By Reason of Insanity (44 page)

A cover story, thought Lavery. They wanted Kenton for a cover story. But a major one this time, the full treatment. Mungo was big news now and swiftly getting bigger. With the right hype he could become a national sensation. And he, Derek Lavery, had started it all with his story on Caryl Chessman and then the two on Mungo. Kenton had done most of the investigative work on all three, with strong help from Ding, so he was the logical choice for New York. Besides being the best they had on the magazine, except for himself and Ding of course. But he and Ding were a team, indivisible, and geared for stories with a wider scope. Adam Kenton was a loner and perfect for an in-depth look at Vincent Mungo. They were basically the same type anyway.

In truth he had been relieved when Mungo left California and the western states. He liked things done in a professional way, that is, everything kept at a distance. Never anything personal. Yet Mungo had made it personal by sending the letters, especially that one with the female … part.

That was unforgivable in Lavery’s view. While it made for a good story, it necessarily involved him in the grubby details of direct police contact and it demoralized his mail room. Worst of all, it put him in a position of having to react to others instead of acting out of his own autocratic view and unquestioned authority. He had suddenly felt impotent.

He enjoyed being the captain of the ship and directing his vast energies outward from his Barclay Lounger. His enormous penthouse office was his captain’s quarters, and he didn’t like being drawn down into the boiler room. It unnerved him. He was a mover, a shaker, a leader of men. When he gave an order it was obeyed. But if he had to involve himself with petty details and people’s emotions, then all his power was gone.

Without power, who was he?

By Thursday, Derek Lavery had almost forgotten about a homicidal maniac named Vincent Mungo. He had been given another reporter from the Chicago bureau to replace Kenton, and he was nursing along a number of stories, including a second one on the insanity-defense issue, which Ding was putting together. As far as Lavery was concerned, Mungo was John Perrone’s New York headache now. His and Adam Kenton’s.

And right where they all belonged.

He told his secretary to make a dinner reservation at the Yacht Club. Over the weekend he intended to go sailing.

AT ABOUT the time that Derek Lavery’s secretary called the Yacht Club, John Spanner was slamming the brakes to a screeching stop in front of the Hillside hospital. A minute later he was in the morgue records room checking the file on Thomas Bishop, DOA from Willows State on July 4, 1973. His fingers shook as he pulled the pictures of the body from the folder. There it was, impossible to miss. The body supposedly of Thomas Bishop. Whoever he had been, he was circumcised.

From the tiny morgue office next to the lockers, Spanner called Sheriff Oates in Forest City and asked him to get to Vincent Mungo’s family in Stockton and find out if Mungo had been circumcised. Yes, that’s right. Circumcised. No, no joke. Try to get the information as soon as possible. At police headquarters. Or later at home. Right. That’s the idea.

He did not tell the sheriff why he wanted to know such a thing, and Oates did not ask.

Next he called Willows and spoke with the new director, a Dr. Mason. He identified himself as the police official originally in charge of the murder investigation several months earlier. If the doctor would be kind enough to have someone check Thomas Bishop’s file for a physical description. Specifically, if Bishop had been circumcised. Developments in the case necessitated that information. He realized that such things might not normally be in a file, but Thomas Bishop had been there for most of his young life and a complete description could be part of his record.

Dr. Mason promised to attend to it immediately and return the call. Hillside police headquarters? Yes, of course. Just as soon as it was received.

Spanner drove back to his office filled with dread.

Something would go wrong.

But nothing could go wrong.

If Bishop’s file at Willows didn’t have the answer, then he’d get it from the hospital record at birth. And if that didn’t work out he’d find another way. Maybe some of the attendants or inmates had noticed Bishop in the shower, maybe he had a homosexual relationship with one or more of them. Or perhaps some relative somewhere remembered. Damn it, there had to be a way.

Twenty minutes later Dr. Mason was on the phone to report no mention of a circumcision in Thomas Bishop’s physical-description data. But the doctor warned that it should not be taken to mean he was not circumcised, only that there was no mention one way or the other.

Spanner understood.

