The Campus Murders (16 page)

“Who's first?”

“I am. Ready, Mr. McCall? Lesson number one—” McCall felt a jolt under his heart, a heavy, heavy blow. He raised and twisted his head, breathing in. If this is the worst I can take it. I've got to take it. Brace …

“Next? Not his face, gentlemen. Just his body. Where he won't advertise.”

They struck him one by one. Once McCall heard himself grunt, and he shook his head. He found himself sagging against the lashings.

“I don't hit hard enough,” the girl who had burned him was tittering. “So I'll just tickle.”

She began at his ribs, working down, ruthless, a demon. McCall watched himself from a distance, writhing, shrinking, fighting hysteria. He had always been ticklish, and this witch in female skin seemed to know his most sensitive zones. Through his helplessness a sense of outrage began to take shape, an anger at the humiliations, a slaver of yearned-for revenge. He fought them down. That wasn't the way. Somebody was talking to him … I had better listen.

“We don't want to have to get tougher with you,” the commanding voice was saying coldly. So they were through with him, and this was the moral lesson, the sermon at the end of the black mass. “But don't ever think we won't if we have to. And what's going to make us feel we have to is if you keep snooping around 'Squanto where you're not wanted. We can settle our own problems, we don't need any help from Governor Holland or his muscle-head. Dig?”

He found himself staring into the mask.

“It's all fouled up on this campus, Mr. McCall, like on all the other campuses. We're going to clean it up—straighten the Establishment out. We don't want interference from upstate. We've got hangups enough without you. And if the governor calls out the National Guard there'll be so much blood spilled in Tisquanto he'll never hold another elective office.”

“Dig, brother?” somebody jeered.

“You can go back to your governor and tell him he's the system, and you're the system, and we don't dig the system.” A hint of warmth had invaded the cold voice. “We want respect around here. We're not sheep or kindergarten kids, we're grownup people. We're sick of being told what to study, where to go to bed, whether to smoke pot, how to arrange our lives. It's public money that's being spent in this institution, and we're going to have a say in how it's spent.”

“Is this a sample of how you're going to run things?” McCall asked. He was astounded to hear his own voice. “The only difference I can see between you and the Klan crowd is you've exchanged white sheets for exhibitionism.”

“Everybody does his thing his own way,” the man-boy said. “I hope you've learned your lesson, McCall. Report it. Maybe the freaky heads'll wise up.”

“Did you and your friends beat up Laura Thornton? And kill Dean Gunther?”

An angry growl came from the crowd.

“Hold it!” the leader shouted; and the growl stopped.

“Did you?” McCall said.

“You're the fuzz, you figure it out. Just remember, we could have killed you tonight.” The voice sounded bitter under the hideous mask. “Now you can rot here for all I care. When you work yourself loose you'd better take the advice I gave you and clear out of Tisquanto. All right, gang: Let's get the hell out of here.”

Whooping, they ran to the two cars. The wild revving of the engines roared against the night. Headlights sliced trees. Then they were gone, and he was left in a silence.

He began to work on the ropes. The pain he had not been feeling began to invade his nervous system. He felt nausea …

Who had they been?

Katie Cohan … waiting for him …

The ropes bit into his flesh. He stopped, feeling exposed and violated in the darkness. After a while he resumed the straining and stretching. The rope around his chest began to loosen. He writhed and thrust against the bonds, finding new strength. He worked up and down, rubbing his flesh raw against the tree trunk. That girl who had pressed the cigarette butt against his groin … it burned like the hell it had come from.

His clothes … if he got free, could he find them?

He struggled in the tight embrace of the ropes, felt them loosening, redoubled his struggles.

After a while he stopped for a breather, peering around in the moonlight. To his right he saw a building, at the edge of the clearing. Their shack, he decided. Their playground off campus … get your hands free …

He worked his wrists against the tree. One wrist was freer than it had been. He strained, perspiring in the night air. Abruptly the hand tore loose.

