Silent Terror

21

Tick

Tick

Tick

Tick

Tick

Tick

Tick

Tick

Stop-time.

12:16 A.M., June 5, 1982.

I stuck my breaker pick in the keyhole of the Kurzinskis’ apartment door. There was a slight give, and I pushed the door inward, to a point just short of where I knew the inside chain would stop it. There was a snap/clink noise as the chain rattled, and I pulled the door toward me for slack, then popped the chain off with the handle of my pick gouger. The loose end hit the doorjamb, and I heard an unmistakable sound register in George Kurzinski’s bedroom: the hammer of his .32 being pulled back.

I eased the door shut and padded through the dark living room, then flattened myself into the far wall, by the hallway, and the light switch. Unclipping the ax that hung from my web belt, I waited for footsteps to creak in my direction. When the first one hit my ears, I tingled. It was exactly nine paces from George Kurzinski’s bedroom to here; his life would consist of that many more seconds.

The creaking drew nearer, and at the ninth footfall I flicked on the light switch and swung my ax blind into the hallway. Impact and blood spray told me I had hit on-target before I even saw the dead man. Stepping forward, I heard liquid gurgles and felt a strong hand yank the blade free. When I looked into the hall, George Kurzinski was up against the wall, trying to form a one-hand tourniquet to stop the gushing from his side-to-side neck wound. He was trying to shout at the same time, but his severed larynx made the task impossible.

Blood spattered off my black plastic jump suit; a little jet hit my face, and I licked at the trickle that reached my lips. George slid to the floor, raised his gun and shot me six times. At the click of the last misfire, I heard a faint, “Georgie? Georgie?” from Paula’s bedroom, then the sound of her groping through the dresser for her Beretta. Leaving George in the hallway to die, I walked toward the lovely metallic echo of a blank round being slid into a chamber, never to connect with a firing pin.

Paula greeted me from the bed, pride and fire in her eyes as she spat out a T.V.-movie warning: “Freeze, sucker.” Disobeying, I walked slowly toward her, baring my fangs like Shroud Shifter and Lucretia out for fuel. She pulled the trigger; nothing happened; she worked the slide and fired again, getting another click. Watching her throat muscles for the scream that had to be coming, I said, “I’m invulnerable,” and jumped on her.

She fought hard, all elbows and knees, but I got my hands around her throat just as she finally expelled the first syllable of “Mother.” Squeezing full force, I saw colors; biting full force at her neck, I came. When she went limp, I picked her up by one ankle and twirled her around and around and around the room in perfect circles, never letting her limbs touch the four walls. Arranging her limp form on the bed, I felt my indignities move to her body, one-two-three, as businesslike as a handshake.

Setting my brain watch at 3:00, I cook the airline and rock posters from the inner compartment of my jump suit and looked at myself in the wall mirror. Shroud Shifter’s stern, hawklike features stared back. My makeup artistry was superb, and accomplished without “Cougarman Comix” as a visual aid. Self-transformed, blood-validated, at last the only alter ego that counted, I found tacks in the kitchen and fixed the posters to the living room walls, then dipped my surgical-rubber hands in George Kurzinski’s blood and wrote “Shroud Shifter Prevails” on the wall above his body. Entering the apartment ten minutes before, I had been a thirty-four-year-old boy-man hoping to resolve an identity crisis; leaving it, I was a terrorist.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, June 7, 1982:

From the Sharon News-Register, June 7, 1982:

From the Philadelphia Post, June 10, 1982:

From the Sharon News-Register, June 13, 1982:

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, June 17, 1982:

From the Philadelphia Post, June 19, 1982:

MOTIVE FOR KURZINSKI SLAYINGS BAFFLES POLICE; FALSE CONFESSORS POURING IN

From the Sharon News-Register, July 14, 1982:

VIGILANTE GROUPS FARMING TO HUNT FOR KURZINSKI KILLER

From the Sharon News-Register, August 1, 1982:

KURZINSKI MURDERS TRIGGER PANIC BACKLASH — WIFE SHOOTS HUSBAND BY MISTAKE

From the Sharon News-Register, December 8, 1982:

STILL NO CLUES IN KURZINSKI MURDERS

From the Sharon News-Register, January 6, 1983:

KURZINSKI CASE CONTINUES TO BAFFLE LOCAL POLICE

From the Sharon News-Register, March 11, 1983:

From the Sharon News-Register, May 14, 1983:

From the Sharon News-Register, May 20, 1983:

From the diary of Inspector Thomas Dusenberry, F.B.I. Serial Killer Task Force:

22

On June 5, 1983, a year to the day from my finest moment as a killer, I left Sharon and drove nonstop to Westchester County, New York. Crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, I hurled my overused and now dangerous Rheinhardt Wildebrand credit cards into the Hudson River below me; driving South on Route 22 to look for country clubs and boat clubs offering summer jobs, I felt like a teenager who left the party early to look cool without realising he had no place to go.

The “party” was my status as the biggest thing ever to hit Sharon, Pennsylvania, and the reason I had to leave it behind was a slow, steady ticking in my head. On the road or in my projected safe harbor of suburban New York the sound would have been just my old brain-clock; back in Sharon it was a fuse. Sooner or later I would have had to duplicate my transformation into Shroud Shifter there, not out of blood lust, but to hear the thunderclaps of the town’s awe go huge once more. And, given the vigilance I had created, the attempt might have been suicidal.

As in San Francisco after Eversall/Sifakis, I had listened. But in Sharon, one-tenth the size and one-fiftieth as sophisticated, the echoes had resounded ten thousand times as loud. The Kurzinskis were known, liked, envied and admired by the entire town; I had destroyed a part of the town along with them. My presence was the town, in much the manner that a powerful lover becomes every piece of space surrounding the one who loves him. I was everything Sharon, Pennsylvania, saw; for my post-killing year there, I was the regulator of its heartbeat.

I had been Billy Rohrsfield, library clerk and Co-ed Connection iron pumper by day, Shroud Shifter by night. For 365 straight dusks I performed ritual identity changes: slacks, shirt and jacket into the hamper; black jump suit on, hawk nose formed and applied out of putty. Cheekbones and eyebrows shaded, so that my whole face came to points. A police-band radio and my party-line hookup for listening to THEM talk about ME; wondering when they would drop their “mystery clue” pretense and speak my night name to the world. Getting hard when old biddies worshipped me with fearful voices; climaxing when men spoke of me in rage. It was paradise until something began going ssss/tick, ssss/tick, ssss/tick in my ears, and I started thinking about voiding the security patrols I had inspired, slipping through their neighborly nets to waste an entire family. Underneath ssss/tick ssss/tick, ssss/tick, I knew it was foolhardy, so discreetly I left the town, with regret and some gratitude for the return of plain old ticking.

I picked up a young man hitching just south of White Plains, and he told me I could caddy the season at any one of a half-dozen Westchester country clubs — all I had to do was look hearty and presentable. He also mentioned a rental bureau in Yonkers that matched up summer passers-through with the apartments of Sarah Lawrence College students on vacation. I took the kid’s advice on both counts, and by the end of the day Billy Rohrsfield was ensconsed in a small bachelor pad on the Yonkers edge of Bronxville and had caddied nine holes at Siwanoy Country Club.

And that night Billy became Shroud Shifter for the first time in New York.

With no local celebrity, no radio band or primitive party line, there was nothing to do but listen to the tick tick tick tick ticks grow louder and wonder who and when and where. So I did — Billy at the golf course days, my special self of hard facial edges at night. The ticking continued, and on a hot day in mid-July I stopped the clock right in the heart of midtown Manhattan, strangling a drunk passed out in a pew at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.

