Sins of the Flesh Page 20

  “They’d better,” he said grimly, “because I won’t let them hound you, Jess.”

  “Rest easy, Walter, I’m in no danger. You have my word on it,” Jess said, gazing at him sternly.

  “I’ll rest easy, I promise.” He fell silent, then suddenly asked, “Who is this Captain Carmine Delmonico?”

  “A long-time and very senior Holloman policeman. A detective. However, he’s a member of the panel that reviews your progress, and therefore he’s important to you. Thus far he’s been an excellent choice for the panel—he never lets his personal prejudices get in the way of his panel decisions, and he accepts my professional opinions in the same way as a Senate Committee would the opinions of Richard Feynman on something atomic.”

  “A friend at court.”

  “Yes, Walter, definitely. Which is why this business with the six women is such a nuisance. It undermines his respect for me.”

  Walter rose, came round the desk, and hunkered down to deal with the safe combination. “We can’t have that, Jess,” he said, his tones absorbed. “No, we just can’t have that.”

  MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 1969

  Since Walter Jenkins had no pathway leading to frustration, but had many leading to an ability to plan, he set about his task in a calm and unhurried way. Having no true comprehension of the multiple-layered nature of Jess Wainfleet’s problem with Captain Carmine Delmonico and the Holloman PD, he had decided that the correct answer was also the most direct: remove Delmonico from his position of leadership and deflect the rest of the Holloman PD into an avenue of investigation that had nothing to do with Jess. Therefore, he reasoned, a simple elimination would not work; he had to do something that suggested Delmonico had about-faced, had found something new and important.

  He had spent all of Sunday in the HI library, which luckily had a microfiche facility that covered all Connecticut major crimes; HI was an institute for the criminally insane, and its senior staff liked to be able to consult newspaper or magazine reports on its speciality. Thus he had learned about Delia’s Shadow Women, and opened up a few more pathways as he did so—pathways that would have greatly thrilled and dismayed Jess. He also sampled the high end of Carmine Delmonico’s profile, and had a half dozen superb photographs of the Captain into the bargain, though he had to process them from negative to positive before he really saw what he had to contend with. Delmonico was well into his forties, but not yet past his prime …. Then Walter found an article in a local magazine on the Holloman PD, a recent, lengthy piece that featured other important faces, like Commissioner John Silvestri, Captain of Uniforms Fernando Vasquez, and Sergeant Delia Carstairs, whom the journalist found fascinating because she was the Commissioner’s niece, from Oxford in England, and whose plain clothes were anything but plain. It also featured the radically new style of the young police artist, one Hank Jones, and how his modern approach had identified a series of bodies labeled “Doe.”

  Walter wallowed in movies. He had watched hundreds and hundreds of them on his road back from insanity, and almost all he knew of the world was movie or television fed. Consequently he saw at once that he could accomplish nothing by attacking head on. That would be like planting the briefcase bomb inside Hitler’s “Wolf’s Lair”—someone could move it to the wrong side of a solid oak table leg. No, he had to be more subtle than that!

  The moment that resolution clicked into place, Walter threw out any idea of a daylight foray, and felt a thrill of emotion that would have transfigured Jess. His medium was the night, in which he could move more stealthily than a predator after prey, and no one would suspect his absence from a high security prison.

  The plan! What ought it be? First, it had to deflect the Captain; second, it had to remove all suspicion in the Shadow Women case from Jess Wainfleet; and third, it had to replace Jess with a different, unconnected suspect.

  Let it look as if Delmonico was the killer! The time was still August, if a little late, so the woman could have done her disappearing act halfway through August, as the others had. Maybe Delmonico kept her a little longer, if she was a special kind of woman? Such a special kind of woman that, having killed her, Delmonico suddenly realized he only had one course—to put his gun in his mouth and make a meal of a bullet. Yes! Yes, that made perfect sense! He had a wife and two kids, but he had heard Jess on the phone to Delia, and one of the subjects was Delmonico’s family, vacationing on the West Coast for some time to come. He must be at home alone. Ideal, ideal!

