Festival of Fear (28 page)

I was in total shock. I couldn't believe what I had seen. The woman stood up, staggered, and backed away from the range, running one hand distractedly through her hair. The boy got up, too, and stood beside her. He had stopped screaming now. He just stared at the oven door, shivering, his face as white as paper.

‘
Open the oven
!' I yelled. ‘
Open the oven
!
For God's sake, open it
!'

The woman still took no notice but the boy looked up at me as if he couldn't understand where all the shouting and thumping was coming from.

As soon as he looked up, I recognized him. He was the boy in the photograph that had stood on my grandmother's mantelpiece.

He was me.

I don't know how I managed to get down from that roof without killing myself. It took me almost five minutes of sweating and grunting, and at one point I felt the guttering start to give way. In the end, however, I managed to get back to the comparative safety of Mrs Woodward's parapet, and climb back in through my attic window.

I limped downstairs and into the street, but I guess I knew all along what I would find there. The house next door was a flat-fronted, three-story dwelling, painted yellow, with a white door and the date 1784 over the lintel. The house with the hooded porch had gone, although God alone knew where, or how.

Three weeks later, when I was back in Fort Lauderdale, working at The Scorpion Lounge, I received a package of photographs and letters from my grandmother's attorneys.

‘Your late grandmother's legacy will be settled within the next three months. Meanwhile we thought you would like to have her various papers.'

I opened them up that evening, on the veranda of my rented cottage on Sunview Street. Most of the letters were routine – thank-you notes from children and cousins, bills from plumbers and carpet fitters. But then I came across a letter from my dad, dated twenty-six years ago, and handwritten, which was very unusual for him.

Dear Margaret,

It's very difficult for me to write to you this way because Ellie is your daughter and obviously you feel protective toward her. I know you don't think much of me for walking out on her and the kids but believe me I didn't know what else to do.

I talked to her on the phone last night and I'm
very
concerned about her state of mind. She's talking about little Janie being sent from hell to make her life a misery by crying and crying and never stopping and always wetting the bed. I don't think the Ellie I know would hurt her children intentionally but she doesn't sound like herself at all.

Please can I ask you to call around and talk to her and make sure that everything's OK. I wouldn't ask you this in the normal way of things as you know but I am very anxious.

All the best,

Travers.

Fastened to this letter by a paper clip was a yellowed cutting from the
Chicago Sun
-
Times
, dated eleven days later. MOTHER ROASTS BABY. Underneath the banner headline there was a photograph of the house with the hooded porch, and another photograph of the woman who had pushed her child into the oven. It was the same woman who had guided me from the Radisson Hotel to Mrs Woodward's lodging house. It was my mother.

There was also a cutting from the
Tribune
, with another photograph of my mother, with me standing beside her, and a little curly-headed girl sitting on her lap. ‘Eleanor Parker with baby Jane and son five-year-old son James, who witnessed the tragedy.'

Finally, there was a neatly typed letter to my grandparents from Dr Abraham Lowenstein, head of the Psychiatric Department at St Vincent's Memorial Hospital. It read:

Dear Mr and Mrs Harman,

We have concluded our psychiatric examination of your grandson James. All of our specialists are of the same opinion: that the shock he suffered from witnessing the death of his sister has caused him to suffer selective amnesia, which is likely to last for the rest of his life.

‘In lay terms, selective amnesia is a way in which the mind protects itself from experiences that are too damaging to be coped with by the usual processes of grieving and emotional closure. It is our belief that further treatment will be of little practical effect and will only expose James to unnecessary anxiety and stress.

So it was true. People
can
forget terrible experiences, totally, as if they never happened at all. But what Dr Lowenstein couldn't explain was how the experience itself could come looking for the person who had forgotten it – trying to remind them of what had happened – as if it
needed
to be remembered.

Or why I shall never give Wendiii her crucifix back, because I still wake up in the night, hearing a young boy screaming, ‘
No, mommy, you can't
!
No, mommy, please, you can't
! NO MOMMY YOU CAN'T!' And I have to have something to hold on to.