Two minutes later he was free.

Three minutes later he was jogging back along the dirt road which he knew led to the highway to Tisquanto. He had found all his clothes except his tie and T-shirt. He had considered taking the ropes with him as evidence and decided against it. The cold-voiced young general wasn't fool enough to use anything that could be traced back to him or his naked troops.

McCall reached the macadam road and turned toward town. He ran at a steady pace along the shoulder of the road, marveling at the response of his body after the punishment. His head felt light but the after-aches had not really yet begun and all in all he was in pretty fair shape.

He knew he was not very far from where he had been abducted.

When a car came along heading for town he ducked behind a tree until it passed. He was in no mood for explanations. Or lies, for that matter.

At last the streetlights began, strings of diamonds along the road.

It could have been a lot worse. They hadn't hurt him badly. All but that damned cigarette-happy blonde.

McCall jogged on through the evening. After a while he slowed to a walk, breathing through his mouth.

15

The inside of the rented Ford was crammed with last winter's mulch, a malodorous mess of damp and rotting leaves. The exterior had been used as a wall for the advertisement of graffiti, a display of obscenities deriding Governor Holland, McCall, President Wade, and authority generally. Perhaps significantly the graffiti had been written in soap.

McCall reamed out the interior as best he could and drove to an all-night garage. He was beginning to stiffen up from the beating, and he kept squirming behind the wheel.

“You'd better wash the car as well as clean the inside,” he told the attendant. “I'll pick it up in an hour or so.”

“We don't do car washes at night, mister.”

“I can't run this thing in its present condition.”

“That's your problem.”

“You don't seem swamped with work. How about it?”

The man grinned. “What am I bid?”

“Does everybody in this town have the morals of a grave robber?” McCall growled. “All right, double the usual. But I want a good job.”

“You got the best, mister. What happened?”

“You tell me. Parked my car and when I got back it was like this.”

“These goddam college bums,” the garage attendant said. “You want a cab, use the office phone. I'll put it on the bill.”

McCall gave the taxi driver Kathryn Cohan's address. He was deposited at the foot of a meandering flight of steps that led up a hillside to the house perched at the top in a broad nest of trees and shrubbery. The front-door lights were on and he could dimly make out an unconventional redwood house all angles and ells.

Apparently she had heard the taxi. She was waiting in the doorway.

“For God's sake, Mike, where have you been? I was beginning to get worried.”

“Here and there. Sorry I was delayed.”

“You could have phoned.”

“Not really,” McCall said.

She pulled him inside and inspected him in her foyer. “What happened, Mike? You look awful. Look at your clothes! You've been in a fight!”

“If I was, it was pretty one-sided. They don't grow many sportsmen in old 'Squanto, do they? I mean, whatever happened to fair play?”

“Mike, will you tell me what happened!”

She clung to his arm. In the soft lighting her hair shimmered red gold. She was all in brown—bell bottoms in crushed velvet, velvet shirt, suede vest, and square-toed reptile shoes.

“You look delicious.”

“Mike.”

“Let's go in there and sit down,” McCall said. “I've been running.”

It was a beautiful living room of naked hand-hewn beams, bright rugs, slapdash furniture, everything a bit oversized and comfortable-looking and surprisingly unfeminine. The walls were crowded with books and pictures.

McCall sank into a leather armchair.

“Bourbon?”

“I'm a weak-gin man.”

“How weak?”

“I hate the stuff, to tell you the truth. All right, this once make it bourbon. One jolt. Old grandma's remedy.”

She brought him the shot and he gulped it down. She sipped hers, nestled at his feet. “Now tell me,” she said.

He told her.

“You poor, poor darling,” Kathryn whispered. “Those
monsters!
Oh, Mike, I don't know what's happening to people! Rebellion is one thing, but … I'm no prude, but this is—is indecency! Don't you think you ought to see a doctor? At least let me run you over to the emergency room of the hospital.”

