Every Dead Thing

“But she died after Susan and Jennifer,” I added softly.

“He took Susan and Jennifer because he wanted to, but the results were unsatisfactory. I think he used Lutice to practice again before he returned to the public arena,” she answered, not looking at me. “He took Tante Marie and her son for a combination of reasons, out of both desire and necessity, and this time he had the time he needed to achieve the effect for which he was searching. He then had to kill Remarr, either because of what he actually saw or the mere possibility that he might have seen something, but again he created a memento mori out of him. He’s practical, in his way: he’s not afraid to make a virtue out of necessity.”

Angel looked unhappy with the thrust of Rachel’s words. “But what about the way most of us react to death?” he began. “It makes us want to live. It even makes us want to screw.”

Rachel glanced at me, then returned to her notes.

“I mean,” continued Angel, “what does this guy want us to do? Stop eating, stop loving, because he’s got a thing about death and he thinks the next world is going to be something better?”

I picked up the illustration of the Pietà again and examined the detail of the bodies, the carefully labeled interiors, and the placid expressions on the faces of the woman and the man. The faces of the Traveling Man’s victims had looked nothing like this. They were contorted in their final agonies.

“He doesn’t give a damn about the next world,” I said. “He’s only concerned with the damage he can do in this one.”

I stood and joined Angel at the window. Beneath us, the dogs scampered and sniffed in the courtyard. I could smell cooking and beer and imagined that, beneath it all, I could smell the mass of humanity itself, passing us by.

“Why hasn’t he come after us? Or you?” It was Angel. His words were directed at me, but it was Rachel who answered.

“Because he wants us to understand,” she said. “Everything he’s done is an attempt to lead us to something. All of this is an effort to communicate, and we’re the audience. He doesn’t want to kill us.”

“Yet,” said Louis softly.

Rachel nodded once, her eyes locked on mine. “Yet,” she agreed quietly.

I arranged to meet Rachel and the others later in Vaughan ’s. Back in my room, I called Woolrich and left a message on his machine. He returned the call within five minutes and told me he’d meet me at the Napoleon House within the hour.

He was as good as his word. Shortly before ten he appeared, dressed in off-white chinos and carrying a matching jacket over his arm, which he put on as soon as he entered the bar.

“Is it chilly in here, or is it just the reception?” There was sleep caked at the corners of his eyes and he smelled sour and unwashed. He was no longer the assured figure I recalled from Jenny Orbach’s apartment, wresting control of the room from a group of vaguely hostile cops. Instead he looked older, more uncertain. Taking Rachel’s papers in the way he did was out of character for him; the old Woolrich would have taken them anyway, but he would have asked for them first.

He ordered an Abita for himself and another mineral water for me.

“You want to tell me why you seized materials from the hotel?”

“Don’t look on it as a seizure, Bird. Consider it as borrowing.” He sipped at his beer and looked at himself in the mirror. He didn’t seem to like what he saw.

“You could just have asked,” I said.

“Would you have given it to me?”

“No, but I’d have discussed what was there.”

“I don’t think that Durand would have been too impressed with that. Frankly, I wouldn’t have been too impressed either.”

“Durand called it? Why? You have your own profilers, your own agents on it. Why were you so sure that we could add something?”

He spun around on his stool and leaned close to me, close enough that I could smell his breath. “Bird, I know you want this guy. I know you want him for what he did to Susan and Jennifer, to the old woman and her son, to Florence, to Lutice Fontenot, maybe even to that fuck Remarr. I’ve tried to keep you in touch with what’s been going down and you’ve walked all over this case like a fucking child in new boots. You’ve got an assassin staying in the room next door, God alone knows what his pal does, and your lady friend is collecting graphic medical imagery like box tops. You ain’t given me shit, so I did what I had to do. You think I’m holding back on you? With the shit you’re pulling, you’re lucky I don’t put you back on a plane to Noo Yawk.”

“I need to know what you know,” I said. “What are you holding back about this guy?”

We were almost head to head now. Then Woolrich grimaced and leaned back.

“Holding back? Jesus, Bird, you’re unbelievable. Here’s something: Byron’s wife? You want to know what she majored in when she was at college? Art. Her thesis was on Renaissance art and depictions of the body. You think that might have included medical representations, that maybe that was where her ex got some of his ideas?”