Post and Daily News headlines turned the ticking to a whimper, and I went Billy/Shifter, Billy/Shifter, Billy/Shifter into the heat of August and another excursion into the Big Apple. This time the alarm went BLAAAAAAAR when I was strolling through Central Park and a bum asked me for change. Surrounded by other strollers, I motioned him behind a mound of bushes and slit his throat. The artist’s sketch of me that adorned page two of the Post the following day was a poor likeness, and as Shroud Shifter that night, I put my mind to the task of creating a prolonged reign of terror.

From Thomas Dusenberry’s Diary:

23

Tick

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Tick

Tick

Tick

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Tick

Dusk, September 7, 1983. Clock noise was in my head, and a bag holding #9 pancake and theatrical putty was in my hands when I returned home from the golf course and shopping in Bronxville. Opening the door, I was anxious to begin my nightly transformation and almost missed the scrapbook pages spread out on my bed.

Feeling what must have happened, I gasped and looked at my bathroom and closet doors — the only places where he could be waiting. With tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick out-decibeled by adrenaline hitting my heart, I somehow managed not to run to either of them, knowing that betraying my eagerness would be an affront to the Shroud Shifter me. About to burst on all sensory levels, I forced myself to read the reunion message.

It was a newspaper article dated February 19, 1979, and it detailed the brilliant machinations that Ross Anderson had undertaken to safeguard the two of us from exposure of our latest murders. Reading and rereading the account in rapid succession, a Technicolor vision of the key points swallowed me whole, and I grabbed the bed for support.

Ross locating the dead man’s car, seeing the O+ donor card and going “Eureka!”;

Ross driving back to Huyserville for a K-9 team, even though he already knew where the body was;

Ross putting his own money in the dead man’s wallet and my old .357, sans silencer, in his hand;

Ross desecrating the man’s chest so that pathologists couldn’t tell that two shots had been the cause of his death.

My burst level decelerating, I reran the mental film; reversed the action; ran it in slow motion. In all versions, it played as pure genius — and something else.

“And you thought I was just another pretty face. Ross the Boss, what a guy.”

I warmed all over, and the spreading heat gave me poise. I got up from the bed, turned around and smiled. “Bravo, Sergeant.”

Ross smoothed his mustache and stroked the alligator emblem on his blue polo shirt. Civilian clothes, four and a half years and a thousand miles had not changed him at all; every bit of the man had stepped intact out of the time warp. “It’s Lieutenant,” he said, “but thanks.”

Made cool by his cool, I held back my barrage of questions and said, “Congratulations.”

Ross shut the bathroom door and said, “Thanks. I’m the youngest lieutenant in the history of the Wisconsin State Police, by the way. Turn those scrapbook pages over: there’s some stuff you’ll like on the back.”

I did it. More newspaper accounts were taped to the reverse sides, accompanied by faded Polaroid snapshots of butchered blond girls. While my eyes scanned the type and my brain played a film of Ross traveling and risking and killing for me, the man himself spoke slowly, his words wafting as background music.

“You were easy to track, sweetie. I am a world-class abuser of police power and an even better skip-tracer. The .38 I gave you was my tracker. I gouged the inside of the barrel, test-fired it into a ballistics tank, then kept the spents. Very distinctive lands and grooves, not even the silencer I figured you’d get could alter the striations. Soooo, all I had to do was make statewide queries on Dead Body Reports filed under ‘Gunshot,’ check the ballistics bulletins and see where my old buddy Martin was hanging out. It took a lot of phoning, but I’m the persistent type. I made you for the retard in Illinois and the tag in Nebraska — you come out of the closet yet, sweetie? They were both big dark-haired guys about your age, and I thought, ‘Uh, oh, Martin wants some new ID because he knows Ross the Boss has got his number.’ Then you offed the old kraut in Michigan, almost two years had passed; I figured if you snuffed an old guy like that, maybe you already got your ID from a stiff you didn’t shoot or the cops never found. I also had a hunch you were getting hinky and cautious, that you must have snuffed Pops for a reason. So I wangled a Xerox of the case file from the Kalamazoo cops.

“And damned if I don’t make you for e pretty good forger. Twelve K in checks to credit-card companies? The dumbfuck Kalamazoo cops don’t even bother to check with the companies, but I do. Future credit-card transactions? Sweetie, you have got a pair of platinum balls, and I’ve been following those balls cross-country, courtesy of Telecredit. There’s Martin in Ohio, maybe doing some cutting in Sharon, P.A. Follow up on that Rohrsfield dead-body report, call the rental-listing hotline the cops have access to keep track of parole absconders, damned if I don’t get a William Rohrsfield right down the road from this family reunion that I thought would be too boring to attend. Good work on Rohrsfield, Martin, but you shouldn’t have buried him under the site of a future 7-11. Sweetie, you want to put those pictures down and look at me?”

The request took my eyes away from the death portraits. Feeling only awe for the way Ross had set me up, I said, “How did you manage this? Different cities? Spacing them like that?”

Petting the alligator on his chest, Ross said, “Extradition assignments. I’d hit the municipal P.D.s, file my papers, shoot the shit with the investigating officers, then mosey by the Vice files and look for some nice blond meat with recent hooking convictions. Easy. Get the information, buzz their door, say it’s Sergeant Plunkett or whoever, do the deed, take the pictures and split. Space the jobs, different cities. It took four jobs for the connection to get made, and I just stopped. New-breed killer, capable of control. I also booked my flights to and from the extradition cities under assumed names, then turned in forged vouchers for myself and my returnee, so that I’m not listed on any passenger manifests. Saul Malvin was the fall guy on the brunettes, and I destroyed the files on them in case somebody connects the ‘Wisconsin Whipsaw’ and the ‘Four-State Hooker Hacker’ and decides to start comparing forensic specs. I’ve just figured out something about the two of us, Martin. We equal out in the end, but you excel in quantity while I excel in quality.”

Despite all my awe and that something else, the condescension rankled, and I said, “What about one-on-one?”

Ross smiled, and I caught a flash of his awe. “I don’t know, sweetie. I truly, honestly don’t. You feel like taking a ride? Maybe meeting some family of mine?”

Ross had taken a cab, so we took Deathmobile II to the summer house where the younger reunion people were staying. Having him in the passenger seat beside me was softly warming, and he spoke softly while we drove north on the Saw Mill Parkway.

“I used to spend summers here as a kid. This bash is being thrown by the Liggetts, my mother’s people. Big bucks. They all thought Mom married beneath herself — Lars Anderson, big dumb handsome squarehead, cabinetmaker from the Wisconsin boonies, no future. They used to let me know in subtle ways, kill me with kindness while they were doing it. Every September around this time, right before they sent me back to Beloit, they bought me a humongous load of fall school clothes, marched me into Brooks Brothers like I was Little Lord Fauntleroy. The salesmen hated me because they thought I was a rich kid with a silver spoon up his ass; the Liggetts blew the wad so they could make my dad look low; and I always ordered everything too big or too small so I could sell it or ditch it when I got home. You remember that buddy of mine? The late Billy Gretzler? You should have seen him wearing this five-hundred-dollar cashmere Chesterfield when he worked on his truck. It finally got so black and greasy that I told him, A joke’s a joke, throw it away. He wouldn’t, though. He chopped the coat up and used the pieces as gun-cleaning rags. We’re almost to Croton, so turn off at the next exit and hang a left.”

Easing over toward the off-ramp lane, I asked, “What was having a family like?”

Ross stroked his alligator. “You didn’t have one, sweetie?”

“Orphaned early,” I said.

“Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve got Andersons and Liggetts and Caffertys up the ying-yang, and mostly they’re just people you see through as being what they are. My mom and sis are weak; my dad’s stupid and proud; Richie Liggett — my cousin who you’ll probably meet — he’s smart, but so lost in this grad-school vision of what he thinks life is that you’d never know it. Another cousin, Rosie Cafferty, she’s your prototypical hot-pants teenybopper with a yen for Italian guys and muscle cars. Good she’s got bucks — she’d be a whore otherwise. She’s—”

Pulling off the parkway, I interrupted: “But what’s it like?”

Ross considered the question as I drove past huge white homes for over a mile. Station wagons crowded with people and luggage were pulling out of driveways, and renters were handing over keys on a score of front lawns. The lights in the houses reminded me of burglary, and I blurted, “Tell me, goddamnit.”

Ross laughed. “You want a definition of family, I’ll give you one. Family is feeling sort of close to people because you know they’re connected to you by blood, and you have to tolerate them, regardless of what you think of them. So over the years they grow on you, in one way or the other, and it’s interesting to observe them and know you’re smarter than they are. Also, they’re beholden to you and can do you solids. Turn left on the corner and park.”

I slowed, accomplished the turn and pulled to the curb in front of a large white house that must have dated back to the Revolutionary War. Ross said, “Nice pad, huh?” and pointed to mounds of toys strewn across the immaculate front lawn. “There’s family and money for you in a nutshell. Lots of bucks in this area, and the kids still carry on like niggers. Come on.”

We walked across the grass and veranda and through the open front door. Inside, the house was expensive furniture and carpeting in need of dusting, with sports clothes, tennis rackets and odd golf clubs scattered around the living room and foyer. Ross put his fingers in his mouth and whistled, then said, “What a bunch of slobs. Richie and Rosie are shacked up here with their paramours, and I’ve been staying in a room about the size of a broom closet. The reunion starts tomorrow night at this yacht club in Mamaroneck, and the unmarried cousins have got this place so they won’t embarrass Big Daddy Liggett by porking in the cabanas. Hey! Achtung! Ross the Boss is here!”

I heard footsteps upstairs, and moments later two couples in tennis whites bounded down the staircase. The young men were wholesome fitness personified, one WASP style, one Italian; the young women were brunette and redheaded outtakes from the Ralph Lauren ads I had seen during my reading spurts. All four started babbling “Hi!” and “Hi, Ross,” at once, looking at me sidelong, like an afterthought. Ross pumped the male hands and hugged the girls, then put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. The shrill report froze all the jabbering, and Ross said, “Hey kids, let’s mind our manners. Cousins, this is my friend Billy Rohrsfield. Billy, we have, left to right, Richie Liggett, Mady Behrens, Rosie Cafferty and Dom De Nunzio.”

Thinking style, I shook the male hands and kissed the female ones. The boys guffawed and the girls giggled, and catching a glimpse of Ross petting his shirt, I went warm again. Winking, Ross said, “Mixed doubles indoors and out?” and the kids all laughed at the wit of the man they obviously adored, then dispersed, picking up gym bags and tennis rackets from the floor. They flew out the door in a cacophony of “See you’s!” and “Bye’s!” and “Nice meeting you’s!”; and the entire scene ended so abruptly that I had to blink my eyes and dig my feet into the carpet to get my bearings.

Ross noticed my look and said, “Culture shock. Come on, I’ll show you around the house. We’ve got it to ourselves now.” He stroked the emblem on his chest, and suddenly I knew he kept doing that to keep from touching me. “Show me your room first,” I said.

We both knew what I meant.

Ross touched his chest. “Alice the alligator. The only woman who never let me down, so I keep her close to my heart.” Pointing up the stairs, he winked. Bowing at the waist, I said, “Walk, sweetie,” and Ross unwittingly acknowledged match point by laughing out loud and exposing a tiny flaw in his almost-perfection — poorly capped teeth that were usually subterfuged by tight smiles and mustache bristles. He walked ahead then, and I winced at the lover’s epiphany.

I couldn’t feel my footsteps as I followed him to the bedroom, and when he reached for the inside light switch I could hardly hear myself say, “No.” Ross’s “Bye, Alice,” boomed in the darkness, and then zippers rasped and belt buckles and shoes hit the floor. Bedsprings squeaked, and then we were together.

We held; we rubbed; we kissed. We felt the weight of each other and made friction with our hands. We were impact rather than melding, force rather than softness. Our fever escalated commensurate with the pressure of our muscles. We strained in embraces, each trying to be stronger, and when we both sensed we were equal combatants, all of us went into our groins and we pushed ourselves there until we were done, over, past it and dead — together.

We lay there, gasping and sweating. My lips were brushing Ross’s chest, and he shifted himself so that the contact was broken. I wanted to fuse the bond again, but inside Ross’s fits of breath I could feel him regrouping, rationalizing, running from what it made us, made him. I knew that soon he’d say something quintessentially cool to dilute the power of us, and I knew I couldn’t let myself hear it. Drawing myself into a child’s sleep ball, I cupped my ears and squeezed my eyes shut until I was numb. Dimly I could hear Ross’s heart beating; very dimly I could hear him muttering stylish denials of what we had just done. Though not audible, the words raked my body, and I shut them out with all my power, my muscle, my will — wrapping myself tighter and tighter, until I lost control of my senses — and my control.

Tick/beat, tick/beat, tick/beat, the strange music lilting, its cadence telling me “This is a dream.” Tight in my ball, I know I’m a child, four or five, it’s about 1953 and a different world. I’m in bed, and pressure in what my mother calls “that place” forces me to the bathroom and relief. Footsteps coming upstairs divert me from returning to my ball, and I stand in hallway shadows, hoping to see my mother and father s secret places. When the footsteps reach the landing it’s a man and woman wearing powder-white wigs and costumes out of my kindergarten picture books — clothes like George Washington and the European royalty used to wear in their different world. I smell liquor, and know the man is my father; but the woman is too pretty to be my mother.

They go to the big bedroom and turn on the light. My father says, “She’s at her aunt’s in San Berdoo and the kid is asleep”; the woman says, “Let’s leave the wigs on for kicks, I’ve always wanted to be a blonde.” My father reaches for the light switch, and the woman says, “No.”

Heavy corsets and shoes and belt buckles go “thud” on the floor, and my father and the woman are naked, both with dark hair at their secret places. He has what I do, only bigger; she has just the hair. The light wigs and the dark hair there are wrong, and what I feel there is wrong, but I tiptoe to the door and watch anyway.

It looks ugly and good. My father is fit and strong, with broad shoulders and chest and a trim waist. He’s good, but the woman has fat legs and thick ankles and big horse teeth and a scar on her stomach and chipped nail polish. They get on the bed and roll around, and the mattress goes tick tick tick. She says, “Put it in,” my father does and it looks ugly, so I close my eyes and listen to the tick tick. They both sound good, and I feel good there, better and better as my father grunts along with the TICK TICK TICK. He grunts harder and harder, TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK — and I’m touching myself there too. It feels better and better, and I run to the bathroom because I know something has to come out. Nothing does, but I’m big.

I listen for more ticking to make me bigger, but there isn’t any I walk to the bedroom door and see my father asleep, snoring. The woman sees me and crooks her finger. Proud of what I have, I go to show her.

She’s ugly and her breath stinks, but her wig is pretty and her hand there feels good. I want my father to see it, and I try to reach across the woman. She stops me by putting her mouth there.

