Incinerator

12

This is what it said: You made me break a rule.

You don’t know how important the rules are.

If I have my way, I’d do five a night, every night of the week, every week of the year. The rules save lives. And you made me break one.

You’ll be sorry. When I kill the others, you’ll be sorry. When I liberate your phlogiston and leave nothing behind but calx, you’ll be sorry.

This one had been written in a hurry: same gold pen, same inexorably straight margins, but no picture at the bottom, no fancy first initial at the top. Like the dance card, it had been messengered. Same approach, different service, no lead. We could have been friends. I used to think we were friends. I hoped we could be friends again.

You didn’t recognize my voice. Well, keep an eye over your shoulder. If you don’t recognize me before I throw the match, you’ll be sorry. Of course, you’ll be sorry either way.

You saw what I did to your girlfriend. She made a lovely light.

Tell your other girlfriend to be careful too. And, by the way, I don’t think much of the guy she’s fooling around with. Real drop in quality there.

I’d attempted, but failed, to prevent them from showing that part. As it flashed onto the screen I wanted to perspire, but the makeup they’d caked on my face wouldn’t let me. I just tried to penetrate the glare of light pouring down on me to locate a friendly face. No deal there, either.

I tried, the note continued. I really tried. But you’re an *******, just like all the others. So you’ll burn.

The note hadn’t said******* of course. It had used a much more descriptive term, which had been covered, for today’s purposes only, with asterisks. This was, after all, family entertainment.

“That’s a letter from a man who has burned thirteen people to death in Los Angeles,” Velez Caputo said, bright as a silver quarter, into the nearest camera. “We’re coming to you live today to bring you this amazing story. The show that was scheduled for this hour, ‘Transvestites and the Women Who Love Them,’ will be shown tomorrow. And we’ll talk with the man the killer sent that letter to after this commercial message.”

The lights on the set went out, and the television monitors facing the set went dark. The sound track to a commercial for disposable diapers boomed through the speakers, preternaturally loud, as though mothers and babies were universally hard of hearing. “Relax for sixty seconds,” Velez Caputo said to me with a smile that had probably sent her dentist’s kids through college. “I love live TV.”

I smiled back, feeling the makeup stiff on my cheeks. I didn’t love live TV, but at least I could see again.

It was Tuesday afternoon. Two days had passed, and the Incinerator had burned three people, two of them out in the Valley, in Van Nuys. Another departure from established procedure. The one in Van Nuys and one of the L.A. victims had been women, which had the effect of making things more urgent. The media were howling.

Stillman had agreed to my insistence on the telephone that we do the show live rather than waiting the usual two weeks between taping and airing, and had even bought full-page ads in both the Times and the Daily News. Velez Caputo had come into the studio on Sunday afternoon to tape radio and television commercials, and they’d been on the air by Sunday night. Only in the L.A. market, of course. Norman wasn’t going to spend any money he didn’t absolutely have to spend.

So the Incinerator was probably watching. I’d guessed that he followed the media, if only to see what they were saying about him. Maybe I’d been wrong. Schultz, for whatever it was worth, was positive that he did. Now that he wasn’t Captain Omnipotent, Schultz and I were getting along better.

Schultz smiled at me.

He was sitting rigidly in what I’d been told was called the Number Two Seat. I was in the Hot Seat. A couple of people I didn’t know filled seats Three and Four. No one had rushed forward to tell me who they were, but Schultz had vouched for the one in Number Three. Behind the cameras and the lights a sort of Peanut Gallery rose in tiers, people packed shoulder to shoulder in narrow, uncomfortable-looking chairs. Their clothes marked most of them as out-of-towners, and the way they gaped at me-those of them who could tear their eyes off Velez Caputo-reminded me of the old adage about fools’ faces. Few places were as conspicuously public as this.