Son of Beast

H
elen dropped her pink toweling bathrobe on to the floor and was just about to step into the shower when her cellphone played
I Say A Little Prayer.

She said, ‘Shit.' She was tired and aching after sitting in her car all night on the corner of Grear Alley, waiting for a rape suspect who had never appeared. But the tune played over and over and she knew that the caller wasn't going to leave her alone until she answered. She picked up the cellphone from the top of the laundry basket and said, wearily, ‘Foxley.'

‘Did I wake you?' asked Klaus.

‘Wake me? I haven't even managed to crawl into bed yet.'

‘Sorry, but Melville wants you down here asap. Hausman's All-Day Diner on East Eighth Street. It looks like Son of Beast has been at it again.'

‘Oh, shit.'

‘Yeah. My feelings exactly.'

She parked her red metallic Pontiac Sunfire on the opposite side of East Eighth Street and crossed the road through the whirling snow. It was bitterly cold and she wished that she had remembered her gloves. As she approached the diner, she shook down the hood of her dark blue duffel-coat so that the two cops in the doorway could see who she was.

Klaus Geiger was already there, talking to the owner. Klaus was big and wide shouldered, so that he looked more like a linebacker for the Bengals, rather than a detective. His dirty-blond hair was all mussed up, and there were plum-colored circles under his eyes, as if he hadn't slept, either.

‘You look like you haven't slept either,' said Helen.

‘I didn't. Greta's cutting two new teeth.'

‘The joys of parenthood, right?'

Klaus turned to the owner and said, ‘Mr Hausman, this is Detective Foxley, from the Personal Crimes Unit. Mr Hausman came to open up this morning about a quarter of six and found the back door had been forced.'

The owner took off his eyeglasses and rubbed them with a crumpled paper napkin. He was balding, mid-fifties, with skin the color of liverwurst and a large mole on the left side of his chin. ‘I don't know how anybody could do a thing like that. It's like killing two people both at once. It's terrible.'

Without a word, Helen went over to the young woman's body. She was lying on her back with her head between two bar stools. Her black woolen dress had been dragged right up to her armpits and although she was still wearing a black lacey bra, her panties were missing. Her head had been wrapped around with several layers of cling wrap, so that her eyes stared out like a koi carp just beneath the surface of a frozen pond.

Like all of the nine previous victims, she was heavily pregnant – seven or eight months. A photographer was taking pictures of her from every angle, while a crime-scenes specialist in a white Tyvek suit was kneeling down beside her. He almost looked as if he were praying, but he was using a cotton bud to take fluid samples.

The intermittent flashing of the camera made the young woman's body appear to jump, as if she were still alive. Helen bent over her. As far as she could tell without unwrapping her head, she was young, and quite pretty, with freckles and short brunette hair.

‘Do we know who she was?' asked Helen.

‘Karen Marie Dozier,' Klaus told her. ‘Age twenty-four. Her library card gives her address as Indian Hills Avenue, St Bernard.'

There was no need to ask if the young woman had been sexually assaulted. There were purple finger-bruises all over her thighs, and her swollen vagina was overflowing with blood-streaked semen.

Klaus said, ‘Same MO as all the others. And the same damn calling-card.'

He held up a plastic evidence envelope. Inside was a ticket for Son of Beast, the huge wooden roller-coaster at King's Island pleasure park, over two hundred feet high and seven thousand feet long, with passenger cars that traveled at nearly eighty miles an hour. Helen had tried it only once, and she had felt as sick to her stomach as she did this morning.

‘That's nine,' said Colonel Melville. ‘Nine pregnant women raped and suffocated in sixteenth months.
Nine
.

He paused, and he was breathing so furiously that he was whistling through his left nostril.

‘The perpetrator has left us dozens of finger impressions. He's so damn lavish with his DNA that we could clone the bastard, if we had the technology. He always leaves a ticket for the roller-coaster ride. Yet we don't have a motive, we don't have a single credible witness, and we don't have a single constructive lead.'

