savoring the experience himself, but reveling in Glen’s experience of it as well.
The heat of life had poured into him.
The power of the constantly working muscle infused his spirit.
The tingling sensation on his skin thrilled him as he touched the innermost sanctum of life itself.
Together, they had continued the experiment, finally squeezing the creature’s heart to the point where it stopped. The Experimenter had prepared a primitive defibrillator, stripping the insulation from the cut end of an extension cord he found hanging from a nail in the wall, but it hadn’t worked.
Once again his experiment had ended in failure, as the cat’s body refused to respond to his efforts to bring it back to life. He’d worked frantically, inflating the cat’s lungs with his own breath. Twice, the heart had begun to flutter, but the uncontrolled energy of the makeshift defibrillator had done no good. Instead of shocking the organ into a steady rhythm, it had only put the animal into convulsions.
Glen had begun to pull away as the Experimenter’s fury mounted. When at last the cat died, too abused, too mutilated to survive any longer, the Experimenter had felt Glen’s revulsion.
The Experimenter had sent Glen back to sleep, wiping his memory almost clean of what he’d seen, but then his own rage had erupted. He’d dug his fingers deep into the cat, ripping its lifeless heart and lungs loose from their bloodied nest, lifting them out to expose the empty cavity.
Snatching up the X-Acto knife, the Experimenter had slashed at the cat’s interior, the blade glinting in the fluorescent light that flickered above the workbench. At last, the experiment over, he’d cleaned up after himself, first disposing of the cat in the alley, shoving it partway under the deck where the garbage cans stood, leaving it where it would quickly be found. Then he had set about cleaning up the basement, carefully erasing every sign of what had happened there.
Finally, he left the note for Anne, setting up her computer so his message would appear just long enough for her to read, then disappear forever.
Only then had he let himself rest, sinking deep beneath Glen’s consciousness, not stirring until a few moments ago, when the man’s acrophobia had threatened to kill them both.
The Experimenter did not intend to die.
Not ever.
Thus, he had stepped in instantly, seizing control, pulling Glen back from the precipice.
He entered the elevator, studied the controls for a moment, then pressed the button that should take him downward. The machinery came to life and the cage began rattling down the shaft The Experimenter glanced idly through the grating of the floor, wondering what it was about heights that bothered some people.
To him, they meant nothing.
Nodding a greeting to each of the men who spoke to him, the Experimenter left the construction site. As he paused at the corner, his eyes fell on a newspaper box. Fishing in Glen’s pocket for the right change, he bought a copy of the Herald, then looked around for a coffee shop. Spotting a Starbucks less than a block away, he strode down the street, bought a latte, and began paging through the newspaper. He found Anne’s story on page three in the second section.
Except it wasn’t Anne’s story: there was no mention of a copycat, let alone of himself. And no byline. Someone else must have written it.
Why?
What were they afraid of?
A copycat?
But a copycat was nothing but a nuisance.
Particularly this copycat.
The Experimenter dropped the newspaper into a wastebasket.
The police might well spend weeks trying to figure out who had killed the whore over near Broadway, and the woman next door.
The Experimenter knew who had done it
He even knew why the murders had been committed.
And that was all they had been — murders, pure and simple.
Nothing had been accomplished, no new bit of knowledge gained, no basic truth uncovered. It had been killing for the sake of killing.
Worse, it had been killing for no other purpose than to gain attention.
The Experimenter had been thinking about it since the moment he recognized the man who carried Joyce Cottrell’s butchered corpse through her backyard and out into the alley. Reluctantly, he’d come to a decision about what he must do.
Unless he acted, other people would die for no better reason than to gain attention for a fool. That was wasteful.
Any way he looked at it, it was wasteful.
But there was another reason for him to carry out the work of the police, the courts, and the executioner. A reason that appealed to the Experimenter’s sense of irony, his sense of style, even his sense of humor. Justice would be served, and Anne — finally — would understand exactly what game was truly afoot.
Dropping a quarter in the pay phone at the back of the coffee shop, the Experimenter dialed a number from memory. On the third ring, a familiar voice answered.
“Hello?” The voice sounded nervous.
The Experimenter said nothing.
“Hello?” the voice said again, and now the Experimenter could clearly hear the terror in it.
The Experimenter knew why the voice sounded nervous.
And he knew more than that — he knew where the man lived, and he knew he hadn’t gone to work.
The Experimenter would pay him a visit.
First, though, he would need certain supplies.
Leaving the coffee shop, the Experimenter found a cab and took it to the Broadway Market.
He began picking up the things he would need.
A pen, the kind you could buy anywhere.
A box of notepaper, again the kind you could buy anywhere.
Gloves — cheap knitted ones, nondescript, the kind everyone had.
A roll of transparent plastic.
Paying for it all with cash from Glen Jeffers’s wallet, he left the market and started south, walking at a steady pace, neither too fast nor too slow, doing nothing that would attract unwanted attention. Anonymity, he had discovered years ago, was by far the best protection.
He came finally to John Street, turned left, and started toward Fifteenth East Less than ten minutes later he was across the street from the building in which lived the man he had come to kill. Gazing up at the second floor, he saw the man peering out of the window.
The man looked nervous.
The man was staring right at him.
The man did not, of course, recognize him.
The Experimenter smiled to himself, crossed the street, and entered the building.…
CHAPTER 45
The plans the Butcher began making after reading the story in that morning’s Herald had grown, until he’d finally shaped a perfect structure for his next killing.
It would be a man — he’d definitely made up his mind on that. And he knew where he could find the perfect prey: there were plenty of them over on Broadway, shopping in the QFC, or hanging around the Broadway Market, or just sitting drinking coffee at one of the small espresso bars scattered along both sides of the street. Even better, they were always watching each other, playing their endless mating game. He even knew how they did it,