  Then the identity of the woman hit him, and his breath hissed out of him like air out of a compressor valve, sharp and loud and vicious. It had to be her kind, even if she wasn’t the renting kind, the disappearing kind. The Captain had grown bored, that was it, he’d moved on to a spicier, juicier, tastier kind of woman. Well, they did, these multiple killers, wasn’t that so? There must be a note, and the note could explain it all. Delmonico was well educated, everyone said, so the note would have to reflect that. Businesslike yet poetic …

  Brimming over with joy, Walter perfected his plan—Jess would smile in triumph, if only she knew how well her subject was planning! Logic wasn’t hard, it was easy.

  Would he do it in two stages, or three? As many as it demanded, decided Walter. My plan is flawless.

  At eleven-thirty he was on the road. First stop was to gas up at a station that had gas pump jockeys; he asked for five dollars’ worth, got it, handed the money over, and was gone before the kid manning the pump even noticed his face. Still easing back on the throttle so as not to irritate folks in the houses nearby, Walter concentrated on the left side of 133, not wanting to ride by the high brick wall when he came upon it. Two or three little shops, and there it was, punctuated in its middle by an archway surmounted by a cross. Speed slackening, he rode well past it before steering the bike off the road into the encroaching forest. A few yards in he killed the engine and dismounted, then reached into one pannier and removed the tools of this particular trade: a roll of duct tape, a pair of thin rubber surgeon’s gloves, and a roll of picture wire. Diagonal pliers-cum-cutters, screwdrivers and scissors resided in one of his jacket pockets.

  The high brick wall was for 133 alone; the property’s fences on its three forest sides were chain-link topped with barbed wire; not a problem for Walter, who produced his diagonals and cut a neat rectangle in the wire, which wasn’t rigged with any kind of alarm. Once through the fence, he found himself in carefully tended grounds, many of the larger lone trees ringed by a wooden seat. There were two separate buildings, the farther one clearly a school of some sort. The spacious grounds held tennis courts, basketball courts and what he suspected was a gymnasium. Unacquainted with schools, Walter didn’t know that the air of demure quietude it emanated was a powerful indication that it lacked both boys and men. The nearer, much smaller building, of two storeys, was Walter’s target. He moved to it quite briskly, but kept one hand on his knife in case of dogs—but there were no dogs.

  The front door he opened with a small steel spatula attached to his screwdrivers—so easy he knew the inhabitants weren’t worried about security. The place was silent and dark, a tiny flame in a red glass bowl showing a faint ruby glint beneath a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the front hall. No one was moving, and he didn’t need a flashlight to see even into the blackest corners, for darkness was his natural milieu. Up the beautiful old staircase to the second floor and its sleepers.

  These nuns each had a big room to herself, which made his task simple. Five doors down on the right, he struck paydirt. A sleeping woman in her late twenties or early thirties, smooth of face, smooth of skin, slender of body; her arms, clad in fine fawn cotton, reclined one to either side of her as she slumbered on her back. Closing her open door, he inched up the edge of her little single bed until he was level with her chest, then put his hands around her throat and jerked her upright, her scream no more than a sigh. A pair of terrified eyes, rolling white, goggled up at him, a black shape in a black room, as he leaped to straddle her, one knee at
each of her shoulders, the weight of his rump settling onto her chest as he lay her down again, his face inches from her own. While his fingers around her neck tightened remorselessly and her legs drummed and threshed vainly behind him, he watched the life go out of her. It was delicious. It was like sucking her animation into himself and becoming more than both of them put together. It was an act of God. It was the ultimate experience, and the I-Walter called it ecstasy. For he was the I-Walter, and finally he knew what the I-Walter wanted. Ecstasy. Nothing but ecstasy.

  To be absolutely sure, he remained sitting on top of her with his hands around her throat for several more minutes—was this what Kris Kristofferson meant by “coming down?” So much he didn’t know, unless he gleaned explanation as well as exposition from television, movies or radio, and he really did feel as if he was coming down from a much higher level. He found another popular word: transcendental. He thought that one applied too.

