Shudder (7 page)

Fortham turned out to be right as usual. The first documented case of a season girl was from nineteen seventy-seven. Only in nineteen eighty-four, when four corpses were found in the course of one year, the annual character of the whole thing became apparent.

Since then, the police knew exactly what to look for, and every year they found a spring corpse, a summer corpse, an autumn corpse, and a winter corpse.

Always with the neat small bruises, always suffocated but not strangled. Always clean, with no fingerprints, and, since technology allowed looking for it, no incriminating DNA either.

For the rest of the day Dave labored to put all the information concerning the girl's races, ages, professions, and marital statuses into the ‘My Math' program, in order to be able to cross-reference the different data.

Then he walked about his room again, pondering, before returning to his swivel chair. The brief pacing of the room produced an insight: he would need to find vintage maps of the city.

After a few minutes in the web, it turned out that the oldest one he could order was from nineteen eighty-seven. It would have to do.

Together with maps from nineteen-ninety, nineteen ninety-seven, twenty-five and twenty-eleven, nice big paper maps. It would be delivered to his office on Monday, after the weekend.

Then, he would be able to be more accurate in pinpointing the exact locations in which each generation of the girls had lived, in order to try to see a pattern.

In case that didn't yield any tangible results—which he suspected would be the case—he would apply the same approach to the places where the girls' corpses were found.

All this sounded like something someone else probably thought of years ago and had not succeeded in catching the killer, but he had to start somewhere. Who knows? Perhaps no one really focused on this long-running series. Perhaps every consecutive generation of law enforcers and their bosses accepted it as an inevitable part of life—something, which appeared before their time and would continue after they left.

Now, there was a depressing thought.

He called Fortham again.

“What's up, detective? Solved the cases already?”

“Yeah, almost. Do me a favor, see if any police detectives have ever actually worked on the case, and if yes, what they had established.”

“I'll do better than that. I'll even tell you where they live, if they're still around.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

* * * *

At home, Dave was moody. The autumn wind made fantastical noises as it bounced off the pavements, scraped the outside of his apartment block, and pushed its tendrils through any small opening, making the walls groan as it roamed their mysterious insides.

Dave made himself a double coffee, moved his easy chair over to the window, and sat down with a thoughtful expression.

He took a big gulp from his mug and looked at the buildings behind the glass. He needed something solid to look at, to act as an anchor while his mind tried to digest all the new information.

The image on the security cameras had shaken him, no question about it. He would have to write a letter to the manufacturers, asking whether their products had the capacity for independent movements.

It was obvious what the reply would be.

Only a crank would entertain the idea of a sex doll developing self-awareness.

Even the most sophisticated models, with vocabularies of up to a thousand words and capacity to learn hundreds more, the expensive dolls which could massage you awake in the morning and even make you coffee if you showed them how, they were still just machines.

The jump from a machine which makes coffee and sucks you off and tells you how fantastic you are, to a machine which becomes a night crawling vigilante was...utterly improbable?

Dave gulped down more coffee.

One by one, the windows in the neighboring buildings lit up. The autumn dusk had descended. His own apartment was becoming shadowy, but he didn't feel like switching on the lights yet. The lack of clear outlines allowed his eyes to rest.

The new info about the Season Girls was also very disconcerting. Apparently, he had also allowed this whole thing to become just so much background noise for him. Another bomb blows up a market in Afghanistan, another ecological conference takes place in Stockholm, another journalist found ‘killed by gangs' in Moscow, another dead girl found on the edge of town.

What Andy told him jolted things back into focus. If this thing has been going on from before he was even born, if no one managed to crack it...why had no one managed to crack it?

Now was the time to get out of the easy chair and switch on the lights. He did that, went over to the coffee table by the sofa, and picked up his notebook.

He mustn't allow himself to go to pieces from a flood of strange information. He should organize it, break it all down into small manageable chunks, then examine it, then make a plan.

