The Face of Fear

The Face of fear

by Dean R.. Koontz

1977

part one

FRIDAY 12:01 A.M. 8:00 P.M.

Wary, not actually expecting trouble but prepared for it, he parked his

car across the street from the four-story brownstone apartment house.

When he switched off the engine, he heard a siren wail in the street

behind him.

They're coming for me, he thought. Somehow they've found out I'm the

one.

He smiled. He wouldn't let them put the handcuffs on him. He wouldn't

go easily. That wasn't his style.

Frank Bollinger was not easily frightened. In fact, he couldn't

remember ever having been frightened. He knew how to take care of

himself. He had reached six feet when he was thirteen years old, and he

hadn't quit growing until he was six-four. He had a thick neck, broad

shoulders and the biceps of a young weightlifter. At thirty-seven he

was in virtually the same good condition, at least outwardly, as he had

been when he was twenty-seven-or even seventeen.

Curiously enough, he never exercised. He had neither the time nor the

temperament for endless series of push-ups and sit-ups and running in

place. His size and his hard-packed muscles were nature's gifts, simply

a matter of genetics. Although he had a voracious appetite and never

dieted, he was not girdled with rings of extra weight in the hips and

stomach, as were most men his age. His doctor had explained to him

that, because he suffered constantly from extreme nervous tension and

because he refused to take the drugs that would bring his condition

under control, he would most likely die young of hypertension. Strain,

anxiety, nervous tension-these were what kept the weight off him, said

the doctor. Wound tight, roaring inside like a perpetually accelerating

engine, he burned away the fat, regardless of how much he ate.

But Bollinger found that he could agree with only half of that

diagnosis. Nervous: no. Tension: yes. He was never nervous; that word

had no meaning for him. However, he was always tense. He strove for

tension, worked at building it, for he thought of it as a survival

factor. He was always watchful. Always aware. Always tense. Always

ready. Ready for anything. That was why there was nothing that he

feared: nothing on earth could surprise him.

As the siren grew louder, he glanced at the rear-view mirror. A bit

more than a block away, a revolving red light pulsed in the night.

He took the .38 revolver out of his shoulder holster. He put one hand

on the door and waited for the right moment to throw it open.

The squad car bore down on him-then swept past. It turned the corner

two blocks away.

They weren't on his trail after all.

He felt slightly disappointed.

He put the gun away and studied the street. Six mercury vapor street

lamps-two at each end of the block and two in the middle-drenched the

pavement and the automobiles and the buildings in an eerie purple-white

light. The street was lined with three- and four-story townhouses, some

of them brownstones and some brick, most of them in good repair. There

didn't seem to be anyone at any of the lighted windows. That was good;

he did not want to be seen. A few trees struggled for life at the edges

of the sidewalks, the scrawny plane trees and maples and birches that

were all that New York City could boast beyond the boundaries of its

public parks, all of them stunted trees, skeletal, their branches like

charred bones reaching for the midnight sky. A gentle but chilly

January wind pushed scraps of paper along the gutters; and when the wind

gusted, the branches of the trees rattled like children's sticks on a

rail fence. The other parked cars looked like animals huddling against

the cold air; they were empty.

Both sidewalks were deserted for the length of the block.

He got out of the car, quickly crossed the street and went up the front

steps of the apartment house.

The foyer was clean and brightly lighted. The complex mosaic floor-a

garland of faded roses on a beige background-was highly polished, and

there were no pieces of tile missing from it. The inner foyer door was

locked and could only be opened by key or with a lock release button in

one of the apartments.

There were three apartments on the top floor, three on the second floor

and two on the ground level. Apartment 1A belonged to Mr. and Mrs.

Harold Nagly, the owners of the building, who were on their annual

pilgrimage to Miami Beach. The small apartment at the rear of the first

floor was occupied by Edna Mowry, and he supposed that right now Edna

would be having a midnight snack or a well-deserved martini to help her

relax after a long night's work.

He had come to see Edna. He knew she would be home. He had followed

her for six nights now, and he knew that she lived by strict routine,

much too strict for such a young and attractive woman. She always

arrived home from work at twelve, seldom more than five minutes later.

Pretty little Edna, he thought. You've got such long and lovely legs.

He smiled.

He pressed the call button for Mr. and Mrs. Yardley on the third

floor.

A man's voice echoed tinnily from the speaker at the top of the mailbox.

"Who is it?"

"Is this the Hutchinson apartment?" Bollinger asked, knowing full well

that it was not.

"You pressed the wrong button, mister. The Hutchinsons are on the

second floor. Their mailbox is next to ours."

"Sorry," Bollinger said as Yardley broke the connection.

He rang the Hutchinson apartment.

The Hutchinsons, apparently expecting visitors and less cautious than

the Yardleys, buzzed him through the inner door without asking who he

was.

The downstairs hall was pleasantly warm. The brown tile floor and tan

walls were spotless. Halfway along the corridor, a marble bench stood

on the left, and a large beveled mirror hung above it. Both apartment

doors, dark wood with brassy fixtures, were on the right.

He stopped in front of the second door and flexed his gloved fingers. He

pulled his wallet from an inside coat pocket and took a knife from an

overcoat pocket. When he touched the button on the burnished handle,

the springhinged blade popped into sight; it was seven inches long, thin

and nearly as sharp as a razor.

The gleaming blade transfixed Bollinger and caused bright images to

flicker behind his eyes.

He was an admirer of William Blake's poetry; indeed, he fancied himself

an intimate spiritual student of Blake's. It was not surprising, then,

that a passage from Blake's work should come to him at that moment,

flowing through his mind like blood running down the troughs in an

autopsy table.

Then the inhabitants of those cities Felt their nerves change into

marrow, And the hardening bones began In swift diseases and torments, in

shootings and throbbings and grindings through all the coasts, till,

weakened, The senses inward rushed, shrinking Beneath the dark net of

infection.

I'll change their bones to marrow, sure as hell, Bollinger thought. I'll

have the inhabitants of this city hiding behind their doors at night.

Except that I'm not the infection; I'm the cure. I'm the cure for all

that's wrong with this world.

He rang the bell. After a moment he heard her on the other side of the

door, and he rang the bell again.

"Who is it?" she asked. She had a pleasant, almost musical voice,

marked now with a thin note of apprehension.

"Miss Mowry?" he asked.

"Yes? "

" Police."

She didn't reply.

"Miss Mowry? Are you there?"

"What's it about?"

"Some trouble where you work."

"I never cause trouble."

"I didn't say that. The trouble doesn't involve you.

At least not directly. But you might have seen something important. You

might have been a witness."

"To what?"

"That will take a while to explain."

"I couldn't have been a witness. Not me. I wear blinders in that

place."

"Miss Mowry," he said sternly, "if I must get a warrant in order to

question you, I will."

"How do I know you're really the police?"

"New York," Bollinger said with mock exasperation.

"Isn't it just wonderful? Everyone suspects everyone else.

"They have to."

He sighed. "Perhaps. Look, Miss Mowry, do you have a security chain on

the door?"

"Of course."

"Of course. Well, leave the chain on and open up. I'll show you my

identification."

Hesitantly, she slid back a bolt lock. The chain lock allowed the door

to open an inch and no farther.

He held up his wallet. "Detective Bollinger, " he said. The knife was

in his left hand, pointed at the floor, pressed flat against his

overcoat.

She squinted through the narrow crack. She peered for a moment at the

badge that was pinned to the inside of his wallet, then carefully

studied the photo identification card in the plastic window below the

badge.

When she stopped squinting at the ID and looked up at him, he saw that

her eyes were not blue, as he had thought-having seen her no closer than

when she was on stage and he was in the shadowed audience but a deep

shade of green. They were truly the most attractive eyes he had ever

seen. "Satisfied?" he asked.

Her thick dark hair had fallen across one eye. She pushed it away from

her face. Her fingers were long and perfectly formed, the nails painted

blood red. When she was on stage, bathed in that intense spotlight, her

nails appeared to be black. She said, "What's this trouble you

mentioned?"

"I have quite a number of questions to ask you, Miss Mowry. Must we

discuss this through a crack in the door for the next twenty minutes?"

Frowning, she said, "I suppose not. Wait there just a minute while I

put on a robe."

"I can wait. Patience is the key to content."

She looked at him curiously.

Mohammed," he said.

"A cop who quotes Mohammed?"

"Why not?"

"Are you-of that religion?"

"No." He was amused at the way she phrased the question. "It's just

that I've acquired a considerable amount of knowledge for the sole

purpose of shocking those people who think all policemen are hopelessly

ignorant.

" She winced. "Sorry." Then she smiled. He had not seen her smile

before, not once in the entire week since he had first seen her.

She had stood in that spotlight, moving with the music, shedding her

clothes, bumping, grinding, caressing her own bare breasts, observing

her audience with the cold eyes and almost lipless expression of a

snake. Her smile was dazzling.

"Get your robe, Miss MoryS he closed the door.

Bollinger watched the foyer door at the end of the hall, hoping no one

would come in or go out while he was standing there, exposed.

He put away his wallet.

He kept the knife in his left hand.

in less than a minute she returned. She removed the security chain,

opened the door and said, "Come in."

He stepped past her, inside.

She closed the door and put the bolt lock in place and turned to him a

him and said, "Whatever trouble-" Moving quickly for such a large man he

slammed her against the door, brought up the knife, shifted it from his

left hand to his right hand, and lightly pricked her throat with the

point of the blade.

Her green eyes were very wide. She'd had the breath knocked out of her

and could not scream.

"No noise," Bollinger said fiercely. "if you try to call for help, I'll

push this pig sticker straight into your lovely throat.

I'll ram it right out the back of your neck. Do you understand?"

She stared at him.

"Do you understand?"

"Yes," she said thinly.

"Are you going to cooperate?"

She said nothing. Her gaze traveled down from his eyes, over his proud

nose and full lips and strong jaw-line, down to his fist and to the

handle of the knife.

"If you aren't going to cooperate," he said quietly, "I can skewer you

right here. I'll pin you to the damn door." He was breathing hard.

A tremor passed through her.

He grinned.

Still trembling, she said, "What do you want?"

"Not much. Not very much at all. just a little loving." She closed

her eyes. "Are you-him?"

Dew R Kovatz A slender, all but invisible thread of blood trickled from

beneath the needlelike point of the knife, slid along her throat to the

neck of her bright red robe. Watching the minuscule flow of blood as if

he were a an extremely rare scientist observing bacterium through a

microscope, pleased by it, nearly mesmerized by it, he said, "Him? Who

is 'him'? I don't know what you're talking about."

"You know," she said weakly.

"I'm afraid not."

"Are you him?" she bit her lip. "The one who-who's cut up all those

other women?"

Looking up from her throat, he said, "I see. I see how it is. Of

course. You mean the one they call the Butcher. You think I'm the

Butcher."

"Are you?"

"I've been reading a great deal about him in the Daily News. He slits

their throats, doesn't he? From one ear to the other. Isn't that

right?" He was teasing her and enjoying himself immensely.

"Sometimes he even disembowels them. Doesn't he? Correct me if I'm

wrong. But that's what he does sometimes, isn't it?"

She said nothing.

"I believe I read in the News that he sliced the ears off one of them.

When the police found her, her ears were on the nightstand beside her

bed."

She shuddered more violently than ever.

"Poor little Edna. You think I'm the Butcher. No wonder you're so

frightened." He patted her shoulder, smoothed her dark hair as if he

were quieting an animal. "I'd be scared too if I were in your shoes

right now.

But I'm not. I'm not in your shoes and I'm not this guy they call the

Butcher. You can relax."

She opened her eyes and searched his, trying to tell whether he spoke

the truth.

,What kind of man do you think I am, Edna?" he asked, pretending to

have been hurt by her suspicion. "I don't want to harm you. I will if

I must. I will cause you a great deal of harm if you don't cooperate

with me. But if you're docile, if you're good to me, I'll be good to

you. I'll make you very happy, and I'll leave you just like I found

you. Flawless. You are flawless, you know. Perfectly beautiful. And

your breath smells like strawberries. Isn't that nice?

That's such a nice touch, that scentful way for us to begin, smell of

strawberries on your breath. Were you eating when I knocked?"

"You're crazy," she said softly.

"Now, Edna, let's have cooperation. Were you eating strawberries?

" Tears began to form in the corners of her eyes.

He pressed a bit harder with the knife.

She whimpered.

"Well?" he said.

"Wine."

"What?"

"It was wine."

"Strawberry wine?"

"Yes."

"Is there any left?"

"Yes.

"I'd like to have some."

which Graham had suddenly found himself so uncomfortable.

"You're a most interesting guest, Mr. Harris."

"Thank you. You're interesting yourself. I don't see how you can keep

your wits about you. I mean, doing this much live television, five

nights a week-"

"But the fact that it's live is what makes it so exciting, " Prine said.

"Being on the air live, risking all, taking a chance of making a fool of

yourself-that keeps the juices flowing.

That's why I hesitate to accept one of these offers to syndicate the

show or to go network with it. They'd want it on tape, all neatly

edited down from two hours to ninety minutes. And that wouldn't be the

same."

The program director, a heavyset man in a white turtleneck sweater and

houndstooth-check slacks, said, "Twenty seconds, Tony."

"Relax," Prine told Harris. "You'll be off in fifteen more minutes."

Harris nodded. Prine seemed friendly-yet he could not shake the feeling

that the night was going to go sour for him, and soon.

Anthony Prine was the host of Manhattan at Midnight, an informal

two-hour-long interview program that originated from a local New York

City station. Manhattan at Midnight provided the same sort of

entertainment to be found on all other talk shows-actors and actresses

plugging their latest movies, authors plugging their latest books,

musicians plugging their latest records, politicians plugging their

latest campaigns (as yet unannounced campaigns and thus unfettered by

the equal-time provisions of the election laws)-except that it presented

a greater number of mind readers and psychics and UFO "experts" than did

most talk shows. Prine was a Believer. He was also damned good at his

job, so good there were rumors ABC wanted to pick him up for a

nationwide audience. He was not so witty as Johnny Carson or so homey

as Mike Douglas, but no one asked better or more probing questions than

he did.

most of the time he was serene, in lazy command of his show; and when

things were going well, he looked somewhat like a slimmed-down Santa

Claus: completely white hair, a round face and merry blue eyes.

He appeared to be incapable of rudeness. However, there were

occasions-no more often than once a night, sometimes only once a

week-when he would lash out at a guest, prove him a liar or in some

other way thoroughly embarrass and humiliate him with a series of

wickedly pointed questions. The attack never lasted more than three or

four minutes, but it was as brutal and as relentless as it was

surprising.

Manhattan at Midnight commanded a large and faithful audience primarily

because of this element Of surprise that magnified the ferocity of

Prine's interrogations. If he had subjected every guest to this abuse,

he would have been a bore; but his calculated style made him as

fascinating as a cobra. Those millions of people who spend most of

their leisure hours in front of a television set apparently enjoyed

secondhand violence more than they did any other form of entertainment.

They watched the police shows to see people beaten, robbed and murdered;

they watched Primarily for those unexpected moments when he bludgeoned a

guest with words that were nearly as devastating as clubs.

He had started twenty-five years earlier as a nightclub comic and

impressionist, doing old jokes and mimicking famous voices in cheap

lounges. He had come a long way.

The director signaled Prine. A red light shone on one camera.

Addressing his unseen audience, Prine said, "I'm talking with Mr. Graham

Hams, a resident of Manhattan who calls himself a 'clairvoyant," a seer

of visions. Is that the proper definition of the term, Mr. Hams?"

"It'll do," Graham said. "Although when you put it that way, it sounds

a bit religious. Which it isn't. I don't attribute my extrasensory

perception to God nor to any other supernatural force."

"As you said earlier, you're convinced-that the clairvoyance is a result

of a head injury you received in a rather serious accident.

Subsequent to that, you began to have these visions. If that's God's

work, His methods are even more roundabout than we might have thought."

Graham smiled. "Precisely."

Now, anyone who reads the newspapers knows that you've been asked to

assist the police in uncovering a clue to the identity of this man they

call the Butcher. But what about your last case, the murder of the

Havelock sisters in Boston? That was very interesting too. Tell us

about that."

Graham shifted uneasily in his chair. He still sensed trouble coming,

but he couldn't imagine what it might be or how he might avoid it.

"The Havelock sisters.. - " -two-year-old Nineteen-year-old Paula and

twenty-two year old paige Havelock had lived together in a cozy Boston

apartment near the university where Paula was an undergraduate student

and where Paige was working for her master's degree in sociology. On

the morning of last November second, Michael Shute had stopped by the

apartment to take Paige to lunch. The date had been made by telephone

the previous evening. Shute and the elder Havelock sister were lovers,

and he had a key to the apartment. When no one responded to the bell,

he decided to let himself in and wait for them.

Inside, however, he discovered that they were at home. Paula and Paige

had been awakened in the night by one or more intruders who had stripped

them naked; pajamas and robes were strewn on the floor. The women had

been tied with a heavy cord, sexually molested and finally shot to death

in their own living room Because the proper authorities were unable to

come up with a single major lead in the case, the parents of the dead

girls got in touch with Graham on the tenth of November and asked for

his assistance. He arrived in Boston two days later. Although the

police were skeptical of his talents-a number of them were downright

hostile toward him-they were anxious to placate the Havelocks, who had

some political influence in the city. He was taken to the sealed

apartment and permitted to examine the scene of the crime. But he got

absolutely nothing from that: no emanations, no psychic visionjust a

chill that slithered down his spine and coiled in his stomach. Later,

under the suspicious gaze of a police property officer, he was allowed

to handle the pillow that the killer had used to muffle the gunshots-and

then the pajamas and the robes that had been found next to the bodies.

As he caressed the blood-stiffened fabric, his paranormal talent

abruptly blossomed; his mind was inundated with clairvoyant images like

a series of choppy, frothing waves breaking on a beach.

Anthony Prine interrupted Graham. "Wait a minute. I think we need some

elaboration on this point. We need to make it much clearer.

Do you mean that the simple act of touching the bloodstained pajamas

caused your clairvoyant visions?"

"No. It didn't cause them. it freed them. The pajamas were like a key

that unlocked the clairvoyant part of my mind. That's a quality common

to nearly all murder weapons and to the last garments worn by the

victims."

"Why do you think that is?"

"I don't know," Graham said.

"You've never thought about it?"

"I've thought about it endlessly," Graham said. "But I've never reached

any conclusions."

Although Prine's voice held not even the slightest note of hostility,

Graham was almost certain that the man was searching for an opening to

launch one of his famous attacks.

For a moment he thought that might be the oncoming trouble which he had

known about, in a somewhat psychic fashion, for the past quarter of an

hour. Then he suddenly understood, through the powers of his sixth

sense, that the trouble would happen to someone else, beyond the walls

of this studio.

'When you touched the pajamas," Prine said, ,did you see the murders as

if they were actually taking place in front of you at that very moment?"

