A Cruel Season for Dying (48 page)

She was tired, physically exhausted with this ten-day roller coaster since Lucia Mancuso had died. She rubbed her eyes, looking
at Michael across the space of the desk. He might have been a million miles away.

“Ten days,” she said to him in the silence.

“What?” He lifted his head.

“It’s ten days since Lucia. There were twelve days between Pinot and Kerry.”

“And it was two weeks after Westlake before he killed Pinot.” Darius’s voice was flat, sounding as tired as she felt. “There’s
no pattern. He killed the first three in less than a week.”

“I know,” she said. “I just can’t help wondering when he’ll strike again.”

He didn’t comment, going back to whatever he was reading, sinking in, oblivious.

She continued to watch him for a while. He was a natural speed-reader, plowing quickly through boxes of files. She imagined
him devouring case law in just the same way. He would pass the bar easily, she decided, if he ever bothered to take it.

“I want to get through everything,” he said, looking up at her again. “But you go ahead.” He made the effort to smile. “You
look tired.”

“You’re telling me to go home, Michael?”

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“No, you’re right.” She gave in without a fight. “I am tired, and I’m not doing any good here. But I would like to look at
my notes.”

“Sorry. I don’t usually forget things. Here …” He wrote some numbers on Jimmy’s memo pad. “You can stop by my apartment. This
is the code for the elevator.” He tore off the paper. “You know where I keep the key.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Call me if you come up with anything … or if you just want to talk. I don’t care how late.”

She reached for the note, felt his fingers wrap around her wrist. He pulled her toward him across the desk. That thrill of
fear with his kiss.

The odor of raw wood and stale cigarette smoke assaulted her as soon as she opened the door. In the half darkness, the white
walls of the living room seemed unfixed, undulating like sheets of clouded water. She flipped the light switch. Her notes
were just where she’d left them on the coffee table. She began to gather up the papers but stopped midway, turning toward
the dark eye of the long hallway. Hanae’s words teased.
After Margot left, he’d sworn never to go into the room again.

She would have liked to have been above such petty intrigue, yet she wanted to see the room Michael had once shared with his
wife. She left the notes with the key on the table and moved in search of a solid face of closed door.

She paused outside his workroom. She could see wood stacked in neat piles, tools shimmering like trophies from shelves on
the walls. She’d seen the models, since the room he slept in was next to the workroom. She walked in, pressing the button
on a fluorescent lamp on his desk. The cold light fell across an open text, onto a glossy photograph of the French cathedral
of Sainte Chapelle. Scattered around the book were bold renderings of the church, notations and measurements scribbled in
the margins. On his worktable was the model. A small architectural puzzle. She ran a finger around the curved lip of an arch.
For a moment she thought of Michael’s hands working the wood, playing the surfaces like a musical instrument. Then she thought
of
his hands playing her. What he did to her in bed was something less than making love, but a great deal more than simple fucking.
She set the model down and shut off the lamp.

It was the last room on the left. She turned the door’s brass handle. A thin band of urban neon slipped in through a break
in the drapes, slashing across one wall, creating a bright green scar on the face of a painting. The walls were the color
of ripe eggplant, the wood floors crisscrossed with Orientals. A carved four-poster bed, thick with pillows, stood high off
the floor. A brocaded chaise stretched in a corner, an abandoned fashion magazine nearby. Everything had a baroque quality,
at odds with the stark simplicity of the rest of the apartment.

On a dressing table perfume bottles glinted. A silver frame stood to one side. Moving closer, she lifted a black-and-white
photograph. A younger Michael Darius stared back at her. The smile he wore never reached his eyes. The eyes, ancient even
then.

Suddenly she felt uncomfortable, guilty for what she was doing. Unaccountably, the hairs on the back of her neck rose. The
hiss caused her to drop the photograph. And in the last moments before the gas filled her lungs, she saw his dark reflection
tripled in the panels of the dressing table’s mirror.

She came to, bound and gagged, staring up at him, lying flat against the cushions of Michael’s sofa. He was nude. Tall and
lean. But not frail. She remembered the viselike grip of his latexed hand as it had closed over her face.

He appeared to be young, although it was impossible to tell. She could only imagine his human face. Behind the gas mask, he
resembled a kamikaze pilot from an old newsreel, the rubber hose curling down like an esophagus from his nose to the tank
at his waist.

