The Throat

'Wow.' John was absolutely glowing at me. 'That's amazing—you're fantastic. The whole story is going to come out.'

'I don't think you want that,' I said. John stared at me, trying to read my thoughts. He slid his leg off the arm of the chair. Whatever he saw in me he didn't like. He had stopped glowing, and now he was trying to look injured and innocent. 'Why wouldn't I want everything to come out?'

'Because you murdered your wife,' I said.

4

'First, you brought her to the St. Alwyn and stuck a knife in her, but you didn't quite manage to kill her. So when you heard that she was coming out of the coma, you got into her room and finished her off. And of course, you killed Grant Hoffman, too.'

He slid down off the arm of the chair into the seat. He was stunned. He wanted me to know that he was stunned. 'My God, Tim. You know exactly what happened. You even know why. It was you who came up with Bachelor's name. You put the whole thing together.'

'You wanted me to know about Bachelor, didn't you? That's part of the reason you wanted me to come here in the first place. You had no idea he was living here—he was supposed to have come in from out of town after seeing your picture in the paper, killed Hoffman and your wife, and then slipped off into his new identity when things got too hot.'

'This is so absurd, it's crazy,' John said.

'As soon as I got here, you told me you thought Blue Rose was an old soldier. And you had worked out this wonderful story about what happened when you got to Bachelor's camp in Darlac Province. It was a good story, but it left out some important details.'

'I never wanted to talk about that,' he said.

'You made me work it out of you. You kept dropping hints.'

'Hints.' He shook his head sadly.

'Let's talk about what really happened in Darlac Province,' I said.

'Why don't you just rave, and when you're finished raving, why don't you get out of here and leave me alone?'

'You shared an encampment with another Green Beret named Bullock. Bullock and his A team went out one day and never came back. You went out and found their bodies tied to trees and mutilated. Their tongues had been cut out.'

'I told you that,' John said.

'You didn't think the VC had killed them. You thought Bachelor had done it. And when you saw Bullock's ghost, you were positive. You were where you thought he was all the time —you were at the point where you could see through the world.'

'That's where I was,' he said. 'But I don't think that you've ever been there.'

'Maybe not, John. But the important thing is that you felt betrayed—and you were right. So you wanted to do what you thought Bachelor would do.'

'You better know what you're talking about,' John said. 'You better not be throwing out guesses.'

'Bachelor had already escaped by the time you got there. So you burned his camp to the ground. Then you systematically killed everyone who had been left behind, all of Bachelor's followers who were too young, too old, or too feeble to go with him. How did you do it? One an hour, one every two hours? At the end, you killed his child— put him on the ground and cut him in half with your bayonet. Then you killed his wife. At the end, you hacked her up and put her in the communal pot and ate some of her flesh. You even cleaned her skull. You were being Bachelor, weren't you?'

He glowered at me, working his jaws. I saw that held-down anger surge into his eyes, but this time he did not try to conceal it. 'You don't really have the right to talk about this, you know. It doesn't belong to you. It belongs to people like us.'

'But I'm not wrong, am I?'

'That's not really relevant,' John said. 'Nothing you say is really relevant.'

'But it isn't wrong,' I said.

John threw up his hands. 'Look, even if all this happened, which no one in the normal world would believe, because they could not even begin to comprehend it, it just gives Bachelor more reason to want revenge on me.'

'Bachelor never worked that way,' I said. 'He couldn't. You were right about him—he was always across the border, and every human concern but survival was meaningless to him. After Lang Vo, he went through three or four different identities. By the time he spent twelve years calling himself Michael Hogan, all he cared about Franklin Bachelor was that the world should keep thinking he was dead.'

'What you're saying just proves that he killed my wife. If you don't see that, I can't even talk to you.'

'He didn't kill her,' I said. 'He beat her up. Or he had Billy Ritz beat her up. It amounts to the same thing.'

'Now I know you're crazy.' John threw back his head and growled at the ceiling. His face was starting to get red. 'I told you. I hit her. It was the end of my marriage.' He lowered his head and looked at me with spurious pity. 'Why in the world would Billy Ritz beat up my wife?'

'To slow her down,' I said. 'Or stop her altogether, without killing her.'

'Slow her down. That means something to you.'

'April was writing a letter a week to Armory Place about the Green Woman. Hogan took his victims there. He kept his notes in the basement. He had to stop her.'

'So he killed her,' John said. 'I wish you could hear yourself. You turn everything around into its opposite.'

'You went out for a drive with April the night she admitted seeing Byron Dorian. You'd been planning to kill her for weeks. You had an argument in the car, and you got out and went to the bar down the street. I think you were drinking to get up the courage to finally do it. You thought you'd have to get home by yourself, but when you left the bar, her car was still parked down the street. And when you looked inside it, there she was, unconscious. Probably bleeding. You were very convincing about the shock of seeing the car, but part of your shock was that she was waiting for you to come back.'

He rolled back in the chair and put his hands over his eyes. 'You didn't know who had beaten her up—all you knew was that it was time to carry out your plan. So you drove behind the St. Alwyn, let yourself in the back door, and carried her up the stairs to the second floor, beat her and stabbed her, and wrote BLUE ROSE on the wall. That's where you made a mistake.' He took his hands off his eyes and let his arms drop. 'You used a blue marker. Hogan's markers were either black or red, the colors used to mark homicides as either open or closed on the Homicide Division's board. I bet you went into the pharmacy in the old annex and bought the marker that night. When you killed Grant Hoffman, you got it right—you wrote BLUE ROSE with a black marker. You probably bought that one at the pharmacy, too, and threw it away later.'

'Jesus, you don't quit,' John said. 'So after I spend all night by her bedside, I suppose I got up the next morning and ran all the way down Berlin Avenue with a hammer in my hand, miraculously got into her room, killed her, miraculously got out, and then ran all the way back. And I managed to do all that in about fifteen-twenty minutes.'

'Exactly,' I said.

'On foot.'

'You drove,' I said. 'You parked on the street across Berlin Avenue so no one in the hospital would see your car, and then you waited on the lawn until you saw the night workers leave the hospital. The man who owned the property saw you out in front of his house. He could probably even identify you.'

John knitted his fingers together, propped his chin on them, and glared at me.