Mister X. John Lutz

Her “If you lie down with dogs…” look.

      “I can put up with fleas,” he said.

      She nodded and turned back to her computer. She’d known exactly what he’d been thinking. Incredible.

      Maybe her mouse pad was a Ouija board.

      “My, my, my,” Pearl said, reading over additional information about Geraldine Knott, the young woman who’d survived an attack eight years ago in Detroit by an assailant very much like the Carver.

      She remained seated at her computer. Quinn and Fedderman were standing behind her, looking over her shoulder at the monitor. They were all reading the old news item from the archives of a Detroit newspaper. It was accompanied by another blurred black-and-white photo. In this one Geraldine Knott was standing and leaning sideways, as if hoping the camera’s aim would miss her, holding both hands covering her face.

      This account of the attack was more detailed. It described how her masked assailant had gotten her on the ground and straddled her, kneeling on her upper arms to pin her to the parking garage’s concrete floor. He’d then shown her a knife and explained to her what he intended to do with it. As the news item quoted the tearful intended victim: “…slice off my nipples, do some creative carving on me, then carve me a big smile under my chin.” Fortunately for Geraldine Knott, her attacker had been frightened away.

      “He mentioned carving twice,” Quinn noted.

      “Could be early Carver,” Pearl said. “Or maybe some sicko imitating him.”

      “Except this woman was attacked before anybody’d ever heard of the Carver,” Fedderman pointed out.

      “Maybe this guy had heard of him and was imitating him even before he became famous,” Quinn suggested.

      Pearl said, “The odds on that are about the same as Fedderman wearing both socks right side out.”

      “Did I do that again?” Fedderman asked automatically, glancing down at his ankles and tugging up his pants legs.

      “Sure seems like this could be our guy,” Pearl said. “The way he showed the knife and told her what he was about to do, getting his jollies by scaring the hell out of her. Or maybe our sicko saw this news account when it was fresh in a Detroit paper and it stuck in his mind.”

      “I’d bet on Feds’s socks,” Quinn said.

      “Then you think this was early Carver?” Pearl asked.

      “I don’t know.”

      Fedderman unconsciously glanced down at his feet again. “So what are we gonna do with this information?”

      “Put it in the hopper,” Quinn said, “along with everything else we know or think we know.”

      “And then?” Fedderman asked.

      “Wait and see if someday it makes sense.”

      16

      Holifield, Ohio, 1992

      Jerry Grantland, thirteen years old last week, lowered himself from his bedroom window onto the soft carpet of lawn. He glanced at the luminous green hands of his Timex watch. One o’clock a.m.

      That was the time it usually happened.

      If it was going to happen.

      There were clouds, and the moon was only a sliver, like a glowing shaving from a larger carving. Jerry knew that once he made it across the dark stretch of lawn that was the shadow of the house, cast by the softly illuminated streetlight out near the curb, he’d be in almost total darkness. The rest would be easy. There was a wooden picket fence running the property line between his house and the Kellers’ side yard, but it was only four feet high. The nimble Jerry could be over it in seconds and on his way into the shadows of the overgrown honeysuckle bush.

      The bush would conceal him until he made it past the rosebushes and into the yews, where he could squat unseen in the darkness outside the Keller twins’ bedroom window.

      He knew where the twins, a year younger than he was, slept in their matching twin beds with their brass headboards. Tiffany’s bed was against the far wall, Chrissie’s nearer the window.

      Jerry found his familiar, comfortable place to squat on his heels and peer beneath the partly drawn shade into the room.

      Both girls appeared to be sleeping beneath thin white sheets that were pulled all the way up to their chins.

      Jerry thought it unlikely that they were sleeping. Like him, they were probably waiting.

      He watched as both girls stirred and stiffened. Tiffany sat straight up in bed and then lay down again. Both twins curled onto their sides, pretending to be asleep. The window was raised slightly to let in the night breeze, and Jerry thought he could hear the faint rustle of the sheets as the girls’ young bodies moved beneath them.

      Jerry let his thoughts about the Keller twins roam free, as he often did. If the twins knew what they did—and what was done to them—in his imagination, they’d be appalled. But they wouldn’t be surprised. In some ways they were interchangeable. In others—

      As he always did when it happened, Jerry drew in his breath.

      The bedroom door had opened and closed silently.

      The twins’ father, Mr. Keller—Ed Keller—was like a shadow in the room, but a shadow with substance.

      Jerry swallowed and stayed as still as possible at the window. He’d been sure Mr. Keller would enter the twins’ room. Mr. Keller was some kind of salesman and was out of town a lot. Whatever he sold had something to do with cars, with Detroit; that’s what either twin would say when Jerry asked about their father.

      Mr. Keller had been away on business most of the week, and this was his first night back. That was how Jerry knew he’d visit the twins’ room. After being out of town for a while on one his sales trips, he almost always paid the twins a visit.

      The tall shadow that was Mr. Keller moved to Tiffany’s bed. Chrissie, in her own bed, turned away, drew her knees up almost to her chin, and held the wadded sheet tightly against her ears. She was facing the window, but Jerry was sure she couldn’t see him, the way her face was screwed into an ugly mask, her eyes clenched tightly shut.

      Behind her, shadows began to move on the far wall. Holding his breath, Jerry leaned slightly forward.

      Within minutes the rhythmic, writhing dance of light and darkness on the wall became more urgent, wilder. It was impossible to know what was shadow and what was Tiffany or her father.

      He could hear a soft moaning through the window and couldn’t be sure if it was Tiffany or Chrissie.

      The writhing and moaning continued in a madder and madder rhythm. Jerry was hard now, and he lowered his right hand and stroked himself. Within minutes he’d reached orgasm.

      The movement of the distorted figures on the wall finally slowed, then stopped altogether.

      The tall shadow that was Mr. Keller straightened up from Tiffany’s bed. It moved toward the window, but Jerry, secure in the knowledge that he was invisible in the darkness and shelter of the yews, stayed motionless and continued to watch.

      Mr. Keller rested a hand briefly on Chrissie’s shoulder. He knew she’d been awake, been listening. Jerry thought that almost surely she hadn’t been the only one in the house who’d heard. The twin’s mother must have heard something of what happened over and over in the twins’ room.

      She must know.

      The world of adults. Jerry wasn’t sure if he’d ever understand it.

      He watched as Mr. Keller crept to the bedroom door, opened it, and merged with the darkness beyond it, closing the door behind him.

      Neither twin moved for a long time, and then Chrissie removed the wadded sheet from her ears and sat up in bed. She