Tick tick tick tick tick as she moves on the bed, straining with her lips around me; tick tick tick tick I shut my eyes; tick tick tick tick she’s biting me and I open my eyes, and my mother is there swinging a brushed-steel spatula and frying pan, and I pull away, and the woman is bleeding at the lips. She pushes my mother and runs, losing her wig; my father snores and my mother holds the wig over my face, and I fall asleep pushed into suffocating liquor breath that goes tick tick tick tick.

Then it’s still about 1953, but later. My mother is giving me pills so I won’t remember. The pills come from a bottle labeled Sodium Phenobarbital, and every time she gives me one she puts a note in another bottle. The notes ask God to forgive me for what I did with the wig woman.

Rough hands pulled at my sleep ball, and a once perfectly stylish voice was oozing agitation. “Hey! Hey man! You going cuntish on me?”

I came out of my self-made womb weeping and swinging, and a backhand caught Ross on the jaw and knocked him off the bed. He got to his feet, and I saw that he had already put on his clothes. Naked, I felt at an advantage. Ross stroked his mustache and said, “Better. You had me worried for a while.”

We just stood there. Ross did his number with the alligator, and I confronted what had happened to me thirty years in the past. The heat in the tiny room dried my tears, and the only thing in the world that I knew was that the next perfect human being who crossed my path was either going to die horribly beyond words or walk away unharmed, their death sentence commuted by my mother in her grave and the killer standing in front of me. Putting on my clothes under Ross’s stare, I thought that the only awful thing about the choice of resolutions would be waiting to know. Staring back at Ross, I said, “Thanks.”

Ross gave me his patented hand-in-the-cookie-jar smirk. “You’re welcome. Spartan revelry’s good sport every once in a while. Bad dreams you had?”

“Old stuff. Nothing earthshaking.”

“I never dream, probably because I lead such an adventurous life. If any other man had hit me, I would have killed him.”

“You could have killed me, Lieutenant. You could have killed me and made it look like anything you wanted to, and you could have profited from the act.”

Ross smiled broadly and showed his bad teeth, and in chat moment I loved him. “It’s because you know that that I’d never hurt you, sweetie.”

A merciful shortcut out of my dilemma ticked across my mind, and I passed it to Ross immediately, knowing the plan’s full implications only too well. “You know this area intimately don’t you?”

“The back of my hand, sweetie.”

“Let’s do a job together. Blonds, brunettes, I don’t care — as long as they’re perfect.”

Stroking Alice, Ross said, “Pick me up tomorrow around noon. We’ll cruise the summer sessions at Vassar and Sarah Lawrence. Wear a jacket and tie so you’ll look like a cop, and I’ll guarantee you some great sport.”

I walked to Ross and kissed him on the lips, knowing that if I couldn’t kill our perfect one, I would have to close out my blood journey by killing the man himself — my liberator and only eyewitness. Calmed by that, I broke the hands-to-shoulders embrace and walked out of the bedroom. The house was alive with chatter as I moved downstairs, and the last thing I heard as I opened the front door was a titillated soprano trill: “Richie, do you think maybe Ross is gay?”

From Thomas Dusenberry’s diary:

24

Edgy like the movie sheriff awaiting High Noon, I spent my morning preparing for the big moment.

First I drove to Brooks Brothers in Scarsdale. Ross wanted me to look like a cop, and since I didn’t own any suits or sports jacket-slacks combinations, I decided to purchase a suitably elegant outfit for my debut as a policeman. Walking into the store, I realized I hadn’t worn a coat and tie since I was a child, and I felt every bit of Ross’s boyhood humiliation when I asked a salesman to show me the extra-large summer blazers. Condescendingly, he said that blazers came in numbered sizes, and suggested I try on a selection of 44 longs. Angry now, I complied, opting for a navy blue linen jacket that looked as though it had the class to disarm a Vassar coed. The salesman did a slow burn at my manner, and when I said, “Slacks, thirty-four, thirty-four,” he pointed to rows of them arrayed on metal rods and walked away. I found a pair of light blue trousers that complemented the blazer and grabbed them; on my way to the cashier I picked up a white shirt and the first necktie I saw — a maroon print with crossed golf clubs. The total price of my showdown costume was $311.00, and leaving the store felt like getting out of jail.

I changed in the back of Deathmobile II, cursing when I found that I’d forgotten how to knot a necktie. Stringing it through my open collar, I drove to a gun shop in Yonkers and spent ninety dollars on something useful — a black leather hip holster for my snubnose .38. Transferring the gun from the Deathmobile’s safety compartment to the beautiful new rig and snapping it onto my belt, cross-draw style, turned the morning around, and I drove to Croton.

The big summer house looked different in daylight, and knocking on the door I sensed the reason — everything about me, from my clothes to my past to my future, was changing at a breakneck speed that subtly altered whatever I saw.

Mady Behrens opened the door, altered almost past recognition — yesterday’s bubbly blonde in tennis whites now looked haggard and suspicious, a shrew-in-waiting dressed in a soggy bathrobe. “Ross was arrested last night,” she said. “Police with shotguns took him away. Richie’s dad says it’s real serious.”

The veranda turned to quicksand under my feet, and the shrew’s open mouth looked like an invitation to the easiest resolution in the world. I went for my holster, but she spoiled my target by bawling, “I knew Ross had a mean streak, but I just can’t believe that he’d—”

I ran to the Deathmobile. Monsters danced on my windshield as I drove away into hiding.

Transcript of the initial interrogation of Ross Anderson. Conducted at Westchester County F.B.I. Headquarters, New Rochelle, New York, 1400 hours, 9/8/83. Present: Ross Anderson; John Bigelow, his attorney, retained by Richard Liggett Sr., Lt. Anderson’s uncle; Inspector Thomas Dusenberry and Special Agent John Mulhearn, of the Federal Serial Killer Task Force; S.A. Sidney Peak, Agent in Charge, New Rochelle Office.

Suspect held in custody since 0340 hours, 9/8/83; informed of his rights in the presence of his attorney, 12:00 hours, 9/8/83; agreed to questioning after consulting with Mr. Bigelow — 1330 hours. This interrogation was both tape-recorded and transcribed in shorthand by Margaret Wysoski, Stenographer, Division 104, Westchester County Superior Court.

Inspector Dusenberry: Mr. Anderson, let’s start—

Ross Anderson: Call me Lieutenant.

Dusenberry: Very well, Lieutenant. Let’s start by having you clarify something, if you will. Have you volunteered any statements since you were arrested early this morning?

Anderson: No. Just my name, rank and serial number.

Dusenberry: Have you been physically abused at any time — either in the course of your arrest or during your detention?

Anderson: You served me instant coffee at the holding tank. Tacky. Make it fresh ground next time, or I’ll check into another hotel.

John Bigelow: Be serious, Ross.

Anderson: I am serious. You didn’t taste it, Counselor. Evil shit.

Bigelow: This is very serious, Ross.

Anderson: You’re telling me? I’m a French roast junkie. I’ll be going into withdrawals soon. Then you’ll be sorry.

Bigelow: Ross—

Dusenberry: Lieutenant, did Mr. Bigelow tell you about the charges you face?

Anderson: Yeah. Murder.

Dusenberry: That’s correct. Do you have any idea whose murder or murders?

Anderson: How’s Billy Gretzler sound? I blew him away in the line of duty back in ’76. He’s the only person I ever killed.

Dusenberry: Come on, Lieutenant. You’ve been a police officer how long?

Anderson: Ten and a half years.

Dusenberry: Then you know that homicides within individual municipal police jurisdictions are not federal crimes.

Anderson: I know that.

Dusenberry: Then I’m sure you also know that as far as federal statutes go, you’d either have to kill an employee of the federal government or engage in interstate flight after killing an ordinary citizen to interest us.

