Paula stared at her. “What? Over that worthless Gary Knox?”
“Partly. Maybe. But it wasn’t just that, it was everything. And he wasn’t worthless, Paula. He wasn’t always worthless. He changed, that’s all. People do, you know.”
“I heard about what happened to him. Dad said it served him right.”
“Oh, I’d left him by then. But I lost it, Paula. Listen to what I’m saying. I just... lost it. Ever since then I’ve hidden myself in my work, buried my head in the sand. I’ve been too ashamed to come home and face you all.” She felt the tears burning in her eyes, felt the pent-up emotion ripping itself loose from her heart. “Why don’t you come back with me?” she said. “You. Dad. Jason and Cathy. A new life.”
Paula laughed. “Don’t be daft. We couldn’t possibly. First off, there’s school for the kids, and Dad... well... ”
Sarah looked directly at her. “I mean it,” she said. “You can do it if you make an effort. Come over and stay with me, Paula. I’m lonely. I’m so lonely.” And she let the tears come. Her head fell to rest on Paula’s shoulder, which hardened with resistance at first, then yielded. First, Paula put an arm around her, then Sarah felt her sister’s hand stroking her hair, just like she had all those years ago. “Somebody’s trying to destroy me, Paula,” she sobbed. “Somebody’s trying to drive me insane.”
21
All day the insects crawled over his exposed flesh: face, wrists, ankles. Some of them were biting him, too, drawing blood, but he didn’t mind. It was only their nature.
The rain came and went. He squatted in the trees at the back of the house. When you stay still for so long, he noticed, your mind moves into a very strange space indeed. Perceptions are heightened. Especially touch, smell and hearing.
He could smell not only every individual leaf of the eucalyptus and pine trees but any number of other, small wild flowers and shrubs in the vicinity. He could smell the dirt and earth-mold beneath him, still damp after rain, and he was even aware of the changing smells of his own skin as the chemical balances inside him altered minute by minute.
It was as if the whole spectrum of electromagnetic radiation beyond the puny strip occupied by visible light had suddenly opened its secrets to him. He could smell the light slowly changing to darkness, too: like saffron and cinnamon to coal dust and ashes. He liked it.
And he could feel every tiny insect footprint on his flesh, could hear every antenna brushing against the hairs on his wrist where the thin cotton gloves ended. He could feel the stingers, or whatever they used, slowly pricking into his skin, sucking his blood for incubation, or injecting inflammatory chemicals, and he could smell his blood as it flowed out.
But there was no pain. The things he experienced were all part of a vast continuum of sensation in which everything could be sensed, but in which nothing felt either good or bad.
He imagined this was what the Zen Buddhists meant when they talked about mindlessness and detachment.
He didn’t even daydream to pass the time. Nothing but pure sensation registered in his mind. He was so exactly focused on the here and now that there was no place for memory, doubt, fear or fantasy. Deep down, he knew why he was here, knew what he had to do and who he was doing it for. He didn’t have to think about it any more; it had become a part of his nature.
So all he had to do was wait, crouched in the woods with the insects getting in his hair and crawling down the back of his shirt collar, up his pant legs. Making tiny whistling, sucking and screaming sounds as they drew his blood.
He heard a car in the distance and instinctively his hand tightened on the hammer he held. It was the only movement he had made in six hours, apart from blinking.
22
It rained on Christmas Day in Santa Monica. All day. A slow, steady drizzle, at times indistinguishable from the fog.
Arvo woke late, showered, brewed a pot of fresh coffee and tuned the radio to FM 93.1. He knew every oldie almost by heart. As he half listened, he thought about what Joe Westinghouse had told him the previous evening. In some ways, it came close to confirming what he had suspected: that the Heimar murder might have been carried out for Sarah Broughton’s benefit.
Before the toxicology results, it had still been possible to believe that Heimar had simply picked up the wrong john and become the victim of a possible homophobic killer. Prostitutes, both male and female, made easy victims because they were often estranged from their families and lived far from where they grew up. They had no community beyond their own kind. If they disappeared, nobody noticed, and if another prostitute did notice, the odds were that he wasn’t going to call the cops.
But now Arvo knew that the Heimar kid had been given so much pentobarbitol that he had been in a coma before his throat was cut, before his neck and chest were stabbed and slashed repeatedly, before his body was cut into pieces, then it looked less like an impassioned sex killing and more like a cold, deliberately planned murder.
Joe had also checked with the coroner’s office about how the drug might have been administered. There were no fresh needle-marks, so intravenous injection was out, and it was unlikely that Heimar had been given it in a drink. Pentobarbitol tastes lousy and he would surely have noticed it, unless he had been almost paralytically drunk, which he wasn’t.
Most likely, Joe had thought at first, the kid had been offered the pills by his killer and had simply taken them himself, for fun, or to dull the pain of what he was doing, the way a lot of street kids do.
But the forensic pathologist who carried out the autopsy found traces of barbituric acid in Heimar’s anus and a high concentration of the drug in his rectal tissue. Which meant that Heimar or his killer had shoved the pills up his ass, probably as a prelude or a coda to anal sex. After all, straw behind the ears or not, John Heimar was a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool LA male prostitute.
Arvo tried to push the depressing thoughts aside. There was nothing more he could do until tomorrow, after the holiday, when life got back to normal. Besides, he still couldn’t be certain it wasn’t a potential serial killer making his first tentative foray into murder and dismemberment. But if he took everything into account — the watcher with binoculars; the letters, with their promise of “proof’; the placing of the body and timing to coincide with Sarah Broughton’s regular morning run; the coldly premeditated abduction and murder of an easy victim — then it seemed more likely there was a connection.
All morning, he had been eyeing the small package on the table by the window: his Christmas present from Nyreen. He couldn’t decide whether to open it or throw it out.
Finally, he opened it. Under all the padding and tissue lay a small, delicate glass bowl with a rose etched on the side. Nyreen was into glass-blowing these days, and it was probably something she had made. What its purpose was, Arvo had no idea. But trust Nyreen to send him something she’d blown. He put the bowl on the mantelpiece and tried to ignore it.
He hadn’t put up a tree this year — there seemed no point — and the few cards he had received stood on the tile mantelpiece — some from old friends in Detroit, one from his brother, Michael, in New York, one from his grandparents in Wales. His maternal grandparents had died when he was very young, before he had a chance to get to know them. When he was a boy, his mother once told him they had been murdered by Stalin after the war, but he hadn’t known what that really meant until much later.