Gray Matter (35 page)

Dog lunged forward, slashing with the knife. Again she threw up her arm to protect herself. He felt the knife connect with the flesh of her forearm, slide through, glance off bone. The bitch must have felt the cut, felt the searing heat of it, because she froze in place, her arm raised and dripping with hot blood. He came in low with his other fist, felt her blood splash onto his arm, coppery-smelling drops like hot wax, and landed his blow in her stomach. He saw the grimace on her face before she doubled over. Pulling his left arm back before it could be trapped, he swung his right hand, the one holding the knife, high in the air and brought the edge of his tightly curled fist down on the back of her head. She crumpled at his feet.

She swung her arm wildly and felt the knife biting deep into her forearm. It felt as though a hot poker had been pressed against her arm, opening a gash and burning down through layers of skin and flesh. Blood welled from the wound, and she was mesmerized by it. She didn’t see the next blow coming, only felt it, as his fist connected with her stomach like an explosion in her mid-section. Doubled over, she felt an impact on the back of her skull, and as blackness curled around her, she sadly let go of her hope of survival.

Dog stood panting over the fallen woman as images whirled in his mind, wordless sequences of cornering, biting, the shallow speeding heartbeat of his prey racing against the thudding of his own heart, taking hold of the warm body, feeling the blood pulse beneath the skin.

Lost in the sensations, Dog stood until his breathing slowed and Pauley Mac put the knife back in the sheath and checked the woman sprawled on the floor.

Not dead. Good.

S
CHULTZ SAT IN HIS
car, watching moths circling the gaslight on the lawn next door to Hampton’s house. Something nagged at him, tugged at his thoughts, concerning what he had found at the house.

Or not found at the house.

Schultz sat up straight. The carrying case was missing. If the computer simulations were correct, there should be a large case with feet on the bottom that matched the measurements of the indentations in the carpet. Schultz closed his eyes and carefully walked through the house again, mentally this time, peering into each room. He saw no case, unless it was inside one of the boxes he hadn’t had time to search, or in the basement.

There were several possibilities. The simulations could be wrong; maybe no such case existed. The killer might store the case elsewhere, such as in a rented garage or self-storage bin. He might have disposed of the case, weighted it down and dumped it in the Mississippi.

Or the case could be missing because it was in use.

That prospect propelled him into action. He called dispatch and requested an APB on one Peter M. Hampton, Caucasian male, thirty-five years old, five feet seven inches, one hundred forty pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, driving a late model red pickup, Missouri license plate BADDOG, suspect wanted for questioning in multiple murders. He felt a powerful urge to get moving, so he didn’t wait for Dave and Anita. They could handle this scene by themselves.

Move. Go.

He drove off, hoping that his hunch was wrong.

PJ opened her eyes and the world began to spin. She closed them, and gradually the spinning stopped, but the pain in her arm and the back of her head didn’t go away. She couldn’t move her arms and legs, so she floated for a minute or two, just a torso with a terrible headache. She heard a door close, then heard humming nearby, close behind her. The “Star-Spangled Banner.” A stab of fear unsettled her stomach, and she fought to keep from throwing up.

After the nausea passed, she took inventory of her body. Her arms and legs were tied, and she was sitting on something hard. Her T-shirt and bra were gone, but she was still wearing her shorts. Her breasts ached as though they had been mauled. The thought of him pulling off her clothes and squeezing her breasts while she was unconscious was hard to take, and she tasted the bile in her throat again. Her right arm hurt, but the terrible freshness of the agony was gone, replaced by a throbbing pain. Her arm was tightly bound in some kind of cloth. She could feel wetness seeping slowly into the cloth, and knew it was her blood. The back of her head felt as though someone had cracked open a coconut on it. She opened her eyes again, just slits this time, and was gratified to see that the world stayed in one place.

Humming. She knew where she was and what was happening to her. But she was still alive. She closed her eyes and thought of Thomas sleeping with Megabite curled on his stomach; of light glinting off Mike’s bald head as he bent to put the lasagna pan in the oven; of Schultz dashing to her rescue when she was startled in Burton’s apartment, his belly preceding him through the door and quivering after the rest of him stopped moving; of standing side by side with him sponging the ketchup letters from her kitchen wall; of Thomas and Winston looking at dinosaurs on the computer, Megabite lazily pawing at the moving forms on the screen.

