw everything up, and he said it’s a mirror of the other four. She and the killer had sex, consensual or not—don’t know for sure yet—but probably consensual, like the others. Then he slashed her open and left her to die....” Suddenly Latovsky’s voice choked.
Bunner looked at him. “Easy, Dave.”
Latovsky laughed, but tears glittered in his eyes. “Four years at Cornell Medical School, three years at John;- Hopkins, an M.D. and a Ph.D... and all you can say is easy, Dave?”
Grinning, Bunner poured the coffee into the chipped, thick old mugs that he’d rescued before Mary gave them to the thrift shop along with all their old china and pots and pans. Clean sweep, she’d said. He hadn’t minded except for the old mugs that he remembered his father drinking out of.
“He’d made love to her,” Latovsky said. “Made love to her, Bunny. Must have felt something. How could he do it? How?”
“I don’t know,” Bunner said, bringing the mugs to the table.
“And why Raven Lake? Why not Echo Lake, or Blue Lake? Why not Plattsburg?” He pulled out a Xerox he’d made of the Adirondack Park map and smoothed it on the table. Red X’s marked the murder sites.
“I did this looking for a pattern, and there isn’t one. They’re all over the place, like he opened the map, closed his eyes, and stuck a pin in it to see where he’d go next. Only two things are consistent. He does it on warm nights... you remember they stopped last October, and we thought the creep had moved on?” Bunner nodded. “And he does it at the full moon. Guy’s a real nut.”
Bunner didn’t say anything.
Latovsky wrapped his fingers around the hot mug, trying to warm them. He’d been cold since he’d left the Klein woman at the little house on Raven Lake. That spring cold that ate through your bones, he thought. Bunny was right about his new kitchen; the hard slick surfaces would soak up the cold and send it back into the room. It’d cost them three hundred a month just to heat the kitchen.
“She knew what my oil bill was last winter,” Latovsky said quietly.
“Stop it, Dave. Just stop it.”
He sipped the coffee and burned the roof of his mouth, and suddenly had an even worse thought than the ones that had been torturing him since Lucci called him about the dead woman. He raised his head and looked sickly at Bunner. “Warm nights, full moon,” he said slowly. “We could have one a month every month until next October.”
“Maybe.”
“Why?” Latovsky cried. “Why does he care what the temperature is?”
“Because he wants to be outside where no one can hear them scream, and he doesn’t have to worry about your finding fibers on carpets or furniture. Hard to pick out a couple of hairs in a bed of pine needles.”
“Okay. And why the full moon?”
“To see by.”
“See what by?”
Bunner looked into space and said softly, “Maybe their faces.”
“So we’ll have a dead woman for every full moon?”
“I don’t think so,” Bunner said suddenly. “He’ll skip May and June.”
“Why?”
“Fly season,” Bunner said, standing up.
“Jesus, you make him sound rational.”
“But he probably is, David. Be much easier to get a nut.”
“You telling me the son-of-a-bitch is sane?”
“No. But he’s not crazy either.” Bunner slid the carafe off the heating element and brought it back to the table to refill their mugs. “There’re lots of shrinks would tell you anyone who kills is crazy. And anyone who slashes open five women and leaves them to die in the woods is off-the-wall out of his skull. But I don’t buy it. And neither should you, because it’ll send you looking for a nut and there is no nut. This guy’s probably perfectly normal on the surface, maybe good-looking, doesn’t have any apparent problems with women. Some serial killers have been married men with kids. Some held down good jobs, were professionals.” Bunner grinned. “He could be a shrink. The hallmark of this guy is the total unlikelihood of his being what he is.”
“You mean he’s just like everyone else.”
“With a glitch.”
“You call killing five people a glitch?” Latovsky cried.
“Yes, Dave, because that’s what it is. Stop thinking raving maniac or you’re never going to get him. Look for a regular guy, a good neighbor. Not old, not real young. Just a regular guy... with a glitch.”
“Anyone you treat fall into that category, Bunny?” Latovsky asked suddenly.
“We’ve been over and over this, Dave. If anyone did, I’d tell you. If I set patient confidentiality over the deaths of five women—or even one—I’d be the crazy one. But the point is I could see the bastard every day and not know it’s him.”
“Because he’s not crazy.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, Bunny. Then what is he?” Latovsky demanded.