This was the fourth hideously disfigured corpse they"d seen in the past four days. Rebecca was probably right: There was a psychopath on the loose.
But this wasn"t merely a crazed killer who slaughtered while in the grip of a psychotic rage or fugue. This lunatic was more formidable than that, for he seemed to be a psychopath with a purpose, perhaps even a holy crusade: All four of his victims had been in one way or another involved in the illegal drug trade.
Rumors were circulating to the effect that a gang war was getting underway, a dispute over territories, but Jack didn"t put much faith in that explanation. For one thing, the rumors were* strange. Besides, these didn"t look like gangland killings. They certainly weren"t the work of a professional a.s.sa.s.sin; there was nothing clean, efficient, or professional about them. They were savage killings, the product of a badly, darkly twisted personality.
Actually, Jack would have preferred tracking down an ordinary hit man. This was going to be tougher. Few criminals were as cunning, clever, bold, or difficult to catch as a maniac with a mission.
"The number of wounds fits the pattern," Jack said.
"But they"re not the same kind of wounds we"ve seen before. Those were stabbings. These definitely aren"t punctures. They"re too ragged for that. So maybe this one isn"t by the same hand."
"It is," he said.
"Too soon to say."
"It"s the same case," he insisted.
"You sound so certain."
"I feel feel it." it."
"Don"t get mystical on me like you did yesterday."
"I never."
"Oh, yes, you did."
"We were only following up viable leads yesterday."
"In a voodoo shop that sells goat"s blood and magic amulets."
"So? It was still a viable lead," he said.
They studied the corpse in silence.
Then Rebecca said, "It almost looks as if something bit him about a hundred times. He looks* chewed chewed."
"Yeah. Something small," he said.
"Rats?"
"This is really a nice neighborhood."
"Yeah, sure, but it"s also just one big happy city, Jack. The good and the bad neighborhoods share the same streets, the same sewers, the same rats. It"s democracy in action."
"If those"re rat bites, then the d.a.m.ned things came along and nibbled at him after he was already dead; they must"ve been drawn by the scent of blood. Rats are basically scavengers. They aren"t bold. They aren"t aggressive. People don"t get attacked by packs of rats in their own homes. You ever heard of such a thing?"
"No," she admitted. "So the rats came along after he was dead, and they gnawed on him. But it was only rats. Don"t try to make it anything mystical."
"Did I say say anything?" anything?"
"You really bothered me yesterday."
"We were only following viable leads."
"Talking to a sorcerer," she said disdainfully.
"The man wasn"t a sorcerer. He was-"
"Nuts. That"s what he was. Nuts. And you stood there listening for more than half an hour."
Jack sighed.
"These are rat bites," she said, "and they"ve disguised the real wounds. We"ll have to wait for the autopsy to learn the cause of death."
"I"m already sure it"ll be like the others. A lot of small stab wounds under those bites."
"You"re probably right," she said.
Queasy, Jack turned away from the dead man.
Rebecca continued to look.
The bathroom door frame was splintered, and the lock on the door was broken.
As Jack examined the damage, he spoke to a beefy, ruddy-faced patrolman who was standing nearby. "You found the door like this?"
"No, no, Lieutenant. It was locked tight when we got here."
Surprised, Jack looked up from the ruined door. "Say what? what?"
Rebecca turned to face the patrolman. "Locked?"
The officer said, "See, this Parker broad* uh, I mean, this Miss Parker* she had a key. She let herself into the house, called for Vastagliano, figured he was still sleeping, and came upstairs to wake him. She found the bathroom door locked, couldn"t get an answer, and got worried he might"ve had a heart attack. She looked under the door, saw his hand, sort of outstretched, and all that blood. She phoned it in to 911 right away. Me and Tony-my partner-were the first here, and we broke down the door in case the guy might still be alive, but one look told us he wasn"t. Then we found the other guy in the kitchen."
"The bathroom door was locked from inside?" Jack asked.
The patrolman scratched his square, dimpled chin. "Well, sure. Sure, it was locked from inside. Otherwise, we wouldn"t have had to break it down, would we? And see here? See the way it works? It"s what the locksmiths call a "privacy set." It can"t can"t be locked from outside the bathroom." be locked from outside the bathroom."
Rebecca scowled. "So the killer couldn"t possibly have locked it after he was finished with Vastagliano?"
"No," Jack said, examining the broken lock more closely. "Looks like the victim locked himself in to avoid whoever was after him."
"But he was wasted anyway," Rebecca said.
"Yeah."
"In a locked room."
"Yeah."
"Where the biggest window is only a narrow slit."
"Yeah."
"Too narrow for the killer to escape that way."
"Much too narrow."
"So how was it done?"
"d.a.m.ned if I know," Jack said.
She scowled at him.
She said, "Don"t go mystical on me again."
He said, "I never."
"There"s an explanation."
"I"m sure there is."
"And we"ll find it."
"I"m sure we will."
"A logical logical explanation." explanation."
"Of course."
IV.
That morning, something bad happened to Penny Dawson when she went to school.