Anderson: I’m an interesting guy in general.

Dusenberry: You certainly are. Do you know what my job is with the Bureau?

Anderson: What, pray tell?

Dusenberry: I’m the Agent in Charge at the Serial Killer Task Force in Quantico, Virginia. Do you know what serial killers are?

Anderson: Psychopaths who commit murder under the influence of Rice Krispies?

Bigelow: Ross, goddamnit.

Dusenberry: That’s all right, Mr. Bigelow. Lieutenant, are these names familiar to you? Gretchen Weymouth, Mary Coontz, Claire Kozol?

Anderson: Those are the names of murder victims in Wisconsin back in late ’78 and early ’79.

Dusenberry: That’s correct. Who do you think killed them?

Anderson: I think it was a man named Saul Malvin. I discovered his abandoned car and later his body. He was a suicide.

Dusenberry: I see. Are these names familiar? Kristine Pasquale, Wilma Thurmann, Candice Tucker, Carol Neilton?

Anderson: No, who are they?

Dusenberry: Young women murdered in a manner identical to the ones in Wisconsin.

Anderson: That’s too bad. Where were they killed?

Dusenberry: In Louisville, Kentucky; Des Moines, Iowa; Charleston, South Carolina and Baltimore, Maryland. Have you ever been in those cities?

Anderson: Yes, I have.

Dusenberry: Under what circumstances?

Anderson: Serving extradition warrants and returning prisoners from there to various cities in Wisconsin.

Dusenberry: I see. Can you recall the exact dates you were there?

Andersen: Not offhand. Sometime during early ’79 to late ’81, though. That’s when I worked the extradition assignment. If you want the exact dates, check the W.S.P. records.

Dusenberry: I have. You were in those cities at the time the four women were killed.

Anderson: Wow. What a coincidence.

Dusenberry: You were also on patrol at the time and near the area where Claire Kozol met her death.

Anderson: Wow.

Dusenberry: And you patrolled the general area where the first two Wisconsin victims were found, and you found the body of their alleged killer.

Anderson: Inspector, I pride myself on my good humor, but this shit is getting old. We’re both college men and ranking officers, so I’ll give you my informed opinion on what you’ve got. Ready?

Dusenberry: Go ahead, Lieutenant.

Anderson: You’ve been cross-referencing chronological factors against the two sets of homicides and compiling lists based on suspect opportunity. I was involved in the Wisconsin Whipsaw investigation, and apparently I was in the other cities when those other girls were killed. So I fit into your pattern circumstantially. But you’ll have to do a lot better if you want an indictment. You’ll get laughed out of court with what you have.

Dusenberry: You or me, Jack?

Agent Mulhearn: You, Tom. He’s your boy.

Dusenberry: Lieutenant, since last night a team of ten agents have been turning Huyserville upside down. They’ve searched your apartment—

Anderson: And found nothing incriminating, because I’ve done nothing criminal.

Dusenberry: Do you know a man named Thornton Blanchard?

Anderson: Sure, old Thorny. He’s a retired switchman for the Great Lakes Line.

Dusenberry: That’s correct. He also likes to take walks through the nature-study woods adjoining Orchard Park. You know the area?

Anderson: Sure.

Dusenberry: Last night Mr. Blanchard told one of the Milwaukee agents that he’s seen you digging in the woods on three or four occasions. He pointed out the approximate area to the team at about three this morning, and they brought in arc lights and started digging. At about eleven A.M. they found two triple-wrapped plastic baggies. One baggie had a Buck knife and a hacksaw in it. We found a latent thumbprint on the knife handle. It was yours. There was brownish matter and gristle on the saw teeth. It’s being tested now. It’s obviously blood and hardened tissue, and we’re going to try to type the blood and compare it to the blood types of the seven girls. The dimensions of the knife blade and saw teeth exactly match the dimensions of the knife and saw marks on the last four victims. The other baggie was filled with photographs of those four girls, naked and chopped up. We found dried semen on three of the photographs, and it’s being typed now. We got a total of five viable latents off the photographs. They were all yours.

Bigelow: Ross? Ross? Goddamnit, somebody get a doctor.

Dusenberry: Get one, Jack. Let the transcript show that at 14:24 hours Lieutenant Anderson experienced an attack of nausea and fainted. We’ll break for now. Talk to your client, Mr. Bigelow. We’re booking him on Interstate Flight to Avoid Prosecution for Murder. He’ll be arraigned tomorrow morning. Representatives of the Louisville, Des Moines, Charleston and Baltimore D.A.’s Offices are flying up to confer with me on the murder indictments and extradition proceedings, so if Anderson wants to talk, I want his statement by this evening. Do you understand?

Bigelow: Yes, goddamnit. Where’s the doctor? This man is ill.

Dusenberry: Sid, stay with Anderson. Don’t let the doctor give him any drugs, and when you take him back to the tank, put him in handcuffs and leg manacles. Miss Wysoski, sign out your transcription at 14:26 hours.

Transcript of the second interrogation and formal statement of Ross Anderson. Conducted at Westchester County F.B.I. Headquarters, New Rochelle, New York. 21:30 hours, 9/8/83. Present: Ross Anderson; John Bigelow, Lt. Anderson’s legal counsel; Stanton J. Buckford, Chief Federal Prosecuting Attorney, Metropolitan New York District Office; Inspector Thomas Dusenberry, SA., John Mulhearn, S.A., Sidney Peak. This interrogation-statement was both tape-recorded and transcribed in shorthand by Kathryn Giles, Stenographer, Division 104, Westchester County Superior Court.

Inspector Dusenberry: Lieutenant Anderson, did the doctor who treated you for your fainting spell give you any mind-altering drugs?

Anderson: No.

Dusenberry: Have you been physically abused or threatened since our first session this afternoon?

Anderson: No.

Dusenberry: Have you conferred with your attorney during that time?

Anderson: Yes.

Dusenberry: Are you ready to make a statement?

Anderson: Yes.

Dusenberry: Mr Bigelow, have you discussed the matter of Lieutenant Anderson’s statement with Mr. Buckford?

John Bigelow: Yes, I have.

Dusenberry: Toward what end?

Bigelow: Toward the end of securing my client’s immunity from Kentucky, Iowa, South Carolina and Maryland murder indictments.

Dusenberry: But not potential Wisconsin indictments?

Bigelow: Wisconsin has no death penalty, Inspector. Two of the other states do.

Dusenberry: Mr. Buckford, do you have a statement to make?

Stanton J. Buckford: Yes, I do. I wanted a transcription of this plea-bargaining process, with federal agents as witnesses, in case controversy arises later on. I know only the barest outline of what Lieutenant Anderson has to say, but if his evidence is as powerful as Mr. Bigelow asserts, and if it results in other indictments, I would be willing to file on Lieutenant Anderson only with the Wisconsin and Federal Interstate Flight charges. As proof of your good faith, Mr. Bigelow, I will require a confession from Lieutenant Anderson beforehand, and should he confess, and should the Wisconsin judiciary hand down any sentence less severe than three consecutive life terms without possibility of parole, I will ask the judge presiding at the Flight trial to hand down that sentence. Do you understand, Mr. Bigelow?

Bigelow: Yes, Mr. Buckford. I do.

Buckford: Lieutenant Anderson, do you understand?

Anderson: Yes.

Bigelow: Make your statement, Ross.

Anderson: On December 16, 1978, I raped and murdered Gretchen Weymouth. On December 24, 1978, I raped and murdered Mary Coontz. On January 4, 1979, I raped and murdered Claire Kozol. On April 18, 1979, I raped and murdered Kristine Pasquale. On October 1, 1979, I raped and murdered Wilma Thurmann. On May 27, 1980, I raped and murdered Candice Tucker. On May 19, 1981, I raped and murdered Carol Neilton. This statement is made of my own free will.

