Mortal Lock (20 page)

But I know a human kill when I see one. No animal could have wrapped one of Alfred Hitchcock’s legs with a strand of wire. No animal uses gasoline. Or matches.

And no animal kills for fun.

3

If it had been a natural predator that killed Alfred Hitchcock, I wouldn’t have said a word to Dolly. I would have just given him a proper burial, and let her think he’d moved on. Maybe found himself a girl bird that wanted a dignified mate.

But I knew better than to bury him. I couldn’t let whoever had tortured Alfred Hitchcock to death know anybody had seen their work. So I just slipped back the way I’d come.

I didn’t leave tracks. I learned that the same place I learned that you don’t always get to bury your dead.

4

When I finally got back to the house that day, it was full of kids, like it always is in the afternoons during the week. Teenagers. Dolly’s just a magnet for them. Mostly girls, but any time you’ve got that many girls, there’s going to be some boys, too.

She knows how to have fun, my Dolly. Dolly used to be a Rockette, and she can
tell
some stories, believe me. But what she’s best at is listening. I know that for a fact. I’ve told Dolly things I never told anyone else. I had to do that before I asked her to marry me—she had a right to know what she was getting if she said yes.

But there’s a lot of stuff I never told Dolly, not out loud. Not because I wanted to keep them a secret. Dolly’s got this … I don’t know the word for it, exactly, but she feels things inside her that
other
people are feeling. I wouldn’t ever want Dolly to have some of the feelings I have.

Maybe that’s why those kids are always talking to her. Not like some guidance counselor, but like she’s the kind of aunt you trust, the kind who’d never rat you out to your folks, no matter what you told her.

She’s always teaching those kids something, like how to stitch up those crazy costumes they’re wearing out in public today. And they’re always teaching
her
stuff, too. Like how to work her cell phone with her thumbs to send messages. She showed me one of those messages one time—it was like it was in a different language. When she tried to explain it to me, I told her I didn’t care about stuff like that.

I don’t … well, I don’t dislike kids, exactly, but I don’t have anything to say to them. And I’m not interested in anything they’ve got to say, either. What could they know at their age?

The kids are used to me staying in my workshop in the basement, and they never bother me when I’m down there. Dolly doesn’t have a lot of rules in her house, but the ones she has, you better follow, or you’re eighty-sixed. Like bringing drugs or booze into her house. First time, it’s two weeks. If there’s a next time, it’s your last.

I’ve actually got
two
places of my own. The basement, and what Dolly calls my den. She fixed it up real fine. It’s got a big dark red leather easy chair, and a flat-screen TV with earphones, so I can watch the news without the racket from all those kids bothering me. One wall is nothing but bookshelves. The others have my terrain maps, from different places I’ve been. And a big porthole window, so I can see right out into the yard.

Some days, I’d be sitting there and Alfred Hitchcock would pace right past that window.

6

Every once in a while, a couple of the boys will wander back to the den. If my door’s open, they know they can just walk right in. Sometimes, girls come in there, too.

The boys always want to talk about Vietnam. That was my mistake, I guess, but we never could have bought the house Dolly wanted if it wasn’t for me saying I was a vet, and showing them the papers to prove it. A town this size, especially nestled away in a cove of its own, word gets around.

“Did you ever kill anyone?” That’s their favorite question.

I always tell them the truth and lie at the same time. “Yes,” I would always tell them, “but that’s what war is. I never killed anyone who wasn’t trying to kill me at the same time.”

They think I was infantry. That’s what it says on my papers. No Special Forces, no Airborne Ranger, just your basic grunt.

That’s all a lie, too. I was in Vietnam, all right, but way after the war. And a lot of other places, too. But I never wore a uniform, and I never carried dog tags.

“Does it make you mad, when people say they’re against the war?” they’d want to know. They meant that mess in Afghanistan—the one that spilled back over from Iraq. Some of their relatives had told them stories, about how it hurt them to be fighting for their country and be hated for doing it.