“Fifteen seconds,” said a man wearing a headset. The man had a nervous tic that effectively deprived him of control over the lids of his left eye. Velez Caputo smoothed her dress and licked her lips. Velez Caputo had wonderful lips, and no tics to speak of.

There were, I’d been told, eighty people sitting out front in the Peanut Gallery. Among them were Eleanor, whom I’d been unable to talk out of attending, Hammond, and three of his boys. They’d followed her in, at a presumably discreet distance, when she absolutely refused to stay home. In exchange for coming, she’d accepted the deal: She had to leave early. In case the Incinerator was waiting outside.

Velez Caputo gave her microphone cord a tug. It was attached to an oversized spool, like the one that lawn maniacs use to keep their garden hoses tidy. An anxious-looking man presided over it as though it were the only responsibility worth shouldering in the entire world.

The lights came on. “Five seconds,” said the man with the headset and the tic. His eye was firing off random squints. “Four, three,” and then he held up a hand and counted down, two, one. He pointed a discreet index finger in the general direction of Velez Caputo. No one pointed directly at Velez Caputo. The little red light on the camera closest to her winked on.

“They call him the Incinerator,” Velez Caputo said immediately. “He’s the latest and most sensational member of a breed that’s become only too common in this decade, the serial killer.

“Where do these people come from?” She stopped smiling and assumed an expression of High Episcopal Seriousness. “What goes through their minds? Why do they walk among us? And what is it like to know that one of them has targeted you?

“When people think about their deaths, what do they dread most? Is it death from a lingering disease? No.” She was reading off a transparent TelePrompter that spooled by in front of the camera she was facing, invisible to the people looking in, the same elite device used by presidents of the United States, and why not? She made a lot more money than the president. “Is it death by drowning? No,” she answered herself, just in case the folks at home had gotten it wrong. “According to a Louis Harris poll, it’s death by fire. By flame,” she said. “And that’s how the Incinerator kills his defenseless victims. We have with us today four guests.”

The light on her camera went out, and I saw myself, wearing makeup, on the monitors, looking as if I’d wandered in from the show on transvestites by mistake. “First is a Los Angeles private detective named Simeon Grist.” The words SIMEON GRIST appeared on the screen beneath my face, which had frozen into a sort of muscular death mask. In print, my name seemed foolish and wrong, like an alias assigned by a substandard intelligence service.

“Mr. Grist,” Velez Caputo was saying about the idiotic-looking individual on the monitors, “is the man who broke up a child prostitution ring here in Los Angeles last year. He was retained by the famous heiress Baby Winston when the Incinerator burned her father, and now, as you’ve seen from the letter we just read, the Incinerator has threatened to burn him alive. It took great courage for him to join us today, ladies and gentlemen. Simeon Grist.”

People applauded, and the idiot on the monitors grinned emptily. Hammond clapped, slowly and ironically. Eleanor sat forward, looking concerned. Stillman, behind the cameras in a nautical blazer, made up for my old pal’s lack of joie de vivre by applauding more enthusiastically than anyone. The light on my camera went off, and none too soon.

“Our other guests,” Velez Caputo said, “are a psychologist specializing in serial killers for the Los Angeles Police Department, Dr. Norbert Schultz.”

Schultz smiled in a nervous, yellow fashion, and I thought, Norbert?

“From VICAP, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s central index, where national information on these maniacs is stored,” Velez Caputo continued as the monitors reflected a sallow individual wearing a blue tie with little red fish all over it, “William Stang.”

William Stang didn’t smile. He probably hadn’t smiled since the day his wife fell through the ice.

The man in the farthest chair had gotten up, and a woman took his place. Great, I thought, a surprise.

“And, finally, the woman who’s being called the Homeless Heroine, the woman who fought off the Incinerator to save the life-only temporarily, I’m afraid-of Baby Winston’s father. Ladies and gentlemen, Hermione X.”

Hermione X, not a new hallmark in alias creativity, had been considerably cleaned up. Wearing a mask that made her look like an aged Lone Ranger in drag, she waved at the audience. They applauded. She was a hit. She was also loving it.

