Small Town

Or he might just stop what he was doing and disappear. The common wisdom held that pattern criminals and serial killers never stopped until they were caught or killed, that what drove them continued to drive them to the end. But he knew this wasn’t always so. Sometimes the bad guys seemed to lose interest. When they’d achieved a degree of notoriety, like the Zodiac nut job in San Francisco, the speculation about them went on forever. When their tally was lower and less publicized, their retirement went unnoticed; if, say, three prostitutes are abducted one after another from truck stops in Indiana and Illinois, and found brutally murdered in Interstate highway rest areas, it’s news; when it doesn’t happen a fourth time, it stops being news, and people forget to wonder why the guy stopped.

They wouldn’t forget about the Carpenter, but he could have stopped. He could have wiped up his fingerprints and left the hammer and nail in the hardware drawer and gone off into the night, and no one would have linked this latest killing to him. And the next time he went to ground he might have worked out a way to do it without killing anybody.

But he’d used the hammer, used the nail. He wasn’t done. He had something planned, something that would dwarf the Chelsea firebombings. Buckram could think of all sorts of possibilities. The city had no end of icons — the skyscrapers, the bridges, the great statue in the harbor. Anyone could compile a list, and, after 9/11, nothing seemed off limits to madness. But what good was a list when you couldn’t read the bastard’s mind?

He couldn’t think his way to a solution, nor could he think of anything else. He wished to God there was something he could do. He’d thought of offering his services to the cop who was running the case, but realized what an embarrassment that would be all around. Even if he did it quietly, who could avoid the assumption that he was grandstanding, positioning himself for a 2005 run at Gracie Mansion? And, if he somehow convinced everybody otherwise, what possible help could he provide? As far as he could tell, they were doing everything there was to do, and doing a reasonably good job of it in the media hothouse that was New York.

He thought of the drawing room mysteries of the twenties and thirties, with the gifted amateur sleuth who volunteered his services to the baffled police and solved intricate murders for them. And here he was, all set to present himself as a latter-day version of that amateur sleuth. Because that was all he was now, his professional experience notwithstanding. He was a private citizen, and nothing changed that — not the awards and commendations boxed up in his closet, not the courtesy cards in his wallet, not the monthly pension check he drew after twenty-plus years of service. Not the revolver in a locked drawer in his desk, or the carry permit for it.

So he sat around reading about the case, and calling old friends to talk about it. And he thought about it, and tried to figure some useful way he could play a lone hand, somehow out-thinking the Carpenter and tracking him down on his own. It was an appealing fantasy, but that’s all it was. A fantasy.

Yet he stayed with it. Because, for some goddamned reason that, like the Carpenter’s scheme, he hadn’t yet managed to figure out, there didn’t seem to be anything else he could do.

It was the woman, of course. Susan Pomerance. Seeing her at Stelli’s, remembering her from L’Aiglon d’Or, he’d seized his opportunity and picked her up.

Right, like a moth picking up a flame.

Next thing he’d known he was spread-eagled facedown on her bed and she was calling him by a girl’s name and treating him like a girl. He thought she was going to rip him open, thought he’d bleed to death shackled to her bed and hooded like a trained falcon. And then he came so hard he thought he’d die of that.

Afterward, dismissed and sent home, he took a long shower, then drew a hot tub and soaked in it. He tried to put the evening in some sort of perspective, but couldn’t get a handle on it, swinging back and forth between excitement and revulsion. He’d sleep on it, he decided. A lot of things made more sense after a good night’s sleep.

He wondered if he’d be able to sleep, but dropped off almost immediately and didn’t stir for almost nine hours. He awoke with a sense of having dreamed throughout the night but no recollection of any of the dreams. He ached physically, not only where she’d penetrated him but in muscles throughout his body that he’d tensed in unaccustomed ways. And he winced at the memory of what he’d done, or rather of what he’d allowed to be done to him. And at the recollection of his own response.