Hush (21 page)

She sat up and swung her bare legs to the
floor. "You're a homicide detective. You should be used to creepy
by now."

"You never get used to creepy."

She put her hands over his hands and squeezed
hard while staring into his eyes. "We're running out of time. It's
been almost two weeks since Sachi Anderson was murdered. That means
the killer could strike again soon. It's not going to matter if you
don't have documentation. It's not going to matter if I freak out.
It doesn't even matter if this drives me over the edge and I go
insane. Which, by the way, isn't going to happen. I've lived for
this moment. I've spent the last sixteen years waiting to catch
this maniac. Don't make it harder. Don't put up roadblocks. Because
you know as well as I do that tonight might be the night. Tonight
you might get a call telling you there's been another murder. Do
this," she pleaded. "You have to do this."

And so he did it.

She was a good subject and went under fairly
quickly. And when he took her back to the night of sixteen years
ago, it happened just the way she'd said, starting with a noise in
the room and Ivy turning on the light.

"Now what are you doing?" Max asked, leaning
closer.

"Screaming," she said in a chillingly
monotone voice.

He swallowed. "Why? Why are you
screaming?"

"There's a man in my room, standing over my
baby."

"Remember, you're simply observing, not
participating. The man you see—does he look up?"

"Yes."

"Can you see his face?"

She frowned in concentration.

"Ivy, can you see any of his face?"

"My name is Claudia." She continued to frown,
as if looking deeply into her own mind. "A pale cheek. Pale skin.
Very pale skin."

"Albino?"

"Not like that. Like someone who doesn't go
outside much."

"His eyes. Can you see his eyes?"

"He's wearing a black hood. His face is in
shadow."

"What's he doing now?"

"He's dropping something. A snow globe. I can
hear the glass shattering. The baby isn't crying. Why isn't my baby
crying? I scream and throw myself at him. But he's so strong. His
hands are like claws, like bird claws. Talons. And he's so strong.
He's throwing me back across the bed and the lamp is knocked to the
floor. Now the room is dark. And the baby isn't crying." Her voice
rose hysterically. "The baby isn't crying!"

"Did you see anything? Before the light went
out?"

Without hesitation, she said, "Mother."

"Mother?"

"A MOTHER tattoo on his forearm. With a rose.
A red rose. Mixed in with the tattoo are hairs. White skin with
straight black hairs."

She let out a gasp. "He's hurting me," she
said. "He's hurting me." All the terror, all the horror of the
moment was evident in the shocked disbelief of her voice.

"Do you know him? Do you see his face?" he
persisted.

"No . . . No . . ."

"He can't hurt you. Nobody can hurt you," Max
reassured her. It would do no good to keep her under any
longer.

She let out a sob.

Max grabbed her gently but firmly by both
arms, speaking close to her face, to her tightly closed eyes.
"You're safe, Ivy. You are safe. It's sixteen years later, and you
are safe."

She pulled in a shuddering breath.

"We're going to go back up the stairs one at
a time until we reach the top. When we get there, you'll wake up.
When you wake up, you won't remember any of this. You will feel
rested, refreshed. You won't remember any of this. Up the stairs.
One, two, three. . . . You've reached the top step, full
consciousness. . . . Now, slowly open your eyes. . . ."

Max sat back in the chair as Ivy slowly
opened her eyes, her unfocused gaze clearing as she realized where
she was. She groggily sat upright and swung her legs to the floor.
With arms crossed at her waist, she sat there trying to get warm
even though she knew it had to be at least eighty degrees in the
small room.

"Do you remember anything?"

She touched her face. "Have I been crying?"
With the back of her hand, she wiped at the tears. "That's the last
thing I wanted to do. Cry in front of you." She sniffed and wiped a
little more, then said, "I remember trying to see his face, and it
was like the dreams I sometimes have where it's always hidden by a
black hood."

"Is the hood like an executioner's? Or
Death's? Something he wears when he's killing?"