  But there were things to be done. He lifted the limp form onto the floor and loosely remade the bed; nothing else was disturbed. Up she came to be draped around his neck; Walter Jenkins quit the scene, closing the door of her room after him. Out by the bike he laid her down to inspect her by flashlight, and was immensely pleased. Clad in a modest fawn cotton nightdress from wrists to neck to feet, she was quite pretty in the face, though her brown hair was cropped as short as a marine’s, and no cosmetic had ever marred her skin. Out of the other pannier came a smallish rubber body bag he had pilfered from HI, and into it went the body of the nun. He looked at his watch: two a.m. Best head home.

  The body bag strapped across pillion and panniers with its contents face down, the whole forming a large U, he kicked the bike into life, eased it to a low growl, and poked the front of it onto 133. No traffic moved; the big trailer trucks that drove all through the night preferred I-95 or I-91, and the locals were at home in bed. He rode the few miles to the vicinity of the Asylum without encountering a soul, turned into the forest, and killed the Harley not many yards from its destination. Walter was growing bold. Provided he didn’t roar, no one on the walls noticed.

  Safely inserted within the wall, the motorcycle stood on its prop with the body bag still lashed across it; there was no need to remove it, as it would remain there until rigor mortis had passed off, and would therefore be flexible when he needed to move it during the next phase. He wouldn’t gas up from his plastic containers until then either. In the meantime he had to be sure there were no signs of his bike or feet outside, so back outside he went to straighten bent grasses and ground things, straighten bent branches or shrubs, break off broken twigs. Only then did he change into his HI uniform of grey T-shirt and shorts, and commence the walk home. If someone saw him, he had his story all ready—restlessness, headache, boredom. Jess was hooked like a fish on boredom, but the I-Walter knew he couldn’t tell her that the most boring aspect of all was Jess herself.

  Walter wasn’t a happy person.

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 1969

  The nuns of the Sacred Heart School for Girls said their first prayers of the day at six a.m.; when Sister Mary Therese Kelly wasn’t present, Mother Perpetua Gonzales discovered she wasn’t anywhere to be found. A thorough search of the convent, school and grounds produced no sign of her. At seven a.m. Mother called the Holloman PD and was put through to Captain Carmine Delmonico.

  “I’m coming,” said Carmine. “Don’t touch anything.”

  Siren on and messages out to Delia and Donny to join him, Carmine raced through traffic building up to rush hour and reached his destination twenty minutes later.

  When Mother Perpetua had taught a six-year-old Carmine to read with enjoyment she had been a skinny little nun not far out of her teens, endowed with a genius for instilling love of learning in kids; a whole career as a primary school teacher had stretched before her. Now that she was into her sixties she was principal of her school and a force to be reckoned with. Vocations had fallen off drastically, so much so that many Catholic schoolteachers these days were laypersons, but Mother Perpetua was still capable of drawing vocations. Once a nun was under the shade of Mother Perpetua’s wing, she seemed to take to the life as if made for it, and its problems, shared, always seemed to have an answer.

  Mother Perpetua was waiting outside the convent door, pacing up and down, when Carmine arrived, Delia and Donny in his wake.

  “Forensics won’t be long,” said Delia tersely.

  “Delia, you take the school buildings. Donny, check under every twig and leaf on the grounds. If you’re done ahead of me, I’ll be with Mother Perpetua.”

  It took Carmine many, many minutes to cross the front hall and ascend the lovely old staircase to the rooms on the floor overhead; there was no third storey.

  “Are bedroom doors ordinarily closed?” he asked at Sister Mary Therese’s closed door.

  “Not unless privacy is required, and that you may imagine why.”

  “Had she asked for privacy?”

  “Definitely not. That was why we were so surprised this morning.”

  Carmine produced a magnifying glass and examined the knob. “The prints are smeared—the last hand on it wore a clammy glove.” He opened the door and went into a large but unostentatious room, a kind of a home, though the bed was single and the furniture unfashionable. A big desk, well lit, shelves of books, a lounge chair facing a TV set, a cork board festooned with pieces of paper. Delia and Donny came in as he summed up a busy, useful, happy life complete to a small shrine to Our Lady.

