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Geordie Karp hurt people and manipulated them because they weren’t real to him. He acted as if he were human, but he was a monster.

While I watched, he stood to greet a woman with long hair and long nails whose floor-length leather coat had what looked like solid silver buttons, to match her silver jewelry. It was plain, from the way their bodies asked before touching—a pause, a raised eyebrow, a you-first gesture—that they were almost strangers. What plans did he have for her? Would she let him? It didn’t really matter. She was young and strong and capable of walking away if she didn’t like it, as Tammy should have done. I was more interested in their plans for dinner. They ordered cocktails, then asked for menus. They examined the menus halfheartedly and I thought for a moment they might swallow their drinks and leave, go back to his loft, and get something delivered, but then the woman shrugged, and Karp nodded, and I heard them place their order: salad and entrée and a bottle of merlot. They would be here at least another hour. I paid and left.

Elevator locks are a more difficult breed to replace than common dead bolts, and Karp had had no reason to bother once Tammy’s key was returned to him. I slid the copied key into the lock and turned. It worked.

On the way up, I unclipped the panel covering the light in the ceiling and looked for a camera. Nothing. When the doors opened I stepped out and sent the elevator back down.

The loft was as I remembered—rich carpet, polished floors,and stark brick support pillars all brilliantly lit, even with no one at home—only now wherever I looked I saw that unfeeling mind at work, controlling, manipulating, hiding.

I started in the most obvious place: the office. Karp’s laptop was out of its leather bag and connected to the printer. I turned it on, but got a password screen. Passwords take time. I could come back to it. The bag held nothing but pens, a notepad, and two cell phone batteries. No interesting papers left in the photocopier. I turned to the stacks of videotapes labeled
Gateways Mall, Champaign, IL, cam #22, 3/27/98
or
Courvoisier St., Mobile, AL, cam. #07, 8/19/00
. Ran a few at random. All what they purported to be. No surprise: the one I was after would be hidden somewhere more personal, like the bedroom. Nonetheless, I checked every drawer and cupboard before moving on.

Finding the camera was easy. It was behind the mirror on the wall at the foot of the bed, and hooked up to a sophisticated editing deck. Sophisticated for analog. I checked camera and deck: no tape. I moved on. Nothing in the drawers, or bedside cabinets, or closets. Nothing under the bed or between the mattresses. Nothing between the curtains and the blank, silvered windows. Eyes and souls and windows. Fifteen minutes gone. No tapes or camera in the linen cupboard or medicine cabinet or behind the toilet, nothing in the shower. I would have moved faster but it was not part of my plan for Karp to know anyone had been here. In the living room I peered behind books, lifted paintings from the wall, pulled aside rugs: no cutout boards, no hidden safes. The bronzes were too heavy to move; the mirrors were all one-way glass with nothing lurking beneath. On to the kitchen, where I found nothing in the freezer, or rice and flour bins, or even the garbage. Twenty-five minutes gone, and my heart was pumping easily and my breath coming smooth as cream. I stopped, and straightened, and stood by a support pillar in the center of the huge loft, thinking.

I slid the VCR from its shelf beneath the TV in the living room and traced the cables: no satellite, cable, antenna, or computer connections. I found the electrical box in the hallway by the elevator and flipped the breakers one by one. No circuits running power to any unexplained outlets. Unless he had a camera and recorder running on battery power, there were no more recording devices hooked up. Just the tape, then. Or tapes. It seemed unlikely that there would be only one.

According to Tammy, the loft was his private haven; no casual friends or business associates were ever invited over. So the tapes wouldn’t have to be secure, merely concealed. He probably used them in the same way he used his tapes of shoppers: to study, over and over, and learn from. They would be readily accessible. The hiding place would be obvious, if you knew what to look for.

I closed my eyes and pictured the floor plan, placing the furniture, the lights, the rugs and art, then examined the picture slowly and methodically from every angle. Nothing unusual. I imagined the loft as a whole, its proportions, the roof with its exposed iron girders, its brick-clothed support pillars—and smiled. I laid my hands on the pillar in front of me. Why would he have covered a cast-iron support in brick when he’d left the girders exposed?

I got a ladle from the kitchen and began banging the pillars one by one, and found the hollow one on my third try. I popped open the false front.

