Prescott gained fifteen pounds that summer and grew two inches. By the end of August, he was lean, tall, and tanned, and as strong as some men. He had also listened to Carl Beeman talk. Beeman was not like his little brother. Carl was thought of as on the slow side of average, but he was given credit for his compact, functional body that had been toughened by the endless physical labor that only small businessmen are willing to endure. Prescott discovered that Carl had also developed his mind during those years, in the eccentric way peculiar to people of a contemplative temperament who spend a lot of time alone.
Carl Beeman made most of his money on rodents. He knew everything about mice and rats: how they had made their way into a building, what they had been eating, how long they had been there, how many there were. He would climb into an attic, go down into a basement, walk slowly around the outside of the house, a skilled hunter scouting the habitat before he made his plan.
As the summer went on, Beeman began to talk to Prescott while he worked, teaching him in low tones just above a whisper, and Prescott learned. The owner of the house was a bystander: the business was between Beeman and the mice. The adversaries understood and recognized each other, engaged in a primal battle for dominion over this space. The human beings whose names were on a paper filed in the county courthouse were as irrelevant to Beeman as they were to the mice. Although these people, in a way, fed and housed both sides of the struggle, they took no part in it and seldom saw the places where major battles were fought. Beeman was a good enough businessman to be sure the customers saw the casualties—rodents he carried out in plastic bags that didn’t need to be transparent but were.
Slowly, Prescott discovered that Beeman respected and sympathized with the mice. They were perfectly normal animals doing what animals did. They struggled for food, a warm, dry place, and safety. They had a good strategy: they shared a house with another, larger species that used it almost exclusively during daylight, so they used it mainly at night. The attributes of the larger species rendered it harmless to mice except for one quirk of evolution: the big, slow daylight creatures had Carl Beeman’s phone number.
Each campaign was carried out over a period of a week, with Beeman using a variety of tactics, checking daily to see how each had worked. Had he blocked all the entrances? Had the corn treated with strychnine been nibbled? Carried off? What were the mice doing on their side—chewing their way out? Prescott sighed. It was thirty-five years later now, and he had become Carl Beeman. He had been right about this adversary, and he had picked the right way to get the adversary to call. It had taken Prescott only a couple of days to select the right poison and deliver it. The killer might spend the next couple of days walking around ignoring it, but it would gradually work its way in and begin to hurt.
The killer would call again. He had to, because the need was hardwired into his brain. He didn’t just have to practice until he was smarter and stronger and more powerful. This was his destiny, the little play that he had been inadvertently raised to act out. He had been struggling to defeat the enemy that was older and bigger and had somehow always thwarted him and kept him down but had, at the same time, been oddly invisible, missing, impossible to even identify. Prescott stared at his hands. To volunteer for that role in this particular drama, a man would have to be crazy. He pushed the REWIND button on the tape recorder, picked up a pen, and waited to copy the words onto a notepad.
5
Prescott spent his days getting ready. Everything he would need had to be laid out, examined, taken apart, then packed in exactly the right order. When that had been done and redone, he passed the time in the big central library in downtown Los Angeles scanning old issues of newspapers on microfilm. He carried with him the list of cities that the killer had mentioned—Columbus, Phoenix, Houston, Pittsburgh, Danville, Biloxi, and Los Angeles—and the months when he had supposedly visited each one.
Each night, Prescott set up his bed on the couch in his office. He had selected the suite for nights like this. It was in a high-rent high-rise office building on Wilshire Boulevard. The other tenants included a few financial managers for the very rich, and several attorneys who had clients with high visibility and rapidly fluctuating reputations, so the security men downstairs were the cold-eyed suspicious sort rather than the kind who could be sent out to bring you lunch or get your car detailed. After hours, the elevators required a key to work. His office was on the ninth floor behind an unmarked polished oak door that had been reinforced on the inside with quarter-inch steel panels. The building’s upper windows were one-way glass, and Prescott’s wall on the hallway side was lined with tall filing cabinets that looked very businesslike but were filled with unopened reams of blank paper. If a bullet went through the wall and pierced the back of a filing cabinet, there was no chance it would come out the front.
He slept within a few feet of the telephone on his desk because he knew the killer’s call would come at night, almost certainly between two and five. The killer would know as well as he did that this was the time to take an enemy off guard. It was when sleep was deepest, and when police raided armed suspects. This killer would feel the need to stake a claim on the night.
On the fourth night at three A.M. the telephone rang. Prescott gave himself one ring to clear his mind, one to take a drink from the glass of water beside the telephone so his voice would not sound dry and scratchy from sleep. Then he picked up the receiver. “Yes?”
There was the breathing on the other end again. The anonymity the killer had relinquished by being goaded into speech the first time was something he seemed to believe he could get back, even though part of his mind must have known that Prescott recorded his calls.
Prescott said, “Oh, it’s you, breather. What’s up?”
What answered him was a whisper. “Just making sure you’re where I wanted you to be.”
“Yep,” said Prescott. “You can stop looking over your shoulder for now, and get some sleep. I’m not in that much of a hurry. I’ll get to you when I’ve gotten my schedule cleared. I’ve got a chore that’s a bit more important than you are right now.”
The whisper was angry. Prescott’s overconfidence was ugly, like a swelling that needed to be lanced. “Didn’t you check the jobs?”
“What jobs?”
“Phoenix, Houston, Pittsburgh . . .”
“Oh, your list of cities,” said Prescott. “I was going to make an attempt, but when I had a minute, I couldn’t see much in it. Los Angeles and Houston each have over a thousand homicides a year. You taking credit for all of them, Slick?”
“No.”
“I did try Danville, because that seemed like it might be a manageable number, but I don’t seem to find any mention of anybody dying in any interesting way in the month of May.”
“Abel Tucker.”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s the one I got there. In L.A. it was Donald Pearson. In Houston it was Sidney Obermeyer. That ought to be enough.”
“Well,” Prescott said doubtfully, “I’ll check and see if I can dig up your press clippings. But what are they supposed to tell me—that you’re bad?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s better if I show you what I do.”
Prescott sensed that something about the voice had changed. He decided to concede something. “I’ve seen what you do.”
“Do you have a family?”
“Nope,” he said. “I tried it once, when I was young and optimistic, but it doesn’t fit with this kind of life.”