Dusenberry: Jack, get him some water.

Bigelow: I want you to take your time with the rest of it, Ross.

Buckford: Are you ready to continue, Mr. Anderson?

Anderson: (Long pause) Yes.

Buckford: Then proceed.

Anderson: I didn’t kill Saul Malvin, and he didn’t commit suicide. Right after I killed Claire Kozol, I drove up the two-lane that parallels I-5. I saw a man check out Malvin’s abandoned Cadillac, then get into a van and slowly drive north. I tracked the vehicle by radar, and I got the feeling the man was looking for the driver of the Caddy, to rob him. I stayed six hundred yards in back, and when the van stopped, I stopped too, then found a perch on some rocks and looked at the van through my binoculars. After about five minutes I saw the man walk back out of the woods, carrying a revolver. He put the gun somewhere underneath the body of the van and kept driving north. I—

Dusenberry: Tell me the man’s name, Anderson.

Buckford: Let him tell it his way, Inspector.

Anderson: Just then I got word on my radio that the girl’s body was discovered, and that roadblocks were being set up on I-5. I stayed on the two-lane, and I saw the van approach the first roadblock on a curve. When the man was about two hundred yards from it, he pulled over and tossed something into the snow by the roadside. I waited while he went through the detaining procedure — you know, search of the van, warrant checks, escort to the Huyserville Station for a blood test and more questioning if he turned up the right type. When things quieted down at the roadblock, I cruised over to I-5 and looked for what the man had thrown out. It was (pause) torn-up pictures of a dead man lying in the snow. Look, I knew I wanted to meet this guy. I drove into Huyserville, found his van parked in the station lot and found a .357 mag in a hidey-hole attached to the undercarraige. I ended up confronting him, and we talked, and he told me he’d killed lots and lots of people, just to do it, and for money and credit cards, and—

Dusenberry: Tell me his name, Anderson. Please, Mr. Buckford, there’s a reason for this.

Buckford: Very well. The man’s name, Mr Anderson?

Anderson: Martin Plunkett. He’s—

Dusenberry: Motherfucking God. Plunkett’s the Shifter, Jack. He’s on the Aspen suspect list. Put him on the wire, now.

Agent Mulhearn: Jesus Fuck.

Buckford: Maintain yourselves, gentlemen. This is a federal document, and what in God’s name are you talking about?

Dusenberry: I don’t fuck — I don’t believe this. Plunkett is a long-term serial we’ve been tracking on paper for months. It’s too involved to go into, and I want more confirmation. Describe him, Anderson.

Anderson: Caucasian, 6'3", 210, dark brown hair, brown eyes.

Dusenberry: It’s him. Vehicle?

Anderson: He had a silver Dodge van back in ’79.

Dusenberry: When did you see him last?

Buckford: Let him finish his way.

Dusenberry: I’ll finish. You faked finding Malvin’s body and put Plunkett’s magnum in his hand so you’d have a fall guy for the girls and so your buddy wouldn’t be remembered as a transient and get tagged for the Malvin job, right?

Anderson: Right.

Buckford: Sit down, Inspector.

Dusenberry: Why, Anderson?

Anderson: What do you mean, ‘Why’?

Buckford: Sit down and be quiet. This is a federal document.

Dusenberry: Where is he, Anderson?

Anderson: I don’t know. It was a long time ago.

Dusenberry: You just beat the electric chair. Tell me, you fuck.

Buckford: Sit down, Dusenberry, now, or I’ll suspend you from this case. (Pause) There. That’s better. I don’t follow this offshoot, Mr. Anderson. Is the Inspector correct? Did you fake s suicide on this man Malvin so that Plunkett could escape?

Anderson: So we both could.

Buckford: Why? Plunkett, I mean.

Anderson: Because I liked his style.

Buckford: Have you seen him since then? Since 1979?

Anderson: No, he rode off into the sunset, like the Lone Ranger.

Buckford: Do you have any idea where he is now?

Anderson: I’m tired. I want to go to sleep. Plunkett and I were a one-night stand. I don’t know where he is, so leave me alone.

Buckford: Let’s wrap it up, then. Inspector, I’ll need to talk to you about this. I’m marking the end of this transcript at nine-fifteen P.M., September 8, 1983.

25

I spent the night parked in a campground in Upper Westchester. Curled tight in a ball, I slept and dreamed of Ross; every time the hard metal floorboard jarred me awake, I thought of him in my first moments of consciousness and felt his body. At dawn, my muscles aching from long hours of holding myself womblike, I stood up on tenuous infant’s legs. Shivering despite the blast-oven heat in the van, I wondered how it had ended all around me — without my even being there.

Still muscle-cramped, I inched up to the cab and turned the ignition key to Accessory, then flipped on the radio. Moving the tuner to an all-news station, I heard, “... and on the Wisconsin end of the investigation, authorities have discovered a Buck knife and hacksaw with Anderson’s fingerprints on them buried in plastic bags in the woods near his apartment. Federal agents believe they are the weapons he used to murder and dismember his seven victims. Here on the New York end, we have a recorded statement made by Anderson’s cousin, seventeen-year-old Rosemary Cafferty:

“I’m... I’m just glad Ross is in jail where he can’t hurt anybody else except other criminals. He... he must be evil. I can’t believe he’s a member of my family. He... he might have hurt one of us. All—”

I turned the radio off, stifling the soprano trill that had tried to relegate Ross and me to a cheap stereotype with the words, “Richie, do you think maybe Ross is gay?” I knew then that she and her tennis-clad chums had been my friend’s betrayers. FAMILY typefaced itself across my vision, and I set out to become Shroud Shifter in broad daylight.

At a sporting goods store in Mt. Kisco, I bought a big Buck knife and a leather scabbard. From there I drove to a hardware store nearby and purchased a hacksaw with razor-sharp teeth A trip to a punk-rock boutique in Yonkers netted me a black vinyl jump suit, and the green-haired salesgirl who sold it to me looked at my Brooks Brothers outfit and said, “You’re really changing styles.” From Yonkers it was only a hop, skip and jump to the Lord & Taylor in Scarsdale and the purchase of a woman’s black silk opera cape and a makeup kit. With a ball of theatrical putty already in my glove compartment, I had everything I needed.

Walking out of Lord & Taylor, I saw a Scarsdale Police cruiser parked at the curb. The cop by the passenger door was saying to the driver, “...youngest fucking lieutenant in his department’s history.” He tapped a stack of papers on the dashboard and added, “And now the feds have got a want on some buddy of his.”

In the most audacious move of my life, I approached the car, looked the passenger cop dead in the eye and said, “Excuse me, Officer. Were you talking about Ross Anderson, the killer?”

The cop gave my Ivy League persona a cursory glance and said, “Yes, sir.”

Seeing that the papers on the dashboard were Wanted flyers, still damp with printer’s ink, I asked, “May I have one of those? My son collects them.”

Chuckling, the policeman handed me the top piece of paper. I said, “Thank you,” then walked over to the shade of Deathmobile II to savor the moment of my formal public emergence.

The big black banner print read, “Wanted: Interstate Flight — Murder.” Below it was two mug shots from my 1969 burglary arrest. I looked callow and sensitive. Underneath my physical statistics, police buzzwords made me buzz: consider armed, extremely dangerous and an escape risk; may be driving pre-1980 silver Dodge van; suspected of multiple murders in numerous states.

