The Straw Men Page 19

  When his Budweiser arrived he nursed it a while, ostensibly looking out of the window. In reality he was, as he had been all day, trying to see a set of facts differently. In a crime where there was no evidence to speak of, the best you could do was try new ways of fitting the information together. Most crimes, in their essence, boiled down to a single sentence. Fingerprints and an affair and a hastily concealed knife and debts and an exploded alibi; these were the business of the courts, requisites for tidying away. The true crime, in all its glory, boiled down to this: people killed each other. Husbands killed their wives. Women killed their menfolk, too, and parents their children, and children their parents, and strangers other strangers. People took things they didn't own. People set fire to places, for money, or because there were people inside. When each manifestation had been tucked away into its judicial drawer, the truth still remained at large. You could take any two people and put the word 'killed' between them.

  Zandt had been able to make no headway in trying to work out what The Upright Man might want from his victims. Why they were being punished. Had they failed him by not loving him, not responding to his advances? Had they been too frightened, or not frightened enough? Had they failed by breaking, by not showing some of the strength he looked for and wished to steal?

  He noticed that he'd finished his beer, and twisted in his seat, looking for the young waiter. There was no sign of him, though the other people dotted around the lounge seemed to have recently been served. He watched them for a while. Strangers, drinking alcohol to feel more comfortable. To sand off the edges of anxiety. Everybody did. Americans—except for a brief experiment that led to an explosion of crime never seen before or since. The Germans and French, heartily. The Russians, with melancholy seriousness. The English, too, beery maniacs. They spent their hours in bars and pubs and at home, making everything blurred. They needed the fizzing mask, the glue.

  Eventually a man appeared. He was dressed in black with a white shirt, exactly as the previous barman had been—but ten years older and considerably less sunny in demeanour. Whereas the younger man's hopes of selling a screenplay or shouting 'Cut!' were probably still fresh, this man appeared on the edge of a curdled acceptance that Hollywood's actresses would continue to survive without his good loving. He regarded Zandt suspiciously, waiter radar telling him that this was a man who was neither resident in the hotel nor waiting to meet anyone in particular.

  'Same again, sir?' Said with an inclined head, a gesture of cordial irony: we both understand that Sir is not of the type one prefers, is moreover somewhat drunk, and not clad to an adequate standard.

  'Where's the other guy?'

  'Other 'guy', sir?'

  'The waiter who served me before.'

  'Shift change. Don't worry. It'll be the same beer.'

  As the waiter walked off, languidly, bouncing his tray on his knee, Zandt briefly considered shooting him. As a lesson to all the other waiters who somehow managed to suggest that the people paying their wages were scum. A long-overdue wake-up call. Perhaps word would get out to the store assistants, too, even the ones on Rodeo Drive. Zandt could still, would always, remember an incident that had taken place one anniversary afternoon six or seven years before. An occasion when he had taken his wife to an expensive store to buy a blouse, and they had left soon afterwards; Jennifer awkwardly clutching a bag, Zandt shaking with unexpressed fury. She had seldom worn the shirt. It was stained by how small she had been made to feel while buying it.

  The memory made him feel far worse than he had before. He was sliding one of the remaining pieces of stationery closer, intending to make notes on something—anything—when suddenly he paused. He could see the waiter, standing behind the counter in the next section of the bar, pouring out his beer.

  It was a Budweiser. Same as he'd had last time. That was to be expected. The previous waiter would have left a chit showing how much he owed, what he had been served so far.

  An indication of what he wanted, in other words.

  Of what his preferences were.

  When the waiter arrived with the beer, he found an empty seat and a ten-dollar bill.

  Chapter 17

  The house was high up in the Malibu hills. It was small, and unusual, arranged as a series of rooms like a tiny motel. To get from one living area to the next you went outside and walked along a covered path, re-entering the building via another outer door. It stood on the edge of a cliff and was approached down a steep and twisting lane that was inadequately lit. It wasn't somewhere you'd find yourself by accident. It was cheap to rent, despite its position, because it was on unstable ground and one step away from being condemned. The combined living room and kitchen area, which was large and glass-sided and easily the best feature, had a crack across the centre of its concrete floor. You could get most of a fist down into it, and the sides differed in height by over two inches. Outside, on the landward side of the lot, was a small swimming pool. It was empty, the pipes having been melted in a brushfire years before she'd come to live there. It took a certain courage to sleep at night.

  Nina had spent the evening on the patio, at the rear of the house, her back against the wall and legs splayed out in front of her. Usually the view was of the ocean, with just a few trees and bushes before the land shaded sharply away. No other houses were visible. Tonight the sea was invisible, too, obscured behind a mist that seemed to start at the ends of her feet. It was sometimes this way, and she wondered if she didn't prefer it. A place on the edge of being, in which anything could happen. She had meant to bring a glass of wine out with her, but forgot. Once she had sat down she seemed becalmed, unable to summon the will to go back in and confront the refrigerator.

