Feast of Murder(17)

It was all in there, just the way it was supposed to be, three copies of the agreement (each signed by Jon acting for Baird Financial) and a stamped, self-addressed envelope. It was all on Baird Financial stationary and neatly typed. He had already read through it three times today, but he decided to read through it again, very carefully, just to be sure nothing was wrong. It took him half an hour of what was really hard work, but he knew for certain that what he had was what he was supposed to have. He looked up and out the windows. While he had been concentrating on other things, the city had moved closer to night. The lights lit in the windows in the distance looked like thousands of candles held up to the dark.

The melon rind marmalade looked like the jar with the pulsating brain in it from some Z-grade 1950s horror movie. McAdam got up, went to the kitchen, and came back with a spoon. He pulled the cotton cover off the top of the jar and dug through the clear wax underneath. The marmalade was greenish black and oddly mobile, as if it were alive. McAdam got a small quivering blob of it on the end of the spoon and licked at it experimentally. It was outrageously sweet, a distillation of pure sugar. It made him feel sick on contact.

The copies of the agreement were still lying on the table. McAdam signed all three, put one copy aside, and folded the other two. He put the two folded copies into the stamped, self-addressed envelope and sealed it. Then he turned the letter over, stared for a moment at the address, and stood up. He was being paranoid and he knew it, but he couldn’t help himself. Someone could break into the apartment during the night and steal all three copies of the agreement. There could be a fire. He could have a heart attack. He went back to the elevator, punched himself in, and rode down to the lobby.

Three minutes later, he was back home, feeling proud of himself and a little relieved. The agreements had been mailed. The doorman had been greeted and dismissed. The fat woman in the elevator who had seen his picture on the cover of Forbes had been fended off and forced to depart on her own floor. Now he had the weekend in front of him, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do with it.

He sat down at the marble table, picked up the silver straw, and smiled. The first line went up his nose feeling as cold as menthol. The second went up feeling like nothing at all. By the time he’d gotten to the fifth he was not only high but happy, jumping, perfect, clear. He felt like dancing and singing and shouting at once, but most of all he felt like being out in the open air. He went to the French doors and let himself out onto the roof garden, high above the city. It all looked so wonderful out there, so perfect, exactly the way he had always expected it to be. It all looked so clean and he was going so fast, so fast, he was jumping and—

—and then it began to hit him, the pain, and the jerking convulsions he could not stop. In one awful moment he felt his body snap and grab and trip and jerk, whipping back and forth as if he were a flag being shaken out in a gale-force wind. He was out of control and the pain was getting worse. He was dipping and riding and jumping back and forth and back and forth in no known pattern and making no known sense and then he saw it—

—the railing—

—the end of the roof and the air, the air, the railing was nothing but two thin lines and not nearly high enough, not nearly high enough—

He felt himself slam into the railing, and jerk upward and push out. He felt himself in the air, still snapping and still in pain. He thought of the cocaine and the time and then he couldn’t think at all.

It was twenty-two minutes before eight o’clock at night on the last day of August and he was floating high above the city, in the air and free, and any minute now he was going to start falling down.





Part One

November 16–November 17





One


1


ON THE DAY THE very young man from the Federal Bureau of Investigation came to Cavanaugh Street, Gregor Demarkian found a picture of the Pilgrimage Green in the morning mail. Actually, the morning mail was the only mail he had—and from what he’d heard from friends who lived in other parts of Philadelphia, he was damned lucky to get it in the morning. His problem with the mail was the same as his problem with half of the rest of his life lately. Gregor had spent twenty years in the FBI himself, ten of those years as founder and head of Behavioral Sciences, the department that coordinated interstate manhunts for serial killers. Like any other high Washington official—like senators, congressmen, presidents, cabinet secretaries, and heads of major departments—he had lived a life free of bureaucratic bungling, management inefficiency, and general bad service. The Bureau made it a point not to bungle with the sort of people who could influence its next appropriation. For the ten long years of his reign at BSD, Gregor had had tax refunds that showed up in his mailbox two weeks after he’d filed his return, phone equipment that got fixed within an hour or two of his making a complaint, and mail that arrived at his office at least twice a day. The Social Security Administration never botched his name or got his number confused with that of a retired miner from Bozeman, Montana. The Post Office never delivered his Visa payment to the Vi-Sal Hair Salon in downtown L.A. He lived, in fact, in a kind of paradise, except for two little problems. In the first place, his wife was dying, painfully and slowly (but much too fast for Gregor) of cancer. For another, long before she started dying, he had begun to hate his job. Sometimes, in his sleep, he saw the cases he had handled strung out before him like beads of blood: the young man who had roamed through Alabama, Mississippi, and northern Florida, killing small girls and taking their right hands for souvenirs; the old woman in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona who had gone from one live-in elderly help job to another, offing each of her charges as she went; the sweet engaged couple from western Virginia who had first murdered all of her living relatives and then all of his. Back at the beginning, when there was no Behavioral Sciences Department, and getting one started had been a holy crusade, Gregor had kept a picture in his office that was meant to remind him how important his work was and why he had to keep going no matter how much pain they made him take. The picture was of a twelve-year-old girl named Kimberly Ann Leach, the last of the countless victims of a man named Theodore Robert Bundy. In the end, not even Kimberly Ann Leach could motivate him. It was one thing to pick up a serial murder case here and there, over the years. It was another thing to live for nothing else. He tried to sleep and the crime scenes played back on the inside of his skull, crime scenes made more vivid and more lurid because he had not actually been at them. For some reason, those badly lit five-by-eight color prints were as potent as lime rickeys made with 151-proof rum.