Shackled and in his complete control, surely she cannot be his blown tire. She smells of despair and defeat. In the beaten tone of her voice, he sees the gray of ashes and feels the texture of a coffin blanket. She is as good as dead, and she is resigned to it. Yet…
From the kitchen comes the clink of chains. Not loud, not a vigorous assault on her bonds. Just a quiet rattle as she shifts position—perhaps to clasp her thighs tightly together to repress the urge to urinate.
Mr. Vess smiles.
He goes upstairs to his room. From the top shelf at the back of his walk-in closet, he takes down a telephone. In the bedroom, he plugs it into a wall jack and makes two calls, letting people know that he has returned from his three-day vacation and will be back in harness by this evening.
Although he is confident that the Dobermans, in his absence, will never allow anyone to get into the house, Vess keeps only two phones and secretes them in closets when he is not at home. In the extremely unlikely event that an intruder should manage to sprint through the attacking dogs and get into the house alive, he will not be able to call for help.
The danger of cellular phones has been on Mr. Vess’s mind in recent days. It’s difficult to imagine a would-be burglar carrying a portable phone or using it to call the police for help from a house in which he’s become trapped by guard dogs, but stranger things have happened. If Chyna Shepherd had found a cellular phone in the clerk’s Honda the previous night, she would not be the one now languishing in shackles.
The technological revolution here at the end of the millennium offers numerous conveniences and great opportunities, but it also has dangerous aspects. Thanks to his expertise with computers, he has cleverly altered his fingerprint files with various agencies and can go without gloves at places like the Templeton house, enjoying the full sensuality of the experience without fear. But one cellular phone in the wrong hands at the wrong time could lead suddenly to the most intense experience of his life—and the final one. He sometimes longs for the simpler age of Jack the Ripper, or the splendid Ed Gein, who inspired Psycho, or Richard Speck; he dreams wistfully of the less complicated world of earlier decades and of killing fields that were less trampled, then, by such as he.
By feverishly pursuing high ratings, by hyping every story steeped in blood, by making celebrities out of killers, and by fawning over celebrity killers, the electronic news media happily may have inspired more of his clear-thinking kind. But they have also alarmed the sheep too much. Too many in the herd are walleyed with alertness and quick to run at the first perception of danger.
Still, he manages to have his fun.
After making his calls, Mr. Vess goes out to the motor home. The license plates, the blunt-end screws and the nuts to attach them to the vehicle, and a screwdriver are in a drawer in the kitchenette.
By various means, usually two or three weeks prior to one of his expeditions, Mr. Vess carefully selects his primary targets, like the Templeton family. And though he sometimes brings back a living prize for the cellar room, he nearly always travels well beyond the borders of Oregon to minimize the chances that his two lives—good citizen and homicidal adventurer—will cross at the most inconvenient moment. (Though he didn’t employ this method to get Laura Templeton, he has found that clandestine browsing, via computer, through the huge Department of Motor Vehicles’ records in neighboring California is an excellent method of locating attractive women. Their driver’s license photographs—head shots only—are now on file with the DMV. Provided with each picture are the woman’s age, height, and weight statistics that assist Vess in identifying unacceptable candidates, so he can avoid grandmothers who photograph well and plump women with thin faces. And though some people list post office boxes only, most use their street addresses; thereafter, Mr. Vess needs only a series of good maps.) Upon nearing the end of his drive, when he gets within fifty miles of the target residence, he removes the license plates from the motor home. Later, because he makes a point of being far away from the scene of his games by the time anyone finds the aftermath, he could be tracked down only if someone in the victim’s neighborhood happened to see the motor home and, though it looked perfectly innocent, happened to glance at the plates and—that damn blown tire again—happened to have a photographic memory. Therefore, he leaves the tags off his vehicle until he is safely back in Oregon.