Heartstopper (17 page)

And what about old Mr. Calhoun, young Mr. Frickey, middle-aged Mr. Rodriguez? What about the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker? What about the man standing on the corner or the man crossing the street? It could be any one of them.

Which one?

It seems that no one is immune from suspicion or safe from gossip. And it’s so interesting how gossip assumes a life of its own, creates its own reality. Interesting too how things can start out in one direction and end up somewhere else entirely. Like Liana Martin. She started off for home and ended up in the ground.

So I guess all the panic and conjecture when another girl went missing wasn’t entirely out of line, although if you ask me—and, of course, nobody did—it was a lot of fuss over
nothing. The missing girl, whose name is Brenda Vinton, was from Collier County, which is directly to the west of Broward and is considered one of the state’s fastest-growing counties, encompassing 2,006 square miles (exactly 787 more square miles than Broward). According to the latest census, the population of Collier County has increased by 65 percent in the last decade. (I like to keep track of such things.) Collier is famous for its cypress trees, and since most of Collier is taken up by the Everglades, the vast bulk of the development has been along the Gulf of Mexico on the west coast. Approximately two thousand Seminole Indians live in Collier, although I doubt you’ll find any of them in a big city like Naples, where Brenda Vinton is from.

Anyway, Brenda Vinton is this pretty, sixteen-year-old girl whose parents reported her missing when she failed to come home from her piano lesson on Saturday afternoon. She was only about half an hour late, but people were already jittery in Naples because some pervert had been going around exposing himself to children, and another pervert—maybe it was the same pervert, nobody was quite sure—had tried to force a ten-year-old girl into his car the previous week, but had been frightened off by the girl’s screams. The good people of Naples had also just heard about Liana Martin’s murder, and so when Brenda Vinton failed to return home at the appointed hour, everyone was understandably concerned. A search party was organized immediately, and someone alerted the media, and next thing you knew, South Florida was in a panic, convinced it had another serial killer—we’ve had several—on its hands.

Which I guess they do.

Except that I don’t consider myself a serial killer. Not really. I think of serial killers as people with misplaced God complexes who strike at random, trolling the streets for targets who unwittingly fulfill their sick fantasies. These people are social outcasts whose overwhelming and sadistic
sexual urges can ultimately be satisfied only through killing. They won’t stop killing until they’re caught.

That isn’t me.

First of all, I don’t strike at random, although I recognize it may seem that way to some, especially now, in the beginning stages of my work. (Because it
is
work.) And my victims are hardly selected at random. No, I have a plan, carefully thought out, and even more carefully put into action, and my victims have all carefully been chosen. Even Candy Abbot, who didn’t exactly fit the mold, was part of my overall plan. She was my test case, if you will, a regretful, if necessary, casualty of war. (Because it
is
war.) I needed to see if my plan was feasible, if the chloroform would work, if the house where I intended to stash my victims was as appropriate a prison as I imagined. But obviously, I’m learning as I go along. Some things will have to be modified—such as always keeping bottles of water on hand—and I have to give more thought to emergencies and allow for the unexpected. But all things considered, Candy Abbot was a positive experience, at least for me. (I doubt she’d agree.) Not to mention, she gave me the confidence to take my plan to the next stage.

Enter—and exit—Liana Martin.

That was a tense time, just before her body was recovered. The sheriff had all his officers out in force, and they’d already organized several search parties, none of which had turned up anything. There was talk of spreading out, of going farther afield, maybe even calling in the FBI. This had me understandably nervous because I dreaded my secret hideaway being discovered. Not that it’s such a secret. I mean, how can it be? The house sits at the end of a large field, clearly visible from the road, if you look hard enough. Although I’ve discovered that people don’t really look very hard, even when they’re searching for something. They think they are, but actually they’re just going through the motions, poking around, waiting for something to pop out
at them. And that field, that old house, have been neglected for so long that people no longer see them as anything but backdrop. Like in the movies.

