She allowed herself to be cajoled to the door, where he relieved her of the store’s keys, kissed her, and shooed her out into the street.
The door closed, and she was gone.
Rothwell came back, and Carter made a guess from his body language that they were heading into
all guys together
territory.
“Okay,” said Ken, smiling a smile he’d gotten out of a can, “let’s get this cleared up. You’ve got the documentation on you, yeah?”
He leaned on the counter as he spoke and grazed Carter’s personal space without intruding into it. It was the sort of trick they taught at half-assed “being a people person” workshops. Carter knew the next move would be to attempt to form intimacy by finding common ground. He wasn’t sure why Rothwell cared so much about being in Carter’s good books. He probably could have bought Carter a dozen times over without scratching his fortune.
At times like this, Carter felt a small and brutal comfort in the weight of his Glock 19 sitting in its Blackhawk paddle holster at his waist. It was a stupid source of confidence, he knew. He could hardly draw on somebody just for being a dick—the gun would hardly ever be holstered if that were the case—but just having the option kept him calm at times like this, because he
didn’t
want to be the guy who drew on somebody just for being a dick.
Instead, he took the wad of documents from his inside pocket and spread them on the countertop. He even managed to smile while doing it.
Rothwell didn’t spend very long going through them. He had already decided Carter’s claim was probably legitimate, it was plain. He was just going through them for appearances, and to cull a few facts.
“Came up from Red Hook, huh? How were the roads?”
Carter considered saying he had no idea; he’d come in his personal Learjet. Instead he said the drive was uneventful.
“What do you do, Mr. Carter?”
“Private investigator” was one of those job titles people hesitate before saying. It carries baggage, and both sides of a conversation know it. The only thing the PI doesn’t know is whether the other side is going to think Sam Spade or some low-life bail-tracer.
“I’m an investigator,” said Carter. Leaving “private” out covered a multitude of sins, real and imaginary.
Rothwell gave him a curious glance. “Hard job, from what I’ve heard. Not great money.”
“It’s okay,” said Carter, recognizing it as the standard euphemism for “barely okay” as soon as it was out of his mouth.
Rothwell finished gathering whatever bits of information he wanted from the papers. Proving Carter’s bona fides seemed almost an afterthought. He didn’t ask for anything that might actually prove that the “Daniel Carter” mentioned in them was the same person who was standing in front of him.
“You want to sell it?”
“Maybe. I’ll work something out with Emily.”
Rothwell laughed. “No. I mean to
me
. I’ll take it off your hands.”
Carter said nothing.
“I can give it to Emily.”
Carter still said nothing.
“As a present.”
Carter knew enough about the landed gentry of New York and New England not to show even a flicker of surprise. Kenneth Rothwell was, for example, a lawyer in the family white shoe firm or, at least, he had a law degree and a salary. How much actual legal work he did was moot. Sinecure or real job, he was where he was because it was the right place for him, for he was a Rothwell, and a kindly and entirely partisan God blessed his every step. Yeah, buying a little indie bookstore was not such a big deal for Ken Rothwell.
“That’s sweet,” said Carter. He meant,
That’s sickening
. Just a few minutes earlier he’d thought of Rothwell doing exactly this, and discarded the thought as too cynical. Now here was Ken, living down to expectations. “Let me think about it. I’m still kind of surprised about how this is all shaking out.”
“Sure, sure,” said Rothwell. He was all smiles and nods, but his eyes were cold. He held out the keys and dropped them into Carter’s hand. “I’ll leave these with you, Dan.”
“Thanks,” said Carter. He was going to say, “Thanks, Ken,” but remembered in time that he was no longer in grade school. He didn’t bother to mention that he already had a set of the keys. Now he had both, and that suited him fine.
“I don’t know the alarm code,” said Rothwell. He walked to the door, paused with his hand on the handle. “If you’re staying the night, I guess that’s unimportant.”
Carter nodded, and Rothwell left.
The bell over the door struck its plangent little note as the door opened and closed. The tone seemed to hang in the air for a long time. It seemed very quiet in the bookstore.