Suddenly there was cold water splashed in her face, and she gasped with the shock of it and shook her head. The shaking made her woozy, as if she was at sea during a hurricane, rising and falling as huge waves traveled beneath her boat.

“Awake, I see,” said a soft voice near her ear. “Good. All the best ones stayed awake.”

A figure came into her field of vision. It was the cook, but with a subtle change: he was the one in control now, the one with the power, not just a man flipping burgers or pushing a mop.

She was in the kitchen, tied up, straddling a chair.

“My name’s Pauley Mac,” he said, extending his right hand as if to shake hers in greeting. “Oops,” he said, pulling back his hand, “I guess you’re not quite up to that at the moment.” He used his left hand to clasp his own right hand, and pumped up and down enthusiastically. “Hello,” he said in a feminine voice that parodied her own, “I’m Doctor Penelope Fucking Gray. Glad to meet you.

“Now that we’ve met, I’d like to ask you a few questions before we get down to business,” Pauley Mac said in his own low-pitched, flat voice. As he spoke, he unpacked items from a large black case onto the kitchen table, deliberately within PJ’s view. Plastic bags, which he removed from the case, turned over thoughtfully in his hands a couple of times, and then replaced. A cloth-wrapped set of sharp tools, whittling knives and picks for fine work. A plastic-wrapped bundle of fresh clothing. Finally, and most horrifyingly, a machete with a scarred handle and a foot-long blade that glinted and flashed sinuously under the light as though it were moving under its own power. His gloved hands lingered over the cutting tools and then traced the length of the cleaver affectionately, as PJ would pet a cat from nose to tail-tip.

PJ’s mind worked furiously. She sensed that while he was willing to talk, he wouldn’t pick up that machete. If she could keep him talking, she could stay alive longer. And suddenly every minute was precious. “Call me PJ,” she said, finding her voice and marveling that it was far steadier than she felt.

“Is that what your man friend calls you, your Detective Leo Schultz? Is that what he calls you when he’s sticking it to you, when you’re begging him to fuck you so hard you’ll split open, when you have your legs wrapped around his ass? Does he call you PJ then?”

Fear took over PJ’s thought processes again, and for a moment she couldn’t speak. She had to think, had to get a handle on how to talk to this man. This murderer.

“He’s just a friend of mine, a co-worker, actually. We just work together. He calls me Doc.”

“Doc, huh? I kind of like that. Doc. I think I’ll call you Doc, too. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Of course not,” she said. “You can call me anything you like.” He hummed some more as he rubbed his whittling knives on a polishing cloth. Her arm throbbed, and she felt a warm drop run down her arm. The cloth tied around the wound must be saturated.

“What I want to know, Doc, is how you knew about the murders. I mean, the little things, the case and the plastic bags and all.”

She almost opened her mouth about the computer, then thought that he wouldn’t want to hear that. He wouldn’t want to know that his moves could be analyzed. Predicted.

“I’ve always been good at making up stories,” she said, working to keep the strain from her voice. “Even when I was a little girl. I could start with a bare story, just a sentence or two, and add all the details like I was seeing them, but it would only be in my mind.”

“You saying you made all those things up?”

PJ gulped. “Yes.”

There was a pause, then a strange noise. Pauley Mac was out other sight at the moment, and she couldn’t see his face, so at first she didn’t relate the sounds she was hearing to laughter. When she did realize that he was laughing, relief flooded through her. She had said the right things, at least so far.

“So you fooled everybody, did you?” he said. “They think you’re some kind of slick-as-snot Sherlock Holmes, and all along you were just keeping your ass out of the fire making things up. That’s a good one.”

“Don’t tell anybody, OK?” Her attempt at rapport fell flat. He went back to humming, and she worried about his next move. Suddenly he thrust his face into hers.

“Question number two: how did you know it was me?”

She could feel his breath on her face. It was hard to concentrate, but she had to say something. He expected an answer. Her professional instincts warned her away from the first thing that sprang to mind, which was his humming, the same humming as she had heard on the video tape. Then she thought of a way to test her theory that he was trying to acquire the skills of his victims.

