dexterity.
Only when the feathers had been flawlessly placed on the hook did the Experimenter finally step back to gaze at the object he’d created. Though he’d applied a tiny bit of glue to the hook before fastening the feathers, none of it showed; not a single drop had oozed through the perfectly wound and knotted thread whose ends had magically disappeared beneath their own turns. Like the wings of a tiny butterfly, the fragments of Hector’s plumage glittered in the bright fluorescent light, and already the Experimenter could see the finished fly flitting above the surface of a stream, floating on its tiny wings, luring a trout from the water’s depths.
All that remained was to tie a tuft of Kumquat’s fur to the hook, forming a nearly weightless body for the fanciful insect he’d constructed. Reaching down, the Experimenter picked up the cat once more and held it against his chest, turning so the cat’s eyes would see the tiny object held in the alligator clamps. “Look at that,” he crooned softly. “Isn’t that pretty? You don’t mind giving up a little fur just to finish it with, do you?”
Kumquat, as if sensing that something unpleasant was about to happen, stirred in the Experimenter’s arms, and he tightened his grip. The cat, feeling the pressure of his fingers, struggled against the constraining force, and its heart began to beat faster.
The Experimenter’s fingers began to tingle. He could feel energy flowing into him, an energy that was almost electric.
Life. He was feeling the energy of life itself, experiencing the force that transformed the animal in his hands from nothing more than a vastly intricate construction of elemental molecules into a living entity. And once again the question rose in his mind: How does it work?
The Experimenter gazed down at Kumquat. The cat struggled in his arms, trying to wriggle free from his grip, but the Experimenter’s hands only closed more tightly.
Deep in his soul, the Experimenter knew it was time to begin his research again. It was almost as if the cat had been fated to come into his hands as a harbinger of his renascent career.
Scanning the basement, he spotted a cardboard box, its lid still intact. Placing Kumquat into the box, he moved through the basement, finding all the things he needed.
Some carbon tetrachloride. If he soaked a rag in the toxic chemical, and put the rag in the box with the cat, it would be almost as effective as the ether he’d sometimes used in the past.
A plastic drop cloth, apparently left over from some paint job. Spread out on the workbench, it would contain whatever blood the cat might spill.
The Experimenter took off his clothes, packing them carefully away in the footlocker until he was done.
When all the preparations were finally made, and the cat lay unconscious on the workbench, the Experimenter picked up the X-Acto knife. The soul of the Experimenter swelled with joy. Finally, he was taking up his work once more.
He worked slowly at first, relishing every movement, the techniques of dissection coming back to him as if it had been no more than a day since his last experiment, rather than years.
Deftly, he sliced through the skin of the cat’s breast, stanching the flow of blood as best he could with the materials he had found.
He made a pair of transverse cuts, then laid the skin back, exposing the thin layer of tissue that covered the sternum and the rib cage. He pressed the trigger of the small Makita saw he’d purchased yesterday, its keening whine sounding to him as sweet as the familiar strains of a favorite symphony. With a steady hand, he lowered the blade, and savored the change in the saw’s pitch as it sank into the cartilage and bone of the cat’s breast In no more than a few seconds the saw had sundered the rib cage, providing the Experimenter free access to the organ that had fascinated him for years.
Laying the saw aside, he spread the rib cage open and slipped his fingers between the lungs to touch the cat’s heart. Gently, he worked the pulsing organ loose, lifting it up just enough to cup it in his palm. He watched its throbbing contractions, thrilling to the energy he could feel flowing through his skin.
At last he was working again.
And it felt good. So good.
Then an image came into his mind, an image of Anne Jeffers. Her face seemed to be suspended before him, and as he gazed into her eyes, the Experimenter’s fingers closed around the still-throbbing heart in his hand. Just as when he’d held Anne’s lingerie a little while ago, the Experimenter’s grip on Kumquat’s heart tightened.
As with the lingerie, he crushed the heart into a shapeless mass.
Shapeless, and lifeless.
CHAPTER 39
Being the center of attention wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. When Heather first arrived at school, it had been great. Everybody already knew that a body had been found in the park early that morning, but only Heather had known who had actually found the body, and whose body it was that her mother had stumbled across.
“Except it wasn’t really Mom who found her,” she explained at least ten times even before the first class. “It was our dog.”
Though she hadn’t actually been there, Heather built a highly detailed image of the scene in her imagination. By the third telling she was able to recite it as vividly as if it had been she herself whom Boots had pulled off the trail and led over to Joyce Cottrell’s maimed corpse. “He was tugging at the leash and barking like crazy, and finally Mom gave up and went to see what he’d found.” Heather felt a delicious shiver as she repeated the story her father told her when he’d gotten back from the park. “And then, when she saw who it was, she nearly fainted!” Though her father hadn’t actually said that, Heather was sure it must be true, because every time she tried to imagine what it would have been like to find Mrs. Cottrell’s body under one of the bushes in the park, she felt a wave of dizziness. Of course, her mom hadn’t actually fainted, since that would have prevented her from calmly finding a phone, calling the police, and then guarding the body until the authorities arrived, all of which Heather was pretty sure her mother had done.
“But who was it?” someone would invariably ask as soon as Heather let it be known that her mother had recognized the victim.
“Our next door neighbor,” Heather would reply. Then she would begin doling out the details of Joyce Cottrell’s life.
During first period it had been terrific. Everyone wanted to talk to her, and even hunky Josh Whitman passed her a note asking if she wanted to have lunch with him. But by third period, when Heather was almost five minutes late because people kept asking her questions even after the bell rang, she was starting to tire of telling the story. By lunchtime, when it became totally clear that the only reason Josh Whitman wanted to eat lunch with her was to hear about the murder, she was thoroughly tired of talking about it.
Now, as she and Rayette Hoover left the school at four, Heather was pleased to see that almost everyone else was already gone; at least she wouldn’t have to tell the story all over again. “Want to go over to Broadway and get a latte?” she asked Rayette.
“Okay,” Rayette agreed.
As they walked across Capitol Hill toward Broadway, Heather could tell right away that Rayette was struggling not to talk about the one thing that everyone in school had been talking about all day. Heather could also tell that Rayette was losing her battle, and silently made a bet that Rayette wouldn’t last out the next block. Within half a block Rayette’s curiosity got the better of her, but when she spoke, Heather had to give her friend points for trying to be indirect.
“What was it like having lunch with Josh Whitman?”
“He invited me to the prom,” Heather replied, injecting just enough excitement into her voice so Rayette actually fell for it, at least for a split second. Then Rayette’s lips stretched into a wide grin that exposed the set of braces she usually took care not to reveal to anyone.
“Get out of here, girlfriend!” she hooted. “That big football stud just wanted to know the same thing we all did! Now you just tell me everything you know about that woman who got killed. This is Rayette, honey! Come clean!”