I was hating it a lot. “He could kill her,” I said over whatever Velez Caputo was reading off the TelePrompter, a stream of over-written conjecture about what has gone wrong with our society.

“Mr. Grist?” Velez Caputo said, swiveling to face me. It would take a lot to surprise her.

“This isn’t smart,” I said. “She has to go back to the streets when you’ve finished with her, and he saw her. So what if she’s wearing a mask? He knows who she is.”

“We’re paying for her security,” Velez Caputo said smoothly. I saw Norman wince. “Anyway, we’re sending her home.”

“The woman doesn’t know her last name. Should be an interesting passport.”

Caputo frowned at me, but Stillman’s face cleared.

“Don’t worry about me, Ducks,” Hermione said gaily.

“I’d think, Simeon-may I call you Simeon?” Velez Caputo said.

“Call me whatever you want,” I said. I’d been warned that there would be surprises, but I hadn’t figured on Hermione.

“I’d think, Simeon, that you’d be more worried about yourself.” The man with the headset was making frantic signals in the direction of the TelePrompter, his left eye sending out a semaphore of panic. She ignored him.

“Well,” I lied, “you’d think wrong.”

“And yet this lunatic has told you what he’s after. Specifically,” she added. “You.”

“He’s not a lunatic,” I said.

“He’s not,” Schultz said, leaning forward in his chair as he picked up his cue. “Clinically, he’s probably as sane as you and I.”

“Sane?” Velez Caputo said, arching an eyebrow that probably required its own gardening staff. “He’s torching defenseless people!”

“Precisely,” Schultz said. “They’re defenseless. He’s got a plan. He’s got rules. We’ve all got rules. Don’t cross on the red, don’t cheat on the wife, don’t do anything that might make you lose the job. Well, he’s got rules, too, and he followed them for a long time. They’re not our rules, but they’re rules. And insofar as the legal definition of sanity is concerned-whether he can distinguish between right and wrong-well, of course he can. And he’s proceeding anyway, in accordance with a program he’s created. He’s completely in control of himself.”

“He’s very much in control,” Stang said. He’d interrupted a sentence fragment from Velez Caputo, but she looked at him as gratefully as though he’d just offered her the names and addresses of seventy Nielson families. “Your mass murderer, the guy who shows up at McDonald’s with an AK-47 and shoots thirty people, he’s maybe crazy. He kisses the wife and kiddies good-bye and slips a clip into the magazine and blows people away until the cops put a couple through his skull. He knows he’s going to die, and he doesn’t care. That’s crazy. But your serial murderer, he’s careful. He chooses one kind of victim exclusively, and one way to kill them, and he makes sure that no one will catch him. He looks both ways, so to speak, and when the field is clear, he slits the throat…”

“Or throws the match,” Schultz said.

“Or throws the match,” Stang said crankily. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter?” Velez Caputo said, smelling a fight.

“Well, it matters to the victim, I suppose,” Stang said. “But, you know, when you’re about to die, there isn’t time to decide that you’d prefer a different form of murder.”

“Mr. Grist?” Velez Caputo said. Hermione cawed something, but Caputo ignored her.

“He’s sane,” I said, “whatever sane means.”

“He’s bloody crackers,” Hermione said. “You should have heard him laugh.”

“Hermione,” I said, “can it.”

“Time for a break,” Velez Caputo said to the camera, and the lights went down.

“You,” she hissed to me, “don’t interrupt. We have to get a flow going here.”

“Would you prefer that I leave?” I asked. “Want to fill some time?”

“Norman,” she said, but she didn’t have to. Stillman was already there, standing over me and looking down with fatherly concern.

“Simeon,” he said, “you haven’t said it yet.”

“If I leave,” I said, “you’ve got an awful long time in front of you.” The computer behind Velez Caputo’s eyes began to click.

