“They got somebody else now who’s supposed to be the Plate Glass Killer,” the woman said. “Maybe he used to live there. Those are old bodies. Maybe he came in from the outside and stashed them in the root cellar and then something happened and he couldn’t anymore—”
“There was that renovation they did a few years ago,” the UPS man said. “Finished part of the cellar to be a laundry room.”
“That was Kathleen’s idea,” the woman said. “A laundry room. What kind of nonsense is that? A laundry room. There are Launderettes all over the neighborhood, and the landlords don’t have to fix the machines when they break.”
“Maybe they just got the wrong man again,” the UPS man said, “and the right one was the white boy who lives at Kathleen’s. You know what the police are like. They can’t tell their asses from their elbows half the time.”
“Oh, I know,” the woman said. “I got a nephew got sent to Camp Hill, and what for? Because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the police were just too damned lazy to go looking for anybody else.”
Bennie had been backing up for some time by then, and as soon as the woman showed signs of going on at length about Camp Hill, he’d disappeared down a side street and started to walk. He’d thought, even then, that it would make more sense to find a place to be and then to stay there. If there were police combing the city looking for him, he’d be easy to find if he was on his feet and moving in the open. The problem was, he had no place to be. He never did. He had no family to speak of, except his mother, and he didn’t know where she was anymore. She got thrown out of apartments and trailers and rooming houses on a regular basis. She ended up in treatment on a regular basis, too. For all the moaning and groaning the news shows did about how there were no treatment options for addicts, there were enough of them so that his mother was always only a step away from a twelve-step experience. She didn’t take it very seriously, and she never stuck with it longer than it took to elude the authorities and get her hands on a bottle, but she was always in and out of the things.
If it had been earlier in the day, he could have gone to a bar or a restaurant. He could have gone to McDonald’s and sat in the back with a single cup of coffee and one of the newspapers people were always leaving around. There had to be an all-night McDonald’s in the city someplace. He just didn’t know where it was. He walked and walked. He wondered if any of it was true. If there were bodies in the root cellar of his own house, where had they come from? Maybe there was a serial killer nobody had ever heard of, a serial killer so good that the police didn’t even realize they were looking at victims of a serial killer at all. Bennie did not think that would be a very good thing. A serial killer nobody ever heard of lacked some quality, some charisma, that made serial killers great. Bennie would not have wanted to be anonymous himself. Half the point was in letting the police know you were there and daring them to catch you.
He didn’t want to be picked up again as the Plate Glass Killer. He especially did not want to be picked up if there were bodies in the root cellar. He knew everything he had done in his life. He was not one of these guys who blacked out and had no idea where they had been the night before. He knew he had not put any bodies in any root cellar, ever, and wouldn’t have. It was a strategy. Frederick and Rosemary West had used it. It wasn’t his kind of thing. He liked the idea of Ted Bundy leaving bodies in the open in the woods, leaving them where the animals could get them and stray hikers could stumble over them. Bodies, Bennie thought, deserved to be exposed.
He walked and walked, and then it was four o’clock in the morning. He could see a line of red against the horizon. The dawn was coming. He couldn’t go back to his apartment, but he couldn’t not go back either. If he disappeared on them, they would be sure to think he was guilty. They would be sure to think he was running away. Serial killers never ran away except when they were escaping from prison.
It was early and it was cold and he was tired, and he hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was supposed to do next.
2
Tyrell Moss could only remember having lain awake this restlessly twice before in his life. Once was on the night before he was first set to be transported from the Eden Hall Avenue Jail to the “real” prison at Malvern. He was nine-teen years old, and it didn’t matter what he’d been saying or doing all through the long botch of his trial; he was scared to death. Some of the men who went away to prison disappeared forever. They vanished out of the world as surely as if they’d been put to death, although most of them hadn’t. Others came back to the same streets they had left, and when they did they were something worse than just changed. They had this odd flatness behind their eyes. It was as if prison did something to a part of you nobody could see, the part that made you who and what you were. The men who came back were almost like zombies. They had no emotions close to the surface. Maybe they had no emotions at all.