"Not exactly. I saw it all take place-well, behind my eyes."

'What do you mean by that? Are your visions sort of like daydreams?"

"In a way. But much more vivid than daydreams full of color and sound

and texture."

F "Did you see the Havelocks' killer in this vision?"

"Yes. Quite clearly."

"Did you also intuit his name?"

"No," Graham said. "But I was able to give the police a thorough

description of him - He was in his early thirties, not shorter than

five-ten or taller than six feet. Slightly heavy. Receding hairline.

Blue eyes. A thin nose, generally sharp features. A small strawberry

birthmark on his chin.... As it turned out, that was a perfect

description of the building superintendent."

"And you'd never seen him?"

"My first glimpse of him was in the vision."

"You'd never seen a photograph of him?"

"No."

"Had he been a suspect before you gave the police this description?"

Prine asked.

"Yes. But the murders took place in the early morning hours of his day

off - He swore that he had gone to his sister's house to spend the

night, hours before the Havelock girls were killed; and his sister

supported his story. Since she lived over eighty miles away, he seemed

out of the running."

"Was his sister lying?"

"Yes.

"How did you prove it?"

While handling the dead girls' clothing, Graham sensed that the killer

had gone to his sister's house a full two hours after the murder had

taken place-not early the previous evening as she insisted. He also

sensed that the weapon-a Smith & Wesson Terrier .-was hidden in the

sister's house, in the bottom drawer of a china closet.

He accompanied a Boston city detective and two state troopers to the

sister's place. Arriving unannounced and uninvited, they told her they

wanted to question her on some new evidence in the case. Ten seconds

after he stepped into her house, while the woman was still surprised at

the 'sight of them, Graham asked her why she had said that her brother

had come to stay on the evening of November first when in fact he

actually had not arrived until well after dawn on November second.

Before she could answer that, before she could get her wits about her,

he asked her why she was hiding the murder weapon in the bottom drawer

of her china closet. Shocked by his knowledge, she withstood only half

a dozen questions from the detective before she finally admitted the

truth.

'Amazing," Prine said. "And you had never seen the inside of her house

before you had that vision?"

"I'd never even seen the outside of it," Graham said.

,Why would she protect her brother when she knew he was guilty of such a

horrible crime?"

"I don't know. I can see things that have happened and very

occasionally, things that soon will happen in places where I've never

been. But I can't read minds. I can't explain human motivations."

The program director signaled Prine: five minutes until they broke for

the commercials.

Leaning toward Harris, Prine said, "Who asked you to help catch this man

they're calling the Butcher? Parents of one of the murdered women?"

"No. One of the detectives assigned to the case isn't as skeptical as

most Policemen. He believes that I can do what I say I can do. He

wants to give me a chance."

"Have you gone to the scenes of the nine murders?"

"I've seen five of them."

" ' And handled the clothes of the victims?"

"Some of them."

Prine slid forward on his chair, leaning conspiratorially toward Harris.

"What can you tell us about the Butcher?

"Not much," Graham Harris said, and he frowned, because that bothered

him. He was having more trouble than usual on this case.

"He's a big man. Good-looking. Young. Very sure of himself and sure

of the-"

"How much are you being paid? Prine asked.

Confused by the question, Graham said, "For what?"

"For helping the police," Prine said.

"I'm not being paid anything."

"You're just doing it for the good of society, then?"

"i'm compelled. i'm doing it because I-"

"How much did the Havelocks pay you?"

He realized that Prine had been leaning toward him not conspiratorially

but hungrily, like a beast preparing to pounce on its prey. His hunch

had been correct: that son of a bitch had chosen him for the nightly

trouncing. But why?

"Mr. Harris?"

Graham had temporarily forgotten the cameras (and the audience beyond),

but now he was uncomfortably aware of them again. "The Havelocks didn't

pay me anything.

"You're certain of that?"

"Of course I'm certain."

"You are sometimes paid for your services, aren't you?

"No. I earn my living by-"

"Sixteen months ago a young boy was brutally murdered in the Midwest.

We'll skip the name of the town to spare the family publicity. His

mother asked for your assistance in uncovering the killer. I spoke with

her yesterday. She says that she paid you slightly more than one

thousand dollars-and then you failed to find the killer.

What the hell is he trying to prove? Graham wondered. He knows I'm

far from poor. He knows I don't need to run halfway across the country

to hustle a few hundred dollars. "First of all, I did tell them who

killed the child and where they could look for the evidence that would

make their case. But both the police and this woman refused to follow

up on the lead that I gave them.

"Why would they refuse?"

"Because the man I fingered for the murder is the son of a wealthy

family in that town. He's also a respected clergyman in his own right,

and the stepfather of the dead boy."

Prine's expression was proof enough that the woman had not told him this

part of it. Nevertheless, he pressed the attack. That was

uncharacteristic of him.

ordinarily, he was vicious with a guest only when he knew that he had

evidence enough to ruin him. He was not entirely an admirable man;

however, he usually didn't make mistakes. "But she did pay you the

thousand dollars? "

"That was for my expenses. Airline fares, car rentals, meals and

lodging while I was working on the case."

Smiling as if he had made his point, Prine said, "Do they usually pay

your expenses?"

"Naturally. I can't be expected to travel all about, spending thousands

of my own money for-"

"Did the Havelocks pay you?"

"My expenses."

"But didn't you lust tell us a minute ago that the Havelocks didn't pay

you anything?"

Exasperated, Graham said, "They didn't pay me. They just reimbursed me

for-"

"Mr. Harris, forgive me if I seem to be accusing you of something you

haven't done. But it occurs to me that a man with your reputation for

performing psychic miracles could easily take many thousands of dollars

a year that is."

from the gullible. If he was unscrupulous, ,Look here-"

"When you're on one of these investigations, do you ever pad your

expenses?" Prine asked.

Graham was stunned. He slid forward on his chair, leaned toward Prine.

"That's outrageous!" He realized that Prine had settled back and

crossed his legs the instant that he got a strong reaction. That was a

clever maneuver that made Graham's response seem exaggerated. He

suddenly felt as if he were the predator. He supposed that his

justifiable indignation looked like the desperate and weak self-defense

of a guilty man. "You know I don't need the money. I'm not a

millionaire, but I'm well fixed. My father was a successful publisher.

I received a substantial trust fund. Furthermore, I've got a moderately

successful business of my own."

"I know you publish two expensive magazines about mountain climbing,"

Prine said. "But they do have small circulations. As for the trust

fund.... I hadn't heard about that."

He's lying, Graham thought. He prepares meticulously for these shows.

When I walked into this studio, he knew almost as much about me as I

know about myself. So why is he lying? What will he gain by

slandering me? What in hell is happening here?

The woman has green eyes, clear and beautiful green eyes, but there is

terror in them now, and she stares up at the blade, the shining blade,

and she sucks in her breath to scream, and the blade starts its

downward,arc...

The images passed as suddenly as they had come, leaving him badly

shaken. He knew that some clairvoyantincluding the two most famous,

Peter Hurkos and his fellow Dutchman Gerard Croiset-could receive,

interpret and catalogue their psychic perceptions while holding an

uninterrupted conversation. Only rarely could Graham manage that.

Usually he was distracted by the visions.

Occasionally, when they had to do with a particularly violent murder, he

was so overwhelmed by them that he blanked out reality altogether.

The visions were more than an intellectual experience; they affected him

emotionally and spiritually as well. For a moment, seeing the

green-eyed woman behind his eyes, he had not been fully aware of the

world around him: the television audience, the studio, the cameras,

Prine. He was trembling.

"Mr. Harris?" Prine said.

He looked up from his hands.

"I asked you a question," Prine said.

,I'm sorry. I didn't hear it."

As the blood exploded from her throat and her cream eyes he watched it

run down, down with a stream down between her bare breasts, and he

nearly laugh mania tber scowls nor guns, and he does not ally but goes

about the killing in a workmanlike manner, as if this is his profession,

as if this is just a job, as if this is no different froma man selling

cars for a living or washing windows, Merely a tluk to be it rite a e

lood nishedstaband pand ar ndbringth b welling up in Pools ... and then

stand up and go home and sleep contentedly, satisfied with a job well

done.

Graham was shaking uncontrollably. His face was greasy with

perspiration, yet he felt as if he were sitting in a cool draft. His

own power scared him. Ever since the accident in which he had nearly

died, he had been frightened of many things; but these inexplicable

visions were the ultimate fear.

"Mr. Harris?" Prine said. "Are you feeling all right?"

The second wave of impressions had lasted only three or four seconds,

although it had seemed much longer than that. During that time he was

totally unaware of the studio and the cameras.

"He's doing it again," Graham said softly. "Right now, this minute."

Frowning, Prine said, '."Who? Doing what?"

"Killing."

"You're talking about-the Butcher?"

Graham nodded and licked his lips. His throat was so dry that it hurt

him a bit to speak. There was an unpleasant metallic taste in his

mouth.

Prine was excited. He faced one of the cameras and said, "Remember, New

York, you heard it and saw it here first." He turned back to Graham and

said, "Who is he killing?" He was suddenly charged with ghoulish

.Inticipation.

"A woman. Green eyes. Pretty."

"What's her name?"

Perspiration trickled into the corners of Graham's eyes and stung them.

He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand-and wondered how foolish

he looked to the hundreds of thousands who were watching.

"Can you tell me her name?" Prine asked.

Edna ... pretty littleEdna ... poor little Edna....

"Edna," Graham said.

"Last name?"

"I don't ... can't see it!"

"Try. You must try."

"Maybe ... dancer."

"Edna Dancer?"

"I don't . maybe not... maybe the dancer part isn't right ...

maybe just... just the Edna "Reach for it"l Prine said. Try harder.

Can't you force it out?"

"No use!" His name "Daryl ... no ... Dwight!"

"Like Dwight Eisenhower?"

"I'm not certain that it's actually his first name ... Or even first or

Last... but people have Called him that ...

Dwight ... yes... and he's answered to it!" ,Incredible," prine said,

apparently having forgotten that he had been in the process of

destroying his guest's reputation. "Do you see his other name, first or

last?" -No. But I sense ... the police already know him ...

somehow ... and they ... they know him well."

,You mean that he's already a suspect?" Prine asked.

The cameras seemed to move in closer.

Graham wished they would go away. He wished prine would go away.

He should never have come here tonight. Most of all, he wished his

clairvoyant powers would go away, vanish back into that locked box deep

within his mind from which they had been sprung by the accident.

"I don't know," Graham said. "I suppose ...

he must be a suspect. But whatever the situation ... they know him.

They-" He shuddered.

"What is it?" Prine asked.

"Edna ...

"Yes?"

"She's dead now."

Graham felt as if he were going to be sick.

"Where did it happen?" Prine asked.

Graham sank back in his armchair, struggling to keep control of himself.

He felt almost as if he were Edna, as if the knife had been plunged into

him.

"Where was she murdered?" Prine asked again.

"In her apartment."

"What's the address?"

"I don't know."

"But if the police could get there in time-"

"I've lost it," Graham said. "It's gone. I'm sorry. It's all gone for

now."

He felt cold and hollow inside.

Shortly before two o'clock in the morning, after a conference on the set

with the director, Anthony Prine left the studio and went down the hall

to his suite, which served him as office, dressing room and home away

from home. Inside, he walked straight to the bar, put two ice cubes in

a glass and reached for the bottle of bourbon.

His manager and business partner, Paul Stevenson, was sitting on the

couch. He wore expensive, welltailored clothes. Prine was a smart

dresser, and he appreciated that quality in other men. The problem was

that Stevenson always destroyed the effect of his outfit with one

bizarre accessory. Tonight he was wearing a Seville Row suit-a

hard-finished gray worsted with a midnight-blue That silk lining-a

hand-sewn light blue shirt, maroon tie, black alligator shoes. And

bright pink socks-with green clocks on the sides. Like cockroaches on a

wedding cake.

For two reasons, Stevenson was a perfect business partner: he had money,

and he did what he was told to do.

Prine had great respect for the dollar. And he did not believe that

anyone lived who had the experience, the intelligence or the right to

tell him what to do.

"Were there any calls for me on the private line?"

Prine asked.

"No calls."

"You're certain?"

"Of course."

"You were here all the time?"

"Watching the show on that set," Stevenson said.

"I was expecting a call."

"I'm sorry. There wasn't one."

Prine scowled.

"Terrific show," Stevenson said.

"Just the first thirty minutes. Following Harris, the other guests

looked duller than they were. Did we get viewer calls?"

"Over a hundred, all favorable. Do you believe he really saw the

killing take place?"

"You heard the details he gave. The color of her eyes. Her name.

He convinced me."

"Until the next victim's found, you don't know that his details were

accurate."

"They were accurate," Prine said. He finished his bourbon and refilled

his glass. He could drink a great deal of whiskey without becoming

drunk. Likewise, when he ate he gorged himself, yet he had never been

overweight. He was constantly on the prowl for pretty young women, and

when he paid for sex he usually went to bed with two call girls. He was

not simply a middle-aged man desperately trying to prove his youth. He

needed those fuels-whiskey, food and women-in large doses. For most of

his life he had been fighting ennui, a deep and abiding boredom with the

way the world was.

Pacing energetically, sipping his bourbon, he said, "A green-eyed woman

named Edna.... He's right about that. We'll be reading it in the papers

tomorrow - "

"You can't know-"

"if you'd been sitting there beside him, Paul, you'd have no doubts

about it."

"But wasn't it odd that he had his 'vision' just when you about had him

nailed?"

"Nailed for what?" Prine asked.

"Well ... for taking money. For "if he's ever been paid more than his

expenses for that kind of work, I've no proof of it," Prine said.

Perplexed, Stevenson said, "Then why did you go after him?"

"I wanted to break him. Reduce him to a babbling, defenseless fool."

Prine smiled.

"But if he wasn't guilty-"

"He's guilty of other things."

"Like what?"

"You'll know eventually."

Stevenson sighed. "You enjoy humiliating them right there on

television."

"Of course."

"Why?"

"Why not?"

"Is it the sense of power?"

"Not at all," Prine said. "I enjoy exposing them as fools because they

are fools. Most men are fools. Politicians, clergymen, poets,

philosophers, businessmen, generals and admirals. Gradually, I'm

exposing the leaders in every profession. I'm going to show the

ignorant masses that their leaders are as dull-witted as they are." He

swallowed some bourbon. When he spoke again, his voice was hard.

"Maybe someday all those fools will go at one another's throats and

leave the world to the few of us who can appreciate it."

"What are you saying?"

"I spoke English, didn't I?"

"You sound so-bitter."

"I've got a right to."

"You? After your success?"

"Aren't you drinking, Paul?"

"No. Tony, I don't understand-"

"I think you should have a drink."

Stevenson knew when he was expected to change the subject. "I really

don't want a drink."

"Have you ever gotten blind drunk?"

"No. I'm not much of a drinker."

"Ever gone to bed with two girls at once?"

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"You don't reach out for life like you should," Prine said. "You don't

experience. You don't get loose enough often enough. That's the only

thing wrong with you, Paulthere than your socks."

Stevenson looked at his feet. "What's wrong with my socks?"

Prine went to the windows. He didn't look at the bright city beyond but

stared instead at his reflection in the glass. He grinned at himself.

He felt marvelous. Better than he had felt in weeks, and all thanks to

Harris. The clairvoyant had brought some excitement and danger into his

life, new purpose and interest.

Although Graham Harris didn't know it as yet, he was the most important

target of Prine's career. We'll destroy him, Prine thought happily;

wipe him out, finish him off for good. He turned to Stevenson. "Are

you certain about the phone? I must have gotten a call."

,No. Nothing."

"Maybe you stepped out of here for a minute."

"Tony, I'm not a fool. Give me some credit. I was here all the time,

and the private line never rang."

Prine finished his second bourbon. It burned his throat. A welcome and

pleasant heat rose in him. "Why don't you have a drink with me?"

Stevenson stood and stretched. "No. I've really got to go."

Prine went to the bar.

"You're drinking those awfully fast, Tony."

"Celebrating," Prine said as he added ice and bourbon to his glass.

"Celebrating what?"

"The downfall of another fool."

Connie Davis was waiting for Graham when he came home to the townhouse

they shared in Greenwich Village. She took his coat and hung it in the

closet.

She was pretty. Thirty-four years old. Slender. Brunette. Gray eyes.

Proud nose. Wide mouth. Sexy.

She owned a prosperous hole-in-the-wall antique shop on Tenth Street. In

business she was every bit as tough as she was pretty.

For the past eighteen months she and Graham had lived together.

Their relationship was the closest thing to genuine romance that either

of them had ever known.

However, it was more than a romance. She was his doctor and nurse as

well as his lover. Since the accident five years ago, he had been

losing faith in himself. His self-respect faded year by year. She was

here to help him, to heal him. She was not certain that he understood

stood this; but she saw it as the most important task of her life.

"Where have you been?" she asked. "It's two thirty.

"I had to think. I went walking. You saw the program?

"We'll talk about it. But first you need to get warm."

"Do I ever. It must be twenty below out there."

"Go into the study and sit down. Relax," she said. "I've got a fire

going. I'll bring you a drink."

" Brandy?

"

"What else on a night like this?"

"You're nearly perfect."

"Nearly?"

"Mustn't give you a swelled head."

"I'm too perfect to be immodest."

He laughed.

She turned from him and went to the bar at the far end of the living

room.

With a sixth sense of her own, she knew that he stared after her for a

moment before he left the room. Good. just as planned. He was meant

to watch. She was wearing a clinging white sweater and tight blue jeans

that accentuated her waistline and her bottom. If he hadn't stared

after her, she would have been disappointed. After what he had been

through tonight, he needed more than a seat in front of the fireplace

and a snifter of brandy. He needed her. Touching. Kissing.

Making love. And she was willing-more than willing, delighted-to

provide it.

She was not merely plunging into her Earth Mother role again.

Unquestionably, she did have a tendency to overwhelm her men, to be so

excessively affectionate and understanding and dependable that she

smothered their self-reliance. However, this affair was different from

all the others. She wanted to depend on Graham as much as he depended

on her. This time she wanted to receive as much as she gave. He was

the first man to whom she had ever responded in quite that fashion.

She wanted to make love to him in order to soothe him, but she wanted to

soothe herself as well. She had always had strong, healthy sexual

drives, but Graham had put a new and sharper edge on her desire.

She carried the glasses of Remy Martin into the den. She sat beside him

on the sofa.

After a moment of silence, still staring at the fire, he said, "Why the

interrogation? What was he after?, "Prine?"

"Who else?"

"You've seen his show often enough. You know what he's like."

"But he usually has a reason for his attacks. And he's always got proof

of what he says."

"Well, at least you shut him up with your visions of the tenth murder."

"They were real," he said.

"I know they were."

"It was so vivid ... as if I were right there.

"Was it bad? Bloody?"

"One of the worst. I saw him ... ram the knife into her throat and then

twist it." He quickly sipped his brandy.