“Fifty minutes,” she said to Stillman. “I told you live was a mistake.”

“Thirty seconds,” said the man with the headset.

“This is national?” Velez Caputo said.

“You wanted it to be,” Stillman replied, demonstrating an Olympian mastery of the sidestep.

“Can I interrupt?” I said as the man with the headset told us that twenty seconds remained. Velez Caputo looked from Norman to me. “Leave us alone,” I said.

Velez Caputo gave me a stare packed with the kind of loathing I usually reserve for the poetry written by characters in novels. “That’s not how it works, sonny,” she said.

“Five,” said the man with the headset, over the strident tones of a commercial for laundry detergent. “Four, three,” and he held up the fingers for two, one. He pointed vaguely in Velez Caputo’s direction.

“We’re back,” she said, sounding very glad to be back. Stillman had retreated behind the cameras. “We were talking to Dr. Stang,” she said, making her first mistake.

“Mr. Stang,” Stang said.

“Of course,” Velez Caputo said, coloring beneath her makeup. “Mr. Stang of the FBI. We were talking about why you’re so sure that the killer is in control of himself.”

“These people,” Stang said sourly, “serial killers, I mean, decide consciously to give up their own lives to take the lives of others. They exert enormous control to do so.”

“Surely that’s insane,” Velez Caputo said. Stang shook his head.

“Painters,” Schultz interrupted, following the script we’d developed, “give up their lives-normal, secure, middle-class lives, I mean-to paint. Writers decide to write, no matter what. This man is following a kind of creative urge. It’s a twisted kind of creativity-

“I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” Velez Caputo said.

“-but it’s a kind of creativity,” Schultz said doggedly. “As in any art form, he’s decided to accept the limitations imposed by his materials-in this case, gasoline and matches-and he’s trying-”

“You’re a doctor” Velez Caputo accused him.

“-he’s trying to take it to the ultimate, trying to do something that no one else has ever done with those materials, all the while facing the challenge of capture.” He sat back, having done that bit. Velez Caputo’s face filled the screen, and Schultz gave me the high sign.

“You sound as though you admire him,” Velez Caputo said. “What about the deaths? What about the agony of the victims?”

“No one’s forgetting about the victims,” I said. “All Dr. Schultz is saying is that it’s a mistake to imagine him as a drooling maniac, hovering in doorways waiting for someone to fall asleep. He’s got a highly developed set of criteria, and he’s almost certainly a very intelligent man. Probably a brilliant man.” Point two.

“So what’s phlogiston?” Velez Caputo said, retreating to consult the TelePrompter at last. “What’s calx?”

“Phlogiston,” I said, glad to get to an easy part, “is a bad idea from the early nineteenth century. It was a principle, sort of like an element, and it was proposed by a German chemist named G. E. Stahl as the thing that actually burned when anything caught fire. Calx was whatever was left over.”

“So he’s saying,” Velez Caputo said, cutting through the history of science with a straight razor, “that he intends to burn you to a crisp.”

“That’s what he’s saying,” I said.

“Because he thinks you betrayed him. I should explain,” she said, turning to the cameras, “some of the background here.” The TelePrompter was whirring again, and she explained it in about forty compact seconds. Finishing, she turned to me. “So how do you feel about that, Mr. Grist?”

It wasn’t time for that yet.

“Miss Caputo,” I said.

“Velez,” she said. “Call me Velez.” Off camera, nobody called her Velez.

“How would you feel if he were after you? And who knows? He may decide to go after you next,” I said. “Surely, he’s watching us now.”

Caputo said, “Well, I don’t-”

“He might like to burn a celebrity,” I said maliciously. Schultz was making frantic hand signals. “Think of the media coverage.”

