Lucy sat quietly on the edge of her bed in the nurse-trainees' dormitory, letting the deep night creep slowly past her. She had spread out on the bedspread the items that she had purchased late that afternoon, but instead of examining them closely, she was staring off into the vacuum around her, as she had done for several hours. When she rose, she walked into the small bathroom, where she began to inspect her face carefully in the mirror above the sink.
She lifted her hair away from her forehead with one hand, and with the other, traced the ridges of the scar, stretching from just beneath the hairline, bisecting the eyebrow, skewing sideways slightly, where the blade had just missed her eyeball, then traveling down her cheek and ending at her chin. Where the skin had knitted together, it was just slightly lighter than the rest of her complexion. In a couple of spots the slice was barely noticeable. In others, painfully obvious. She thought that she had grown oddly familiar with the scar, and accepted it for what it represented. Once, several years back, on a date that had started with promise with an overly self-assured young doctor, he had offered to put her in touch with a prominent plastic surgeon, whom, he insisted, could fix her face so that so one would ever know she'd been cut. She had neither contacted the plastic surgeon nor ever gone out on another date with that or any other doctor.
Lucy thought of herself as the sort of person who continues to define existence every day. The man who had put the scar on her face and stolen her privacy had thought he was damaging her, she told herself, when, in reality all he had done was give her focus and purpose. There were many men behind bars because of what that one man had done to her one night during her law school days. She told herself that it would be some time before the debt that outrage to her heart and body was owed would be paid in full. Single immense moments, Lucy thought, steered one through life. What made her uncomfortable in the hospital was how the patients weren't necessarily confined by a single act, but by great accumulations of infinitesimally small incidents, all of which sent them hurtling into their depressions or schizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar diseases, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Peter, she recognized, was much closer to her in spirit and temperament. He, too, had let a single moment shape his entire life. His, of course, had been rash impulse. Even if justifiable, on one level, it was still the product of a momentary lack of control. Hers was far colder, far more calculated and, for lack of a more correct term: revenge.
She had a sudden, harsh memory, the sort that enters unbidden into one's imagination and nearly slices one's breath away: In Massachusetts General hospital, where she'd been taken after she had been discovered sobbing, bleeding, stumbling about haphazardly in a quadrangle between buildings by a pair of undergraduate physics majors coming home late from a lab, the police had questioned her closely, while a nurse and a doctor had performed the rape examination. The detectives had stood up by her head, while the physician and assistant had worked in quiet in a different realm all together, below her waist. Did you see the man? No. Not really. He wore a tight ski mask and all I could see were his eyes. Could you recognize him again? No. Why were you walking alone at night across campus? I don't know. I'd been in the library studying and it was time to go home. What can you tell us that will help us to catch him? Silence.
Of all the terrors that had been delivered to her that night, she thought the one that had undeniably stayed with her was the scar on her face. She had been almost comatose from shock, her mind fleeing from her body, separating itself from sensation, and then he had cut her. He did not kill her he could have easily done that. Nor was there any overt need to do anything else. She was almost unconscious and lost, and he had more than ample opportunity to flee undetected and unobserved. But instead, he'd leaned down, marked her forever, and then through the fog of pain and insult, she'd heard him whisper a single word in her ear: Remember.
The word had hurt more than the cut across her beauty.
So she did, but not she thought, in the way the man that assaulted her expected.
If she could not put the man who had scarred her in prison, she could put dozens of similar men there. If she regretted anything, it was that the assault had stolen what remained of innocence and lightheartedness from her life.
Laughter came much harder afterward and love seemed impossible to attain. But, she often told herself, she was likely to have lost those qualities soon enough anyway. She had become monk like in her pursuit of evils.
She stared into the mirror and slowly put all her memories back into the compartments where she kept them filed in an orderly and acceptable fashion. What had happened once, was finished now, she told herself. She knew the man she hunted in the hospital was as close to the one man who haunted her actions as any that she'd stared down across a courtroom. Finding the Angel would do much more, she thought, than merely stop a repetitive killer from striking again.
She felt a little like an athlete, centering herself on the single purpose of the moment.
'A trap,' she said out loud. 'A trap needs bait.'
She moved her hand through the cascade of black hair that framed her face, letting it drip between her fingers like raindrops.
Short hair.
Blond hair.
All four victims had worn hair that was styled noticeably short. They had all approximated much the same physical characteristics. They had all been killed in the same fashion, the same murder weapon used in each case and the throat slashed left to right the same way. The postmortem mutilations to the hands had been the same. Then their bodies were abandoned in similar settings. Even the last victim, there in the hospital, when she considered the storage room that had housed the nurse-trainee's last seconds, she could see the way that the killer had replicated the rural, forest locations of the other killings. And, she remembered, he'd compromised the physical evidence with water and cleaning fluid in the same way that nature had unwittingly abetted him with the first three homicides.
He was here, she knew this. She suspected that she'd even looked directly into his eyes, at some point during her days in the hospital, but hadn't seen him for what he was. This thought made her shudder, but also seemed to stoke the fury that was building within her.
She stared at the strands of black hair that she held like so many delicate spider webs in her fingers.
A small price to pay, she thought.
She turned abruptly and returned to the bed. The first thing she did was remove a small black suitcase from where she had stored it beneath the frame. The suitcase had a combination lock, which she dialed and opened up. There was a second, zippered pocket inside, and this she opened as well, drawing forth a deep brown leather holster which held a snub-nosed.38 caliber revolver. She hefted the pistol in her hand for a moment, feeling its heft and weight. She had fired this weapon less than a half-dozen times in the years that she had owned it, and it felt unfamiliar, but incisive in her hand. Then, with a single, determined motion, she scooped up the remaining items gathered on the bedspread: A hairbrush. A pair of barber's scissors. A box of hair dye.
Her hair would grow back in time, she told herself.
And the great sheen of black that she'd known for the entirety of her life would return before too long.
Telling herself that there was nothing permanent in what she was doing, but what could be permanent was not doing enough to find the Angel right then, right at that moment, she took all the items into the bathroom and arranged them all in front of her on a small shelf. Then she lifted the scissors and half expecting to see blood flowing, began to saw away at her hair.
One of the tricks that Francis had learned, over all the years since the first day in his childhood when he'd first heard voices, was how to find the one that made the most sense in the symphony of discord within his head. He had come to know that his own madness was denied by his ability to sort through everything that came rushing at him from inside, and make his path ahead as best he could. It wasn't exactly logical, but there was some practicality in what he had learned to do.
He told himself that the situation in the hospital was not all that different. A detective takes many disparate clues and pieces them together into a consistent whole, he thought to himself. He was persuaded that everything that he needed to know in order to paint the portrait that would become the Angel had
