Don't Be Afraid (7 page)

“I already did,” Black called over his shoulder. Juarez mentally shook his head, but waited until they were safely out of the town-house complex and back at the car.

“What the hell was that about?” he demanded as Black moved automatically to the driver’s side.

“We don’t have to take that shit from people,” Black said nonchalantly.

“Yeah, well, we also don’t have to create an unnecessary scene and risk getting cited for something stupid.”

“Are you afraid of standing up for the job?” Black said.

Juarez’s temper, carefully held in check, finally snapped. “Is that some line from
Dirty Harry
?” he demanded. “Because this isn’t some movie or TV, this is real life and if you play it like that, things can get fucked up fast.”

“Are you lecturing me, Juarez?” Black stormed back. “I’ve got more than twenty years on the job, kid, so don’t you tell me what this job is and isn’t.”

“I’m not your kid and I’ve had plenty of experience—”

“You were NYPD. God forbid we forget that for even a minute. Well, you didn’t last long, did you, big shot?”

“Fuck you!”

They glared at each other over the roof of the car and then Black jerked his door open. Juarez did the same and both got in and slammed the doors.

Silence reigned for a full five minutes, though Black made his feelings pretty clear with a squealing exit from the parking spot and a lead foot on the road. They got caught in heavy traffic heading back toward Steerforth. The funeral for Sheila Sylvester was due to start at two
P.M.
Black moved to put the magnetized light on their roof.

“This doesn’t violate your ethical code, does it?” he said, his voice laced with sarcasm. “Do you object to using the siren?”

Juarez shook his head. “Try not to hit any civilians,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to have to explain the body in the trunk to the boss.”

A few minutes later, Black said in a gruff voice, “How’s your dad?”

“He’s okay. They’ve got him doing speech therapy now, in addition to the physical.”

“Shame what happened to him. He’s a good cop.”

Which was as close to an apology as Black could get, Juarez knew. “You really think Trevor’s our guy?”

Black nodded. “He took off after he killed her and he’s not coming back.”

“Just seems like a pretty organized killing for a man who lives like that. Trevor’s got two-time loser written all over him, yet he somehow managed to pull it together to leave a crime scene that clean?”

“He wore gloves. Big deal.”

“Okay, maybe the gloves explain why there are no prints. But they don’t explain why a man who uses his fists to communicate suddenly develops more finesse.”

“Look, you’re thinking too hard about this. So he decided to use a nail gun. Maybe he had it in his car. Maybe he was going to knock the crap out of her after he’d wounded her, but he killed her instead and then he has to get out of there because that other realtor shows up.”

“And the missing finger?”

Black laughed. “Hey, you’re the one telling me this isn’t the movies or TV. If it wasn’t Trevor, who was it? He fits the profile—he’s got means and motivation. Stop trying to find drama where none exists.”

It was something his father would have said. Most homicides were committed by family members or friends. Sheila had gotten away from an abusive marriage, but she hadn’t been able to escape the man himself. He’d probably been resentful of how well she did after she left him. It probably was enough motivation to kill her.

So why was it that some instinct was pricking Juarez, telling him that the crime scene they’d looked at was far more sinister and the man they were looking for was far more dangerous?

 

 

“Aren’t you going to let me in? These are very heavy.” With a bright smile on her face, Dorothy Busby hefted the two big bags she was carrying and waited for her daughter to hold the door open for her.

“Mom, you should have called,” Amy said, even as she moved aside so her mother could enter the house and offered her cheek for a glancing kiss. “Emma’s taking a nap and she needs to rest.”

“A nap? Oh, shoot, I brought some clothes for her to try on.”

As if on cue, Amy heard a door creak open, the soft slap of small bare feet running on tile and then Emma launched herself into Dorothy Busby’s arms.

“Nana!”

“Emma!”

Amy stifled a groan and took the bags her mother had brought. “Mom, you don’t need to keep bringing us things, we’re doing okay.”

“Who said you weren’t?” Dorothy planted another loud smooch on her granddaughter’s cheek as the little girl squirmed and giggled. “There’s the cutest children’s boutique in Westport and I just had to buy some clothes for Emma. Wait until you see the jacket I found.”

Amy held up containers of what looked like chicken soup and gave her mother a mute inquiring look.

“Now don’t start, Amy.”

“We’re not starving, Mother—”

“Well, of course you aren’t—”

“And I can cook—”

“Of course you can—”

“So why do you keep bringing us food?”

Dorothy ignored her, reaching for the other bag and unpacking brightly colored clothes, but Amy saw spots of pink appear on her mother’s cheekbones.