She thought a moment, then shook her head.
"It's a sweatshirt. A black sweatshirt. He probably wore it into
the building in case someone saw him, so they wouldn't be able to
identify him. Damn," she said, pounding a fist against her leg. "I
was hoping to come up with something new."

"Don't be too hard on yourself. You may not
have remembered his face, but you remembered something else. A
tattoo."

"Tattoo?" She gave that some thought, then
her face cleared. "A tattoo that says MOTHER. It's on a banner
woven through a red rose. That's good. That's something," she
said.

"That's very good. More than we've ever had
on him before."

"So now what?"

"We'll see if we can come up with a match on
the Internet. If not, we'll get one of our sketch artists to put
together an accurate image, then we'll run it through the tattoo
database and also get it out to the media."

"My God. Can you imagine how many people in
the country have a tattoo like that?"

"It will take an enormous amount of manpower
to check up on all the false leads."

"We were right about his mother fixation,"
she said, getting up from the bed. "I'm hoping good old mom is
still around and recognizes her son's tattoo."

"I'm not sure she'd turn him in if she did.
She might prefer to deal with him herself."

"Which could escalate the killings."

Downstairs, they returned the key while
getting the name of the previous manager.

"Couldn't find the name of the guy who wanted
to rent that room," the manager said. "But I've got some boxes in
storage I can go through."

"Give me a call if you come up with
anything," Max said.

They stepped outside.

In the short time they'd been in the
apartment building, the weather had taken a turn, an east wind
carrying in one of those violent summer storms that made the
windows rattle and turned the sky dark as night.

Angry wind pushed at the basement window,
shoving it open with a loud thud as the metal hinge caught, keeping
it from opening more than a few inches. Raindrops sharp as knives
stabbed against his arm as he struggled to reclose the window, the
latch finally catching.

He used to be terrified of storms. When he
was little, he used to hide under his bed. His mother would find
him there, and she would laugh at him.

But now storms gave him power. They made him
strong, made him more than he used to be. With each crash of
lightning, his power grew. He could feel the hot blood pumping
through his veins with every thunderous heartbeat, feel the oxygen
saturating his brain. Man was such a complex machine, a malformed,
sickening joke. If aliens landed on Earth, they would have to think
humans hideously ugly with all of their guts and fluids and
teeth.

He was horny.

He needed a woman.

Not a whore, but a real woman.

He stood in the basement with his hand deep
in his pants, wrapped around his power. Any woman in the world
would want him. Any woman in the world would gladly die to have
him. Even his mother.

"Do you have a hard-on?" she'd asked him one
morning when he was sixteen. She'd laughed and stuck her hand down
his underpants and he'd shriveled up like a button. "Think you'll
get a girl when you can't even keep it up? But don't worry. Your
mamma will always love you."

That's how she was. One time she would berate
him for masturbating or having girlie magazines, the next she would
be putting her hands down his pants as if she owned everything
about him.

His first date had been with a girl who was
popular with the guys because she'd put out anytime, anywhere. But
that night, when it had come time to stick it in her, he'd
shriveled up just like the day his mother had put her hands down
his pants. And the girl had laughed at him. Just like his
mother.

Whores. They were all whores. That was the
reason. Men paid his mother for sex. Not much anymore, but
occasionally an old customer came around. And he would wonder, Are
you my father? You ugly son of a bitch.

He would remind himself, reassure himself,
that he couldn't have come from her.

What he needed was someone who wasn't a
whore. Someone who was clean and pure and virginal.

Ivy Dunlap.

The name sprang into his mind.

He was halfway there, because she was already
interested in him.

It had been easy to find out her name.

All he had to do was follow her home from
police headquarters. Inside the lobby of her apartment building,
he'd watched her get her mail, taking note of the box number that
matched her apartment number. All he had to do was find her name on
the security panel near the locked double doors.

Ivy Dunlap.

After that, he'd gone home and done a search
on his computer, not expecting to find anything, thinking he'd have
to use other avenues, other connections, other resources. Instead,
he immediately found out that Ivy Dunlap had written a book.
Symbolic Death: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer.

