Next Victim (17 page)

"No more postcards, Tess," he whispered behind the mask. "I’m sending you a message of a different kind."

Now he was home in his private room, his special sanctuary, staring at a wall covered with a collage of newspaper clippings, photos, and yellowed archival documents. One of the smallest items in the display was the one he most cherished—a black-and-white photo of his mother that he’d found in her high school yearbook. She had attended a small, private, fancy school for girls, a school catering to debutantes and heiresses. His mother had been both, until the first fruits of her germinating insanity had gotten her disinherited.

He had tracked down the yearbook in the school library and ripped out the crucial page, using exactly the same ruse Jack Nicholson had employed in
Chinatown
, a phony sneeze to cover the sound of tearing paper. Now she was on his wall of memories, or perhaps he should call it his wailing wall, a place to mourn the dead. Only in this case, it was his own death he came to mourn.

His mother had been just nineteen, a graduating senior, when the photo was taken. Melinda Davenport, later to be Mrs. Harrison Beckett. A pretty girl, austere and fine-featured and smooth-skinned. Looking at her, no one could guess that less than ten years later, in 1968, she would go insane.

After his mother had stopped living with them, his dad had warned him that someday she might try to get him to go with her, and that it would be dangerous to go. But when she’d visited him at recess, she hadn’t seemed dangerous. And he hated school, which was boring, and he hated recess even more, because he was never picked for any games. So when she’d asked if he wanted to go to the rodeo, he’d said yes.

But there hadn’t been any rodeo. There had been only miles of blurry back roads and the crazed repetition of a single song on an eight-track player, and she had hummed along with it in a furious nasal monotone.

"Na na na na na na na, na na na na na na naaa…"

By the time they reached the Howard Johnson’s in Alcomita, New Mexico, he hated her. He knew this one thing with certainty. He didn’t like to be scared, and she was scaring him very badly. If he’d had a gun, he would have shot her—
bang
, dead—and she wouldn’t have scared him anymore. When her back was turned, he even pretended to have a gun, and he pantomimed pulling the trigger and making his mother go away.

Bang
.

Dead.

Sometime in late morning, while a policeman talked through a bullhorn outside and the crazy song played on the portable phonograph, his mother filled the bathtub.

"You’re dirty," she said. "You need to be clean. You’re a very dirty boy, and you’ve caused me a lot of trouble."

He didn’t think he had caused any trouble. He had been quiet and good. But he did not protest, because he liked baths.

"Can I play with my submarine?" he asked. The submarine was a plastic model he had taken to school for show-and-tell and had brought with him in the car.

She didn’t answer, just went on filling the tub.

When the bath was ready, he slipped out of his day-old clothes and eased into the hot water, taking his submarine with him. Outside, the policeman was saying something, but over the blare of the record player he couldn’t hear it. When the music started to bother him, he submerged, holding his breath, moving the toy sub underwater and imagining nautical adventures.

Needing air, he surfaced, and his mother was there.

She stood over the tub, and her face…her face was strange. It was not his mother’s face at all. There was no love in her eyes, not even any recognition. She looked at him as if he were a stranger.

"Mommy?" he whispered.

She did not move, did not blink.

"Wipe out," she said, and the gun bucked in her hand.

Mobius blinked, reliving it—the impact, the sudden inexplicable numbness. He touched his chest. Through the thin fabric of his shirt, he could feel the lump of scar tissue in the shape of a starfish, where the .38-caliber round had entered, and where the long ribbons of blood had come out.

His gaze switched from his mother’s photo to the central item in the collage—the entire front page, both above and below the fold, of the Albuquerque
Tribune
’s September 21, 1968, edition. A huge headline stretched over the multicolumn story.

"WIPE-OUT" IN ALCOMITA HOJO’S

A tense, hours-long standoff at the Howard Johnson’s motor inn in Alcomita came to an abrupt and tragic end at 12:20 P.M. when sheriff’s deputies heard two shots discharged inside the room where alleged kidnapper and former mental patient Melinda Ellen Beckett was holding her eight-year-old son…

Melinda Beckett had lost custody of the boy after her third hospitalization for mental illness. She was recently separated from her husband, Mr. Harrison Beckett, who had been raising their son alone. Mrs. Beckett is said to have become obsessed with violent, paranoid thoughts, and had twice been placed in restraints while institutionalized.

