Precious Blood (38 page)

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books.

He opened the box, and was surprised to find it was packed with newspaper. He looked at the front of the box and saw there was no bank logo, no return address.

The hair on the back of his neck began to prickle.

It wasn’t newspaper, it was a supermarket flyer, carefully folded. It smelled funny, but the newsprint wasn’t running, and the paper was free of oily staining or powder particles that would suggest an explosive charge.

Completely focused now, he went to the bathroom and found his manicure set, a gift from his mother when he started medical school. He sat at the desk and gently picked up the paper using a tweezers and a clippers. The papers came out as one, and he saw that the inner pages of the flyer had been carefully folded to create a small packet the size of a thick sausage.

Holding the packet with the tweezers, he swept everything off the desk. He covered the desktop with a clean sheet of drafting paper, then carefully set the little packet down in the center, switching on his desk lamp.

The wrapper was in black and red ink, a flyer from Dalrymple’s Discount, a budget market chain with branches in poorer neighborhoods throughout the Northeast.

He opened the drawer and pulled out his camera. He photographed the wrapped packet, rolled it, and photographed it methodically on each side. On the underside, where the flyer had been tucked under into folded points, he saw russet staining, possibly from the red flyer ink running.

He carefully folded open the points, then the wrappings.

The package had been made by simply rolling and folding the flyer around its contents. It was a page from the butcher’s section, with kitschy illustrations that looked like they’d appeared in Dalrymple’s holiday catalogues since the early 1950s: turkey, ham, lamb, and an image of a family at Christmas dinner. Inside the layers of paper there was a wadded-up clear plastic bag; he slowly unrolled it with the
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tweezers.

At first he thought they were two pale green olives. Bemused, he nudged them toward the opening of the bag; they rolled out onto the paper and lay there, and the sickly sweet stench of putrefaction rose from the bag, quickly engulfing the room, and he knew then that he was looking at the eyes of Lucia Fiore.

The man was gone, she was pretty sure of it. He went out most nights—he brought fresh newspaper every morning, usually the previous day’s
Post
, and he had to be getting it from somewhere. She had heard the creak, and then silence, and she was left alone in the dark and the cold.

Her candle was gone now, used up; he wouldn’t give her another. She had begged, but he’d just closed the door without saying a word—he hadn’t spoken to her since the first day.

It was a bad sign that he was avoiding making any connection with her. She wanted him to talk—she’d read that it’s harder for killers to go through with it if they see you as a person. Then again, she’d also read that it was an inability to feel empathy that allowed them to torture and kill.

She struggled to sit. She was weak now, she realized. He’d stopped feeding her—another scary sign. Before, he’d been feeding her nothing but bread and water, and once, pretzels.

It was some kind of sick joke, she thought—cartoon prison food. Maybe it meant something to him. Bread and water.

And salt?

Whatever it meant, he was weakening her. It was a struggle to get upright on the mattress now, wriggling on the rotting ticking, pushing herself up onto her hips with frozen knuckles—he checked her wrist bindings several times a day, making her hold her hands like she was praying as he tied her wrists tightly with coarse rope.

The effort to sit up—just to sit up—left her breathless now,
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and it took a few seconds for the dizziness to fade. But being upright, difficult and unstable as it was, made her feel a little better.

She listened for him.

Nothing. She’d learned that before his absences there’d be a metallic creak—a door or latch or something. When he left he’d be gone for up to three or four hours. As soon as he came back, he’d rush to check on her, his precious treasure.

It disgusted her. It was like Hansel and fucking Gretel, the witch poking them through the bars of their cage to see if they were fat enough to eat.

He’d been growing increasingly suspicious. Several times that day, he’d burst through the door without warning, blinding her with his flashlight. But now she heard the sighing squeaks of the floorboards outside her room as if they were notes on a piano, and she knew the tune his feet played, and she’d hear him coming and quickly cover up what she was doing.

Because she
was
doing something now: she was escaping.

It was his own doing: she’d found a way out because he hadn’t given her another candle. That morning, rolling around on the mattress to find a position to ease her numb shoulder and arm, she’d knocked the stub of remaining candle into the hole in the floor.

The feeling of loss was devastating. It was only a one-inch cylinder of wax, and she’d been hoarding it so resolutely that she might never have lit it, but now it was gone, and she would be left in pitch-black until he killed her—for the rest of her life. As she felt herself disappearing into the dark, she realized she’d heard a soft
thunk
when the candle fell through the hole.

It hadn’t sounded like the stub had bounced off something so much as it had landed on something.

She rolled to her side and stretched out her hands, sliding them across the floor until she found the opening. The air
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was cold—maybe colder even than in her room. She’d just assumed that the hole led through to the floor below, but perhaps she’d been wrong.

She reached out, letting her hands slip down into it. She leaned forward and wedged her arms into the void up to the elbow, and felt her fingertips touch cold, damp debris and wood.

There was a crawlspace under the warehouse floor.

It wasn’t deep, sixteen inches if that, but if she could get into it, she might be able to crawl through it until she found a way out. If the air inside the crawlspace was that cold, maybe the wood of the ceiling below had holes in it. Maybe even a trapdoor that let out to the floor below.

But how could she get into the crawlspace? She could barely get her arms in to the elbow—what was that, an eight-inch diameter? But if the wood was softened by age and rot . . .

She pressed the wood as hard as she could. Her heart sank—it felt pretty sturdy. Stroking the floorboards around the hole, she found them all quite solid, the edges of the hole smooth with age; maybe there’d been a pipe or something.

But perhaps, if she could get enough leverage on the individual planks, she could somehow pry them up.

She hooked her fingers around one plank and tipped backward, hauling on the wood as hard as she could, but it didn’t budge. When she finally brought her hands away, they were raw and wet, and she could feel blood on her fingers, scraped on the splintering edges.

