from behind through the sweeping, upturned boughs of the firs. It was a dense geometric shape floating high in the trees where everything else was airy grace and flickering light, where the only other straight lines were the soaring verticals of the tree trunks.
He began moving toward the house, walking quietly on his rubber-soled shoes, keeping to the cover of the trees, and came upon the damnedest sight. A rustic-looking wooden chair and a slatted chaise had been placed at forty-five-degree angles to each other, with a three-legged table in the angle between them holding a pitcher of water, two plastic drinking glasses, an ashtray full of unfiltered butts, and a box of pop-up lilac-colored tissues.
Despite the oddness of the setting, Pender recognized the simulacrum of a psychiatrist's office. A good omen, an excellent omen: it almost certainly meant that Dr. Cogan was alive. Or had been, fairly recently. He picked up one of the butts-a Camel-then tossed it back down and followed the path through the woods to the house, a high, narrow dwelling of dark-stained, weatherwarped deal.
He entered through the back door, found himself in the kitchen. Bread, baggies, a knife with damp traces of mayonnaise and mustard on the counter. It looked like someone had packed a lunch here-not long ago, either.
A picnic or outing of some kind? Was that why no one heard the shots?
There were two doors ahead of him, the open door to the hallway and a closed door to the right of the hallway door. Again the vision of the strawberry blonds waiting in a cellar appeared to Pender: apparently his subconscious mind had grasped where the closed door led before his conscious mind could reason it out.
He switched the gun to his left hand, opened the door, felt around for the light switch, started down the open-treaded stairs. At the bottom of the stairs he looked left-laundry room-then turned right, rounded a corner, and came upon the glass-fronted display case containing four shelves, each with three featureless white mannequin heads, all but two wearing wigs of human hair.
Pender groaned softly to see his secret hope, his secret vision, so cruelly, surrealistically parodied. Here were his strawberry blonds-he even recognized a few. That one with the bangs on the second shelf from the bottom, that was Gloria Whitworth, wearing her hair the way she wore it in the photo her roommate snapped a week before she left Reeford. This darker one on the top shelf, with the reddish highlights, that was Donna Hughes. And there on the bottom shelf was Sandra Faircloth-her long straight hair had faded badly in the ten years since she'd disappeared from Eugene, Oregon, shortly after meeting the man of her dreams.
So much for hopes and visions. In a career spent hunting serial killers, many of them of the type known as collectors, Pender had seen far more obscene and gruesome displays. This one was pretty tame in comparison. Why then was he so badly shaken, he wondered? Because he had come to believe in his hopeful vision?
Let that be a lesson to you, Edgar Lee, he told himself. Now get your fat ass out of this house and back down that hill and get some real cops in here, clear-eyed, clearheaded young ones who'll shoot first and have visions later.
Then he remembered that Dr. Cogan might still be alive. He tiptoed back up the stairs, switched off the light, closed the cellar door behind him, sidled around the doorway into the hall. His steps were noiseless, Hush Puppies on hardwood, as he started up the stairs.
When he reached the second-floor landing, Pender heard someone moving in one of the rooms. He tiptoed toward the open doorway, peeked around the jamb just as a woman in a long green dress emerged from an adjoining room and crossed to the bed, her back toward Pender. Her strawberry blond hair was short and curly. Dolores Moon, he thought, taking a step forward.
Miss Miller turned; her green eyes started to widen over the mask, but the surgically repaired lids couldn't go any higher. She tried to scream-Pender closed the gap between them in two strides and clapped his hand over her mask. A disconcerting sensation-there didn't seem to be any nose under there.
“It's all right, I'm with the FBI,” he whispered. “Don't make a sound. Do you understand me?”
A nod. He loosened his grip. She tried to scream again; again he closed his hand over the mask, this time covering both her mouth and the hole where her nose would have been, denying her air. She clawed at his arm, tried to kick him. He bent backward far enough to lift her off the ground and held her dangling there, legs kicking and arms flailing, chest heaving, until her body went limp. He dropped her onto the bed, turned her over.
Please let her be breathing, he thought to himself-he didn't want to have to perform mouth-to-mouth on whatever was under that surgical mask. But the green bodice rose, fell; the silk mask fluttered. And as Pender looked around for something to stuff into her mouth to prevent her from screaming again when she regained consciousness, it occurred to him that he still didn't know whether he'd rescued a victim or captured an accomplice.
82
It's over, Irene told herself. The chase, the capture, the glimpse of her own death in that frozen moment when the rock was poised in Kinch's upraised hand, then the ordeal of being halfpushed, half-dragged up the ravine and across the meadow, followed by the stumbling descent into this glaring white hell with its two damned souls, had left her beyond exhaustion, beyond hope, even beyond terror-or so she thought.
The room was ten feet high, twelve paces wide, and thirty paces long, with cement walls, a musty green indoor-outdoor carpet over the cement floor, and an elongated, opaque, thermoplastic bubble for a ceiling. Electric fans, one to suck air in and another to draw it out, were set into the walls at either end of the room, just under the ceiling.
A single tap eighteen inches above floor level in one corner supplied water for drinking and, apparently, washing hair, because lined up against the wall nearby were at least a dozen bottles of shampoo and creme rinse. No soap, just lots of shampoo. The only other amenity in the room, the privy, was a doorless four-by-four alcove, with a wood-grained plastic toilet seat mounted on a hollow platform over a deep pit.
“Over here,” whispered the taller of the two women, seizing Irene by the elbow, attempting to pull her toward the tap. “Please, it's best to do as he says.”
“Why?”
“To avoid unnecessary pain,” the smaller woman explained patiently, taking Irene's other elbow. “He's very good at pain.”
And what Irene saw in their eyes, glancing from one woman to the other as they gently tugged her toward the corner of the room, sent the terror welling up inside her again. Because what she saw was pity-for some reason too frightening even to contemplate, these two walking cadavers felt sorry for her.
When she understood that they meant for her to kneel naked on the steel grate set into the concrete floor under the tap, Irene balked. Even together, they weren't strong enough to force her down; as they urged her, their eyes kept glancing back to the door in the opposite corner of the room. When it opened, they stepped away from Irene.
“Kneel,” called Maxwell, striding across the room naked, with the sewing basket over one arm, and gesturing to Irene with the barrel of his pistol. She knelt.
“You two, over there.” He waved the gun in the direction of the door; they obeyed, but instead of crossing the room directly, they scuttled sideways around the perimeter, blankets drawn around their throats, giving him as wide a berth as possible without turning their backs on him.
“Get your head under the faucet, close your eyes.”
After the fear, and the shock of the cold water, came the humiliation. Kneeling naked and powerless left Irene feeling not so much angry, or even despairing, as defeated. No more praying, no more bargaining, no more affirmations, no more scheming. She closed her eyes and let her head loll while Maxwell, his touch as sure and gentle as her own hairdresser, lifted and separated the strands of her hair, parting and sifting them with his fingers to rinse out the mud and leaves from the riverbank, the pale green clinging seeds of meadow grass.
Under the rushing water, a sort of peace came over Irene. And although the pychiatrist in her couldn't help putting a name to ittraumatic dissociation-Irene knew that what she was experiencing was beyond classifying, beyond analyzing. How presumptuous of her, she thought, to insist on dragging her patients back to reality all these years. Because in the not-here, not-now, she had somehow managed to distance herself from the pain and the unbearable fear. The once overwhelming emotions were still there, but at a remove; hers, but not her.
And not even the gentle tugging at her scalp as Max gathered her twice-washed, creme-rinsed, strawberry