There were five shelves. Only the bottom three were filled: a small, matte-black box, a slim sheaf of papers in a file folder, and two rows of tapes. Like his work tapes, these were neatly labeled:
Anthony, April, Cody, Fiona
… Alphabetical order. No
Strange Woman Who Took Tammy Away
, no
Unidentified Blond Intruder
. I found
Tammy
and took it to the office, where I turned on the video unit, put the tape in, and hesitated.

Have you ever seen yourself having sex? You don’t look human. You are a thing… But I wouldn’t put it past Karp to have one last joke on anyone who found these tapes, and I had to be sure. I pressed PLAY.

If I hadn’t known what to expect, it would have taken me a moment to work out what I was seeing because the body, naked and bound and writhing, and observed close-up, does not move in familiar ways. He must have had remote control on the camera, because the focus zoomed in and out; one minute it was a close-up of a belly and right thigh, slippery with sweat and other things, looking white and enormous and inhuman, the next she was hanging there, about eight feet away. I fast-forwarded until the hanging, writhing figure moved its head and I saw its face. It was Tammy.

My hand shook slightly when I pulled the tape out and put it in my jacket pocket. No one but a lover should ever see such an expression, and then only fleetingly, yet here it was, captured forever.

I went back into the living room. Twenty-two tapes. I carried them eleven at a time into the kitchen. Only six would fit in the microwave at once. I tried the first batch on thirty seconds, picked one at random,
Jean
—who were you? what dreams of yours did he destroy?—and trotted it through to the office, where I played it. Nothing but a snowstorm. Perfect. Back in the kitchen I did the same for the other three batches, then carried them all to the living room and put them back on the shelves in the right order.

Forty-five minutes gone.

The box was made of steel, and locked. I tilted it gently and recognized the sliding thump. A handgun. I put it back. Then I took out the papers.

A seven-year-old girl with soft, toffee brown eyes and sharp baby teeth beamed at me from the head-and-shoulders photo. Her hair, cut just longer than her ears, was the color of rich, fertile mud, the kind you can’t help plunging your hands in. I turned it over. The next sheet was typed. It had a bar code label at top right, a miniature black-and-white version of the bigger color photo on the left, and a large, florid signature at the bottom. It was written in Spanish, a medical report of a seven-year-old girl, one Luz Bexar, healthy and reasonably nourished, good teeth, good eyes, virgo intacta, no intestinal parasites, small scar above right elbow, vaccinations given on the following dates. Behind that, with the same bar code at the top right, was an adoption certificate, again in Spanish, with two signatures: the rounded, laborious letters of someone who doesn’t write very often, and George G. Karp, of New York, New York. There was a catalogue of foster families in various parts of the country, followed by a receipt acknowledging Karp’s payment and confirming his choice of the Carpenter residence in the town of Plaume City, Arkansas. After that there were progress reports dated at six-monthly intervals. I learned that she now spoke English fluently, had an excellent memory for rote learning as evidenced by progress with the Bible, was nimble—enclosed one embroidery sample—modest, demure, and clean. A medical update was stapled to the latest report: she was now well nourished, and still virgo intacta. The picture on the Mexican passport was the same one on the medical report; the visitor’s visa to the United States had long since expired. There were two more pictures, one taken a year ago, one about three months ago. In the first, her hair had grown and lay about her shoulders in a wild swirl, her baby teeth were gone, and the light in her eyes did not fit with “demure” or “modest.” My hand was now shaking so much that I had to lay the second photo on the floor: her hair was neat and her eyes wary. I didn’t read the rest.

What I’d told Tammy was true. I was not in the revenge business; I was not the universal protector of the weak. I was only here to get the tape.

Fifty minutes gone. I put everything back in the folder, put the folder back on the shelf, closed the false front, turned away, then turned back and opened it again. What Geordie did to adults who knew the ways of the world was one thing, but this was another.

While I fed Luz’s documents into Karp’s photocopier one sheet at a time, a process made slow and clumsy by my gloves, I listened for the elevator. Six months ago I wouldn’t have worried: if Karp had returned before I was done, it would have been a simple matter to disable him—a palm strike to the forehead would knock him unconscious for thirty seconds and leave very little in the way of a bruise—and depart before the police arrived. There would be no fingerprints through which I could be traced, and my description would mean nothing to New York police. The upright and outraged citizen—who might be famous in his own field but almost certainly was unknown outside it—wouldn’t even have a bruise to point to, no sign of forced entry, and nothing disturbed; they would write him off as a kook. Until six months ago, everything had always gone the way I wanted it to; anything that hadn’t, I had fixed, or walked away from with a shrug, and if anyone had had a few bones broken as a result, what of it?

