Lee looked at Chuck, who was biting his lower lip.
'Is that right?' he said, looking at the others.
The girl picked at her fingernails. They were long and pointed, with tiny death's-head emblems on each nail. 'Yeah. I saw the cross. At first I thought it was like, ironic, you know, but she wasn't really the ironic type.'
Lee turned to Scott. 'Did she wear it during sex?'
The boy's face turned a mottled, boiled-lobster red, and Lee felt sorry for putting him on the spot.
'Yeah,' he answered in a barely audible voice.
'Can you describe it exactly?'
'Uh, silver…just plain silver, that's all.' He held up his thumb and forefinger. 'About this big.'
'Okay,' said Chuck. 'Anything else you can tell us?'
The kids looked at one another, and all of them shook their heads.
'If you think of anything-anything at all-you can call us day or night,' Chuck said, handing them each a business card. 'You've been really helpful,' he added, escorting them out the door. 'Thanks again.'
The girl stopped and looked at him. 'Whatever. Just catch that guy, okay?'
'Don't worry, we will,' Chuck replied.
Just then Chuck's cell phone rang.
'Morton here,' he said, leaning against the wall. He looked exhausted; Lee could see the toll the investigation was taking on his friend.
After listening for a moment, Chuck said, 'Are you sure?' After another pause, he said, 'Okay. Thanks anyway,' and hung up.
'What is it?' Lee asked.
'That was Delaney from the Ninth Precinct. He sent his guys over there right after I called, but they couldn't find the bullet.'
'Are you sure it was the right lamppost?'
'Oh, it was the right one-had a deep dent in it. But the bullet was gone. Looks like the shooter got there first and dug it out himself.'
'Christ,' Lee said. 'Whoever this is, he's good at covering his tracks.'
'He's got to slip up sooner or later.'
Lee wished he shared his friend's confidence. His cell phone beeped, and a shiver shot through him as he fumbled to dig it out of his pocket. Another text message: I'm watching her too.
He stared at it, then handed the phone to Chuck.
'What's this about?' Chuck said after reading it.
Lee told him about the text message of the day before.
'Your sister?' Chuck said, puzzlement on his squarely handsome face.
'What else could it be about? Laura was wearing a red dress when she disappeared.'
'But no one knows that except-'
'Exactly. How did he find out?'
'And is this even the same guy?' Chuck said. 'How do we know these messages are from the…the killer?' He resisted using the name Butts had chosen for the killer. He thought 'the Slasher' sounded lurid and distasteful.
'We don't,' Lee answered, but in his mind there wasn't much doubt.
'I'll see what we can do about tracing the messages,' Chuck said. 'And starting tomorrow, you'll be under surveillance.'
What neither of them said was that if the Slasher was talking about watching his sister, it meant that Laura was still alive.
Chapter Twenty-four
'Who among us can say he's never had a violent fantasy?'
John Paul Nelson looked over the assembly of students, who looked back at him uncomfortably, as if he had just accused them personally of being criminals.
Lee sat in the back of the lecture hall, watching as Nelson surveyed the young faces, blank as unformed clay. It was Monday morning, and today the heat was on with a vengeance. Hisses of steam erupted at irregular intervals from the radiators lining the assembly room walls. As soon as the lecture was over, Lee planned to give Nelson Chuck's urgent invitation to join their investigation. He had tried to reach Nelson by phone the day before without success-sometimes, he knew, Nelson would turn off both his phone and answering machine.
'Anybody?' Nelson continued, a smile struggling to break through the corners of his mouth. 'So you've all had a violent fantasy at one time or another in your life, then. Good-then you'll be able to follow what I'm about to say next.' He picked up the remote and aimed it at the slide projector.
One click and a familiar face appeared on the screen: the hangdog, boyish features of Jeffrey Dahmer, with his sad, basset hound eyes and splotch of blond bangs. A murmur floated up from the crowd and dissipated, smokelike, when Nelson turned to face them.
'I see most of you recognize him. Ask yourselves: what separates him from us?'
The blond girl snaked an arm tentatively into the air.
'Yes?' Nelson said.
'Uh…nothing, sir.'
'Nothing? You mean you don't have an answer?
She cleared her throat and pushed a strand of straight pale bangs from her eyes. 'No, sir; I mean 'nothing' as in nothing separates us.'
'That's an interesting point of view. Would you care to elaborate?'
The girl shifted in her seat and tightened her grip on her notebook.
'What I mean is that they're more like us than us than they are different from us. I mean, they're different in degree but not in kind, you might say.'
Nelson raised his left eyebrow. 'Nicely done, Ms. Davenport-I couldn't have put it better myself.'
Lee smiled. For all his arrogance, Nelson was always ready with praise for students who asserted their own opinions. Lee had never really studied Dahmer's face before, but now, seeing him closely, he looked lost, so lost, like a little boy abandoned by his parents-which, of course, he was.
Nelson cleared his throat. 'Mr. Dahmer was not an alien, a scientific oddity, an exotic species of some kind-a mutation, a marsupial, or a manta ray.'
He paused and looked at Ms. Davenport, who gazed up at him with rapturous devotion.
'Alike in kind,' he mused. 'I want you all to consider Ms. Davenport's felicitous phrasing. We are all alike in kind-even the most degraded, despised, or dispossessed.'
He walked back to the slide projector and picked up the remote again. A click and Dahmer's face disappeared and was replaced by a colorful illustration. Two interwoven strands-one red, the other blue-climbed like vines around one another, twisting in and out in perfect symmetry.
'This is what we all share: DNA, the double helix, the structure of life as we know it. Or perhaps this is only the starting point, and everything we are cannot be reduced to ink stains on a piece of paper.' He clicked again, and a symmetrical, dark-on-white design appeared-a black splash of ink that Lee recognized immediately as a Rorschach blot.
'What is this?' Nelson asked, stroking his chin. 'A butterfly? Or maybe an anvil? Or do some of you see a manta ray? Or a uterus? How about a dead body? If you do see a dead body, are you a serial killer in the making? Or maybe the serial killer is so repressed that he's the one who sees the butterfly?'
He seated himself on the edge of the desk and swung his right leg back and forth. 'Flaubert famously said, 'Madame Bovary, c'est mois.' In order to write about a character, a writer insinuates himself into the character's mind-slips into his skin, as it were. The criminal profiler must do the same, like the actor who becomes the character he plays.'
The theater had certainly lost a gifted actor when Nelson turned to a career in psychology. With his forceful personality, resonant voice, and charisma, Lee thought Nelson would have been a natural for the stage.