“Look, Em, isn’t this dress adorable?” Dorothy pulled out a blue smocked dress and held it up against her granddaughter.

“Mother,” Amy repeated, giving the word its full weight as she pulled out boxes of cereal and jars of expensive-looking jam.

“Cereal’s expensive, Amy, and I know you like that apricot jam. You said so when you had it at my house—”

“We’re doing okay, Mom. We don’t need you to do this.”

“Do you really think I’m going to let my daughter and my granddaughter fend for themselves?”

“We’re doing fine.”

Dorothy piled some clothes into her granddaughter’s welcoming arms. “Go and try those on in your room, honey. Then come on out and give Nana a fashion show.”

As soon as Emma was gone, Dorothy looked directly at her daughter and let the smile drop from her face. “You are not doing fine, honey. You look tired, you’re working too hard and just look at your house. When was the last time someone dusted in here?”

Amy gave a short laugh. “Bringing me chicken soup is not going to get the house cleaner, Mom.”

“I know, but it might just wake you up and make you realize that being stubborn is not helping either you or Emma.”

“Oh, not this again.” Amy stood up and carried the food into the kitchen. Dorothy followed.

“When was the last time you talked to Chris?”

“The last time he called here, which was about a month ago.” Amy put the soup in the fridge, the jam in the cupboard.

“And? How did it go? Did you talk?”

“Yes, Mother, we talked.”

Dorothy sighed. “You know what I mean. Did you tell him you’re coming home?”

“No.” Amy’s answer was flat and final. “And I’m not going to tell him, so you can drop that right now.”

“You’ve always been stubborn and it’s not an attractive quality in a woman, Amy.”

“Neither is infidelity in a man.”

This time Dorothy’s sigh was softer. “I know he hurt you—”

“And Emma.”

“And Emma,” her mother conceded. “But men are always going to do stupid things. You can hold on to foolish pride or you can fix your marriage. Doesn’t Emma deserve a father?”

“I didn’t take away her father—he did.”

Dorothy stood up, shaking her head. “Fine. Have it your way. But did it ever occur to you that maybe you’re asking for a perfect life that just doesn’t exist?”

Guy was looking forward to attending the funeral. Sheila Sylvester would be buried, he’d read that in the paper, and though he would have preferred cremation—such a lovely, clean thing to reduce all that useless flesh and bone to ash—it would still be satisfying to see her lowered into a hole in the ground.

There was a little coverage of the impending event on TV and he watched it over lunch, nursing his sandwich while he stared at the screen. He was mesmerized by the numbers the newscasters were talking about, the crowds of mourners who would gather to say goodbye to a woman most of them had never known. Vultures. Lured there by all the reporting. It was the biggest crime to hit Steerforth in years.

The reporters were invariably standing in front of St. Andrew’s Church. He didn’t like churches like that. Modern and angular, all big airy spaces and comfortable seats. That wasn’t church. Where was the structure? Where was the focus? It was all feel-good religion now and Jesus as some big psychotherapist. He was surprised they didn’t depict Him wearing a cardigan.

Not like the religion he grew up with. At St. Joe’s religion had been hard work. Hard on the knees, hard on the back—proper behavior drummed in through physical pain. A church with uncomfortable pews but glorious stained glass windows to look up at as reminders of all the wonders that awaited those willing to make the effort.

His mother wasn’t willing. She’d drop him off at St. Joe’s and pay the tuition, but she didn’t attend Mass. She was too busy fucking to focus on that. He’d seen her once when he was very young. That’s how he knew what she was doing, how she was supplementing her secretary’s salary and making sure the rent got paid and they ate. He was playing with his Matchbox cars and one of them ran under the closed bedroom door. He heard the strange creaking noises and the grunt, grunt, grunt before he opened the door and saw them on the bed like two pigs rutting.

After that she’d locked him in the cellar when the men came or when she went out at night to find them.

“Now you be a good boy and stay here and be very quiet. Do you think you can do that? Can you be my big brave boy and be very quiet? Mama will bring you a present.”

He was scared of the cellar. Scared of the shadows and the dusty jars of pickled things left by the old lady who rented them the house. There was mold and damp and spiderwebs and only a little light from a single incandescent bulb. He didn’t want to stay down there. No, Mama, he didn’t want to stay. And he’d clung to her until she’d pulled him off and slapped him.

“Stop that! You should be ashamed, a big boy like you!” And he held himself while she disappeared into the gloom, listening to the
click, click, click
of her heels on the stairs, listening to the key turning, locking him in. He needed to pee that first time. He needed to pee so bad and Mama hadn’t thought of that. He was a bad boy not to hold it, she said later. Bad boy! Bad! She shoved his nose in the wet underpants, made him wear nothing the rest of the day so he stood around trying to cover himself with his shirt. One of the men saw him like that and laughed.

