inmates’ shit and dirty laundry.
Steel doors crashed shut.
Markham said, “I could see the hand move. It held a knife. I knew what would happen, but I couldn’t change that. It wasn’t my hand. It was there in the space between us.”
I fragmented, split into more pieces than I could keep track of, accompanied by the chattering of English sparrows beyond the barred and screened window.
“What happened to the balloons?” I asked.
He shrugged, his forehead creased.
I knew the answer. Markham took them home to his kid. A surprise gift from a dead girl.
“What balloons?”
Then I saw the hand plunge the knife into Darcy Smith’s chest.
Markham sat cross-legged on the ground and, with his bloody knife, peeled and ate an orange.
I opened my eyes and listened to the sea throb in swells. Rage surged through me like currents churning from the ocean’s floor.
The mind-set for murder was mine.
“Stanley Markham never did any postmortem cutting,” I said. “When his victim was dead, and he had snacked, he was done.”
I sat up on the couch and pushed aside the blanket.
Even at the end, when Markham tipped totally out of control, he stabbed, throttled, or bludgeoned, sated his desire for a piece of fruit, and then he fled. Period.
“You know,” Markham told me, “fear never came into it while they were alive. A few girls freaked out and I had to calm them down, or kill them sooner than I planned. After they were dead, though… God. Dead people scare me. I watched them while I ate. I expected them to sit bolt upright, undead, and lurch after me. I didn’t get close to them after they went down.”
Death did not frighten the killer who cracked the silent night on Crescent Street.
It was conceivable that Markham had changed his M.O., that he would use a gun now because it was expedient, because he knew that police would catch him or kill him anyway. But he could not alter his fear of the dead; it was a characterological fixture.
As I pushed myself from the sofa, I realized that my mind was not working only Markham and the murders. Karen Jasper had sliced her way under my skin.
Subconsciously, I sought an incontrovertible argument against Stanley Markham having any status as asuspect. I was inclined to label my need to prove her wrong as “professional competitiveness.”
That was not all that nipped at nerves. Jasper had dismissed me as an artifact.
“Face it,” I told myself. “Growing old pisses you off.”
I sipped coffee and examined one of the new reports that Jaworski had given me—lists of vehicles seen on or near Crescent Street on the night of the killings. Investigators had identified most of the cars, interviewed the owners, and appended their statements to the reports.
As I leafed through the sheets, a corner light in the living room switched on, startling me. My first night in the house, I thought the bulb had blown when it extinguished itself at eleven P . M . I glanced at the clock. It was eight-thirty P.M. More technology of dubious value, I thought, and returned to my reports.
Jaworski had placed a red check at the top of one field-interview form. Luther Peterson, a local resident, had observed an old, dented, light-colored Volvo with Maine license plates parked across from his house when he got up at three A.M. to stoke his woodstove. The reason he paid any attention at all, he said, was that his neighbor, Brenda Noddy, worked eleven P.M. to seven A.M. at the regional hospital and always parked in the space occupied by the Volvo. She was usually tired when she got home, and he worried that she would have trouble finding another place to leave her car.
As Brenda’s friend returned to bed thirty minutes later—“That’s how long it takes me to do the stove”—he saw a slightly built young man, a “student-type” wearing a flannel shirt, jeans, and backward ball cap, and carrying a knapsack. He walked to the Volvo “from the vicinity of 42 Crescent,” made a U-turn, and
Steel doors crashed shut.
Markham said, “I could see the hand move. It held a knife. I knew what would happen, but I couldn’t change that. It wasn’t my hand. It was there in the space between us.”
I fragmented, split into more pieces than I could keep track of, accompanied by the chattering of English sparrows beyond the barred and screened window.
“What happened to the balloons?” I asked.
He shrugged, his forehead creased.
I knew the answer. Markham took them home to his kid. A surprise gift from a dead girl.
“What balloons?”
Then I saw the hand plunge the knife into Darcy Smith’s chest.
Markham sat cross-legged on the ground and, with his bloody knife, peeled and ate an orange.
I opened my eyes and listened to the sea throb in swells. Rage surged through me like currents churning from the ocean’s floor.
The mind-set for murder was mine.
“Stanley Markham never did any postmortem cutting,” I said. “When his victim was dead, and he had snacked, he was done.”
I sat up on the couch and pushed aside the blanket.
Even at the end, when Markham tipped totally out of control, he stabbed, throttled, or bludgeoned, sated his desire for a piece of fruit, and then he fled. Period.
“You know,” Markham told me, “fear never came into it while they were alive. A few girls freaked out and I had to calm them down, or kill them sooner than I planned. After they were dead, though… God. Dead people scare me. I watched them while I ate. I expected them to sit bolt upright, undead, and lurch after me. I didn’t get close to them after they went down.”
Death did not frighten the killer who cracked the silent night on Crescent Street.
It was conceivable that Markham had changed his M.O., that he would use a gun now because it was expedient, because he knew that police would catch him or kill him anyway. But he could not alter his fear of the dead; it was a characterological fixture.
As I pushed myself from the sofa, I realized that my mind was not working only Markham and the murders. Karen Jasper had sliced her way under my skin.
Subconsciously, I sought an incontrovertible argument against Stanley Markham having any status as asuspect. I was inclined to label my need to prove her wrong as “professional competitiveness.”
That was not all that nipped at nerves. Jasper had dismissed me as an artifact.
“Face it,” I told myself. “Growing old pisses you off.”
I sipped coffee and examined one of the new reports that Jaworski had given me—lists of vehicles seen on or near Crescent Street on the night of the killings. Investigators had identified most of the cars, interviewed the owners, and appended their statements to the reports.
As I leafed through the sheets, a corner light in the living room switched on, startling me. My first night in the house, I thought the bulb had blown when it extinguished itself at eleven P . M . I glanced at the clock. It was eight-thirty P.M. More technology of dubious value, I thought, and returned to my reports.
Jaworski had placed a red check at the top of one field-interview form. Luther Peterson, a local resident, had observed an old, dented, light-colored Volvo with Maine license plates parked across from his house when he got up at three A.M. to stoke his woodstove. The reason he paid any attention at all, he said, was that his neighbor, Brenda Noddy, worked eleven P.M. to seven A.M. at the regional hospital and always parked in the space occupied by the Volvo. She was usually tired when she got home, and he worried that she would have trouble finding another place to leave her car.
As Brenda’s friend returned to bed thirty minutes later—“That’s how long it takes me to do the stove”—he saw a slightly built young man, a “student-type” wearing a flannel shirt, jeans, and backward ball cap, and carrying a knapsack. He walked to the Volvo “from the vicinity of 42 Crescent,” made a U-turn, and
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