McCall shook his head. “I'm all right. They were careful not to hurt me badly.” At the last moment he had decided to omit the part about the lighted cigarette and his groin.

“You're sure?”

He nodded. “I think I could use one more drink.”

She jumped up and refilled his shot glass. This time he nursed the stuff. It burned its way down, and he made a face. She watched him with her head cocked.

“You're a strange guy, Mike.… It's a known group, by the way. I mean, nobody can ever prove anything, and from what you say you can't actually accuse individuals because you wouldn't be able to identify anybody. They've been in trouble before with all their running-around-naked activities. They call themselves Nature's Children.”

“Mother Nature spawned a litter of mean little bastards.”

“The police have hauled them in a few times. But they deny everything, nobody can ever make an identification—they always use those horrible masks—and anyway I'm sure if you accused them they'd come up with interlocking alibis for this evening, the way they always do. They're a disgrace to the college.”

“Why aren't they kicked out?”

“Because you have to have due process on campus as elsewhere,” Kathryn said dryly. “You can't kick a student out without cause. No one's ever pinned anything on them. A few have been dropped from Tisquanto for poor grades—they're not very good students—but most of them manage to get by. They stick pretty close and avoid the other students.”

“Nature's Children,” McCall said savagely. “I'd like to kick a few of their rosy little asses.” He winced, and she jumped up.

“You're in pain!”

“I've felt fitter. Katie, I wonder if I might take a shower.”

“I should have thought of that right off! And while you're taking it I'll clean up your clothes. You follow me.”

He tagged her to a pink-and-white bedroom furnished in maple. Where she takes her clothes off, he thought, she wants it feminine; and felt an absurd relief. “There's the linen closet,” she said, “and that door there leads to the bath. Leave your clothes out here and I'll get busy on them. Oh, you'll need a robe. Oh, dear, I don't think any of mine would fit you …”

“A big bath towel will do fine, Kathryn.”

“Plenty of those in the linen closet. Throw your clothes out here when you're undressed.”

He stripped in the bathroom and tossed his clothes out dutifully. Then he took a look at himself in the full-length mirror set into the inside of the bathroom door.

His body was a welter of bruises well on their way to lividity. I'm going to look like a working palette, he thought. The cigarette wound was nasty. He rummaged in the medicine chest and found a jar of burn ointment. This he applied liberally to the burn. Then he got under the shower and adjusted it for its gentlest spray. Even so, it hurt abominably. He dried himself gingerly, feeling like the sensitive Prince in the fairy tale who could feel the pea through sixteen mattresses.

He wrapped himself in a huge bath towel and went into the living room. She was clucking over the condition of his shirt.

“I'll have to wash your shirt and shorts, Mike. They're filthy. I've got a drier,” she added quickly. “It won't take long.”

“When I go to the Turkish bath,” McCall said, “I put myself entirely in the hands of the attendant.”

“Feeling a little better?” she asked when she got back.

“Not much.”

“You sit down here. I'll bathe those bruises.”

“It's okay, Katie.”

“Do as you're told.”

He sat down. She immediately began on his face. The rubbing alcohol burned like acid. Her extraordinary eyes kept watching him, concerned.

He told her suddenly about the burning joint and his groin. Kathryn blanched. “That can't be true! You're putting me on.”

“Do you want me to show it to you?”

“No! I mean—how
could
she? It sounds like something out of Krafft-Ebing.”

“Or Buchenwald,” McCall said. “I can only tell you that it happened. It's all right, Katie, I put some of your burn salve on it.”

“Do you want another drink?”

“I don't think so.”

“You're really not a drinker, are you?”

“No.”

“I notice you don't smoke, either.”

“I'm fighting it,” McCall smiled.

“You're remarkably free of vices, Mr. McC.”

“Except one,” he said, and pulled her to, him.

Afterward she accused him of having raped her.

“I had a remarkable lot of cooperation,” McCall said dreamily.

“What's more, you
promised
, Mike. You gave me your
word.
”