"Disgusting," he snapped. "Like a pig. Decent people live here. Clean it up. Now."
The dialogue was stilted and hit the ear as awkwardly as a poorly writ-ten play. At first, unsettled by Buddy's rapid change of personas, Anna wondered if he suffered from multiple personality disorder. It was rare but occurred often enough to be taught in med school during the psychiatry rotation. Watching him, ice cold and authoritarian as he threw his words at the child soiling herself, she realized that he knew exactly who he was. The masks, the play-acting, were a game, an exercise in power, an enter-tainment.
"I have to go to the bathroom, too," Anna said before he could do anything to Candace, if that was what was on his mind.
"Be my guest," he said pleasantly. "Clean it up," he ordered Candace in the nasty nun voice.
Candace got down on her hands and knees and began to lick at the puddle. Anna was grateful it had almost immediately been absorbed by the tinder-dry wood on the floor.
"That's attractive," Anna said acidly. "What's the point of it?"
"Discipline. And it amuses me." He turned from lighting the kindling in the stove. Masks were gone. Instinctively, Anna knew she was seeing the real man beneath the poses.
The most terrifying thing about the look of him was the sanity. Eyes were clear, muscles relaxed, humor of a hard and edgy sort played around lips neither too niggardly nor too lush. He had dropped the aura of a flesh-eating Jeffrey Dahmer and doused that inner burn that ate away at the jailed remnants of Charlie Manson. Not that Anna had had any per-sonal contact with either of these men, or others of that ilk, but even through the diffusing effects of the television screen their dysfunction was visible. At least in retrospect.
This guy, this new Buddy, was the old pseudonymous Ray Bleeker. He was comfortable. He felt like people.
Without any more thought than a man batting aside a crumpled-up bit of newspaper, he kicked Candace out of the way with the side of his sneakered foot. She crawled from the urine stain to sit in a narrow space between the rope-sprung bed and the dining table. Anna could see noth-ing of her but the toes of her shoes, then they, too, were drawn from sight.
Buddy stepped carefully around the wet spot on the boards and looked squarely at Anna.
"I doubt you'd take well to discipline and you don't amuse me," he said. "I need you to assist me in a housekeeping chore. Man's best friend there isn't strong enough."
"Maybe because she's half-starved."
"There is that," he said with his razor-sharp smile.
"Had my other guests arrived, you would have been saved a walk down the hill. As it is, my departure from this little Eden won't be as tidy-as I hoped, but it will have to do. After we've had our tea-the royal 'we' mind you, you would have trouble holding the cup in your present position-you and I will go fetch Brother Robert."
Of the many things Anna expected, this was not one of them. When Candace showed up with all ten digits accounted for, Anna had assumed the bone in her evidence envelope, the finger bone rescued from the wolf pups, had once carried the flesh of the vanished Robert Proffit -pinky finger.
But Robert was here.
Robert was in on it.
Psycho meets psycho in the beautiful mountains of Colorado, a mar-riage made in hell.
No.
She was to help fetch Robert because Candace hadn't the strength "You killed him and kept the body."
"Don't make it sound so dramatic," he said peevishly and turned from her to answer the call of the kettle murmuring on the stove. "It's not as if 1 intended to eat it or make Christmas tree ornaments from the viscera. It's a prop 1 need for the last act. My disappearing act. Besides, I didn t keep it all."
"You threw a handful of fingers to Rita's wolves."
"I was curious. They seemed to like human flesh just fine." He poured water over his tea bag, then set the alarm on his watch before leaving it to steep.
Her hands had been held higher than her heart for so long, the blood was draining from them. She began clenching and unclenching her fin-gers in an attempt to pump some back uphill. Why she might need them was not immediately apparent, but she wasn't anywhere near ready to lie down and die, literally or metaphorically.
A tiny beep sounded. Buddy's tea was steeped. Having removed the bag, he wrung it out against the spoon, then held it up by the string. "Remind you of anything?"
Anna drew a blank.
"I'm disappointed," he said as he tossed it into the fire. "A dead mouse maybe? Nailed to a wall?"
He sat down in one of the ladder-backed chairs by the dining table and blew gently on his tea. There was a skittering sound that might have been Candace moving deeper into her own darkness or the little feet of Fern Lake Cabin's mouse population.
"I think you just reminded them why they hate you."
"I have evened the odds somewhat," he said amiably. "My three pets were quite good mousers. We made a game of it."
In her mind's eye Anna saw the thirteen mice nailed alive to the out-house wall, the charred and bloodied remains of the Abert squirrel burned alive in her bedroom.
Beth, when she had rescued the kitten that was to become Anna's, had gone berserk at the sight of boys torturing it, yet had run screaming at the suggestion it be entrusted to her care. The ritual torture and murder of small animals must have been part of the package.
As he sat at apparent ease studying her, Anna studied him. At this moment he looked sane. Mostly he felt sane. Yet, knowing what she did, he could not be defined as sane by anyone's tenets. Not true, she realized. The world was full of killers, they simply didn't make Lifetime's movie-of-the-week lineup if they did it on a grand scale. If they weren't white males between the ages of twenty and forty who kept to themselves. Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, most of the boy soldiers surviving in the armies of Africa and Asia, despots from Nero to Stalin, all behaved far worse than Buddy.
According to the rules of his kind, Buddy was perfectly sane, re-served even.
To take some of the weight off her feet, Anna rested her butt on the third rung of the ladder. Her hands were cuffed above and behind her head and she realized she was posed like a sadist's vision of a forties pinup girl.
"So," she said. "You killed those two boys-students in your freshman sociology class weren't they? At that school in the East."
"Pennsylvania." Buddy sipped his tea. The temperature was to his lik-ing and he took a longer drink. Anna realized how terribly thirsty she was. Not wanting to give him the pleasure of refusing, she didn't ask for water.
