Precious Blood (33 page)

It hurt more when he looked at it, so he quickly dressed the chest tube site and shrugged his shirt on. He buttoned it gingerly, looked at himself in the mirror, and said out loud,

“Good as new!”

It didn’t work. He took a Tylenol Number 3, brushed his teeth, then finished dressing. He had some cereal, then packed an overnight bag.

He sat in the armchair to rest, and watched TV. Outside a church in Queens, several hundred cops in dress blues were getting into formation, lining up along the procession route.

They were several deep along the path to the front door, where the body would be carried. There was a large civilian turnout; he tried to spot anyone who might be one of Joey’s relatives, but it began to drizzle, and he couldn’t see faces after the umbrellas came out; they were probably inside. He turned off the TV when the mayor arrived, a little before 10:00 a.m.

He couldn’t do anything for Joey, other than nail the man who’d killed him. But maybe he could still do something
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for Ana. He couldn’t let himself slow down now, couldn’t stop to wallow. No more thinking about victims, no more thinking about loss, no more thinking about the days ticking away, counting down to the twenty-fifth, the feast of Saint Anastasia.

He e-mailed Jun to say that he was going out of town for a couple days, and not to worry, that he’d be careful. He tried to say thanks, but the more he tried to express, the slower he got, so he deleted it all and wrote, “Thanks. For everything.”

Then, just for the hell of it, he called the Ninth Precinct.

He left a message on Pat Mullins’s voice mail that he was going to Pennsylvania to see if he could get any more information about the text, and could Pat call him if they found anything. He read the number of his new cell phone, squinting as he struggled to decode Ana’s scrawl.

He carefully pulled his coat on, checked to make sure he’d packed his painkillers, and went down to find a cab.

It was a long shot, he knew, but it was the only lead he had.

The police had already made inquiries, and reached a dead end. But, at the time the detectives had called around, the theft of an old manuscript from a college in the middle of nowhere had hardly seemed critical; no one had gone out to the location to ask in person.

Interstate 78 was a long crawl from the Delaware River Bridge until well after the Hamburg exit. Traffic finally eased when he got onto the westbound I-76, but the sky was dark before he reached Deene’s College.

The school was on the border of Somerset County, pretty as a picture, with hills and valleys blanketed with handsome old-growth forests. The local joke was that it was a beautiful place to be dirt poor; the cool climate made for miserly farmlands where backbreaking work produced heartbreaking yields.

At the front gates, a worn white billboard with uneven
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black lettering announced “deene’s college, founded 1978, Achievement Through Excellence,” lack of ambition passed off as lack of pretense.

Behind the sign was a small tan-brick building that did double duty as security post and information center. He couldn’t see anyone inside, but the lights were on, so he tapped on the window; he was answered by the sound of a flushing toilet. A beefy young man with a pink face emerged.

He wore gray pants and a white shirt labeled “Wharton-Somerset Private Security,” and was hurriedly wiping his hands with ragged paper towels.

“You caught me off guard.”

“Sorry to bother you.”

He eyed Jenner up and down.

“The school is closed until January seventh.”

“I’m looking for the Security Service,” Jenner said, flashing his shield, wondering if he was breaking the law.

The man looked at the brass badge and murmured, “New York City . . .” He straightened up, suddenly helpful. “Well, you got me tonight. How can I help you?”

“About fifteen years ago, you had a theft from the collection of ancient manuscripts. A fairly valuable document was stolen. You ever heard of that?”

“Can’t say that I have—fifteen years is a while ago.

Mostly we just deal with drunken freshmen vandalizing Mr.

Deene’s statue during rush week, the occasional mopey girl who takes a few too many pills, stuff like that.”

Jenner pointed toward the green computer screen in the room.

“Would it be on there?”

The man laid his palm softly on the monitor. “Nope. This only goes back about five years, six tops. Wouldn’t be in it.”

