Maybe Hilary Thomas is the one, he thought as he pulled into the parking slot in front of his apartment. She’s special. I can see that. Very special. Maybe she’ll think I’m someone special, too. It could work out for us. Couldn’t it?
For a while he sat in the Jeep, staring at the night sky, thinking about Hilary Thomas and about getting old and dying alone.
***
At 10:30, when Hilary was deeply involved in the James Clavell novel, just as she was finishing a snack of apples and cheese, the telephone rang.
“Hello?”
There was only silence on the other end of the line.
“Who’s there?”
Nothing.
She slammed the receiver down. That’s what they told you to do when you got a threatening or obscene phone call. Just hang up. Don’t encourage the caller. Just hang up quickly and sharply. She had given him a real pain in the ear, but that didn’t make her feel a lot better.
She was sure it wasn’t a wrong number. Not twice in one night with no apology either time. Besides, there had been a menacing quality in that silence, an unspoken threat.
Even after she had been nominated for the Academy Award, she had never felt the need for an unlisted number. Writers were not celebrities in the same sense that actors and even directors were. The general public never remembered or cared who earned the screenplay credit on a hit picture. Most writers who got unlisted numbers did it because it seemed prestigious; unlisted meant the harried scribbler was so busy with so many important projects that he had no time for even the rare unwanted call. But she didn’t have an ego problem like that, and leaving her name in the book was just as anonymous as taking it out.
Of course, maybe that was no longer true. Perhaps the media reports about her two encounters with Bruno Frye had made her an object of general interest where her two successful screenplays had not. The story of a woman fighting off a would-be rapist and killing him the second time–that might very well fascinate a certain kind of sick mind. It might make some animal out there eager to prove he could succeed where Bruno Frye had failed.
She decided to call the telephone company business office first thing in the morning and ask for a new, unlisted number.
***
At midnight, the city morgue was, as the medical examiner himself had once described it, quiet as a tomb. The dimly lighted hallway was silent. The laboratory was dark. The room full of corpses was cold and lightless and still except for the insect hum of the blowers that pumped chill air through the wall vents.
As Thursday night changed to Friday morning, only one man was on duty in the morgue. He was in a small chamber adjacent to the M.E.’s private office. He was sitting in a spring-backed chair at an ugly metal and walnut-veneer desk. His name was Albert Wolwicz. He was twenty-nine years old, divorced, and the father of one child, a daughter named Rebecca. His wife had won custody of Becky. They both lived in San Diego now. Albert didn’t mind working the (you should forgive the expression) graveyard shift. He did a little filing, then just sat and listened to the radio for a while, then did a bit more filing, then read a few chapters of a really good Stephen King novel about vampires on the loose in New England; and if the city remained cool all night, if the uniformed bulls and the meat wagon boys didn’t start running in stretchers from gang fights or freeway accidents, it would be sweet duty all the way through to quitting time.
At ten minutes past midnight, the phone rang. Albert picked it up. “Morgue.”
Silence.
“Hello,” Albert said.
The man on the other end of the line groaned in agony and began to cry.
“Who is this?”
Weeping, the caller could not respond.
The tortured sounds were almost a parody of grief, an exaggerated and hysterical sobbing that was the strangest thing Albert had ever heard. “If you’ll tell me what’s wrong, maybe I can help.”