Prayer for the Dead (15 page)

She had brought all the cleaning equipment she owned with her except a vacuum cleaner. Everyone had a vacuum cleaner, whether they used it or not.

Other than that, she had come prepared; there was no telling what supplies he had on hand.

The smell was so bad she could detect it on the porch. Why had she not noticed it from outside that first night? She was surprised the neighbors didn’t complain. Inside, it was even stronger.

A mouse had died under her refrigerator once and Helen had not been able to move the appliance to get the corpse. This house smelled like that, sickeningly sweet. Disgusting. No one should live like this. In a way, Helen thought, it reflected badly on her. She was not doing much of a job domesticating Roger if she allowed him to come home to this kind of thing.

She put her cleaning supplies in the kitchen and looked around. It was as good a place to start as any. Oddly, the sink was clean. The huge restaurant pot that she had last seen covered with cooking scum was scrubbed spotless.

She turned on the tap and the drain belched once, emitting a blast of putrid air before the water backed up and filled the sink. Helen had dealt with clogged drains before; one learned things living alone or else paid an arm and a leg to every repairman in town. She found his tools in a bottom drawer, including a plumber’s wrench. Surprisingly, the wrench was not rusted shut. It had been oiled and maintained, and the bolt on the sink trap had marks on it as if it had been opened frequently. He must have had trouble with the sink before. It surprised her that Dyce had dealt with the problem himself, however. He didn’t seem the handy type.

Helen turned off the water, placed her bucket under the trap to catch the spill, and began to work. Dyce had stored nothing in the cabinet under the sink except a heavy cleaver. Helen removed the cleaver and felt the flooring give spongily. She tapped it. It sounded hollow. There was obviously a space under the bottom of the cabinet. The kind of place a small animal could get trapped and die, perhaps.

The linoleum covering came off in one piece. The flooring seemed solid, but when Helen touched it, the boards moved slightly, as if they were not nailed down. One of them had a recess where a knot had been. Helen put her finger in the recess and pulled up on the board. It came out easily and underneath it she saw the first bone.

Steadying himself against the bed, Dyce drew on his pants and slipped his feet into his shoes. He stuck the socks into his pocket to be put on when he had more time to do it one-handed. His blood on the shirt had dried to an orange-brown. He buttoned it as quickly as he could, the unpracticed left hand fumbling and skipping some buttons. Shrugging on the jacket, Dyce stood and waited for the dizziness to pass.

A nurse glanced at him on the way down in the elevator, took in his bloody shirt, his stubbled cheeks with four-days’ growth of beard, his bruised face, and thought whatever she thought but said nothing. Dyce could not worry what people thought of him now; he could only get away from this place as quickly as he could manage.

A security guard glanced at him and then away; the fat lady behind the information counter didn’t even deign to look at him.

The sun surprised him and left him blinking. For some reason he had thought it was raining and cold. There were no keys in his pocket, no money in his wallet, and he didn’t know where his car was. It didn’t matter; he couldn’t use the car in any event since they would soon be looking for it. As soon as the calm one, Becker, began to think. There was only one reason to ask his mother’s maiden name. They knew something: They had sensed his pattern, perhaps not all, but some, and some was too much. In days, or minutes, Becker would be back. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they weren’t going to put it together, perhaps Dyce was safe, but it was a chance he couldn’t take.

He turned and walked away from the hospital, going down a long hill to the main road below. He didn’t know where he was going, but then neither did anyone else. The main thing now was not his destination, but his escape.

“You’ll replace this?” Tee asked, detaching the police seal from the front door. “I mean, of course you will. How long you going to be?”

Becker had never seen him so agitated.

“I’m not going to hurt anything, you know that.”

“I know that.”

“If you don’t feel comfortable about this. Tee, you don’t have to let me in.”

“I know you won’t hurt anything. I know you know what you’re doing. I know when the state boys show up in the morning, they’ll never know I let you in.” He paused. “Right?”

“Tee, the house is sealed by the order of the state police, but it’s in your jurisdiction, too. You can break the seal if you want to.”