“And yet,” Velez Caputo said, a trifle grimly as the man with the tic made frantic adjustments in the TelePrompter, “up until a few days ago, this Incinerator specialized, as you say, in men. Then he apparently decided to kill women as well.” She paused and licked her lips again, and this time the gesture looked functional rather than cosmetic. “Why?” she asked. “Why do you suppose he changed course?” The man with the tic pointed at Schultz, and Caputo turned toward him. “Dr. Schultz?”

Schultz was sitting taller than a man who suspected the presence of a whoopee cushion. He hadn’t wanted to do this part. He’d asked me repeatedly to do it myself, but I’d refused. If he did it, it meant that he hadn’t talked to Finch.

“He feels that the rules were broken in the, um”-he looked at me, and I returned his gaze, feeling my heart pound against the walls of my jugular vein-“in the, in the…”

“Police action,” Velez Caputo said.

“Yes,” Schultz said, and his Adam’s apple did a little swan dive. “In the police action last Sunday evening.” Hammond, in the back of the room, glared first at me and then at Schultz. “He feels that Mr. Grist betrayed his trust by talking to the police, and he broke his own rules in return. So he burned his first woman.”

“We have a picture of her,” Velez Caputo said, and Schultz sagged back into his chair as a photograph flashed onto the monitors. It might have been the woman I talked to, but the photo had been taken in a different life, a life when she shopped and went home and went to the beauty parlor, and there she was with a matronly smile on her face, a woman living safely within the walls of a world that shut out rain and cold and Thunderbird and bottles of gasoline and Incinerators.

“Helena Troy,” Caputo said. The name sounded like a sick joke.

“Mrs. Troy,” Schultz acknowledged.

“A woman deserted by her husband in Boston less than a year ago,” Velez Caputo said. “Left with nothing, not even the rent for her apartment. Mr. Troy, wherever you are, I hope you’re watching. She was the first woman he killed,” she said to Schultz.

“Yes,” he said, looking like someone whose shoes were wet.

“And you think this is significant.”

“We think, that is I think,” Schultz said, “as a trained psychologist with some experience with this kind of mentality, that he’s been keeping himself from burning women, that, in fact, women have been his real target all along. He’s been denying himself that target-”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Velez Caputo said, on behalf of the folks at home.

“Remember the note,” Schultz said. The camera had had enough of the note, and it remained on him. “Remember the control in that note. He talks about the rules. The rules protect people, he says. Remember his behavior. Always the homeless, always within a certain area, until after the, um, police and Mr. Grist broke the rules. He could have killed elsewhere, someplace the police weren’t looking for him. He didn’t, until the, ah, police action Sunday night.” Dr. Schultz was sweating like a waterfall. He was a police psychologist, and he’d just suggested police culpability not only in the shooting of Dennis Thorpe, but also in the deaths of three women. I felt sorry for him, but I also felt a small thrill of victory at recognizing an ally. He hadn’t consulted with Finch.

“So he felt Mr. Grist had broken the rules,” Velez Caputo said. “Why did he react by burning women?”

“Because,” Schultz said, advancing the theory we’d spent two days arguing over, “he’d always meant to burn women.”

“Please,” she said. “Can you be more specific?”

“With considerable effort,” Schultz said.

“Male serial killers always kill women, unless they’re homosexuals who derive sexual pleasure from killing men,” Stang broke in. “That’s been the problem from the beginning. There didn’t seem to be any sexual element. Put him into a whole new category. He was just burning them and going away. What was he getting out of it?”

“He was deriving the same kind of enjoyment,” Schultz said, literally shutting his eyes so he could plow ahead with a theory he hadn’t shared with the LAPD, “that an artist gets by not putting real wood, say, into his paintings but rather facing the challenge of painting wood. Wood has a very difficult texture. To paint wood in its natural state, wood that’s full of whorls and loops and seemingly random patterns, well, that’s very difficult indeed. Why not just put a piece of wood into the picture and paint around it?”

“You keep comparing this man to an artist,” Velez Caputo said.