She leaned against him, kissed him on the cheek.

"l- can't figure this Butcher," he said worriedly. "I've never had so

much trouble getting an image of a killer."

"You sensed his name."

"Maybe. Dwight.... I'm not entirely sure."

You've given the police a fairly good description of him "But I can't

pick up much more about him," he said. "When the visions come and I try

to force an image of this man, this Butcher, to the center of them, all

I get are waves of ... evil. Not illness, not an impression of a sick

mind. just overwhelming evil. I don't know how to explain this-but the

Butcher isn't a lunatic. At least not in the classical sense. He

doesn't kill in a maniacal frenzy.

"He's chopped up nine innocent women," Connie said. "Ten if you count

the one they haven't found yet. He cuts off their ears and fingers

sometimes. Sometimes he disembowels them. And you say he isn't crazy?"

"He's not a lunatic, not by any definition we have of the word.

I'd stake my life on it."

"Maybe you don't sense mental illness because he doesn't know he's sick.

Amnesia-"

"No. No amnesia. No schizophrenia. He's very aware of his murders.

He's no Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I'll bet he'd pass any psychiatric

examination you'd care to give him, and with flying colors.

This isn't easy to explain. But I have the feeling that if he is a

lunatic, he's a whole new breed. No one's ever encountered anything

like him before. I think-dammit, I know he's not even angry or

particularly excited when he kills these women. He's just-methodical."

"You're giving me the shivers."

"You? I feel as if I've been inside his head. I've got a chronic case

of shivers."

A coal popped in the fireplace.

She took hold of his free hand. "Let's not talk about Prine or the

killings."

"After tonight, how can I not talk about them?"

"You looked wonderful on television," she said, working him away from

the subject.

"Oh, yeah. Wonderful. Sweating, pale, shaking" Not during the visions.

Before them. You're a natural for television. Even for movies.

Leading-man type."

Graham Harris was handsome. Thick reddish-blond hair. Blue eyes,

heavily crinkled at the corners. Leathery skin with sharply carved

lines from all the years he had spent in an outdoor life. Five-ten; not

tall, but lean and hard. He was thirty-eight, yet he still had a trace

of boyish vulnerability about him.

"Leading-man type?" he said. He smiled at her. "Maybe you're right.

I'll give up the publishing business and all this messy psychic stuff.

I'll go into the movies."

"The next Robert Redford."

"Robert Redford? I was thinking maybe the next Boris Karloff."

"Redford," Connie insisted.

"Come to think of it, Karloff was a rather elegant looking man out of

makeup. Perhaps I'll try for being the next Wallace Beery."

"if you're Wallace Beery, then I'm Marie Dressier."

"Hi, Marie."

"Do you really have an inferiority complex, or do you cultivate it as

part of your charm?"

He grinned, then sipped the brandy. "Remember that Tughoat Annie movie

with Beery and Dressler? Do you think Annie ever went to bed with her

husband?"

"Sure! "

"They were always fighting. He lied to her every chance he got-and most

of the time he was drunk."

"But in their own way they loved each other," Connie said. "They

couldn't have been married to anyone else."

"I wonder what it was like for them. He was such a weak man, and she

was such a strong woman."

"Remember, though, he was always strong when the chips were down: right

near the end of the picture, for example.

"Some good in all of us, huh?"

"He could have been strong from the start. He just didn't respect

himself enough."

Graham stared at the fire. He turned the brandy snifter around and

around in his hand.

"What about William Powell and Myrna Loy?" she asked. -"The Thin Man

movies."

"Both of them were strong," she said. "That's who we could be.

Nick and Nora Charles."

"I always liked their dog. Asta. Now that was a good part.

"How do you think Nick and Nora made love?"

she asked.

"Passionately."

"But with a lot of fun."

"Little jokes."

"That's it." She took the brandy glass out of his hand and put it on

the hearth with her own snifter. She kissed him lightly, teasing his

lips with her tongue. "I bet we could play Nick and Nora."

"I don't know. It's such a strain making love and being witty at the

same time."

She sat in his lap. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him

more fully this time and drew back and smiled when he slid a hand

beneath her sweater.

"Nora?" he said.

"Yes, Nicky?"

"Where's Asta?"

"I put him to bed."

"We wouldn't want him interrupting."

"He's asleep."

"Might traumatize the little fella if he saw-"

"I made sure he'd be asleep."

"Oh?"

"I drugged his Alpo."

"Such a smart girl."

"And now we belong in bed."

"Such a very smart girl."

"With a lovely body," she said.

"Yes, you're ravishing."

"Am I?"

"Oh, yes."

"Ravish me, then."

"With pleasure."

"I would hope so."

An hour later he was asleep, but Connie was not.

She lay on her side, studying his face in the soft glow of the bedside

lamp.

His experience and attitudes were stamped on his features. His

toughness shone through clearly, yet there was the boyish quality too.

Kindness. Intelligence. Humor. Sensitivity. He was a deep-down good

man. But the fear shone through as well, the fear of falling, and all

of the ugly things that had grown from it.

During his twenties and early thirties, Graham had been one of the best

mountain climbers in the world. He lived for the vertical trek, for the

risk and the triumph. Nothing else in his life mattered half so much as

that. He had been an active climber from the age of thirteen, year by

year setting higher and more difficult goals for himself. At twenty-six

he was organizing parties to scale the most taxing peaks in Europe, Asia

and South America. When he was thirty he led an expedition up the South

Col route of Everest, climbed the West Ridge to traverse the mountain,

and returned down the South Col.

At thirty-one he tackled the Eiger Direct with an Alpine-style single

push up the hideously sheer face without using fixed ropes.

Accomplishments such as these, his good looks, his wit, and his

reputation as a Casanova (exaggerated by both his friends and the press)

made him the most colorful and popular figure in mountaineering at that

time.

Five years ago, with only a few challenging climbs remaining, he put

together a team to assault the most dangerous wall of rock known to man,

the Southwest Face of Everest, a route that had never been taken to the

top. Two-thirds of the way through the climb, he fell, breaking sixteen

bones and suffering internal injuries. He was given first aid in Nepal,

then flown to Europe with a doctor and two friends at his side in what

everyone assumed would conclude as a death watch. Instead of adding one

more outstanding achievement to his record, he spent seven months in a

private Swiss clinic. However, the ordeal was not at an end when he

left the hospital. This Goliath had not been beaten, and had left this

David with a warning: Graham limped.

The doctors told him he could still scale easy cliffs and ridges as a

weekend sport if he wished. With sufficient practice he might even

learn to compensate for his partially game right leg and move on to more

ambitious climbs. Not Eiger. Not Everest, by any route. But there

were hundreds of lesser palisades that should interest him.

At first he was convinced that he would be back on Everest within a

year. Three times he tried to climb, and three times he was reduced to

panic in the first hundred feet of the ascent.

Forced to retreat from even the simplest climbs, he quickly saw that

Everest or anything remotely like it would most likely scare him to

death.

Over the years, that fear had undergone a metamorphosis- had grown and

spread like a fungus. His fear of climbing had become a generalized

fear that affected every aspect of his life. He was convinced that his

inheritance would be lost in bad investments, and he began following the

stock market with a nervous interest that made him the bane of his

broker. He started his three low-circulation, high-priced

mountainclimbing magazines as a hedge against a collapse of the market;

and although they were quite profitable, he periodically predicted their

demise. He began to see the dread specter of cancer in every cold, case

of flu, headache and bout with acid indigestion. His clairvoyance

frightened him, and he attempted to deal with it only because he could

not run from it. At times the fear intruded between him and Connie in

the most intimate moments, leaving him impotent.

Recently he had sunk into a depression far deeper than any that had come

before it, and for several days he had seemed unable and unwilling to

claw his way out of it. Two weeks ago he had witnessed a mugging, heard

the victim's cries for help-and walked away. Five years ago he would

have waded into the fight without hesitation. He came home and told

Connie about the mugging, belittled himself, called himself names and

argued with her when she tried to defend him. She was afraid that he

had come to loathe himself, and she knew that for a man like Graham such

an attitude would lead inevitably to some form of madness.

She knew that she was not particularly qualified to put him back

together again. Because of her strong will, because of her competitive

and fiercely self-sufficient nature, she felt that she had done more

harm than good to her previous lovers. She had never thought of herself

as a women's liberationist and certainly not as a ball breaker; she

simply had been, from the age of consent, sharper and tougher and more

self-reliant than most men of her acquaintance. In the past her lovers

had been emotionally and intellectually weaker than she. Few men seemed

able to accept a woman as anything but an inferior. She had nearly

destroyed the man she lived with before Graham, merely by assuming her

equality and-in his mind, at least-invalidating the male role he needed

to sustain himself.

With Graham's ego in a fragile state, she had to modify her basic

personality to an extent she would have thought impossible. It was

worth the strain, because she saw the man he had been prior to the

accident. She wanted to break his shell of fear and let out the old

Graham Harris. What he had once been was what she had hoped for so long

to find: a man who was her equal and who would not feel threatened by a

woman who was his match. However, while trying to bring that Graham

back to life, she had to be cautious and patient, for this Graham could

be shattered so very easily.

A gust of wind rattled the window.

Although she was warm under the covers, she shivered.

The telephone rang.

Startled, she rolled away from Graham.

The phone was strident. Like the cry of a halidon, it echoed eerily in

the room.

She snatched up the receiver to stop the ringing before it woke him.

"Hello?" she said softly.

"Mr. Harris, please."

"Who's calling?"

"Ira Preduski."

"I'm sorry, but I-"

"Detective Preduski."

"It's four in the morning," she said.

"I apologize. Really. I'm sorry. Sincerely. If I've wakened you ...

terrible of me. But, you see, he wanted me to call him immediately if

we had any-major developments in the Butcher case."

"Just a minute." She looked at Graham.

He was awake, watching her.

She said, "Preduski."

He took the receiver. "Harris speaking."

A minute later, when he was finished, she hung up for him. "They found

number ten?"

"Yeah.

"What's her name?" Connie asked.

"Edna. Edna Mowry."

The bedclothes were sodden with blood. The carpet at the right of the

bed was marred by a dark stain like a Rorschach blot. Dried blood

spotted the wall behind the brass headboard.

Three police lab technicians were working in the room under the

direction of the coroner. Two of them were on their hands and knees

beside the bed. One man was dusting the nightstand for fingerprints,

although he must have known that he would not find any. This was the

work of the Butcher, and the Butcher always wore gloves. The coroner

was plotting the trajectory of the blood on the wall in order to

establish whether the killer was left-handed or right-handed.

"Where's the body?" Graham asked.

"I'm sorry, but they took it to the morgue ten minutes ago," Detective

Preduski said, as if he felt responsible for some inexcusable breach of

manners. Graham wondered if Preduski's entire life was an apologia. The

detective was quick to take the blame for everything and to find fault

with himself even when he behaved impeccably. He was a nondescript man

with a pale complexion and watery brown eyes. In spite of his

appearance and his apparent inferiority complex, he was a highly

respected member of the Manhattan homicide detail. More than one of the

detective's associates had made it clear to Graham that he was working

with the best, that Ira Preduski was the top man in the department. "I

held the ambulance as long as I could.

You took so much time to get here. Of course I woke you in the dead of

night. I shouldn't have done that. And then you probably had to call a

cab and wait around for it. I'm so sorry. Now I've probably ruined

everything for you. I should have tried to keep the body here just a

bit longer. I knew you'd want to see it where it was found."

"That doesn't matter," Graham said. "In a sense, I've already had a

firsthand look at her."

"Of course you have," Preduski said. "I saw you on the Prine show

earlier."

"Her eyes were green, weren't they?"

"Just as you said."

"She was found nude?"

"Yes.

"Stabbed many times?"

"Yes."

"With a particularly brutal wound in the throat?"

"That's right."

"He mutilated her, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"How?"

Awful thing," Preduski said. "I wish I didn't have to tell you.

Nobody should have to hear it." Preduski seemed about to wring his

hands. "He cut a plug of flesh out of her stomach. It's almost like a

cork, with her navel in the center of it. Terrible."

Graham closed his eyes and shuddered. "This ...

cork . . ." He was beginning to perspire. He felt ill. He wasn't

receiving a vision, just a strong sense of what had happened, a hunch

that was difficult to ignore. "He put this cork ... in her right hand

and closed her fingers around it. That's where you found it."

"Yes." The coroner turned away from the blood-spattered wall and stared

curiously at Graham.

Don't look at me that way, Graham thought. I don't want to know these

things.

He would have been delighted if his clairvoyance had allowed him to

predict sharp rises in the stock market rather than isolated pockets of

maniacal violence. He Would have preferred to see the names of winning

horses in races not yet run rather than the names of victims in murders

he'd never seen committed.

If he could have wished away his powers, he would have done that long

ago. But because that was impossible, he felt as if he had a

responsibility to develop and interpret his psychic talent. He

believed, perhaps irrationally, that by doing so he was compensating, at

least in part, for the cowardice that had overwhelmed him these past

five years.

"What do you make of the message he left us?" Preduski asked.

On the wall beside the vanity bench there were lines of poetry printed

in blood.

Rintah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air; Hungry clouds

swag on the deep "Have any idea what it means?" Preduski asked.

"I'm afraid not."

"Recognize the poet?"

"No."

"Neither do I. " Preduski shook his head sorrowfully.

"I'm not very well educated. I only had one year of college.

Couldn't afford it. I read a lot, but there's so much to read. if I

were educated, maybe I'd know whose poetry that is. I should know. If

the Butcher takes the time to write it down, it's something important to

him. It's a lead. What kind of detective am I if I can't follow up a

lead as plain as that?" He shook his head again, clearly disgusted with

himself. "Not a good one. Not a very good one."

"Maybe it's his own poetry," Graham said.

"The Butcher's?"

"Maybe."

"A murderous poet? T.S. Eliot with a homicidal urge?

Graham shrugged.

"No," Preduski said. "A man usually commits this sort of crime because

it's the only way he can express the rage inside him.

Slaughter releases pressures that have built in him. But a poet can

express his feelings with words. No. If it were doggerel, perhaps it

could be the Butcher's own verse. But this is too smooth, too

sensitive, too good. Anyway, it rings a bell. Way back in this thick

head of mine, it rings a bell." Preduski studied the bloody message for

a moment, then turned and went to the bedroom door. it was standing

open; he closed it. "Then there's this one."

On the back of the door, five words were printed in the dead woman's

blood.

a rope over an abyss "Has he ever left anything like this before?"

Graham asked.

"No. I would have told you if he had. But it's not unusual in this

sort of crime. Certain types of psychopaths like to communicate with

whoever finds the corpse. jack the Ripper wrote notes to the police.

The Manson family used blood to scrawl one-word messages on the walls.

'A rope over an abyss." What is he trying to tell us?"

"Is it from the same poem as the other?"

"I haven't the faintest idea." Preduski sighed, thrust his hands into

his pockets. He looked dejected. "I'm beginning to wonder if I'm ever

going to catch him."

The living room of Edna Mowry's apartment was small but not mean.

Indirect lighting bathed everything in a relaxing amber glow.

Gold velvet drapes.

Textured light tan burlap-pattern wallpaper.

Plush brown carpet. A beige velour sofa and two matching armchairs. A

heavy glass coffee table with brass legs. Chrome and glass shelves full

of books and statuary.

Limited editions of prints by some fine contemporary artists. It was

tasteful, cozy and expensive.

At Preduski's request, Graham settled down in one of the armchairs.

Sarah Piper was sitting on one end of the sofa. She looked as expensive

as the room. She was wearing a knitted pantsuit-dark blue with Kelly

green piping-gold earrings and an elegant watch as thin as a half

dollar. She was no older than twenty-five, a strikingly lovely,

well-built blonde, marked by experience.

Earlier she had been crying. Her eyes were puffy and red. She was in

control of herself now.

"We've been through this before," she said.

Preduski was beside her on the couch. "I know," he said. "And I'm

sorry. Truly sorry. It's terribly late, too late for this. But there

is something to be gained by asking the same questions two and even

three times. You think you've told me all the pertinent facts.

But it's possible you overlooked something. God knows, I'm forever

overlooking things. This questioning may seem redundant to you, but

it's the way I work. I have to go over things again and again to make

sure I've done them right. I'm not proud of it. That's just the way I

am. Some other detective might get everything he needs the first time

he speaks to you. Not me, I'm afraid. It was your misfortune that the

call came in while I was on duty. Bear with me. I'll be able to let

you go home before much longer. I promise."

The woman glanced at Graham and cocked her head as if to say, Is this

guy for real?

Graham smiled.

"How long had you known-the deceased?" Preduski asked.

She said, "About a year."

"How well did you know her?"

"She was my best friend."

"Do you think that in her eyes you were her best friend?"

"Sure. I was her only friend."

Preduski raised his eyebrows. "People didn't like her? "

"Of course they liked her,", Sarah Piper said. "What wasn't to like?

She just didn't make friends easily. She was a quiet girl. She kept

mostly to herself."

"Where did you meet her?"

"At work."

"Where is work?"

"You know that. The Rhinestone Palace."

"And what did she do there?"

"You know that too."

Nodding, patting her knee in a strictly fatherly manner, the detective

said, "That's correct. I know it. But, you see, Mr. Harris doesn't

know it. I neglected to fill him in. My fault. I'm sorry.

Would you tell him?"

She turned to Graham. "Edna was a stripper. just like me."

"I know the Rhinestone Palace," Graham said.

"You've been there?" Preduski asked.

"No. But I know it's fairly high class, not like most striptease

clubs."

For a moment Preduski's watery brown eyes seemed less out of focus than

usual. He stared intently at Graham. "Edna Mowry was a stripper.

How about that?"

He knew precisely what the detective was thinking. On the Prine show he

had said that the victim's name might be Edna Dancer. He had not been

right-but he had not been altogether wrong either; for although her name

was Mowry, she earned her living as a dancer.

According to Sarah Piper, Edna had reported for work at five o'clock the

previous evening. She performed a ten-minute act twice every hour for

the next seven hours, peeling out of a variety of costumes until she was

entirely nude. Between acts, dressed in a black cocktail dress, sans

bra, she mixed with the customers-mostly men, alone and in

groups-hustling drinks in a cautious, demure and stylish way that

skipped successfully along the edge of the state's B-girl laws. She had

finished her last performance at twenty minutes of twelve and left the

Rhinestone Palace no more than five minutes after that.

"You think she came straight home?" Preduski asked.

"She always did," Sarah said. "She never wanted to go out and have fun.

The Rhinestone Palace was all the night life she could stomach.

Who could blame her?"

Her voice wavered, as if she might begin to cry again.

Preduski took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly.

She let him hold it, and that appeared to give him an innocent pleasure.

"Did you dance last evening?"

"Yeah. Till midnight."

"When did you come here?"

"A quarter of three."

"Why would you be visiting at that hour?"

"Edna liked to sit and read all night. She never went to bed until

eight or nine in the morning. I told her I'd stop around for breakfast

and gossip. I often did."