His
bookstore.
That morning he hadn’t owned a bookstore, and now he did. He picked up the abandoned documents from the counter, felt the paper between his fingers, reassuring himself that they were real. He refolded them and put them back in his jacket. It was time to survey his domain.
He flipped the sign on the door to
Closed
and released the bolts on the Yales. Satisfied that the door was secure, he walked back into the body of the shop and looked at the shelves. He would have to take Emily’s word for it that some of the books were worth something; he could tell Dante from Dan Brown, but that was about his limit. There were shelves of old,
old
encyclopedias, books on theology, philosophy, mathematics, botany. Biographies of people he’d never heard of, autobiographies of people who were interesting in their own minds, books on gardening, boating, and all kinds of other stuff he didn’t care about. He found the fiction shelves and a whole section of vintage detective stories.
He ran his eye over the Hammetts and Chandlers, the Latimers and Thompsons, tales of hardboiled dicks in naked cities. There was still a mild kick to it, being in the same trade, but it was fading. Maybe one day he wouldn’t feel anything at all, or just irritation at how it wasn’t like that, it was never like that.
Carter didn’t read so much anymore. He wished he did, but he never had the time, or he could never find a book that really grabbed him. Owning a bookstore was not a good fit with him. Rothwell would give him a good price, he was sure. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to go that way, though. Part of it was personal dislike, true, but he also wondered what would actually happen. Rothwell would just hand the place over to Emily like he said he would? Or maybe he’d just quietly dismantle it to take it away from Emily. Either way—a patronizing “little pastime for the little lady” or getting rid of it so he was her only focus—Carter didn’t like it. The more he thought about it, the more it appealed to him to keep the place a going concern. Maybe give Emily a 10 percent stake in the place to keep her involved, a bonus on top of her wages. Yeah, she’d like that. Even better, it would irritate the fuck out of Ken.
Cool.
The stairs to the second floor were in a combined kitchen/storage area at the back of the store behind a door. Carter stood on the lowest step and inhaled. The air did not seem especially musty. He went up.
The staircase rose directly into Alfred Hill’s apartment, performing a right-hand turn to come out into a notional line that separated the front bedroom end of things from the rear bathroom and kitchenette. It felt claustrophobic there, not least because the walls were as dense with bookshelves as the store below. Dark wood and a dull rainbow of book spines served to eat most of the light coming through the small front window. By it was a double bed, stripped of bedding and the mattress wrapped in plastic. The room smelled fresh. Carter realized that the building’s only toilet was upstairs, so Emily must have had to come up here a few times a day. She had kept the place dusted and aired.
The mattress looked clean, and the idea of sleeping here no longer seemed so unreasonable. He made up his mind to go across the street and buy a sleeping bag. It probably wasn’t very adult of him, but he liked the sense of this small adventure. He wouldn’t eat there, but he would get some basic stuff while he was out.
He was just finalizing these plans when he heard the bell ring on the door below. His first reaction was his heart sinking as he thought a customer had come in and he would have to explain that the store was shut. Then he remembered he had turned the sign to
Closed
. He had locked the door and tested it. It must be Emily.
He took a step toward the top of the stairs.
But she had given her keys to Rothwell, and he had handed them on to Carter.
He walked down the stairs as quietly as the wooden steps would allow. The storeroom/coffee-making area was empty. He moved into the store proper and found it empty, too. The tone of the bell still hung in the air. He looked closely at it. It hung motionless.
* * *
The sports store was having a sale, and Carter got a good deal on a sleeping bag. On an impulse, he bought a cheap foam roll to lay over the mattress. He had no intention of sleeping on plastic and being disturbed by its crackling all night, but part of him maintained an irrational belief that the old but barely used mattress would harbor bedbugs. Exactly how they’d survived for seven years without feeding was part of the irrationality of it.
