31
After the macabre dance, he wrestled her to the ground. That was when she gave up. Her gaze darted around and found only darkness. He’d been clever, waiting for her here. There was no one to help her, no hope.
She could feel him sense her surrender. Grinning down at her in the dim light, he raised his body slightly, keeping a tight grip on her hair, pressing her head tight against the ground. He held the knife up where she could see it, moving the blade in a lazy circular motion.
“All right,” she gasped, still out of breath from her struggle. “All right, whatever you want.” And she was sure she knew what he wanted; she’d felt his erection seconds ago as he’d brought his body down on hers.
Or did she know? The knife darted to her throat and she felt the cold kiss of the blade.
When she looked into his eyes and saw a darkness blacker than the night, she knew she was going to die.
Suddenly he moved, pulling the knife away and granting her a reprieve. Through paralyzing fear and a strange gratitude for sparing her momentarily, she felt his free hand groping beneath her skirt, yanking down her panty hose, then her panties. A fingernail scraped the back of her thigh. She was glad he was going to rape her; she’d live that much longer, anyway. And where she was, so near to death, every second of life loomed huge and of monumental importance, the difference between being and not being.
He surprised her once more, though. She realized what he was going to do when he grabbed her hair again, then adjusted his grip and moved well to the side, obviously so he wouldn’t get blood on him, and jerked her head back unbelievably far to expose her throat.
He said something she didn’t understand, his words floating to her from another universe. It didn’t matter what he’d told her. She knew she belonged to the dead, even before she felt the slash of the knife, breathed in but drew no air, and prayed for it to end soon after all.
32
“Way I see it,” Helen said, “he’s killing his mother.”
She was sitting next to Mary on the Romance Studio bench. Mary hadn’t understood her because Helen had been bending down to buckle a dance shoe as she’d spoken. When the words did fall into vague meaning in her mind, she asked who was killing whose mother.
Straightening, face still flushed and mottled from being upside down, Helen swiveled on the bench and stared at her. “You okay, Mary Mary?”
“Been a rough day since morning,” Mary said, “but I’m all right.”
“Killed his mother is what I said.”
“Who?”
“The guy that murdered the dancers in New Orleans and Seattle. That’s why the two women looked something alike. They find this guy, I betcha dollars to doughnuts it turns out his mother was the same type as his victims. He hates her but he’s scared shitless of her, so he murders other women as a sort of symbolic gesture of his contempt. Kills her over and over again. That’s the way it works.”
“Sounds like talk-show psychology,” Mary said. Her gaze shifted to the office door, waiting for Mel to emerge so her lesson could begin. Waltz music was floating from the big Bose speakers, and tall Lisa and her instructor were gliding over the floor. Lisa did an elegant develope, holding the count and extending her pointed foot gracefully as she slowly raised and lowered her long, long leg.
“It’s a known fact mass murderers do that kinda thing because of their mothers,” Helen explained. “Like Ted Bundy and Son of Sam.”
“I don’t remember reading about them hating their mothers.”
“Well, you gotta admit they couldn’t have had a healthy relationship with old mom, or they wouldn’t have felt the way they did about women.”
Trapped, Mary had to agree. But she said, “The police aren’t even positive the same man killed both dancers.”
“Yeah, they are,” Mary said knowledgeably, “they’re just not clueing in the public. And can you blame them? You know how the news media is-jackals with microphones and typewriters. They’d make an investigation, then a trial, impossible. Cops are smarter’n a lotta people think, and in a case like this they use something called VICAP. I read about it in a magazine just this morning, part of a list of things where America still leads the rest of the world.”
“Vicap? Sounds like a cold medicine.”
“Stands for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program,” Helen said smugly. “It’s a central storehouse of information about crimes and criminals all over the country, so a computer can pick up similarities in them and print them out and the police can know about matching M.O. s-that means Method of Operation. So when those two women were killed, the cops’ computer linked up with VICAP and showed they were both humped by the killer after they were dead. See, that’s the common denominator in the two crimes, and you can bet there’s others they’re keeping secret. Other things that were done to those poor gals.”
“Why wouldn’t the computer point out the fact both women were ballroom dancers? The police don’t seem very interested in that.”
“Probably they’re not interested because that’s not the sort of information they’d feed a computer about a murder victim in the first place, that she knew how to dance. Or that she competed. Big deal. To them the only ballroom dancing’s the kind that goes on at proms or country clubs. They wouldn’t figure it’d matter anymore’n if she played racquetball or liked sour cream on her potato. The similarity’s not in the main data bank, so the cops disregard it. Cops think like that, you know.”
Mary didn’t know, but everyone else seemed to have a handle on how the police operated.
Still sitting down, she bent forward and slipped her street high heels into her dance bag. She saw on the carpet the scuffed toes of a man’s black leather dance shoes, and looked up at Mel.
He was smiling down at her, so young, gentle, anything but threatening.
“They’re playing a waltz,” he said. “We might as well do that. Can’t work on nothing but tango, or that’s all you’ll know how to dance in Ohio.” He held out a hand for her, palm up, like a beggar imploring for alms. Not a hand that could ever harm anyone.
She followed him onto the dance floor and he led her into some basic box steps to warm her up, then through some balance steps and spiral turns. For a second they swept close to Lisa and her partner. Mary and Lisa glanced at each other, and Lisa suddenly tightened her posture and tilted back her head farther to emphasize a long and graceful dance line. Mary responded, kicking from the hip to follow Mel’s lead. A spark. An instant of rivalry and competition that might not have occurred a few months ago, before the two women had begun grooming for Ohio. Lisa had gone to the in-house Romance Studios’ competition in Miami and returned with a first in rumba and a second in fox-trot. Buoyed by success, however bogus, she’d been expressing grandiose ideas about Ohio.
Mel guided Mary to the edge of the dance floor and they stood for a second watching Helen and Nick waltz past and swirl into a parallel hesitation step. Helen was improving fast, too, and had plans to compete and succeed in November. A few competitive volts had also passed in her glance at Mary. The bulldog was coming out in the ladies.
“What we’re gonna do now,” Mel said, “is practice how to get on and off the floor. That’s important, ’cause when we walk on, it’s the judges’ first impression of us. When we’re gonna dance rhythm, you take my arm”-he extended his right arm and she wound her left through it-“and you look at me while I lead you out onto the floor. Sometimes I won’t be looking at you, ’cause I’m the one watching where we’re going. We walk fast, with a sense of purpose. I’ll choose our spot, probably toward the center of the floor, where the judges are most likely to pay attention to us. Main thing is, we need to seem confident.” He grinned, then bumped her lightly with his hip. “No problem for us, huh? We are confident.”