"You've probably already told me . . ." Preduski made a face:

embarrassment, apology, frustration. "I'm sorry. This mind of

mine-like a sieve. Did you tell me why you didn't come here at

midnight, when you got off work?

"I had a date," she said.

Graham could tell from her expression and from the tone of her voice

that the "date" had been a paying customer. That saddened him a bit. He

liked her already. He couldn't help but like her. He was receiving

low-key waves, threshold psychic vibrations from her; they were very

positive, mellow and warm vibrations. She was a damned nice person. He

knew. And he wanted only pleasant things to happen to her.

"Did Edna have a date tonight?" Preduski asked.

"No. I told you. She came right home."

"Maybe her boyfriend was waiting for her."

"She was between boyfriends."

"Maybe an old boyfriend stopped in to talk."

"No. When Edna dropped a guy, he stayed dropped."

Preduski sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose, shook his head sadly.

"I hate to have to ask this....

You were her best friend. But what I'm going to say please understand I

don't mean to put her down. Life is tough. We all have to do things

we'd rather not do. I'm not proud of every day of my life.

God knows. Don't judge. That's my motto. There's only one crime I

can't rationalize away. Murder. I really hate to ask this.... Well,

was she ... do you think she ever .

"Was she a prostitute?" Sarah asked for him.

"Oh, I wouldn't put it that way! That's such an awful ... I really

meant ..."

"Don't worry," she said. She smiled sweetly. "I'm not offended."

Graham was amused to see her squeeze the detective's hand. Now she was

comforting Preduski.

"I do some light hooking myself " Sarah said. "Not much. Once a week,

maybe. I've got to like the guy, and he's got to have two hundred bucks

to spare. It's all the same as stripping to me, really.

But it wouldn't have been something Edna could do. She was surprisingly

straight."

"I shouldn't have asked. It was none of my business," said Preduski.

"But it occurred to me that in her line of work there would be a lot of

temptation for a girl who needed money."

"She made eight hundred a week stripping and hustling drinks," Sarah

said. "She only spent money on her books and apartment. She was

socking it in the bank. She didn't need more."

Preduski was somber. "But you see why I had to ask?

If she opened the door to the killer, he must have been someone she

knew, however briefly. That's what puzzles me most about this whole

case. How does the Butcher get them to open the door?"

Graham had never thought about that. The dead women were all young, but

they were from varied backgrounds. One was a housewife.

One was a lawyer. Two were school-teachers. Three secretaries, one

model, one sales clerk.... How did the Butcher get so many different

women to open their doors to him late at night?

The kitchen table was littered with the remains of a hastily prepared

and hastily eaten meal. Bits of bread. The dried edge of a slice of

bologna. Smears of mustard and mayonnaise. Two apple cores.

A can of cling peaches empty of everything except an inch of packing

syrup. A drumstick gnawed to the bone. Half a doughnut.

Three crushed beer cans. The Butcher had been ravenous and sloppy.

"Ten murders," Preduski said, "and he always goes to the kitchen for a

snack afterward."

Stifled by the psychic atmosphere of the kitchen, by the incredibly

strong, lingering presence of the killer which was nearly as heavy here

as it had been in the dead woman's bedroom, Graham could only nod. The

mess on the table, in contrast with the otherwise tidy kitchen,

disturbed him deeply. The peach can and the beer can were covered with

reddish-brown stains; the killer had eaten while wearing his bloody

gloves.

Preduski shuffled forlornly to the window by the sink. He stared at the

neighboring apartment house. "I've talked to a few psychiatrists about

these feasts he has when he's done the dirty work.

As I understand it, there are two basic ways a psychopath will act when

he's finished with his victim. Number one, there's Mr. Meek. The

killing is everything for him, his whole reason for living, the only

color and desire in his life. When he's done killing, there's nothing,

he's nothing. He goes home and watches television.

Sleeps a lot. He sinks into a deep pit of boredom until the pressures

build up and he kills again. Number two, there's the man who gets

psyched up by the murder. His real excitement comes not during the

killing but after it. He'll go straight from the scene of the crime to

a bar and drink everyone under the table. His adrenaline is up. His

heartbeat is up. He eats like a lumberjack and sometimes picks up

whores by the six-pack. Apparently, our man is number two.

Except .

"Except what?" Graham asked.

Turning away from the window, Preduski said, "Seven times he's eaten a

big meal in the dead women's own homes. But the other three times, he's

taken the food out of the refrigerator and faked a big meal."

"Faked it? What do you mean?"

"The fifth murder, the Liedstrom woman," Preduski said. He closed his

eyes and grimaced as if he could still see her body and blood. "We were

aware of his style by then. We checked the kitchen right away.

There was an empty pear can on the table, an empty cottage cheese

container, the remains of an apple and several other items. But there

wasn't a mess. The first four times, he'd been sloppy-like he was

tonight. But in the Liedstrom kitchen, he hadn't left a lot of crumbs.

No smears of butter or mustard or mayonnaise or ketchup. No bloodstains

on the beer cans."

He opened his eyes and walked to the table. "We'd I found well-gnawed

apple cores in two of the first four kitchens." He pointed at an apple

core on the table in front of him. "Like that one.

The lab had even studied the teeth marks on them. But in the Liedstrom

kitchen he peeled the apple and removed the center with a corer. The

skins and the core were piled neatly on one corner of his dinner plate.

That was a change from what we'd seen previously, and it got me

thinking. Why had he eaten like a Neanderthal the first four times-and

like a gentleman the fifth? I had the forensic boys open the plumbing

under the sink and take out the garbage disposal unit. They ran tests

on it and found that each of the eight kinds of food on the table had

been put through the disposal within the past few hours. In short, the

Butcher hadn't taken a bite of anything in the Liedstrom kitchen. He

got the food from the refrigerator and tossed it down the drain. Then

he set the table so it would look as if he'd had a big meal. He did the

same thing at the scene of murders seven and eight.

That sort of behavior struck Graham as particularly eerie. The air in

the room seemed suddenly more moist and oppressive than before.

"You said his eating after a murder was part of a psychotic compulsion."

"Yes."

"If for some reason he didn't feel that compulsion at the Liedstrom

house, why would he bother to fake it?"

"I don't know," Preduski said. He wiped one slender hand across his

face as if he were trying to pull off his weariness. "It's too much for

me. It really is. Much too much. If he's crazy, why isn't he crazy in

the same way all of the time?"

Graham hesitated. Then: "I don't think any court appointed psychiatrist

would find him insane."

"Say again?"

"In fact, I think even the best psychiatrist, if not informed of the

murders, would find this man saner and more reasonable than he would

most of us."

Preduski blinked his watery eyes in surprise. "Well, hell. He carves

up ten women and leaves them for garbage, and you don't think he's

crazy?"

"That's the same reaction I got from a lady friend when I told her."

"I don't wonder."

"But I'll stick by it. Maybe he is crazy. But not in any traditional,

recognizable way. He's something altogether new."

"You sense this?"

"Yes."

"Psychically?"

"Yes."

"Can you be more specific?"

"Sorry.

"Sense anything else?"

"Just what you heard on the Prine show."

"Nothing new since you came here?"

"Nothing.

"If he's not insane at all, then there's a reason behind the killings,"

Preduski said thoughtfully. "Somehow they're connected. Is that what

you're saying?"

"I'm not sure what I mean."

"I don't see how they could be connected."

"Neither do I."

"I've been looking for a connection, really looking. I was hoping you

could pick up something here. From the bloody bedclothes. Or from this

mess on the table - "

"I'm blank," Harris said. "That's why I'm positive that either he is

sane, or he is insane in some whole new fashion. Usually, when I study

or touch an item intimately connected with the murder, I can pick up on

the emotion, the mania, the passion behind the crime. It's like leaping

into a river of violent thoughts, sensations, images.... This time all I

get is a feeling of cool, implacable, evil logic. I've never had so

much trouble drawing a bead on this kind of killer."

"Me either," Preduski said. "I never claimed to be Sherlock Holmes. I'm

no genius. I work slow. Always have. And I've been lucky.

God knows. It's luck more than skill that's kept my arrest record high.

But this time I'm having no luck at all. None at all. Maybe it's time

for me to be put out to pasture."

On his way out of the apartment, having left Ira Preduski in the kitchen

to ponder the remnants of the Butcher's macabre meal, Graham passed

through the living room and saw Sarah Piper. The detective had not yet

dismissed her. She was sitting on the sofa, her feet propped on the

coffee table. She was smoking a cigarette and staring at the ceiling,

smoke spiraling like dreams from her head; her back was to Graham.

The instant he saw her, a brilliant image flashed behind his eyes,

intense, breathtaking: Sarah Piper with blood all over her.

He stopped. Shaking. Waiting for more.

Nothing.

He strained. Tried to pluck more pictures from the ether.

Nothing. Just her face. And the blood. Gone now as quickly as it had

come to him.

She became aware of him. She turned around and said, "Hi."

He licked his lips, forced a smile.

"You predicted this?" she asked, waving one hand toward the dead

woman's bedroom.

"I'm afraid so."

"That's spooky."

"I want to say .

"Yes?"

"It was nice meeting you."

She smiled too.

"I wish it could have been under other circumstances," he sad, stalling,

wondering how to tell her about the brief vision, wondering whether he

should tell her at all.

"Maybe we will," she said.

"What?"

"Meet under other circumstances."

"Miss Piper ... be careful.

"I'm always careful."

"For the next few days ... be especially careful."

"After what I've seen tonight," she said, no longer smiling, "you can

bet on it."

Frank Bollinger's apartment near the Metropolitan Museum of Art was

small and spartan. The bedroom walls were cocoa brown, the wooden floor

polished and bare. The only furniture in the room was a queen-size bed,

one nightstand and a portable television set. He had built shelves into

the closets to hold his clothes. The living room had white walls and

the same shining wood floor. The only furniture was a black leather

couch, a wicker chair with black cushions, a mirrored coffee table, and

shelves full of books. The kitchen held the usual appliances and a

small table with two straightbacked chairs. The windows were covered

with venetian blinds, no drapes. The apartment was more like a monk's

cell than a home, and that was how he liked it.

At nine o'clock Friday morning he got out of bed, showered, plugged in

the telephone, and brewed a pot of coffee.

He had come directly to his apartment from Edna Mowry's place and had

spent the early morning hours drinking Scotch and reading Blake's

poetry. Halfway through the bottle, still not drunk but so happy, very

happy, he went to bed and fell asleep reciting lines from The Four Zoas.

When he awoke five hours later, he felt new and fresh and pure, as if he

had been reborn.

He was pouring his first cup of coffee when the telephone rang.

"Hello? "

"Dwight? "Yeah."

"This is Billy."

"Of course."

Dwight was his middle name-Franklin Dwight Bollinger-and had been the

name of his maternal grandfather, who had died when Frank was less than

a year old. Until he met and came to know Billy, until he trusted

Billy, his grandmother had been the only one who ever used his middle

name. Shortly after his fourth birthday, his father abandoned the

family, and his mother discovered that a four-year-old interfered with

the hectic social life of a divorcee. Except for a few scattered and

agonizing months with his mother-who managed to provide occasional

bursts of affection only when her conscience began to bother her-he had

spent his childhood with his grandmother. She not only wanted him, she

cherished him. She treated him as if he were the focus not just of her

own life but of the very rotation of the earth.

"Franklin is such an ordinary name," his grandmother used to say. "But

Dwight ... well, now, that's special. It was your grandfather's name,

and he was a wonderful man, not at all like other people, one of a kind.

You're going to grow up to be just like him, set apart, set above, more

important than others. Let everyone call you Frank. To me you'll

always be Dwight."

His grandmother had died ten years ago. For nine and a half years no

one had called him Dwight; then, six months ago, he'd met Billy.

Billy understood what it was like to be one of the new breed, to have

been born superior to most men. Billy was superior too, and had a right

to call him Dwight. He liked hearing the name again after all this

time. It was a key to his psyche, a pleasure button that lifted his

spirits each time it was pushed, a reminder that he was destined for a

dizzyingly high station in life.

"I tried calling you several times last night," Billy said.

"I unplugged the phone so I could drink some Scotch and sleep in peace."

"Have you seen the papers this morning?"

"I just got UP."

"You haven't heard anything about Harris?"

"Who?"

"Graham Harris. The psychic."

"Oh. No. Nothing. What's to hear?"

"Get the papers, Dwight. And then we'd better have lunch. You are off

work today, aren't you?"

"I'm always off Thursdays and Fridays. But what's wrong?"

"The Daily News will tell you what's wrong. Be sure to get a copy.

We'll have lunch at The Leopard at eleven-thirty.

" Frowning, Bollinger said, "Look-"

"Eleven-thirty, Dwight."

Billy hung up.

The day was dreary and cold. Thick dark clouds scudded southward; they

were so low they seemed to skim the tops of the highest buildings.

Three blocks from the restaurant, Bollinger left his taxi and bought the

Daily News at a kiosk. In his bulky coat and sweaters and gloves and

scarves and wool toboggan cap, the vendor looked like a mummy.

The lower half of the front page held a publicity photograph of Edna

Mowry provided by the Rhinestone Palace. She was smiling, quite lovely.

The upper half of the page featured bold black headlines: BUTCHER KILLS

NUMBER 10 PSYCHIC PREDICTS MURDER At the corner he turned to the second

page and tried to read the story while waiting for the traffic light to

change. The wind stung his eyes and made them water.

It rattled the paper in his hands and made it impossible for him to

read.

He crossed the street and stepped into the sheltered entrance way of an

office building. His teeth still chattering from the cold, but free of

the wind, he read about Graham Harris and Manhattan at Midnight.

His name is Dwight, Harris had said.

The police already know him, Harris had said.

Christ! How could the son of a bitch possibly know so much?

Psychic powers? That was a lot of bullshit. There weren't such

things.

Were there?

Worried now, Bollinger walked to the corner, threw the newspaper into a

litter basket, hunched his shoulders against the wind, and hurried

toward the restaurant.

The Leopard, on Fiftieth Street near Second Avenue, was a charming

restaurant with only a handful of tables and excellent food. The dining

area was no larger than an average living room. A hideous display of

artificial flowers filled the center of the room, but that was the only

really outrageous element in a generally bland decor.

Billy was sitting at a choice table by the window. In an hour The

Leopard would be full of diners and noisy conversation. This early,

fifteen minutes or more before the executive lunch crowd could slip away

from conference rooms and desks, Billy was the only customer.

Bollinger sat opposite him. They shook hands and ordered drinks.

"Nasty weather," Billy said. His Southern accent was heavy.

"Yes." They stared at each other over the bud vase and single rose that

stood in the center of the table.

"Nasty news," Billy said at last.

"Yes.

"What do you think?"

"This Harris is incredible," Bollinger said.

"Dwight.... Nobody but me knows you by that name. He hasn't given them

much of a clue."

"My middle name's on all my records-on my employee file at the

department." Unfolding a linen napkin, Billy said, "They've got no

reason to believe the killer's a policeman."

"Harris told them they already knew the Butcher."

"They'll just suppose that he's someone they've already questioned."

Frowning, Bollinger said, "If he gives them one more bit of detail, one

more clue, I'm blown."

"I thought you didn't believe in psychics."

"I was wrong. You were right."

"Apology accepted," Billy said, smiling thinly.

"This Harris-can we reason with him?"

"No."

"He wouldn't understand ?"

"He's not one of us."

The waiter came with their drinks.

When they were alone again, Bollinger said, "I've never seen this

Harris. What does he look like?"

"I'll describe him to you later. Right now ... do you mind telling me

what you're going to do?"

Bollinger didn't have to think about that. Without hesitation he said,

"Kill him."

"Ah," Billy said softly.

"Objections?"

"Absolutely none."

"Good." Bollinger swallowed half of his drink. "Because I'd do it even

if you had objections."

The captain came to the table and asked if they would like to hear the

menu.

"Give us five minutes," Billy said. When the captain had gone, he said,

"When you've killed Harris, will you leave him like the Butcher would?"

"Why not?"

"Well the others have been women."

"This will confuse and upset them even more," Bollinger said.

"When will you do it?"

"Tonight." Billy said, "I don't think he lives alone."

"With his mother?" Bollinger asked sourly.

"No. I believe he lives with a woman."

"Young?"

"I would imagine so."

"Pretty?"

"He does seem to be a man of good taste."

"Well, that's just fine," Bollinger said.

"I thought you'd see it that way."

"A double-header," Bollinger said. "That just adds to the fun."

He grinned.

"Detective Preduski is on the line, Mr. Harris."

"I'll talk to him. Put him through. Hello?"

"Sorry to bother you, Graham. Can we be less formal than we've been?

May I call you Graham?"

"Sure."

"Please call me Ira.", "I'd be honored."

"You're very kind. I hope I didn't interrupt something."

"No.

"I know you're a busy man. Would you rather I called you back later? Or

would you like to call me back at your convenience?"

"You didn't interrupt. What is it you want?"

"You know that writing we found on the walls of the Mowry apartment?"

"Too clearly."

"Well, I've been trying to track down the source for the past few hours,

and-"

"You're still on duty at two in the afternoon?"

"No, no. I'm at home."

"Don't you ever sleep?"

"I wish I could. I haven't been able to sleep more than four or five

hours a day for the past twenty years. I'm probably ruining my health.

I know I am. But I've got this twisted brain. My head's full of

garbage, thousands of useless facts, and I can't stop thinking about

them. I keep picking at the damnedest things. Like the writing on the

walls at the Mowry apartment. I couldn't sleep for thinking about ' it.

"

"And you've come up with something?"

"Well, I told you last night the poetry rang a bell. 'Rintah roars and

shakes his fires in the burden'd air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep."

As soon as I saw it I said to myself, 'Ira, that's from something

William Blake wrote." You see, when I was in college for that one year,

my major was literature. I had to write a paper on Blake.

Twenty-five years ago. You see what I mean about garbage in my head? I

remember the most useless things. Anyway this morning I bought the

Erdman edition of Blake's poetry and prose. Sure enough, I found those

lines in 'The Argument," part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Do

you know Blake?"

"I'm afraid not."

"He was a mystic and a psychic."

"Clairvoyant?"

"No. But with a psychic bent. He thought men had the power to be gods.

For an important part of his career he was a poet of chaos and

cataclysm-and yet he was fundamentally a table-pounding optimist. Now,

do you remember the line the Butcher printed on the bedroom door?

"Yes. 'A rope over an abyss."

"Do you have any idea what that's from?"

"None."

"Neither did I. My head is full of garbage. There's no room for

anything important. And I'm not a well educated man. Not well educated

at all. So I called a friend of mine, a professor in the Department of

English at Columbia. He didn't recognize the line either but he passed

it around to a few of his colleagues. One of them thought he knew it.

He got a concordance of the major philosophers and located the full

quotation. 'Man is rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a

rope over an abyss."

"Who said it?"

