The Straw Men Read online

  The female investigator had shown identification, but the man had never been named. With the dedication of someone who believed in the magic of articulation, that naming and containing events in words could subdue them, Michael Becker had read as much as he could concerning the previous crimes of the man who had taken his daughter. He had been on the Internet, and found copies of the news pieces, even sought out a copy of the supermarket hackbook on unsolved crimes. He had done this at the expense of, among other things, his work. He hadn't touched Dark Shift since the night of the disappearance. He privately thought it was unlikely he ever would, though his partner was as yet unaware of this, and kept frantically rescheduling the meeting with the studio. Wang had money, and his contacts appeared inexhaustible. He was plugged into the city in a way Michael could never hope to be. He'd survive.

  Through his research Michael had learned, or been reminded, that in addition to the LeBlanc girl and Josie Ferris and Annette Mattison, another young woman had disappeared at around the same time. This girl had been the daughter of a policeman who had been involved in the apprehension of two previous serial killers. There had been speculation, of a quiet kind, that she had been targeted as a taunt, a punishment for her father's successes. He had become involved in the investigation of her disappearance, against the advice of the FBI, and at least one newspaper had implied that he was believed to be making concrete progress where they were manifestly failing. Then he had simply dropped out of sight. The policeman's name had been John Zandt. The Delivery Boy, as Michael Becker had reason to know, had not been apprehended. A retrospective published a year after the disappearances had reported that a Mrs Jennifer Zandt had returned to Florida to be close to her family. The journalist had been unable to discover what had happened to the detective.

  Michael thought that tonight, whatever was on television, he and his wife should talk. He would tell her what he believed concerning the man who had come to see them, and he would suggest that when the other policemen and women came to visit, the well-meaning people with whom they now shared a horrible familiarity, they should not mention this evening's visit.

  And something else. Though his faith in words had been deeply shaken, he clung to the belief that words and names were to reality what pillars and architecture were to space. They humanized it. Just as DNA took the random chemicals and turned them into something recognizable, language could take inexplicable phenomena and tame them into situations about which something could be said, and thus about which something could be done.

  He would no longer think of The Delivery Boy. He would call him The Upright Man. But in the meantime he would assume the worst. The policeman was right. More than that, Michael Becker realized that it was what Sarah would want.

  Nokkon Wud be damned. If the fates demanded this level of tribute, then they could go fuck themselves.

  •••

  They were sitting outside the Smorgas Board, a combination cafe and surfer hangout about eight yards down the street from where the Becker girl had been abducted. They had been for an hour, and the place was near to closing. The only other customers were a young couple hunkered around a table a couple of yards away, listlessly sipping something out of big cups. 'Are you thinking, or just watching?' Zandt didn't respond immediately. He sat beside Nina, observing the street. He had barely moved. His coffee was cold. He had only smoked one cigarette, and most of that had burned away unnoticed. His attention was focused entirely elsewhere. Nina was reminded of a hunter, though not necessarily a human one. An animal that was prepared and able to sit, to wait, for as long as it took, without boredom, rage or pain to distract it.

  'They don't all come back,' she said, irritably.

  'I know,' he said, immediately. 'I'm not watching.'

  'Bullshit.' She laughed. 'It's either that or you've had a seizure.'

  He surprised her by smiling. 'I'm thinking.'

  She folded her arms. 'Care to share?'

  'I'm thinking what a waste of time this is, and wondering why you brought me here.'

  Nina realized it hadn't really been a smile. 'Because I thought you might be able to help,' she said. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. 'John, what is this? You know why. Because you helped me before. Because I value your advice.'

  He smiled again, and this time she actually shivered.

  'What did I achieve last time?'

  'I don't know,' she admitted. 'Tell me. What happened?'

  'You know what happened.'

  'No, I don't,' she said, suddenly angry. 'All I know is that you told me that you were getting somewhere. And you started getting secretive and not telling me anything, despite the fact that up until then you'd relied upon me to feed you stuff out of the Bureau. Stuff you wouldn't have gotten otherwise because you'd been specifically barred from taking part in the investigation by your own department. I did you a favour and you cut me out.'

  'You did me no favours,' Zandt said. 'You did what you thought would do you the most good.'

  'Oh, fuck you, John,' she snapped. The two slackers at the far table jerked upright, like puppets whose master had suddenly woken up. Heavy vibes.

  She lowered her voice and spoke fast. 'If that's what you really think of me, then why don't you just walk away, go back to fucking Vermont. It's going to snow hard there real soon. You could just bury yourself in it.'

  'You're telling me that you helped me out of consideration for my family?'

  'Yes, of course. What the hell else?'

  'Despite the fact you'd helped me be unfaithful to my wife.'

  'That's pathetic. Don't blame me for what your dick did.'

  She glared at him. Zandt stared back. There was silence for a moment, and then she abruptly let her eyes drop.

  He laughed, briefly. 'That supposed to make me think I'm in control?'

  'What?' She silently cursed herself.

  'Looking away. Kind of an animal kingdom thing. Male ego massaged by a sign of submission. Now I'm back to being king of the hill, I'll do what you want again?'