“It…it was your painting, the one I saw at Millie’s. It’s very good. As good as Sheila Armor’s work.”

His face softened a little. “At least you can recognize true talent when you see it.”

“The way you do?”

“Yeah, I see the things that other people can do, and I figure I can do them just as well.”

“So you take classes?” PJ knew she was pushing it.

His benign expression melted away. “Cut the crap, Doc. We both know what I do.” He turned away from her. “I’m not a cannibal. You hear that, bitch? Cannibals are scum. What I do has nothing to do with being a cannibal.”

“I believe you. I never really thought that you were. I was just going along, you know, trying to keep my job.”

“Just so you know that.” He made an animal sound, a growl deep in his throat. It was the most chilling thing PJ had ever heard. “Now Dog might just do something like that,” he said, “if nobody was watching him.”

She wondered what he was doing behind her back. Her head hurt so badly she wished she could slip back into unconsciousness, but she knew she couldn’t do that. If she did, she wouldn’t wake up again. She licked her lips and decided to try a different approach.

“Tell me, are you interested in their personalities too, or do you just collect skills?” She tried to summon some professional detachment. “You’re really unique. I’d like to understand you a little better.”

“Don’t give me any of that shrink bullshit, bitch, or I’ll cut your head off one little slice at a time. I know about shrink talk. You just want to hear about the voices. They all do.”

She felt a hot pain, like a finger of fire tracing across the skin of her back, high on her right shoulder. Sickened and immobilized by the sudden pain, she realized that Pauley Mac was beginning to carve on her skin. Another streak of pain. Gasping, she fought back the blackness at the edge of her sight.

“What about your carvings, then,” she said desperately. “Tell me about the dog pictures. They’re done so well. You have real talent.”

Pauley Mac paused in his work. PJ took several deep breaths, hoping he would answer, hoping he would talk to her.

“Do you really think so?” he said. “None of my other guests have really appreciated them.”

PJ struggled to keep her voice under control as blood ran down her back and into the waistband of her shorts. She had to keep him talking. “I’ve never seen anything like them. Why did you choose a dog?”

“It’s kind of a self-portrait.” Another stroke. She tried to close off the pain, lock it in a little compartment in her brain. “I wasn’t planning to do a full job on you, Doc, but I just might change my mind. You’re fun to talk to. Mostly I get moaning, that sort of thing. You’re not part of this cycle, you know. You don’t by any chance play a musical instrument? Dance? Paint?”

PJ shook her head no, and regretted it as the room spun.

“No? Too bad. But then I’m done with this cycle anyway. Time to move on to something else.” He leaned forward over her back, and put his lips next to her ear. “I’ve already picked a new theme. You’ll be the first to know. It’s Childhood Innocence. Sad to say, you don’t qualify there, either.”

PJ tried to pull her thoughts together. There was something there, if she could just grasp it.
Voices. Guests. Self-portrait.

“This is a waste of time,” Pauley Mac said, suddenly irritable. His voice sounded odd. It was as if someone else were in the room and had just spoken for the first time. “Let’s get on with it. You don’t have to finish the carving. She’s not part of the cycle. She won’t be a guest.”

PJ realized that he was speaking to someone else, discussing her fate with someone whose voice she couldn’t hear.

Voices.

An idea burst upon her. It was far-fetched, but she had to try something. He had put down the carving tool and was about to pick up the machete.

“Sheila! I want to talk to Sheila,” she said, the words pouring out. “She’s one of your guests. I know she’s there. Sheila, I’m talking to you. Only you. Remember when we met in my office? We were friends, Sheila. We liked each other from the start.”

Pauley Mac hadn’t said anything, but his face showed…surprise? He hadn’t been aware that PJ and Sheila knew each other.

“I need your help now. Help me, Sheila,” she said pleadingly. She didn’t have to fake the desperation.

“Help me. Stop this man from killing me. Make him stop.”

Pauley Mac put his hands over his ears and pressed tightly. He wanted to shut out the bitch’s voice. He had to think, and her words were keeping him from thinking clearly.