“Okay. How about security officers? Anyone been working here long enough that they might remember it?”

The guard put his hand to his chin, his expression clouded
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with doubt.

“Naah . . . fifteen years is a long time to stay at Deene’s . . .”

“No one at all?”

The man shook his head.

“How about your boss?”

He brightened.

“No! But he got the job after his brother retired, and his brother lives real close.”

He thought the guard was reaching for a pen to write down the man’s phone number, but the man surprised Jenner by grabbing his jacket and coming out of the booth.

“C’mon. I’ll take you to him,” he said, jiggling the door handle to make sure the booth was locked.

Jenner thanked him, and unlocked the passenger side of his car.

The guard thrust out his hand and said, “Tommy Anderson.”

They shook hands, then Anderson started glancing around the car, as if expecting to see a head, or body parts or something.

Jenner said, “Relax, it’s a rental.”

Anderson seemed a bit disappointed. He leaned toward the windshield and said, “Okay, in about a minute College Drive’ll cross Oak, then Wireless Road. Go past Oak, then take a right on Wireless.”

The college’s buildings were low and nondescript. The dorms were mostly paired semi-detached town houses; in one area, there were three-story apartment-type complexes around a tiny swimming pool, the pool area surrounded by chain-link fence.

Anderson tapped on the window and said, “Two years ago, at Halloween, we had a sexual perversion incident right behind the gazebo over there.”

He sat back in the seat. “Guy completely ass-naked except for a face mask and flippers—you know? For scuba diving?

He jumps out from behind the gazebo and exposes himself
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to some Chinese exchange students.
Girl
students.”

They crested a ridge and drove downhill, into a valley; the road ahead, the trees ahead, dissolved into thick fog. Jenner slowed, and turned off his high beams.

They crept forward slowly, the lights carving tunnels into the shifting mist ahead. Anderson put one leg up onto the dashboard and glanced at Jenner.

“You should wear your seat belt—you have to be careful on these roads.”

“I do usually. I had an accident; it hurts to wear the belt.”

Anderson nodded slowly and looked ahead. He started tapping the dashboard rhythmically.

“I bet you see a lot of weird shit.”

Jenner shrugged, keeping his eyes on the road.

“What’s the most messed-up thing you’ve ever seen?”

Jenner looked at him briefly. “A David Hasselhoff music video—apparently he’s huge in Germany.”

Anderson snorted. “No! I meant at your work! I once saw this movie where . . . ,” and he launched into an impenetrable description of a slasher film.

As they neared the bottom of the hill, the fog became paler and paler. They reached a bend at the bottom of the hill, and they were bathed in light; it was like floating inside a big white cloud.

Jenner squinted as Anderson pointed in front of them.

“That’s Bill Johnson’s house. That’s where we’re going.”

Bill Johnson lived in an old Airstream trailer at a sharp bend in Wireless Road at the bottom of the valley of Deene’s Holler. After the second time his trailer was hit by a car, he petitioned the county for road signs. They’d put up a steep incline sign, and a zigzag sign, and Johnson paid for a children playing sign out of his own pocket.

After the third time his home got hit, Johnson bought spotlights from the same company that set up the college
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sports field. Now the glare from thousands of watts of bright light irradiating the chrome-bright Airstream trailer was dazzling; had Johnson come out to see who his visitors were, Jenner might have mowed him down without even seeing him.

Jenner parked the Taurus at the foot of the lighting rig and got out, stiffly. He blinked a little, holding his palm like a visor to shield his eyes. Anderson stood there, a little smug in aviator sunglasses.

“Yo, Bill!”

There was no answer.

Tommy walked to the open door of the trailer and rapped his knuckles on the inner screen-door frame.

“Bill!”

Behind the screen, the door opened. A man in a ratty plaid bathrobe stood there, leaning on a walker.

“Heard you the first time.”

