Werehunter (anthology)

correspondence when he was trying to figure himself out. Look at the way kids played “doctor” the minute you turned your back on them. That religious cult had it right; kids wanted it, needed it, and the only thing getting in the way was the way a bunch of repressed old men felt about it.

He’d show her what it was she wanted, show her good. He’d make it last, take it slow. Then, once she was all his and would do anything he said, he’d make sure nobody else would ever have her again. He’d keep her his, forever. Not even her parents would have her the way he did.

Under the last layer of pictures was the knife, the beautiful, shining filleting knife, the best made. Abso­lutely stainless, rustproof, with a pristine black handle. He laid it reverently beside the leather straps, then zipped up his pants and rose to his feet.

No doubt, she was shuffling around on the other side of the door, moving uncertainly back and forth. She should be just dazed enough that he’d get her gagged before she knew enough to scream.

He paused a moment to order his thoughts and his face before putting his hand on the doorknob. Next to the moment when the kid lay trussed-up under him, this was the best moment.

He flung the door wide open. “Hel-lo, Mo—”

That was as far as he got.

The screams brought the neighbors to break down the door. There were two sets of screams; his, and those of a terrified little girl pounding on the closet door.

A dozen of them gathered in the hall before they got up the courage to break in, and by then Jim wasn’t screaming anymore. What they found in the living-room made the first inside run back out the way they had come.

One managed to get as far as the bedroom to release the child, a pale young woman who lived at the other end of the floor, whose maternal instincts over-rode her stomach long enough to rescue the weeping child.

Molly fell out of the closet into her arms, sobbing with terror. The young woman recognized her from news; how could she not? Her picture had been every­where.

Meanwhile one of the others who had fled the whimpering thing on the living-room floor got to a phone and called the cops.

The young woman closed the bedroom door on the horror in the next room, took the hysterical, shivering child into her arms, and waited for help to arrive, absently wondering at her own, hitherto unsuspected courage.

While they were waiting, the thing on the floor mewled, gasped, and died.

Although the young woman hadn’t known what to make of the tangle of leather she’d briefly glimpsed on the carpet, the homicide detective knew exactly what it meant. He owed a candle to Saint Jude for the solving of his most hopeless case and another to the Virgin for saving this child before anything had happened to her.

And a third to whatever saint had seen to it that there would be no need for a trial.

“You say there was no sign of anything or anyone else?” he asked the young woman. She’d already told him that she was a librarian—that was shortly after she’d taken advantage of their arrival to close herself into the bathroom and throw up. He almost took her to task for possibly destroying evidence, but what was the point? This was one murder he didn’t really want to solve.

She was sitting in the only chair in the living-room, carefully not looking at the outline on the carpet, or the blood-spattered mess of pictures and leather straps a little distance from her feet. He’d asked the same question at least a dozen times already.

“Nothing, no one.” She shook her head. “There’s no back door, just the hatches to the crawl-space, in each closet.”

He looked where she pointed, at the open closet door with the kitchen stool still inside it. He walked over to the closet and craned his head around sideways, peering upward.

“Not too big, but a skinny guy could get up there,” he said, half to himself. “Is that attic divided at all?”

“No, it runs all along the top floor; I never put anything up there because anybody could get into it from any other apartment.” She shivered. “And I put locks on all my hatches. Now I’m glad I did. Once a year they fumigate, so they need the hatches to get exhaust fans up there.”

“A skinny guy, one real good with a knife—maybe a ’Nam Vet. A SEAL, a Green Beret—” he was talking mostly to himself. “It might not have been a knife; maybe claws, like in the karate rags. Ninja claws. That could be what he used—”

He paced back to the center of the living room. The librarian rubbed her hands along her arms, watching him