Wally opened his mouth, couldn't think of a reply.
Laughing, Celestina said to him, 'You can never win, you know.'
'Maybe it's not where the heart is,' Wally corrected himself. 'Maybe it's where the buffalo roam.'
On the counter beside the bathroom sink stood an open box of BandAids in a variety of sizes, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a bottle of iodine.
Tom Vanadium checked the small wastebasket next to the sink and discovered a wad of bloody Kleenex. The crumpled wrappers from two Band-Aids.
Evidently, the blood was Cain's.
If the wife killer had cut himself accidentally, his writing on the wall indicated a hair-trigger temper and a deep reservoir of long-nurtured anger.
If he had cut himself intentionally for the express purpose of writing the name in blood, then the reservoir of anger was deeper still and pent up behind a formidable dam of obsession.
In either case, printing the name in blood was a ritualistic act, and ritualism of this nature was an unmistakable symptom of a seriously unbalanced mind. Evidently, the wife killer would be easier to crack than expected, because his shell was already badly fractured.
This wasn't the same Enoch Cain whom Vanadium had known three years ago in Spruce Hills. That man had been utterly ruthless but not a wild, raging animal, coldly determined but never obsessive. That Cain had been too calculating and too self-controlled to have been swept into the emotional frenzy required to produce this blood graffiti and to act out the symbolic mutilation of Bartholomew with a knife.
As Tom Vanadium studied the stained and ravaged wall again, a cold and quivery uneasiness settled insectivally onto his scalp and down the back of his neck, quickly bored into his blood, and nested in his bones. He had the terrible feeling that he was not dealing with a known quantity anymore, not with the twisted man he'd thought he understood, but with a new and even more monstrous Enoch Cain. Carrying the tote bag full of Angel's dolls and coloring books, Wally crossed the sidewalk ahead of Celestina and climbed the front steps.
She followed with Angel in her arms.
The girl sucked in deep lungsful of the weary clouds. 'Better hold tight, Mommy, I'm gonna float.'
'Not weighed down by cheese and Oreos, you won't.'
'Why's that car following us?'
'What car?' Celestina asked, stopping at the bottom of the steps and turning to look.
Angel pointed to a Mercedes parked about forty feet behind the Buick, just as its headlights went off.
'It's not following us, sugarpie. It's probably a neighbor.'
'Can I have an Oreo?'
Climbing the stairs, Celestina said, 'You already had one.'
'Can I have a Snickers?'
'No Snickers.'
'Can I have a Mr.'Goodbar?'
'It's not a specific brand you can't have, it's the whole idea of a candy bar.'
Wally opened the front door and stepped aside.
'Can I have some 'nilla wafers?'
Celestina breezed through the open door with Angel. 'No vanilla wafers. You'll be up all night with a sugar rush.'
As Wally followed them into the front hall, Angel said, 'Can I have a car.
'Car?'
'Can I?'
'You don't drive,' Celestina reminded her.
'I'll teach her,' Wally said, moving past them to the apartment door, fishing a ring of keys out of his coat pocket.
'He'll teach me,' Angel triumphantly told her mother.
'Then I guess we'll get you a car.'
'I want one that flies.'
'They don't make flying cars.'
'Sure they do,' said Wally as he unlocked the two deadbolts. 'But you gotta be twenty-one years old to get a license for one.'
'I'm three.'
'Then you only have to wait eighteen years,' he said, opening the apartment door and stepping aside once more, allowing Celestina to precede him.
As Wally followed them inside, Celestina grinned at him. 'From the car to the living room, all as neat as a well-practiced ballet. We've got a big headstart on this married thing.'
'I gotta pee,' Angel said.
'That's not something that we announce to everyone,' Celestina chastised.
'We do when we gotta pee bad.'
'Not even then.'
'Give me a kiss first,' Wally said.
The girl smooched him on the cheek.
'Me, me,' Celestina said. 'In fact, fiancees should come first.'
Though Celestina was still holding Angel, Wally kissed her, and again it was lovely, though shorter than before, and Angel said, 'That's a messy kiss.'
'I'll come by at eight o'clock for breakfast,' Wally suggested. 'We have to set a date.'
'Is two weeks too soon?'
'I gotta pee before then,' Angel declared.
'Love you,' Wally said, and Celestina repeated it, and he said, 'I'm gonna stand in the hall till I hear you set both locks.'
Celestina put Angel down, and the girl raced to the bathroom as Wally stepped into the public hall and pulled the apartment door shut behind him.
One lock. Two.
Celestina stood listening until she heard Wally open the outer door and then close it.
She leaned against the apartment door for a long moment, holding on to the doorknob and to the thumb-turn of the second deadbolt, as though she were convinced that if she let go, she would float off the floor like a cloud- stuffed child.
In a red coat with a red hood, Bartholomew appeared first in the arms of the tall lanky man, the Ichabod Crane look-alike, who also had a large tote bag hanging from his shoulder.
The guy appeared vulnerable, his arms occupied with the kid and the bag, and Junior considered bursting out of the Mercedes, striding straight to the Celestina-humping son of a bitch, and shooting him point-blank in the face. Brain-shot, he would drop quicker than if the headless horseman had gotten him with an ax, and the kid would go down with him, and Junior would shoot the bastard boy next, shoot him in the head three times, four times just to be sure.
The problem was Celestina in the Buick, because when she saw what was happening, she might slide behind the steering wheel and speed away. The engine was running, white plumage rising from the tailpipe and feathering away in the fog, so she might escape if she was a quick thinker.
Chase after her on foot. Shoot her in the car. Maybe. He'd have five rounds left if he used one on the man, four on Bartholomew.
But with the silencer attached, the pistol was useful only for close-up work. After passing through a sound- suppressor, the bullet would exit the muzzle at a lower than usual velocity, perhaps with an added wobble, and accuracy would drop drastically at a distance.
He had been warned about this accuracy issue by the thumbless young thug who delivered the weapon in a bag of Chinese takeout, in Old St. Mary's Church. Junior tended to believe the warning, because he figured the eight-fingered felon might have been deprived of his thumbs as punishment for having forgotten to relay the same or an equally important message to a customer in the past, thus assuring his current conscientious attention to detail.