“You trying to compare dicks with me, kid? You want to see a dick, I’ll show you a dick.” He pulled his out of his pants and waggled it at the boy while his mother laughed.

“Put that away, Mike. Stop it.”

The next time she left him in the cellar, she left a jar with him. “You pee in that.”

There were two windows in the cellar, covered with grime. One looked out of the west side to a stretch of barren lawn and a cracked sidewalk and the street. The east-side window looked out on the apartment building next door, so close that he could see into the first-floor windows where the woman with yellow hair lived.

She seemed unaware of him. She probably couldn’t see him at all. He’d dragged an old chair over to the window and opened it a fraction in order to see out and with the gloom in the basement she’d have seen nothing but shadows. He liked that. He liked watching her without her knowing he was watching.

One day it occurred to him that he could probably squeeze through the window if he opened it farther. He tried it at the other window, so he’d crawl out near the sidewalk and not risk having the yellow-haired woman see him. Only he couldn’t boost himself up to get through the window. It took a strength he didn’t have. So he worked at it, pushing himself, trying every time he was down there and in the moments when he wasn’t, focusing his attention.

On a hot summer day, he made it up and slipped through the glass into the heat outside. He could still remember that rush of late-afternoon heat, the dizzying sensation as he’d stood up in the sparse grass, freed by his own hands from the prison his mother had made.

His freedom was short-lived. He went to the playground and stayed there until all the other children left. He didn’t notice the looks some of the kids’ mothers cast his way. It got dark, but the basement had trained him. He’d learned not to mind the dark, and besides, there was a streetlight at the playground, so he could still see the silver of the slide and the rungs of the jungle gym.

The cop surprised him. “It’s late, little boy. Does your mother know you’re out here?”

And when the cop took him home, there was his mother, frantic. She hugged him to her, digging her nails into his arms where the cop wouldn’t see, and repeatedly thanked the policeman for bringing him home, blaming his disappearance on a teenage babysitter, not mentioning the basement.

When the cop was gone, she hit him, with her hands, with a belt, again and again, while he wrapped himself up tight in a ball on the floor, trying to play dead. Accompanying her blows was a litany of reasons why he couldn’t go out: It was dangerous, there were dangerous men, they’d hurt him, and they’d touch him where no one should touch him.

When she got tired, she left him there, sobbing on the floor, and the next morning she took him down to the basement and made him watch as she nailed the windows shut.

This was when he became Houdini. He’d read about him in a book at the school library. He used an old wire hanger and a screwdriver to pick the lock. It took him many tries before he got it. He learned to listen to the scrape of metal against metal and the click as the pins moved into place. The final click, when he turned the knob and the door opened, gave him a sense of pleasure that never left.

By the time he was ten, she’d stopped locking him in the basement, but by then he’d graduated to picking other locks. He visited the home of the yellow-haired woman and learned her name was Pamela. He visited the other apartments as well, getting to know the lives of all the different residents of the building.

The first time he killed a person—the moment of his second birth—it was an accident. He was a teenager then, the size of a man and getting attention from girls. He’d graduated from his own neighborhood to others, driving around in the secondhand car he’d purchased with money from his job as a florist’s delivery boy—a job that gave him the chance to check out other houses, other people. He could tell pretty quickly if it was a house he’d revisit. Picking locks was easy. Slipping in and out undetected was easy. He’d joined the drama club at school, becoming a backstage presence, using his strength to lift the curtains and man the lights, staying in the shadows though he was urged to reconsider.

“You’ve got a classic profile—the face of a Caesar or Hamlet!” the drama teacher wailed, wringing his hands at the waste of it. But it wasn’t wasted. Guy had free access to the costume room and he borrowed wigs and mustaches, learning how to apply them by watching the student actors. From then on, he’d go into houses in disguise.

He was visiting what he thought was an empty house and sorting through the contents of a lingerie drawer when someone walked into the bedroom. She was an older woman, probably in her seventies, and she must have been sleeping in another room, for she was wearing a nightdress and carrying a lamp without the shade as a weapon.

She lunged at him, but he easily sidestepped her and she fell hard against the far corner of the dresser and then she started screaming. Neighbors would be alerted, police would be called. She’d probably remember him as the florist’s delivery boy and then he’d be caught and sent away to prison because the one thing he knew for sure was that nobody in society appreciated his type of talent. It was impulse to grab the stockings lying right there in the drawer. He pulled them taut around her neck until the only sound she could make was a faint gargling and her eyes protruded from their sockets and her face turned purple.