“Sorry.” He gestured to Jenner. “This man is an ME from New York City, working on a murder. He wants to know about a valuable book stolen from the college a few years back. Fifteen, was it, sir?”

“Yes, about fifteen. An old manuscript.”

Johnson reached his arm behind the door frame, and the brightness eased. He pushed the screen door half open, then turned and painfully began to push his walker into the dark of the trailer, muttering, “Come in,” as he disappeared.

It was Jenner’s first time in a trailer; it seemed neither smaller nor larger than it had appeared on the outside. The air was heavy with cigarettes, the curtains yellowed from years of smoke.

“Sorry about the light. Idiots take that turn way too fast, and when the fog gets bad, I turn the lights up all the way.

Probably take you five minutes to roast a turkey up there on that main light trestle.”

Johnson eased himself into a lounge chair. Jenner saw that he was wearing a nasal cannula, attached by a thin tube of
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green plastic to a cylinder of oxygen behind the chair.

“So, Bill, this is Mr. Jenner, and—”

“
Dr.
Jenner. He’s an ME—that means he’s a medical examiner, and that means he’s a doctor.”

He turned to Jenner. “I think I know what you’re talking about. Maybe fourteen or fifteen years, someone stole an Egyptian document from the Parler Collection. That it?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

Johnson leaned back in his chair and began to struggle with the cannula, tugging it awkwardly to get it past his big ears.

“Damn thing keeps getting caught.”

He leaned forward, picked up a Marlboro 100 from a box on the coffee table, flicked open a gray metal Zippo with a sharp snap of his wrist, fired up the cigarette, then leaned back again, inhaling with obvious satisfaction.

His lips were the color of liver, his face bluish. He coughed a little, then put the cigarette down and reached for the cannula. Holding the nasal prongs to his lips, he turned the tap on the canister and sucked down a blast of oxygen.

He looked at the two of them as they watched him.

“Bastards should make a mask that gives you oxygen while you smoke, fer chrissakes.”

Tommy Anderson nodded in vague agreement.

“Doc, what you think? Think I should quit?”

Jenner shrugged.

“That’s what I say! I been smoking since I was twelve, I worked in the mines until I was thirty, of course I’m gonna have emphysema! Had it when I was forty! And I’ve almost made it to seventy, so screw all those sanctimonious bastards who told me I had to quit.”

He took another hit of the cigarette, breathed out, then had a coughing fit, the phlegm rattling coarsely in his chest. He was breathless in seconds. He sat there, breathing in short gulps against pursed lips, his eyes watering with effort.

He caught his breath for a few seconds, then began to
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speak.

“So, Doctor, sure, I remember that. Not much else happened at the campus in my time there. We knew who did it, too, but they never could arrest him. No proof, no witnesses, no statements, no nothing.”

Jenner sat up a little straighter.

“You knew who did it?”

“Sure. God, I can’t remember the name, but it was a student. Funny kid, some poor orphan kid. Weird kid. I can’t remember how we knew it was him, but we were pretty sure about it. We interviewed him, even called in the state police.

But the kid said it wasn’t him, and we had nothing on him, and we had to let him go. What the hell was his name?”

Jenner said, “Do you have any notes or records from back then?”

“Sure! It should all be on the computer in the security office.”

Anderson said, “No, sir! Computer only goes back, maybe, six years!”

Deep into an inhale, Johnson rolled his eyes. He breathed the smoke out smoothly.

“You ever wonder what that folder labeled ‘Archives’ was for, Tommy? You should click it sometime . . .”

He pushed forward and grasped the walker. He gasped and puffed as he pulled himself to standing.

Jenner stood, ready to help.

“No, Doc, I got it, thanks. I can do this . . .”

He shuffled over to a desk, empty except for a bulky old laptop. There was a silver metal decal on the top: property of deene college.

The man opened up the screen, then sat down, panting.

“Sir, if you would be so kind as to pass me my gas . . .”