Sheriff’s deputies report that throughout the standoff Mrs. Beckett played the song "Wipe Out," an early 1960s hit for the Surfaris, on a portable phonograph. Deputies also found an eight-track tape containing the song in the dashboard tape player of Mrs. Beckett’s 1964 Buick Grand Sport.

Harrison Beckett, who arrived at the scene only minutes after the twin shootings, is described as being in a state of shock and is currently under medical care….

He would never leave medical care. Harrison Beckett was still in a hospital somewhere—Mobius had long since lost track of his father’s whereabouts, as the Wyoming bureaucracy shuttled him from one institution to another. He was an incurable patient, one who—in the quaint parlance of 1968—had suffered a "nervous breakdown." Quite simply, he had lost all contact with the outside world on that day in New Mexico.

Two parents, both crippled by mental illness. It was almost enough to make him doubt his own sanity.

The other items on his wall were less sensational. There was his birth certificate, obtained from a Casper, Wyoming, hospital. Some of the medical records compiled during his long recuperation from the gunshot, the months of physical and psychological therapy. A snapshot of his triumphant release from the hospital at the age of nine. Nurses and doctors were all gathered, grinning at the camera, and in the middle of this crowd stood a wan little boy with a pinched face and cool, untrusting eyes. He remembered exactly what he had been thinking as the photo was snapped.

Bang
. Dead.

It was too late to make his mother dead for what she had done to him. The psychologists had worked long and hard to make him understand this. And he did understand. But what the psychologists didn’t realize was that there was a whole world of other people out there, and he hated them all. He hated the doctors who had brought him back to life. He hated the deputies who had cornered his mother and provoked her. He hated the social workers who had put her in a mental hospital in the first place. And the new family that had adopted him—he hated them too, hated their frozen smiles and evasive eyes and the way they touched him like glass.

He hated the entire world, and he wished he could make it all go away with one pull of a trigger, one clap of his hands.

He wished he had a way to do it. A weapon to kill them all.

And now, perhaps, he did.

He was cleaning out his pockets, disposing of evidence, when he realized he was missing something.

The tape player.

Maybe it had fallen out in the car. He went into the garage and checked under the driver’s seat. Not there.

Then he understood.

When Scott Maple had knocked him off balance, the player must have slipped out of his pocket. In the clatter of breaking glass he’d never heard it drop.

He had left it in the lab. The player itself was of no importance, a mass-produced item that could never be traced to him. But the tape inside…it was just possible that they could find him though the tape….

No way. He was just getting paranoid.

Anyway, the incident at the chemistry lab would not be connected with the serial killings. And the tape player and the cassette inside would never be recovered in any identifiable form.

He had made a small slip, uncharacteristic of him, but everything was fine.

He was in no danger. Of course he wasn’t.

Of course.

18

The fire was out by the time Dodge reached the Life Sciences Center at the northeast corner of the university campus. An engine from Fire Station 37 idled on the curving street under an elm tree’s branches. Parked around the engine were three LAPD squad cars, light bars cycling blue and red in the pinkish light of dawn.

Dodge parked his unmarked Caprice behind the nearest patrol unit and strolled toward the knot of firefighters gathered with the cops near the front door of Life Sciences. The firefighters looked tired, and the cops looked bored. That was nothing new. Cops at a crime scene always looked bored.

If this was a crime scene. There was, as yet, no evidence that a crime had been committed. With any luck, it would stay that way. Dodge didn’t need another fucking homicide on his plate.

Spears of light from the sun breaking the horizon jabbed his eyes as he crossed the greensward, his shoes collecting dew. On the fringe of the crowd, he ran into a fireman he recognized as the chief of station 37. He was wearing his heavy canvas turnout coat, the high collar snapped shut. Only the tips of his ears were visible, and they were blistered from the heat.