He hesitated before buying the bedroll. He knew he didn’t really need it, just as he knew he hadn’t really heard the door chime. Logically, he knew there was no way it had rung. The door was locked, the rear of the store was secure, and he was the only person in the building. There was, he admitted willingly, the possibility of something other than the door ringing it. Perhaps it rang in sympathy with other frequencies. A passing truck might have made the building shudder. Perhaps even the sunlight filtering through the tinted windows was enough to make the metal of the spring expand and shake the bell as the tension was released. These were all logical possibilities. Carter had never seen anything truly inexplicable other than what went on in some people’s minds.
Like Martin Suydam.
Carter was eating in an Italian restaurant he had found a couple of blocks from the bookstore, a little family-run place. His fork paused, halfway between the dish of puttanesca and his mouth. He hadn’t thought of Suydam for months. Hammond still troubled him almost daily, but Suydam had faded from his memory until now. He’d never seen a man so happy to be gutshot.
The restaurant owner saw the slowly lowering fork and bustled over with dismay to make sure everything was all right. Carter assured him that the food was fine, and the owner was content to refill Carter’s wineglass and leave him alone with his thoughts once more.
So … Suydam. Carter still drank with some of the guys from the 76th and knew more than he should about how the clear-up of the case had gone. The man might have been dead, but missing child cases that had been suspected as his doing still had to be confirmed one way or another, and there was the chance that he was responsible for out-of-state abductions.
As it turned out, the educated guesses had been good: from the remains extracted from beneath the cellar floor and another body found dumped exactly where Suydam’s exhaustive notes said it would be, all the disappearances ascribed to him were confirmed. His notes said nothing about taking any boys from outside the counties of the New York metropolitan area at all, and all but a couple were taken outside the five boroughs.
The notes were unusual in as far as they made sense. They were cogent and ordered, which came as a relief to the officers who’d had to read them. There was none of the cramped writing, overwriting, marginalia (relevant and not), random additions, and such that were usually the mark of a troubled mind. Suydam presented his thoughts as clearly as a scientist recording his experiments for posterity. But while reading the notes might have been straightforward, their contents were still wearing on the psyche.
Suydam was obsessed with the limits of human perception, even the limits of machines. He wrote at length on something he called “The Twist,” always capitalized. The detective who told Carter that detail didn’t even bother making a joke about dancing. It was obvious they’d tried every variation of that in the precinct house and ground whatever few grains of humor they could find there out of it long ago.
“The Twist” itself was not explained. From his writings, Suydam took its nature as self-evident, and felt no impulse to explain it in notes that were always meant only for himself. He was not writing one of the ranting declarations of purpose so beloved of mass killers, after all. The psychiatrists and psychologists who studied the transcriptions and facsimiles could offer no explanation beyond the obvious, that Suydam absolutely believed in The Twist, and that all his efforts were bent on perceiving it more clearly.
To do so, he had attempted to hotwire the brains of young boys. He needed them young because their brains had not yet finished their maturation and were more “perceptive” than adult examples. More than once, he decried the “fossilized” and “programmed” state of his own brain, its synapses long since in place, and “too much learning and experience” cluttering the halls of its architecture. The victims were all male because Suydam explicitly stated that women have enough violence visited upon them without him adding to it. It was comments like that, and parts of the procedure that were intended to be as humane as possible, that set Suydam aside from the body of serial killers. He had no psychosexual motivation. His notes even contained his worries that the abductions might be considered sexual in nature, and that people might think him a pedophile. Being a child killer was acceptable in Suydam’s world. Being mistaken for a pedophile was not.
“The sickest thing?” Carter’s friend had told him over beers. “Out of a whole shitload of sickness? The sickest thing was that the fuck was doing it for the good of humanity. This guy was a reg’lar altruist.”
“Madness,” said Carter, borrowing wisdom from elsewhere, “is when you keep doing the same thing and expect different results.”
“Yeah!” The friend raised his bottle to this. His face clouded. “Yeah. The last three kids, he said he was getting there. The Mottram boy, he said he’d had a breakthrough. Estes he was real excited about, wrote that he knew what he’d been doing wrong. He’d get it right next time.”