understood the cause of it, the emotion was still impossible for him to control. The moment real love or real friendship was near, the sheer terror that it might again be so brutally taken from him rose from nowhere to engulf him like a raging tide. And with it came a mistrust and jealousy he was powerless to do anything about. Out of nothing more than sheer self protection, whatever joy and love and trust there had been, he would erase in no time at all.
But now, after nearly thirty years, the cause of his sickness had been isolated. It was here, in Paris. And once found there would be no notifying of police, no attempt at extradition, no seeking of civil justice. Once found, this man would be confronted and then, like a disease itself, swiftly eradicated. The only difference was that this time the victim would know his killer.
7
THE DAY after his father’s funeral, Paul Osborn’s mother moved them out of their house and in with her sister in a small two-story home on Cape Cod.
His mother’s name had been Becky. He assumed it was short for Elizabeth or Rebecca but he’d never asked and never heard her referred to as anything but Becky. She’d married Paul’s father when she was only twenty and still in nursing school.
George David Osborn was handsome, but quiet and introverted. He’d come from Chicago to Boston to attend M.I.T. and immediately following graduation had gone to work for Raytheon and then later for Microtab, a small engineering design firm on the Route 128 high-tech hub. The most Paul knew about what his father did was that he designed surgical instruments. Much more than that, he’d been too young to remember.
What he did remember in the blur that followed the funeral was packing up and moving from their big house in the Boston suburbs to the much smaller house on Cape Cod. And that almost immediately, his mother began drinking.
He remembered nights when she made dinner for them both, then left hers to get cold and instead drank cocktail after cocktail until she could no longer talk, and then fell asleep. He remembered being afraid as the drinks mounted up and he tried to get her to eat but she wouldn’t. Instead she became angry. At little things at first, but then the anger always came around to him. He was to blame for not having done something—anything—that might have helped save his father. And if his father were alive, they would still be living in their fine home near Boston, instead of where they were in that tiny little house on Cape Cod with her sister.
And then always, the rage would turn to the killer and I the life he had left her. And then to the police, who were inept and impotent, and finally to herself, whom she despised most of all, for not being the kind of mother she should have been, for not being prepared or equipped to deal with the aftermath of such a tragedy.
At forty, Paul’s aunt Dorothy was eight years older than her sister. Unmarried and overweight, she was a simple, pleasant woman who went to church every Sunday and was active in community projects. In bringing Paul and Becky into her home, she did everything possible to encourage Becky to pick up her life again. To join the church and go back to nursing school and to one day make nursing a career she could be proud of.
“Dorothy is a clerk who works in the county administration building,” his mother would rail halfway through her third Canadian Club and ginger ale. “What does she know of the horrors of raising a child without a father? How can she possibly understand that the mother of a ten-year-old boy has to be available every single day when he comes home from school?”
Who would help with his homework? Make his supper? Make certain he didn’t fall in with the wrong crowd? Dorothy didn’t understand that. Couldn’t understand it. And kept on about the church, a career and a normal life. Becky swore she was prepared to move out. There was quite enough life insurance for them to live alone, if frugally, until Paul graduated from high school.
What Becky couldn’t understand was that church, a career and a new life weren’t what Dorothy was talking about. It was her drinking. Dorothy wanted her to stop. But Becky had no intention of doing so.
Eight months and three days later Becky Osborn drove her car into Barnstable Harbor and sat there until she drowned. She had just turned thirty-three. The funeral was held at First Presbyterian Church in Yarmouth, December 15, 1966. The day was gray, with a forecast of snow. Twenty-eight people, including Paul and Dorothy, attended the service. Mostly they were Dorothy’s friends.
On January 4, 1967, at age eleven, Aunt Dorothy became Paul Osborn’s legal guardian. On January 12 of that same year, he entered Hartwick, a publicly funded private school for boys in Trenton, New Jersey. He would live there, ten months out of the year, for the next seven years.
8
THE POLICE artist’s sketch of the severed head made the London tabloids on Tuesday morning. It was presented as the face of a missing man, and the caption asked anyone with any information to please inform the Metropolitan Police immediately. A phone number was given along with a notation saying all callers could remain anonymous if they so chose. All the police were interested in was information on his whereabouts for a grievously concerned family. No mention was made that the face belonged to a head that had no accompanying body.
By nightfall not a single call had come in.
In Paris, a different sketch had more luck. For a simple hundred-franc bribe, Jean Packard had been able to shake the memory of one of the waiters who had pulled Paul Osborn from the throat of Henri Kanarack while they struggled on the floor of Brasserie Stella.
The waiter, a small man, with slight, effeminate hands and a like manner, had seen Kanarack a month earlier when he had been employed in another brasserie that had closed shortly afterward because of a fire. As he had at Brasserie Stella, Kanarack had come in alone, ordered espresso, then opened a newspaper and smoked a cigarette. The time of day had been about the same, a little after five in the afternoon. The brasserie was called Le Bois on boulevard de Magenta, halfway between the Gare de l’Est and Place de la Republique. A straight line drawn between Le Bois and Brasserie Stella would show a preponderance of Metro stations within the area. And since the stranger did not have the appearance of a man who took taxis, it was reasonably safe to assume he’d either come to each by car or on foot. Parking a car near either cafe at evening rush hour to linger alone over an espresso was not a likely happenstance either. Simple logic would suggest he’d come by foot.
Both Osborn and the waiter had described the man as having a stubble beard or “five o’clock shadow.” That, coinciding with his working-class manner and appearance, made it reasonably safe to presume that the man had been on his way home from work and, since he had done so at least twice, that he seemed to be in the habit of stopping for a respite along the way.
All Packard had to do now was make the rounds of other cafes within the area between the two brasseries. Failing that, he would triangulate out from each, until he found still another cafe where someone would recognize the man from Paul Osborn’s sketch. Each time he would show his identification, explain that the man was missing, and that he had been hired by the family to find him.
On only his fourth try, Packard found a woman who recognized the crude drawing. She was a cashier at a bistro on rue Lucien, just off boulevard de Magenta. The man in the sketch had been stopping there, off and on, for the past two or three years.
“Do you know his name, madame?”
At this the woman looked up sharply. “You said you were investigating for the man’s family, but you do not know his name?”
“What he calls himself one day is quite often not the same as the next.”
“He is a criminal?”