“One strange thing in Bishop’s file, though.”

“Oh?”

“Or rather not in the file, which is the strange part.”

“What was that?”

“Every inmate folder has two photos, one taken on admission and one usually taken within the previous two years. In Bishop’s case this would mean a picture of him as a young boy and another as he looked now.”

A pause.

“The strange thing is—”

“Yes?”

“Well, both pictures are missing.”

Spanner’s heart quickened.

“There apparently are no pictures of Thomas Bishop anywhere.”

That was it!

No pictures of him in his file. He had gone there as a boy. So no pictures of him as a man anywhere. It was too much of a coincidence. The policeman in Spanner rebelled at the thought.

He got out his own file on Vincent Mungo, put together at the time of the Willows killing. The information on Bishop was in it. Born April 30, 1948, in Los Angeles County General Hospital. Mother: Sara Bishop Owens, deceased. Father: Harry Owens, deceased. The mother was killed by the boy at age ten. But how did the father die?

Spanner intended to find out.

He asked Communications to request immediate help from the Los Angeles police. What he wanted was the full record of Thomas Bishop at the hospital in which he was born. Also, he needed all information regarding the death of the father, Harry Owens.

Hopefully, morning would bring some answers. After a half hour’s attempt to work on other things he gave up and went home.

At eight o’clock he was awakened by the phone while dozing in front of the TV. It was Oates. He had talked to Vincent Mungo’s people in Stockton. The boy had been circumcised at the hospital where he was born. Perhaps someone had thought that Mungo sounded Jewish. Or maybe it was just done routinely, in view of the fact that no father seemed to be around. Though the mother’s family was Protestant, no one objected to the circumcision. It didn’t seem important.

No chance of a mistake?

None. Why?

He told Oates that the Willows body had also been circumcised.

With the body gone, how did he know?

The pictures that were taken in the morgue showed the circumcised penis. It was the one thing they had never thought of.

Until now.

No, it was a civilian.

Spanner told him about Amos Finch and his ideas on the killer. Or killers. And how Finch had solved the riddle of how to identify the dead man.

Except he hadn’t really solved it yet, Oates pointed out. All they knew now was that it could’ve been Mungo. But if Thomas Bishop also had been circumcised, they were back where they started.

Los Angeles was checking on him now.

It would just be a matter of time.

All they could do was wait.

When he finally drifted into troubled sleep, John Spanner dreamed that he stood helpless, unable to move, as a figure slowly approached from a great distance. When it drew closer he saw it was of average height and weight and dressed in man’s clothes. Still nearer came the figure until he was able to see the face. It had no features. Nothing. Just a small hole where a mouth should have been, out of which came a sound of maniacal laughter.

As the figure drew abreast, a hand mechanically opened to reveal a long thin knife of incredible sharpness. Spanner watched in mounting horror while the hand with the knife rose higher and higher and higher until it blotted out all light in front of him and he stood in the dark screaming against the insane laugh as the knife plunged downward through his eyes to softened tissue turning the sockets to rivers of blood… .

Thirteen

BISHOP ROSE early Tuesday morning filled with enthusiasm. He intended to do many things on his first full day in New York. In his narcissistic mind the city lay before him like an extension of his own body, open, waiting to be touched, to be caressed in the warm glow of self-gratification. He would walk its streets to feel the blood coursing through its veins and arteries, he would stand on crowded corners and listen to its heartbeat. In the nameless faces and faceless bodies of its inhabitants he would find the ultimate onanistic thrill of knowing that the Power was now among them. He was the Power and he alone knew that he held absolute life and death over all around him. At any moment, in the while of a whim, he could strike down any one of them, any number of them, without design or effort, as they scurried about their meaningless duties, their empty lives. The thought was delicious. He would look at them, the women of New York, and in their eyes he would see that for which they longed so desperately and worked so diligently. They would find through him the release from their pain and madness. He would give them their due, which was death. And for his benevolence they would honor him by taking into their vile bodies for the last time the seed of life which they both craved and feared. It was justice. In the final moment of suffering they would become part of him and he them, and even as he was reborn in the agony of orgasm they would be released in the ecstasy of death.