  'You've gotten really paranoid, John,' she said, though of course he'd been right. She realized she spent too much of her time with fools. 'I just don't want to argue with you.'

  'What do you think the deal with the hair is?' he said.

  She frowned, thrown by the sudden switch. 'What hair?'

  'The Upright Man. Why cut the hair off?'

  'Well, for the sweaters. So he could embroider the names.'

  Zandt shook his head, lit a cigarette. 'You don't need a whole head for that. All of the girls had long hair. But when they're found, it's all been cut off. Why?'

  'To dehumanize them. To make it easier to kill them.'

  'Could be,' he said. 'That's what we all assumed back then. But I wonder.'

  'Are you going to tell me what you do think?'

  'I'm wondering if it was a punishment.'

  Nina considered this. 'For what?'

  'I don't know. But I think this man took these girls, a very particular type of girl, on purpose. I think he had something in mind for them, and each of them failed to come up to scratch in some way. And as a punishment for that, he took something he thought would be of paramount importance to them.'

  He took a drink of his coffee, seeming not to care that it was cold. 'You know what they did to collaborators in France, at the end of the Second World War?'

  'Of course. Women who were thought to have accepted their German invaders too wholeheartedly were paraded down the street with their hair shorn off. A proud moment for our species.' She shrugged. 'I can maybe see the punishment thing, but I don't see what global conflict has to do with it. These girls hadn't fraternized with anyone.'

  'Maybe not.' Zandt seemed to have lost interest in the subject. He was sitting back in his chair and gazing vaguely across the patio. One of the slackers accidentally caught his eye. Zandt didn't look away. The slacker did, rapidly. He made a signal to his friend, evidently suggesting this might be a good time to go wax their boards.
They got up and sloped off into the night.

  Zandt seemed satisfied with this.

  Nina tried to haul his concentration back. 'So where does that lead?'

  'Possibly nowhere,' he said, grinding out his cigarette. 'I just didn't think hard enough about it last time. Then I was hung up on the method he'd used to find them. How the intersection of their lives had come about. Now it strikes me as curious. How they failed. What he really wanted them for.'

  Nina didn't say anything, hoping there would be some more. But when he did speak, it wasn't about the case.

  'Why did you stop sleeping with me?'

  Caught again, she hesitated. 'We stopped sleeping with each other.'

  'No.' He shook his head. 'That's not the way it was.'

  'I don't know, John. It just happened. You didn't seem especially hurt at the time.'

  'Just kind of accepted it, didn't I.'

  'What are you getting at? You don't accept it now?'

  'Of course I do. It was a long time ago. I'm just asking questions that I haven't before. Once you start doing that, you find they pop up all over the place.'

  She didn't really know what to say to that. 'So what do you want to do next?'

  'I want you to go,' he said. 'I want you to go home and leave me alone.'

  Nina stood. 'Suit yourself. You got my number. Call me if you decide to get off your butt and do something.'

  He turned his head slowly, and looked her directly in the eyes. 'Do you want to know what happened? Last time?'

  She stopped, looked at him. His face was cold and distant. 'Yes,' she said.

  'I found him.'

  Nina felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. 'Found who?'

  'I tracked him for two weeks. In the end I went to his house. I'd seen him watching other girls. I couldn't leave it any longer.'

  She didn't know whether to sit or keep standing. 'What happened?'

  'He denied it. But I knew it was him, and now he knew I'd made him. He was the man, but I had no proof, and he would have run. I stayed with him two days. He wouldn't tell me where she was.'

  'John, don't tell me this.'

  'I killed him.'

  Nina stared at him, and knew it was the truth. She opened her mouth, shut it again.

  'And then two days later the sweater and the note arrived.'

  He looked suddenly very tired, and turned away. When he spoke again, his voice was flat. 'I got the wrong guy. It's up to you what you do with the information.'

  She walked away, across the Promenade. She willed herself not to look back at him, and instead concentrated on the tops of the palm trees nodding in the faint breeze, a couple of blocks away.

  But when she reached the corner she did stop, and turn. He'd vanished. She waited for a moment, chewing her lip, but he didn't reappear. Slowly she started walking.

  Something had changed. Until tonight Zandt had seemed malleable, but sitting with him in the cafe had been an uncomfortable experience. She realized it wasn't a hunter that he had reminded her of, but a boxer, glimpsed on camera in the period an hour before the actual fight. The time when the show business was put to one side, and the fighter seemed to move off into a realm of his own, a place where he stopped meeting people's eyes and became absorbed into his archetype. Other people might bet on the outcome, put on monkey suits, get high on corporate hospitality. The rest would crap on about how boxing should be banned, cocooned in lives from which nobody wanted an escape route, any escape route. For the guys in the ring, it was different. They did it for the money, but not only for that. They did it because that was what they did. They weren't looking for a way out. They were looking for a way in, a road back to some place they sensed inside themselves.

  The parents had been a mistake. Zandt had access to little enough real information as it was, and was already questioning what she wanted of him. The only new investigative material could come from the Beckers. She'd had to let him talk to them. But she'd known as soon as she came back from the garden that this had opened doors that would have been better kept shut.