The Wellton School, a private inst.i.tution, was in a large, converted, four-story brownstone on a clean, tree-lined street in a quite respectable neighborhood. The bottom floor had been remodeled to provide an acoustically perfect music room and a small gymnasium. The second floor was given over to cla.s.srooms for grades one through three, while grades four through six received their instruction on the third level. The business offices and records room were on the fourth floor.
Being a sixth grader, Penny attended cla.s.s on the third floor. It was there, in the bustling and somewhat overheated cloakroom, that the bad thing happened.
At that hour, shortly before the start of school, the cloakroom was filled with chattering kids struggling out of heavy coats and boots and galoshes. Although snow hadn"t been falling this morning, the weather forecast called for precipitation by mid- afternoon, and everyone was dressed accordingly.
Snow! The first snow of the year. Even though city kids didn"t have fields and country hills and woods in which to enjoy winter"s games, the first snow of the season was nevertheless a magic event. Antic.i.p.ation of the storm put an edge on the usual morning excitement. There was much giggling, name-calling, teasing, talk about television shows and homework, joke-telling, riddle-making, exaggerations about just how much snow they were supposed to be in for, and whispered conspiracy, the rustle of coats being shed, the slap of books on benches, the clank and rattle of metal lunchboxes.
Standing with her back to the whirl of activity, stripping off her gloves and then pulling off her long woolen scarf, Penny noticed that the door of her tall, narrow, metal locker was dented at the bottom and bent out slightly along one edge, as if someone had been prying at it. On closer inspection, she saw the combination lock was broken, too.
Frowning, she opened the door-and jumped back in surprise as an avalanche of paper spilled out at her feet. She had left the contents of her locker in a neat, orderly arrangement. Now, everything was jumbled together in one big mess. Worse than that, every one of her books had been torn apart, the pages ripped free of the bindings; some pages were shredded, too, and some were crumpled. Her yellow, lined tablet had been reduced to a pile of confetti. Her pencils had been broken into small pieces.
Her pocket calculator was smashed.
Several other kids were near enough to see what had tumbled out of her locker. The sight of all that destruction startled and silenced them.
Numb, Penny crouched, reached into the lower section of the locker, pulled out some of the rubbish, until she uncovered her clarinet case. She hadn"t taken the instrument home last night because she"d had a long report to write and hadn"t had time to practice. The latches on the black case were busted.
She was afraid to look inside.
Sally Wrather, Penny"s best friend, stooped beside her. "What happened?"
"I don"t know."
"You didn"t do it?"
"Of course not. I* I"m afraid my clarinet"s broken."
"Who"d do something like that? That"s downright mean mean."
Chris Howe, a sixth-grade boy who was always clowning around and who could, at times, be childish and obnoxious and utterly impossible- but who could also be cute because he looked a little like Scott Baio- crouched next to Penny. He didn"t seem to be aware that something was wrong. He said, "Jeez, Dawson, I never knew you were such a slob slob."
Sally said, "She didn"t-"
But Chris said, "I"ll bet you got a family of big, grody c.o.c.kroaches in there, Dawson."
And Sally said, "Oh, blow it out your ears, Chris."
He gaped at her in surprise because Sally was a pet.i.te, almost fragile-looking redhead who was usually very soft-spoken. When it came to standing up for her friends, however, Sally could be a tiger. Chris blinked at her and said, "Huh? What What did you say?" did you say?"
"Go stick your head in the toilet and flush twice," Sally said. "We don"t need your stupid jokes. Somebody trashed Penny"s locker. It isn"t funny."
Chris looked at the rubble more closely. "Oh. Hey, I didn"t realize. Sorry, Penny."
Reluctantly, Penny opened the damaged clarinet case. The silver keys had been snapped off. The instrument had also been broken in two.
Sally put a hand on Penny"s shoulder.
"Who did it?" Chris asked.
"We don"t know," Sally said.
Penny stared at the clarinet, wanting to cry, not because it was broken (although that was bad enough), but because she wondered if someone had smashed it as a way of telling her she wasn"t wanted here.
At Wellton School, she and Davey were the only kids who could boast a policeman for a father. The other children were the offspring of attorneys, doctors, businessmen, dentists, stockbrokers, and advertising executives. Having absorbed certain sn.o.bbish att.i.tudes from their parents, there were those in the student body who thought a cop"s kids didn"t really belong belong at an expensive private school like Wellton. Fortunately, there weren"t many of that kind. Most of the kids didn"t care what Jack Dawson did for a living, and there were even a few who thought it was special and exciting and better to be a cop"s kid than to have a banker or an accountant for a father. at an expensive private school like Wellton. Fortunately, there weren"t many of that kind. Most of the kids didn"t care what Jack Dawson did for a living, and there were even a few who thought it was special and exciting and better to be a cop"s kid than to have a banker or an accountant for a father.
By now, everyone in the cloakroom realized that something big had happened, and everyone had fallen silent.
Penny stood, turned, and surveyed them.
Had one of the sn.o.bs trashed her locker?
She spotted two of the worst offenders-a pair of sixth-grade girls, Sissy Johansen and Cara Wallace-and suddenly she wanted to grab hold of them, shake them, scream in their faces, tell them how it was with her, make them understand.