He twiddled his pen, started writing three times, and gave up three times. He couldn't concentrate.

A fear swelled up inside him, fear that he was not up to the task. He took refuge from it by briskly unbuttoning his jeans and thinking about Georgette.

After three minutes, he forced himself to stop. Obviously, this was not an evening in which he would be able to make a plan for his assignments. He was feeling horny again, too.

Horny with a surprising intensity.

Perhaps one night of sex wasn't enough after all. He should go to the club and find another woman, and after that, he would have a clear mind for a month at least.

With such reasoning, Dave gulped down the remainder of his evening cup, ran a comb through his hair, got dressed, and went out.

Outside, the chilly wind woke him up immediately.
Get the ‘ole blood moving again
, he commented to himself as he took one last deep breath before getting into his car and conjuring up two merging tunnels of light ripping through the dusk.

Natalie was at home, organizing her wardrobe. She tried to ignore the wind singing in the corridor outside her apartment, whistling as it tried to crawl in under her door.

After she'd correctly rearranged the pullovers, the shirts, the ties, the skirts and dresses, and pants, and shorts, she surveyed them and then mopped the floor of the kitchen.

Then, as she debated with herself whether it's okay to vacuum the hall at half past midnight, she realized that she was putting off going to sleep.

The safety of the day had folded into itself. The matrix of work had retreated and she was now alone. Alone with her thoughts.

Her flat felt empty and this was in itself depressing, but it was the thought of the moment when it would stop feeling empty that filled her with apprehension. The dreadful possibility that the loathsome presence would be there again.

She needed someone, a male body. She needed sex but not the gigolos.

Apart from being prohibitively expensive, it just wasn't what she needed now. Her hysterical flu-reaction to the devastation by Rafael and Phil had only just subsided, and her nose was almost completely open again.

What she required now was some company, then sex, and then company again.

Time to go fishing.
Natalie put on her fishnets, her red latex jacket, and called a taxi.

Luckily, the driver was also a woman, a middle-aged manly woman, who swore at the other drivers and spoke in a hoarse voice. At least that spared Natalie the knowing leer a male driver would have given her.

She got out of the taxi and looked at the entrance of the Faceoff Club. Then she took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and tapped with her heels towards the entrance.

Inside, a popular tune was playing loudly. It was last year's hit,
Yes, I Wanna Bond
.

“
I be no alone,

Yes, I wanna bond,

Let's bond,

I said let's bond,

This be the age of bonding,

This—be bond-age,

Be bond-age.

Be bond-age.”

Natalie tried to get into the mood and wiggled her hips slightly as she moved through the smoky semidarkness towards the bar. Her heels were glowing blue and so were the heels of at least two more ladies. Although one pair glowed red. Something Natalie considered rather vulgar.

Lipstick glowed on certain lips, not all of them female, and the eyelids of the barman also displayed luminous qualities in the violet part of the spectrum.

He showed a politely querying face to Natalie and she opened her mouth to shout her order, but then changed her mind. With a smile, she showed both thumbs pointing down and then slowly rotated them upwards.

The barman nodded and after a quick fumble behind the bar gave her a bottle of ‘Promiscuous Promise', the popular energy drink. He showed nine fingers to Natalie and she counted out the bills and slid them over.

It had been Bob's brainchild, from a year back, to advise the ‘PP' producers to use a slowly rising thumb as a symbol of the promise of their drink. It was her brainchild to make the thumbs two. The advert was a success, and now that she remembered it, confidence trickled back into her tired frame.

She sipped the foul tasting drink and surveyed her surroundings. Men and women danced, as did men and men, and women and women.

There were also single men and women who waggled and doddered alone, drinks in hands.

Two ferrets were dancing a complicated dance with three fallen angels and one horned devil.

As she sat there, with her back to the bar, leaning on her elbows, the first potential night partner wobbled over to her with a grin.