Only the “Escape Risk” rang untrue. It was over now; there was no escape. Thinking of Ross, I added plastic bags to my shopping list, ran across the street to a supermarket and bought a pack of a dozen. Returning to the Deathmobile, I looked at the dashboard clock and saw that it was almost noon. I sang “Do not forsake me, O my darling, on this our wedding day!” over and over as I drove to Croton.

Beer parties were in rowdy progress on front lawns up and down the summer-house block, and I cruised by slowly, trawling for Ross’s cousins and their consorts. Not seeing them, I drove to a shopping center, found a pay phone and called Information. The operator gave me a Croton listing for Richard Liggett Senior, and I dialed the summer-house number, letting the phone ring twenty times. The dial tone ticked rather than buzzed, and I hung up and headed back toward my target street.

Parking a block away, I stepped into the back of the van and stripped off my preppy garb. Nude, I held my shaving mirror with one hand and with the other applied my Shroud Shifter face, turning my pug nose hawk with putty, my blunt cheekbones sharp with rouge, my eyebrows dark and menacing with mascara. Slicking back my hair with spittle, I wrapped my knife and hacksaw up in a paper bag, then put on my black jump suit and affixed my cape. Remembering a pair of scuffed black loafers under my spare tire, I dug them out, dusted them and slipped them on. Then, dripping with sweat and smelling of vinyl and face powder, I stepped out of my Shroud Shifter closet for the world to see.

Children waved at me from passing cars; an old man sitting on his porch drinking beer yelled out, “Halloween ain’t till next month, buddy!” I bowed and fluffed my cape for all my fans, and when I turned onto my target block, the keg partyers pointed to me and gifted me with little rounds of applause and bursts of laughter. Walking across the Liggetts’ front lawn, a boy roasting hot dogs on the veranda next door yelled, “Hey, Alex! That you, man!”

“Yeah, man!” I shouted back.

“You pledging Delta, man?”

“Yeah!”

“Boogie down, man! Richie and Mady are at the club, but there’s brew in the fridge!”

I shouted, “Yeah, man,” and twirled my cape, then walked across the porch and through the open door. Inside, the house was cool and quiet, and I moved from room to room memorizing the disarray, recalling how it had offended Ross. Overflowing ashtrays, unmade beds, clothes on the floor and expensive computer games upended atop sofas and chairs fascinated and enraged me, and I kept circuiting, upstairs and down, looking for more evidence of the bankruptcy known as HAPPY FAMILY LIFE.

Razor stubble and shaving cream caked on disposable razors; a toothpaste tube crimped all the way up to the top; a diaphragm in its case. Still life after still life after still life kept me in a swirl for hours, with the lengthening of shadows through the windows providing a dim awareness of time passing. Then, as I was examining paperback novels spilling out of a bookcase, I heard, “Alex, are you here?”

It was the voice of Richie Liggett, issuing from downstairs. I looked around for the bag holding my knife and hacksaw, saw it on a dresser across the bedroom and called out, “I’m upstairs, Richie!” Footsteps thudded on the stairway, and by the time they reached the second floor hallway I had the knife held in my right hand behind my back.

Richie Liggett appeared in the doorway and laughed. “Jesus, Alex. Delta? Your family’s always gone Sigma O. Your mascara’s running, by the way.”

Disguising my voice with a movie-monster growl, I said, “Where’s Mady?”

“In the kitchen. You hear about Ross?”

I monster-growled “traitor,” then grabbed Richie by the hair, brought my knife up and slit his throat, straight through to the windpipe in one motion. He reached for his neck and pitched forward in another single movement, and I stepped away to avoid being sprayed by his blood. Hitting the floor with a crash, he started gurgling, and I flipped him onto his back He kept trying to speak, his mouth flapping in spastic counterpoint to his twitching legs, and I took a pillow off the bed and dropped it on his face. Straddling the traitor’s head, I stepped on the ends of the pillowcase and held the death mask firm with all my weight. When the flailing stopped and the white fabric was seeping with red, I wiped my knife and walked down to the kitchen.

Mady Behrens was frying hamburgers. When she saw me, she let out a ladylike yelp and managed to say, “You’re not Alex.” I said, “You’re right,” and stabbed her in the stomach, then the chest, then the neck. In her death throes she knocked the frying pan off the stove, and the last thing she felt before her eyes closed was hot grease spattering her tennis-tan legs.

TICK/BEAT TICK/BEAT TICK/BEAT TICK/BEAT TICK/BEAT TICK/BEAT.

I stumbled upstairs, breathing blood and vinyl. Richie Liggett was now a piece of inanimate disarray to match the rest of the HAPPY FAMILY LIFE detritus. I carved SS on both of his legs, then sheared them off with the hacksaw and tossed them onto a dusty chair covered with tennis balls. With the blood smell now dominating all others, I took my tools and walked down to Mady Behrens. When she was similarly marked and vivisected, I threw her legs in the sink along with the dirty dishes.

BEAT/TICK

BEAT/TICK

BEAT/TICK

BEAT/TICK

BEAT/TICK

Exhausted, I ran my eyes over the kitchen. The disarray I had created looked soft and pretty; the unevenly hung calendar and framed mottoes undercut my art and buzzed me like angry little bees. Straightening them made me think of Ross, and with his image came a new surge of energy. I began to set the house right.

For hours I straightened, tidied and rearranged, putting the HAPPY FAMILY DWELLING in an order that spotlighted the Shroud Shifter and his revenge. With all the room lights blazing, I worked, forcing my brain away from Ross only to look at my watch and remind myself that Dom De Nunzio and Rosie Cafferty were due. The more I toiled, the more I saw that required fixing, and when I heard voices on the veranda just after midnight, I was nowhere near finished.

I cut them down in the entrance hall, all stab and shriek and my Buck knife darting past protective arms to tear into the traitors’ faces. Rosie Cafferty was already dead and my weapon was raised to give her boyfriend’s throat a final slice when I remembered that Ross introduced me to them as Billy Rohrsfield, meaning someone else had betrayed the two of us. I hesitated, and for a split second Dom De Nunzio, helplessly pinioned under my knees, looked absolutely perfect — and perfectly like Ross. Hoarsely whispering “I’m sorry,” I held his eyes shut while I stabbed and stabbed and stabbed his life away.

There were no ticks or tick/beats as I carved SS on two more pairs of lovely legs in tennis whites, sawed them off, then walked to the living-room wall and rolled a set of my bloody fingerprints on it, circling the area in blood so that even the most stupid cop wouldn’t miss the evidence. Gathering up my knife and hacksaw, I walked to the Deathmobile, my cape flowing in the summer night wind. Inside the van I changed back to Brooks Brothers, then scrubbed blood from my hands and Shroud Shifter from my face. With calm hands I pressed fingerprints to the handles of my knife and saw, then triple-wrapped them in plastic bags. Rummaging through the van’s tool kit, I found an earth spade. I took it up to the cab with me, then went looking for places to plant the means to rapid justice.

I buried the hacksaw at the base of a tree adjoining the Bronxville Library, and the knife by the lake in Huguenot Park in New Rochelle. Remembering a rooming house that several caddies had mentioned, I drove to the 800 block of South Lockwood and knocked on the door underneath a sign that read: “Rooms by the week — usually vacancies.”

The old black woman who answered my knock feigned anger at my late-night intrusion, but when I said, “I want a room, and I’ll pay two months cash in advance,” she fell all over herself letting me in and pointing me toward a desk holding a large guest register. Handing her a big wad of hundreds that were useless to me now, I said, “My name is Martin Plunkett. Remember that. Martin Plunkett.”

26

It took them three days to find me.

