Life Penalty (16 page)

“Gail, I’ve had enough. Let’s go to lunch.”

“I want to hear this.”

“I don’t,” Carol said forcefully, starting to move away. “Look, we’ve signed the petition. There’s nothing else we can accomplish here. Let’s go.” Gail didn’t budge. “Gail, I’m going. Half the people signing this stupid thing are pickpockets and muggers. I’m getting out of here.”

“I’ll meet you at the restaurant,” Gail told her.

“Gail!”

Gail turned her attention back to the crowd, peripherally aware that Carol had vacated the space beside her and someone else had replaced her.

“Capital punishment tries to vindicate one murder by committing another. How can you say that’s right?”

“Society has a right to take force against injustice.”

“No one has the right to take a life.”

“Nothing will bring our murdered children back to us.”

“That’s not the point.”

“The point being?”

“The point being,” Gail heard someone saying as she pictured her daughter’s body discarded in the dirt, “that some people just don’t deserve to live.”

“Exactly,” nodded the man beside her.

After that, the gathering seemed to run out of steam and the people began to disperse.

Gail looked around the comer for Carol but she was gone. She’d have to find her and apologize. Gail turned in the direction of the Russian Tea Room, catching sight of a fair-haired youth who was studying her from a distance of several feet.

When her eyes caught his, the youth turned his head quickly and moved away, more than a touch self-consciously, looking back at her over his shoulder several times. Gail kept careful track of his movements, only to lose him in a fresh onslaught of pedestrians.

She peered with great concentration through the people, but the youth had virtually disappeared. Gail proceeded carefully, looking into each store window, wondering what there was about the boy that was pulling her forward.

He had been watching her. Had he recognized her from her photographs in the newspapers? Had he known who she was? Was it possible that Cindy’s killer had fled to New York, seeking to lose himself among the other illegals and undesirables? Could she possibly have stumbled across him in so miraculous a fashion?

No, this was crazy, she thought, remembering her sister, about to turn back toward Fifty-seventh Street.

And then she saw him across the street, going into what was euphemistically referred to as an adult bookstore. Gail took a deep breath and crossed the street, reaching the bookstore and pushing open its door, feeling several pairs of eyes turn in her direction as she walked inside and down the first aisle after the boy.

Whatever she had been expecting, whatever her mind had prepared her for, she was still sickened and surprised by what she saw.
Twenty New Cunts
, one magazine proclaimed simply, its pages filled with appropriate close-ups. Gail riffled quickly through several of the least offensive magazines she could find, all the while edging her way to the rear of the store.

The next aisle dealt mostly in bondage and discipline. There were photographs of women being whipped, women being chained, women being tortured with branding irons.
How to Rape a Virgin
, one article advised. In
one memorable photograph, a woman was being stuffed into a meat grinder.

Gail closed her eyes and tried to will the rising flood of nausea back into her stomach. Her hands shaking, she returned the magazine to its appropriate slot. She thought of Jennifer, studying the art of photography with her father. What of the people who took
these
pictures? she wondered. What of the men and mostly women who posed?

She reached the last aisle. More of the same, only worse.
Men Loving Boys
, she read, picking up the magazine and studying a picture of a perhaps thirty-year-old man with a boy no more than fourteen.
Little Girl Lost
, another title announced, the accompanying photographs depicting a young girl made up to look much younger. Her long hair was braided with ribbons, her boyish body was clad in a short, open pinafore; she wore little-girl socks and shoes. And no underpants, revealing a shaved pubic area. She was being ogled and fondled by several middle-aged men.

What was she doing in here? Gail wondered, suddenly panicking, bolting for the front of the store, desperate for some fresh air. An outstretched arm appeared out of nowhere and blocked her way.

Gail looked up to see the young man whom she had been following. He was taller than she had been prepared for, possibly over six feet, and very muscular despite being slim.

“Looking for me?” he asked with a taunting grin. Gail gasped with surprise, focusing her attention on the sign behind him which directed patrons to the back room to see the impressive display of films.

“Can I take you to the movies?” he sneered.