Still, I began to worry. If Liana’s body wasn’t discovered soon, the sheriff would be forced to enlarge the area of his search, and he might stumble across the field and the house, and then it would be game over. At least temporarily. I’d have to go back to the drawing board, and I doubted I’d ever again find a place so perfect for what I had to do. Not to mention the time it would take to relocate and begin again. No, I definitely didn’t want that.

So when the search teams gathered, I made sure to drop a few quiet suggestions. There were quite a few of us in the various search parties, and everyone was talking at the same time, vying for position of alpha male, suggesting this area and that as a good place to start, and pretty soon it was impossible to decipher who had suggested what, so I was able to steer us subtly toward the field where I’d buried Liana’s body. Once there, it didn’t take a lot of effort to angle the group toward the actual grave site, and then—lo and behold!—there she was.

Okay. I admit it. That part was fun. Seeing the looks of wary anticipation on the faces of the others when that suspect mound of earth was discovered, those looks becoming grimaces as a limp hand was uncovered, and then the gasps of horror as Liana’s body was pulled from the ground. God, she was a mess! Time and the animals had done their job all right, and no amount of expensive gloss would have helped those once sassy lips. Of course, I mimed shock and outrage, the same as everybody else. I threw my hand over my mouth and pretended I was about to be sick. And to be truthful, the smell of nearby vomit was almost enough to do the trick. It’s funny how just that odor is enough to induce nausea. Anyway, I took half a dozen deep breaths, the way my mother used to tell me to do when I was a child, and I was okay.

What is it they say? Mother is always right?

What do they know? What does anybody know?

They didn’t even realize I was there.

I’ll tell you what
I
know, and that’s that I don’t have any misplaced deity complex. I’m not the least bit interested in playing God, thank you very much. And I certainly don’t get any weird sexual thrill out of either killing or watching people die. As I’ve already explained, the part of this whole thing that I enjoy is the buildup, the game-playing. (Because it
is
a game.)

Which brings me back to Brenda Vinton.

Brenda Vinton is one of those vacuously pretty girls you see everywhere these days. Long hair, pert little nose, expressionless eyes. Hardly a heartstopper, at least judging from the picture I saw on one of those ubiquitous flyers that papered the state almost as soon as she went missing. Although maybe she just doesn’t take a good picture. Some people are like that. They’re beautiful in person, but they don’t photograph well. In pictures, they appear awkward and stilted, void of personality and character.

On the other hand, some people aren’t good-looking by any stretch of the imagination, yet they photograph beautifully. You see a picture of them and you think, That person is gorgeous. But then you see them in real life, and there’s nothing special about them at all. In fact, often they’re rather plain. This is certainly true of many of the top models, those glorious faces you see on the covers of fashion magazines. They seem stunning on the surface, but really they’re just the highly paid, high-cheekboned receptacles of someone else’s vision, a bunch of blank canvases awaiting the right combination of paint and proper lighting. They need an outsider’s hand to bring them to life.

Of course, sometimes an outsider’s hand brings death.

Ask Liana Martin.

But we’re talking about Brenda Vinton now. And she has
one of those faces that won’t age particularly well, at least judging by her mother, whom I saw in that ludicrous press conference she threw, tearfully thanking all those volunteers who gave up their weekend to search for her darling daughter. Mrs. Vinton’s face—round and uninteresting, with soft, bovine lips and small, deep-set eyes that kept filling up with tears—registered an ever-shifting combination of relief, anger, and embarrassment, sometimes all three at the same time. Occasionally Mrs. Vinton would glance behind her at her former husband and his new wife, a girl who looked young enough to be his daughter—he should really be ashamed—and she’d grimace, although I doubt she realized she was doing so. I had to laugh. People betray themselves so easily. The smallest of gestures give them away.

So, there was Mrs. Vinton on the steps of some civic building, probably City Hall, torn tissue in hand, thanking the police force and the volunteers, stealing peeks at her husband and his young wife, and saying how sorry she is for all the trouble her daughter has caused. Brenda is remorseful, she says repeatedly, adding that they’ll be seeking help for her. She takes a final glance at her former husband, whose scowl is barely contained by his tight smile. And then the press conference concludes, and she is gone.