“He is an artist,” Schultz said. “He’s an artist of death. Death is his area of creativity,” he said, word for word from the script, “and, like all great artists, he set down rules, limitations for himself.” Schultz drew a deep breath. “And the primary limitation he established, I believe, was that he would only burn men, even though his hatred, the spark that ignited his rage, was women. When Mr. Grist broke the, um, when the…” he faltered. “Oh, hell,” he said, settling into his chair at last, “when the LAPD broke the rules he had set down for talking to Mr. Grist, he threw out his own rules and started to burn women instead.”

“Women,” Velez Caputo said neutrally.

“Women were always his main target,” Schultz bravely reiterated, risking his professional reputation. “It’s women he hates.”

“We’ll be back with Mr. Grist’s reactions-and a very personal plea to the killer,” Velez Caputo said into the camera, “after this.”

Things went dark. “And keep it short,” Velez Caputo said to me as a squadron of makeup women rushed to repair the damages of whatever real emotions she might have endured while we were on the air. They were finishing when the tic with the headset said, “Fifteen.”

Two men were hustling Hermione out of Seat Number Four, and she was cawing protest.

Three, two, one, the man with the tic counted with his fingers. The lights had come on.

“Mr. Grist,” Caputo said, and then she looked at Stillman and fought down a rebellious grin. “We’ve heard from Dr. Schultz that the Incinerator may concentrate on female victims from now on, and yet this note was addressed to you. We promised that we’d get your feelings about all this, but before we do”-she glanced to her right, where a woman was being seated in Hermione’s place in Seat Number Four-“we want to focus on that note. In fact, on all the notes.”

I glanced wildly toward Schultz, who looked like he’d just been hit by a train.

“Hold on,” he shouted.

“There have been three,” Velez Caputo said, as though Schultz hadn’t spoken. He got up, but the first note was already on the screen, pictures and all, in glorious color.

“That’s not allowed,” Schultz said helplessly, still standing there. People waved him back to his chair. “That hasn’t been made public.”

“Sit down, Doctor,” Caputo said, flicking a finger at the floor director to keep the note on the screen. “It’s public now.”

I got up, too. “You won’t show the other one,” I said, “or Dr. Schultz and I are leaving.”

The monitors opened up to show a wide shot, Caputo, Schultz, and me all standing there, the woman in Seat Four looking calmly on. Schultz was jiggling from foot to foot like a prizefighter.

“And why is that?” Velez Caputo asked, looking happy. She’d finally gotten her fight.

“Because it’s privileged information,” Schultz said. “In any murder investigation, certain details are kept quiet. Do you know how many people have confessed to these murders?”

“How would I?” Velez Caputo said accusingly. “The police haven’t released much of anything.”

“More than a dozen,” Schultz said.

The first note flashed back onto the screen.

“We’ll make a deal,” Velez Caputo said. “We won’t show the second one.”

“You sure as hell won’t,” Schultz said. “You’ll give it back, and you’ll tell us where you got your copy.”

“We’ll talk about that after the show,” Caputo said. She came back onto the monitors. Up in the booth, the director must have been tearing his hair out. “For now,” Caputo continued, “we believe that the note you’re now looking at-where is the note?” she demanded. It reappeared. “We believe that the way this note is written tells us something entirely new about the Incinerator, and we have with us an expert who can enlighten us. Joining us,” Velez Caputo said, “is Dr. Catherine Cowan of the University of Southern California, an expert on medieval manuscripts.”

“Hello,” Dr. Cowan said to the cameras. She was an angular woman of forty or forty-five with a determined jaw, a large Victorian garnet brooch, and a beehive hairdo that suggested a hidden fondness for country music. Schultz was studying her as though she were a piranha that had popped up in his bathtub.

“Dr. Cowan,” Velez Caputo said, “you’ve had a chance to review all the Incinerator’s letters to date.”

“I have,” Dr. Cowan said.

“And what is your opinion of them?”

“They’re parodies,” Dr. Cowan said, “no, that’s not the right word because they’re not scornful-they’re imitations of illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.”