“I know this.” Tee remembered Captain Drooden, who had slapped the seal on the door only hours before. Hard-nosed bastard. Threatened to remove Tee’s gonads if he so much as breathed on the house before Drooden’s full forensic team could arrive from a murder scene in Greenwich.

“But you still have a problem with this?”

“I don’t have a problem with it. Quit saying I have a problem. I’m not afraid of Drooden, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“1 wasn’t thinking that. You fear no man.”

“It’s those damned brown uniforms the states wear. Makes them act mean. Drooden doesn’t scare me … What are you going to do in there?”

“Nothing.”

Tee eased the door open but stayed on the porch. He had no desire to go in again; once had been enough. Even now the house was virtually untouched since he and Becker had responded to Helen’s panicked telephone call. Just what damage she had done, he couldn’t say, but he and Becker had touched nothing, even though Becker had prowled like a dog on the scent. The smell of the place was too much for Tee, but Becker had not been bothered and had squatted beneath the sink for fifteen minutes, just staring at the skeletons as if he expected them to stir and speak at any moment. When Becker finally rose, it was to tell Tee to call the forensic people in Hartford, taking the case immediately out of Tee’s hands. Tee had not even considered arguing.

“If you’re not going to do anything, why go in? Or is that a silly question?”

“After Drooden’s men get finished, the place will be sterile. They will have lifted all the fingerprints and sought out all the hairs and fibers, and that’s great, they need to do that, but there won’t be any
spirit
left. A crime scene feels like a museum after the forensic snails get through with it. It looks the same, but it’s a re-creation.”

“Spirit?
Jesus Christ, what are you talking about? You’re not into that kind of thing, are you, John? You’re not talking psychic shit here, are you?”

“I’d prefer not to be talking at all. Tee, if you’d just step aside and then get out of here.”

“Okay, you’re the expert—but what are you going to do?”

“Just sit there for a couple hours.”

Tee shivered. “A couple hours?”

“More or less. It’s nothing mystical, Tee. It’s just an exercise in imagination, but it helps me to be on the scene.”

“What are you imagining?”

“We don’t have to do it. Drooden will probably find out all you need with his microscopes and tweezers.”

“Okay, okay. Go. Enjoy yourself” Tee stood aside as Becker switched on his flashlight and stepped into the house. “And you’ll remember to put the seal back?”

“Go find Dyce.”

“We’re looking. He’s walking wounded, how far can he get? We’ll have him in no time.”

But Becker was already concentrating on the house. He didn’t seem to notice as Tee closed the door.

Thank God, Tee thought, that I’m just a Clamden cop. An exercise in imagination? Sitting in a house for a couple hours where we’ve found God knows how many bodies under the floorboards? What kind of imaginings could that inspire?

Tee looked up and down the block as he walked to his car. Lights were on, televisions playing. The excitement of the afternoon with cop cars and flashing sirens was over, and the good citizens had already stopped thinking about the commotion in the Dyce house, whatever it was. He wished he could do the same. Traffic violations and the occasional breaking and entering were all he aspired to. He didn’t want any part of communing with goddamned spirits, and the spirit of a mass murderer at that.

Thinking of Dyce lying on his hospital bed twelve hours ago. Tee still could not picture the innocuous, defeated little guy killing anyone, much less eight or more. It had almost seemed to Tee that they were after the wrong man, that the skeletons had been inherited or had crawled in there on their own to die. Any explanation seemed more likely than thinking it was the man with his face punched in on the hospital bed, the guy with the girlfriend who thought she was his mother—crime in Clamden had not prepared him for this. Everybody cheated a little bit, everybody drove too fast and lied on his taxes, and the sons of the privileged were just as apt to get into drugs as the children of the poor—maybe more likely depending on the price of the drug—but when it came to actual
crime,
in Tee’s experience that was still done by criminals. The kind who started out bad and stayed bad, and they were easy to recognize. Tee knew who they were and where they worked and where they lived. He wanted his monsters to wear horns and spit fire and felt no remorse about not recognizing the man for what he was, but Becker was furious, berating himself during the whole frantic search of the hospital and the neighborhood and the town.