  She had spent the day looking for Zandt. He had not been at the hotel, nor on the Promenade, or anywhere else she had tried. Early evening she had driven all the way out to sit and watch the house where he had once lived. Other people owned it now, and he had not appeared. She had driven home again. So all she could do was sit. The living room behind her was lined with bookshelves filled with texts and papers and notes. She did not wish to look at any of them. She didn't want to talk to anyone in the Bureau. Her position there was not as it had been before. The Upright Man had sidelined her career—not because of their failure to apprehend him, though that had not helped. Rather because she had continued to leak information to a policeman who had been ordered not to interfere after the disappearance of his daughter. Agents had lost their jobs for far less. She had managed to keep hers, but things were different now. Once she'd had Monroe's ear, had been a comer. Now their relationship felt stretched and tired.

  She felt alone, and afraid. Her fear was unconnected with the loneliness. She was used to solitude and did not mind it, despite a nature that yearned for something else. She had ended the affair with Zandt for one reason only. The more she came to care about him, the less she had felt willing to destroy the life he already had. The fact that it had been destroyed anyway had made it impossible to explain this fact to him when he asked. Not impossible, perhaps: sentences could have been framed to convey the information. But somewhere within them might have been something that betrayed her. Betrayed the fact that, two weeks after Karen's disappearance, she had witnessed a thought that had floated unbidden across the back of her mind. That if this thing had been going to happen, the destruction of this family, she might as well have been the one to do it.

  There had been other men in the meantime, though not many, and there would presumably be more. Finding men was no real problem, at least the ones you had little desire to keep. It was more the despair that ground her down, the endless procession of terrible events. If this was what we were like, then perhaps there was nothing to be done. If you looked at what our species did to its own kind and to other animals, you had to ask if we didn't deserve whatever we had coming to us, whatever autonemesis we brought merrily into being; if the rough beasts that slouched towards Bethlehem were anything more than our own prodigal children, comi
ng home.

  At about nine-thirty she stood up and went back inside. As she opened the fridge, which held nothing except a half-drunk bottle of wine, she kept half an eye on the small television on the counter. More coverage of the killings in England, though with the sound turned down she could not tell what was being said, or revealed, or alleged. Some dismal facts or other, some new reason to feel sad.

  She shut the door again, the bottle untouched, and leaned for a moment with her face against its cool surface.

  She looked up when she heard a sound from outside. After a moment the noise resolved into the sound of tyres on the gravel of the road. She walked quickly across the room, stepping over the crack, and got a gun from her bag.

  The car came to a halt outside, and she heard a muffled conversation. Then the sound of a door slamming shut, and the noise of tyres again, reversing back up the drive. Footsteps, and a knock on the door. Hand behind her back, she went to open it.

  Zandt stood outside. He looked breathless, and a little drunk.

  'Where the hell have you been?'

  'All over.' He walked into the room, stopped, and looked around. 'I love what you've done with the place.'

  'I haven't done anything to it.'

  'That's what I mean. It looks exactly the same.'

  'Not every chick is obsessed with interior decoration.'

  'Yeah, they are. I think you must be a man in disguise.'

  'Damn. You got me.' She stood with arms folded. 'What do you want?'

  'Just to tell you I killed the right man after all.'

  •••

  By the time she came out onto the patio with the bottle, he had already started talking.

  'The problem was that we couldn't work it like other cases. It didn't respond to normal investigative procedure. When people disappear you trace back through the contacts, work it down. You talk to the families, their friends, the people in their environments. You're looking for an intersection. A bar they went to at different times on different nights. Memberships to the same gym. A friend of a friend of a friend. Some point of confluence that says these people are linked by something other than now being dead. By something before, something that led to their deaths. With The Upright Man we had multiple disappearances but only superficial similarities. Same sex, same age, more or less. All pretty. So what? There's boys sitting in rooms all over the city praying for girls like this. Women, come to that. It's a consensual desire, not psychopathology. Apart from the long hair. That's the only thing that can be pointed at, the only preference—along with the fact the girls came from families where money isn't a big issue. They're not runaways, they're not junkies. Which just means that what he did was more difficult, because girls like this are harder to steal. It's not a lead.'

  He paused. Nina waited. He wasn't looking at her. He didn't even seem aware of her presence. He stood on the very edge of the patio. From the doorway his outline looked indistinct. When he started again, he spoke more slowly.

  'A man is looking for something. He has an anxiety, something that can only be resolved through a certain course of action, which he has become aware of through accident or trial and error. He hasn't allowed it to happen for a while. He's been good. He hasn't done the bad thing. He's kept himself to himself, and not done anyone any harm. He's never going to do it again. He's not weak—he doesn't need it. Not now, maybe not ever. Maybe he's never going to do it again. Maybe he can leave it behind. Maybe it's over.