But she didn’t cry.

She felt around, trying to get a sense of what it was like in the space beneath the floor. There had to be a way.

But even if she got into the crawlspace, what then? The subfloor was damp and soft—would it hold her weight? So what if it didn’t! She’d fall through to the next floor, maybe twelve feet or so. She doubted that the fall would be more than maybe fifteen feet, and it might hurt, and she might be stunned for a bit—maybe even knocked out—but she would
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live.

She imagined herself lying half-conscious on the floor, fragments of rotten wood around her. Sunlight from big factory windows flooded the floor, and it was warm. She’d lie there for a second, get her bearings. In the light, it would be easy to undo the knots. She imagined pulling herself to her feet, then making her way to the window. She’d slip onto the fire escape, and creep down to the ground. And then she’d run, and someone would find her and she’d be saved.

She just had to get through the floor.

But how?

There was nothing in the room, just the mattress, her toilet bucket, and newspaper. The bread plate and the plastic water bottle. Nothing she could use for a lever or a pry tool.

She couldn’t stop to think about that now. Keep moving.

She reached back into the crawlspace again, patting the subflooring. Her hands brushed something loose. She grasped it and passed it between her hands, feeling the smooth surface, the row of metal bumps of the edge of a corkscrew.

Her knife. She’d dropped it the first day, and now it had come back to her.

She lifted it carefully through the hole and held it in her right palm. With some difficulty, she managed to open the blade with her left. She held the open knife in her hands, pressing the blade flat against her thigh, showing herself it was real.

She had a weapon.

This time, she cried.

tuesday,

december 24

Farrar walked briskly down Greenpoint Avenue, the length of plastic hose shoved back into his pack, swinging the five-gallon canister of gas—filled to the brim, an easy fifty pounds in weight—by his side as if it were filled with cotton candy. He felt a bit like vomiting.

His mouth and nose still burned, and he kept on raking up phlegm in the back of his throat. The gas he’d spilled while siphoning made his shirt stink like a service station, which didn’t help.

But he had plenty of gas, and that was what mattered.

More than enough for the generator and the girl.

He looked at his watch. After midnight! Just twenty-four more hours.

Good.

He didn’t like keeping the girl. Well, he liked parts of it, but there was something about her that wasn’t right. She didn’t behave like the others, who had begged, cried, even offered actual sex if he’d let them go.

Sure, this girl had cried, and yesterday she’d begged for another candle, but still: she wasn’t like the others.

There was something about her he didn’t trust. Sometimes she was completely immobile when he went in, just lying there in the dark, eyes closed. She knew that she wasn’t to look at him, but the fun part was that he got to look at her.

He knew it got to her. He’d sometimes just stand there, looking at her on the mattress, letting the light play up and down her shivering body, knowing she could feel the movement of the flashlight beam through her eyelids, that she knew he was standing there, looking at her.

But at other times, he could almost
feel
her thinking.

Plotting. Scheming. Waiting for him to let his guard down.

Maybe he should tie her ankles.

But that would be an admission of weakness. He wasn’t
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afraid of her—what could she do to him? She had no weapon, and he’d been feeding her what the Blessed Anastasia had eaten when she was in the convent. Now he’d stopped her food, as Publius the Prefect had punished Anastasia at Diocletian’s request. She would grow weaker. The ankle bindings were unnecessary.

He stopped short, stunned to see himself on TV. There he was, in the display window of Walkuski Brothers Electronic, his face filling a twenty-seven-inch Sony television screen surrounded by glittering garlands of red and green tinsel. It was his face of twelve years ago, from his driver’s license.

How on earth had they got that? And then, underneath, his name appeared on the screen.

For a fraction of a second, panic rose into the back of his throat, and then, just as quickly, there was a rush of satisfaction.

Recognition.

They knew who he was! Everyone knew that it was he, Robert Farrar, who had done these things. That he could strike at will, reach in among them and transform their daughters, slay their sisters, even murder their guardians, throwing cops aside as if he were brushing lint from his sleeve. His name would be on the lips of the city by morning.

No! Not just the city, the entire country, maybe the entire world . . .

Their nameless dread now had a face, had a name.

His name.

Crime Scene left Jenner’s loft at about 5:00 a.m., after taking endless pointless photographs of the box and wrappings lying on the kitchen counter. They clearly didn’t want to screw anything up, but still, what did they think they were doing? Back at the lab, the criminalists would photograph everything all over again, until the ink on the wrapping was just about starting to fade from all the flashes.

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When they’d gone, the exhaustion and the wine overtook him; he passed out in the chair at the kitchen table. He woke to the cat trying to climb onto his lap, his claws digging into Jenner’s thigh as he sank back to the floor.

It was already after 2:00 p.m. Angry with himself for sleeping at all, he headed to the shower.

There was no return address on the box. Farrar had used self-adhesive stamps for postage. The ink of the postal franking was barely visible, obscured by the dark blue sky through which Santa’s sled flew on the fifty-cent stamps. In the shower, it occurred to him that maybe he could find something if he played around in Photoshop.

He put on his robe, sat at the table, and uploaded the photos from his camera to his laptop. He’d photographed the box before Crime Scene had arrived, bracketing with shots from different angles and different illumination of the postal stamp.

He opened the images in Photoshop, lightened them, and then bumped up the contrast. The image went grainy, and the numbers and letters started to swim on the screen, but he was pretty sure that the zip code ended in 378.

He went online and looked through a zip code database for the city. Manhattan ran 10001 through 10286, Staten Island 10301 to 10314. In the Bronx, the numbers began at 10451, while Brooklyn numbers started with 112. He saw that 11378 was the post office code for Maspeth, Queens.