The Madman - Страница 40

"Of course," Cleo replied, easily flicking the ball back toward him. "And the more I think about it, the more intrigued I get. There is much afoot here in Egypt. Rome, too, has its interests, no?"

"How so?" Francis said, grunting this time, but keeping the ball in play.

"What I saw only took a few seconds," Cleo said, "but I think it said a lot."

"Go on," Francis said.

Cleo returned the next shot with a little more pace and a little more angle, so that he had to reach to his backhand to get it back, which he did, surprising himself. He saw Cleo grin as she gathered his return and parried it easily.

"Entering the room, and surveying it, after he'd done all that he'd done," Cleo said, "indicated to me that he's not really afraid of very much, is he?"

"I don't follow," Francis said.

"Sure you do," Cleo replied, this time giving him an easy slow shot down the middle of the table. "We're all afraid of something, here, aren't we C-Bird? Either afraid of what's inside us, or afraid of what's inside each other, or afraid of what's outside. We're afraid of change. We're afraid of staying the same. We're petrified by anything out of the ordinary, terrified of a change in the routine. Everyone wants to be different, but that's the biggest threat of all. And so, what are we? We live in a world so dangerous that it defies us. Do you follow?"

Everything Cleo said, Francis thought was true. "What you're saying is we're all captives?"

"Prisoners. Absolutely," Cleo said. "Confined by everything. Walls. Medications. Our own thoughts." This time she hit the ball a little harder, but she kept it within his reach. "But the man I saw, well, he wasn't was he? Or, if he was, then what he's thinking isn't at all like everyone else, is it?"

Francis knocked the ball into the net. It dribbled back toward him.

"My point," Cleo said. "Serve it up."

Francis plunked the ball across the table, and once again the clicking noise of the ball traveling back and forth filled the room. "He wasn't afraid," Francis said, "when he opened that door to your dormitory…"

Cleo caught the ball in midair, stopping the rally. She leaned across the table. "He has keys," she said quietly. "He has keys that can unlock what? The doors in the Amherst Building? Or beyond? Keys that can unlock the other dormitories. Storage areas? How about the offices in the administration building? How about the staff housing, will his keys work on those doors? Can he unlock the front gate, Francis? Can he unlock the front gate and simply walk out of here whenever he wants?"

She put the ball back in play.

He thought for a moment, then said, "The keys are power, aren't they?"

Click, click went the ball against the table surface. "Access is always power," Cleo said, with a sense of finality in her voice. "The keys say much," she added. "I wonder how he obtained them."

"Why did he come into your room, risking being seen?"

Cleo did not answer for several passes of the ball back and forth above the net, before she said, "Perhaps because he could."

Again, Francis considered this, then he asked, "Are you sure you couldn't recognize him if you saw him again? Have you thought about how tall he was, what his build was like. Anything that might distinguish him. Something to look for…"

Cleo shook her head, but then stopped. She took a deep breath, and seemed to concentrate on the game, picking up velocity with each stroke, making the ball fly back and forth across the table. Francis was a bit surprised that he was able to keep pace with her, returning her shots, moving right and left, forehand and backhand, meeting the ball solidly each time. Cleo was smiling, dancing from side to side, her own body moving with ballet like grace that contradicted her bulk. "But Francis, you and I, we don't have to know his face, to recognize him," she said after a moment. "We need only to see that attitude. It would be unique in here. In this place. In our home. No one else will have that look, will they, C-Bird? Because, once we spot that," she said, "we'll know precisely what it is we are looking at. True?"

Francis reached out and struck the ball just a little hard. It flew across the table, missing the back line by two inches. With a darting, quick motion, Cleo snatched the ball from the air, before it bounced across the room. "Just long," she said. "But an ambitious shot to try, C-Bird."

Francis thought: In a place filled with fears, they were looking for the man who had none. In a corner of the dayroom, several voices suddenly started shouting. He could hear rage, and he pivoted around. A loud sob, followed by an angry shriek, creased the room. He put the paddle down, and stepped back from the table.

"You're improving, C-Bird," Cleo cackled, her laugh superimposed on the sounds of the burgeoning fight. "We should play again."

When Francis reached Lucy's office, he'd had a little time to think about what he'd learned. He found her leaning up against a wall, behind a simple gray steel desk. Her arms were folded in front of her, and she was watching Peter. He was seated, and he had three large manila case files opened on the desktop surface in front of him. Spread about were eight-by-ten glossy color photographs, crime scene maps in stark black-and-white, with arrows and circles and notations, and written forms that were filled out with details. There were coroner's office reports and aerial pictures of the locations. As Francis entered the room, Peter looked up with a look of exasperation.

"Hi, Francis," he said. "Any success?"

"Maybe a little," Francis replied. "I spoke with Cleo."

"Could she provide any better description?"

Francis shook his head. He gestured at the piles of documents and pictures. "That seems like a lot," he said. He'd never seen the volumes of paperwork customarily associated with a homicide investigation before, and it impressed him.

"Lots that says little," Peter replied. Lucy nodded her head in agreement.

"But then again, says a lot, too," Peter added. Lucy made a wry look with her face, as if this particular observation was painful or unsettling.

"I don't understand," Francis said.

"Well," Peter began slowly, but picking up momentum, as he spoke, "what we have are three crimes, all committed in different police jurisdictions, probably, because bodies were moved postmortem, which means that no one precisely has charge of any case, which is always a bureaucratic mess, even when the State Police get involved. And we have victims discovered in various states of decomposition, whose bodies have been exposed to the elements, which makes forensics at best difficult and really well-nigh impossible. And we have crimes, which, as best as one can tell from the detectives' reports, were randomly selected, at least the victims were, because there are few, if any similarities in the women who were killed, other than body type, hair type, and age. Short hair and slender physique. One was a waitress, one was a college student, and one was a secretary. They didn't know each other. They didn't live anywhere near each other. They didn't have anything in particular that linked them together, other than the unfortunate fact that each traveled home alone on various forms of public transportation you know, subways or buses and that each had to walk several blocks through darkened streets to get to their apartments. Making them eminently vulnerable."

"Easy," Lucy said, "for a patient man to pick out and stalk."

Peter hesitated, in that second, as if something Lucy said raised some question within him. Francis could see that some notion was churning about within him, and he was unsure whether to put it to words and speak it out loud. Finally after a few moments had passed, Peter leaned back, and said, "Different jurisdictions. Different locales. Different agencies. All here together…"

"That's right," Lucy said carefully, as if she was suddenly watching her words.

"Interesting," Peter replied. Then he leaned forward, back toward the materials on the desktop, surveying the entirety slowly. After a second, he stopped and picked up the three photographs of the victims' right hands. He stared at the mutilated fingers for a moment. "Souvenirs," he said briskly. "That's pretty damn classic."

"What do you mean?" Francis asked.

"In the studies done on repetitive killers," Lucy said quietly, "one common characteristic is the need for the killer to remove something from the victim, so that he can relive the experience later."