Heather looked up, glancing at her brother then turning to her father. “Is she sick?”
Glen sighed exaggeratedly and retrieved the crossword from his daughter. “Nothing’s happened to her. She’s fine. She just decided to jog a little longer than usual this morning, that’s all.”
“They had a fight,” Heather instantly translated for Kevin.
“We didn’t have a fight,” Glen told her. “How come nobody around here ever believes anything?”
“Because grown-ups always lie to kids,” Kevin informed him. “Justin Reynolds told me so. And how come Mom’s allowed to go to the park by herself, when I’m not?”
“Because she’s a grown-up,” Glen replied, leaning toward Kevin and giving him a mock-fierce glare. “You can tell Justin Reynolds that that’s another thing grown-ups do.”
Kevin began to giggle, but then Heather spoke again.
“Maybe we better go look for her,” she said. “She’s never gone this long. What if something has happened to her?”
Glen felt the balance of power in the room tilt. In about five more seconds, unless Anne came walking in the door, Kevin would team up with Heather and he might as well give up. Better to offer an instant compromise rather than wind up having them late for school. “I’ll tell you what — I’ll go take a look, while you two finish your breakfast. But I suspect that your mom will come breezing in ten seconds after I’m gone, and I’ll just be on a wild goose chase.”
Before Kevin could plead with him to come along, Glen was out the back door and behind the wheel of the ten-year-old Saab he refused to part with despite Kevin’s insistence that it was a “dweebmobile.”
Minutes later he entered Volunteer Park from the Fifteenth Avenue side, just as Anne had a little more than an hour earlier. Until he reached the greenhouse, everything looked normal, but as he started down the gentle grade past the tennis courts, he saw the first of what turned out to be five police cars. A little farther down he spotted the familiar yellow plastic tape marking a police barricade. The tape ran along the left side of the road, blocking entrance to the shrubbery that covered this flank of the reservoir. Glen slowed to a stop as he came abreast of a cop who was impatiently trying to wave him through.
“Keep it moving, Mac,” the cop said as Glen rolled his window down. “Nothing to see here.”
“I’m looking for my wife,” Glen said, ignoring the policeman’s words. “She came out jogging a little over an hour ago, and she hasn’t come back yet.”
The patrolman’s expression changed from impatience to uncertainty, and he unclipped a radio from his belt, speaking into it too quietly for Glen to hear what he was saying. When he’d gotten a reply, he turned his attention back to Glen. “What’s your wife’s name?”
“Anne Jeffers. She’s a report—”
The patrolman’s expression shifted again. “She’s up there,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the crest of the hill. “I can’t let you go up this way, but if you want to walk around from the other side, I don’t suppose anyone’s going to stop you.”
“What happened?” Glen asked.
The cop shook his head. “Body. Fact is, I heard your wife found it.”
“Gay bashing?” Glen asked, aware that more than one man had been beaten in this part of the park over the last few years.
The cop shook his head. “A woman.”
For some reason, an image of Joyce Cottrell flashed into Glen’s mind, then was gone almost as quickly as it had come. As another police car pulled up behind, briefly flashing its lights, Glen moved on, completing the circuit around the reservoir and the water tower, then pulling the Saab into an empty space near the huge black granite doughnut that stood across the street from the Art Museum.
Locking the car despite the fact that there were half a dozen more police cruisers within the surrounding fifty yards of roadway, Glen crossed the sidewalk and loped down the short slope. A well-worn path followed the chain- link fence that kept swimmers out of the reservoir. Halfway around, another police tape blocked his way, but before he could decide what to do next, he spotted Anne. Boots was sitting at her feet. As he approached, the little dog caught his scent, barked happily and dashed toward him, only to do a complete back flip as he came to the end of the leash. Unfazed by the mishap, the terrier scrambled back to its feet, straining at the leash, his tail wagging furiously. Anne turned to quiet the dog, caught sight of Glen, and waved him over. Scooping Boots up and cradling him in the crook of one arm, Glen slipped the other protectively around his wife. “What’s going on?” he asked.
For a moment Anne said nothing at all. Suddenly Glen realized how pale she was — every drop of blood seemed to have drained from her face. But Anne had seen corpses before — accident victims, even the butchered remains of the brutal Kraven killings; she’d even wondered out loud from time to time if she wasn’t becoming insensitive to the violence of the city. Then she spoke, and with a rush of horror, he understood. “It’s Joyce, Glen,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. Glen felt a cold knot form in his stomach as he remembered the image that had inexplicably come to him the moment the patrolman at the foot of the hill had told him the body of a woman had been found. But it was crazy — what would Joyce Cottrell have been doing in the park? She rarely even left her house except to go to work!
“Oh, God, Glen, it’s horrible. She was naked, and her chest was all torn open, just like Shawnelle Davis’s. But they say it didn’t happen here. It looks like whoever killed her dumped her here after she was already dead. So it must have happened in her house, Glen.” Anne’s voice was shaking now, her body shivering. “Right next door to us, while we were sleeping. Oh, God …”
Glen’s arm tightened around his wife, partly to offer her support, but as much to support himself. For now another image had flashed into his mind.
He saw a figure carrying a body through the dark.
Light was spilling onto the face of the figure so it was clear in his mind, as vivid as if he were staring at a clearly focused black-and-white photograph. But he didn’t recognize the face.
It was the face of a stranger, and the stranger was carrying Joyce Cottrell’s body.
Though the image was nearly perfect, there was no familiarity to go with it, no sense of recollection. Was it possible he had witnessed a murder but had no memory of it?
Now he remembered the blackouts he’d had, the time that seemed forever lost from his consciousness.
Glen stood mutely listening to Anne as she brokenly described how Boots had led her to their next-door neighbor’s corpse, how she hadn’t been certain what the object in the bushes was at first, how she’d finally seen the face and recognized it.
Joyce Cottrell.
Someone who had no friends. No enemies.
Someone no one even knew.
Why had Joyce been killed?
Neither of them could answer that question. Still, though neither of them spoke the thought aloud, Anne and Glen each had a terrible feeling: somehow, in a way neither of them had yet begun to understand, this murder had something to do with them.
CHAPTER 35
The man called in sick for the second day in a row. He’d intended to go to work this morning, for even though they didn’t appreciate him at Boeing, he still took his job seriously.
Just as he took everything seriously.
But when he got home last night, he’d been far too excited to go to sleep right away. Instead of going to bed, he’d stayed up, reliving the event in his memory over and over again.
Relishing the memory of being in Joyce Cottrell’s house.
Of waiting for her.
Of watching her undress.
Of killing her, and possessing her.
And finally, he’d relished the memory of the feeling he’d had as he carried her through the night. Bearing her