Violence is usually a tool, like any other, but occasionally it is much more. Occasionally it takes me to a place where time and light seem to stretch, and the air is tinged with blue. In that blue place the test of bone and muscle becomes a pavane where everyone but me is locked into preordained steps while I dance lightly, mind clean as a razor: faster, denser, more alive. There I exist wholly as myself, wholly outside the rules, and the world is stripped to its essence: clean and clear and simple.

But I don’t go to the blue place now. I avoid every temptation. Last time I had forgotten I had a gun: the mistake that got Julia killed. I wanted to be out before Karp came back. I put the warm photocopies in my inside pocket with the tape, and the original papers back on the shelves. The false front clicked shut, and everything was as it had been. I took the ladle back to the kitchen and opened the drawer from which I’d taken it—and was almost overwhelmed by the urge to smash every glass and plate I could find. I shook with it. I wanted to tear the doors from the cupboards and break them over my knee, wanted to feel the heft of that cleaver and swing it hugely at the antique dresser in the bedroom, wanted to punch my fist through the screen of his monitor, to throw the copier against the fake brick support columns until the place was reduced to shards and splinters, and torn fabric glittering with scattered glass.

I used the elevator key, flattened myself against the wall to one side, and waited, the plaster cool and hard at the back of my head. The elevator rose slowly, stopped. I stepped away from the wall: empty.

I got in. Breathed. My hands uncurled. The cage lurched slightly as it descended, and the muscles wrapped around my femur and spine flexed. I breathed, in and out, and gradually my muscles relaxed. Everything had gone well, I told myself. There would be time to pack, get to the airport, and have a drink while I waited for the last plane to North Carolina. Everything had gone well. My blood pulsed evenly, and every joint felt oiled and smooth.

When the elevator opened, the only people on the street were two men entering the café where I’d eaten earlier: one of those strange city moments where, for an instant, it seems as though humanity has been swept from the earth. I stood for a moment, to adjust to the dark and the now-definite autumn chill, then turned to walk north up West Broadway, and had taken perhaps ten steps when behind me I heard the laughter of a woman and the answering “Yes, on this block” of a man as they came around the corner from Broome Street. I shouldn’t have turned, but, oh, I did, and the streetlight caught on the reddish gold of Karp’s hair as he leaned in towards the woman, and the light slid across her hair, too, as she tossed her head and the soft brown wing of it swang past her cheek, just as Julia’s had, and I saw the way he looked at her, and wondered if, in some alternate world, I would stand by and do nothing while another Julia talked and laughed and trusted this man—wondering if maybe she loved him and whether he would take care of her— while silently he calculated and jeered and rubbed his hands as she let down her guard, little by little. And then my muscles moved and I was upon them, and “Run!” I spat between bared teeth to the woman, and she did, and I turned to Karp.

This is not the blue place. It is a rough roar in my ears, the need to damage this man heaving like volcanic mud in my belly, swelling through my veins until I shake all over—the long, rolling shudders of the ground before it splits open. I hit him across the throat, and with a small cough he can no longer breathe. I pull him into the elevator and throw him against the metal wall, and he starts slipping to the floor only half conscious but I hold him up with one hand while the doors close. If I had a good knife I would hang him up by the ankles and gralloch him, slit him from throat to pubis and watch his guts fall out in a soft heap. I would wipe my left cheek then my right with the flat of the bloody knife, and begin. I don’t have a knife. I have my hands; they are very strong.

I growl as I hurt him; the noise spills from me as harsh and hot as gravel shoveled from a furnace. By contrast, the noise bone and flesh makes is mundane, dull and sullen as an uncooked roast thrown on the chopping board. Even when teeth break, their sharp snap is muted by the gush of blood—the same blood splashed on my face and coating my own teeth. A human arm coming free of its socket makes a deep creak, more like a wooden trestle under the weight of a train than a chicken wing being twisted off.

It is a few minutes after the doors open in the loft that I drag him out onto the polished floor. He slides easily in his own blood. I am covered in blood, and slick with spittle. He mews a little, then is quiet. I try to think but my brain is still thick and hot and swollen. I rub my forehead, then see my bloody foot-prints.

I take my shoes off and step onto a rug. That’s better, but I’m not sure why. I stare at the red tracks. Tracks. Hunters.