reasoning that, he has to admit, owes a good deal to the Marquis de Sade, for all that he dredges up supporting arguments from Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. One draft of the essay, including specific references to the killings of Willis and Sawyer, he erases, knowing it will prove recoverable; the other, which covers the same ground but is less damning, he saves on the hard drive, adding to the file the notation: Publish this? Where???
One afternoon he drives to Applewhite’s suburban neighborhood. Both cars are gone, and school’s still in session. He lets himself into the house, tingling with excitement as he walks from room to room. Applewhite has a den, which his tax return no doubt identifies as a home office, and he leaves the computer in a desk drawer.
In the bedroom, he takes socks and underwear from Applewhite’s dresser, a shirt and a pair of khaki trousers from his closet. The shirt has a laundry mark, he notes, and the pants, hanging on a peg, have been worn at least once since their last washing.
Shoes? He considers a pair, then remembers some ragged sneakers he spotted on an earlier visit to the garage, no doubt reserved for gardening and yard work. And ideal for his purposes.
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The selection and disposal of the third victim is almost beside the point, because by now his chief concern is the web he’s weaving for Preston Applewhite. Slow down, he admonishes himself. Take time to smell the flowers. And, remembering how Scott Sawyer had amused him less than Jeffrey Willis, he takes pains this time to select a boy from the younger, more innocent end of the spectrum.
The online newsgroups and bulletin boards for pedophiles (and yes, he’s found his way to them, and ScoutMasterBates has contributed observations of his own to more than one) have taught him a new vocabulary.
A boy on the threshold of adolescence, he has learned, is said to be in his bloom, the dew of youth still on him. That is what he seeks, and what he finds in the thirteen-year-old person of Marcus Leacock. Who is not hitchhiking at all when he finds him, but merely walking home from school.
He’s driving the Camry now. And he changed clothes at the storage shed. He’s rolled up the sleeves of Applewhite’s shirt, turned up the cuffs of the khaki trousers. The sneakers are a little large, too, and he experimented with tissue paper in the toes, but decided against it. They’re not that big, and it’s not as if he’s going to be walking long distances in them.
“Son? Come here a minute, will you? There’s an address I’m having trouble finding.”
Delicious. He’s spent enough time on the man-boy bulletin boards to have little regard for the pedophiles, but their enthusiasm is not entirely incomprehensible. Out at the abandoned golf course, he takes his time with Marcus, and, while that increases his own enjoyment of the enterprise, it perforce adds to the boy’s pain and suffering. Well, sometimes it does appear to be a zero-sum universe, doesn’t it? A gain for one is a loss for another, and one knows on which side of the equation one would prefer to be.
Anyway, it’s soon enough over, and once it’s done the boy has to endure neither pain nor the memory of pain. The boy is gone, wherever people go.
Wherever that is . . .
And the finishing touches: The body, minus a lock of hair, covered in brush and a blanket a few yards from Scott Sawyer’s body. Underneath it, apparently dropped and overlooked, the handkerchief that set all of this All the Flowers Are Dying
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in motion, his own handkerchief, soaked two months ago in Applewhite’s blood. The mallet, the spade, the tape, the scissors, stowed first in the Camry’s trunk and transferred in the dead of night to Applewhite’s, where they’ll be found hidden away in the spare tire well. The box of a dozen condoms, minus the two he used, stashed in Applewhite’s glove compartment, so they can be matched to the residue to be found on the bodies. The clothes he wore, the sneakers and socks and underwear, the khakis, the laundry-marked shirt, all go in a Hefty bag and the bag in the trunk, as if Applewhite were planning to dispose of them.
And does he dare enter the house one more time?
He does, moving slowly and silently. There’s no dog, no burglar alarm.
This is a safe neighborhood, a low-crime suburb, and the sleep of all the Applewhites is deep and untroubled. Standing there in their darkened house, an alternate plan suggests itself to him. He has the knife with him; how hard would it be to murder the children in their beds, to slit the throat of the sleeping wife, and to arrange a convenient suicide for the master of the house?
No, he decides. Better to stick with the original plan, better to let the Commonwealth of Virginia handle the business of punishment.
He tapes the three glassine envelopes to the underside of a desk drawer.
The knife, the magnificent knife that Randall made, wiped clean of visible blood and prints but surely bearing blood traces from all three victims, proves difficult to part with.
All the more reason to part with it. One must never allow oneself to become too deeply attached to anything —not a place, not a person, not a possession. One’s only attachment, and it must be total, should be to oneself. If thy right eye offend thee, get over it; if thy house or car or custom-made knife delight thee overmuch, cast it out.
The knife goes in a desk drawer. As he leaves the house, moving slowly and silently, he transforms the pain of losing the knife into the satisfaction of having chosen the right course of action. And it’s only a knife, after all, a tool, a means to an end. In the course of time there will be other knives, and he’ll like some of them as much as he’s liked this one.
He’s been driving the Camry, and he keeps it and takes I-95 into Washington. It’s morning by the time he gets there. He runs the car 86
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through a car wash, then leaves it parked on the street a few blocks from Dupont Circle, with the key in the ignition and the windows rolled down. He takes the Metro to Union Station, confident that the car will have been stolen by the time his train departs for Richmond.
He goes to the rented storage shed, reclaims his Ford, and drives off.
