She didn’t recognize his face in the shadows, couldn’t place it, didn’t have a clue who he was. But his eyes… something about his eyes, the way they were locked in on her, made her think she probably didn’t
She backed up on impulse, confused, anxious, suddenly realizing there was nobody on the park side of the street, nobody else on this side.
Nobody but the two of them standing out here on the darkened sidewalk.
“I’m sorry,” she said to whoever the hell he might be. Starting to get really frightened now, trying to ease forward around both his body and the door. “I’m in a hurry to get somewh—”
His gloved hand came up, clapped over the lower half of her face before she could finish her sentence. Then another had came up to her neck, something held in it, what she thought looked like a fat marker pen. As she started to scream against the hand covering her mouth, a snapping sound came from the tubular object, and she felt a sting right through her scarf, and the scream died off into a muffled in-turned whimper.
Instantly dizzy, her senses flushing away, her legs turned to soft putty, she reeled, felt herself being shoved into the car, thrown across the backseat. And then heard its doors slamming shut in what seemed some distant place behind her.
By the time the driver got back into his vehicle and pulled from the curb, she was completely unconscious.
His Maglite raised above his shoulder, its lens turned downward in the pitch blackness, he walked around the pile of sod, rotten leaves, and splintered branches concealing her body. The surface of the frozen bog quivered underfoot, its icy carpet of moss and tangled weeds crackling with each step he took through his slow circle, like a thick rubber mat that had been spread over an even thicker layer of broken glass.
The flash’s wide, high-powered beam revealed a hint of white flesh — part of her cheek, or maybe her neck — and he knelt to scoop another clump of dead foliage into his gloved hand and toss it where he’d caught his glimpse. He recalled having seen patches of snow among the nearby brush and stunted trees, momentarily considered flinging some onto the heap for added cover, but then decided it was better to leave the snow undisturbed. More would fall to blanket her soon enough… unless the coyotes and bobcats arrived first. They were all over these woodlands, half starved in the bareness of winter, scavenging for whatever food would sustain them. Probably they would take care of the body before any human being had a chance to discover it. Not many people wandered this far from the beaten path, and those who did — off-trail hikers, nature watchers, that type — wouldn’t get the inclination for months. Not until the wicked cold abated.
He continued to move around the corpse, frost-hardened mud crunching beneath his weight.
The auto-injector couldn’t have worked any better, he thought. A little pressure was all it had taken for its needle to eject from the tip and penetrate the heavy scarf she’d worn around her neck, releasing the contents of its prefilled dispenser.
The propofol had put her out in less than a minute. He’d experimented with a wide range of sedatives, tranquilizers, and anesthetics in his solitary career, could recite a whole desk reference’s worth of names from memory, and was convinced he’d never gotten hold of anything more potent. The dosage he’d pumped into the woman, eighty milligrams into the artery that fed her brain, could have put a horse on the ground in seconds. She’d already been semicomatose when he finished her in the backseat, pinching shut her nose with one hand, clapping the other over her mouth, blocking her airways until her autonomic motor system simply gave up on trying to fill them.
His take-outs weren’t always as clean, but he preferred it when they were. With his best ones, the ones that went the way she’d gone, it was almost as if he was the Sandman kneeling at their sides, gentling them to sleep, making them yield to him with a soft, easy touch.
He had kissed her goodnight — lightly, on the cheek — as she went out with hardly a shiver and a gasp.
Now he came full circle and paused to stand in silence over the body’s outstretched legs. He could see filaments of vapor escaping his mouth and nostrils to scatter in the bright cast of his Mag, hear timber creaking and groaning around him in the wind.
In the unlikely event anything was left of her when the thaw arrived, it would be sucked down into the bog. The acid mire sped up decomposition, turning organic remains into food for the peat and sphagnum. There was a whole education to be gotten from being piss poor and orphaned young, and that had been among the abundant lessons he learned in the cranberry bogs where he’d toiled during the October harvests, just a kid back then, part of a large troop of strapped and exploited seasonal laborers. The pickers, most of them, were minors like himself, along with hardscrabble local women and Mexican illegals who had come thousands of miles north of the border to join them in slogging through those flooded fields for less than minimum wage, raking berries loose from the vines so they would float to the water’s surface, then skimming for them with big brooms, rakes, and nets… and this while the foreman, their
He remembered the cranberry bogs. Remembered the dead things. But that was long ago, and he wasn’t here to do any picking tonight.
He’d found this patch of spongy ground a while back, used it for another of his jobs, and hadn’t had a problem locating it again. It was the ideal place to dispose of her, hidden at the end of a dirt trail among a million acres of unpopulated wilderness out here in the Jersey barrens… miles and miles of nothing, of nowhere, a quick shot from Manhattan. The drive had been under forty minutes, and he’d taken it slow to make sure the staties didn’t get interested in him. When he was finished looking over his work, he would pull his rental back onto Highway 73, head a few exits down the ’pike to the Lincoln Tunnel, and then he would be across the Hudson, out of that underwater tube, city lights greeting him, Broadway in his face, the Empire State Building thrusting into the eastside sky like a giant multicolored glowstick. But here, right here, none of it seemed to exist.
Over the river and through the woods, amazing.
Remaining very still over the body, he switched off his flashlight on an impulse that, while not quite unconscious, arose from a chamber of his mind buried deep down at the lowermost level of consciousness.
And then the world went dark.
He could have been anywhere.
He could have been nowhere.
After a second he thumbed his flash back on, turned, and walked away from the evidence of his latest atrocity, bearing with him an indelible reminder of the many crimes of his past.
FIVE
Avram Hoffman dashed by Jeffreys on his way to the elevators in the DDC’s ground-floor entrance hall. It was already twenty minutes past nine, late for his morning prayer session, and he couldn’t afford to run even a minute later. Mr. Katari had left the Club in a huff well before Avram returned from yesterday’s hastily arranged meeting with Lathrop, and his indignance over having been put off was understandable. In the competitive hustle of the jewelry trade, one’s time was not to be squandered. A missed appointment could lead to another, and that might result in lost opportunities. The domino effect could be rapid and serious. All the hard, quantifiable appraisals