“It doesn’t make me angry,” I always tell them. And that part’s the truth.

“My father says Jane Fonda was a traitor,” one of them said, once. I could see he was trying to get me going.

“I can see where he’d think that,” I answered.

“But do
you
think that?” one of the girls asked. At that age, they’re a lot sharper than boys.

“It’s not people like me who matter,” I told them. “It’s people like you.”

“How come?”

“Because the only way anyone listens to someone like Jane Fonda is when people treat them like they’re important. You get famous enough, you start to think you’re special. If someone’s a big enough movie star, journalists ask them questions about stuff they don’t know anything about, because their
fans
want to know what a celebrity thinks.

“Jane Fonda was never a soldier. She wasn’t a political scientist, or a historian. And she sure was no expert on Southeast Asia. But if she calls a press conference, everybody shows up. That’s all that happened.”

“That’s true!” one of the other girls said, backing me up. A tough-looking little freckle-face with big owl glasses, she looked
like she was used to standing her ground. “Once I saw Britney Spears on TV. They were asking her about global warming. I’ll bet her idea of global warming is when the air-conditioning breaks.”

I caught a glimpse of Dolly smiling at me over the girl’s shoulder. I treasure how that makes me feel.

7

The morning after the day I found Alfred Hitchcock, I told Dolly I was driving up to the city. There’s always some little things I need for my projects, and she knows I’d never buy anything over the Internet. I asked her if she wanted me to bring back anything for her and she said what she always does: “A surprise!”

I stopped at the nursery first, picked up a whole mess of stuff for Dolly. A couple of gay guys own the place. They’re nuts about Dolly. I’m not sure how they feel about me, but that doesn’t matter. Not to them; not to me.

I never ask for anything in particular; they just load up whatever they think Dolly might like. We’ve got Asian lilies growing in big tubs I made out of cut-down barrels. I put some PVC to work as a liner, drilled a few drainage holes, and Dolly did the rest. We’ve got purple-and-white lilacs, what Dolly calls a butterfly bush. Fuchsia for the hummingbirds. Even some black bamboo—thin, strange-looking stalks with green blades for leaves, not the sharp-edged kind I’d felt before.

This time, I got Dolly some new orchids, for inside the house. Those were my own idea. I know I should have left the nursery stop for last, to keep everything fresh. But I had to get Dolly’s surprise done first—I wasn’t sure how late I’d be out looking for what I needed. So I misted everything down real good, and covered it all with a dark mesh tarp.

As it turned out, I had to drive quite a distance until I found
the place I wanted. They’ve got a lot of those places in a city about ninety miles away, and they all kind of look alike. Either the glass in the windows is all blacked out or there’s no windows at all.

The guy at the desk didn’t look up when I came in the door. That’s part of his job, same reason they don’t have security cameras in those places.

I found what I was looking for easy enough—there was a big selection.

I paid for what I bought the same way I paid for Dolly’s plants. I don’t have any credit cards, and I don’t have a checking account.

Dolly didn’t say a word about how long I’d been gone. And she loved everything I brought back. I took the other stuff I’d bought down to my workshop.

8

I knew who he was. Just like I knew Alfred Hitchcock hadn’t been his first one.

I didn’t need his name, because I had his path. His kind, they always move in straight lines. You may not know where they’re going, but you always know where they’ve been.

The local paper keeps the crime reports on a separate page. Not big crimes, like an armed robbery or a murder. Around here, something like that’s so rare it would make headlines. The Crime Beat page is just a printout of the entire police blotter. Drunk driving takes up most of it, with some domestic violence sprinkled in. Lately, a lot of meth busts, too. But you also see things like shoplifting, disorderly conduct, urinating in public … any petty little thing you could get arrested for.

The library has a complete archive, going all the way back for years and years. I read three years’ worth. Found seven little notices that qualified: five “animal cruelties”—no details; it wasn’t that kind of newspaper—and two fires they called “arson, unsolved.”