"Hitler's favorite philosopher."

"Nietzsche."

"You know his work?"

In passing."

"He believed men could be gods-or at least that certain men could be

gods if their society allowed them to grow and exercise their powers. He

believed mankind was evolving toward godhood- You see, there's a

superficial resemblance between Blake and Nietzsche. That's why the

Butcher might quote both of them. But there's a problem, Graham."

"What's that?"

"Blake was an optimist all the way. Nietzsche was a raving pessimist.

Blake thought mankind had a bright future.

Nietzsche thought mankind should have a bright future, but he believed

that it would destroy itself before the Supermen ever evolved from it.

Blake apparently liked women. Nietzsche despised them. In fact, he

thought women constituted one of the greatest obstacles standing between

man and his climb to godhood. You see what I'm getting at?"

"You're saying that if the Butcher subscribes to both Blake and

Nietzsche's philosophies, then he's a schizophrenic."

"Yet you say he's not even crazy."

"Wait a minute."

"Last night-"

"All I said was that if he's a maniac, he's a new kind of maniac. I

said he wasn't crazy in any traditional sense."

"Which rules out schizophrenia?"

"I guess it does, Ira."

"But I think it's a good bet . . . maybe I'm wrong ...

God knows ... but maybe he looks at himself as one of Nietzsche's

Supermen. A psychiatrist would call that delusions of grandeur. And

delusions of grandeur characterize schizophrenia and paranoia. Do you

still think the Butcher could pass any psychiatric test we could give

him?"

"Yes."

"You sense this psychically?"

"That's right."

"Have you ever sensed something and been wrong?"

"Not seriously wrong. No worse than thinking Edna Mowry's name was Edna

Dancer."

"Of course. I know your reputation. I know you're good. I didn't mean

to imply anything. You understand? But still-now where do I stand?"

"I don't know."

"Graham ... if you were to sit down with a book of Blake's poems, if you

were to spend an hour or so reading them, would that maybe put you in

tune with the Butcher? Would it spark something-if not a vision, at

least a hunch?"

"It might."

"Would you do me a favor then?"

"Name it."

"If I send a messenger right over with an edition of Blake's work, will

you sit down with it for an hour and see what happens?"

"You can send it over today if you want, but I won't get to it until

tomorrow."

"Maybe just half an hour."

"Not even that. I've got to finish working on one of my magazines and

get it off to the printer tomorrow morning. I'm already three days late

with the issue. I'll be working most of tonight. But tomorrow

afternoon or evening, I'll make time for Blake."

"Thank you. I appreciate it. I really do. I'm counting on you.

You're my only hope. This Butcher is too much for me, too sharp for me.

I'm getting nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. If we don't get a solid lead

soon, I don't know what's going to happen."

Paul Stevenson was wearing a hand-sewn blue shirt, a

blue-and-black-striped silk tie, an expensive black suit, black socks,

and light brown shoes with white stitching. When he came into Anthony

Prine's office at two o'clock Friday afternoon, unaware that Prine

winced when he saw the shoes, he was upset. Because he was incapable of

shouting and screaming at Prine, he pouted. "Tony, why are you keeping

secrets from me?"

Prine was stretched out on the couch, his head propped on a holster

pillow. He was reading The New York Times. "Secrets?"

"I just found out that at your direction the company has hired a private

detective agency to snoop on Graham Harris' "

"They're not snooping. All I've asked them to do is establish Harris's.

whereabouts at certain hours on certain days.

"You asked the detectives not to approach Harris or his girlfriend

directly. That's snooping. And you asked them for a forty-eight-hour

rush job, which triples the cost. If you want to know where he was, why

don't you ask him yourself?"

"I think he'd lie to me."

"Why should he lie? What certain hours? What certain dates?"

Prine put down the paper, sat up, stood up, stretched. "I want to know

where he was when each of those ten women was killed."

Perplexed, blinking somewhat stupidly, Stevenson said, "Why?"

"If on all ten occasions he was alone-working alone, seeing a movie

alone, walking alone-then maybe he could have killed them."

"Harris? You think Harris is the Butcher?"

"Maybe."

"You hire detectives on a maybe?"

"I told you, I've distrusted that man from the start. And if I'm right

about this, what a scoop we'll have!"

"But Harris isn't a killer. He catches killers."

Prine went to the bar. "If a doctor treats fifty patients for influenza

one week and fifty more the next, would it surprise you if he -got

influenza himself during the third week? "

"I'm not sure I get your point."

Prine filled his glass with bourbon. "For years Harris has been tuning

in to murder with the deepest levels of his mind, exposing himself to

trauma as few of us ever do. He has been literally delving into the

minds Of wife killers, child killers, mass murderers.... He's probably

seen more blood and violence than most career cops. Isn't it

conceivable that a man, unstable to begin with, could crack from all the

violent input? Isn't it conceivable that he could become the kind of

maniac he's worked so hard to catch?"

"Unstable?" Stevenson frowned. "Graham Harris is as stable as you or

me."

"How well do you know him?"

"I saw him on the show."

"There's a bit more you should know." Prine caught sight of himself in

the mirror behind the bar cabinet; he smoothed his lustrous white hair

with one hand.

"For example?"

"I'll indulge myself in amateur psychoanalysis-amateur but probably

accurate. First of all, Graham Harris was born into borderline poverty

and-"

"Hold on. His old man was Evan Harris, the publisher.

"

"His stepfather. His real father died when Graham was a year old. His

mother was a cocktail waitress. She had trouble keeping a roof over

their heads because she had to pay off her husband's medical bills. For

years they lived day to day, on the edge of disaster. That would leave

marks on a child."

"How did she meet Evan Harris?" Stevenson asked.

"I don't know. But after they were married, Graham took his

stepfather's name. He spent the latter part of his childhood in a

mansion. After he got his university degree, he had enough time and

money to become one of the world's leading climbers. Old man Harris

encouraged him. In some circles, Graham was famous, a star.

Do you realize how many beautiful women are drawn to the sport of

climbing?"

Stevenson shrugged.

"Not as participants," Prine said. "As companions to the participants,

as bedmates. More women than you'd think. I guess it's the nearness of

death that attracts them. For more than a decade, Graham was adored,

made over. Then he took a bad fall. When he recovered, he was

terrified of climbing." Prine was listening to his own voice,

fascinated by the theory he had developed. "Do you understand, Paul? He

was born a nobody, lived the first six years of his life as a

nobody-then overnight he became a somebody when his mother married Evan

Harris. Now is it any wonder that he's afraid of being a nobody again?

" Stevenson went to the bar and poured himself some bourbon. "It's not

likely he'll be a nobody again. He did inherit his stepfather's money."

"Money isn't the same as fame. Once he'd been a celebrity, even within

the tight circle of climbing enthusiasts, maybe he developed a habit for

it. Maybe he became a fame junkie. It can happen to the best. I've

seen it."

"So have I."

"if that's what he is ... well, maybe he's decided that being infamous

is as good as being famous. As the Butcher, he's grabbing headlines;

he's infamous, even if only under a nora de guerre- "

"But he was with you in the studio last night when the Mowry girl was

murdered."

"Maybe not."

"What? He predicted her death."

"Did he? Or did he simply tell us who he had selected for his next

victim?"

Stevenson stared at him as if he were mad. Laughing, Prine said, "Of

course Harris was in the studio with me-but perhaps not when the murder

took place. I used a source in the police department and got a copy of

the coroner's report. According to the pathologist, Edna Mowry was

murdered sometime between eleven-thirty Thursday night and one-thirty

Friday morning. Now, Graham Harris left the studio at twelve-thirty

Friday morning. He had an hour to get to Edna Mowry."

Stevenson swallowed some bourbon. "Jesus, Tony, if you're right, if you

break a story like this, ABC will give you a late-night talk show and

let you do it your way, live!"

"They might."

Stevenson finished his bourbon. "But you don't have any proof.

It's just a theory. And a pretty far-out theory at that. You can't

convict a man because he was born to poor parents. Hell, your childhood

was worse than his, and you're not a killer."

"At the moment I've got no proof," Prine said. But if it can't be

found, it can be manufactured, he thought.

Sarah Piper spent the early part of Friday afternoon packing for a

five-day trip to Las Vegas. Ernie Nolan, a men's clothing manufacturer

who had been on her special list of customers for three years, went to

Vegas every six months and took her with him. He paid her fifteen

hundred dollars for her time in bed and gave her five hundred as a

gambling stake. Even if Ernie had been a beast, which he was not, it

would have been a good vacation for her.

Beginning today, she was on a week's leave from the Rhinestone Palace;

and she was glad that she hadn't tried to squeeze in one more night's

work before catching the flight to Vegas tomorrow morning.

She'd had only two hours' sleep after returning from Edna's place, and

those two hours had been plagued by nightmares. She would need to rest

well tonight if she was going to be at the top of her form for Ernie.

As she packed, she wondered if there was something missing from her.

Heart? Normal emotions? She had cried last night, had been deeply

affected by Edna's death. But already her spirits were high again. She

was excited, pleased to be getting away from New York.

Introspection didn't give rise to any guilt. She had seen too much of

the world-too much violence, desperation, selfishness and grubbiness-to

chastise herself for being unable to sustain her grief. That was the

way people were built: forgetfulness was the hub of the wheel, the core

of the mind, the thing that kept you sane. Maybe that was not pleasant

to contemplate, but it was true.

At three o'clock, as she was locking the third suitcase, a man called.

He wanted to set up a date for that evening. She didn't know him, but

he claimed to have gotten her name from one of her regular clients.

Although he sounded quite nice-a genuine Southern gentleman with a

mellow accent-she had to turn him down.

"If you've got something else going," he said, "I can make it worth your

while to drop him for tonight."

"There's no one else. But I'm going to Vegas in the morning, and I need

my rest."

"What's your usual rate?" he asked.

"Two hundred. But-"

"I'll give you three hundred."

She hesitated.

"Four hundred.

"I'll give you the names of a couple of girls-""

"i want to spend the evening with you. I hear you're the loveliest

woman in Manhattan."

She laughed. "You'd be in for a big disappointment.

"I've made up my mind. When I've made up my mind, nothing on God's

earth can change it. Five hundred dollars."

"That's too much. If you-"

"Young lady, five hundred is peanuts.

I've made millions in the oil business. Five hundred-and I won't tie

you up all evening. I'll be there around six o'clock. We'll relax

together-then go out to dinner, You'll be home by ten, plenty of time to

rest up for Vegas."

"You don't give up easily, do you?"

"That's my trademark. I'm blessed with perseverance. Down home they

call it pure mule-headed stubbornness." Smiling, she said, "All right.

You win. Five hundred. But you promise we'll be back by ten?"

"Word of honor," he said.

"You haven't told me your name."

"Plover," he said. "Billy James Plover."

"Do I call you Billy James?"

"Just Billy."

"Who recommended me?"

"I'd rather not use his name on the phone."

"Okay. Six o'clock it is."

"Don't you forget."

"I'm looking forward to it," she said.

"So am I," Billy said.

Although Connie Davis had slept late and hadn't opened the antique shop

until after lunch, and although she'd had only one customer, it was a

good day for business. She had sold six perfectly matched

seventeenth-century Spanish chairs. Each piece was of dark oak with

bowed legs and claw feet. The arms ended in snarling demon heads,

elaborately carved gargoyles the size of oranges. The woman who

purchased the chairs had a fourteen-room apartment overlooking Fifth

Avenue and Central Park; she wanted them for the room in which she

sometimes held seances.

Later, when she was alone in the shop, Connie went to her alcove office

at the rear of the main room. She opened a can of fresh coffee,

prepared the percolator.

At the front of the room the big windows rattled noisily. Connie looked

up from the percolator to see who had come in. No one was there.

The windows were trembling from the sudden violence of the winter

weather; the wind had picked up and was gusting fiercely.

She sat down at a neatly kept Sheraton desk from the late 1780s and

dialed the number of Graham's private office phone, bypassing his

secretary. When he answered she said, "Hello, Nick."

"Hi, Nora."

"If you've made any headway with your work, let me take you to dinner

tonight. I just sold the Spanish chairs, and I feel a need to

celebrate."

"Can't do, I'm afraid. I'm going to have to work most of the night to

finish here."

"Can't the staff work a bit of overtime?" she asked. "They've done

their job. But you know how I am. I have to double-check and

triple-check everything."

"I'll come help."

"There's nothing you can help with."

"Then I'll sit in the corner and read."

"Really, Connie, you'd be bored. You go home and relax. I'll show up

sometime around one or two in the morning."

"Nothing doing. I won't get in your way, and I'll be perfectly

comfortable reading in an office chair. Nora needs her Nick tonight.

I'll bring supper."

"Well ... okay. Who am I kidding? I knew you'd come."

"A large pizza and a bottle of wine. How's that?"

"Sounds good."

"When?" she asked.

"I've been dozing over my typewriter. If I'm to get this work done

tonight, I'd better take a nap. As soon as the staff clears out for the

day, I'll lie down. Why don't you bring the pizza at seven-thirty?"

"Count on it."

"We'll have company at eight-thirty."

"Who?"

"A police detective. He wants to discuss some new evidence in the

Butcher case."

"Preduski?" she asked.

"No. One of Preduski's lieutenants. A guy named Bollinger. He called

a few minutes ago and wanted to come to the house this evening.

I told him that you and I would be working here until late."

"Well, at least he's coming after we eat," she said. "Talking about the

Butcher before dinner would spoil my appetite."

"See you at seven-thirty."

"Sleep tight, Nicky."

When the percolator shut off, she poured steaming coffee into a mug,

added cream, went to the front of the store and sat in a chair near one

of the mullioned show windows. She could look-over and between the

antiques for a many-paned view of a windswept section of Tenth Street.

A few people hurried past, dressed in heavy coats, their hands in their

pockets, heads tucked down.

Scattered snowflakes followed the air currents down between the

buildings and ricocheted along the pavement.

She sipped her coffee and almost purred as the warmth spread through

her.

She thought about Graham and felt warmer still. Nothing could chill her

when Graham was on her mind. Not wind.

Not snow. Not the Butcher. She felt safe with Graham-even with just

the thought of him. Safe and protected. She knew that, in spite of the

fear that had grown in him since his fall, he would lay down his life

for her if that was ever required of him. Just as she would give her

life to save his. It wasn't likely that either of them would be

presented with such a dramatic choice; but she was convinced that Graham

would find his courage gradually in the weeks and months ahead, would

find it without the help of a crisis.

Suddenly the wind exploded against the window, howled and moaned and

pasted snow, like specks of froth and spittle, to the cold glass.

The room was long and narrow with a brown tile floor, beige walls, a

high ceiling and fluorescent lights. Two metal desks stood just inside

the door; they held typewriters, letter trays, vases full of artificial

flowers, and the detritus of a day's work. The two well-dressed

matronly women behind the desks were cheerful in spite of the drab

institutional atmosphere. There were five cafeteria tables lined up,

short end to short end, so that whoever sat at them would always be

sideways to the desks. The ten metal chairs were all on the same side

of the table row. Except for the relationship of the tables to the

desks, it might have been a schoolroom, a study hall monitored by two

teachers.

Frank Bollinger identified himself as Ben Frank and said he was an

employee of a major New York City firm of architects. He asked for the

complete file on the Bowerton Building, took off his coat and sat at the

first table.

The two women, as efficient as they appeared to be, quickly brought him

the Bowerton material from an adjacent storage ' room: original

blueprints, amendments . .

to the blueprints, cost estimates, applications for dozens of different

building permits, final cost sheets, remodeling plans, photographs,

letters ... Every form-and everything else required by law-that was

related to the Bowerton highrise and that had passed officially through

a city bureau or department was in that file. It was a formidable mound

of paper, even though each piece was carefully labeled and both

categorically and sequentially arranged.

The forty-two-story Bowerton Building, facing a busy block of Lexington

Avenue, had been completed in 1929 and stood essentially unchanged. It

was one of Manhattan's art deco masterpieces, even more effectively

designed than the justly acclaimed art deco Chanin Building which was

only a few blocks away. More than a year ago a group of concerned

citizens had launched a campaign to have the building declared a

landmark in order to keep its most spectacular art deco features from

being wiped away during sporadic flurries of "modernization." But the

most important fact, so far as Bollinger was concerned, was that Graham

Harris had his offices on the fortieth floor of the Bowerton Building.

For an hour and ten minutes, Bollinger studied the paper image of the

structure. Main entrances. Service entrances. One-way emergency

exits. The placement and operation of the bank of sixteen elevators.

The placement of the two stairwells. A minimal electronic security

system, primarily a closed-circuit television guard station, had been

installed in 1969; and he went over and over the paper on that until he

was certain that he had overlooked no detail of it.

At four forty-five he stood up, yawned and stretched. Smiling, humming

softly, he put on his overcoat.

Two blocks from City Hall he stepped into a telephone booth and called

Billy. "I've checked it out."

" Bowerton?

"Yeah.

"What do you think?" Billy asked anxiously.

"It can be done."

"My God. You're sure?"

"As sure as I can be until I start it."

"Maybe I should be more help. I could-"

"No," Bollinger said.

"if anything goes wrong, I can flash my badge and say I showed up to

investigate a complaint. Then I can slip quietly away. But if we were

both there, how could we explain our way out of it?"

"I suppose you're right."

"We'll stick to the original plan."

"All right."

"You be in that alleyway at ten o'clock."

Billy said, "What if you get there and discover it won't work? I don't

want to be waiting-"

"If I have to give it up," Bollinger said, "I'll call you well before

ten. But if you don't get the call, be in that alley.

"Of course. What else? But I won't wait past ten thirty. I can't

wait longer than that.

"That'll be long enough."

Billy sighed happily. "Are we going to stand this city on its ear?"

"Nobody will sleep tomorrow night."

"Have you decided what lines you'll write on the wall?

Bollinger waited until a city bus rumbled past the booth. His choice of

quotations was clever; and he wanted Billy to appreciate them. "Yeah.

I've got a long one from Nietzsche. 'I want to teach men the sense of

their existence, which is Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud

man."

"Oh, that's excellent," Billy said. "I couldn't have chosen better

myself."

"Thank you."

"And Blake?"

"Just a fragment from the alternate seventh night of The Four Zoas.

'Hearts laid open to the light .

Billy laughed.

"I knew you'd like it."

"I suppose you do intend to lay their hearts open?"

"Naturally," Bollinger said. "Their.hearts and everything else, from

throat to crotch."

Promptly at six o'clock, the doorbell rang.

Sarah Piper answered it. Her professional smile slipped when she saw

who was standing in the hall. "What are you doing here?" she asked,

surprised.

"May I come in?"

"Well .

"You look beautiful tonight. Absolutely stunning." She was wearing a

tight burnt-orange pantsuit, flimsy, with a low neckline that revealed

too much of her creamy breasts. Self-consciously she put one hand over

her cleavage. "I'm sorry, but I can't ask you in. I'm expecting

someone."