“Dr. Wilhelmina French.” His voice was hollow sounding, filtered through the tubing.

Her eyes shifted from the mask to her opened wallet in his gloved hands, to the remaining contents of her handbag scattered
on the floor.

“I apologize for any discomfort.” Insanely, he sounded sincere. “But some things are unavoidable.” He shrugged his shoulders
and touched
the valve on the oxygen tank, making a slight adjustment. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

She twisted her head, fighting the tape over her mouth.

“I’m sorry I can’t remove that. Or the restraints. You understand, of course. But, still, I wouldn’t want you to be in pain.
Is the sofa comfortable?”

It had been the odor of the leather that had registered first in her reviving consciousness. That, and the strange halting
sound of his breathing. She focused on him again. He seemed more humanoid than human.

He set her wallet down, picking up her folder of notes from the coffee table. He glanced at its heading; then with the tip
of a finger, he reached and found a spot on her cheek. He bent over. The breathing hose brushed against her shoulder.

He stepped away from the sofa. “You know who I am?” His voice gurgled inside the rubber as he rose to his full height.

She nodded her head.

“I’m an interesting specimen, Dr. French, am I not?” His laugh reverberated inside the mask. He glanced down and began examining
her notes. “But you do not understand.” He looked up. “I do not kill them. I release them.”

He came closer and squatted. “I do for them what they are unable to do for themselves. I awaken them to who they are.”

Her eyes widened, asking,
Who are they?

She somehow knew he frowned behind the mask. “I know it’s been confusing—five men, one little girl. But they are all the same.”
He shook his head. “Human words are so inadequate.”

She raised her brows.

He backed away again, withdrawing a page from the folder. “I see you have made some interesting observations, Dr. French.”

She fixed her eyes on him.

He read aloud from her transcribed notes. “‘A serial killer seems not to be able to distinguish himself as a separate entity.
Cannot distinguish himself from other human beings. Cannot even distinguish himself from things. There are no boundaries.
Bodies are objects. The act of murder is the disposition of flesh, not the taking of life.’” He stopped his recitation.

Her eyes remained on him.

“Does not apply, Dr. French.” He allowed the page he’d been holding to slip to the floor.

He moved to stand before the window, where night fell hungrily. The room close to dark. He walked to a bag he’d left near
the sofa and reached in for a sealed package. Quickly he tore into the plastic sheathing and pulled out a syringe.

“I meant it when I said I wouldn’t want you to be in pain, Dr. French.”

The office was quiet, and dark with the fluorescents turned off overhead. Darius closed the folder on the file he’d been reading
and pushed it out of the yellow circle made by the cantilevered desk lamp. He relaxed against the chair back, tilting it into
shadow. His hands rubbed at his eyes, tested the stubble on his cheeks. He was avoiding the squad room, and his coffee mug
had been empty for an hour. He didn’t want to see anyone. Didn’t want to talk.

He bent down and pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk. The bottle of whiskey rumbled amid Sakura’s tea things. He set
it down with a glass and poured a healthy double, which burned liquid fire all the way down to his stomach. Food was what
he needed. Food and sleep. But he didn’t want to stop and break the continuity he’d established. It was a fact that the wide
net cast by most serial-murder investigations took in the killer early on. The problem was seeing the important details amidst
the sheer mass of data.

He poured another thumb into the glass. That weirdness last night in his apartment was a symptom that he was becoming obsessed.
He was in danger of letting this case get to him in the same way that Hudson had, with that sense of something half recognized,
some substrata of knowledge that nagged at him.

He sipped on the whiskey—this one had to last—and angled the lamp upward to the blackboard, to the close-ups of the victims
that were tacked around the frame. He ignored the faces, permitting himself to see only anonymous white flesh. The glyphlike
ash markings, broken bull’s-eyes on the chests, looked like purpling bruises.

The thought was a charge that jerked him around in the chair, to the console that held Jimmy’s books. In moments he had readjusted
the light and was rifling through the standard text on forensics for the picture that had finally been triggered like a ticking
bomb in his brain.

He almost laughed when he found it.

Darius relived it through the sudden haze. Rushing out of Jimmy’s office, thinking that there was a trail to be followed now.
Accident reports to be gathered. Cross-checks to be run with the witness and canvass lists. He had been eager to get home.

He’d wanted to think about it all some more before he talked to Jimmy. And Willie. He’d been hoping she might be waiting in
his apartment.