Mr. Murder

his wife increasingly attractive as she had aged from nineteen to thirty-three. Her eyes were no bluer than they had been when he’d first met her, her hair was not a richer shade of gold, and her skin was neither smoother nor more supple. Nevertheless, experience had given her character, depth. Corny as it sounded in this era of knee-jerk cynicism, she sometimes seemed to shine with an inner light, as radiant as the venerated subject of a painting by Raphael.

So, yeah, maybe he had a heart as soft as butter, maybe he was a sucker for romance, but he found her smile and the challenge of her eyes infinitely more exciting than a six-pack of naked cheerleaders.

He kissed her brow.

She said, “One bad moment? What happened?”

He hadn’t decided how much he should tell her about those seven lost minutes. For now it might be best to minimize the deep weirdness of the experience, see the doctor Monday morning, and even have some tests done. If he was in good health, what had happened in the office this afternoon might prove to be an inexplicable singularity. He didn’t want to alarm Paige unnecessarily.

“Well?” she persisted.

With the inflection she gave that single word, she reminded him that twelve years of marriage forbade serious secrets, no matter what good intentions motivated his reticence.

He said, “You remember Audrey Aimes?”

“Who? Oh, you mean in One Dead Bishop?”

One Dead Bishop was a novel he had written. Audrey Aimes was the lead character.

“Remember what her problem was?” he asked.

“She found a dead priest hanging on a hook in her foyer closet.”

“Aside from that.”

“She had another problem? Seems like a dead priest is enough. Are you sure you’re not over-complicating your plots?”

“I’m serious,” he said, though aware of how odd it was that he should choose to inform his wife of a personal crisis by comparing it to the experiences of a mystery-novel heroine whom he had created.

Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it sometimes was for a writer? And if so—was there a book in that idea?

Frowning, Paige said, “Audrey Aimes . . . Oh, yeah, you’re talking about her blackouts.”

“Fugues,” he said.

A fugue was a serious personality dissociation. The victim went places, talked to people, and engaged in varied activities while appearing normal—yet later could not recall where he had been or what he had done during the blackout, as if the time had passed in deepest sleep. A fugue could last minutes, hours, or even days.

Audrey Aimes had suddenly begun to suffer from fugues when she was thirty, because repressed memories of childhood abuse had begun to surface after more than two decades, and she had retreated from them psychologically. She’d been certain she’d killed the priest while in a fugue state, although of course someone else had murdered him and stuffed him in her closet, and the entire bizarre homicide was connected to what had happened to her when she was a little girl.

In spite of being able to earn a living by spinning elaborate fantasies out of thin air, Marty had a reputation for being as emotionally stable as the Rock of Gibraltar and as easy-going as a golden retriever on Valium, which was probably why Paige still smiled at him and appeared reluctant to take him seriously.

She stood on her toes, kissed his nose, and said, “So you forgot to take out the garbage, and now you’re going to claim it’s because you’re suffering a personality breakdown due to long-forgotten, hideous abuses when you were six years old. Really, Marty. Shame on you. Your mom and dad are the sweetest people I’ve ever met.”

He let go of her, closed his eyes, and pressed one hand against his forehead. He was developing a fierce headache.

“I’m serious, Paige. This afternoon, in the office . . . for seven minutes . . . well, I only know what the hell I was doing during that time because I’ve got it on a tape recorder. I don’t remember any of it. And it’s creepy. Seven creepy minutes.”

He felt her body tense against his, as she realized that he was not engaged in some complex joke. And when he opened his eyes, he saw that her playful smile was gone.

“Maybe there’s a simple explanation,” he said. “Maybe there’s no reason to be concerned. But I’m scared, Paige. I feel stupid, like I should just shrug and forget about it, but I’m scared.”

6

In Kansas City, a chill wind polishes the night until the sky seems to be an infinite slab of clear crystal in which stars are suspended and behind which is pent a vast reservoir of darkness.

Beneath that enormous weight of space and blackness, the Blue Life Lounge huddles like a research station on the floor of an ocean trench, pressurized to resist implosion. The facade is covered in a shiny aluminum skin reminiscent of Airstream travel trailers and roadside diners from the 1950s. Blue and green neon spells the name in lazy script and outlines the structure, glimmering in the aluminum and beckoning with as much allure as the lamps of Neptune.

Inside, where an amplified combo blasts out rock-’n’-roll from the past two decades, the killer moves toward the huge horseshoe bar in the center of the room. The air is thick with cigarette smoke, beer fumes, and body heat; it almost resists him, as if it’s water.

The crowd offers radically different images from the traditional Thanksgiving scenes flooding television screens during this holiday weekend. At the tables the customers are mostly raucous young men in groups with too much energy and testosterone for their own good. They shout to be heard above the thundering music, grab at waitresses to get their attention, whoop in approval when the guitarist gets off a good riff.

Their determination to enjoy themselves has the frantic quality of insectile frenzy.

A third of the men at the tables are accompanied by young wives or girlfriends of the big-hair and heavy- makeup persuasion. They are as rowdy as the men—and would be as out of place at a hearthside family gathering as screeching bright-plumed parrots would be out of place at the bedside of a dying nun.

The horseshoe-shaped bar encircles an oval stage, bathed in red and white spotlights, where two young women with exceptionally firm bodies thrash to the music and call it dancing. They wear cowgirl costumes designed to tease, all fringe and spangles, and one of them elicits whistles and hoots when she removes her halter top.

The men on the bar stools are all ages and, unlike the customers at the tables, each appears to be alone. They sit in silence, staring up at the two smooth-skinned dancers. Many sway slightly on their stools or move their heads dreamily from side to side in time to some other music far less driving than the tunes the band is actually playing; they are like a colony of sea anemones, stirred by slow deep currents, waiting dumbly for a morsel of pleasure to drift to them.

He sits on one of only two empty stools and orders a bottle of Beck’s dark from a bartender who could crack walnuts in the crooks of his arms. All three bartenders are tall and muscular, no doubt hired for their ability to double as bouncers if the need arises.

The dancer at the far end of the stage, the one whose breasts bounce unfettered, is a striking brunette with a thousand-watt smile. She is into the music and genuinely seems to enjoy performing.

Although the nearest dancer, a leggy blonde, is even more attractive than the brunette, her routine is mechanical, and she seems to be numbed either by drugs or disgust. She neither smiles nor looks at anyone, but gazes at some far place only she can see.

She seems haughty, disdainful of the men who stare at her, the killer included. He would derive a lot of pleasure from drawing his pistol and pumping several rounds into her exquisite body—one for good measure in the center of her pouting face.

An intense thrill shakes him at the mere contemplation of taking her beauty from her. The theft of her beauty appeals to him more than taking her life. He places little value on life but a great deal on beauty because his own life is often unbearably bleak.