"You're expecting me," he said. "Billy James Plover.

"What? That's not your name."

"It surely is. It's the name I was born with. I changed it years ago,

of course."

"Why didn't you give me your real name on the phone? "

"I've got to protect my reputation."

Still confused, she stepped back to let him pass. She closed the door

and locked it. Aware that she was being rude but unable to control

herself, she stared openly at him. She couldn't think what to say.

"You seem shocked, Sarah."

"Yeah," she said. "I guess I am. It's just that you don't seem like

the sort of man who would come to a woman-to someone like me."

He had been smiling from the moment she'd opened the door. Now his face

broke into a broad grin. "What's wrong with someone like you?

You're gorgeous."

This is crazy, she thought.

She said, "Your voice."

"The Southern accent?"

"Yeah.

"That's also part of my youth, just like the name. Would you prefer I

dropped it?"

"Yeah. Your talking like that-it's not right. It's creepy." She

hugged herself.

"Creepy? I thought you'd be amused. And when I'm Billy ... I don't

know ... I kind of have fun with it ...

kind of feel like someone altogether new." He stared hard at her and

said, "Something's wrong. We're off on the wrong foot. Or maybe worse

than that. Is it worse than that? if you don't want to go to bed with

me, say so. I'll understand. Maybe something about me repels you.

I haven't always been successful with women. I've lost out many times.

God knows. So just tell me. I'll leave. No hard feelings."

She put on her professional smile again and shook her head. Her thick

blond hair bounced prettily. "I'm sorry. There's no need for you to

go. I was just surprised, that's all."

"You're sure?"

"Positive.

He looked at the living room beyond the foyer arch, reached down to

finger the antique umbrella stand beside the door. "You have a nice

place."

"Thank you." She opened the foyer closet, plucked a hanger from the

clothes rod. "Let me take your coat."

He took it off, handed it to her.

As she put the coat in the closet, she said, "Your gloves too.

I'll put them in a coat pocket."

"I'll keep my gloves," he said.

When she turned back to him, he was standing between her and the front

door, and he was holding a wicked switch-blade knife in his right hand.

She said, "Put that away."

"What did you say?"

"Put that away!"

He laughed.

"I mean it," she said.

"You're the coolest bitch I've ever met."

"Put that knife in your pocket. Put it away and then get out of here."

Waving the knife at her, he said, "When they realize I'm going to slit

them open, they say some silly things.

But I don't believe any of them ever seriously thought she could talk me

out of it. Until you. So very cool."

She twisted away from him. She ran out of the foyer, into the living

room. Her heart was pounding; she was shaking badly; but she was

determined not to be incapacitated by fear. She kept a gun in the top

drawer of her nightstand. If she could get into the bedroom, close and

lock the door between them, she could hold him off long enough to put

her hands on the pistol.

Within a few steps he caught her by the shoulder.

She tried to jerk free.

He was stronger than he looked. His fingers were like talons. He swung

her around and shoved her backward.

Off balance, she collided with the coffee table, fell over it.

She struck her hip on one of the heavy wooden legs; pain like an

incandescent bulb flashed along her thigh.

He stood over her, still holding the knife, still grinning.

"Bastard," she said.

"There are two ways you can die, Sarah. You can try to run and resist,

forcing me to kill you now-painfully and slowly. Or you can cooperate,

come into the bedroom, let me give you some fun. Then I promise you'll

die quickly and painlessly."

Don't panic, she told herself. You're Sarah Piper, and you came out of

nothing, and you made something of yourself, and you have been knocked

down dozens of times before, knocked down figuratively and literally,

and you've always gotten up, and you'll get up this time, and you'll

survive, you will, dammit, you will.

"Okay," she said. She stood up.

"Good girl." He held the knife out at his side. He unbuttoned the

bodice of her pantsuit and slipped his free hand under the thin

material. "Nice," he said. She closed her eyes as he moved nearer.

"I'll make it fun for you," he said.

She drove her knee into his crotch.

Although the blow didn't land squarely, he staggered backward.

She grabbed a table lamp and threw it. Without waiting to see if it hit

him, she ran into the bedroom and shut the door. Before she could lock

it, he slammed against the far side and pushed the door open two or

three inches.

She tried to force it shut again so that she could throw the lock, but

he was stronger than she. She knew she couldn't hold out against him

for more than a minute or two. Therefore, when he was pressing the

hardest and would expect it the least, she let go of the door altogether

and ran to the nightstand.

Surprised, he stumbled into the room and nearly fell.

She pulled open the nightstand drawer and picked up the gun. He knocked

it out of her hand. It clattered against the wall and dropped to the

floor, out of reach.

Why didn't you scream? she asked herself. Why didn't you yell for

help while you could hold the door shut? It's unlikely anyone would

hear you in soundly built apartments like these, but at least it was

worth a try when you had a chance.

But she knew why she didn't cry out. She was Sarah Piper. She had

never called for help in her life. She had always solved her own

problems, had always fought her own battles. She was tough and proud of

it. She did not scream.

She was terrified, trembling, sick with fear, but she knew that she had

to die the same way she had lived. If she broke now, whimpered and

mewled when there wasn't any chance of salvation, she would be making a

lie of her life. If her life was to have meant anything, anything at

all, she would have to die as she had lived: resolute, proud, tough.

She spat in his face.

"Homicide."

"I want to speak to a detective."

"What's his name?"

"Any detective. I don't care."

"Is this an emergency?"

"Yes."

"Where are you calling from?"

"Never mind. I want a detective."

"I'm required to take your address, telephone number, name-"

"Stuff it! Let me talk to a detective or I'll hang up."

"Detective Martin speaking."

"I just killed a woman."

"Where are you calling from?"

"Her apartment."

"What's the address?"

"She was very beautiful."

"What's the address?"

"A lovely girl."

"What was her name?"

"Sarah."

"Do you know her last name?"

" Piper.

"Will you spell that?"

"P-i-p-e-r."

"Sarah Piper."

"That's right."

"What's your name?"

"The Butcher."

"What's your real name?"

"I'm not going to tell you."

"Yes, you are. That's why you called."

"No. I called to tell you I'm going to kill some more people before the

night's out."

"Who?"

"One of them is the woman I love."

"What's her name?"

" I wish I didn't have to kill her."

"Then don't. You-"

"But I think she suspects."

"Why don't we-"

"Nietzsche was right."

"Who?"

"Nietzsche."

"Who's he?"

"A philosopher."

"Oh.

"He was right about women."

"What did he say about women?"

"They just get in our way. They hold us back from perfection.

All those energies we put into courting them and screwing them-wasted!

All that wasted sex energy could be put to other use, to thought and

study.

If we didn't waste our energies on women, we could evolve into what we

were meant to be."

"And what were we meant to be?"

"Are you trying to trace this call?"

"No, no."

"Yes. Of course you are."

"No, really we aren't."

"I'll be gone from here in a minute. I just wanted to tell you that

tomorrow you'll know who I am, who the Butcher is. But you won't catch

me. I'm the lightning out of the dark cloud man."

"Let's try to-"

"Good-bye, Detective Martin."

At seven o'clock Friday evening, a fine dry snow began to fall in

Manhattan, not merely flurries but a full-scale storm.

The snow siftedout of the black sky and made hale, shifting patterns on

the dark streets.

In his living room, Frank Bollinger watched the millions of tiny flakes

streaming past the window. The snow pleased him no end. With the

weekend ahead, and now especially with the change of weather, it was

doubtful that anyone other thin Harris and his woman would be working

late in the Bowerton Building. He felt that his chances of getting to

them and pulling off the plan without a hitch had improved considerably.

The snow was an accomplice.

At seven-twenty, he took his overcoat from the hall closet, slipped into

it and buttoned up.

The pistol was already in the right coat pocket. He wasn't using his

police revolver, because bullets from that could be traced too easily.

This was a Walther PPK, a compact .38 that had been banned from

importation into the United States since 1969. (A slightly larger

pistol, the Walther PPK/S, was now manufactured for marketing in the

United States; it was less easily concealed than the original model.)

There was a silencer on the piece, not homemade junk but a

precisionmachined silencer made by Walther for use by various elite

European police agencies. Even with the silencer screwed in place, the

gun fit easily out of sight in the deep overcoat pocket.

Bollinger had taken the weapon off a dead man, a suspect in a narcotics

and prostitution investigation. The moment he saw it he knew that he

must have it; and he failed to report finding it as he should have done.

That was nearly a year ago; he'd had no occasion to use it until

tonight.

In his left coat pocket, Bollinger was carrying a box of fifty bullets.

He didn't think he'd need more than were already in the pistol's

magazine, but he intended to be prepared for any eventuality.

He left the apartment and took the stairs two at a time, eager for the

hunt to begin.

Outside, the grainy, wind-driven snow was like bits of ground glass. The

night howled spectrally between the buildings and rattled the branches

of the trees.

Graham Harris's office, the largest of the five rooms in the Harris

Publications suite on the fortieth floor of the Bowerton Building,

didn't look like a place where business was transacted. It was paneled

in dark woodreal and solid wood, not veneer-and had a textured beige

acoustical ceiling. The forest-green ceiling-to T

floor drapes matched the plush carpet. The desk had once been a

Steinway piano; the guts had been ripped out, the lid lowered and cut to

fit the frame. Behind the desk rose bookshelves filled with volumes

about skiing and climbing. The light came from four floor lamps with

old-fashioned ceramic sconces and glass chimneys that hid the electric

bulbs. There were also two brass reading lamps on the desk. A small

conference table and four armchairs occupied the space in front of the

windows. A richly carved seventeenth century British coatrack stood by

the door to the corridor, and an antique bar of cut glass, beveled

mirrors and inlaid woods stood by the door to the reception lounge. On

the walls were photographs of climbing teams in action, and there was

one oil painting, a mountain snow scape. The room might have been a

study in the home of a retired professor, where books were read and

pipes were smoked and where a spaniel lay curled at the feet of its

master.

Connie opened the foil-lined box on the conference table. Steam rose

from the pizza; a spicy aroma filled the office.

The wine was chilled. In the pizzeria, she had made them keep the

bottle in their refrigerator until the pie was ready to go.

Famished, they ate and drank in silence for a few minutes.

Finally she said, "Did you take a nap?"

"Did I ever."

"How long?"

"Two hours."

"Sleep well?"

"Like the dead."

"You don't look it."

"Dead?"

"You don't look like you'd slept."

"Maybe I dreamed it."

"You've got dark rings under your eyes."

"My Rudolph Valentino look."

"You should go home to bed."

"And have the printer down my throat tomorrow?"

"They're quarterly magazines. A few days one way or the other won't

matter."

"You're talking to a perfectionist."

"Don't I know it."

"A perfectionist who loves you."

She blew him a kiss.

Frank Bollinger parked his car on a side street and walked the last

three blocks to the Bowerton Building.

A skin of snow, no more than a quarter inch but growing deeper, sheathed

the sidewalks and street. Except for a few taxicabs that spun past too

fast for road conditions, there was not much traffic on Lexington

Avenue.

The main entrance to the Bowerton Building was set back twenty feet from

the sidewalk. There were four revolving glass doors, three of them

locked at this hour. Beyond the doors the large lobby rich with marble

and brasswork and copper trim was overflowing with warm amber light.

Bollinger patted the pistol in his pocket and went inside.

Overhead, a closed-circuit television camera was suspended from a brace.

It was focused on the only unlocked door.

Bollinger stamped his feet to knock the snow from his shoes and to give

the camera time to study him. The man in the control room wouldn't find

him suspicious if he faced the 'camera without concern.

A uniformed security guard was sitting on a stool behind a lectern near

the first bank of elevators.

Bollinger walked over to him, stepped out of the camera's range.

"Evening," the guard said.

As he walked, he took his wallet from an inside pocket and flashed the

gold badge. "Police." His voice echoed eerily off the marble walls and

the high ceiling. "Something wrong?" the guard asked.

'Anybody working late tonight?"

"Just four."

"All in the same office?"

"No. What's up?"

Bollinger pointed to the open registry on the lectern.

"I'd like all four names."

"Let's see here ... Harris, Davis, Ott and MacDonald."

"Where would I find Ott?"

"Sixteenth floor."

"What's the name of the office?"

"Cragmont Imports."

The guard's face was round and white. He had a weak mouth and a tiny

Oliver Hardy mustache. When he tried for an expression of curiosity,

the mustache nearly disappeared up his nostrils.

"What floor for MacDonald?" Bollinger asked. "Same. Sixteenth."

"He's working with Ott?"

"That's right."

"Just those four?"

"Just those four."

"Maybe someone else is working late, and you don't know it."

"Impossible. After five-thirty, anyone going upstairs has to sign in

with me. At six o'clock we go through every floor to see who's working

late, and then they check out with us when they leave. The building

management has set down strict fire-prevention rules. This is part of

them." He patted the registry. "If there's ever a fire, we'll know

exactly who's in the building and where we can find them."

"What about maintenance crews?"

"What about them?"

"Janitors. Cleaning women. Any working now?"

"Not on Friday night."

"You're sure?"

"Sure I'm sure." He was visibly upset by the interrogation and

beginning to wander if he should cooperate. "They come in all day

tomorrow."

"Building engineer?"

"Schiller. He's night engineer."

"Where is Schiller?"

"Downstairs."

lee "Where downstairs?"

"Checking one of the heat pumps, I think."

"Is he alone?"

"Yeah."

"How many other security guards?"

"Are you going to tell me what's up?"

"For God's sake, this is an emergency!" Bollinger aid. "How many

security guards besides you?"

"Just two. What emergencyz"

"There's been a bomb threat."

The guard's lips trembled. The mustache seemed about to fall off.

"You're kidding."

"I wish I were."

The guard slid off his stool, stepped from behind the lectern.

At the same time Bollinger took the Walther from his pocket.

The guard blanched. "What's that?"

"A gun. Don't go for yours."

"Look, this bomb threat ... I didn't call it in."

Bollinger laughed.

"It's true."

"I'm sure it is."

"Hey ... that gun has a silencer on it."

"Yeah.

"But policemen don't-" Bollinger shot him twice in the chest.

The impact of the bullets threw the guard into the sheet marble.

For an instant he stood very straight, as if he were waiting for someone

to measure his height and mark it on the wall. Then he collapsed.

part FRIDAY 8:00 P.M 8:30 P.M

Bollinger turned immediately from the dead man and looked at the

revolving doors.

Nobody was there, no one on the sidewalk beyond, no one who might have

seen the killing.

Moving quickly but calmly, he tucked the pistol into his pocket and

grabbed the body by the arms. He dragged it into the waiting area

between the first two banks of elevators. Now, anyone coming to the

doors would see only an empty lobby.

The dead man stared at him. The mustache seemed to have been painted on

his lip.

Bollinger turned out the guard's pockets. He found quarters, dimes, a

crumpled five-dollar bill, and a key ring with seven keys.

He returned to the main part of the lobby.

He wanted to go straight to the door, but he knew that was not a good

idea. That would put him in camera range. If the men monitoring the

closed-circuit system saw him locking the door, they would be curious.

They'd come to investigate, and he would lose the advantage of surprise.

Keeping in mind the details of the plans he had studied at City Hall

that afternoon, he walked quietly to the rear of the lobby and stepped

into a short corridor on the left. Four rooms led off the hall.

The second on the right was the guards' room, and the door was open.

Wondering if the squeaking of his wet shoes sounded as loud to the

guards as it did to him, he edged up to the open door.

Inside, two men were talking laconically about their jobs, complaining,

but only halfheartedly.

Bollinger took the pistol from his coat pocket. He walked through the

doorway.

The men were sitting at a small table in front of three television

screens. They weren't watching the monitors. They were playing

two-handed pinochle.

The older of the two was in his fifties. Heavy. Grayhaired. He had a

prizefighter's lumpy face. The name "Neely" was stitched on his left

shirt pocket. He was slow. He looked up at Bollinger, failed to react

as he should have to the gun, and said without fear, "What's this?

The other guard was in his thirties. Trim. Ascetic face. Pale hands.

As he turned to see what had caught Neely's attention, Bollinger saw

"Faulkner" stitched on his shirt.

He shot Faulkner first.

Reaching with both hands for his ruined throat, too late to stop the

life from gushing out of him, Faulkner toppled backward in his chair.

"Hey!" 'Fat Neely was finally on his feet. His holster was snapped

shut. He grappled with it.

Bollinger shot him.m twice.

Neely did an ungraceful pirouette, fell on the table, collapsed it, and

went to the floor in a flutter of pinochle cards.

Bollinger checked their pulses.

They were dead.

When he left the room, he closed the door.

At the front of the big lobby, he locked the last revolving door and put

the keys into his pocket.

He went to the lectern, sat on the stool. He took the box of bullets

from his left coat pocket and replenished the pistol's magazine.

He looked at his watch. 8:10. He was right on schedule.

"That was good pizza," Graham said.

"Good wine, too. Have another glass."

"I've had enough."

"Just a little one."

"No. I've got to work."

"Dammit."

"You knew that when you came."

"I was trying to get you drunk."

"On one bottle of wine?"

"And then seduce you."

"Tomorrow night," he said.

"I'll be blind with desire by then."

"Doesn't matter. Love is a Braille experience."

She winced.

He got up, came around the table, kissed her cheek.

"Did you bring a book to read?"

"A Nero Wolfe mystery."

"Then read."

"Can I look at you from time to time?"

"What's to look at?"

"Why do men buy Playboy magazine?" she asked.

"I won't be working in the nude."

"You don't have to be."

"Pretty dull."

"You're even sexy with your clothes on."

"Okay," he said, smiling. "Look but don't talk."

"Can I drool?"

"Drool if you must."

He was pleased with the flattery, and she was delighted by his reaction.

She felt that she was gradually chipping away at his inferiority

complex, peeling it layer by layer.

The building engineer for the night shift was a stocky, fair-skinned

blond in his late forties. He was wearing gray slacks and a

gray-white-blue checkered shirt. He was smoking a pipe.

When Bollinger came down the steps from the lobby corridor, the gun in

his right hand, the engineer said, "Who the hell are you?" He spoke

with a slight German accent.

"Sie sind Herr Schiller, night wahr?" Bollinger asked. His grandfather

and grandmother had been German-Americans; he had learned the language

when he was young and had never forgotten it.

Surprised to hear German spoken, worried about the gun but confused by

Bollinger's smile, Schiller said, "la, which bin's.

'Es freut which sehr Sie kennenzulernen.

Schiller took the pipe from his mouth. He licked his lips nervously.

"Die Pistole?""

lis THE FAM OF FEM "Fur den Mord, " Bollinger said. He squeezed off two

shots.

Upstairs, on the lobby floor, Bollinger opened the door directly across

the hall from the guards' room. He switched on the lights.

The narrow room was lined with telephone and power company equipment.

The ceiling and walls were unfinished concrete. Two bright red fire

extinguishers were hung where they could be reached quickly.

