him.
'What?'
'Please don't hold it against me. I can't afford to lose your friendship, it means too much to me…
'Tell me what it is, Stanley.'
She had used his name. Kom grinned triumphantly. If Becker was there, he knew who was calling. 'I keep thinking about you,' he said. He heard the check in her breathing, knew that she teetered on the delicate edge between caution and desire to hear more. He eased her over onto his side. 'I don't mean anything more by that, — I know nothing can be done and I shouldn't even be saying it, but I just had to tell you. I'm not asking anything from you, Karen, I don't expect you to do anything, I know you don't want me to do anything-but please, just accept how I feel. It's all I can offer. I know it's very little, coming from me-but I had to share it with you, I had to let you know, it's been driving me crazy.' She was silent for a long while and he listened to her breathing, trying to gauge her reaction-but in his heart Kom already knew her reaction. Any woman's reaction. The mastery lay as much in his delivery as in his lines. They loved his shyness, his unassuming candor, the implied morality of his stance. He groped for his words, tripped over them, stuttered forth his sincerity. His was an open heart, exposed and vulnerable, asking for nothing in return but the chance to adore her.
When she had had time enough to collect her thoughts, he continued. 'I won't call you again,' he said. 'I'm sorry. I hope I didn't… I don't want to… I'm so sorry, I just had to tell you. '
'I don't know what to say,' she said. Her voice was clear and fully awake now. He could see her sitting up in bed, struggling to find the right tone to deal with him, not wanting to say too much, not wanting him to hang up. Clearly Becker was not there. The guarded quality did not come from an effort to speak in code so an auditor would not understand, she was simply protecting herself. For all the good it might do her.
'You must have known,' he said. 'You must have seen how I was fall-how I was getting. Don't hate me for this. It's been so long since Tovah and I had any kind of decent relationship… you just make me feel so alive.'
'Yes,' she said timorously, 'I know.' Her voice was softer now. She had made up her mind. Kom smiled wolfishly to himself and settled in for a long late-night conversation, private and secret, a warm bath of intimacy. Who could resist love? Fresh, new, tender, hesitant, undemanding love? Hewas on his way.
'Can we talk for a while?' he asked. 'Just talk?'
When she replied, her voice was barely audible, as if the simple word itself was committing her to an act of betrayal-which it was.
'Yes,' said Karen. 'We can talk.'
31
Kom was awakened in the night by a distant sound and he lay still for a moment, blinking in the dark. He glanced at Tovah to see if she had heard it too, but she slumbered on beside him, mouth slightly ajar, rendered beyond the reach of casual noises by her sleeping pills. The noise came again and Kom turned toward his window where a faint glow diffused the darkness. It was not moonlight or any other kind of illumination that he could readily identify, and it seemed to shift and dance across the pane. The sound came again, a dull rasp, not close but not too distant, either.
Kom crossed to the window and peered into the night. It took him a moment to take it in and make sense of it. At the far reaches of his lawn, several yards into the woods but still on his property, he could make out the form of a man with a flashlight. The noise was the sound of his shovel scraping through dirt and stone. From this distance, it looked to Kom for all the world like a man digging a grave. For just a moment he felt a shiver as he imagined it was Kiwasee, returned somehow, but he shook the feeling off disdainfully and focused on reality. There was no time for supernatural maunderings, the situation at hand was perilous enough.
His first thought was that the police were there, searching for something, but when he reached the kitchen door and viewed the spectacle from the ground level, he realized that the police would not come without notice, without proper authority-and they wouldn't come alone.
There was only one man digging, and it could only be Becker.
Kom slipped out the front door, hidden from view of the digger in the woods by the entire house, and made his way silently to the edge of the trees that flanked his property like a horseshoe. Timing his movements to coincide with the thrusts of the shovel, he crept slowly around and behind the scene of the activity. If Becker was watching at all, he would be watching the house. Kom would come at him from the rear.
Kom stopped thirty yards away with a clear line of sight to Becker's back. He knelt behind the wide double trunk of a hickory and eased the golf club he had snatched from his garage onto the ground. It would be easy enough to slip up behind Becker and bury the golf iron in his skull. The man was working hard and making enough noise with his exertions to cover any sound Kom might make. It would be a solution to his problem, it would be easy to do, and he had proven to himself that he could act when he needed to. Kiwasee had been younger and stronger than Becker and Kom had handled him easily. He could do the same with Becker anytime. It was more important now, he thought, to discover what Becker was up to.
As Kom watched, Becker finally rested, leaning against his shovel and breathing heavily while he eyed the house. Apparently content that he was still undetected, the agent picked up a garbage bag and dropped it into the hole he had dug. The bag swung easily in his hand and Kom could tell there was nothing heavy in it. No body being buried. He grinned to himself. But then Becker wouldn't have a body at hand, would he? Becker didn't have the balls to create his own when he wanted one.
Becker may have killed some people, but only when the law said it was all right to do so, only when he was defending himself. What did a man like that know about the mania that could sweep over Kom? What did he even know about the courage it took to kill Kiwasee? That had been done without passion, without desire, without a trace of the demon riding on his soul. And Denise. There was no gutless claim of selfdefense with Denise, not even the demand of necessity. Kom had done it because he could, because it was clever, because it would thwart any further investigation of himbut not because he needed to do it in any sense.
Because he wanted to. Becker would know nothing about any of that. Kom was swept by a profound contempt for his opponent, a creation of his own press, a creature of reputation. It was hard to believe that he had ever respected Becker so, that he had ever wanted to learn what Becker knew.
There had been a time when he felt perhaps he could form a bond of the soul with the man, that they could somehow share their secret and unutterable passion. But Becker had not been worthy as a friend. He was not worthy as an adversary now, Kom had countered and foiled him every step of his clumsy way. He thought again of bashing his skull, sweeping him away and being done with it so that even the memory of his ill-fated attempt at friendship would be gone. He lifted the golf club, feeling its comforting heft. A perfect lever. Swung at the length of his arm, it could kill from five feet away, its iron head speeding at a hundred miles an hour. It would crush Becker's head like an eggshell.
Becker shifted his weight, glancing to the side, and Kom pressed himself against the tree trunk. As if sensing the danger-or more likely just to give his muscles a breakBecker filled in the hole from the side of the grave so that he was partially turned toward Kom. It didn't matter, Kom thought. Becker was desperate and that would make him careless; he could be lured into his death whenever Kom desired.
When Becker had at last moved off into the night, Kom opened the grave once more. The digging was easy now that the rocks had been removed and the soil loosened. He pulled the bag from the bottom of the hole and undid the twist tie. In the light of his own flashlight Kom surveyed the contents of the bag. A scalpel with flecks of blood still on the blade and handle. A pair of surgical gloves. A surgical gown, also marked with blood. A surgical cap. He could see a few stray hairs within the cap, lying there as if carefully placed by hand. A name tag from a supermarket chain. 'Denise' was printed on the black plastic background. Kom tried to remember if Denise had worn it on her last night. Of course not, ridiculous. She had awaited him in a teddy, but she would never have worn the tag into the Marriott, no matter what outfit she had on. It might have been in her purse, it might have fallen out… He scoffed at the idea. It was a plant, like the rest of it, like the bloody scalpel, like the operating gown. There was no possibility that these were the actual ones he had worn, although he imagined that Becker might have managed to get Denise's blood on them.
Nothing of Kom's though. There could be no trace of Kom on any of the items-except the hairs in the cap.
