“It’s just up the hall from the gym, and it’s the classroom. The lab is in the general lab area. Go ahead, Lieutenant, look wherever you like,” said Daiman, went to a chair and sat on it with his head in his hands.
The passageway door was single, not double locked: was it ever double locked? On the tunnel side it couldn’t be opened without a key – or a credit card if it wasn’t double locked. Carmine entered the nine-foot-long tube and emerged to find himself staring at a girls’ toilet block directly across the hall.
This killer knows everything! he thought, staggered. He grabbed her when she went into the toilets – she was notorious for that – dragged her across a three-yard hall into a three-yard tunnel and a deserted gym. Most likely he opened the door before he grabbed her. And he knew the gym would be deserted! It is on every Wednesday after school because that’s when the contractors come in to treat the floors. But they didn’t treat them yesterday because Francine went missing and they weren’t allowed in. Once he was in the gym, he rearranged the mats, put her in the bottom of the nearest box and made sure Winslow’s super-thick mat covered her completely. Did he gag her and tie her, or did he give her a shot of something to keep her out for a few hours?
We searched every square inch of this school twice, but we didn’t find her. And when we didn’t find her, we knew she was the twelfth victim, spirited out of Travis before the squad car outside could radio base. Both times some searcher would have opened that locker and seen what was in all the others: rolled-up gym mats. Maybe whoever looked poked around inside it, but Francine didn’t move or make a noise. Then, when we were satisfied that Francine was gone – when Travis had ceased to be of any interest to us – he came back and retrieved her. I’ll put Corey on the door lock, he’s the best in the business.
Maybe where we keep going wrong is in underrating the grind, the pain of his planning. It’s as if he had nothing else to do between each abduction than spend all of every single day scheming how he’s going to grab the next one. How far in advance does he know the identity of his next victim? Did he pick them out years ago, when they were on the brink of puberty? Has he got them all listed on a wall chart, carefully ruled in columns – name, date of birth, address, school, religion, race, habits? He has to watch them, he must have known about Francine’s weak bladder. Is he a substitute teacher, flitting from school to school with glowing references and a great reputation? That, we have to investigate starting right now.
“Did he leave the jacket behind to jerk our strings, or did Francine manage to hide it in the mat?” he asked Patrick as he watched Paul delicately ease the unwieldy coat into a plastic bag.
“I’d say Francine hid it,” Patrick answered. “He’s arrogant, but to leave us the jacket betrays one of his craftiest tricks. Until now, we’ve been convinced that the girls are snatched and whisked away immediately. Why tell us that he doesn’t always do that? I believe that he wants to keep us peering down the same tunnel at the same ray of light. Which means, Carmine, that this new development can’t possibly be leaked to the press. Do you trust the boy who found it? The principal?”
“Yes, I do. How did he keep her quiet in the locker, Patsy?”
“He drugged her. Someone this meticulous wouldn’t have made the mistake of gagging her before putting her in a relatively airless, smelly sports locker. There’s no sign she did throw up, but human beings vary and some are the vomiting type. Gagged, she would have drowned in her own vomit. No, he wouldn’t risk that. She’s too valuable, he’s planned her for at least two months.”
“If we find her body -”
“You don’t think we’ll find her alive?”
Carmine gazed at his cousin with what Patrick called his “scornfully stern look.” “No, we’re not going to find her alive. We don’t know where to search, and all the places we’d like to search, we can’t. So when we find her body,” he went on, “you’d better go over her skin with a microscope. There’s a prick in it somewhere because he wouldn’t have had time to inject her where a good pathologist couldn’t find the mark. Odds are he’ll have used a very fine needle, and this time the body parts might not be in such good shape.”
“Maybe,” said Patrick wryly, “I could borrow the Hug’s Zeiss operating microscope. Mine’s shit by comparison.”
“With our unlimited budget, I don’t see why you can’t order one. It mightn’t come in time for Francine, but once you have it, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of use for it.”
“What I love most about you, Carmine, is your gall. They’ll crucify you, because I won’t put my name on the requisition.”
“Fuck them,” said Carmine. “They don’t have to see all those poor families. I have nightmares about the heads.”
Chapter 9
Friday, December 10th, 1965
Ten days went by with no sign of Francine Murray, though Francine Murray was not on Ruth Kyneton’s mind that morning. Even through the worst of winter, Ruth Kyneton preferred to use the outside line than shove her freshly laundered linens in one of those dryer things. You couldn’t beat the smell of clothes dried in sweet, clean air. Besides, she strongly suspected that the artificially scented anti-static fabric conditioners advertised on TV were actually a government plot to impregnate the skins of loyal, law-abiding Americans with substances designed to turn them into zombies. Every time you turned around, Congress was trampling on someone’s rights in favor of drunks, skunks and punks, so why not fabric conditioners, bathroom deodorants and fluoride?
She hung out her washing the proper way: fold a corner over the previous one to make it thick, pin them together, then tuck its far corner under the corner of the next item and pin them together, her mouth stuffed with pins, more in the pockets of her apron. Yep, her way meant half the number of pins and a line so crowded that no wire showed; finished, she levered a forked sapling under the line to stop it from sagging. The good thing about today was that it wasn’t cold enough to freeze things while they were wet. Purist though she was, Ruth never relished wrestling with frozen washing.
Throughout this exercise she had been aware that the three curs from farther down Griswold Lane were fighting at the bottom of her yard; they were bound to move on up because curs always did, and she was not about to let curs soil her blindingly white whites, her vividly vivid colors. So she returned to the house to fetch a straw broom and marched resolutely down the yard to where, at the end of it, a streamlet trickled. The streamlet was a nuisance – kept the ground from freezing quickly, admittedly, but it created mud. The curs would be caked in slimy black mud.
“Git!” she shouted, descending like a witch dismounted from her broom, waving it about viciously. “Git, you mangy critters, git! Go on, git!”
The dogs were squabbling amicably rather than fighting, all three tugging at a long, fleshy bone smeared in mud, and were unwilling to give up this prize until Ruth’s broom swiped two of them so hard that they fled, yelping, to stand some distance off and wait for her to give up. The third dog, pack leader, crouched and put its ears back, growling and snarling at her. But Ruth had lost interest in the curs; the bone was double, and had a human foot attached.