weeds. “He’s in there,” she said again, over her shoulder, giving Beth a show of yellowed, jagged teeth. She looked Beth up and down. “He could prob’ly use some company.” The woman headed back toward her trailer, holding the metal roaster in one hand now, letting it dangle at her side.
Determined not to let herself be scared away, Beth climbed up on the first step leading to Salas’s trailer door and pushed a buzzer that almost certainly didn’t work. She knocked three times on the metal frame of the screen door.
There was a faint noise from inside the trailer. Then the door on the other side of the screen door opened inward, and there Salas stood, staring down at her.
He was only a vague shape behind the dark screen, not as big a man as she remembered, but still large. He seemed to have put on weight in the right places while in prison. If he hadn’t been wearing a sleeveless white undershirt, he would have been almost invisible in the dimness behind the screen.
“So what do you want?” he asked, in a hoarse voice that suggested Beth had awakened him.
She fought to find words for the ominous dark form towering over her, gazing down at her with a stillness that suggested great calm and a kind of superiority. She was the one who had lied. She was the one who had caused all the damage. Even her husband Roy had told her that before leaving her.
Salas made no move to open the door and invite her inside, or to step outside and talk with her. This wasn’t going at all as Beth had planned.
“I’m…” she managed to say.
“I know who you are.”
“I thought we should talk.”
He was silent for several seconds, then: “So talk.”
“I came here to assure you-” Beth said. God! Did that even make sense?
The shadowy form behind the screen said nothing.
Beth forged ahead. It was why she’d come all this way. “When I identified you in that police lineup, and in court, I would have sworn I was pointing at the right man.”
“You did swear.”
“I don’t know how I could have made such a mistake. And…” She gulped air. “… I sincerely apologize.”
He said nothing. Didn’t move.
“I-I’m genuinely sorry,” Beth said. “I know it can’t mean much to you now, considering what happened, but I just wanted you to know-”
He closed the trailer door and she was standing alone on his bottom step, staring up at the screen with a blank surface behind it.
She stood that way for more than a minute, arms at her sides, head inclined, as if gazing up in search of a god that had forsaken her.
When she backed down off the step, she stumbled and almost fell on the hard baked earth.
Beth barely remembered the drive back to Hogart and home. It seemed that suddenly there she was, in front of her garage with the car’s engine idling.
She realized she was crying.
She knew that nothing had changed, but that everything must.
After parking in the garage and slamming the car’s door behind her, she had to run from the hornets.
50
New York, the present
The Skinner sat hunched over his chocolate latte at an outside table at Starbucks and stared at the City Beat he’d plucked from a neutered vending machine a block away. The giveaway paper was lying on top of several newspapers the Skinner had bought that morning. The headline infuriated him.
SKINNER, CARVER, CANNIBAL
What on earth…?
He read on, oblivious to the people streaming past nearby on the sidewalk, the rumble and exhaust fumes of traffic, and the morning sun beginning to shine brighter and hotter on the round metal table. His attention was rapt.
Anonymous sources… Unnamed authorities… removed his victim’s tongues for the purpose of cooking and consuming…
He felt sick. He pushed his latte across the table and rested his elbows on the warm iron. How could they possibly believe that? What right did they have to jump to such a conclusion? To lie about him?
Cannibalism! The sick bastards!
Quinn! This has to be Quinn’s doing. He knows it isn’t true. There’s no reason even to imagine such a thing.
It’s so goddamned unfair!
Quinn. He’d somehow gotten the story planted. And this was exactly the kind of reaction he wanted. The idea was to get under his skin. Under the Skinner’s skin.
Well, it wasn’t going to happen. Not in the way Quinn expected. Not with the desired result.
He was calmer now that he had an understanding, or at least a hypothesis, as to what such a breathtakingly absurd accusation was about. And it was in some ways an effective stratagem. What could he do about it? Sue for defamation of character. No, Your Honor, I did not consume the tongues of those women! Would the court break out in laughter or in violence?
He felt himself smile. Good. He had a handle on this now.
This was a demeaning and devious move by Quinn, its aim no doubt to infuriate him and make him careless. But it wouldn’t work. Let the papers print what they wanted. Let the bubble heads on televised news babble. The Skinner knew the truth. Quinn knew the truth. The two of them were locked in a deadly game, and the game board was the city.
So far, the Skinner was way ahead.
He intended to stay ahead.
Now that he had something of a grip on what had happened, he was breathing less raggedly. His rage had turned cold.
So had his latte.
He carried the mug inside and told the acne-scarred kid behind the counter that the latte had been cool when he’d given it to him. The kid listened to his voice, took a look at his face, and promptly made a fresh latte, very hot.
The Skinner returned with it to his table and sat and read newspapers for a while longer. The Times and Post, the Daily News, the real newspapers, hadn’t yet picked up on the cannibalism angle. But the Skinner knew they would. It would be irresistible. Then it would be on televised news (if it wasn’t already), and people would be talking about it. Tongues would wag.
The Skinner laughed out loud at his unintentional play on words.
Laughter! Is that what you expected, Quinn?
“Is this true?” Jerry Lido asked Quinn.
They were in the office. The air conditioner hadn’t caught up with the heat. Vitali and Mishkin had just left to interview two more of the thirty-two prospective killers. Quinn was behind his desk. Lido had just come in. He looked neat this morning-for Jerry Lido. He had on a navy blazer, white shirt, and a red, blue, and gray diagonally striped tie that made him appear to have attended some kind of posh British school. Even his pants were pressed.
“That thing about the tongues and the Skinner,” Lido persisted. “Cannibalism. I saw it on TV news.”
Already? “It might be true,” Quinn said.
“We don’t deal in mights, do we?”
“We try not to.”
“So?”