When she was finally dead, he removed the stockings and wiped off her body and left her tucked in a corner near the dresser. He scattered a few pieces of paste jewelry about the floor and wrapped the more valuable stuff in a pillowcase. Then he broke one of the small panes of glass in the kitchen door downstairs, because otherwise the police would wonder how he’d gotten into the house.

That drive home, with the pillowcase stuffed inside his jacket, was the longest of his life. He cut the pillowcase into little pieces and burned it. The jewelry he sealed in an envelope and locked it away in the bottom of a small fireproof safe, underneath his birth certificate and Social Security card and the passport he’d recently gotten because he wanted to travel.

It was more than a week before her body was discovered. The mail carrier noticed that her papers were piling up and called the police after she failed to come to the door. In the paper it said she had surprised a burglar. He was satisfied, then, that they’d never catch him. And they never did.

Power could be addictive and addicts spiraled out of control. He made sure to keep his life in balance. He studied hard and made good grades. The college of his choice offered him a scholarship and he studied hard there, too, rarely going to bars or partying with other students.

“You never relax, man,” his hard-drinking roommate complained his freshman year. “You’ve got to just chill out sometimes.”

He did chill out, just not with others, and not in the same way. His methods of relaxing were different. While others spent their weekends lost in the smoky, pulse-throbbing and beery haze of the local bars, Guy spent his alone. In good weather he went on foot. If it was raining he preferred his car. He cruised the streets at an unhurried pace, looking for women.

How to choose? This was the delightful dilemma he faced each and every time. It could be a smile given him in passing, the fullness of a lip, the roundness of an eye. It could be the sway of the hips as a young woman teetered on high heels or a sudden spicy breath of perfume.

He liked to know those he chose, but not in the standard way. It was a different, more intimate kind of knowing. Instead of approaching and conversing he watched them. He followed them on the journey from class to sorority house or bar to dorm. He knew how to blend in with a crowd and how to follow several feet behind. In an inside pocket of his jacket he carried a few carefully chosen lock picks and a length of thin, strong rope.

Who were the chosen? There was the pretty co-ed who smiled drunkenly at him when he offered her an arm as she tripped out of a bar one evening. Then there was Tania, a student cashier at the campus bookstore. There was an older professor, Dr. Susan Burke, who taught in the English department and spent her nights drinking and flirting with students half her age. There was the plump freshman who did her laundry alone on Saturday nights. He chose them for their looks or their attitude. He chose them because they wore a certain dress or smiled a certain way. He chose them because they were available.

It was a cold night in February when he killed Karen Chang. She sat in the row in front of him in biology class, tossing her long, black hair in a distracting way. He’d watched her for weeks, visiting her apartment when she was out, getting to know her. He passed her as they exited the movie theater, their breath mingling in the cold air. She walked ahead of him down the sidewalk and he followed after half a block, moving stealthily, hands in the pockets of his black jacket, a dark knit hat covering his head.

Five blocks later she approached a dilapidated row of duplexes. Student rentals. He watched her fumble for a key in the flimsy macramé bag slung on her shoulder. He waited until she was in a shadow between streetlights and then he moved swiftly, one hand covering her mouth, the other holding a knife to her back.

He dragged her around the back of the building while she struggled, the heels of her boots dragging. She clawed at his arms, at his hands. She tried to bite him, but his leather gloves were too thick and the pressure on her mouth too tight.

Forcing her into a dark corner between two teeming dumpsters, he shoved her hard against the brick building and pressed his lips against her ear. “Don’t be afraid,” he whispered. “Just do what I want and you won’t get hurt.”

She nodded earnestly, her eyes wide with fear. He turned her to face the wall and ran his free hand along her body, feeling it tremble under his touch. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

He reached his hand under her wool skirt and stroked along the inside length of her leg, traveling past her high boots and up to the cotton tight–covered thighs. Her tremors increased as he tickled along the edge of her crotch. When he moved his hand away she sagged slightly in obvious relief, and in that moment he reached swiftly into his pocket and pulled out a ball of socks and a length of rope.

It was simple really. Shoving the sock ball into her mouth as a gag, he used his weight to keep her pinned to the wall and circled her neck with the rope. Then he used both hands to pull it tight.

She struggled like a fish on a line, tearing at the rope, gagging, begging him with her eyes to release her. He panted along with her, tightening the rope and rubbing his body against hers until her fingers faltered and the muffled exclamations died away.

When she’d stopped struggling he eased her body onto the ground and arranged it to his liking. He took a small camera from his coat pocket and snapped two pictures of her, one a close-up of her face frozen in fear, the other of her entire body, clothes carefully peeled back to expose her.