“I guess so. Except that I’m still sort of under her spell.”
Oh brother.
“In all these years,” he said, “nobody’s been able to turn me on like her. She knows things, does things. She’s totally uninhibited and free with herself. She’s a pleasure giver. Do you know how hard it is for me to give that up?”
Dr. Ruth, I’m not, but I took a stab at it anyway. “Roger, it sounds to me like Melanie Corrigan is a taker, not a giver, and you better stay the hell out of her hot tub.”
“There is a certain side to her, a kind of danger,” he said. “Maybe that’s part of the appeal, I don’t know.” He just let it hang there, his mind working something over, not letting me in on it.
“Okay then, I’ve got it all, right? You played hide the weenie with the missus while the old man watched, videotaped, and once in a while jumped on the pile.”
“That’s it.” He paused, looked side to side and added, “There is one more thing.”
“There always is.”
“She asked me to kill her husband,” he said.
NIGHT VISION
PROLOGUE
Live at Five
Look at those legs.
Look at those goddamn floor-to-ceiling million-dollar legs, Michelle thought, then unconsciously sneaked a peek at her own. Short. Stubby little shapeless legs. God, how she hated them.
Shit, now they’re on a two-shot. Look at the monitor. Next to her I look like a double amputee.
Then there was her hair. Thick, auburn hair brushed straight back. And her skin, that patrician paleness so out of place in Miami. Just a subdued line of gloss on full lips… She probably gets dressed and made up in ten minutes.
If Michelle didn’t spend half an hour covering her freckles with pancake, Max Factor Number Two, they’d ship her back to Scranton to handle neighborhood weather from Nanticoke. The legs, nothing you could do about those. But thank God for plastic surgeons and periodontists. A rhinoplasty-the Sandy Duncan model, pert but not prominent-and capped teeth called “Hollywoods.” Thanks to lawyers, too. Two hundred bucks to change Mabel Dombrowsky to Michelle Diamond.
“So, Dr. Metcalf, your book suggests that serial murderers share certain characteristics,” Michelle said.
“Well, we can place them into distinct categories,” Pamela Metcalf replied. “There are the organized murderers, who are above average in intelligence and are socially and sexually competent. They are usually the eldest sons in the family. Ordinarily they know their victims and plan the crime. The crime scene is neat and orderly-”
“Well, neatness counts,” Michelle Diamond chirped. Inside the control booth, the director groaned.
“The disorganized murderer is quite the opposite,” Dr. Metcalf explained, ignoring the interviewer and smiling politely at the camera. “Below average in intelligence, socially inadequate, sexually incompetent. Usually the last or next to last born. His crimes are more spontaneous. The victims are usually strangers, and rather than using conversation, he subdues with sudden outbursts of violence. Often he will perform sexual acts after the death of the victim…”
Oh shit, how do you follow that one up?
“In either case,” Dr. Metcalf said, “the killers have highly active fantasy lives. The fantasies often are of rape, torture, and murder. When they can no longer differentiate fantasy from reality, the two become one.”
And that upper-crust voice. Like Masterpiece Theatre.
Michelle cleared her throat, and the sound man cursed, his earpiece clacking like an enraged rattlesnake. “We seem to have more mass murderers in our country-”
“Serial murderers,” Pamela Metcalf corrected her. “Mass murderers kill many persons at the same time. Serial murderers kill many over time, usually at random.”
Michelle felt her face heat up. “Yes, of course. Is there something uniquely American about these serial killers? Something about our violent society?”
“Goodness no. In Britain we had Jack the Ripper, Germany its Peter Kurten. During the time of Joan of Arc France had the infamous Gilles de Rais, who killed hundreds. There have been serial killers throughout history.”
Damn. Like being lectured by Jane Seymour with a medical degree. Michelle racked her brain for news stories. “Yes, but here we’ve had Ted Bundy, the Hillside Strangler, the Night Stalker'- Michelle strained to keep up the patter- “the Son of Stan…”
“Son of Sam,” Dr. Metcalf helped out. “No doubt America has had its share. My primary interest is in understanding the reasons for these motiveless murders. We know that serial killers frequently cannot separate sex from aggression. We don’t know whether this psychological deficit is caused by genetic, chemical, or hormonal reasons.”
Thank God the director cut to a close-up of the British bitch.
Michelle caught a cue from the floor manager. “We’ll be back with Dr. Pamela Metcalf, author of The Murderer Within Us, right after this…”
The news director’s door was open, so Michelle walked in. Jerry Abrams was devouring a bacon cheeseburger. Late thirties, bushy mustache, disheveled, overweight. He chewed noisily, occasionally burping as he kept his eyes on one of three TV screens in his glass-enclosed cubicle.
“Hey, Michelle, get a load-”
“ Me-chelle.”
“Okay, Meeee-chelle, get a load of this turkey.”
On the screen a crew-cut blond man with a string tie was reciting baseball scores. The sound was turned low. Jerry Abrams always reviewed audition tapes this way. Watch the way they look, nobody listens anyway, he explained.
“Wanna play?” Jerry Abrams asked.
“I dunno, Jerry.”
“C’mon, guess.
“El Paso?”
He shook his head.
“Albuquerque?”
Jerry fished a french fry out of a paper sack. The office smelled of grease and charred meat. “The Wyatt Earp tie’s throwing you off. Smaller market, farther north.”
“North Platte, Nebraska,” she said.
“Good guess. Quad Cities, Iowa. Hayseed wants to come to Gomorrah-by-the-Sea.”
He punched a button on the remote control and grabbed another cassette. More than a hundred were stacked around his desk.
“Jerry, I’d like you to relieve me on the five o’clock. Just for a couple weeks.”
“What? During sweeps? Jesus, no!”
“But I’m working on an investigative piece…”
He stopped in mid-bite. A glob of ketchup clung to his mustache. “What investigative piece? Who assigned you?”
“No one. I’ve been working on my own. A blockbuster I can’t tell you about, yet. I’ve got a confidential source.”