He went to the far side of the room, to a pair of yardsquare metal

cabinets that were fixed to the wall. The lid of each cabinet bore the

insignia of the telephone company. Although the destruction of the

contents would render useless all other routing boxes, switchboards and

backup systems, neither of the cabinets was locked. Each housed

twenty-six small levers, circuit breakers in a fuse box. They were all

inclined toward the "on" mark. Bollinger switched them off, one by one.

He moved to a box labeled "Fire Emergency," forced it open, and tinkered

with the wires inside.

That done, he went to the guards' room across the hall. He stepped

around the bodies and picked up one of the two telephones that stood in

front of the closedcircuit television screens.

No dial tone.

He jiggled the cut-off spikes.

Still no dial tone.

He hung up, picked up the other phone: another dead line.

Whistling softly, Bollinger entered the first elevator.

There were two keyholes in the control panel. The top one opened the

panel for repairs. The one at the bottom shut down the lift mechanism.

He tried the keys that he had taken from the dead guard. The third one

fit the bottom lock.

He pushed the button for the fifth floor. The number didn't light; the

doors didn't close; the elevator didn't move.

Whistling louder than before, he proceeded to shut down fourteen of the

remaining fifteen elevators. He would use the last one to go to the

sixteenth floor, where Ott and MacDonald were working, and later to the

fortieth floor, where Harris and his woman were waiting.

Although Graham hadn't spoken, Connie knew that something was wrong. He

was breathing heavily. She looked up from her book and saw that he had

stopped working and was staring at empty air, his mouth slightly open,

his eyes sort of glazed. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"You're pale."

"Just a headache."

"You're shaking."

He said nothing.

She got up, put down her book, went to him. She sat on the corner of

his desk. "Graham?"

"It's okay. I'm fine now."

"No, you aren't."

"I'm fine."

"There for a minute you weren't."

"For a minute I wasn't," he agreed.

She took his hand; it was icy. "A vision?"

"Yeah," Graham said.

"Of what?"

"Me. Getting shot."

"That's not the least bit funny."

"I'm not joking."

"You've never had a personal vision before. You've always said the

clairvoyance works only when other people are involved."

"Not this time."

"Maybe you're wrong."

"I doubt it. I felt as if I had been hit between the shoulders with a

sledgehammer. The wind was knocked out of me. I saw myself falling."

His blue eyes grew wide. "There was blood. A great deal of blood."

She felt sick in her soul, in her heart. He had never been wrong, and

now he was predicting he would be shot.

He squeezed her hand tightly, as if he were trying to press strength

from her into him.

"Do you mean shot-and killed?"

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe killed or maybe just wounded.

Shot in the back. That much is clear."

"Who did it-will do it?"

"The Butcher, I think."

"You saw him?"

"No. just a strong impression."

"Where did it happen?"

"Someplace I know well."

"Here?"

"Maybe .

"At home?"

"Maybe."

A fierce gust of wind boomed along the side of the highrise. The office

windows vibrated behind the drapes.

"When will it happen?" she asked.

"Soon."

"Tonight? "I can't be sure."

"Tomorrow?"

"Possibly."

"Sunday?"

"Not as late as that."

"What are we going to do?"

The lift stopped at the sixteenth floor.

Bollinger used the key to shut off the elevator before he stepped out of

it. The cab would remain where it was, doors open, until he needed it

again.

For the most part, the sixteenth floor was shrouded in darkness.

An overhead fluorescent tube brightened the elevator alcove, but the

only light in the corridor came from two dim red emergency exit bulbs,

one at each end of the building.

Bollinger had anticipated the darkness. He took a pencil flashlight-

from an inside coat pocket, flicked it on.

Ten small businesses maintained offices on the sixteenth floor, six to

the right and four to the left of the elevators. He went to the right.

Two suites down the hall he found a door that bore the words CRACMONT

IMPORTS.

He turned off the flashlight and put it away.

He took out the Walther PPK.

Christ, he thought, it's going so smoothly. So easily. As soon as he

finished at Cragmont Imports, he could go after the primary targets.

Harris first. Then the woman. If she was good-looking ... well, he was

so far ahead of schedule now that he had an hour to spare. An hour for

the woman if she rated it. He was ready for a woman, full of energy and

appetite and excitement. A woman, a table filled with good food, and a

lot of fine whiskey. But mostly a woman. In an hour he could use her

up, really use her up.

He tried the door to Cragmont Imports. It wasn't locked.

He walked into the reception lounge. The room was gloomy. The only

light came from an adjacent office where the door was standing halfway

open.

He went to the shaft of light, stood in it, listened to the men talking

in the inner office. At last he pushed open the door and went inside.

They were sitting at a conference table that was piled high with papers

and bound folders. They weren't wearing their suit jackets or their

ties, and their shirt sleeves were rolled up; one was wearing a blue

shirt, the other a white shirt. They saw the pistol at once, but they

needed several seconds to adjust before they could raise their eyes to

look at his face.

"This place smells like perfume," Bollinger said.

They stared at him.

"Is one of you wearing perfume?"

"No," said blue shirt. "Perfume's one of the things we import."

"Is one of you MacDonald?"

They looked at the gun, at each other, then at the gun again.

"MacDonald?" Bollinger asked.

The one in the blue shirt said, "He's MacDonald."

The one in the white shirt said, "He's MacDonald."

"That's a lie," said the one in the blue shirt. "No, he's lying," said

the other.

"I don't know what you want with MacDonald," said the one in the blue

shirt. "Just leave me out of it. Do what you have to do to him and go

away."

"Christ almighty!" said the one in the white shirt. "I'm not

MacDonald! You want him, that son of a bitch there, not me!"

Bollinger laughed. "It doesn't matter. I'm also here to get Mr. Ott."

"Me?" said the one in the blue shirt. "Who in the hell would want me

killed?"

Connie said, "You'll have to call Preduski."

"Why?"

"To get police protection."

"It's no use."

"He believes in your visions."

"I know he does."

"He'll give you protection."

"Of course," Graham said. "But that's not what I meant.

"Explain."

"Connie, I've seen myself shot in the back. It's going to happen.

Things I see-always happen. Nobody can do anything to stop this."

"There's no such thing as predestination. The future can be changed."

"Can it?"

"You know it can."

A haunted look filled his bright blue eyes.

"I doubt that very much."

"You can't be sure."

"But I am sure."

This attitude of his, this willingness to ascribe all of his failings to

predestination, worried and upset her more than anything else about him.

It was an especially pernicious form of cowardice. He was rejecting all

responsibility for his own life.

"Call Preduski," she said.

He lowered his eyes and stared at her hand but didn't seem to see how

tightly he was gripping it.

She said, "If this man comes to the house to kill you, I'll probably be

there too. Do you think he's going to shoot you, then just walk away

and let me live?"

Shocked, as she had known he would be, by the thought of her under the

Butcher's knife, he said, "My God."

"Call Preduski."

"All right." He let go of her hand. He picked up the receiver,

listened for a moment, played with the dial, led the buttons.

"What's wrong?"

Frowning, he said, "No dial tone." He hung up, waited a few seconds,

picked up the receiver again. "Still nothing."

She slid off the desk. "Let's try your secretary's phone."

They went out to the reception room.

I That phone was dead too.

"Funny," he said.

Her heartbeat quickening, she said, "Is he going to come after you

tonight?"

"I told you, I don't know for sure."

"Is he in the building right now?"

"You think he cut the telephone line."

She nodded.

"That's pretty farfetched," he said. "It's just a breakdown in

service."

She went to the door, opened it, stepped into the hall. He came behind

her, favoring his injured leg.

Darkness lay on most of the corridor. Dim red emergency lights shone at

each end of the hall, above the doors to the staircases.

Fifty feet away a pool of wan blue light marked the elevator alcove.

Except for the sound of their breathing, the fortieth floor was silent.

"I'm not a clairvoyant," she said, "but I don't like the way it feels. I

sense it, Graham. Something's wrong."

"In a building like this, the telephone lines are in the walls. Outside

of the building they're underground. All the lines are underground in

this city. How would he get to them?"

"I don't know. But maybe he knows."

"He'd be taking such a risk," Graham said. "He's taken risks before.

Ten times before."

"But not like this. We're not alone. The security guards are in the

building."

"They're forty stories below."

"A long way," he agreed. "Let's get out of here."

"We're probably being silly."

A haunted look filled his bright blue eyes.

"Probably."

"We're probably safe where we are."

"Probably."

"I'll grab our coats."

"Forget the coats." He took hold of her hand. "Come on. Let's get to

those elevators."

Bollinger needed eight shots to finish off Macdonald and Ott.

They kept ducking behind the furniture.

By the time he had killed them, the Walther PPK was no longer firing

silently. No silencer could function at peak efficiency for more than a

dozen shots; the baffles and wadding were compacted by the bullets, and

sound qscaped. The last three shots were like the sharp barks of a

medium-sized guard dog. But that didn't matter. The noise wouldn't

carry to the street or up to the fortieth floor.

I in the outer office of Cragmont Imports, he switched on a light.

He sat on a couch, reloaded the Walther's magazine, unscrewed the

silencer and put it into his pocket. He didn't want to risk fouling the

barrel with loose steel fibers from the silencer; besides, there was no

one left in the building to hear shots when he killed Harris and the

woman. And a shot fired on the fortieth floor would not penetrate walls

and windows and travel all the way down to Lexington Avenue.

He looked at his watch. 8:25.

He turned off the light, left Cragmont Imports, and went down the hall

to the elevator.

elevators served the fortieth floor, but none of them was working.

Connie pushed the call button on the last lift. When nothing happened,

she said, "The telephone, and now this."

In the spare yet harsh fluorescent light, Graham's laugh lines looked

deeper and sharper than usual; his face resembled that of a kabuki actor

painted to represent extreme anxiety. "We're trapped."

"it could be just an ordinary breakdown of some sort," she said.

"Mechanical failure. They might be making repairs right now."

"The telephones?"

"Coincidence. Maybe there's nothing sinister about it.

Suddenly the numerals above the elevator doors in front of them began to

light up, one after the other: 16 ... 17 ... 18 ... 19 ... 20....

"Someone's coming," Graham said.

A chill passed down her spine.

' 25 ... 26 ... 27....

Maybe it's the security guards," she said.

He said nothing.

She wanted to turn and run, but she could not move. The -numbers

mesmerized her.

... 30 ... 31 ... 32....

She thought of women lying in bloody bedclothes, women with their

throats cut and their fingers chopped off and their ears cut off ...

33....

"The stairs!" Graham said, startling her.

"Stairs?"

"The emergency stairs."

... 34....

"What about them?"

"We've got to go down."

"Hide out a few floors below?"

... 35....

"No. All the way down to the lobby."

"That's too far!"

"That's where there's help."

... 36....

"Maybe we don't need help."

"We need it," he said.

... 37....

"But your leg-"

"I'm not a complete cripple," he said sharply.

... 38....

He grabbed her by the shoulder. His fingers hurt her, but she knew he

wasn't aware of how fiercely he was gripping her. "Come on, Connie!"

... 39....

Frustrated with her hesitation, he gave her a shove, propelled her out

of the alcove. She stumbled, and for an instant she thought she would

fall. He kept her upright.

As they hurried down the dark corridor, she heard the elevator doors

open behind them.

When Bollinger came out of the elevator alcove he saw two people running

away from him. They -ere nothing but ghostly shapes, vaguely

silhouetted against the eerie glow of the red emergency light at the end

of the corridor.

Harris and the woman? he wondered. Have they been alerted? Do they

know who I am? How can they know?

"Mr. Harris?" Bollinger called.

They stopped two-thirds of the way down the hall, in front of the open

door to the Harris Publications suite. They turned toward him, but he

could not see their faces even with the red light spilling over their

shoulders.

"Mr. Harris, is that you?"

"Who are you?"

"Police," Bollinger said. He took a step toward them, then another. As

he molved he took the wallet with his badge from his inside coat pocket.

With the elevator light behind him, he knew they could see more than he

could.

"Don't come any closer," Harris said.

Bollinger stopped. "What's the matter?"

"I don't want you to come closer."

"Why?"

"We don't know who you are."

"I'm a detective. Frank Bollinger. We have an appointment for

eight-thirty. Remember?" Another step. Then another.

"How did you get up here?" Harris's voice was shrill.

He's scared to death, Bollinger thought. He smiled and said, "Hey,

what's going on with you? Why are you so uptight? You were expecting

me." Bollinger took slow steps, easy steps, so as not to frighten the

animals.

"How did you get up here?" Harris, asked again. "The elevators aren't

working."

"You're mistaken. I came up on an elevator." He held the badge in

front of him in his left hand, arm extended, hoping the light from

behind would gleam on the gold finish. He had covered perhaps a fifth

of the distance between them.

"The telephones are out," Harris said.

"They are?" Step. Step.

He put his right hand in his coat pocket and gripped the butt of the

pistol.

Connie couldn't take her eyes off the shadowy form moving steadily

toward them. To Graham she said softly, "You remember what you said on

the Prine show?"

"What?" His voice cracked.

Don't let the fear take you, she thought. Don't break down and leave me

to handle this alone.

She said, "In your vision you saw that the police know the killer well."

"What about it?"

"Maybe the Butcher is a cop."

'Christ, that's it!"

He spoke so softly that she could barely hear him.

Bollinger kept coming, a big man, bearish. His face was in shadow.

He had closed the distance between them by at least half.

"Stop right there," Graham said. But there was no force in his voice,

no authority.

Bollinger stopped anyway. "Mr. Harris, you're acting very strange. I'm

a policeman. You know ... you're acting as if you've just done

something that you want to hide from me." He took a step, another, a

third.

"The stairs?" Connie asked.

"No," Graham said. "We don't have enough of a lead. With my game leg,

he'd catch us in a minute."

"Mr. Harris?" Bollinger said. "What are you two saying? Please

don't whisper."

"Where then?" Connie whispered.

"The office."

He nudged her, and they ducked quickly into the Harris Publications

suite, slammed and locked the reception room door.

A second later, Bollinger hit the outside of the door with his shoulder.

it trembled in its frame. He rattled the knob violently.

"He's probably got a gun," Connie said. "He'll get in sooner or later."

Graham nodded. "I know."

part three

FRIDAY 8:30 P.Mo 10:30 PoM.

moas Ira Preduski parked at the end of a string of three squad cars and

two unmarked police sedans that blocked one half of the two-lane street.

Although there was no one in any of the five vehicles, all the engines

were running, headlights blazing; the trio of blue-and-whites were

crowned with revolving red beacons. Preduski got out of his car and

locked it.

A half inch of snow made the street look clean and pretty. As he walked

toward the apartment house, Preduski scuffed his shoes against the

sidewalk, sending up puffs of white flakes in front of him. The wind

whipped the falling snow into his back, and cold flakes found their way

past his collar. He was reminded of that February, in his fourth year,

when his family moved to Albany, New York, where he saw his first winter

storm.

A uniformed patrolman in his late twenties was " standing at the bottom

of the outside steps to the apartment house.

"Tough job you've got tonight," Preduski said. "I don't mind it.

I like snow."

"Yeah? So do I."

"Besides," the patrolman said, "it's better standing out here in the

cold than up there in all that blood."

The room smelled of blood, excrement and dusting powder.

Fingers bent like claws, the dead woman lay on the floor beside the bed.

Her eyes were open.

Two lab technicians were working around the body, studying it carefully

before chalking its position and moving it.

Ralph Martin was the detective handling the on scene investigation. He

was chubby, completely bald, with bushy eyebrows and dark-rimmed

glasses. He avoided looking at the corpse.

"The call from the Butcher came in at ten of seven," Martin said.

"We tried your home number immedi lately, but we weren't able to get

through until almost eight o'clock."

"My phone was off the hook. I just got out of bed at a quarter past

eight. I'm working graveyard." He sighed and turned away from the

corpse. "What did he say-this Butcher?"

Martin took two folded sheets of paper from his pocket, unfolded them.

"I dictated the conversation, as well as I could recall it, and one of

the girls made copies.

my . Preduski read the two pages. "He gave you no clue to who else he's

going to kill tonight?"

"Just what's there."

"This phone call is out of character."

"And it's out of character for him to strike two nights in a row,"

Martin said.

"It's also not like him to kill two women who knew each other and worked

together."

Martin raised his eyebrows. "You think Sarah Piper knew something?"

"You mean, did she know who killed her friend?"

"Yeah. You think he killed Sarah to keep her from talking?"

"No. He probably just saw both of them at the Rhinestone Palace and

couldn't make up his mind which he wanted the most. She didn't know

who-murdered Edna Mowry. I'd bet my life on that. Of course I'm not

the best judge of character you'll ever meet. I'm pretty dense when it

comes to people. God knows. Dense as stone. But this time I think I'm

right. If she had known, she would have told me. She wasn't the kind

of girl who could hide a thing like that. She was open.

Forthright.

Honest in her way. She was damned nice."

Glancing at the dead woman's face, which was surprisingly unmarked and

clear of blood in the midst of so much gore, Martin said. "She was

lovely."

"I didn't mean just nice-looking," Preduski said. "She was a nice

person.

Martin nodded.

"She had a soft Georgia accent that reminded me of home."

"Home?" Martin was confused. "You're from Georgia?"

"Why not?"

"Ira Preduski from Georgia?"

"They do have Jews and Slavs down there."

"Where's your accent?"

"My parents weren't born in the South, so they didn't have an accent to

pass on to me. And we moved North when I was four, before I had time to

pick it up."

For a moment they stared at the late Sarah Piper and at the pair of

technicians who bent over her like Egyptian attendants of death.

Preduski turned away from the corpse, took a handkerchief from his

pocket and blew his nose.

"The coroner's in the kitchen," Martin said. His face was pale and

greasy with sweat. "He said he wanted to see you when you checked in."

"Give me a few minutes," Preduski said. "I want to look around here a

bit and talk with these fellows."

"Mind if I wait in the living room?"

"No. Go ahead."

Martin shuddered. "This is a rotten job."

"Rotten," Preduski agreed.

The gunshot boomed and echoed in the dark corridor.

The lock shattered, and the wood splintered under the impact of the

bullet.

Wrinkling his nose at the odor of burnt powder and scorched metal,

Bollinger pushed open the ruined door.

The reception lounge was dark. When he found the light switch and

flipped it up, he discovered that the room was also deserted.

Harris Publications occupied the smallst of three business suites on the

fortieth floor. In addition to the hall door by which he had entered,

two other doors opened from the reception area, one to the left and one

to the i-ight. Five rooms. Including the lounge. That didn't leave

Harris and the woman with many places to hide.

First he tried the door to the left. It led to a private corridor that

served three large offices: one for an editor and his secretary, one for

an advertising space salesman, and one for the two-man art department.

Neither Harris nor the woman was in any of those rooms.

Bollinger was cool, calm, but at the same time enormously excited.

No sport could be half so dramatic and rewarding as hunting down people.

He actually enjoyed the chase more than he did the kill.