“We already know all this,” Schultz said.

“Our viewers don’t,” Velez Caputo said. “And what are illuminated manuscripts, Dr. Cowan?”

“Well, as I say, they’re medieval,” Dr. Cowan said, settling into her chair for a nice long chat. “Should I establish the dates?”

“Never mind,” Velez Caputo said. “The Middle Ages.”

“Yes, well, illuminated. Anything illustrated in silver or gold. Usually, although not always, containing religious texts. They’re hand-painted, of course, on vellum, which is the stretched skin of a goat. Vellum is very durable.”

“Is it?” Velez Caputo said, a bit impatiently.

“Certainly,” Dr. Cowan said serenely. “In fact, the most common surviving objects from the Middle Ages are books.”

“Isn’t that interesting,” Velez Caputo said. “Now the notes-”

“It’s not just interesting,” Dr. Cowan continued, “it’s fascinating. Remember, most of the libraries and monasteries that held them have crumbled away into ruins, and they were made of stone. But the books are with us still.”

“And looking at this note,” Velez Caputo prompted.

“Some illuminated manuscripts survived appalling treatment. In Ireland, they were dipped in cattle troughs because it was thought that their magic would protect livestock.” Dr. Cowan permitted herself a well-bred snicker, and Caputo used it as a shoehorn.

“Dr. Cowan,” she said in a tone that would have haltered an avalanche in midslope.

Dr. Cowan had her mouth open to say something, but she took a little bite out of the air instead. “Sorry?” she said.

“The note from the Incinerator,” Velez Caputo said briskly. “The one that will be on the screen as soon as the technical staff gets on the ball.” It appeared. “We’ll confine our discussion to that note,” she said, glancing at Schultz but meaning the words for Dr. Cowan. “Now, in what ways does this note- this note, Dr. Cowan- resemble an illuminated manuscript?”

“Well,” Dr. Cowan said, her mouth a straight line, “it’s written in gold, of course. One of those cheap metallic pens from Japan. An authentic illuminated manuscript, you understand-”

“Please,” Velez Caputo said. “It would have been written in real gold. We understand that.”

“Not pure gold, of course,” Dr. Cowan began.

“Ink with gold in it then,” Velez Caputo almost snapped. Schultz was beginning to enjoy himself. I, on the other hand, was feeling distinctly odd. I was hearing echoes.

Dr. Cowan had her mouth zipped tight. “What was the question?” she said, after a moment. Schultz grinned uncharitably. Norman was wilting.

“Other points of resemblance,” Velez Caputo said. “Looking at this note and this note only, Doctor.”

“The drawing at the bottom,” Dr. Cowan said, giving Caputo’s attitude back to her, with change. “It resembles a miniature, a painting on an illuminated manuscript. They’re not called miniatures because they’re small-

“Minium,” I said out loud. I felt as though I were saying it with someone else’s voice. Something that might have been a worm seemed to be crawling up my spine.

Velez Caputo shot me a glance, but Dr. Cowan rolled on.

“-but because they’re painted with a lead-based paint called minium. That’s one reason they lasted so-’

“What do you know about minium, Mr. Grist?” Velez Caputo asked me. I shook my head. The worm, or the tremor, or whatever it was, had just about reached my shoulder blades.

“The big initial at the very beginning,” Velez Caputo said, giving up on me and turning back to Dr. Cowan.

“It’s an historiated initial,” Dr. Cowan said tightly, and the little worm reached the back of my neck and set off a small firework inside my skull, and just for a moment I saw a face, a very young face, and then it broke and shivered apart like a reflection in water that’s been disturbed.

“… They have scenes painted in them,” Dr. Cowan said. Schultz was staring at me as though I’d popped out in spots. “Or around them, like this one,” she added, apparently unable to stop talking.

“So what does this tell us about the man who wrote this note?” Caputo asked, happy to be back on track.

