Colleen McCullough - Naked Cruelty

The rest of the men were a lost cause. Nick, Buzz, Liam, Tony and Donny eyed her warily, avoided one-on-one situations if they possibly could, and dried up conversationally whenever she hove in view. Privately she despised them as specimens off the Ark; they believed women belonged to the kitchen and their children. Well, let them be male chauvinist pigs! She was protected by Captain Delmonico, and she stood on better terms with him than they did.

Delia was Delia, a good friend, a staunch supporter, the loyalest of fellow women. Never having fired her.38 or her Saturday night special save at the range, she couldn’t fit herself into Helen’s shoes, was the trouble. Since her secondment to Abe Goldberg, Helen didn’t see enough of Delia, a pity.

Most astonishing change of all to Helen was that in her parents. Her mother waffled about “bad karma” and was having sessions with her swami or guru or whatever he was called-just like the Beatles, really. Though Angela was very happy at the resolution of a quincunx in Helen’s natal horoscope-it had bothered her ever since, she told Helen, now she knew that it was Helen’s ability to shoot people dead. Her father, one of the nation’s great liberals, found himself on the receiving end of remorseless sarcasm at producing a killer-cop child, and hadn’t thanked her for the adverse publicity.

In fact, Kurt’s death had changed everything, Helen thought as she stared down at Busquash Inlet from behind her glass wall. The Warburton twins, briefly owners of this apartment, were moving back to the West Coast, having struck a fabulous deal with the movie mogul Myron Mendel Mandelbaum to write, direct, and star in a blood soaked film about murder and twin detectives.

It hadn’t taken any steel on her part to continue living here. The white carpet had been replaced by a rust-red one-Delia was right, no snowy bedroom vistas for Helen MacIntosh! The trouble was that now the rust-red carpet was down, she found she didn’t like it. Purple would look better. This debate over decor, she was astonished to discover, was seen by people like the male detectives as callousness! She was supposed to be cringing in fear! Why ? Hadn’t she achieved a great victory? She, a weak woman, had put paid to the existence of a man who had raped, tortured and eventually murdered fellow women! They should give her a medal, not subject her to an enquiry. Of course that had exonerated her; she had acted in self-defense.

Some of the consequences were exasperating, like the one that compelled her to see Dr. Liz Meyers and attend the rape clinic sessions devoted to Dodo victims. How she hated those sessions! After she spent two of them insisting loudly that the Dodo had not raped her, Dr. Meyers dismissed her as unsuitable for group therapy of this nature; after another one-on-one session, Dr. Meyers referred Helen to Dr. Matthew Worthing, who specialized in difficult cases. But Helen never saw him.

What a profound experience it had been! The thrill of the kill… When she closed her eyes she could see, as if in slow motion, the crimson flower bloom in Kurt’s bare chest, followed by another in the right upper belly, and a final one over the heart. Not huge blooms, but tight little buds that had slowly unfurled. The sight of him on that white carpet! The look in his eyes! That was best of all. Amazement and terror, absolute incredulity. And then he died. Poof! Lights out.

How often dare I kill? Not here-never again in Holloman! Not even in Connecticut. I’ll be able to kill at least once in Manhattan, maybe twice or three times before I have to move on. Three million square miles of police departments, so many that I can wander from place to place at my whim. I’ll get better at it. To dispose of a body would be a tremendous help…

The look in his eyes! Watching the life vanish from his eyes, I came to climax. Now, even thinking of it, I climax again.

COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH was born in Australia. A neurophysiologist, she worked in Australia and the U.K. before joining the department of Neurology at the Yale University School of Internal Medicine, where she remained for ten years.

Publication of The Thorn Birds , her second novel, in 1977, saw the end of her scientific career. She moved to Norfolk Island in the South Pacific, where she lives with her husband, Ric Robinson.