Brenda, of course, was nowhere to be seen throughout these proceedings. Too ashamed, her mother explained.

I don’t buy that. I don’t think little Brenda is the least bit ashamed. After all, she got what she wanted, which I suspect was a break from her mother, who’s no doubt been way overprotective since her husband abandoned her, as well as some attention from her neglectful father, who’s no doubt been busy of late with his new wife. Not to mention that for more than twenty-four hours, hers was the name on everyone’s lips, the face on every telephone pole and television newscast, the subject of every prayer.

And where was little Brenda while all this was going on?

She was holed up in some crummy, local motel, drinking Coke and eating potato chips while following reports of her disappearance on TV. She hadn’t meant any harm, she insisted to police officers after the chambermaid discovered her still in bed when she went in to change the sheets on Sunday afternoon. She hadn’t planned to run away. She certainly hadn’t realized the furor her disappearance would cause. It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. She’d just finished her piano lesson and was on her way home to study for a test on Monday, and she was worried because she hadn’t read any of the books that were going to be on the test, and she was afraid she wasn’t going to pass, and then her mother would be angry and probably wouldn’t let her go to the Killers’ concert taking place next weekend in Fort Lauderdale, even though she’d stood in line for five hours to get tickets and spent all the money she’d gotten for her last birthday to get a halfway decent seat, and it really wasn’t fair, and she hated being a kid, and she hated school, and she especially hated having to take piano lessons on a Saturday morning when all her friends got to sleep in, and she just decided, right then and there, totally impromptu, not to go home and study for that stupid test, but to go to some motel and just veg out for a few hours. And that’s what she did. Except later, when she turned on the TV, there was her picture and the news that she’d vanished. And she didn’t know what to do. And no, since you ask, she didn’t realize her mother would get that bent out of shape. How was she to know the commotion her being a few hours late would cause, that the whole city would be out looking for her? Yes, of course, she’d heard about that poor girl in Torrance who’d gotten herself killed, but that was halfway across the state, for heaven’s sake, and why would anyone think one thing had anything to do with the other? She’s sorry, okay?

Well, no, it’s not okay. And I have half a mind to pay
Brenda Vinton a visit, teach her what happens to stupid little twits who cry wolf. Except her mother’s probably watching her like a hawk right now, and it’d be way too risky. And it would mean all that driving, and more time wasted when there’s already been enough time wasted because of that silly girl. Because of her, I’ll have to delay the next phase of my plan. People are way too uptight right now. They’re on red alert, as it were. The mayor’s on the warpath. A few big-city reporters have been nosing around. Everywhere I go, people are looking over their shoulders, peering into the windows of cars they don’t recognize, picking their kids up from school. I observe them when they don’t know they’re being watched. I listen in when they’re talking. I understand what they’re feeling. I’m one of them after all.

Or so they think.

And so I understand it would be foolhardy to proceed at this point, that it would be prudent to wait, at least another few weeks, until people have relaxed their guard, at least a little, and the reporters have returned to their big-city newspapers, the mayor has stopped pontificating for the cameras, and the sheriff and his deputies have gone back to their usual routine of handing out speeding tickets and enforcing the noise bylaws.

Besides, I already have the next girl picked out, so there’s no rush, although I would have preferred to have kept to my original schedule. But, as I stated earlier, I have to be prepared for the unexpected, for the deus ex machina, however unfair. And looking on the bright side, this way I’ll have more time to anticipate, which, as I’ve said before, is my favorite part.

Maybe when I’m done with the good people of Torrance, I’ll take a drive over to Naples and pay Brenda Vinton a little visit. We’ll see. I have lots of time to decide.

O
kay, people, we don’t have a lot of time,” Mr. Lipsman announced, waving his hands in the air, as if he’d stumbled into a horde of angry bees. He looked around the three-hundred-seat auditorium, beckoning about a dozen malingerers standing at the back of the large space to come forward and join the approximately fifty other students gathered in the front couple of rows. “Come on, people.” He clapped his hands, swatted at the air again, paced impatiently back and forth in front of the raised platform.