  'But gradually… it stops being okay. It starts getting harder. His concentration goes. He finds he can't function. He can't focus on his job, his family, his life. He's getting tense. Ideas start recurring, patterns of fantasy. He's becoming anxious, and what makes it worse is that he knows what is causing it. He knows the only thing that is going to resolve it. He begins to revisit old campaigns in his head, but they don't help. He may find it difficult to remember them in any detail. They don't diminish the way he's feeling now. It's yesterday's news. You can't resolve a current anxiety through something that has already happened: last year's good times do not combat this week's misery. He needs something in front of him, something he hasn't done yet. Not even the talismans help, the things he kept, the proof that he's done it before. All they do is remind him that it's possible. He needs to do it so much and knows that he can't live without it—and in any event, no matter how hard he tries, he's already done it and there can never be any real peace or any hope of forgiveness. His life is tainted and he can't go back.

  'And so, accidentally, almost, he starts looking again. He may tell himself that this is all he is doing. Looking. That he is more in control now. That this time he will only look, not take. But he will start looking again, and once he has taken this step there can be only one outcome. He will forget how bad he felt last time, as the memory of a hangover will not stop you drinking next Friday night. He may have done it so many times that he no longer feels bad about it even in prospect. It may be the only thing that has meaning to him. He will go to a place he's been before, or somewhere like it. He will have a plan by now. This is a dangerous business, and he will have developed ways of reducing the risk. This is where the intersections come into play, because the intersections are the man, and lie at the heart of his paths. They come from the places where he feels safe, where he wanders as himself. Some will think of it as a hunting ground. Others will just think of it as somewhere they blend in, or where nobody watches, where they're invisible. Where he is not weak, but has power; where he is not part of the crowd, but above it. His hidden places, the ones where people come to find him, where the thing he is looking for walks in out of the evening and into a night he has planned for them. He will watch for a while, and then finally one night, when the girl turns as she walks down the street, she will see someone behind her and then it will all be over until it's time to clean up and feel sick and promise God or whoever you think listens that he will never, ever do it again.'

  'And that's how you found him,' Nina prompted.

  'No. We found nothing that tied all the girls together. We never came close to finding the man because we could never work out where he'd first seen the girls. That's why, when Karen disappeared, I ended up falling back on the places the girls had been taken from. They were the only sites we knew were linked to the killer. It was all I had left. There's no link. No way of finding one. Except… last time he did come back. He came back to visit a site, and I thought it was to relive what had happened there. And once I'd seen him at two of them, I believed he was the man. And so I tracked him, and I found him.'

  'But then,' Nina said, choosing her words carefully, 'you discovered that he wasn't the man after all.'

  'Wrong. The man I killed was the man who abducted some of the girls.'

  'Are you saying the one now is a copycat?'

  'No. I'm saying I killed the waiter, not the man who ordered the beer.'

  'I don't understand.'

  'The man who sent the parcels was different from the one who abducted the girls.'

  Nina stared at him. 'The Upright Man decides he needs a girl, and he just puts in an order? And then this guy just goes out and snatches them to order? Like a fucking pizza delivery?'

  'That's why no more girls disappeared after Karen, even though someone delivered the package. The man who abducted them was gone. The killer was still alive.'

  'But serial killers don't work that way. Okay, there's been a few who worked in pairs. Leonard Lake and Charles Ng. John and Richard Darrow. The Wests, depending how you look at it. But nothing like this.'

  'Not until now,' he agreed. 'But we live in a changing world, where everything is bigger, brighter and better. Convenient. On-demand.'

  'Then how come there were no links between all of the girls? The abductor must have had a standard MO, like you said. We should have been able to find it.'

  'If it was the same man each time.'

  Nina just looked at him, and blinked. 'There were two abductors?'

  'Maybe more. Why not?'<
br />
  'Because, John, because The Upright Man has only taken one potential victim in the last two years. Sarah Becker.'

  'Who says it's just him?' He picked up the wine bottle, found it was empty. 'You must have some more wine somewhere.'

  Nina followed him as he walked back into the house. He opened the fridge, stared with disbelief at its emptiness.

  'John, I don't have anything more to drink. What do you mean, who says it's just him?'

  'How many serial killers you got working in California at this time?'

  'At least seven, maybe as many as eleven. Depends how you define…'

  'Exactly. And those are the ones you know about. In one state, and a state that comes way down the rankings. Call it a hundred and fifty nationwide, and say ten to fifteen of them can afford twenty thousand a pop. Maybe more. Maybe a lot more. That's a client base. A big one. You could get a fucking bank loan on the back of that business plan.'

  'Even if you're right, which frankly remains to be proved, how does this help us find Sarah Becker?'

  'It doesn't,' he admitted, and his nervous energy abruptly disappeared. He rubbed his forehead with his fingers, hard. 'I assume the Feds are still running down any lines leading from the family?'

  Nina nodded.

  'Well,' he said, sounding tired and defeated. 'Then I guess we just wait.' He was watching the mute television. They were still doing a wrap-up of recent mass murders, background to the high street massacre in England. 'Have you been following this?'