Paul Levine - Night vision

"A lady in our midst," proclaimed the old wino, bending from the waist and extending an arm.

"Dr. Maxson," Nick acknowledged, nodding. "Perhaps I shouldn't say this, but you have the greatest legs I've ever seen, and I've seen them from here to Hong Kong."

Pam nodded politely but kept her eyes on me. "Well, Jake, you seem to have drawn us together in this hellhole. What is the purpose of it?"

"I wanted to tell you a story. Nick, you might as well listen, too."

Pam cocked a hip and pouted. "Jake, really. It's stifling and smelly"-she looked toward old fishbait nearby-"and I have to catch-"

"A short story about a beautiful woman. She grew up in the English countryside, a picture-postcard place. But she was unable to resolve what they call the positive Oedipal complex. She couldn't transfer her love for her father onto other men. At the same time she hated her mother's promiscuity, which had driven Father off. She once told me, 'Never underestimate the damage a mother can do.' So she had a horrible dilemma. She was attracted to other girls, yet hated them for it, especially their heterosexual promiscuity, which reminded her of Mother. She began experimenting with homosexuality while a teen, and when she learned that her lovers, also country girls, had taken up with boys, too…"

"You're no good at this, Jake," she said, an edge to her voice. "You're just as wrong about me as you were about Bobbie."

"We'll get to her in a minute. Let's cut to the chase. The heroine of our story killed two of the Cotswolds girls, strangled them in their barns or pastures or wherever they met to entangle limbs. The experience fascinated and repelled her at the same time."

"Jesus, Jake," Nick said, "what's going on?"

"Shut up for once and listen. This girl was different than most psychopaths. She wanted to stop, really wanted to be normal. And maybe she could. After all, we are all born psychopaths. Maybe she could find the emergency brake. And she was smart enough to learn everything there was about the subject. Study, become a doctor, a psychiatrist. Spend years interviewing serial killers, dissecting their psyches, staffing mental wards. And for a while it worked. She ran group therapy and no one knew she was one of the patients. Except maybe the real patients. What was it the Fireman said? That she wasn't my type, only I didn't know it yet.

"She'd take an occasional male lover and tried to convince herself that everything was in sync. But sometimes she drifted back to those early days in a hayloft in the Cotswolds. And the urges returned. To love and to kill. Finally she found radical psychiatry. She stopped delving into the reasons why. After all, the unconscious is a myth. There's no such thing as mental illness. Her choices were as rational as those of an officer who killed his best friend on a rainy day in a muddy village far from home."

Fox's eyes hardened and he started to say something, but I kept going. "So now she finds occasional lovers, and when they stray, they die. But it's suspicious if your girlfriends keep dropping off. So she controls it, maybe confines the killing to her travels. If we studied her passport and air tickets, what correlations would we find? An unsolved murder of a young woman killed in Paris, Barcelona-who knows, Miami Beach? And the corpses, some evidence of sexual activity, but of course, never any semen."

"Jesus H. Christ," Nick Fox breathed. "You got any proof of this?"

"At a homicide scene on Miami Beach a young assistant ME shoots enough pictures to make a family album. It's good training. You never know what you'll find. He takes close-ups of Marsha Diamond's neck. He thinks he can tell if a strangler is right-handed or left-handed from the crescents. Charlie Riggs sets him straight. No big deal. Charlie notices that one of the crescents isn't a crescent at all. It's jagged because of a torn nail. But that's no big deal either, because it'll grow back in a few days. No use looking for a guy with a hangnail. It's not like DNA, where your genes are your genes for life. Then Whitson takes shots of all the spectators, including one of Pam Maxson squeezing my forearm and a close-up of the marks. Nobody pays attention to anything but the reversal of the crescents. And that's all you can see until you blow it up to an eight-by-ten and compare it to the enlargements of Marsha's neck. They match, Nick, four crescents and one jagged edge."

I opened my tackle box and showed Nick Fox the blowups. He held the photos in the light of the tower and studied them. Then he grimaced. "This shit won't hold up. There can be ten thousand people with a busted nail. This ain't fingerprints. Jake, you're off the deep end again."

"Nick," I said, "do me a favor and shut the fuck up."

Pam was forcing a condescending smile. I hadn't gotten through to her, and Nick wasn't helping.

"I should have seen it earlier, but I couldn't or didn't want to. But it was there all the time. She has a good grip, really dug her nails into me. Maybe her hands aren't as strong as a jockey's. No fractured larynx, but she was strong enough to cut off the air, squeeze Marsha into unconsciousness, and from there into death. Then there was the lipstick message on the bathroom mirror. 'Catch me if you can, Mr. Lusk.' Who's the expert on Jack the Ripper? The lady from England, that's who. And how about a motive? Insane jealousy. Infidelity infuriated her, and she found Marsha sweet-talking on her computer just after they made love. What was it Jack the Ripper wrote: 'I am down on whores and I shan't quit ripping them till I do get buckled.' They were all whores to Pam Maxson, too. But one thing kept bothering me. Why did Marsha Diamond get out of bed with one lover-a lover who left no trace of semen-and start seeking another on the computer?"

Nick Fox shrugged. Pam Maxson looked away.

"Because Marsha knew this lover was just passing through, a one-night stand who was heading back across the Atlantic. I wasn't listening, Nick, but the clues were everywhere. Maybe she wanted us to know. Even the title of her book, The Murderer Within Us. It was there, within her, now and always."

"Mr. Fox," Pam said, "surely you don't believe-"

"It's my fault, Nick. I couldn't see. I was dumb enough to think she came back to be with me. She came back to be part of the investigation, to relive the murder, just like the ambulance driver who killed and rushed to pick up the body. It's a thrill, isn't it, Pam? Tell me, did you really want to be caught?"

"Madness!" she spat. "Sheer madness."

"But you were right about one thing, Pam," I said. "I fouled it up with Bobbie Blinderman. She wasn't a killer. She was a pathetic lost soul in search of herself. She didn't come to the hotel to kill you. She came to love you, to tell you there was nothing between us. You didn't have to do it."

"She fell," Pam said, "that's all."

"She never would have hurt you, and you knew it."

Pam turned away and stared across the water. The cruise ships were lined up at the seaport on the south side of Government Cut, thousands of tourists prepared for their seven days, six nights of prepackaged Caribbean fun. When Pam turned back, she said, "Bobbie already had hurt me with her slutty ways. I could have treated her, arranged for her operation, everything. But she couldn't help being a trollop, could she?"

"And you hated her for it, just as you hate your mother and you hate yourself. But you would never kill Mum and you would never kill yourself."

"I would never kill anyone, not even a strumpet who deserves no respect whatsoever."

Nick Fox's head was bouncing back and forth. Finally the enormity sank in.

He grabbed my arm and said, "She killed them both?"

"That's what I've been trying to tell you," I said.

"Christ, the two of you are something. The broad kills my girlfriend and some she-male. The guy I hire kills my friend."