Jenner wheeled the cylinder to the desk and helped Johnson arrange the cannula around his head. Johnson settled the prongs inside his nostrils, then nodded, and Jenner turned the knob to start the flow of oxygen.

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His stubby fingers were surprisingly fast on the keyboard.

Jenner recognized an old-fashioned text-based telecom program in the active window. A speaker turned on with a tinny click, and then there was the very loud sound of a touch-tone phone being dialed. There were a few seconds of shrill electronic honking, and then the connection was established.

The screen displayed an ASCII mosaic banner reading

“deene/admin/database.”

Johnson tapped in his password.

“Now, let’s see . . . I remember the year and the month—

half the student body was still drunk because we beat the Halsford team for the first time ever that weekend.”

He tabbed through a few screens, then stopped.

“Okay. The week before. Nothing much during the week . . .”

He tabbed onto another screen, this one promisingly full of text.

“Okay, here’s the game. Lots of drinking, a little vandalism, and we found out about the theft on Monday morning, I think . . .”

He tabbed to the next screen. The ledger was blank.

“Huh . . .”

He tabbed forward again, followed the ledger down on the screen with a finger, then checked the date and started tabbing back through previous dates.

Then forward again.

He shuttled back and forth for a few minutes before turning to Jenner, drawing a long draft of oxygen before saying,

“So, someone’s deleted the ledger for the week of the incident.”

He smiled weakly up at Jenner.

“Sorry, Doc. Looks like someone’s beat you to it.”

Jenner said, “Is there a hard copy of the ledger?”

“Nope. I don’t think the administration even knows they have this much.”

“Can I look on the original computer?”

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“Don’t see why not. You some kind of computer whiz?”

“No. But this is my only lead.”

Johnson lifted his arm weakly.

“So, Doc—you going to tell us what’s this all about, anyway?”

Jenner glanced at the TV set in the corner. “You been following the Inquisitor case in New York at all?”

“The guy killing those students? Sure—you think it’s connected?”

“Yes. It looks that way.” Jenner looked Johnson in the eye and said, “He’s abducted a student; unless we get to him first, he’s going to kill her on Wednesday.”

Johnson had caught his breath again. His face was set, serious now. He pursed his lips for a few seconds, then exhaled in a weak, breathy whistle.

“Well, I’ll tell you what you’re gonna do. You’re going to help me over to my chair, then you’re going to drive a few miles down to Accident, Maryland; there’s an okay motel about eight miles out of Accident. Tonight, I’ll make some calls, and if there’s a way to get the information, we’ll figure it out.” He breathed in deeply through his nose. “I can’t promise anything, but God, we’ll do our best.”

The man listened, ear pressed against the door. She was finally quiet.

She wasn’t what he’d expected, not by a long shot, not at all what he’d thought she’d be like after seeing her from the window.

He stroked his thigh, the muscles cramped and aching.

Unreliability was a big issue for him. When he selected a target, he stuck to it. You had to
commit
to a target, always.

His algorithm was specific: select, locate, track, survey, prepare, isolate, access, execute, document, exit.

The man knew how to commit.

When he’d finally seen her in the flesh in that courtyard
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on Seventh, gasping and trying to stand after falling off the trellis, like a pretty little kitten stunned from its first big fall, he’d found her terribly appealing.

He knew now that a lot of that had been the situation.

She’d seen him at his peak, ecstatic, exhilarated, wrapped in a crusting carapace of her friend’s blood. She’d seen him as no other soul still living had, seen his true self revealed.

And, naturally, it had made him imagine certain . . . possibilities. Now he felt a little foolish.

In taking her, he’d also wanted to show them what he could do, show the world his strength, his courage, his resolve. The newspapers were turning him into a cartoon—that name

“the Inquisitor” was a joke! What if it stuck? What did “Inquisitor” even
mean
?

