Christians did-pretend. Prison had taught him well how to do that.
He could sometimes even pretend and fool himself.
The way Jock figured it, he’d been done wrong. Somebody owed him. That somebody was Judith Blaney.
He hadn’t raped Judith. He’d been home in bed alone, suffering with a cold, on the evening of her rape. Of course he had no witnesses to corroborate his alibi. Usually you didn’t welcome company when you were flat on your back with a fever and congested chest.
Jock had never seen Judith before his arrest. But he dreamed about her a lot in prison. He’d seen her face almost every night in his dreams. Her nightmare lived within his nightmare.
Often, some of the things that had been done to him in prison, he did to Judith Blaney in his dreams. His muffled screams became hers. Also his humiliation. His pain. She would beg him with her eyes to stop. But he didn’t stop. Not in his dreams.
Sometimes, he thought, dreams meant something.
Jock had been following Judith for almost three months. He didn’t mind if now and then she noticed him. Let her wonder.
After the first month, she’d obtained a restraining order. He was forbidden by law to harass her, or even to approach within a hundred feet of her.
He knew what a hundred feet meant. He could measure the precise distance in his mind. So he continued to follow Judith. He would be far enough away that she couldn’t do anything about it. She would know he was there though. Not always, but she could never be sure when he was observing her. At times she’d forget and feel safe. Then she’d glance behind her and there on the crowded sidewalk, or perhaps across the street watching her pull away in the back of a taxi, there he would be, and any joy would drain from her features and an expression he interpreted as fearful would come over her. That would give him a cold satisfaction.
But most of the time she didn’t know he was tailing her. That also gave him satisfaction. He was becoming expert at watching her without her knowledge. Sometimes even moving close to her, inside the protective hundred- foot legal distance. Like a trespasser on a dare.
Like tonight. He’d been on the same crowded subway car, then only ten feet behind her on the teeming platform. He’d been nearby her on the escalator. He kept a more prudent distance behind her on the sidewalk on the way to her apartment. She would often glance behind her, especially if the night was dark and the sidewalks not crowded.
He was close enough tonight to hear the tapping of her high heels. If he stayed tight to the buildings, keeping an awareness of light and shadow, he could haunt her like a ghost whose presence she would barely sense.
Now and then he’d deliberately let her catch a glimpse of him, let her know she wasn’t alone in this fear-filled world that only the two of them inhabited and that she had helped to create.
Jock knew Judith now better than she could imagine. The way hunters knew the thing they hunted.
It was almost an hour after dusk. They were on a long block that was almost deserted. Only the two of them. Tap, tap, tap went her heels on the hard concrete. Echoing in the street and in his mind.
Can you feel my eyes on you?
Sense my thoughts?
I already served time for raping you. Maybe I have a free one coming. Maybe more than just rape. I paid. You should pay.
Her stride was brisk and rhythmic, hurried but not panicked. Not yet.
Tap, tap, tap…
Faster now. She was picking up her pace. Afraid of something. Did she know he was here? No, she couldn’t. She couldn’t be sure.
He was certain she hadn’t spotted him.
He dropped back, confused by her obvious uneasiness, and saw a figure detach itself from the shadows and fall in behind Judith. The figure was that of a man. Medium height. Medium build. That was all he could be sure of from this distance.
Jock slowed his pace and tailed the man who was following Judith. Unquestionably, the shadowy figure was acting furtively. What was going on? Was Judith getting plainclothes protection? Had she gotten the police interested in him again?
No, he was sure the police would have approached him or come to his door and warned him. Since the day Judith had pointed her finger at him in a lineup, he’d been close acquaintances with the police, with the prison system, with the thugs that kept the order. They were all alike.
Sometimes they wore uniforms, sometimes not. But he was positive the figure ahead wasn’t a policeman. The police didn’t work that way. Didn’t look that way. Didn’t feel that way.
Jock watched the man following Judith stand across the street from her as she entered her apartment building.
The man tilted back his head and stared up at the correct window and waited patiently until it became illuminated. Then he put his hands in his pockets and walked away. His gait was different now. More relaxed. The intensity had gone out of him.
Excitement rippled through Jock like a chill. Something strange was happening here. Someone else had entered their private, fearful world.
He wasn’t the only one stalking Judith.
33
It was a few minutes past eleven the next morning. Quinn was alone in the office, a quiet cocoon in the maelstrom of Manhattan. The sharp ring of the phone was startling. He squinted at caller ID. Nift from the morgue. Quinn reached for the receiver.
“I won’t keep you in suspense,” Nift said, when Quinn had picked up. “Official cause of Candice Culligan’s death was a heart attack.”
Quinn was slightly surprised. “Pain did that to her?”
“More likely the thought of more pain. Under the kind of torture she underwent, sometimes the body and mind simply can’t endure any longer. If Candy hadn’t had the coronary event, she would have soon bled to death from the knife wounds. The partial skinning process.”
Candy. Not only was Nift on a first-name basis with the woman’s corpse, he was using a nickname. Quinn wondered sometimes about Nift’s relationships with his female subjects. Pearl had voiced suspicions about the obnoxious little ME, and Pearl had an annoying way of being right about people.
“What about the way her throat was cut open?” Quinn asked, trying to shake the creepy feeling that sometimes came over him when he was talking with Nift.
“A sharp, broad, and curved knife blade did that in two intersecting cuts, probably done slowly. The cutting wasn’t as deep or damaging as it appeared. The throat wound might have been the final one inflicted, and the killer thought it was the coup de grace. But she was already near death when her throat was cut. I say near death because her heart was still pumping when the injury was inflicted. The wound bled enough to indicate that.”
“Was the same knife used to inflict all her wounds?”
“It looks that way. A handy little blade. And by the way, there was no damage from the necklace chain with the S charm. And apparently it was put on the victim before her death.”
“I don’t suppose there was anything of the perpetrator on her.”
“Not even a hair. And the only blood on her was her own. There was no flesh beneath her fingernails. No saliva or sperm anywhere. Just the marks of long and arduous torture, mostly of peeling off her top layer of skin and leaving it hang in shreds, until finally her heart gave out. I’ve been over every inch of her, Quinn, and I can tell you this little tootsie went the hard way.”
Little tootsie. Jesus, Nift!
“There were twelve carefully placed cuts on her body, used to initiate the peeling process, and twenty-seven stab wounds in and around her pubic area. The knife penetrated her vagina at least twice. Not far, but it did great