He alone would choose upon whom to bestow this final ultimate blessing. Nor would he, could he, be stopped. They were waiting for him by the millions, not knowing who he was or when he would strike, but waiting in frantic hope nonetheless. He would not disappoint them. Though the quest was endless and victory seemingly impossible, he would continue with his mission for in truth he could do no less. His was the Power that prevailed and he survived only by its exercise, Now in New York, where he believed he belonged from the very beginning, and in which he intended to remain at least for a while, Bishop had no doubts that he would continue to be safely anonymous as he prowled the largest city in the world. That it might not literally be the very largest city in the world didn’t bother him; it was eminently big enough. Nor did he doubt that he would find enough work to keep him occupied. He had already noticed in his few Monday hours that women were everywhere. Dozens of them, hundreds, thousands, millions of them. They were absolutely everywhere, just waiting for him. Everywhere.

Meanwhile the city lay open before him. He would search out a place to live, a crowded area of young people with little money where he could go unnoticed. He would secure still another identity, this one virtually undetectable. He would funnel the hundred-dollar bills he had in the black case into legal channels, so that he could draw from the amount or add to it. He would fabricate a whole history in order to give the appearance of roots, should anyone become inquisitive about a newcomer to town. Finally, he would create some slight business venture in order to have a seemingly legitimate source of income, one at the barest survival level, to be sure, yet enough to allay any suspicions about how he managed to survive.

Since he wasn’t going to travel, at least for a while, and would not be in bus stations or train depots where police were watching, he decided to grow a beard. It was a common practice among young men now and would enable him to blend in more easily. In the unlikely event that his true identity were discovered, he would be safer with a beard. The authorities had no photographs of him any longer but they would be able to come up with a good drawing of his face. Putting a beard on the drawing would render it almost useless, and he could always change the shape of his own. It was the best he could do short of plastic surgery, which he ruled out as being too risky even though he now had the money. A surgeon would surely become suspicious and notify the police. While he believed himself perhaps immortal, Bishop somehow knew he was not bulletproof

All this and more would he do in the days to come. Winter clothes had to be bought, maybe even some light furniture and bedding. Books about New York had to be read, the city divided into areas and studied. With living quarters and an established identity, with a new face and the proper money, he would be truly invisible. And with invisibility would come invincibility. A face in the crowd, one of the masses, a workingman, able to slip in and out, appear and disappear, undistinguished, unrecognized, unseen.

Untouchable.

Not as the leper, slow and cumulative.

But as the plague, swift and deadly.

In the tickings of his heart, in the twistings of his mind, Bishop knew this all would come to pass. But first—.

First he would offer up a sacrifice in celebration.

He would perform his ritual in thanksgiving for his safe arrival upon these shores. In the beginning he had intended to move ever onward because to remain fixed was far too dangerous. As he crossed the mountains and plains, the cities and towns of America, eventually he came to realize that New York was his true destination, his star in the East. The wisest of men by his own definition, he did not try to fight that which compelled him to follow the star. Unlike others, he was aware of his destiny and accepted it without bitterness.

Now he had arrived safely at his destination, at least for the present, and his star shone overhead. It was time to celebrate.

By 8:30 that Tuesday morning he was already out of the dingy hotel of one night’s lodging. He turned into Broadway in the eighties and headed downtown. The air was cool and crisp, the start of one of those bright October days for which New York is famous. Bishop shivered against the cold; his jacket seemed suddenly inadequate in such weather, and he decided it would be prudent to buy something warmer as soon as possible. And perhaps a heavier shirt and a cap of some kind. He noticed the men in suits, apparently on the way to office work; most of them wore topcoats. The younger people he saw were dressed in the fashion of youth everywhere; in denim and corduroy and outer jackets of every description and indeterminate origin. Boots of leather or plastic, usually well scuffed and worn under bellbottom pants, were the standard footwear for both sexes. He gazed down at his own shoes, now worn beyond redemption, and made a mental note. They would have to go too.