Well, they knew about his power now. He’d read an interview where the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association said that the dead cop “fought like a lion”; he’d laughed out loud at that. The man just lay there and gasped like a pig while he got stabbed! It had taken, what—twelve, thirteen seconds to kill him? He was a big guy, he went down hard, he bled quick, and he died fast. End of story. Some lion!

It had been
easy
for him to take her. And that was why he took her. And he took her because he found her intriguing.

And he took her because he wanted Jenner to suffer.

Jenner! No matter how much a mess the girl was, she was too much woman for Jenner. The man clearly didn’t know what to do with her. And he might be a doctor, and he might have book smarts, but Jesus! The man couldn’t take a punch!

He thought of Jenner lying there helplessly, wriggling a little in his friend’s blood, staying down when told to stay down, just like a dog. Like a pussy.

He sat there, grinning now, in the dark outside the girl’s room.

But she didn’t behave like he thought she would. She’d been docile and obedient, but not terrified of him, of what
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he could—probably would—do. He’d hoped that that situation might have emerged—what was it, Copenhagen syn-drome?— where she developed a fondness for her captor. He felt himself blush.

She wasn’t like that. She played it safe, did just as she was told, didn’t resist his anger. And then, once he had her in the room, and everything had calmed down and the situation was established and it was time to get to know her, she had been sick. Retching and puking, sweating and moaning.

At first he thought it was because she knew he was going to kill her, but it got worse, and he realized it wasn’t fear at all. It was drugs. She was coming down from drugs. Heroin, he was pretty sure.

He had no respect for people who did drugs. If you cannot master your urges, if you cannot respect the temple of the body, you forfeit your humanity, you become the beast that has somehow wandered into the cathedral.

That boy he killed had been that way. Peddling his ass to buy drugs, trying to drag the man down with him, trying to make him wade in that stinking pit of degradation that was his faggot life. He’d killed the boy out of anger—no,
outrage
.

Outrage that the boy could even have
dreamed
that someone like him would do the things he was proposing.

It had been an act of kindness, releasing the boy from the moral and physical squalor that was his earthly life. And now again, this girl, again the drugs.

He pressed his ear to the door again, and heard nothing.

The crying had stopped, the moaning was over. He imagined her lying there in the blanket, her breathing slow and even, her body calm, her mind at peace.

She was quiet now because the drugs were out of her body.

The process had been hard on him, but it was finished now.

She was herself again. But what self was that? At what level did she understand what he was doing?

He knew a way to find out.

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When he opened the wooden box of mementos he kept under his desk, he was impressed by how full it was. On top was some sentimental stuff he’d been looking at the day before—a certificate for good drawing he got in the fifth grade, and a couple of photographs of the set he’d designed for the drama club production of
Our Town
when he was at Deene’s. Underneath that layer, the old papyrus sheets had crumbled so badly that they now lay like a low stack of leathery yellow cards in the vellum he folded around it. He put the parchment to one side to remove his trove of Polaroids, as many as fourteen or fifteen from each Saint.

He spread them on the table, as if playing solitaire. He loved the photos, loved being able to fold the entire little scene into his palm—setup, execution, final image. It was like being dealt a good hand in poker.

He chose four or five of the most spectacular—pictures where the participants’ reactions were really clear, final photos of each tableau so you could really see what was going on. He swept them up into a little deck, then looked for something to hang them with. He didn’t have any thumb-tacks; nails would have to do. Besides, nails were symbolic.

He lit a hurricane lamp and walked back down the corridor to her door. He slid the bolts one by one, then stepped inside. She was lying where she always lay.

He didn’t care if she could see now. She was weak—she’d been ill for a day and a half, and hadn’t eaten much since, and had thrown up what she’d tried to eat. He looked at the loaf; black and gray mold spread across the corner where she had nibbled it—if it was, indeed, her eating it and not the rats. She was weak, and no threat.

If she joined him, she joined him, and if she didn’t, she would die, so either way, it wasn’t an issue.