He held up a copy of the
Cincinnati Enquirer
, with the banner headline:
Ninth Mom-To-Be Murder: Cops Still Clueless.

Colonel Melville was short and thickset with prickly white hair and a head that looked as if it was on the point of explosion, even when he was calm. Today he was so frustrated and angry that all he could do was twist the newspaper like a chicken's neck.

‘This guy is making us look like assholes. Not only that, no pregnant woman can feel safe in this city, and that's an ongoing humiliation for this Investigations Bureau and for the Cincinnati Police Department as a whole.'

‘Maybe we could try another decoy,' suggested Klaus. He was referring to three efforts they had made during the summer to lure Son of Beast into the open, by having a policewoman walk through downtown late in the evening wearing a prosthetic bump.

Helen shook her head. ‘It didn't work before and I don't think it's going to work now. Somehow, Son of Beast has a way of distinguishing a genuinely pregnant woman from a fake.'

‘So how the hell does he do that?' asked Detective Rylance. ‘Do you think he's maybe a gynecologist?'

Klaus said, ‘Maybe he's a gynecologist who was reported by one of his patients for malpractice, and wants to take his revenge on pregnant women in general.'

‘I don't think so,' said Helen. ‘Not even a gynecologist could have told that those decoys weren't really pregnant, not without going right up to them and physically squeezing their stomachs. But if Son of Beast knows for sure which women are pregnant and which ones aren't, maybe he has access to medical records.'

‘Only two of the victims attended the same maternity clinic,' Klaus reminded her. ‘It wouldn't have been easy for him to access the medical records of seven different clinics – three of which were private, remember, and one of which was in Covington.'

‘Not easy,' Helen agreed. ‘But not impossible.'

‘OK, not impossible. But we still don't have a motive.'

Helen picked up her Styrofoam cup of latte, but it had gone cold now, and there was wrinkly skin on top of it. ‘Maybe we should be asking ourselves why he always leaves a Son of Beast ticket behind.'

‘He's taunting us,' said Detective Rylance. ‘He's saying, here I am, I'm going to take you on the scariest roller-coaster ride you've ever experienced. I'm going to fling you this way and that. You're helpless.'

‘I'm not sure I agree with you,' said Helen. ‘I think there could be more to it than that.'

‘Well, look into it, Detective,' said Colonel Melville. ‘And – Geiger – you go back to every one of those maternity clinics and double-check everybody who has access to their records. I want some real brainstorming from all of you. I want fresh angles. I want fresh evidence. I want you to find me some witnesses who actually saw something. I want this son of a bitch hunted down, and nailed to the floor by his balls.'

Helen went back to her apartment at three thirty p.m. that afternoon, undressed, showered, and threw herself into bed. It was dark outside, and the snow was falling across Walnut Street thicker than ever, so that the sound of the traffic was muffled, but she still couldn't sleep. She kept thinking of Karen Dozier, staring up at her through all those layers of cling wrap, the way she must have stared up at the man who was raping her.

She thought she heard a child crying out, and the slow clanking of a roller-coaster car, as it was cranked up to the top of the very first summit. But the child's cry was only the yowling of a cat, and the clanking noise was only the elevator, at the other end of the hallway.

She switched on her bedside lamp. It was seven thirty-five p.m. For the first time in a long time she missed having Tony lying beside her. They had split up at the end of September, for all kinds of reasons, mostly the antisocial hours she had to work, and her reluctance to make love after she had witnessed some particularly vicious sex crime. She had found it almost impossible to feel aroused when she had spent the day comforting a ten-year-old boy whose scrotum had been burned by cigarettes, or a seventeen-year-old girl who had been forcibly sodomized with a wine bottle.

She went into the kitchen and switched on the kettle to make a cup of herbal tea. In the darkness of the window, she saw herself reflected, a slim young woman of thirty-one years and seven months, with scruffy, short-cropped hair, and a kind of pale, watery prettiness that always deceived men into thinking that she was helpless and weak. She decided that she needed some new nightwear. The white knee-length sleep-T that she was wearing made her look like a mental patient.