The Face of Fear (10 page)

“Yeah. Your talking like that—it’s not right. It’s creepy.” She hugged herself.

“Creepy? I thought you’d be amused. And when I’m Billy ... I don’t know ... I kind of have fun with it ... kind of feel like someone altogether new.” He stared hard at her and said, “Something’s wrong. We’re off on the wrong foot. Or maybe worse than that. Is it worse than that? If you don’t want to go to bed with me, say so. I’ll understand. Maybe something about me repels you. I haven’t always been successful with women. I’ve lost out many times. God knows. So just tell me. I’ll leave. No hard feelings.”

She put on her professional smile again and shook her head. Her thick blond hair bounced prettily. “I’m sorry. There’s no need for you to go. I was just surprised, that’s all.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

He looked at the living room beyond the foyer arch, reached down to finger the antique umbrella stand beside the door. “You have a nice place.”

“Thank you.” She opened the foyer closet, plucked a hanger from the clothes rod. “Let me take your coat.”

He took it off, handed it to her.

As she put the coat in the closet, she said, “Your gloves too. I’ll put them in a coat pocket.”

“I’ll keep my gloves,” he said.

When she turned back to him, he was standing between her and the front door, and he was holding a wicked switch-blade knife in his right hand.

She said, “Put that away.”

“What did you say?”

He laughed.

“I mean it,” she said.

“You’re the coolest bitch I’ve ever met.”

“Put that knife in your pocket. Put it away and then get out of here.”

Waving the knife at her, he said,“When they realize I’m going to slit them open, they say some silly things.

But I don’t believe any of them ever seriously thought she could talk me out of it. Until you. So very cool.”

She twisted away from him. She ran out of the foyer, into the living room. Her heart was pounding
_;
she was shaking badly
_;
but she was determined not to be incapacitated by fear. She kept a gun in the top drawer of her nightstand. If she could get into the bedroom, close and lock the door between them, she could hold him off long enough to put her hands on the pistol.

Within a few steps he caught her by the shoulder.

She tried to jerk free.

He was stronger than he looked. His fingers were like talons. He swung her around and shoved her backward.

Off balance, she collided with the coffee table, fell over it. She struck her hip on one of the heavy wooden legs; pain like an incandescent bulb flashed along her thigh.

He stood over her, still holding the knife, still grinning.

“Bastard,” she said.

“There are two ways you can die, Sarah. You can try to run and resist, forcing me to kill you now—painfully and slowly. Or you can cooperate, come into the bedroom, let me give you some fun. Then I promise you’ll die quickly and painlessly.”

Don’t panic, she told herself. You’re Sarah Piper, and you came out of nothing, and you made something of yourself, and you have been knocked down dozens of times before, knocked down figuratively and literally, and you’ve always gotten up, and you’ll get up this time, and you’ll survive, you will, dammit, you will.

“Okay,” she said. She stood up.

“Good girl.” He held the knife out at his side. He unbuttoned the bodice of her pantsuit and slipped his free hand under the thin material. “Nice,” he said.

She closed her eyes as he moved nearer.

“I’ll make it fun for you,” he said.

She drove her knee into his crotch.

Although the blow didn’t land squarely, he staggered backward.

She grabbed a table lamp and threw it. Without waiting to see if it hit him, she ran into the bedroom and shut the door. Before she could lock it, he slammed against the far side and pushed the door open two or three inches.

She tried to force it shut again so that she could throw the lock, but he was stronger than she. She knew she couldn’t hold out against him for more than a minute or two. Therefore, when he was pressing the hardest and would expect it the least, she let go of the door altogether and ran to the nightstand.

Surprised, he stumbled into the room and nearly fell.

She pulled open the nightstand drawer and picked up the gun. He knocked it out of her hand. It clattered against the wall and dropped to the floor, out of reach.

Why didn’t you scream? she asked herself. Why didn’t you yell for help while you could hold the door shut? It’s unlikely anyone would hear you in soundly built apartments like these, but at least it was worth a try when you had a chance.

But she knew why she didn’t cry out. She was Sarah Piper. She had never called for help in her life. She had always solved her own problems, had always fought her own battles. She was tough and proud of it. She did not scream.

She was terrified, trembling, sick with fear, but she knew that she had to die the same way she had lived. If she broke now, whimpered and mewled when there wasn’t any chance of salvation, she would be making a lie of her life. If her life was to have meant anything, anything at all, she would have to die as she had lived: resolute, proud, tough.

She spat in his face.

“Homicide.”

“I want to speak to a detective.”

“What’s his name?”

“Any detective. I don’t care.”

“Is this an emergency?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“Never mind. I want a detective.”

“I’m required to take your address, telephone number, name—”

“Stuff it! Let me talk to a detective or I’ll hang up.”

 
“Detective Martin speaking.”

“I just killed a woman.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“Her apartment.”

“What’s the address?”

“She was very beautiful.”

“What’s the address?”

“A lovely girl.”

“What was her name?”

“Sarah.”

“Do you know her last name?”

“Piper.”

“Will you spell that?”

“P-i-p-e-r.”

“Sarah Piper.”

“That’s right.”

“What’s your name?”

“The Butcher.”

“What’s your real name?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

“Yes, you are. That’s why you called.”

“No. I called to tell you I’m going to kill some more people before the night’s out.”

“Who?”

“One of them is the woman I love.”

“What’s her name?”

“I wish I didn’t have to kill her.”

“Then don’t. You—”

“But I think she suspects.”

“Why don’t we—”

“Nietzsche was right.”

“Who?”

“Nietzsche.”

“Who’s he?”

“A philosopher.”

“Oh.”

“He was right about women.”