Indeed, he got an even greater kick out of the first few days

immediately after a kill than he did from either the hunt or the murder

itself. Once the act was done, once blood had been spilled, he had to

wonder if he'd made a mistake, if he'd left behind a clue that would

lead the police straight to him. The tension kept him sharp, made the

juices bubble. Finally, when sufficient time had passed for him to be

certain that he had gotten away with murder, a sense of well-beingf

great importance, towering superiority, godhood-filled him like a magic

elixir flowing into a long-empty pitcher.

The other door connected the reception room and Graham Harris's private

office. It was locked.

He stepped back and fired two shots into the lock. The soft metal

twisted and tore; chunks of wood spun into the air.

He still could not open it. They had pushed a heavy piece of furniture

against the far side.

When he leaned on the door, pushed with all of his strength, he could

not budge it; however, he could make the unseen piece of furniture rock

back and forth on its base. He figured it was something high, at least

as wide as the doorway, but not too deep. Perhaps a bookshelf.

Something with a high center of gravity. He began to force the door

rhythmically: push hard, relax, push hard, relax, push hard.... The

barricade tipped faster and farther each time he wobbled it-and suddenly

it fell away from the door with a loud crash and the sound of breaking

glass.

Abruptly the air was laden with whiskey fumes.

He squeezed through the door which remained partly blocked. He stepped

over the antique bar they had used as a barrier and put his foot in a

puddle of expensive Scotch.

The lights were on, but no one was there.

At the far end of the room there was another door. He went to it,

opened it. Beyond lay the gloomy fortieth-floor corridor.

While he had wasted time searching the offices, they had slipped back

into the hall by this circuitous route, gaining a few minutes lead on

him.

Clever.

But not clever enough.

After all, they were nothing but ignorant game, while he was a master

hunter.

He laughed softly.

Bathed in red light, Bollinger went to the nearest end of the hall and

opened the fire door without making a sound. He stepped onto the

landing in the emergency stairwell, closing the door quietly behind him.

A dim white bulb burned above the exit on this side.

He heard their footsteps reverberating from below, amplified by the cold

concrete walls.

He went to the steel railing and peered into the alter nave layers of

light and shadow: landings hung with bulbs, and stairs left dark. Ten

or twelve flights down, five or six floors below, the woman's hand

appeared on the railing, moving along less quickly than it should have.

(If he had been in their place, he would have taken the steps two at a

time, perhaps even faster.) Because the open core was so narrow-as long

as a flight ,of stairs, but only one yard wide-Bollinger wasn't able to

see at an angle into the tiers of steps beneath him. All he could see

was the serpentine railing winding to infinity, and nothing of his prey

except her white hand. A second later Harris's hand emerged from the

velvety shadows, into the light that spilled out from a landing; he

gripped the railing, followed the woman through the hazy light and into

the darkness once again, descending.

For an instant Bollinger considered going down the steps behind them,

shooting them in the back, but he rejected that thought almost as soon

as it occurred to him. They would hear him coming. They would most

likely scuttle out of the stairwell, seeking a place to hide or another

escape route. He wouldn't know for certain at which floor they had left

the stairs, and he couldn't run after them and watch their hands on the

railing at the same time.

He didn't want to lose track of them. Although he wouldn't mind an

interesting and complicated hunt, he didn't want it to drag on all

night. For one thing, Billy would be waiting in the car, outside in the

alley, at ten o'clock. For another, he wanted time with the woman, at

least half an hour if she was at all good-looking.

Them Her pale hand slipped into sight on a light-swathed patch of

railing.

Then Harris's hand.

They were still not moving as fast as they should have.

He tried to count flights of stairs. Twelve to fourteen.... They were

six, maybe seven flogrs below. Where did that put them?

Thirty-third floor?

Bollinger turned away from the railing, opened the door and left the

stairwell. He ran down the fortiethfloor corridor to the elevator cab

he was using. He switched, it on with his key, hesitated, then put his

thumb on the button for the twenty-sixth floor.

To Connie the stairwell seemed endless. As she passed through

alternating levels of purple darkness and wan in light, she felt as if

she were follow' g a long pathway to hell, the Butcher fulfilling the

role of the grinning hellhound that harried her ever downward.

The stale air was tool. Nevertheless, she was perspiring.

She knew they should be going faster, but they were hampered in their

flight by Graham's lame left leg. At one point she was almost overcome

with anger, furious at him for being a hindrance to their escape.

However, her fury vanished in the same instant, leaving her surprised by

it and flushed with guilt. She had thought that no pressure, however

great, could cause her to react to him so negatively.

But filled with-nearly consumed by-the survival instinct, she clearly

was capable of responses and attitudes that she would have criticized in

others. Extreme circumstances could alter anyone's personality. That

insight forced her to understand and appreciate Graham's fear to an

extent she had never done before. After all, he had not wanted to fall

on Everest; he hadn't asked for the injury. And indeed, considering the

dull pain he suffered when he tried to climb or descend more than two

flights of stairs, he was responding to this challenge damned well.

From behind her, Graham said, "You go on ahead."

He had said it several times before. "You move faster."

"I'm staying," she said breathlessly.

The echoes of their low-pitched voices were eerie, soft and sibilant.

She reached the landing at the thirty-first floor, waited for him to

catch up, then went ahead. "I won't leave you alone. Two of us ...

have a better chance against him ... better than one of us would."

"He's got a gun. We've no chance."

She said nothing. She just kept taking the steps one at a time.

"Go on," he said, sucking breath between phrases. "You bring back.....

security guard . . . in time to keep ... him from...

killing me."

"I think the guards are dead."

,what?"

She hadn't wanted to say it, as if saying would make it so. "How else

... would he get past them?"

"Sign the registry."

"And leave his name ... for the cops to find?"

A dozen steps later he said, "Christ!"

"What?"

"You're right."

"No help... to he had," she said. "We've just got ...

to get out of... the building."

Somehow he found new strength in his left leg, When she reached the

thirtieth-floor landing, Connie didn't have to wait for him to catch up.

A minute later, a cannonlike sound boomed up from below, halting them

within the fuzzy circle of light at the twenty-ninth floor.

"What was that?"

Graham said, "A fire door. Someone slammed it ...

down there.

"Him?"

"Sss,h,b.

They stood perfectly still, trying to hear movement above the noise of

their own labored breathing.

Connie felt as if the circle of light were shrinking around her, rapidly

pulling back to a tiny point of brilliance. She was afraid of being

blind and helpless, an easy target in pitch blackness. In her mind the

Butcher had the quality of a mythical being; he could see in darkness.

As they got control of their breathing, the stairwell became silent.

Too silent.

Unnaturally silent.

Finally Graham said, "Who's there?"

She jumped, startled by his voice.

The man below said, "Police, Mr. Harris."

Under her breath Connie said, "Bollinger."

She was at the outer edge of the steps; she looked down the open core. A

man's hand was on the railing, four flights below, in the meager

illumination just two or three steps up from the landing. She could

also see the sleeve of his overcoat.

"Mr. Harris," Bollinger said. His voice was cold, hollow, distorted by

the shaft.

"What do you want?" Graham asked.

"Is she pretty?"

"What?"

"Is she pretty?"

"Who?"

"Your woman."

With that, Bollinger started up. Not hurrying. Leisurely. One step at

a time.

She was more frightened by his slow, casual approach than if he had

rushed them. By not hurrying, he was telling them that they were

trapped, that he had the whole. night to get them if he wished to

stretch it out that long.

If only we had a gun, she thought.

Graham took hold of her hand, and they climbed the steps as fast as he

was able. It wasn't easy for either of them. Her back and legs ached.

With each step, Graham either gritted his teeth or moaned loudly.

When they had gone two floors, four flights, they were forced to stop

and rest. He bent over, massaging his bum leg. She went to the

railing, peered down.

Bollinger was four flights under them. Evidently he had run when he

heard them running; but now he had stopped again. He was leaning over

the railing, framed in i pool of light, the gun extended in his right

hand.

He smiled at her and said, "Hey now, you are pretty.

She screamed, jerked back.

He fired.

The shot passed up the core, ricocheted off the top of the rail, smashed

into the wall over their htads and ricocheted once more into the steps

above them.

She grabbed Graham; he held her.

"I could have killed you," Bollinger called to her. "I had you dead on,

sweetheart. But you and I are going to have a lot of fun later."

Then he started up again. As before. Slowly. Shoes scraping ominously

on the concrete: shuss ... shuss ...

shuss ... shuss.... He began to whistle softly.

"He's not just chasing us," Graham said angrily.

"The son of a bitch is playing with us."

"What are we going to do?"

Shuss ... shuss....

"We can't outrun him."

"But we've got to." Shuss.... shuss....

Harris pulled open the landing door. The thirty-first floor lay beyond.

"Come on."

Not convinced that they gained anything by leaving the stairs, but

having nothing better to suggest, she went out of the white light into

the red.

Shuss ... shuss....

Graham shut the door and stooped beside it. A collapsible doorstop was

fixed to the bottom right-hand corner of the door. He pushed it all the

way down, until the rubber-tipped shank was hard against the floor and

the braces were locked in place. His hands were trembling, so that for

a moment it looked as if he wouldn't be able to handle even a simple

task like this.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

He stood up. "It might not work if the stop didn't have locking hinges.

But it does. See the doorsill? It's an inch higher than the floor on

either side. When he tries to open the door, the stop will catch on the

sill. It'll be almost as good as a bolt latch."

"But he's got a gun."

"Doesn't matter. He can't shoot through a heavy metal fire door."

Although she was terrified, at the same time Connie was relieved that

Graham had taken charge-for however brief a time-and was functioning in

spite of his fear.

The door rattled as Bollinger depressed the bar handle on the far side.

The stop caught on the sill; its hinges didn't fold up; the door refused

to open.

"He'll have to go up or down a floor," Harris said, "and come at us by

the stairs at the other end of the building. Or by the elevator.

Which gives us a few minutes." Cursing, Bollinger shook the door,

putting all his strength into it. It wouldn't budge.

"What good will a few minutes do us?" Connie asked.

"I don't know."

"Graham, are we ever going to get out of here?"

"Probably not."

iss Dr. Andrew Enderby, the medical examiner on the scene, was suave,

even dashing, extremely fit for a man in his fifties. He had thick hair

going white at the temples. Clear brown eyes. A long aristocratic

nose, generally handsome features. His salt-and-pepper mustache was

large but well kept. He was wearing a tailored gray suit with

tastefully matched accessories that made Preduski's sloppiness all the

more apparent.

"Hello, Andy," Preduski said.

"Number eleven," Enderby said. "Unusual. Like numbers five, seven and

eight." When Enderby was excited, which wasn't often, he was impatient

to express himself. He sometimes spoke in staccato bursts.

He pointed at the kitchen table and said, "See it? No butter smears.

No jelly stains. No crumbs. Too damned neat. Another fake."

A tab technician was disconnecting the garbagedisposal unit from the

pipes under the sink.

"Why?" Preduski said. "Why does he fake it when he isn't hungry?"

"I know why. Sure of it."

"So tell me," Preduski said.

"First of all, did you know I'm a psychiatrist?"

"You're a coroner, a pathologist."

"Psychiatrist too."

"I didn't know that."

"Went to medical school. Did my internship. Specialized in

otolaryngology. Couldn't stand it. Hideous way to make a living. My

family had money. Didn't have to work. Went back to medical school.

Became a psychiatrist."

"That must be interesting work."

"Fascinating. But I couldn't stand it. Couldn't stand associating with

the patients."

"Oh?"

All day with a bunch of neurotics. Began to feel that half'l'f of them

should be locked up. Got out of the field fast. Better for me and the

patients."

"I should say so."

"Kicked around a bit. Twenty years ago, I became a police pathologist."

"The dead aren't neurotic."

"Not even a little bit."

"And they don't have ear, nose and throat infections."

"Which they don't pass on to me," Enderby said. "No money in this job,

of course. But I've got all the money I need. And the work is right

for me. I'm perfect for the work, too. My psychiatric training gives

me a iss different perspective. Insights. I have insights that other

pathologists might not have. Like the one I had tonight."

"About why the Butcher sometimes eats a hearty meal and sometimes fakes

a hearty meal?"

"Yes," Enderby said. He took a breath. Then: "It's because there are

two of him."

Preduski scratched his head. "Schizophrenia?"

"No, no. I mean ... there isn't just one man running around killing

women. There are two." He smiled triumphantly.

Preduski stared at him.

Slamming his fist into his open hand, Enderby said, "I'm right! I know

I am. Butcher number one killed the first four victims. Killing them

gave him an appetite. Butcher number two killed the fifth woman.

Cut her up as Butcher number one had done. But he was ever so slightly

more tender-hearted than the first Butcher. Killing spoiled his

appetite. So he faked the meal."

"Why bother to fake it?"

"Simple. He wanted to leave no doubt about who killed her.

Wanted us to think it was the Butcher."

Preduski was suddenly aware of how precisely Enderby's necktie had been

knotted. He touched his own tie self-consciously. "Pardon me.

Excuse me. I don't quite understand. My fault. God knows. But, you

see, we've never told the newspapers about the scene in the kitchens.

We've held that back to check false confessions against real ones. If

this guy, Butcher number two, wanted to imitate the real Butcher, how

would he know about the kitchen?"

"You're missing my point."

"I'm sure I am."

"Butcher number one and Butcher number two know each other.

They're in this together."

Amazed, Preduski said, "They're friends? You mean they-go out and

murder-like other men go out bowling? "

"I wouldn't put it like that."

"They're killing women, trying to make it look like the work of one

man?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Don't know. Maybe they're creating a composite character in the

Butcher. Giving us an image of a killer that isn't really like either

of them. Throw us off the track. Protect themselves."

Preduski started to pace in front of the littered table. "Two

psychopaths meet in a bar-"

"Not necessarily a bar."

"They get chummy and sign a pact to kill all the women in Manhattan."

"Not all," Enderby said. "But enough."

"I'm sorry. Maybe I'm not very bright. I'm not well educated.

Not a doctor like you. But I can't swallow it. I can't see psychopaths

working together so smoothly and effectively."

"Why not? Remember the Tate murders in California? There were

several psychopaths in the Manson family, yet they all worked smoothly

and efficiently together, committing a large number of murders."

"They were caught," Preduski said.

"Not for quite some time."

business offices occupied the thirty-first floor of the Bowerton

Building. Graham and Connie tried a few doors, all of which proved to

be locked. They knew the others would be shut tight as well.

However, in the main hall near the elevator alcove, Connie discovered an

unmarked, unlocked door. She opened it. Graham felt for the light

switch, found it. They went inside.

The room was approximately ten feet deep and six or seven feet wide. On

the left was a metal door that had been painted bright red; and to one

side of the dour, mops and brooms and brushes were racked on the wall.

On the right, the wall was lined with metal storage shelves full of

bathroom and cleaning supplies.

"It's a maintenance center," Graham said.

Connie went to the red door. She took one step out of the room, holding

the door behind her. She was sur iss prised and excited by what she

saw. "Graham! Hey, look at this."

He didn't respond.

She stepped back into the room, turned and said, "Graham, look what-" He

was only a foot away, holding a large pair of scissors up to his face.

He gripped the instrument in his fist, in the manner of a man holding a

dagger. The blades gleamed; and like polished gems, the sharp points

caught the light.

"Graham?" she said.

Lowering the scissors, he said, "I found these on the shelf over there.

I can use them as a weapon."

"Against a gun?"

"Maybe we can set up a trap."

"What kind of trap?"

"Lure him into a situation where I can surprise him, where he won't have

time enough to use the damned gun.

"For instance?"

His hand was shaking. Light danced on the blades. "I don't know," he

said miserably.

"It wouldn't work," she said. "Besides, I've found a way out of the

building."

He looked up. "You have?"

"Come look. You won't need the scissors. Put them down."

"I'll look," he said. "But I'll keep the scissors just in case."

She was afraid that when he saw the escape route she'd found he would

prefer to face the Butcher armed only with the scissors.

He followed her through the red door, onto a railed platform that was

only eighteen inches wide and four feet long. A light glowed overhead;

and other lights lay some distance away in a peculiar, at first

unidentifiable void.

They were suspended on the side of one of the two elevator shafts that

went from the ground floor to the roof. It served four cabs, all of

which were parked at the bottom. Fat cables dangled in front of Connie

and Graham. On this side and on the opposite wall of the cavernous

well, from roof to basement at the oddnumbered floors, other doors

opened onto other tiny platforms. There was one directly across from

Graham and Connie, and the sight of it made them realize the precarious

nature of their perch. On both sides of the shaft, metal rungs were

bolted to the walls: ladders connecting the doors in each tier to other

exits in the same tier.

The system could be used for emergency maintenance work or for moving

people off stalled elevators in case of fire, power failure, or other

calamity. A small white light burned above each door; otherwise, the

shaft would have been in absolute darkness. When Connie looked up, and

especially when she looked down from the thirty-first floor, the sets of

farther lights appeared to be closer together than the sets of nearer

lights. It was a long way to the bottom.

His voice wavered when he said, "This is a way out?"

She hesitated, then said, "We can climb down."

T "No."

"We can't use the stairs. He'll be watching those."

"Not this."

it won't be like mountain climbing."

I His eyes shifted quickly from left to right and back again.

"No."

"We'll have the ladder."

"And we'll climb down thirty-one floors?" he asked.

"Please, Graham. If we start now, we might make it. Even if he finds

that the maintenance room is unlocked, and even if he sees this red

door-well, he might not think we'd have enough nerve to climb down the

shaft. And if he did see us, we could get off the ladder, leave the

shaft at another floor. We'd gain more time.

"I can't." He was gripping the railing with both hands, and with such

force that she would not have been surprised if the metal had bent like

paper in his hands.

Exasperated, she said, "Graham, what else can we do?

He stared into the concrete depths.

When Bollinger found that Harris and the woman had locked the fire door,

he ran down two flights to the thirtieth floor. He intended to use that

corridor to reach the far end of the building where he could take the

second stairwell back up to the thirty-first level and try the other

fire door. However, at the next landing the words "Hollowfield Land

Management" were stenciled in black letters on the gray door: the entire

floor be T RK longed to a single occupant.

That level had no public corridor; the fire door could be opened only

from the inside. The same was true of the twenty-ninth and

twenty-eighth floors, which were the domain of Sweet Sixteen Cosmetics.

He tried both entrances without success.

Worried that he would lose track of his prey, he rushed back to the

twenty-sixth floor. That was where he had originally entered the

stairwell, where he had left the elevator cab.

As he pulled open the fire door and stepped into the hall, he looked at

his watch. 1 S. The time was passing too fast, unnaturally fast, as if

the universe had become unbalanced.

Hurrying to the elevator alcove, he fished in his pocket for the dead

guard's keys. They snagged on the lining. When he jerked them loose,

they spun out of his hand and fell on the carpet with a sleighbell

jingie.

He knelt and felt for them in the darkness. Then he remembered the