I slept throughout most of those seventy-two hours, sating a weariness caused by one of the longest road tours in history, and when I heard the helicopters hovering directly over my head, I was relieved that it was over. Looking out my window I saw the flashing lights of a dozen police cars, and within moments whispers, sleep-blurred grunts and scurrying footsteps told me the rooming house was being evacuated. Then heavy boots went thump/tick, thump/tick, chump/tick all around me, and the ritual bullhorn warning sounded: “We have you surrounded, Plunkett! Surrender, or well come in and get you!”

I walked to the door and shouted through it. “I’m unarmed. I want to talk to the head man before you take me in.”

Backing away, ready to hit the floor, I got my answer — loud voices arguing. I was able to pick out “You’re crazy, Inspector,” and “He’s mine,” and then the door was kicked in and an ordinary-looking middle-aged man in a gray suit was pointing a .38 at my head.

He didn’t say “Freeze, motherfucker,” or “Up against the wall, asshole.” He said, “My name’s Tom Dusenberry,” as if we had just met at a cocktail party. I said, “Martin Plunkett,” and when he pulled back the hammer of his gun, I smiled.

He didn’t look as though he was deciding whether to shoot me; he looked like a man living deep within himself, wondering how far to let me in. Still smiling, I said, “Are you with the New Rochelle police?”

“F.B.I.,” he said.

“The exact charges?”

“Interstate Flight from the Malvin killing for me; the four kids in Croton for keeps.”

Something in the man’s statement hit me low and hard, but I couldn’t place it. Trying to nail the blow, I stalled for time, sizing Dusenberry up in the process. He was beginning to grow on me as extraordinary — and I didn’t know why.

We remained silent for close to a minute, me thinking, him staring. Finally he said, “Why Plunkett?” and I knew. The man was simply moderation personified — voice, body clothes, soul. It was something he could never have cultivated; he just was it. “Why what, Mr. Dusenberry?”

“Why all of it.”

“You’re being ambiguous.”

“I’ll be specific. Why have you killed so many people, caused so much fucking pain?”

Now I could sense he was straining, getting itchy for something to happen fast. Sweat was darkening his shirt collar and his bland blue eyes were narrowing. Soon his legs were quivering with tension, and the only thing calm about the man was his finger on the trigger. He was growing feverish in his desire for pat answers.

“I’ll make a formal statement,” I said. “Then you’ll know. And I won’t make that statement unless it’s released for the public at large, verbatim. Do you understand?”

“You’ve made that very clear.”

“I’ve made it very clear because I know you want to know, and unless you let me confess my own way, you never will.” Dusenberry lowered his gun. “You’ve been wanting to tell it for a long time,” he said. “You’ve been dropping hints for years.”

If he thought it was a trump card, he was wrong; I knew my desire for glory had grown cancerously self-destructive a long way back on the road. “And that’s how you found me?”

Dusenberry said, “In part,” and smiled; the blandness of his perfectly capped teeth froze me and clarified his puzzling statement. The Interstate Flight charge stemmed from the Saul Malvin killing — and only Ross knew about that. “In whole,” I whispered.

Now the teeth were sharp and pointed, and the bland federal agent was a shark. “Anderson plea-bargained you to beat the death penalty,” he said. “He threw you to the hungriest, most ambitious fed prosecutor who ever breathed — to save his own worthless, sadistic faggot ass.”

The shark became a monster; his jaws opened wide to eat me with words: “You loved him, didn’t you, you fuck? You snuffed the kids because they knew what you and Anderson were, and you couldn’t take it. You loved him! Admit it, goddamn you!”

I moved forward, and Dusenberry raised his gun. It was two inches from my face with the trigger at half pull when I knew that attacking meant he was the winner; retreating meant I was. Smiling like Ross at his most stylish, speaking like Martin Plunkett at his most resolute, I said, “I used him; and I’ll use you, and in the end I’ll prevail.”

Dusenberry lowered his weapon, and I held out my hands to be cuffed.

From the New York Times, February 4, 1984:

From the Milwaukee Post, February 12, 1984:

From the editorial page of the Milwaukee Journal, March 3, 1984:

From Thomas Dusenberry’s Diary.

27

June 15, 1984.

I was lying on my bunk when I heard movement on the catwalk in front of my cell. Thinking it was just another guard or administrator curious to see the silent killer in the flesh, I kept my eyes on the ceiling. Then I smelled alcohol, looked over and saw Dusenberry gripping the bars. “Talk to me,” he said.

I decided not to. I had broken my silence in the course of retaining my literary agent, and had spoken to key Sing Sing administrators along with him, but my F.B.I. pursuer drunk at two in the afternoon wasn’t worthy of repartee. I looked back at the ceiling and began brain-screening colors.

“Did you pork Anderson or did he pork you?”

The swirls I was seeing were soft pink and beige.

“Probably the latter. They’re out to get you, boy. Ronnie’s got the Supreme Court packed with hardballs, Colorado’s got a whole team of legal hotshots looking into ways to fry your ass.”

Dark tan and red now, blending softly.

“If you fry, you’ll never get to write your book. You’ll be forgotten.”

Tan and red into blue, deepening.

“Look at me, you fuck!”

Still deepening, the colors slowly separating, returning to their original shades, only prettier.

“I’ll never let you make me like you!”

Deeper, softer, prettier.

“Never, never, you fuck! Never be shit like you!”

Softer, prettier still as I heard the guards come and take Dusenberry away.

From Thomas Dusenberry’s diary:

From the New York Times, June 24, 1984:

28

Save for this epilogue, my story is complete. I have been at Sing Sing for fourteen months; Dusenberry has been dead for nine. No extradition warrants have been filed on me, and there are sixty-two pins stuck in the map adorning my cell wall. I was thirty-seven yesterday.

Milton Alpert is reading the first pages of my manuscript in a cell directly across the catwalk from me. I have been observing him for an hour, and he looks frightened.

It’s over now. I’m as dead and inanimate as the red-topped pins in my map. Looking back over these four-hundred-odd pages, I see that I was, by turns, frightened and enraged, bold and cowardly, vicious and possessed of a warrior’s noblesse oblige. I fought and fled, and when I loved, my empathy was sparked by a will to power similar to my own. That he proved weak and traitorous is of no import; like all human beings, I cleaved to a comely lover who filled in my own blank spaces with grace, relinquishing parts of my will in sighs and embraces. Unlike most human beings, I did not let my desire destroy me. My last killings were for him, and I almost spared my final victim for him in a split-second’s clarity, but in the end my will remained intact. I possessed the experience, but did not pay the ultimate price.

Others paid that price for me

Taking their lives, I knew them in their most exquisite moments of existence. Cutting them down young, ardent and healthy, I assimilated brashness and sex that would have gone timid had I not usurped it for my own use. Part of it was to kill my nightmares and staunch my awful rage, and part of t was for the sheer thrill and high-voltage sense of power that murder gave me. I cannot summarize my drives in any greater perspective than that.

So you look for cause and effect; you partake of my brilliant memory and absolute candor and conclude what you will. Build mountains out of ellipses and bastions of logic from interpretations of the truth I have given you. And if I have gamed your credibility by portraying myself honestly, frailties and all, then believe me when I tell you this: I have been to points of power and lucidity that cannot be measured by anything logical or mystical or human. Such was the sanctity of my madness.

It’s over now. I will not submit to the duration of my sentence. With this valediction in blood completed, my transit in human form has peaked, and to subsist past it is unacceptable. Scientists say that all matter disperses into unrecognizable but pervasive energy. I intend to find out, by turning myself inward and shutting down my senses until I implode into a space beyond all laws, all roadways, all speed limits. In some dark form, I will continue.