He'd ordered the book off the Internet,
wondering why he hadn't heard of it. He thought he'd read every
serial-killer book that had been published. With a little more
digging, he discovered that the book hadn't had a national release,
and that it had been printed by an obscure press in Canada. So. Ivy
Dunlap was from Canada. They had brought her in to catch him.

He found that extremely funny. Extremely
satisfying.

The phone rang. He picked it up before the
first ring stopped. It was Dr. Mathias.

"I've had something come up," Dr. Mathias
said. "I'm going to have to reschedule this week's
appointment."

"Since I'm doing so well, maybe we could just
skip it."

"Are you taking your medication? You know how
important that is."

"I'm taking it."

A lie. He hadn't taken it for two months.
Funny that Dr. Mathias hadn't noticed anything different about him
on their last visit. But then Mathias was always preoccupied,
thinking about golf and his expensive girlfriend.

"Then we'll just skip this month," Dr.
Mathias said as if his mind had been probed and his thoughts
manipulated. The Manipulator. Maybe that's what he would call
himself from now on. Gosh, but he'd always hated being called the
Madonna Murderer. The Manipulator. With a capital M. He liked that.
Manipulator of the Mind. M.M.

"Would you mind if we started meeting on the
twenty-second of the month instead of the thirteenth?" the
Manipulator asked.

"The twenty-second?" Dr. Mathias questioned
in that vague way of his. "I don't see why not. I'll have Irene
pencil you in."

The Manipulator picked up a snow globe and
shook it. "Super," he said, watching the flakes of snow fall gently
on the mother and her infant son.

Yesterday he'd driven to Max Irving's house.
He'd parked his car a block away and sat there, drinking pop and
waiting. Ethan Irving had finally come out and he'd followed him to
a record shop in a strip mall. He'd followed him inside and taken
note of the CDs he examined and the purchases he made. Now he knew
what the kid liked; with the help of the Internet, he could study
up on it.

An interesting kid. A nice-looking kid.

He hoped the rain stopped soon. He had a
hockey game to go to.

Ethan's day had started out bad and kept
getting worse. First of all, someone outbid him on the Plantations
of Pale Pink Guided by Voices seven-inch auctioned on eBay. That
kind of find didn't come along that often. Shit, there were only a
few thousand made. Then his dad had called to tell him he wouldn't
be able to take him to his hockey game. So even though Ethan was
old enough to drive, he had to bum a ride, which made him feel
about twelve years old. He and his dad had been getting along
pretty well lately, so why wouldn't he let him use the car? Why was
he still hiding the keys?

Ethan and his team members were warming up on
the ice, slapping pucks back and forth. Ethan caught a flying puck
in his gloved hand, then dropped it near his feet. Using his stick,
he played with it a little, moving it back and forth in front of
him, then he shot it back to his teammate Ryan.

The other crappy thing that had happened was
that he'd found out he'd been adopted not once, like he'd always
thought, but twice. A place on the Internet said they could find a
person's natural parents, so Ethan had paid them two hundred bucks
to discover that his mother—or the woman he'd always thought was
his mother—had also adopted him. Now, if he wanted to go back any
further, he had to pay another two hundred bucks.

Maybe it was a scam. Maybe the whole thing
was a he. Maybe they told everybody the same story so they could
get more money out of them. His friend Jake had tried to get a fake
driver's license off the Internet. He got a passport photo taken
and gave the guy all the info he wanted on his card, along with a
hundred bucks. Jake hadn't wanted the ID to drink. He'd wanted it
to get into an over-21 concert. Why did bands do that? Play
someplace where half their fans couldn't go? Maybe they didn't want
teenyboppers hanging around, acting stupid. Yeah, that was probably
it. But anyway, Jake got ripped off. Jake had told the guy he
needed it in time to go to the concert, and the guy had told him
that was cool, not to worry. Jake bought his ticket, then waited
and waited, but the ID never showed up.