Лоуренс Блок - Random Walk - A Novel for a New Age

He fled. He forced himself to observe the speed limit returning to Topeka, not wanting anything that might establish his presence in Kansas City that night. Back home, he drank two ounces of whiskey straight from the bottle, scrubbed himself in the shower. First thing in the morning he took the Nova through a car wash. She had been in the car, and when the boys scrubbed and vacuumed the interior, they might remove some traces of her presence.

There was a three-paragraph story the following day in the Kansas City Star , and no follow-up to it over the next several weeks. When a month had passed without incident he allowed himself to believe that he had gotten away with it.

It was, after all, hardly the crime of the century. A black streetwalker, beaten to death in a sordid motel room. What clues did the police have to work with? No license number, no eyewitness description of the killer, no fingerprints. He’d left his seed on her belly and in her loins, and he’d very likely left pubic hairs entwined with her own, but so, he suspected, had other of her clients. The police could tell a lot about you from that sort of physical evidence, and once they had reason to suspect you they could either clear you or tighten the ring of circumstantial evidence with blood and semen and hair, but in the absence of other clues they would have no reason to beat a path to your door.

He had killed. For no reason more rational than rage he had battered a young woman senseless. With no motive more justifiable than blood lust he had strangled her. The thought sickened him even as the memory continued, God help him, to thrill him.

Well, it would never happen again.

But of course it did.

Again and again and again. In eight years, he had killed an astonishing total of fifty-three women. Every now and then the urge would come on him, triggered by a scent or a smile or a pout or the swell of a breast or the curve of a hip. His blood would race with the need for satisfaction, and there was only one way that kind of satisfaction could be achieved.

Sometimes he fought the urge, stifling it for a greater or lesser period of time. Sometimes he gave in to it as soon as he conveniently could. He was always prudent, always kept risks to a minimum, but as soon as an appropriate victim provided herself, he took her.

He was clever about it, and he took a certain pride in his cleverness. Early on he realized that the best way to avoid detection was to keep the authorities from suspecting that his various homicides were all the work of a single killer. He read about other serial killers, and they all seemed to be wedded to some variable that stamped all their killings as having been done by the same hand. They used the same murder method, or they picked the same type of victim, or they left the same kind of diorama at the murder scene.

He purposely did things differently each time from the last. Now a knife, now a scarf, now his bare hands. An ice spick, a hammer, a length of clothesline. One time the girl would be nude, another time she’d be fully clothed, and on the next occasion she might be tied up. He had a lifetime of delicious fantasies to draw upon and an imagination more than equal to the task of supplying new fantasies. Of his fifty-three episodes, no two had been quite the same.

No cute crap, though. No blood smears on the walls, no lipstick marks on the dead woman’s forehead. He was not playing a game with the police. The thrill was not in tempting fate, in almost getting caught. The thrill — and God knew it was thrill enough — the thrill was in the doing.

Mrs. Minnick, whose round plumpness had inspired him in Denver, had never been at risk. He had been careful from the beginning never to select a woman whom he knew personally, or one who could be connected with him in any conceivable way. The simple act of murder was the only tie between him and his victims.

That was his rule, but he had broken it once. One afternoon he’d been showing a house in Kansas City. The prospective tenant was a divorced woman, new in town; her children were in school and she was looking at houses and apartments, and oh, she was just too delicious to resist, with thin wrists and ankles and lank blond hair and librarian’s glasses and rabbity front teeth, not traditionally pretty but wonderfully desirable.

He asked her enough questions to determine that no one knew where she was. And it was still impossibly risky, because anyone in the neighborhood might have noticed her car parked in the driveway, but he weighed the risks and decided she was worth it. God, she was nice!

He picked up a heavy glass ashtray and knocked her unconscious with a series of blows to the back of the head. He used a cord from one of the floor lamps to tie her hands and feet, and gagged her with her own pantyhose. He hurried down to his own car and fetched a large screwdriver from the trunk. She was conscious by the time he got back, flopping around on the carpet like a beached fish.

He talked to her for a while, and he felt her tits through her clothes and reached up under her skirt to fondle her. Then, when he just couldn’t stand it another minute, he thrust the blade of the screwdriver up one of her nostrils and into her brain.

Afterward, in the quietest part of the night, he carried her out of the house and loaded her into the trunk of her car. He drove to Crown Center and left the car at a municipal parking ramp. He took a cab back to his rental house and drove his own car home. He threw the screwdriver down a storm sewer, and he tossed the pantyhose and the lamp cord into a trash can. A day later he vacuumed the carpet where she’d flopped about and put a new cord on the lamp.

Now, while Marilee slept, he made himself a cup of tea with milk and sugar and took it to his den. He put the TV on but devoted most of his attention to the newspaper, giving the real estate listings and the financial pages a thorough review.

His daughter came home around ten-thirty. He heard her and called to her, and she came in and sat with him for a few minutes before going upstairs. After she’d kissed him and left he remembered he hadn’t said anything to her about missing her graduation.

Well, he’d tell her the next day. Or leave it for Marilee to handle. Anyway, he didn’t think Jennifer would be all that torn up about it.

She’d get a good present, and that ought to take some of the sting out of his absence.

He put the paper aside and thought, by no means for the first time, of the clashing inconsistency of his life. He loved his wife and daughter, was indeed devoted to them, and at the very same time he was passionately addicted to the sport of killing women for pleasure. For that was what he did; he hunted them down and killed them with the same delight that some other men killed deer — not for the chase or for the venison, but for the unutterable joy of killing.

The women he preyed on were other men’s wives, other men’s daughters. How would he feel if someone else used Jennifer as he had used Cindi in Denver? How would he feel if some other man gazed greedily into Marilee’s eyes while she died?

He forced the thoughts aside. They had come before, they would come again. He forced them aside.

And thought instead about some of the things he had done over the past eight years and some of the women he had done them to. He gave himself up to his memories and let himself be stirred by them.

A shame he hadn’t had more time in Denver. She was nice, Cindi, and he would have liked taking his time with her. And yet there was something especially exciting about the speed of it. Just a couple of minutes and she was gone, almost before she knew what was happening to her.

He got up, paced back and forth across the oriental carpet. Jesus, he’d done Cindi just a week ago and he was ready to go again. Usually it was a month or more before he felt this agitated, but he felt like going out right this minute.