My ears were humming, but I gathered that it meant that the Incinerator had some training in art history.

“We already knew that,” Schultz said, a bucket of cold water in Seat Number Two. He was looking at me, but I barely saw him. I was wondering whether I’d kept any of my notes. My God, it had been thirteen or fourteen years.

“… After this message,” Velez Caputo said. The studio went dark.

“I must say,” Dr. Cowan began angrily.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Velez Caputo said, dismissing her. The powder-puff brigade reassembled and began its repair work. Norman and a helper ushered Dr. Cowan off the set. She sounded a lot like Hermione.

“God damn it,” Schultz said to Velez Caputo, “where did you get that note?”

“Sources,” Caputo said airily.

“Simeon,” Schultz turned to me. “I promise you…”

“I know,” I said. “Skip it.” I was trying to reassemble the face I’d glimpsed.

“You’re next, Mr. Grist,” Caputo said as the tic started to count down from fifteen. I must have looked vague, because she said, “Mr. Grist?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

The lights snapped back on.

“Well,” Velez Caputo said, “this has been interesting. New information about the nation’s most dangerous serial killer.” Stang made a scornful sound. “And the man who probably has most to fear from this monster is here in the studio. Mr. Grist,” she said as the monitors reflected a two-shot, “let’s assume that the Incinerator is watching. Have you got anything to say to him?”

“I do,” I said, through the buzzing in my mind. The camera was now on me, as we’d been promised it would be.

“And what is it?” Velez Caputo said, checking her lipstick in a mirror held by one of the makeup girls.

“As you know, I got your letter,” I said to the camera. It was very hard to keep my eyes on the camera, as opposed to looking around the room for someone-Eleanor, or even Hammond-to whom I could speak directly. I’d been told, though, that skipping past the camera would look shifty and untrustworthy, so I forced myself to stay locked on the lens that had the red light beneath it, feeling like someone practicing a speech to an ashtray. “We all know what it said. It said I made you break the rules. It said, basically, that I’d betrayed you.” I took a deep breath and tried to keep my eyes on the camera lens.

“Well, I did. I betrayed you. I was frightened, and I didn’t remember you, and I betrayed you. But, and I ask you to believe me, I told the police to keep their distance. They didn’t.” Behind the cameras, I saw Hammond bristle. Too bad.

“I had a friend on the force,” I said, deviating from the script. “I trusted him to keep the cops under control. He couldn’t, but that wasn’t his fault. It was my fault for having involved him, and the LAPD, in the first place. So here’s what I’m saying.”

I looked over toward Schultz, and he nodded encouragingly.

“I’m saying no more cops,” I said between dry lips. “I’m saying that I’ve stopped working for Annabelle Winston. I’m saying that I’m hanging out there solo, and if you want to write me a letter, or talk to me, or burn me alive, there won’t be any cops around. Check out my street, if you’ve got the nerve.” The challenge had been Schultz’s idea, and I hadn’t been sure I’d use it until that moment. “Or else, wait a week and follow me. You’ll see. I’ll be clean.” I couldn’t look at the camera any longer, and I lowered my head.

“Are you finished?” Velez Caputo said.

“No,” I said. I encountered the camera’s gaze again and drew breath to steady my voice. “When you’re certain, come to me. Or make me come to you. But as long as I’m straight with you, no more women.”

“A courageous pronouncement,” Velez Caputo said, pleased to have it behind her at last. “I’m sure we all sympathize with Mr. Grist.” She beamed to demonstrate her sympathy. “But tell me, if you will,” she said, and the camera once again switched to a two-shot. “This man is after you. Tall, dressed in black rubber, a cheap fright wig on his head, and a bottle of gasoline in his hand. Tell us, Mr. Grist, aren’t you afraid?”

“Miss Caputo.”

“Velez,” she breathed invitingly.

“Velez,” I said to the whole nation on live television, “that’s a fucking stupid question.”