  She didn't need this. She'd never wanted a hunter, or a killer. She believed the only thing that would draw The Upright Man into the open was a man he wanted to dominate.

  She wanted bait.

  Chapter 13

  The man sat in his chair, in the centre of the living room. The room was large and stuck out from the front of the house, with windows on three walls. Two sides were protected by a stand of trees; the other looked down on a sloping, terraced lawn. This afternoon all of the curtains were drawn, heavy drapes that allowed not the slightest suggestion of the outside to penetrate. Sometimes the man had them shut, sometimes he left them open. He was entirely unpredictable in this regard.

  The chair was positioned with its back to the door into the room. He liked the way this made him feel. It generated a mild tension, the sensation of being unprotected. Someone could, in theory, sneak up behind him and bash him over the head. That person would have to overcome the comprehensive security systems, but the point still held. It showed how in control of his environment he was. He had no fear of the outside world. From an early age he had been forced to make his way in it, to help himself. But he liked his interior spaces to be just so.

  His face was smooth and unlined, the result of assiduous use of moisturizer and other skin foods. His eyes were sharp and clear. His hands were lightly tanned, the nails trimmed. He was entirely naked. The chair was at a slight angle to the polished floorboards that traversed the room in orderly rows. A very hot cup of black coffee sat on a small table beside the chair, next to a saucer filled with tiny glass beads. A thin publication lay nearby. The cup was placed so that just less than half of its base protruded past the edge of the surface. The chair was old, covered in battered leather. By rights it should have a copy of The New York Times folded on one of the arms, and a flunky hovering just behind, ready to dispense sandwiches with the crusts cut off. One entire bookcase he had decorated by crosshatching it with green, blue and red pens, each stroke of the pen no longer than three millimetres, until an overall effect of subtly mottled black had been achieved. It had required seventeen pens, and taken several weeks. A fine Arts and Crafts bureau on the other side of the room was entirely covered by very small glued-on photographs of Madonna, all cut from magazines and none later than her Material Girl incarnation, after which the man had lost interest in her. He had covered the result with a number of coats of dark varnish, until it looked as though the piece was covered in nothing more than an unusual walnut veneer. As with the bookcase, only very close inspection would reveal how the effect was obtained.

  His current project involved the small occasional table by his chair, which he was covering with the glass beads. The beads were about one millimetre in diameter, and came in four colours: red, blue, yellow, and green. Genetic colours. Gluing them in position took a great deal of care, not least because they were not placed at random but in a long and complex pattern, which was at least partly speculative. When the table was done he was going to cover it with several coats of thick black lacquer, until all but the faintest hint of texture was removed. It would occur to no one to wonder what was beneath the surface, in the same way that no one would realize that one, and only one, of the floorboards in the house had been constructed from a very large number of wooden matchsticks and then sanded and varnished until it exactly resembled the others. The collecting of the matches had taken the man over six months. Each had, so far as he had been able to ensure, been struck by a different person. He believed deeply in individuality, in its crucial importance to humanity. These days everyone watched the same television shows, read the same glossy magazines, and was press-ganged by the media into dutifully lining up to watch the same ludicrous movies. They stopped smoking because they were told to by people who meanwhile crammed themselves with fat. For the comfort and convenience of others. They lived their lives by rules designed by these others, by people they had never even met. They lived on t
he surface, in an MTV and CNN world of the last five minutes. Now was all. They had no understanding of 'then', but wallowed in a perpetual present.

  The publication on the table was a recent academic paper, which had arrived in the mail that morning. He had seen a synopsis of it online and ordered a copy of the full text for closer inspection. Though its subject was quite specialized, he was more than capable of comprehending it fully. He had spent many years reading carefully in the subjects that interested him: genetics, anthropology, prehistoric culture. Although his schooling had finished very early, he was intelligent, and he had learned a lot from life. His life, and other people's. The things they said, in extremis. There was often a lot of truth to be found there, once you got beyond the pleading, and the body spoke without interference from the mind.

  Before reading it he stood up, walked a short distance from the chair, and did three sets of push-ups. One set with his palms flat on the floor and hands shoulder-distance apart. One set with palms flat again, but hands wide apart. A final set with hands back close together, but closed like fists, knuckles on the floor. A hundred of each, with a short break in between.

  He barely broke a sweat. He was pleased.

  •••

  Sarah Becker heard the muffled sound of the man's measured exertions below her, but spent no time trying to work out what the noise might mean. She didn't want to know. She didn't know what time it was, and wasn't inclined to know that either. Her internal clock told her it was probably day, maybe afternoon. In some ways that was worse than it being night. Bad things happened at night. It was to be expected. People were scared of the dark because when it was dark it was night, and when it was night things sometimes came to get you. That was the way of the world. Daytime was supposed to be better. Daytime was when you went to school, and had lunch, and the sky was blue and everything was pretty much safe so long as you stayed out of places where people were poor. If daytime wasn't going to be safe, then she didn't want to think about it. She didn't want to know.