There was the usual exchange of bullshit hellos and how-you-doin’s, and then Dodge asked him what had gone down here.

"Fucking mess," the captain said. "Oh-four-fifty, we respond to an alarm. I lead in the company—two vehicles, wagon and pumper. The blaze is a worker, basement level of the building fully involved, no way we can get inside. It’s strictly surround and drown. We pump in maybe ten thousand gallons. Use foam too, when the wind dies down. Finally some of us suit up in our BAs"—breathing apparatus—"and get in. Hosemen lay down lines, rest of us search for casualties. Visibility zero. Gotta feel our way through. I pretty much stumble over the victim. Deceased."

"You apply CPR?"

"Wouldn’t have helped. This guy was a goner. Anyway, by then I’m drawing a vacuum on my facepiece, so I get the hell out of there."

"Where’s the DB now?" Dead body.

"Still inside. Figured there was no point in moving it, disrupting the scene any more than necessary."

"You thinking arson? Is that why you wanted to keep the scene intact?"

"Don’t know what to think. We got an arson unit coming over, but they’re hung up on other cases right now."

"Busy night for the firebugs."

"They’re all busy nights."

"Okay, I got the picture. Take care of yourself." Dodge started to walk away.

"Hey, Jim, one more thing. There’s some pooled water from our hoses down there, though luckily there are floor drains in the lab, and once we unclogged ’em, the water mostly ran off. Still, you’ll want waterproof boots. Got any with you?"

"Yeah, right along with my fly-fishing gear and my pup tent. Who do I look like, Eddie fucking Bauer?"

"You can borrow a pair out of the wagon."

Dodge thanked him again, then waded into the crowd and buttonholed the nearest uniform. "Who’s the first officer?"

"Painter." The cop pointed toward a woman in blue.

Dodge didn’t know her. Since he knew all the veteran West LA cops, this one was probably a recent transfer from another division. He looked her over. Wide hips, skin so shiny black it was almost purple. Reminded him more of a goddamn welfare whore than an officer of the law.

He took Painter aside, introduced himself, and got out his notepad as she ran down the details. She reiterated much of what Dodge already knew before getting to the vic.

"Male or female?" Dodge asked.

"Male. That’s about all we can tell so far."

"No idea who he was? Student, teacher, janitor, night watchman…?"

"His clothes were vaporized and so was any DL or other ID he was carrying. Can’t tell what the hell he looked like. They may have to go by dental records."

"That bad, huh?"

"That bad." She added, "Some kids said it might be a student named, uh, Scott Maple."

"What makes them say so?"

"He’s a grad student, apparently worked down there at all hours on some big project with a deadline."

"Oh? What’s in the basement anyway?"

"Chemistry lab."

"I see." Like any cop, Dodge paid attention when the subject of labs came up. A lot of crime revolved around labs.

"You thinking crank?" Officer Painter asked.

"Could be. Or some designer drug."

"Pretty unusual to cook up something like that in a university chem lab, don’t you think?"

Dodge shook his head. "When I went to college, we got some big-name rock groups to play on campus. Nobody could figure out how we induced them to show up. I mean, this was a little shit college in the middle of nowhere."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." He was warming up to Painter a little bit. He liked people who showed an interest in his stories. "So I looked into it. Turned out some enterprising grad students in the chemistry department were paying the bands in LSD."

Painter seemed unconvinced. "Think that kind of thing still goes on? I mean, it was a long time ago."

His momentary enthusiasm for Painter’s companionship vanished. "Right, it was the fucking dinosaur age." He didn’t like the insinuation that he was old, especially coming from some fat bitch who’d probably been giving blow jobs to the high school football squad a couple of years ago. "So what the fuck else have you got?" he asked stiffly.

Painter seemed unaware of his disappointment in her, or maybe she just didn’t give a shit. "We’re trying to track down this Maple. His dorm mates haven’t seen him."

"He got a girlfriend? Boyfriend? Anything?"

"Girlfriend. We’re looking for her. Not sure if she’s on campus this weekend. School’s out for the holiday, you know."