“I
knew,”
Becker had said. “I knew but I didn’t say so.”

“Knew? How could you know?”

“I knew.”

“Did you have any proof? Did you even know his crime? What could you have done even if you did know?”

“I knew, and he realized it, and I didn’t act and he did, and that’s why he’s gone.”

“We’ll get him,” Tee had said, wondering how. This was not an isolated town in Nebraska. He could not throw up roadblocks and seal off the city. Given a car and a fifteen minute head start, Dyce could be in any of three adjoining towns or a few miles from Hartford. Given an hour of lead time, he could have vanished as completely as a rat down a sewer. As far as they knew, he had had at least three hours’ head start.

The mess would only get worse, he realized. Tomorrow there would be the press and the Hartford television people, and after that probably the national television as well. Mass murder was good for a minute or two on the evening news. But the actual police-work was already in other hands. Drooden was a bastard and deserved all the trouble he could get. Wherever Dyce was now. Tee was glad it was no longer Clamden.

As he drove off he realized that he could see no light coming from the Dyce house.

Standing in the bedroom, Becker played the beam of the flashlight slowly over the heavy oaken furniture, the thick drapes, the simple, almost monastic bed. Clearly not a room where Dyce spent any time; there were no comforts, no books by the bedside, no television. Becker held the beam on the silver-backed hair brushes atop the dresser. Old, like the furniture. None of it was rare enough to be antique; it was just old. Either he had a taste for it, or he had inherited it, but in either case, it was a link to the past. And what keeps you in the past, Becker wondered. What happened then? Or is still happening? Whatever it was, it would not be in the bedroom.

Becker went cursorily through the kitchen again, but that was simply a workplace, a room in which to butcher and boil and bury, a place of grisly utility, but not the place to catch the spirit of the man.

Dyce dwelt in the living room: Becker could feel it. It was the only room in the house where anyone had actually lived. Was it the room in which they had died? Like all the windows, these were covered and sealed with soundproofing material. That meant there was noise, that meant they were alive when he brought them here. Anesthetic in the syringe, the syringe in the car. So he drugged them when he took them, brought them into the house drugged. The garage was at the back of the house. Becker returned to the kitchen and looked into the backyard, playing the light on the garage and then the driveway. If he parked in the right spot, it was no more than four steps to the kitchen door. The house shielded him from the view of the neighbors on one side, the car on the other. Four steps in the dark of night and into the house with a body, drugged and helpless, into the house, into the kitchen. If he killed them then, while they were still unconscious, there was no need for soundproofing.

But he wouldn’t do it then, Becker knew. There was no sense to it. More to the point, there was no joy to it. Drug them in the car, drag them into the house, and chop them up? Why? What would he get out of it? He was getting something out of it. He’d killed many times; he wouldn’t take the risk if it offered him nothing in return.

So he kept them alive for a while. That’s why he needed the soundproofing, that’s why there was anesthetic in the syringe and not poison.

Becker returned to the living room. And he kept them alive in here. Where he lived.

Switching on the lights for a moment, squinting against the sudden brightness, Becker studied the room. There was only one place where Dyce would have sat. He turned off the lights and sat in the overstuffed chair. It was easier in the dark.

He had told Tee that it was an exercise in imagination, but that was not how Becker thought of it. He had to study his quarry’s lair the way an anthropologist would study the cave paintings of early man. Those paintings went a long way toward explaining the man behind them. Becker hoped to learn as much about Dyce by sitting in his living room and absorbing his presence. He sat in the dark in Dyce’s chair and breathed the air Dyce had breathed. He let the atmosphere sink in. He unleashed his mind and set it free to wander the room, the house, to seek out Dyce and inhabit his soul.

Sitting in the chair, looking straight ahead, Becker turned on the flashlight. It did not hit the screen of the television set. Why would he align the chair so he could not watch the television without twisting his head—unless he didn’t watch TV. When he sat here and rehashed what he did, dreamed what ghoulish fantasies he needed, what did he look at? The light fell on nothing but space from the chair clear across the room to the wall.