“Fifteen seconds,” said a man wearing a headset. The man had a nervous tic that effectively deprived him of control over the lids of his left eye. Velez Caputo smoothed her dress and licked her lips. Velez Caputo had wonderful lips, and no tics to speak of.
There were, I’d been told, eighty people sitting out front in the Peanut Gallery. Among them were Eleanor, whom I’d been unable to talk out of attending, Hammond, and three of his boys. They’d followed her in, at a presumably discreet distance, when she absolutely refused to stay home. In exchange for coming, she’d accepted the deaclass="underline" She had to leave early. In case the Incinerator was waiting outside.
Velez Caputo gave her microphone cord a tug. It was attached to an oversized spool, like the one that lawn maniacs use to keep their garden hoses tidy. An anxious-looking man presided over it as though it were the only responsibility worth shouldering in the entire world.
The lights came on. “Five seconds,” said the man with the headset and the tic. His eye was firing off random squints. “Four, three,” and then he held up a hand and counted down, two, one. He pointed a discreet index finger in the general direction of Velez Caputo. No one pointed directly at Velez Caputo. The little red light on the camera closest to her winked on.
“They call him the Incinerator,” Velez Caputo said immediately. “He’s the latest and most sensational member of a breed that’s become only too common in this decade, the serial killer.
“Where do these people come from?” She stopped smiling and assumed an expression of High Episcopal Seriousness. “What goes through their minds? Why do they walk among us? And what is it like to know that one of them has targeted you?
“When people think about their deaths, what do they dread most? Is it death from a lingering disease? No.” She was reading off a transparent TelePrompter that spooled by in front of the camera she was facing, invisible to the people looking in, the same elite device used by presidents of the United States, and why not? She made a lot more money than the president. “Is it death by drowning? No,” she answered herself, just in case the folks at home had gotten it wrong. “According to a Louis Harris poll, it’s death by fire. By flame,” she said. “And that’s how the Incinerator kills his defenseless victims. We have with us today four guests.”
The light on her camera went out, and I saw myself, wearing makeup, on the monitors, looking as if I’d wandered in from the show on transvestites by mistake. “First is a Los Angeles private detective named Simeon Grist.” The words SIMEON GRIST appeared on the screen beneath my face, which had frozen into a sort of muscular death mask. In print, my name seemed foolish and wrong, like an alias assigned by a substandard intelligence service.
“Mr. Grist,” Velez Caputo was saying about the idiotic-looking individual on the monitors, “is the man who broke up a child prostitution ring here in Los Angeles last year. He was retained by the famous heiress Baby Winston when the Incinerator burned her father, and now, as you’ve seen from the letter we just read, the Incinerator has threatened to burn him alive. It took great courage for him to join us today, ladies and gentlemen. Simeon Grist.”
People applauded, and the idiot on the monitors grinned emptily. Hammond clapped, slowly and ironically. Eleanor sat forward, looking concerned. Stillman, behind the cameras in a nautical blazer, made up for my old pal’s lack of joie de vivre by applauding more enthusiastically than anyone. The light on my camera went off, and none too soon.
“Our other guests,” Velez Caputo said, “are a psychologist specializing in serial killers for the Los Angeles Police Department, Dr. Norbert Schultz.”
Schultz smiled in a nervous, yellow fashion, and I thought, Norbert?
“From VICAP, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s central index, where national information on these maniacs is stored,” Velez Caputo continued as the monitors reflected a sallow individual wearing a blue tie with little red fish all over it, “William Stang.”
William Stang didn’t smile. He probably hadn’t smiled since the day his wife fell through the ice.
The man in the farthest chair had gotten up, and a woman took his place. Great, I thought, a surprise.
“And, finally, the woman who’s being called the Homeless Heroine, the woman who fought off the Incinerator to save the life-only temporarily, I’m afraid-of Baby Winston’s father. Ladies and gentlemen, Hermione X.”
Hermione X, not a new hallmark in alias creativity, had been considerably cleaned up. Wearing a mask that made her look like an aged Lone Ranger in drag, she waved at the audience. They applauded. She was a hit. She was also loving it.
I was hating it a lot. “He could kill her,” I said over whatever Velez Caputo was reading off the TelePrompter, a stream of over-written conjecture about what has gone wrong with our society.
“Mr. Grist?” Velez Caputo said, swiveling to face me. It would take a lot to surprise her.
“This isn’t smart,” I said. “She has to go back to the streets when you’ve finished with her, and he saw her. So what if she’s wearing a mask? He knows who she is.”
“We’re paying for her security,” Velez Caputo said smoothly. I saw Norman wince. “Anyway, we’re sending her home.”
“The woman doesn’t know her last name. Should be an interesting passport.”
Caputo frowned at me, but Stillman’s face cleared.
“Don’t worry about me, Ducks,” Hermione said gaily.
“I’d think, Simeon-may I call you Simeon?” Velez Caputo said.
“Call me whatever you want,” I said. I’d been warned that there would be surprises, but I hadn’t figured on Hermione.
“I’d think, Simeon, that you’d be more worried about yourself.” The man with the headset was making frantic signals in the direction of the TelePrompter, his left eye sending out a semaphore of panic. She ignored him.
“Well,” I lied, “you’d think wrong.”
“And yet this lunatic has told you what he’s after. Specifically,” she added. “You.”
“He’s not a lunatic,” I said.
“He’s not,” Schultz said, leaning forward in his chair as he picked up his cue. “Clinically, he’s probably as sane as you and I.”
“Sane?” Velez Caputo said, arching an eyebrow that probably required its own gardening staff. “He’s torching defenseless people!”
“Precisely,” Schultz said. “They’re defenseless. He’s got a plan. He’s got rules. We’ve all got rules. Don’t cross on the red, don’t cheat on the wife, don’t do anything that might make you lose the job. Well, he’s got rules, too, and he followed them for a long time. They’re not our rules, but they’re rules. And insofar as the legal definition of sanity is concerned-whether he can distinguish between right and wrong-well, of course he can. And he’s proceeding anyway, in accordance with a program he’s created. He’s completely in control of himself.”
“He’s very much in control,” Stang said. He’d interrupted a sentence fragment from Velez Caputo, but she looked at him as gratefully as though he’d just offered her the names and addresses of seventy Nielson families. “Your mass murderer, the guy who shows up at McDonald’s with an AK-47 and shoots thirty people, he’s maybe crazy. He kisses the wife and kiddies good-bye and slips a clip into the magazine and blows people away until the cops put a couple through his skull. He knows he’s going to die, and he doesn’t care. That’s crazy. But your serial murderer, he’s careful. He chooses one kind of victim exclusively, and one way to kill them, and he makes sure that no one will catch him. He looks both ways, so to speak, and when the field is clear, he slits the throat…”