Carns inspected the house through his binoculars one last time. Satisfied, he reached into the glove compartment and withdrew one of his untraceable cellular phones. He punched in the woman’s number. Three rings, four… Finally an answering machine picked up.
“Hi. You’ve reached the Welsh residence,” a young girl’s voice announced. “We can’t come to the phone right now, but please leave a message for Wes, Julie, Heather, or Brian, and we’ll return your call. Wait for the beep.”
Carns closed the phone and started the van. He proceeded down the street, slowing as he approached the Welsh residence to activate the opener remote he had purchased and programmed the previous day. With a lurch, the Welshes’ garage door levered open, revealing two empty parking spaces. Carns drove in. He depressed the remote button again. The door creaked shut behind him.
He was in.
Smiling, he stepped from the van and moved to a door leading into the house. After pulling on a pair of latex gloves, he turned the knob. The door was unlocked, as expected-not that the cheap lock present would have slowed him appreciably. He stepped inside and glanced around.
No security system. Good.
Quickly, he surveyed the ground floor, committing the layout to memory. He found the electrical panel in a service alcove beside a downstairs bedroom. After examining the panel, he ducked into the adjacent bedroom, noting model planes, cars, a skateboard.
The boy’s room. Too close to the breaker panel. The outside meter, then.
Carns returned to the family room, where a pair of French doors led to a bricked patio on the side of the house. A brass key protruded from a deadbolt in one of the doors. He turned the key and stepped outside. Vine-covered fencing shielded the patio on two sides. The rear of the lot dropped off to the next street thirty feet below. Making his way along the side of the house, he located the electrical meter and master cutoff switch-easily accessible from the driveway past a six-foot-high wooden gate.
Perfect.
Carns returned to the family room, relocked the door, and pocketed the key.
Better and better.
Upstairs, on either side of a bathroom and a small linen closet, were three more bedrooms. One had been converted to an office, another was the girl’s room. He glanced into each, then entered the last. Her room.
The bed there was an antique four-poster, solidly built, with plenty of room. Carns pictured how it would be-the woman in the center of the mattress, her husband by the closet, well away from the window but in full view of the bed. The candles here, and here. Camera and tape recorder on the bedside stand. Implements on top of the dresser. And the knife…
Reluctantly, Carns forced his thoughts back to the business at hand. He still had one thing left to do. After crossing the room, he entered a walk-in closet. Ignoring the husband’s wardrobe, he moved to a clothes rack in the back and began flipping through a number of the woman’s coats, skirts, dresses. He found what he was looking for in a wicker hamper. Often over the past months, he had seen her wearing the brightly hued garment. Now it was his.
He returned to the bedroom, running the woman’s leotard through his fingers as though it were the pelt of some exotic animal. Feeling himself growing erect, he moved to a dresser mirror and pressed the silky fabric to his chest, draping the straps over his shoulders and smoothing the elastic apparel against his abdomen, turning to view himself from various angles.
Try it on? She’s tall. The fabric will stretch…
Not now. Later.
Slowly, Carns lowered his treasure. Though his body ached for release, he knew he couldn’t risk it. There would be time enough for that later. As he glanced again at his image in the mirror, his thoughts traveled back, revisiting the days he had first begun exploring his secret passion. In retrospect, he could see now that it had all been inevitable. All of it, from the very beginning.
Two weeks following his third birthday, after stints with various foster families and brief stays at the Auburn Children’s Center as a ward of the State of New York, he had been adopted by a family living on a dairy farm north of Albany. It was there he’d spent his next twelve years. His earliest memories of his adoptive mother, a raw-boned immigrant who had taken the name Adelia upon entering the country, were of onions, cigarette smoke, and whiskey. Her tongue was lacerating, her temper vile, her discipline severe. Her husband, Nicholas, a diminutive man in both stature and spirit, accepted her iron-fisted domination, suffering her humiliations in silence.
He had never met his true birth mother. According to records he later uncovered, she had been an unmarried, alcoholic teenager who’d died in a state mental institution. After learning that unsettling fact, he hadn’t touched alcohol for years, fearing the possibility of a genetic link. Adelia harbored no such compunctions, however, and Nicholas, rather than crossing his strong-willed wife, routinely joined her in an evening ritual of argument, Southern Comfort, and sex. Over the years, as he lay awake listening to their grunts in the next room, knowing that the following morning he would have to do their chores as well as his own, he had grown to despise them both.
Five years earlier, Adelia’s and Nicholas’s union had produced a daughter, Paula. Following a difficult delivery, Adelia had undergone a complete hysterectomy, a loss she blamed on her husband. Often, in the presence of anyone who would listen, she complained bitterly that if it hadn’t been for the operation, she wouldn’t have had to bring an outsider into their house. Granted, adopting was cheaper than paying a handyman, but if she’d been able to have another real child of her own…
Like her mother, Paula never accepted the three-year-old boy who had been thrust so unexpectedly into her life. For one thing, he seemed… odd. For instance, he had those peculiar white patches of hair. “And his hands are so icky!” he had heard her snicker to a classmate one day. She’d been sitting a half dozen seats behind him on the school bus, but he had heard her clearly. Staring at the drab farmland rolling past, he had made a solemn promise to himself. Someday Paula would pay.
And in the end, she had.
Later he learned that the thickening of his palms and soles, his ridged nails, and the white patches in his otherwise coal-black hair were the result of a developmental abnormality falling under the catchall diagnosis of ectodermal dysplasia. He was lucky, the examining physician had told him. A wide spectrum of manifestations were possible, ranging from neurological and cardiac malformations to the partial or even complete absence of hair, teeth, nails, even sweat glands. For years he had used black shoe polish to conceal his hoary patches of hair. It proved less than satisfactory, but better than nothing. Unfortunately, he could do little to conceal his disfigured nails or the thick, fissured tissue of his palms.
Weasel.
Paula had bestowed that name upon him following his tenth birthday, likening his patchy hair to that of a weasel’s going into molt, still showing its winter white through the emerging brown fur of summer. Somehow, her nickname pleased him. He remembered seeing the aftermath of a weasel attack on a neighbor’s henhouse. Several birds had been partially eaten, the rest senselessly slaughtered. Gazing at the carnage, he had been excited in a way he’d never felt before. Later, after everyone had left, he’d returned and sat inside the bloody enclosure, trying to imagine what must have taken place.
The sleeping chickens. The weasel appearing out of the darkness, slipping under the gate…
He wished he could have been inside when it happened.
Shortly after the henhouse attack, he began his game with the mice. Many farms in the area, including his, used a gully on the far side of the highway as a trash dump. It was there that he first started to hunt. Each day after school he amused himself by trapping small rodents in the rusty oil cans they made their homes. Smashing down his boot, he trapped them inside, then impaled them with a blunted stick as they tried to escape. He enjoyed their panic, and the slippery popping squeaks they made when he shoved in the stick, and the way they quivered at the end-their eyes bulging uncomprehendingly in death.