  “I don’t think there’s much here for us, guys,” he said.

  Mother Perpetua spoke. “Then come and have breakfast and coffee with us. You must be famished.”

  “He remade the bed,” said Delia.

  “How old was Sister Mary Therese Kelly?” Carmine asked at the end of an excellent breakfast.

  “Thirty-four next May,” said Mother Perpetua. “Most nuns look younger than they are. Conventual life keeps the spirit youthful because our troubles are shared. She was a marvelous teacher of arithmetic.”

  “Did she enter straight from high school, Mother?”

  “Yes. She took her degree from Albertus Magnus.”

  “Her relatives?” Delia asked.

  “One brother a parish priest in Cleveland, Ohio, and another an insurance salesman, married, with two children. No sisters.”

  “I take it Father Kelly is the head of the family,” Carmine said. “Would you like me to contact him?”

  “If it’s at all possible, Carmine, I would prefer to do it?”

  “Mother, it’s one job I don’t mind handing over, believe me!” Carmine said fervently.

  “Have you any idea what might have happened to her?” Mother asked as she walked them to the front door.

  “As yet, no,” Carmine answered, keeping his voice casual. “It’s too early, Mother, and kidnapping seems unlikely—I mean, why her when there were better candidates closer to the stairs? Though I have notified the archbishop, just in case there’s a ransom demand.”

  Delia waited until the front door was closed and she, Donny and Carmine were alone. “I very much fear that Sister Therese is dead.”

  “Why?” Carmine asked with a premonitory shiver.

  “This is Mystery Man—the out-of-towner on the big bike.”

  “No one heard a bike,” Donny said.

  “Or saw one, I know. But it’s he. I don’t care what you argue to the contrary,” Delia maintained. “What’s more, he’s working to a plan. This chap is a loner, and I’d be willing to bet that he’s not fixated on nuns. Sister Mary Therese is essential.”

  Walter had discovered that he could mirror-write as easily as he could write in the ordinary way; it only meant, as he called it now, “shifting gears” to turn a very sharp corner, and—hey presto!—he was through the looking glass. Right and left, side to side, had always confused him, whereas the points on a compass did not; now he reasoned that it had something to do with two different worlds, the linearity of right and lef
t, the circularity of north, east, south, west, and back to north. The trouble was that explanations bored him. If he told Jess, she would insist on hours and hours of dissection and discussion. The I-Walter was not even remotely interested in the Jess-Walters because the Jess-Walters were a mishmash. The I-Walter was the whole entity, and was complete in himself.

  He knew what the I-Walter’s purpose was, though sometimes it still came in patches, or was befogged and twisted. That frustration never occurred was the result of a kind of infinite patience that only a lifetime prisoner could endure.

  His plan was working, he could see that clearly, and once he had written his mirrored note and read it through, he smiled. Jess was right: when a good feeling invaded him, he was more and more tempted to betray that fact by smiling. Not a good idea! The smile vanished immediately. Time to feel the pleasure-thing after it was over and he could confirm that it had worked. There were dangers in too many pathways; events were starting to go too fast. He couldn’t slow down events, but he could set a guard on himself.

  “What did you do today, Walter?” Jess asked him at dinner.

  He’d lead his mentor somewhere he knew she found alluring. “Remember when I discovered I could write just as well with my left hand as with my right?”

  “How could I forget?” Amusement gleamed in her eyes, but not, he knew, a contemptuous emotion; Jess thought the Walter she had created was a wonder of the world. “Don’t tell me you’ve taught yourself something new?”

  “No, not new. My toes, remember?”

  Her amusement fled. “You mean—?”

  “Yes, I can write with my toes now.”

  “Right foot, or left foot?”

  It was as if he had neatly caught her amusement as it vanished and installed it in his own eyes. “Both.”

  “What provoked you to try, Walter?”

  “Ari Melos said I had prehensile toes, so I looked up ‘prehensile’ in Webster’s and found out that it means capable of gripping an object. A pencil is an object, so I gripped it in my left toes and wrote.”