After I marked the locations on my close-terrain map, I could see they were all within a two-and-a-half-mile area. You wouldn’t need a car to cover that much ground, no matter where you started from.

I started leaving the door of my den open all the time, even when I wasn’t around.

Under the bookshelves, there’s a cabinet. It has a lock built into it, but I sometimes forget to use it. You can tell that by looking—the key would still be in the lock, sticking out.

There’re magazines in there now. All kinds, from
Soldier of Fortune
to
Playboy
to the stuff I bought on that last visit to the city.

It took a couple of weeks for one of those new ones to go missing. Whoever took it would never notice that I had removed the staples and replaced them with a pair of wire-thin transmitters.

Those transmitters were real short-range, but I was sure I wouldn’t need much. I knew he was close.

9

Dolly was asleep when I slipped out that night. Rascal was awake, but he kept his mouth shut. He gave me a look, so I’d know he wasn’t sleeping on the job.

When I picked up the signal, I didn’t try to track it to the exact house—I wasn’t dressed for that kind of risk. All I really needed was the general area, anyway. The library had a city directory, and every school yearbook, too.

The high school was closed for the summer. There was no security guard. The alarm system was probably older than me.

The guidance counselor’s office wasn’t even locked.

I could tell it was a woman’s office without even turning on my fiber-optic pin light. Whoever she was, she kept her file cabinets locked. Cost me an extra fifteen seconds.

Jerrald had a thick file. He’d been evaluated a number of times.
I kept seeing stuff like “attachment disorder.” I skipped over the flabby labels and went right to the stone foundation they built those on—the boy had been torturing animals since he was in the second grade.

The counselors wrote that Jerrald was “acting out.” Or “crying for help.” Some mentioned “conduct disorder.” Some talked about medications.

To read what they wrote, you’d think they knew what they were talking about. Every one of his “behaviors” always had some explanation.

But I knew what Jerrald was doing.

Practicing.

10

The counselors had done all kinds of things for Jerrald. Individual therapy. Group therapy. Medication.

The most recent report said he had been making real progress. Jerrald was keeping a blog. I knew what that was from those kids Dolly always had around—a kind of diary they keep on their computers, so other people can see it.

I read some of Jerrald’s stuff the counselor had printed out. Torture-rape-murder. The counselor said that the blog was a good outlet for Jerrald; a “safe place for him to vent.”

Jerrald’s English teacher said his writing showed real promise.

I knew what promises he was going to keep.

I left the school the same way I’d left Alfred Hitchcock’s body in the woods.

11

You never work angry—that could get you killed. The best way to keep anger out of your blood is to always do it by the numbers.
First, secure the perimeter. By August, I knew Jerrald’s parents were going on vacation. To Hawaii. They were taking his little sister with them, but not Jerrald. He was eighteen, more than old enough to leave on his own for a couple of weeks.

I don’t know whose idea that was. Or, I guess, whose idea they
thought
it was.

12

The newspapers said Jerrald must have been building some kind of bomb in his room. A pretty serious one, too—it blew out the whole back of his house, where his bedroom was.

They brought in the FBI. Anytime a high school kid gets caught with heavy explosives, they figure it for a terrorist plot. If that doesn’t pan out, they look for a Columbine connection.

It was the FBI that told the local TV people the bomb was probably a crude, homemade device. “Very simplistic,” their expert said. “You can get instructions how to build one on the Internet.”

They printed parts of Jerrald’s blog in the papers, and the Columbine connection was all over it. He was obviously a very disturbed young man, most probably the target of school bullying.

13

The town had a big funeral for him. A lot of kids were crying. Dolly went too; some of the kids really wanted her there.

I didn’t go. I was out in the deep woods giving Alfred Hitchcock a proper burial. The way he would have wanted it.

for Zak

“Don’t put that on!” the gray man driving the generic-looking gray sedan hissed at the much younger man in the passenger seat.

“The boss said—”

“What the boss said was, I’m in charge.”

“Yeah, but—”