He was a thin man dressed in a tight fitting black latex jacket and equally tight green pants, with red latex gloves on his hands. He smiled at Natalie and made a ‘cheers' gesture with his cocktail glass.

Natalie returned the gesture and scrutinized his face with a polite smile. He had the popular thin mustache and pointy sideburns.

“Alec,” he shouted into her face.

“Miriam,” lied back Natalie on an impulse.

There was something wrong with this man, something that set off tiny alarms, but she couldn't put her finger on it.

Then she realized that his cheeks seemed rather immobile and his forehead looked frozen in a perpetual amiable half-frown.

This cat had given his face a temp-frieze, this distasteful means of being without a mask, but still subtly hiding one's identity, one's everyday face.

Unnerved, Natalie showed him a thumbs down, shrugged her shoulders with a thin sympathetic smile, and turned to the bar.

In the mirror behind the rows of bottles, she saw his reflection look at her with a frozen smile for another ten seconds, before abruptly turning and gyrating away to look for another potential playmate.

* * * *

Dave went to the bar and ordered a beer. He still insisted on interpreting his knotted stomach as a sign of overwhelming amorphous arousal and now looked around trying to see a fitting target on which to focus it.

He saw a tipsy Georgette sitting alone and a chap in a black jacket and green pants walking over to her. She felt Dave's gaze and gave him a brief smile, before returning to the pretense of conversation with her latex suitor.

Dave's gaze wandered about the club for a minute, lingered on the ferrets for a second, and when he looked again into Georgette's direction, she was gone. So was Mister Greenpants. Oh well, more power to them.

Dave turned to look at the other people on the bar. Just seven feet away there was a petite black girl, energy drink can in hand, scanning the club. She was in a red latex jacket and in fishnets. Her heels glowed blue.

Dave decided to try his luck and approached the girl. She noticed his movement, and lifted her eyes to meet his gaze. A second of mutual paralysis passed very slowly.

“Natalie?”

“Dave?”

“Natalie.”

“Dave.”

They hugged each other for a long time. Then Dave signaled with a stronger squeeze that he was letting go, let go, stepped back, and looked her over.

She had grown thinner and a little older, but she was still a fantastic young woman. He only hoped that he still didn't look too old at his forty-one years.

After some courteous but impossible attempts at conversation, Dave realized that they had to change location. Obviously there was nothing for both of them to do in the bar anymore.

“Let's go for an evening coffee in the
Byway
,” he shouted to her. She nodded in happy agreement. The wind ruffled their hair as they walked to his car, and didn't make conversation much easier than back in the club, but once inside the BMW, they finally talked.

“Such a surprise to see you, Dave, I didn't know you were back,” Natalie said as she was buckling herself up.

The headlights dispersed once again the night in front; with a lurch like a lowly amateur, a wound up Dave propelled the car forward. He tried to keep his mind on the road. The night traffic was meager but not nonexistent.

He answered the implied question. “Oh yes. I've been back for quite some time now.”

“And you didn't call?”

“Well...” Dave changed lanes while struggling to concentrate, “a lot of time had passed, and I thought you probably have a new phone number and stuff...”

He threw a quick glance at Natalie, who looked at him with an indecipherable expression.

“You're right about that,” she said. “I do have a new number and address, but you could've looked me up in the web. I have a
NuSmart
account and a
MyFace
profile, I'm easy to find.”

“Well...” Dave said again and thanked the gods. They reached the lights of the
Byway
and he focused solely on parking.

The night cafe was half-empty and they chose a table between two crimson leather couches. The walls of the cafe were covered with nostalgic old posters of ancient movies, there was
Twilight
and
2012
, and even
Waterworld
.

True to form, the music was of the same era, more or less, and one of the incalculable number of
Rhythm is a Dancer
remixes played softly, intertwining with the sounds of liquids slurped, burgers munched, and words cross-pollinating with chatter and giggles.

