But it didn't take a detective to figure that the Butcher had, in an oblique way, taken another victim.
With the help, that is, of the sheriff of Cuyahoga County and, Ness bitterly knew, the safety director of the city of Cleveland.
CHAPTER 13
Stalking Ness was fun.
It had been something of a challenge for Lloyd. Something different. He was tickled by the idea of following-or 'shadowing,' as the detective magazines called it- this supposed great sleuth who had made such a show in the papers about 'tracking down the Butcher.' Oh, really? Well, maybe Lloyd would just have to track him down.
For days now Lloyd had followed Ness around, on foot-from City Hall to various public buildings and restaurants-and by car, 'tailing' him (another good detective magazine term!) back to Lakewood. Tonight Lloyd had even followed Ness down into the private development of cottages and boathouses where the King Detective lived in his little stone castle. Lloyd had parked the car on Ness's side and crossed the road and stood with the lake at his back, looking up at the turreted roof of the tiny fortress.
He stood, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat, one hand grasping the handle of the jackknife, its long blade out. He had practiced last night, practiced withdrawing the knife in one swift motion, without tearing the coat. There was a breeze and the faintest mist in the air; Lloyd wasn't sure if it was from the lake or a bit of rain. When he glanced behind him, at the lake, it was a beautiful thing: an expanse of ripply gray-blue with ivory overtones from the full moon. He liked to kill in the moonlight, though sometimes he had to settle for indoors.
Then he glanced up and saw a shape in the window- Ness! — and for some reason (which now, upon reflection, eluded him) he ran to the car and raced away. As if frightened! Frightened… him! Lloyd. The Mad Doctor of Kingsbury Run.
That was how he thought of himself: he rejected, resented, the appellation 'Butcher.' Butcher! With his skill? 'Mad' he could accept-loosely, that might just mean 'daring' or even 'creative,' and after all, he was seeing a psychiatrist, so the other meaning of 'mad' did have some bearing, being objective about it. But 'Butcher,' hardly!
That was the newspapers for you. Those hack news-hounds had no pride in their own work; how could you expect them to understand the pride another person had in his?
He kept their clippings nonetheless. He liked getting press, getting credit where due. He could easily have disposed of the bodies without a trace. Instead he left them where they'd be found, eventually, to thumb his nose at the world in general and the police in particular.
It made him smile to think of the public praise his father had heaped upon him. The smile quivered on his face and his eyes brimmed with tears. It was an approval he had sought for so long.
Right now Lloyd was sitting in the same downtown diner to which he'd earlier followed Eliot Ness. He'd sat just two stools down from the great, meat-loaf-eating safety director, in fact. Had restrained laughter at the thought of how stupid the safety director was, sitting two stools down from the prey he sought so avidly but whose presence his bloodhound nose could not begin to detect.
Now, several hours later, Lloyd was back in the diner again, sitting at one of the small tables along the row of windows, with only a narrow aisle separating him from the counter, where the pretty young brunette waitress who had made eyes at Ness earlier was still at work.
What did she see in him? Lloyd knew, from society gossip, that Ness was something of a ladies' man. He used to date Viv Chalmers, for Christ's sake! What did they see in him? Ness was just a nondescript, almost Milquetoast of a paper pusher.
That's how Lloyd saw it. Lloyd saw himself as handsome, and some people would have agreed, while others would have found the six-three, blue-eyed blond to have oddly babyish features for a man of twenty-six. As a matter of fact, Lloyd was eating a bowl of cereal right now-Wheaties-though it was nearly midnight.
Lloyd associated breakfast with his mother. It was a meal they would share together-his father always had a quick cup of coffee and skipped the morning meal and was gone. Mother would pour the milk gently from a white pitcher, and her smile would be as white as the pitcher and her beautiful complexion as pale as the milk itself. Her hair had been blond-as blond as Lloyd's-and she wore it in a bun. She was very beautiful. She was very kind.
Father had been less kind. Lloyd's dark, severely handsome father believed in education above all else, and he believed that punishment was a form of education. The strop had taught Lloyd many lessons as a child.
One of the lessons had been that where punishment is concerned, it is better to give than receive.
He had two sisters, both older than him. He was the baby, to his mother; the son, to his father. He had been very ill with rheumatic fever as a young boy, and his mother would not allow him to play at sports. He'd taken some ribbing over this, at school, because he was a big, strapping kid and should have been a natural for baseball and football.
But he preferred to read, anyway. He was a very good student (he took ribbing about that too) and had hoped this would please his father, who didn't seem to notice. The only time Lloyd's father seemed to notice his son's grades was the time he got a B in geography; the strop was an incentive to improve.
Bookworm though he was, Lloyd did have his athletic side. He loved to swim and as the family had a summer home at Ashtabula, he got plenty of practice. And he loved the out of doors, loved to hike, loved nature-he was an Eagle Scout with merit badges to spare. Father said nothing about that accomplishment, one way or the other.
The only hint Father ever gave that he took some pride in Lloyd was the casual comment he would make, to family and friends, that his boy would 'one day be a finer surgeon than I.' This comment, which his father began to state as a fact as early as Lloyd's junior-high years, meant the world to the boy.
Appropriately, science was his favorite subject. He had begun to experiment on animals, on his own, while in grade school. He had found a cat in the street that had apparently been struck by a car; the cat was half-dead, so surgical experimentation couldn't do any harm. He had set up a little lab, a little workshop, in the garage, which was a freestanding building away from the large main house. Here he dissected living animals for the pure science of it. For the educational value.
He'd been fascinated by Kingsbury Run since he was a kid; he would see the lovely desolation of it out the window of the Rapid Transit train, which he and Mother occasionally took from Shaker Heights into the city, for a day of shopping together. An an older boy, in the Scouts, he would sometimes take the train and get off at Seventy-ninth or Fifty-fifth Street and explore the Run by himself, catch animals and experiment on them, right out there in nature.
The younger of the two sisters once caught him carving up a small dog and told their mother, and he explained that he was experimenting scientifically and she understood, though she asked him not to operate on living things again. Henceforth, out of deference to his mother, he would kill the animals first-though it limited the range of his experimentation, and the sense of power he so enjoyed.
Unlike Father, his mother had never struck him a physical blow, though she had hurt him once, in another way. She had walked in on him, when he was masturbating in his room, and had reacted with shock, with horror, and then tears. She later told him she had never been so disappointed in anyone in her life.
She had been pregnant at the time, and even now Lloyd could see her, standing in the doorway, a fat silhouette, choking with horror.
She died trying to have that fourth child. While his father had not been the attending physician, Lloyd was filled with anger toward Father. Not because his father had caused the pregnancy, no; but because medicine, surgery, had failed her. This exhalted profession to which his father gave so much time and energy, to which his father expected him to give his own life, had not been able to save the one person on the face of the earth worth saving.
He'd been thirteen when she died, and his father-whom he never saw cry over his mother's death, what a cold, cold bastard he was! — had responded to the change in the household by sending Lloyd off to military school. His oldest sister was married, and the other sister was off at college, so Lloyd-out at last from under the spell of his 'sensitive' mother (that was how Father would often describe his late wife, giving the word a distasteful ring) — would finally be made a man.
And the academy was where Lloyd had been made a man, all right. He had learned that the feelings of
