the fear, even for an instant, she would be lost. It was an emotional balancing act, and if she fell, there would be no climbing back onto the high wire.
“Okay, here's your first question, Bill,” said Max. “Are you expecting any visitors?” He'd parked the Volvo under a lean-to garage with a corrugated green plastic roof and positioned Bill's own battered white Dodge Tradesman van at the top of the driveway, pointing down the hill, ready to roll.
Bill shook his head.
“Anybody else live here?”
Shake.
“Anybody else ever lived here?”
Another shake.
“That's a lie, Billy-boy. You never hung those curtains.”
Irene glanced over her shoulder, saw that the curtains were white, flounced, and feminine, with little blue windmills. Observant fellow, that Max.
“Honey, you're supposed to be watching the driveway.”
She turned around again quickly. By cooperating with Max, Irene hoped to help him lower his stress level and maintain his dominance over the other personalities.
“Now, Bill, I'm goin' to give you a second chance,” Max said softly, almost gently. “See, we just robbed us a bank up in Carmel. We're not interested in doing you any harm-we only want to get out of here. But the situation is heatin' up pretty fast. What I want from you is first, the truth, and second, your van. What I'll do for you in return is, I'll leave the keys in the Volvo-it's a better'n even trade, and you'll get the van back anyway once we're done with it. Now, do we have a deal?”
Bill nodded.
“Swell. Who hung the curtains?”
“My wife-she died last year. Cancer.”
“Well, I'm sorry to hear that, Bill. Were the two of you married long?”
“Thirty years.”
“Man, but life can be cruel.” Max tsk-tsked. “Tell ya what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna leave you tied up here for a couple hours while we borrow your van. If you can get to the phone before then, more power to you-if not, we'll give somebody a call to come get you loose. Any family around here? Any close neighbors?”
Bill shook his head. His daughter lived nearby-she was working the dinner shift at a restaurant down by the highway-but he'd be damned if he was going to give her name to these two characters.
“How about if I call some local business then? I'd just as soon not phone the police, you know how it is.”
“Nepenthe-call Nepenthe. The restaurant-they'll be open.”
“Nepenthe it is. Let's go, honey.”
Max followed Irene out of the trailer and, in a bit of excessive chivalry, helped her up onto the passenger seat of the van. Then he slapped his forehead. “I almost forgot, we'll need clothes and supplies. Be right back.”
He cuffed her left wrist to the steering wheel. Irene didn't mind as much as she thought she would. In a way it was a relief, not having to decide whether or not to make a run for it. She watched through the rearview mirror as he entered the trailer, still wearing that ridiculous pink suit, and emerged a few minutes later dressed in jeans and a blue flannel shirt, wearing a black knit watchcap over his blond hair and carrying a cardboard box, which he tossed in the back of the van.
“There's some clothes in there.” He climbed up into the driver's seat and uncuffed Irene. “They look like they might fit you, but you need to change even if they don't. There's also a wig for you- Mrs. Bill must have lost her hair before she died.”
A dead woman's wig-Irene could feel her scalp contracting involuntarily. “Do I have to?”
“You have to do everything I tell you. That's how this works.”
As the van bumped down the long steep driveway, Irene crawled into the back and went through the contents of the cardboard box. Food: peanut butter, jelly, bologna, white bread, apple juice. Clothes: cranberry- colored polyester slacks; polyester blouse, mauve, with plastic toggle buttons. Mrs. Bill must have been quite a pistol in her day.
Irene sat on the ribbed steel floor of the van and pulled the blouse and slacks on over her tank top and shorts, then removed the wig from the box. It was Bozo red. She clenched her jaws, fought against an urge to vomit, tasted bile as she slipped the wig on and tucked her hair under it all around.
“Irene?”
“Yes, Max?”
“There's a carton of Camels in that box somewhere. Bring me a pack, would you?”
His tone was casual, conversational. Irene mirrored it. “Lucky for you he smokes your brand. I hope you left him a pack.”
Silence. A long silence. Irene realized she might have overstepped her bounds, been too flip. Squatting in the back of the van, she felt a sudden wave of dizziness, and realized she was holding her breath.
“No, no, I didn't,” Max said eventually; to Irene's relief, he sounded more amused than upset. “It wasn't necessary-I happen to know that the old man just quit smoking.”
34
Pender left the bedroom shortly after Harriet Weldon, the FBI criminalist, pulled down the sheet that covered the women to their waists, to reveal one last ghastly surprise Casey had left behind for the investigators. Below the waist both women had been hacked so savagely as to be all but unrecognizable-too many stab wounds to count had reduced their private parts to a pulp of blood and splintered bone.
Shortly after sunset, when the bodies, along with most of the FBI agents (including an extremely agitated Thomas Pastor, who had refused to speak with, or even look at, Pender), had departed, leaving the crime scene to the MoCo Sheriff's Department, Weldon found Pender in the backyard.
“I have something I want to show you,” she said, leading him into the darkened bedroom, closing the door behind them, and plugging in the portable black light laser. “Quite a love machine, your Casey.”
“God- damn,” said Pender. Ghostly white stains glowed like distant stars on the bed, on the carpet, on the cushion of the vanity chair, on several of the items of lingerie strewn about the floor, and even on one of the walls. “Hard to believe all that came from one man.”
For each of the stars almost certainly represented an ejaculation-seminal fluid glows white under ultraviolet light. Later an acid phosphatase test would verify the presence of semen, but under the circumstances, the investigators could already be reasonably certain of the origin of the stains.
“We won't know for sure whether it's all from Casey until the DNA comes back,” said Weldon, a short, pleasantly homely woman whose dark-framed spectacles, lumpy nose, and bushy eyebrows made her look as if she were wearing a Groucho mask. “But everything else points to one perp, so unless one of the victims had a boyfriend who'd visited her after the sheets were washed, I'd wager my per diem on it. Tell you what, though-I've never seen anything like it.”
Pender agreed. “Generally speaking, most serial killers commit rape not because they love sex, but because they hate women. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am, if they can get it up at all.”
“I wouldn't say this one was all that fond of women, either.” Weldon switched on the room lights, knelt to unplug the black light.
Pender took one last glance around the room as they left. Chalk marks, measurements, crime scene tape, fingerprint powder-he found himself almost nostalgic for those first heady moments when he'd been alone in the house. “I don't suppose you've come up with anything that'll tell us where he came from or where he's taking Dr. Cogan?”
“Dream on.”
“How about the Chevy he was captured in?” They walked back down the hall to the kitchen, where Casey had apparently fixed himself several meals, which he'd eaten in the living room, probably while watching television. He'd