She didn’t move. In the shaky yellow light, he could tell she was awake, but she stayed turned away from him.

Good enough.

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He put the lamp down on the floor. He held nails between his lips as he worked, the Polaroids in his hip pocket. He kept half an eye on her: as he began to hammer the first into the door, she stiffened, but did not turn.

It didn’t take long—a few taps were enough to drive a nail through each photo into the wood. Nailing them, of course, interrupted some of the Coptic he’d copied in waterproof marker, but the dense writing filling the white borders of each Polaroid made a handsome frame, and almost looked better with the nail.

When he finished, he stood back and looked at the door.

It was an impressive sight, by any reckoning. Twenty Polaroids, each with its filigreed mantle of Coptic text, nailed to the black door in neat columns.

He looked down at her, and nudged the lamp a little nearer to the door. He decided to leave. He’d come back for the lamp later, after she’d had a chance to look at it by herself. She was shivering now, and he knew it wasn’t the drugs anymore.

By the time he reached his workshop, she’d begun to wail, hysterical shrieks that ended as choked sobs.

No. She was not at all what he’d thought.

sunday,

december 22

They smoke at breakfast at the Gap Weekender Motel, just outside of Accident, Maryland. They smoke in the bedrooms, they smoke in the bathrooms, they smoke in the concrete breezeway in front of the long blocky slabs of sagging plasterboard and concrete that constitute each wing, and they were smoking in the motel’s diner.

Jenner was the only person not smoking. The two men at the other end of the counter were using the fatter one’s plate as an ashtray, now a small heap of mangled butts and gray ash smearing through the yellow streaks of clotting yolk.

From their conversations, most of the men in the room were there to apply for work at a new federal prison just over the state line in Hazelton, West Virginia. The prospects, at least the ones at breakfast, were burly and heavily tattooed.

He ordered more toast, and watched the waitress scoop out a glob of concentrate for his second glass of orange juice.

He was moving slowly: the muscles in his chest were still cramping, but he felt a bit better than the day before.

What was Ana doing now? Was he feeding her? Probably—

he’d want her in shape for her ordeal on the twenty-fifth. The day before, thinking over the crime scenes in a travel-plaza Arby’s near Paxtonia, Jenner had realized that, beneath the injuries, all of the victims had seemed pristine, almost polished. It was clear that the defilement of something beautiful and pure made the act somehow more
worthy
to him, a richer sacrifice. He’d take good care of Ana.

Johnson had called at 8:00 a.m. to say that Jenner should be at the counter at nine. It was now nine thirty, and still no sign of him.

He peeled the foil cover off a butter packet and spread some on his toast.

The phone rang, and a second later the waitress called him over.

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Everyone watched him walk around the counter to the phone. He turned toward the milk dispenser to talk. Bill Johnson’s voice, slightly hoarse; the quiet hiss of the oxygen made him sound a thousand miles away.

“Mornin’, Doc. You checked out yet?”

“I was waiting for your call.”

“Okay, well, Deene’s College’s Finest is about to deliver: I got you a name, I got you a location, and I even went so far as to get you an interested contact in local law enforcement.”

“That’s great. Where is it? Nearby?”

Jenner could hear the tinny scrape of the tubing against the receiver as Johnson sucked in his breath.

“Nope, Doc. Maybe sixty, seventy miles north of here. In some town I never heard of named Snowden. The sheriff will meet you in some other town I never heard of named Houtzdale.”

“Why is the sheriff interested?”

“Search me. My brother said we should call the county sheriff, give them a heads-up that you’d be coming. About ten minutes ago I got a call back saying they’d be glad to help you, and to meet the sheriff at the junction of Route 53

and McAteer Street in Houtzdale; they’ll be expecting you about noon.”

He paused, breathing heavily.

“He said to take 219 up—you can pick it up in Somerset.

He’ll take you on into Snowden, I guess.”