"Your name is Steve Whittfield, Steve D. Whittfield," she said, sud-denly remembering. An all-points bulletin had gone out to every state in the lower forty-eight when the suspect wanted for questioning had disappeared.
"Stephen. Not Steve. And 'E' not 'D.' The 'E' is for Eisner, my grand-father on my mother's side. Gunter Eisner. He was a guard at Buchenwald during World War Two. They moved to the United States when Mother was three."
"You're a chip off the old block, is that it?"
"Grandfather was a gentle soul who did his best for the unfortunates in his care. He was the soul of kindness. At our house even cockroaches were merely banished."
"Who else have you killed?" Anna interrupted the questionable eulogy.
He smiled at her. "Other than Raymond Bleeker and that insufferable preacher boy? I'm not a serial killer stitching dresses out of women's skin or eating livers with a nice Chianti, if that's what you're getting at."
"What are you?"
There was genuine interest in her voice. It got a surprising reaction. He set down his teacup, leaned forward and looked at her as if, for the first time, he genuinely saw her.
"I'm a sociologist."
"You killed two little boys as a sociological experiment," she managed after a moment.
"Not per se, no. And they weren't little boys. Jason-they are all named Jason, are they not-was nearly as tall as I am and fifteen pounds heavier. Chad was somewhat smaller but not by a great deal. Jason was spineless. He actually killed himself, which, I admit, was handy. Chad showed promise but it was early in my new venture and I couldn't trust him not to revert, so I had to put him down. Then things got a bit out of control. I had to..." He smiled ruefully. "Leave town in a hurry, as they say."
Anna's hands were definitely going numb, as was her butt. She stood again, stomped, shifted, stretched. Muscles she didn't want to spasm, did; muscles she would have been grateful to have the use of were too tired to so much as cramp.
"I'd let you go but you can't be trusted," Buddy said. Anna found she could not think of him as Stephen the sociologist. He would always be Buddy the psycho-sociopath. "I'll have to kill you. Killing. Now that's incon-venient, did you know that? Bodies! Try and get rid of one sometime. I honestly believe Hitler would have won World War Two if he hadn't wasted so much time, energy, manpower and money on killing gypsies, Jews and cripples and whatnot. Think of the bodies he got rid of. It's mon-umental. I'm having a heck of a time with the preacher boy. And now you."
Anna refused to apologize for creating a nuisance though he seemed to expect her to. "So why go to all the trouble? I mean what with the corpses and all?" she asked.
"Trying to keep me talking to put off the inevitable?" He smiled. "Better rethink the old Scheherazade strategy. Wouldn't it be smarter to hustle me along? Surely you'll have a better chance of escape-or at least evening the odds-as we lumber through the dark fetching the preacher boy's mortal coil."
He was right. Anna gave him the satisfaction of letting him see that she realized it.
"Fine then. Let's go."
"I haven't finished my tea." He sat again, crossed his legs neatly and picked up his cup, sipping, watching her over the brim.
He was bright, educated. Anna guessed he believed himself to be even smarter than he was, believed himself to be almost a breed apart from ordinary human beings, an intellectual Titan. Maybe he was, but he was only half right about the wisdom of keeping him talking. She would have a greater chance for action uncuffed from the ladder, but once Proffit was in place, Buddy would kill her. Since leaving Bleeker's body behind as a red herring had been so successful, he was probably going to try it again with Robert Proffit. Proffit was the prime suspect. With a bit of stage-managing, it might be made to look like a murder-suicide. Like as not, a hunt would commence for Raymond Bleeker's body. Even if it were guessed "Bleeker" lived, it was an identity Buddy could shed as easily as his NFS uniform.
He would need transportation that couldn't be readily traced. She guessed he would take her patrol car and drive quietly out of the park With blue light and a uniform, he could simply pick the kind of vehicle he wanted and pull it over. One with out-of-state plates would be best. Chances were, no one would even know it was missing till long after he'd abandoned it for another make and model.
The longer Anna put off all of the above, the less night he would have remaining to clean up the evidence and pull his disappearing act, the sooner the rangers she'd requested to assist with her prisoner would be headed up the trail.
"So, what makes you so darling damn different than your basic, scratch-and-grunt, run-of-the-mill mass murderer?" she asked equitably. "Didn't you grow up torturing little animals like the other boys? Momma didn't molest you? From where I stand, I see absolutely no difference between you and John Wayne Gacy."
Buddv was stung. He hid it well but nowhere near quickly enough, and Anna's senses were preternaturally tuned in to his moods. Like many a battered wife, her survival hinged on seeing and understanding every nuance of her batterer's emotional repertoire.
'All right, if you insist. We've got time to get to know one another." He poured himself another cup of tea. Anna could smell the crisp enticing aroma. Dry enough to spit cotton, the old cliche came to mind, freed from some memory trunk by its stunning accuracy. What saliva she could muster was gathering in puff balls at the top of her throat and the corners of her mouth. Before pride had time to interfere, she heard herself saying, "I could use a drink."
"Certainly," Buddy replied. "Tea, water, wine? All you had to do was ask."
"Water," Anna replied, careful to keep the gratitude from her voice. After all, she'd not yet gotten it. After all, he's fucking chained you to a wall, she reminded herself. Even when one was aware of the Stockholm syndrome, it was hard to remain utterly free of it.
"Get our guest a cup of water."
Far quieter than the mice she shared the cabin with, Candace brought a cup of water and held it to Anna's lips while she drank. Such was her incredible relief, she nearly missed Buddy's first few words.
"What makes me different from Gacy? You might at least have chosen Bundy. He was mentally ill but he didn't let it ruin his fashion sense."
