the shape of a man, a huge man, as he rushed into the car. He seemed as big as a bear with a chest as large as two men’s, yet he vanished into the car like a wraith. Again the woman drove toward the highway with her headlights off and again when she came within the light of the road sign, only her silhouette was visible in the car.
It was the third time Reggie had seen it happen and it was exactly the same each time. Two nights ago, on her second sleepless night in bed, Reggie had seen the car return. She saw the sweep of the headlights as the car turned in off the highway and then sudden darkness once more as the lights were extinguished. Only the woman was visible in the road sign light, but when the cabin door was opened, Reggie could see the shape of the bear- man again in the television glow, scurrying into the room like a frightened animal.
Only a fool such as George would believe that nothing strange was going on in there. She had joked with the trooper about vampires, but there was something just as sinister afoot, no doubt about it. And when she was well again, she would find out exactly what it was.
Reggie was seized by a spasm of coughing that brought tears to her eyes. When it released her, she slumped back against the pillows. She would wait until they returned. She would watch the pattern repeat itself, try to measure the dimensions of the bear-man. When she reported things to the state police she wanted to be very precise. She wanted no scoffing about “proof” this time. She would wait; she would be awake anyway.
Chapter 15
Becker slept for an hour then awoke, as fully alert as if he had slept the night through. He didn’t move when he woke, just opened his eyes and lay still, listening, assessing his environment. As always he had a reaction to the darkness, a quick, involuntary flinch of the nervous system that he grasped and controlled before it could escalate into fear. There was no reason for fright, he told himself, no cause for alarm. His heart was pounding and his skin tingled with the rush of adrenaline, but he forced himself to lie still and listen.
He told himself the time was now, not then. The demons of the dark lay in his past-or in his soul-but not here within this room. It was an ordinary night in his adult life, he told himself. The nocturnal noises could all be accounted for, the other breath came from the woman beside him. There was no tread upon the stair. His tormentors were long since dead, the feet that trod so heavily as they descended into the cellar had ceased to move years ago. His only torment now came from within, he reminded himself, and it required no racing heart to deal with it. There was no way to flee it in any event.
He continued to lie very still and to listen to Karen’s breathing. He was accustomed to jolting awake like this, sometimes soaked in his own sweat; he was used to the struggle to control himself, his reason straining against instinct and the unwarranted alarms of his subconscious. In recent years his reason had always won the battle and in time his mind would be in command of his body. The terror would be banished to whatever cave it lurked in within his psyche, the fear would be calmed and made to stand in place, if never completely banished. Anxiety remained with him always in the dark, but Becker was well used to anxiety; he regarded it as an almost pleasant companion compared to what lay in wait to take its place.
Karen’s breath was loud, slightly irregular, the breathing of a dreamer. Becker rolled his head to the side to look at her. She was facing him, her mouth open slightly, her hair falling across her face so that it moved slightly with each exhalation. She had kicked off the single sheet they used in the summer heat and her T-shirt had ridden up her body, revealing her bare legs and stomach, which looked ghostly pale in the night. She needed more time off from work, Becker thought. She needed to spend some time in the sun to get some color in her skin, but he knew she would take no vacation as long as Lamont was on the loose.
He could understand her obsession, it was the way he approached a case as well, but Becker could not remember a case that had yielded so little, so slowly. After weeks of grinding, they seemed no closer to a solution than when they had started, and the fault, Becker thought, was his. Either they were missing something or they were working on false assumptions to begin with. In most cases of serial murder the hardest part was the initial discovery that a number of murders were related. Or, as was, more often the case, that any murders had been committed at all. Frequently a serial killer was a hoarder of bodies as well. Dyce had dissected and boiled the bodies and stored the skeletons under his kitchen floor. Leon Brade had used the hair of his victims to stuff the crocheted pillows he kept in his grandmother’s house. In those cases, to discover one body was to discover most of them and after that it was a simple manhunt with Becker after a fleeing quarry. The hunt might take longer or shorter, but once the quarry was identified it was a straightforward if painstaking business. The motive and methods of the deaths were almost irrelevant, an afterthought to be dealt with at a trial, but not essential matters in the chase. With Lamont there were bodies in plenty, but not so much as a scent of the quarry.
They must be looking in the wrong places. Becker thought. Maybe the killer’s method that Becker had hypothesized was all wrong and all the time and effort that had been spun off of it was just so much waste.
Becker eased out of the bed as softly as he could. Karen’s breathing and position did not change. His wife, Cindi, had slept as lightly as a cat, often waking if he so much as tossed in bed. Often he would come joltingly awake as he had just now, doing nothing more than opening his eyes, and her warm hand would slide across his chest to comfort him. As if she were connected to him in some psychic way that he could not understand. Becker tried to shake off the thought. He did not want to start thinking about Cindi now, not as he slipped out of Karen’s bed. If he started to dwell on Cindi he could be at it all night.
He felt along the floor until he found his underpants. Becker and Karen had made love upon going to bed-as they had every night-and had fallen asleep immediately afterwards. Becker’s clothes were scattered across the room wherever Karen had removed and discarded them.
Wearing his shorts, he slipped silently out of the bedroom and into the living room. Still moving in the darkness, Becker went to the window and looked out at the night sky. The moon was the thinnest sliver but the stars seemed to be at their brightest. Becker stepped onto the porch and studied them. Stargazing had become an obsolete activity to all but astronomers, he thought, and what a shame. If one could get far enough away from city lights the night sky still twinkled and shone with as much fascination as it had millennia ago, nighttime’s eternal treat for the sleepless. When on a mountain-climbing foray, Becker would lie for hours watching the slowly wending parade of the heavens. Although human nature seemed to Becker to be getting ever more perverse, heavenly nature remained the same-beautiful, impossibly distant, and available to anyone who would take the trouble to look.
Checking first that no neighbors were about. Becker stepped onto the lawn and looked at the house. The grass was cool and damp against his naked feet. A faint breeze blew the warm night air against his skin. Becker walked to an elm that grew close to the sidewalk. Standing in the shelter of the tree so that he was all but invisible to anyone looking from either the street or the house, Becker studied the window where the light shone from Jack’s room.
To steal a child, he thought. To want someone else’s child badly enough to steal him. To change forever the boy’s life, his parents’ lives, the lives of his siblings, his grandparents, the widening skein of lives connected with the family. To take the risk each time of being caught and then to tire of the prize that had already cost so much in human suffering. To abuse the child to the point of death-and then to kill him and discard him as so much rubbish, to toss him aside like one more bundle of roadside litter.
It made no sense, of course, but sense was hardly the point. What it lacked for Becker was the emotional linkage that was necessary for him to follow the killer’s tortured route. There seemed no handles for Becker to grasp the killer’s mind. In other cases Becker had always managed to find a way to grip the thoughts of the madman. He had been forced to go deep within himself to uncover the murderous impulse in his own soul in order to do it. The price had always been high, but he had always done it The intuitive connection had always given him the scent of the killer and allowed Becker to follow him. Even when the trail had gone cold, Becker had always had the image of the killer in his mind because, at least for a moment of chilling introspection, he had been able to step into the killer’s skin, to breathe his overheated air, to feel the tremor of excitement in the killer’s heart as he committed his crime.
As he had told Karen, it was neither trick nor magic, but an act of courage and honesty that allowed him to look at himself without disguise or hypocrisy. But in this case it had abandoned him. He knew only what it was to be Lament’s victim, not Lamont. There was something wrong, something hidden in the crime, or in Lamont, that
