My blood.
She knew what he was going to do with the knife. With the saw.
He squatted down next to the bathtub, knowing she was too weak even to splash him with her blood. Holding the scalpel up so she could see it with her dimming eyesight, he smiled and said, “Open wide.” Then he laughed and said, “Oh, I’ll do that.”
There was an icy sensation at the base of her sternum. Then came the pain. Her body arched and rose to meet him. He bent her right arm over the tub, twisting it and pinning it tight against the porcelain. Then he went to work with the jigsaw.
It was all the same pain that shocked her and sent her whirling toward brilliant white light and the darkness beyond. The relentless rasping of the saw against bone or sinew seemed the harsh breathing of predators.
Margaret was alive long enough to see him carry her arm over to the shower stall and gently lay it inside to be rinsed off before he studied and reconstructed her.
It was easy, when he was finished with Margaret, for the Gremlin to leave her apartment building without being seen. A stocky man in dark clothes—Jordan didn’t even know for sure he was a doorman—went halfway to the corner to hail a cab for some people who might not even have come from Margaret’s building.
To be on the safe side, Jordan waited for the stocky doorman (if that’s what he was) to work his way toward the corner again to hail another taxi. When the man’s back was turned, Jordan simply slipped outside without being seen and walked away. He was wearing a stocking cap beneath a Yankees cap, keeping his ears flat against his skull and unnoticeable.
As he walked away he knew the doorman might be watching, but he wouldn’t know where Jordan had come from. As small as Jordan was, the man might even mistake him for a woman or child. For good measure, Jordan stuffed his hands in his pockets and skipped a couple of steps. Serial killers didn’t play hopscotch.
When he turned the corner, he felt safe.
He continued to walk, relaxed now, replaying in his mind Margaret’s miseries and final moments. Her grasping at life and her inexorable slide into death. Her eyes. Yes, her eyes. They’d fixed on his and the primal understanding was there. This was a shared experience, all but the last brief fractions of seconds, when he, in doom and shadow, turned away from the void as she could not.
That was his power, and it was monumental.
19
Iowa, 1991
The private road, more a long driveway, actually, ran straight from the Kray house to the county road. The driveway was dirt, the road blacktop. Jordan stood alone at the T of the private drive and county road, a math book stuck under his arm, his hands in his pants pocket.
Not being obvious about it, he was gazing across the patchwork of farmland where corn, beans, and potatoes were grown. The morning was beginning to heat up beneath a brilliant sun in a cloudless sky. Jordan was watching the house, made small by distance, a neat white geometrical shape among the pattern of fallow and green fields.
Movement caught Jordan’s attention, and he shielded his eyes from the sun with his flattened hand, like a frozen military salute. The bus was coming to pick him up at the T and, making three other stops along the way, drive him and some of the area’s other students to Robert F. Kennedy School.
Right now, the bus was a small yellow dot crawling in his direction along the perfectly straight, perfectly flat county road. Jordan’s view was a mosaic of straight lines and ninety-degree angles.
He looked back toward the distant house and his heartbeat quickened. He was sure there was a barely visible curl of dark smoke rising from the house.
It’s working!
He squinted again at the bright morning sun, his friend and accomplice.
Jordan moved out where he could be seen as the bus grew larger. He knew there would be half a dozen kids on the bus, and he wanted to board fast, so no one would look off in the direction of the house. A glance back informed him that the smoke was rising darker and more visible. He knew it wasn’t rising as fast and high as it might, because the morning was still.
The bus became larger faster, and then it was very near. Air brakes hissed and the yellow pneumatic doors folded open. Jordan got in fast, flashed his student pass even though the bus driver knew him, and moved quickly down the aisle. He flung himself into a seat halfway back, and saw that the driver, a man he knew only as Ben, was watching him in the big rearview mirror, waiting to make sure he was seated. Ben waited before driving away, making Jordan nervous enough to notice that his right arm was trembling. He willed it to be still, and it became still.
“Nobody else this morning?” the driver called.
“Sleepin’ in,” Jordan answered.
“Lucky them,” Ben the driver said. The diesel engine growled and clattered and the bus moved away.
Jordan could smell burning. He was sure it was the bus’s exhaust and not the house. Not from this distance.
The driver caught his eye in the oversized mirror. “How’re your mom and dad?” he called in a loud voice.
“They’re good,” Jordan said.
As the bus picked up speed, it rattled and roared and became too loud to talk over. Jordan chanced a glance off to the side. There was now what appeared to be a dark cloud looming behind the Kray house. It could have passed for a rain cloud, but he knew it was smoke.
Jordan thought about his mother and father, his sister, and his brother, Kent. He was pleased that he felt no stab of conscience. No regret. None of them, including even Nora, deserved his regret. Bad things in this world simply happened. Everyone tried to make sure they happened to somebody else. Jordan had been taught early on that was how the world worked. And it had to be worked. Losers had to learn to become winners, small fish to survive long enough to become big fish.
He settled back in his seat, excited inside, calm outside. They had taught him how to wear a mask.
The other kids, not long out of their beds, were sleepy and bored and as quiet as Jordan. Ben the driver began mindlessly humming a tune. Jordan couldn’t place it at first, but soon realized it was from the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Then Rollie Conrad, the fat kid who made top grades, yelled, “Hey! Fire!” He was out of his seat and pointing. “Look! Fire! Fire!”
Everyone in the bus crossed the aisle or swiveled to look in the direction Rollie was pointing.
“Fire!” Rollie yelled again, this time louder and spraying spittle.
“We see it,” an older girl named Mary Ann said calmly. She made a face and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
Jordan knew it was time to pretend.
“Oh, no! That’s my house! My mom and dad—everybody—they’re in there sleeping!”
“The other kids are in there with your folks?” the driver asked.
“Yes, yes! I said everybody! My whole family!”
The driver said, “Jesus H. Christ!” and brought the bus to a near stop that caused two of the passengers to fall on the floor. “Everybody back in your seat! Now!”
Ben slowed the bus even more, looking for a place to pull to the side where he wouldn’t go off the shoulder or block the road. Then he thought, what the hell? The bus might be the only vehicle for a couple of miles!
He stopped the bus, though it was blocking half of the road, and got his brand-new cell phone. No connection. He remembered the phone company hadn’t put the towers up yet. He was too far from any major population center to make a phone call. Too far from anywhere.
A dead zone.
The driver looked at his passengers. A boy named Wally Clark appeared old enough, skinny and fast enough.