Gail forced herself to look at him. His eyes were small and piercing, his skin bad, his nose and mouth thin, his hair uneven and uncombed, neither blond nor brown. He was possibly twenty years old, she estimated.

He moved closer to her. “Why are you following me?” he asked, his lips moving closer to her face. “Think I can do something for you? Want me to do it for you right behind one of those curtains back there? You name it, lady, I’ll do it.”

Gail struggled to find her voice, but no words came.

He pushed his face closer to her, his hand reaching for her and catching the back of her hair.

“Nice hair,” he said, moving still closer.

“Please …” she said softly.

“Please? Oh yeah, please. I like my women nice and polite.”

Gail’s hands shot wildly into the air, catching both herself and the boy by surprise. He dropped his arm and stepped back, not sure what had happened. In the several seconds it took him to reassess the situation, Gail raced past him, knocking over a row of magazines and watching in horror as pages of bound and gagged women fell lifeless before her eyes. In another instant she was out on the street, straining to catch her breath and praying that the youth would not follow her.

What could she possibly have been thinking about when she’d followed him inside? Even discarding the odds on finding the killer here, this boy couldn’t be the one she was looking for. He was too tall, too bold, too forward. And he obviously had no trouble dealing with older women. He was not the sort to attack a child, she decided, unless the child was old enough to give him a good fight back. His interests would run to bigger prey. Gail slowly straightened her shoulders and headed shakily toward the Russian Tea Room.

Carol was on her second glass of wine when she arrived. “Sorry I left you like that,” she apologized before Gail had a chance to speak.

“I’m sorry too,” Gail said sincerely.

“Enough said,” Carol decreed, signaling for the waiter. “I’m starving.”

Carol was as good as her word, saying nothing about the incident to either Jack or Jennifer when they met later at the theater.

It was a pleasant evening, and everyone agreed when the day was over that they would have to do it again soon.

A
fter a particularly vicious series of late-night murders along Highway 280 into the New Jersey Turnpike, Gail began to drive there daily. At first, she was curious to pinpoint the exact location of the killings. However, even after her initial foray told her that there would be nothing to mark the spot, no police blockade of the area, no blood left splattered along the roadway to interrupt the tedium of the drive, she continued to cruise there every day.

The newspapers were frustratingly vague. Highway 280, they reported, west of the New Jersey Turnpike. About the details of the crimes themselves, they had been appallingly explicit.

The first of the four killings had occurred sometime after midnight on the sixteenth day of September. A young woman, age thirty-two, had been returning from an evening spent visiting friends who lived in New York. She was alone in her car when she was waylaid and forced off the road by another car, which police surmised from the tire tracks found near the scene, had been waiting for just such an opportunity. The woman had been led into the grass at the side of the highway, stripped of her clothing, sexually attacked with a sawed-off shotgun and then murdered.

Two nights later another car was forced off the road in a similar fashion at just past ten. According to a near-hysterical
motorist who was driving by but didn’t come forward until several days later, the middle-aged couple inside were forced out of their car at gunpoint and led into the tall grass by the side of the road. No one but the killer was around to appreciate the depth of their fear, the degree of their horror. The police could comment only on the savagery of their wounds. Both had been sodomized and shot repeatedly; both had been mutilated after death and left by the side of the road for early morning motorists to discover on their way to work. The driver who had witnessed the couple being led to their doom claimed he saw only one gunman, that the man was white and appeared to be young and blond, but it was dark and he had been terrified and couldn’t be sure.

Police insisted that they were keeping a sharp eye on that stretch of highway, but the following week, there was yet another killing: a young man returning from a late date had been edged off the road and slaughtered in the identical manner of his predecessors. The police, though they voiced strong doubts in print that the killer was likely to strike again in the same spot, were nonetheless advising motorists who had to travel between the two states at night to take 24 or a suitable alternative. The traffic between New Jersey and New York after dark along Highway 280 came to a virtual stop.

During the day it was as busy as ever. No one thought that the killer, or killers, would strike before dark. Gail was usually on the highway before twelve noon and home by four, giving her enough time to travel back and forth between the two states twice. Occasionally, she pulled over to the side of the road and stopped for several minutes, trying to internalize the terror of being pulled from her car and being forced to walk into the high grass at gunpoint. A walk toward death.

