Chase said, “I don’t want you calling here again.”
“Yes, you do.”
Chase didn’t reply.
“I’m your motivation,” said the killer.
“My motivation?”
“There’s a destiny here.”
“My motivation to do what?”
“That,” said the killer, “is for you to decide.”
“I’ll have the line bugged.”
“That won’t stop me,” the stranger said, again amused. “I’ll simply place the phone calls from various booths around the city, and I’ll keep them too short to trace.”
“If I refuse to answer my phone?”
“You’ll answer it. Six o’clock this evening,” he reminded Chase, and he hung up.
Chase dropped the receiver, uneasily aware that the killer knew him better than he knew himself. He would answer every time, of course. And for the same reasons that he had answered all the nuisance calls of the last few weeks rather than obtain an unlisted number. The only problem was that he didn’t know just what those reasons were.
Impulsively, he lifted the receiver and placed a call to the police headquarters downtown. It was the first time in ten and a half months that he had initiated a call.
When the desk sergeant answered, Chase asked for Detective Wallace.
Wallace came on the line a moment later. “Yes, Mr. Chase, can I help you?”
Chase didn’t mention the calls from the killer – which had been why he thought he’d phoned Wallace. Instead he asked, “How’s the investigation coming along?”
Wallace was not averse to talking shop. “Slowly but surely. We found prints on the knife. If he’s ever been arrested for a serious crime or worked for any branch of government, we’ll have him soon.”
“And if he’s never been printed?”
Wallace said, “We’ll get him anyway. We found a man’s ring in the Chevy. It didn’t belong to the dead boy, and it looks as if it would be too small for your fingers by a size or three. Didn’t lose a ring, did you?”
“No,” Chase said.
“I thought so. Should have called you on it, but I was pretty sure about it. It’s his, right enough.”
“Anything else besides the prints and ring?”
“We’re keeping a constant watch on the girl and her parents, though I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say anything about that to anyone.”
“You think he might try for her?”
“Maybe. If he thinks she can identify him. You know, it’s occurred to me that we wouldn’t be far off if we gave you a tail as well. Have you thought of that?”
Alarmed out of proportion by the suggestion, Chase said, “No. I don’t see what value that would have.”
“Well, the story was in the papers this morning. He probably doesn’t fear you identifying him as much as he does the girl, but he might bear a grudge against you.”
“Grudge? He’d have to be nuts.”
Wallace laughed. “Well, if not nuts, what is he?”
“You mean you’ve found no motives from questioning the girl, no old lovers who might have-”
“No,” Wallace said. “Right now we’re operating on the assumption there’s no rational motive, that he’s psychotic.”
“I see.”
“Well,” Wallace said, “I’m sorry there isn’t more solid news.”
“And I’m sorry to have bothered you,” Chase said.
He hung up without telling Wallace about the calls that he had received from the killer, though he had intended to spill it all. A twenty-four-hour guard on the girl. They would do the same to him, if they knew that he’d been contacted.
The walls seemed to sway, alternately closing in like the jaws of an immense vise and swinging away from him as if they were flat gray gates. The floor rose and fell – or seemed to.
A sense of extreme instability overcame him, a sense that the world was not a solid place but as fluid as a shimmering mirage: the very thing that had landed him in the hospital and had eventually led to his seventy-five-percent disability pension. He could not let it grip him again, and he knew that the best way to fight it was to constrict the perimeters of his world, take solace from solitude. He got another drink.
The telephone woke him from his nap just as the dead men touched him with soft, white, corrupted hands. He sat straight up in bed and cried out, his arms held before him to ward off their cold touch.