“What did he say about women?”

“They just get in our way. They hold us back from perfection. All those energies we put into courting them and screwing them—wasted! All that wasted sex energy could be put to other use, to thought and study. If we didn’t waste our energies on women, we could evolve into what we were meant to be.”

“And what were we meant to be?”

“Are you trying to trace this call?”

“No, no.”

“Yes. Of course you are.”

“No, really we aren’t.”

“I’ll be gone from here in a minute. I just wanted to tell you that tomorrow you’ll know who I am, who the Butcher is. But you won’t catch me. I’m the lightning out of the dark cloud man.”

“Let’s try to—”

“Good-bye, Detective Martin.”

At seven o’clock Friday evening, a fine dry snow began to fall in Manhattan, not merely flurries but a full-scale storm. The snow sifted out of the black sky and made pale, shifting patterns on the dark streets.

In his living room, Frank Bollinger watched the millions of tiny flakes streaming past the window. The snow pleased him no end. With the weekend ahead, and now especially with the change of weather, it was doubtful that anyone other than Harris and his woman would be working late in the Bowerton Building. He felt that his chances of getting to them and pulling off the plan without a hitch had improved considerably. The snow was an accomplice.

At seven-twenty, he took his overcoat from the hall closet, slipped into it and buttoned up.

The pistol was already in the right coat pocket. He wasn’t using his police revolver, because bullets from that could be traced too easily. This was a Walther PPK, a compact .38 that had been banned from importation into the United States since 1969. (A slightly larger pistol, the Walther PPK/S, was now manufactured for marketing in the United States
_;
it was less easily concealed than the original model.) There was a silencer on the piece, not homemade junk but a precision-machined silencer made by Walther for use by various elite European police agencies. Even with the silencer screwed in place, the gun fit easily out of sight in the deep overcoat pocket. Bollinger had taken the weapon off a dead man, a suspect in a narcotics and prostitution investigation. The moment he saw it he knew that he must have it
_;
and he failed to report finding it as he should have done. That was nearly a year ago
_;
he’d had no occasion to use it until tonight.

In his left coat pocket, Bollinger was carrying a box of fifty bullets. He didn’t think he’d need more than were already in the pistol’s magazine, but he intended to be prepared for any eventuality.

He left the apartment and took the stairs two at a time, eager for the hunt to begin.

Outside, the grainy, wind-driven snow was like bits of ground glass. The night howled spectrally between the buildings and rattled the branches of the trees.

 
Graham Harris’s office, the largest of the five rooms in the Harris Publications suite on the fortieth floor of the Bowerton Building, didn’t look like a place where business was transacted. It was paneled in dark wood—real and solid wood, not veneer—and had a textured beige acoustical ceiling. The forest-green ceiling-to-floor drapes matched the plush carpet. The desk had once been a Steinway piano
_;
the guts had been ripped out, the lid lowered and cut to fit the frame. Behind the desk rose bookshelves filled with volumes about skiing and climbing. The light came from four floor-lamps with old-fashioned ceramic sconces and glass chimneys that hid the electric bulbs. There were also two brass reading lamps on the desk. A small conference table and four armchairs occupied the space in front of the windows. A richly carved seventeenth-century British coatrack stood by the door to the corridor, and an antique bar of cut glass, beveled mirrors and inlaid woods stood by the door to the reception lounge. On the walls were photographs of climbing teams in action, and there was one oil painting, a mountain snow-scape. The room might have been a study in the home of a retired professor, where books were read and pipes were smoked and where a spaniel lay curled at the feet of its master.

Connie opened the foil-lined box on the conference table. Steam rose from the pizza
_;
a spicy aroma filled the office.

The wine was chilled. In the pizzeria, she had made them keep the bottle in their refrigerator until the pie was ready to go.

Famished, they ate and drank in silence for a few minutes.

Finally she said, “Did you take a nap?”

“Did I ever.”

“How long?”

“Two hours.”

“Sleep well?”

“Like the dead.”

“You don’t look it.”

“Dead?”

“You don’t look like you’d slept.”

“Maybe I dreamed it.”

“You’ve got dark rings under your eyes.”

“My Rudolph Valentino look.”

“You should go home to bed.”

“And have the printer down my throat tomorrow?”

“They’re quarterly magazines. A few days one way or the other won’t matter.”

“You’re talking to a perfectionist.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“A perfectionist who loves you.”

She blew him a kiss.

 
Frank Bollinger parked his car on a side street and walked the last three blocks to the Bowerton Building.

A skin of snow, no more than a quarter inch but growing deeper, sheathed the sidewalks and street. Except for a few taxicabs that spun past too fast for road conditions, there was not much traffic on Lexington Avenue.

The main entrance to the Bowerton Building was set back twenty feet from the sidewalk. There were four revolving glass doors, three of them locked at this hour. Beyond the doors the large lobby rich with marble and brasswork and copper trim was overflowing with warm amber light.

Bollinger patted the pistol in his pocket and went inside.

Overhead, a closed-circuit television camera was suspended from a brace. It was focused on the only unlocked door.

Bollinger stamped his feet to knock the snow from his shoes and to give the camera time to study him. The man in the control room wouldn’t find him suspicious if he faced the camera without concern.

A uniformed security guard was sitting on a stool behind a lectern near the first bank of elevators.

Bollinger walked over to him, stepped out of the camera’s range.

“Evening,” the guard said.

As he walked, he took his wallet from an inside pocket and flashed the gold badge. “Police.” His voice echoed eerily off the marble walls and the high ceiling.

“Something wrong?” the guard asked.

“Anybody working late tonight?”

“Just four.”

“All in the same office?”

“No. What’s up?”