After a few days she began leaving the car, walking along the side of the busy highway. Passing motorists
regarded her strangely, then averted their eyes, not stopping to ask if she might need help. She began concentrating her attention on the tall grass, kicking at it with her feet and wondering if there were snakes.

She imagined being led into the thick of it, being told to remove her clothes and lie down, disappearing into it as if into an open grave. She felt the coldness of a gun’s metal as it inched up her thigh and forced its way rudely inside her. She heard the squeeze of the trigger, saw her body exploding around her, felt … nothing.

“Hey, what the hell are you doing out here?”

Gail turned around sharply at the sound of the man’s voice and saw a late-model silver car with its driver, a balding, middle-aged man, leaning out of the window on the passenger side. “What’s the matter with you?” he continued angrily. “Are you crazy? Don’t you know what happened on this road? It’s goddamn dangerous to leave your car! You gotta take a leak?! Wait till you hit a service station!”

Gail thanked the man for his concern and retreated timidly to her car. He waited until she was safely inside before resuming his own journey, shaking his head in dismay as he passed her.

She was getting nowhere, she thought restlessly, her mind not on the traffic at all. Her excursions into Newark and East Orange were proving fruitless. Everyone was guilty, she decided cynically. There were no innocents left.

She’d certainly never find anybody driving along the highway in the middle of the afternoon. It was an exercise in futility.

A few days later Gail ceased driving along Highway 280 in the afternoons, and went there at night.

She waited until the evening that Jack was scheduled to attend one of Lloyd Michener’s group meetings, declining once again to accompany him. Soon after he was gone, she informed Jennifer that she was restless and felt like
going to a movie. When Jennifer offered to go with her, Gail reminded her she had homework, and left the house before Jennifer could protest further.

The highway at night was a different world. The darkness took away its cloak of civility, making the serpentlike twists and turns a tangible menace. Even before the murders she had felt this, driving home with Jack and Jennifer after their recent foray into New York. Gail had never been a creature of the night. As a child, she had slept with the bathroom door wide open, its light spilling over into her room. With the daylight, she felt in the middle of things, included, protected, secure. But with the darkness came the isolation. She felt like an observer on an alien planet, and the feeling had always frightened her. Now, along this dark stretch of highway, aware that hers was the only car in sight, that feeling of isolation intensified and overwhelmed her. She fought the urge to turn back, to return to the safety of her well-lit kitchen and wait until morning. And then she remembered (as if she had ever for a moment forgotten) that Cindy had been killed in the bright, friendly light of day, that monsters did not always require the glow from the moon to guide them. Her eyes searched out the darkness at the side of the highway. (“Are there such things as monsters, Mommy?” “Of course not, sweetie.”) She tightened her grip on the wheel and continued full speed ahead.

And then she saw the other car.

She was almost at the New York border when she saw it hidden behind some trees and camouflaged by its own dark color. Within seconds it was behind her, edging closer and closer to her rear fender. Gail stepped on the accelerator. The other car stayed right behind. Gail checked her rearview mirror but the darkness and the glare from the other car’s headlights made it impossible for her to get a good look at the men inside. All she could make out was that there were two of them. She saw the other car veer
suddenly to the left, out of her sight line. In another instant it pulled up beside her, trying to force her off the road. Gail pressed the gas pedal to the floor but the other car matched her speed, the man in the passenger side waving her frantically over. Then she heard the siren and looked toward the other car with measurable relief. But the man on the passenger side was flashing something in her direction, something that looked like a badge, and she realized that he was responsible for the siren, though the car was unmarked. She took her foot off the gas pedal and slowly reduced her speed, gradually pulling over to the side of the road. The car was right behind her. She heard the sound of car doors slamming and saw two men racing in her direction, guns drawn. It suddenly occurred to her that no one knew precisely how the other victims had been waylaid. What better way, she thought, as the men approached her door, their guns clearly visible, than to pretend to be the police. Everyone stops for a cop. No one questions the authority of a uniform and a badge.