Last Breath

13

Treat arrived home just in time for the 5:00 P.M. news. He had expected to be the top story, and he wasn’t disappointed.

He stood in front of the Sony Trinitron in his living room, his windows shuttered, the lights off. The phosphorescence of the picture tube painted the room in bright colors at first, as the newscast began with its two comely anchorpersons at their desk.

Then the taped report began, and the screen dimmed with a shot of a strip mall in the predawn darkness.

The mall, closed pending renovation, was on Sepulveda Boulevard south of Pico. Every morning for the past month. Treat had driven past the mall on his way to work. Today he saw a crowd of squad cars parked outside, and he knew his latest work had been discovered at last.

LAPD cruisers, roof lights cycling, threw scintillant stripes of blue and red across the camera lens. In the background was the sad little mall, where his most recent victim lay undisturbed until today. Treat wondered who found her. A night watchman alerted by the odor? The smell must be fairly noxious by now. Or perhaps some wandering street person seeking shelter-they were always finding their way into sealed buildings, as resourceful as Treat himself.

It hardly mattered. He had known that she would be found eventually. By now, enough time had passed to ensure that her remains would yield no clues to the task force hunting him.

Now the news camera was moving forward, drifting, restless as a shark, among the squad cars, its lens focused on the strip mall wrapped in crime-scene ribbon.

At the time of Treat’s reconnaissance this morning, the authorities had not yet brought out the body. It would have taken a good long while, he knew, for the criminalistics team to take the photographs and make the measurements, collect the raw data that would be filed away in a report in the cold steel drawer of a file cabinet, just as the subject of that report would be filed away in another drawer in another cabinet, this one in the morgue.

The report cut to later footage, recorded after sunrise-the body’s emergence from its tomb. It had been stuffed inside a bag, and he saw nothing but its outline. Still, he was glad the shot was included in the report. Seeing it on TV made it more real.

Odd how nothing was real these days unless it was a picture on a screen, how life itself had become only a succession of pictures on a succession of screens, and relationships had become transmissions of electronic data, people reaching across a void. Sad, in a way.

The shape inside the bag seemed unaccountably small. Treat had not realized that Martha Eversol was so petite. It seemed wrong of him to pick on someone who was not his size. He wasn’t playing fair.

The camera followed the body until it disappeared inside the coroner’s van. When the van drove away, the newscast cut to a standup of a babbling reporter at the scene, and Treat lost interest. He clicked the TV off. He was in darkness again, alone in the silence and privacy of his bedroom.

He stood still, conscious of nothing but the expansion of his belly with each slow intake of air.

He was in a contemplative mood, as was often the case shortly before a kill. There was something about the taking of a life that made him philosophical. He supposed it was the awareness of being so near the great and final mystery of death.

In darkness he went down the hall to his bedroom, where his notebook computer rested in its docking station on the bureau. When he raised the lid, the machine flickered out of suspend mode, and the screen-another of the many screens in his life-lit up.

His fingers, long and supple like a pianist’s, prowled over the keyboard and the touchpad, initiating an Internet connection, then navigating to a bookmarked Web page.

And there she was-his next chosen one, or her electronic simulacrum. Undressing in her bedroom. Entering the lavatory. Disappearing behind the translucent shower curtain.

Treat inhaled, exhaled. Watched.

He was glad she was taking a shower.

He liked his ladies to be clean.