Slaughter - Lutz John - Страница 17

The way she had the magnifier tilted up against the window was interesting to Jordan. He had read in various outdoors magazines how it was possible to start a fire with a magnifying glass. The sunlight and heat streaming through the curved glass could be focused to a tiny flammable dot.

He’d almost started a fire that way once himself. One of the magazines had a story about a guy in Alaska who’d used a single lens from his glasses to start a campfire that kept him and his sled dogs from freezing to death. Jordan didn’t know if the story was true, but he saw how such a thing could have happened.

It was fascinating, the way so many things had more than one purpose.

Like a belt that would keep your pants up, or be used for something else altogether.

In the morning, when it was ten minutes past time to get up and start getting dressed for school, Jordan’s mother shook his bed as if an earthquake had struck.

“I was you, I’d make sure I wouldn’t miss that school bus this mornin’,” she said. “You got no room to misbehave.”

“Where’s everybody?” he asked, though he could hear his father snoring.

“They’re sleepin’ in. I’m gonna give you a note that says Kent’s got a stomachache. You take that to school and give it to his teacher. Or to the principal or somebody in the office.”

“Why can’t I stay home and sleep in, too?”

“It wouldn’t look right, the both of you being sick at the same time.”

“I don’t know. It seems—”

“Just get up and get dressed afore that school bus arrives at the end of the road. Unless you want more of what you got last night.”

“No,” Jordan said. “No more.” He wasn’t sure if it was pain or embarrassment that was making his cheeks flush.

He managed to climb out of bed and stood swaying. His buttocks and the backs of his thighs were on fire, and it seemed that every joint in his body ached.

“Get movin’,” his mother said. “A hot shower’ll fix you up. I’ll put out some cereal for you, then I’m goin’ back to bed.”

Nude, he stumbled toward the bathroom.

The one thing he surely didn’t want was to miss the bus.

He skipped his shower and got dressed in a hurry. He decided to skip breakfast, too.

His curiosity was nagging. More than nagging. Raging. Instead of eating the bowl of stale Cheerios his mother had put out for him, he slightly adjusted the magnifying glass on the windowsill, propping it over some crinkled tissue and wadded newspaper from the trash.

Near the kitchen curtains.

18

New York, the present

He’d drugged her. Margaret was sure of it. But why?

And where . . . ?

She knew where without having to open her eyes. But, hoping against hope, she did open them.

Margaret was in her apartment’s bathroom, nude and in the bathtub in lukewarm water. She was on her back, leaning back, her head tilted up for a view of the ceiling and to keep her face dry. She couldn’t close her mouth—something was jammed into it. It felt to her probing tongue like a rubber ball. One of those things sadists used to silence their victims.

She inhaled and made noises, not loud and certainly not understandable.

She felt so weak....

Why so weak? Tired? A faint trickling sound was so restful.

Movement on the periphery of her vision . . .

There was Casey—no, Corey—standing above her near the foot of her bathtub. The warm water—that must be the trickling sound she heard, a faucet running slightly, slowed to a gradual ticking. The warmth of the water felt so good . . . Was this some kind of kinky sexual experience he’d dreamed up?

I don’t even know this man!

He moved closer and she saw what looked like a scalpel or some other kind of sharp knife in his right hand. In his left was a U-shaped saw with a whipcord-thin and taut serrated blade strung between its arms.

A jigsaw.

The bathwater turned cool with her knowledge. Margaret remembered her childhood and her father’s basement woodworking shop, his various kinds of saws and what they could do. She made another small, animal noise, raising her right hand to plead with Corey—with the Gremlin. She was shocked by the scarlet, almost black color of her arm. And she knew the liquid in the tub wasn’t water, it was blood.

My blood.

She knew what he was going to do with the knife. With the saw.

He squatted down next to the bathtub, knowing she was too weak even to splash him with her blood. Holding the scalpel up so she could see it with her dimming eyesight, he smiled and said, “Open wide.” Then he laughed and said, “Oh, I’ll do that.”

There was an icy sensation at the base of her sternum. Then came the pain. Her body arched and rose to meet him. He bent her right arm over the tub, twisting it and pinning it tight against the porcelain. Then he went to work with the jigsaw.

It was all the same pain that shocked her and sent her whirling toward brilliant white light and the darkness beyond. The relentless rasping of the saw against bone or sinew seemed the harsh breathing of predators.

Margaret was alive long enough to see him carry her arm over to the shower stall and gently lay it inside to be rinsed off before he studied and reconstructed her.

It was easy, when he was finished with Margaret, for the Gremlin to leave her apartment building without being seen. A stocky man in dark clothes—Jordan didn’t even know for sure he was a doorman—went halfway to the corner to hail a cab for some people who might not even have come from Margaret’s building.

To be on the safe side, Jordan waited for the stocky doorman (if that’s what he was) to work his way toward the corner again to hail another taxi. When the man’s back was turned, Jordan simply slipped outside without being seen and walked away. He was wearing a stocking cap beneath a Yankees cap, keeping his ears flat against his skull and unnoticeable.

As he walked away he knew the doorman might be watching, but he wouldn’t know where Jordan had come from. As small as Jordan was, the man might even mistake him for a woman or child. For good measure, Jordan stuffed his hands in his pockets and skipped a couple of steps. Serial killers didn’t play hopscotch.

When he turned the corner, he felt safe.

He continued to walk, relaxed now, replaying in his mind Margaret’s miseries and final moments. Her grasping at life and her inexorable slide into death. Her eyes. Yes, her eyes. They’d fixed on his and the primal understanding was there. This was a shared experience, all but the last brief fractions of seconds, when he, in doom and shadow, turned away from the void as she could not.

That was his power, and it was monumental.

19

Iowa, 1991

The private road, more a long driveway, actually, ran straight from the Kray house to the county road. The driveway was dirt, the road blacktop. Jordan stood alone at the T of the private drive and county road, a math book stuck under his arm, his hands in his pants pocket.

Not being obvious about it, he was gazing across the patchwork of farmland where corn, beans, and potatoes were grown. The morning was beginning to heat up beneath a brilliant sun in a cloudless sky. Jordan was watching the house, made small by distance, a neat white geometrical shape among the pattern of fallow and green fields.

Movement caught Jordan’s attention, and he shielded his eyes from the sun with his flattened hand, like a frozen military salute. The bus was coming to pick him up at the T and, making three other stops along the way, drive him and some of the area’s other students to Robert F. Kennedy School.