Dave opened the long, thin menu in the form of a Cadillac convertible. The car had a brief comeback as a fashionable hybrid copy of the classic thing, and its image still lingered here and there.

A photo of a very greasy looking burger, with bits of onion and lettuce sticking out invitingly from between the two buns, tickled his interest.

He glanced up at Natalie. “You know what you will take?”

“Aha, I think I'm ready.”

Dave waved at a girl in a red shirt and black pants, and after finishing with the neighboring table, she came over. “Hi,” she said with a genuine glow of pleasure at seeing them.

She was about Natalie's age, looked like white trash, or at least formerly white trash, and had the positive face of someone who is on the usual mix of speed and over-the-counter antidepressants. She had ‘Ivy' written on her name tag.

“Hi,” answered Dave, and looked at Natalie. She was apparently waiting for him to order first, just like he was waiting for her, and Ivy was throwing both amiable glances, holding her check-box in hand.

Dave firmly resolved the situation by waving a hand with vague invitation at Natalie.

Natalie took her cue, took her menu, and ordered, without meeting the waitress's eyes. “I'll have the Queen of Egypt salad please, and a glass of water.”

“Will that be cold or warm water?”

“Room temperature, please.”

“Fine, thank you.” With a burst of lightning clickity-clack, Ivy punched the order in and turned her eyes to Dave.

He cleared his throat. “Yeah, I'll have the Biker Grease burger, with fries, not spicy, and a cappuccino.” Then a small stab of guilt made him add an orange juice too.

Ivy the waitress left and now they were alone, just the two of them.

A silent moment pregnant with conversational possibilities descended upon the table.

Then Natalie looked at Dave, placed her handbag on her lap, and stooped over it, slowly rummaging through its contents. “I'll go outside and have a smoke, Dave; you go ahead and wait for the drinks.”

“You still smoking then?”

“Of course. You still holding out?”

“Yup, still haven't ever even lit one.”

Natalie gave him a quick glance of approval and fished out her pack. “Good boy. Don't start. The stuff's unquitable.”

She placed her bag back on the seat of the couch and got up.

“Wait, wait, I'll go with you,” Dave said and also started getting up.

“No, no, there's no need. Anyway, someone has to watch our things. Look, I'm leaving my handbag here.” She smiled at him. “I'll be back real quick, I promise.”

She went.

Dave escorted her with his eyes. In the bright light of the night cafe, she was sexier than seemed polite.

Her thin legs in fishnets, sticking out from her light purple dress, which in turn was sticking out from below her very short latex jacket, all worked on him in a very exciting and intimidating manner.

He tried to put all sensual thoughts out of his mind. What was in the past was in the past.

A shadow fell on the table. Ivy had arrived with the drinks.

He quickly set to work on his cappuccino with the spoon, making the thin brown streaks mix with the milky whiteness and produced a light brown liquid. He then added two packs of sugar, went through the motions a second time. It was ready, but still too hot.

He took a sip from his orange juice. Not bad, there was some nice squishy pulp floating inside.

He looked at Natalie's silhouette beyond the glass walls of the cafe. Perhaps she also felt this strange mix of joy at the unexpected meeting, and the woody artificiality, which made spontaneous behavior and conversation rather strenuous.

Why the artificiality? Just because they were former lovers?
Did the veiled guilt, to which no one would admit, arise from them running into each other at a place for casual sex with strangers?

He looked at his orange juice, the pulp slowly swirling in the yellow liquid, descending towards the bottom of the glass. Perhaps all they needed was some time to pass, for both of them to get used to the idea that they had met again.

He saw the entrance door open out of the corner of his eye and looked up. It wasn't Natalie. It was a group of boys and girl, whose manic banter mixed with what Dave realized was a revamped ZZ Top hit.

Ivy came over again and put a flat plate with shredded cabbage mixed with some brown beans in front of Natalie's vacant chair. Dave took one bean from the salad and chewed it slowly.