“Good,” said Sondgard, smiling. The contrast between Rod McGee and Will Henley went deeper than physical appearance. Here was the eager boy, the willing worker, the one who in college wound up on every club’s Entertainment Committee, who never got a single mark higher than B or lower than C, who loaned his money indiscriminately, and who at a get-together in a professor’s home would leap to help the professor’s wife with the refreshments. Not out of calculation, but simply because that’s the way he was.
Sondgard asked the next question for the record only, expecting a negative answer. “Have you ever been in trouble with the police? Parking tickets and such excepted.”
“Oh, no. Not till now. I mean — I guess I’m not really what you’d call in trouble now either, am I? But I mean I’ve never even talked to a policeman before, except maybe ask directions or something.”
“All right, fine. Now, this afternoon. You spent the entire time at the rehearsal, is that right?”
“Oh, sure. Listen, do you think we’ll be able to go on? I mean, I know that sounds awfully heartless, with Cissie just dead and all, you know, but we’ve all been talking in there and we were kind of wondering, you know...”
“I imagine the play will go on.” Sondgard smiled. “The show must go on, remember?”
“Sure, I know. But a couple of us were thinking maybe it wouldn’t. I don’t know, I guess it doesn’t make any difference.”
“Just a minute.” Sondgard was finding Rod McGee the most difficult of them all to interview. The boy kept going off on tangents, and it took a bulldozer to bring him back. “About this afternoon,” Sondgard insisted. “You say you spent all your time at the rehearsal?”
“Oh, sure. We started at—”
“Yes, I know what time you started.” But as soon as he said it, Sondgard was sorry, afraid he’d sounded harsh. Rod McGee was certainly friendly and co-operative, and it wasn’t his fault if he was too eager to be orderly. More softly, Sondgard said, “But I was wondering if you spent every minute in that room there. You didn’t leave at all to—”
“Oh, to go to the bathroom!” It burst out of him, and he was sparkling again. “Oh, sure! I’m sorry, honest, I didn’t know what you meant. Oh, sure. I went to the bathroom twice.”
“What times?”
“A little after two, I guess, and maybe around three-thirty, quarter to four.”
“Did you see anyone else in the house either time?”
“No, I didn’t. You think it was a prowler, huh?”
“It might have been.”
“Some of the others say you think it’s one of us. That would be a real mess, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, it would. Now, did you happen to notice—”
But he never got to finish the sentence. Mike Tompkins stuck his head in the door at that moment and said, “Captain, can I see you for a second?”
“What? Oh, yes. Be right with you.” He turned off the tape recorder and told Rod McGee, “I guess that’s all. Thank you for co-operating. Would you go back with the others now? Tell them I’ll be with them in a minute.”
“Will do.” McGee got to his feet. He motioned at the tape recorder. “That looks like one of the new ones,” he said.
Mike was waiting impatiently in the doorway, a strained expression on his face. Sondgard got up from the table and went over to him, saying, “What is it, Mike?”
“Something I want to show you.”
Sondgard went with him, the two of them following Rod McGee down the hall. McGee went into the rehearsal room. Standing at the foot of the stairs, looking unusually pale, was Tom Burns.
Mike said, “Tom here found it. None of the others know about it yet.”
“What is it?”
“You ought to see it for yourself. Come on along, Tom.”
“Anything to be of service,” said Burns, but he sounded reluctant.
The three men went upstairs, and Mike led the way to the bathroom. “Here it is, Captain.”
Sondgard looked where Mike was pointing. On the mirror over the sink, in a huge and childish scrawl, were the words, I’M SORRY. The letters were shaky and ill-formed, sprawling over the entire surface of the mirror, the “Y” of SORRY crammed against the edge of the mirror by the size of the letters preceding it. The writer had pressed the soap so hard against the mirror that chunks of it stuck here and there, protuberances on the letters, and more small pieces had dropped to the sink. The bar of soap itself, all mashed together, lay in the soap dish on the sink.
Sondgard looked at the letters, and felt a sudden rush of pity. A poor bewildered mind had scrawled out those words, and Sondgard had no doubt they were sincere. This creature, whoever he was, driven by whatever sickness infested his brain, had raped and killed. And then, in shock and terror and remorse, he had come here to gaze upon his own face in this mirror, and to scratch out on its surface his plea for forgiveness.
A madman. Not simply a low and cunning intelligence, or a brutish mind, but a sensitive mind twisted by madness. Just as Sondgard had placed and typed the people he had questioned, trying to understand them, now he automatically built up in his mind a portrait of this poor lost wretch, who here for the second time had left his spoor. If the carnage upstairs was the result of a Mr. Hyde, this writing on the mirror was surely the outcry of a Dr. Jekyll. It was Jekyll that Sondgard pitied, forced to share the same husk with Hyde.
Was that husk here in this house? Sondgard riffled the mental daguerreotype he had made of his suspects, and tried to match one up against the daguerreotype of this sick and twisted human being. But he couldn’t find the pair that matched, and a paraphrase of a line from television ran idiotically through his head: Will the real madman please stand?
So, not yet. He would have to talk to them more, he would have to get to know them better
Mike’s usually loud voice was unexpectedly hushed. He said, “You want me to call Captain Garrett now, Captain?”
Captain Garrett?
No, not this time. Captain Garrett was a hunter. This poor wretch couldn’t be hunted; he would have to be understood. Would Captain Garrett, on seeing this pitiful message, have understood its implications as Sondgard did?
“Maybe there’s prints on that soap,” said Mike, more to himself than Sondgard.
Of course. That’s what Garrett would see. A clue to the man’s hands, not a clue to his soul.
It was one of the people waiting in the room downstairs. Sondgard knew that now as surely as if the guilty man had come and whispered it in his ear. After the crime, coming down the stairs, he had stopped here to remove the evidences of what he had done. And why? To make himself presentable when he returned to the group below. And he had scrawled this message to whom? To his co-workers, pleading with them for understanding. A stranger from outside would not have left this message here. Either the message would have been found in the murdered girl’s room itself, or it would have come through the mail — shaky block letters clipped from a newspaper.
The killer was here, in this house. Sondgard had talked to him. Sondgard would find him.
“Captain? You want me to call Captain Garrett?”
“No,” said Sondgard. “Not yet. We’ll handle it ourselves for a while.”
Externally, the asylum wore the modern look. Situated atop a clear and grassy knoll, it presented to the visitor a pleasing façade, the bright brick administration building fronted by white pillars and with an approach of white limestone-painted rocks bounding the asphalt road through well-landscaped and well-manicured lawn.