The husband turned and looked directly at the closet door. Captain Luv held himself very still, but did not take his eyes off the man. Despite Inge's residual sniffling and the comforting noises of the wife, the room seemed to have gone deadly still. For Captain Luv, time seemed to have slowed down and focused itself sharply on the husband and himself.
He was aware of an itch in the back of his knee, he was aware of the way Inge's clothes felt against his skin, aware even of the vanishingly faint metallic odor of the clothes hanger an inch in front of his nose.
As he watched the husband, who seemed to be in suspended animation, Captain Luv was aware, too, of the beating of his heart. Where others' would be racing with fear and adrenaline, his had actually slowed and a kind of calm that had nothing to do with serenity had come over him. He loved danger, not with excitement but with acceptance, as if it were his natural state, as if he were a bird that had been returned to the medium of the air after a life underground. He knew exactly what to do in crisis, exactly how to behave.
The husband stepped toward the closet, each movement as clear and distinct as if illuminated by a strobe light. It seemed to Captain Luv to take forever, and he watched with amusement to see what the man would do next. Would he hurl open the closet door, thrust the clothing aside, and grab the good Captain? Would he go for a baseball bat, a knife, a gun? Would he see the Captain, recognize him, scream for the cops, make Inge's indiscretion public and ruin the Captain's career? Captain Luv continued to grin. He would get out of it, whatever happened, he would get out scotfree. He believed in himself, in his invulnerability. He knew it.
The man put his hand to the closet door and pushed it closed, sealing Captain Luv into the blackness with a gesture of obsessive orderliness.
Luv wanted to laugh and he put Inge's blouse in his mouth to keep himself quiet. Chewing the taste of cotton, he put his hand on himself and felt his erection. It was even larger than before, threatening to burst the condom with its swelling. He did it for this, he realized.
All the tiresome seduction, the slipping around, the risks, the inconvenience, the going without sleep, he did it all not for the sex.
He did it to get away with it. It was fooling everyone that he loved.
He fooled the victims, he fooled the cuckolded boyfriends and husbands, the disapproving parents. He fooled his wife. He wondered if it would be nearly as much fun if he weren't married.
When the husband and wife had gone Captain Luv came out of the closet to find Inge in a state.
'You must go,' she whispered fiercely. 'You must go. '
'Can't go yet,' he said, grinning at her. 'They'll hear me.
'You cannot stay, you cannot stay. It is very dangerous now, you see.'
She stood in front of him, gesticulating. Luv, still grinning, pointed at his erection.
'No, no, impossible now,' she said, shaking her head.
'Not impossible.' He grinned. 'It just looks that way. You managed it before.'
'No, no,' said Inge, looking past him toward the door as if the wife might reappear at any second. 'You do not understand. '
'You do not understand,' he said, mocking her accent. 'Ve shall resume.'
He turned her around and took her from behind, bending her over the bed.
She resisted briefly, but without conviction. He took his time, still making sure to please her because a craftsman takes pride in his work, and by the end she was moaning vigorously again, but this time with a pillow stuffed in her mouth.
As his own climax approached he waited to see if the mania would seize him, waited for the great gasping need to possess him and demand her death. He thought that it might, he thought it was due, but the mania didn't arrive, so he let her live. For now.
Luv made a great show of his orgasm, panting hoarsely as it arrived, clutching her to him, then quivering wildly, as if being thrown about by his passion. He knew the victims liked a big display, it made them feel powerful to think they had him, at least temporarily, under their control, to think that something about themselves had brought him to this shivering, spasming end.
'Incredible,' he whispered, when he could speak at last. 'You were incredible.' He would have preferred to utter his victim's name at the end for the personal touch, but experience had taught him that he sometimes got it wrong and more frequently couldn't remember it at all.
Still later that night, safe in his own home, he would make an entry in his secret journal, recording one more victim in a list that numbered 127. When he slid quietly into his bed, his wife stiffed and mumbled.
'How did it go tonight?' she asked sleepily. 'Fine,' he said, returning to his real self, no longer Captain Luv, leaving that persona between the sheets of some other bed. 'Just fine.'
3
With Jack away for two weeks in the summer to be with his father, Karen and Becker spent their evenings in a grateful peace. It was surprising to find themselves suddenly without the burden and pleasures of caring for an eleven-year-old, and for the first few days there was a sense that the tranquillity of the house was a fraud, a cruel trick that would be suddenly reversed, leaving them off balance and embarrassed. But they both soon adjusted to childlessness and turned to each other in deeper and warmer ways. Karen had suffered from Jack's absence when he was younger, feeling nervous and deprived of his love as well as his presence. She had not trusted the elements or the fates to keep him warm and dry and safe and healthy without her moderating influence. She had resented the time her ex-husband spent with the boy, mistrusted his ability to nurture and parent, feared that his influence would woo her son away from her. As Jack grew older, she had come to relish the two weeks as relief, respite, an island of tranquillity in the year-long effort to do the impossible job of raising a child without error.
Becker and Karen would do the dishes by hand rather than use the dishwasher, because it was a way to prolong the mealtime, and afterwards they would sit next to each other on the sofa, listening to music, sipping wine, and talking. The wine was a recent innovation. She had read that people who drank a small amount of alcohol dailyother factors being equal-were less prone to heart attack than teetotalers. Although neither of them was even a casual drinker by nature, Karen had instituted a glass-of-wine-aday regimen, like it or not. Becker's glass frequently saw him through dinner and well into evening, but Karen had come to meld into the ritual, feeling the wine warm and soften her in places that had spent the day as clenched as a fist.
Karen was Associate Deputy Director of the FBI in charge of Serial Killings and her days were fraught with tension.
'I'll bet I'm the only associate deputy having her feet massaged right now,' she said contentedly.
Becker smiled at her and gripped the outer edge of her foot between his thumb and finger. She winced and then hummed in that mixture of pleasure and pain peculiar to massage.
'It's your hands,' she said. 'You have the best hands.'
'It's your mind,' he said. 'You want to think I have the best hands.'
'Are you saying I'm easy?'
'I'm saying you're the best,' he said. He ran his thumb stiffly lengthwise on the center of the sole of her foot and she jerked so violently her foot jumped from his lap.
'Yikes,' she said. Then, grinning: 'Do it again.'
'That one's done,' Becker said, shifting her feet in his lap and starting on the other. He began by just running his hand over the length of her foot, letting her skin respond to the warmth of his touch. She closed her eyes and moaned again.
'I think something's up with Tee,' he said. 'Why do you say that?'
'I just have a feeling… Certain things he was saying, way he was saying them… I told you about the lady with the bone in her yard?
Well, I think Tee might be having a thing with her. Or would like to.
Or has been offered the chance. Some combination there.'
'What makes you think so?'
'If you knew the police were coming over to investigate something-would you greet them in shorts and a halter?'
