Red Dragon hl-1 Read online

  He walked around the side of the house, moving carefully, not using his flashlight. He stopped twice to listen. TheAtlantapolice knew he was here, but the neighbors did not. They would be jumpy. They might shoot.

  Looking in a rear window, he could see all the way through to the light in the front yard, past silhouettes of furniture. The scent of Cape jasmine was heavy in the air. A latticed porch ran across most of the back. On the porch door was the seal of theAtlantapolice department. Graham removed the seal and went in.

  The door from the porch into the kitchen was patched with plywood where the police had taken out the glass. By flashlight he unlocked it with the key the police had given him. He wanted to turn on lights. He wanted to put on his shiny badge and make some official noises to justify himself to the silent house where five people had died. He did none of that. He went into the dark kitchen and sat down at the breakfast table.

  Two pilot lights on the kitchen range glowed blue in the dark. He smelled furniture polish and apples.

  The thermostat clicked and the air conditioning came on. Graham started at the noise, felt a trickle of fear. He was an old hand at fear. He could manage this one. He simply was afraid, and he could go on anyway.

  He could see and hear better afraid; he could not speak as concisely, and fear sometimes made him rude. Here, there was nobody left to speak to, there was nobody to offend anymore.

  Madness came into this house through that door into this kitchen, moving on size-eleven feet. Sitting in the dark, he sensed madness like a bloodhound sniffs a shirt.

  Graham had studied the detectives’ report at Atlanta Homicide for most of the day and early evening. He remembered that the light on the vent hood over the stove had been on when the police arrived. He turned it on now.

  Two framed samplers hung on the wall beside the stove. One said “Kissin’ don’t last, cookin’ do.” The other was “It’s always to the kitchen that our friends best like to come, to hear the heartbeat of the house, take comfort in its hum.”

  Graham looked at his watch. Eleven-thirty P.M. According to the pathologist, the deaths occurred between eleven P.M. and one AM.

  First there was the entry. He thought about that…

  The madman slipped the hook on the outside screen door. Stood in the darkness of the porch and took something from his pocket. A suction cup, maybe the base of a pencil sharpener designed to stick to a desktop.

  Crouched against the wooden lower half of the kitchen door, the madman raised his head to peer through the glass. He put out his tongue and licked the cup, pressed it to the glass and flicked the lever to make it stick. A small glass cutter was attached to the cup with string so that he could cut a circle.

  Tiny squeal of the glass cutter and one solid tap to break the glass. One hand to tap, one hand to hold the suction cup. The glass must not fall. The loose piece of glass is slightly egg-shaped because the string wrapped around the shaft of the suction cup as he cut. A little grating noise as he pulls the piece of glass back outside. He does not care that he leaves AB saliva on the glass.

  His hand in the tight glove snakes in through the hole, finds the lock. The door opens silently. He is inside. In the light of the vent hood he can see his body in this strange kitchen. It is pleasantly cool in the house.

  Will Graham ate two Di-Gels. The crackle of the cellophane irritated him as he stuffed it in his pocket. He walked through the living room, holding his flashlight well away from him by habit. Though he had studied the floor plan, he made one wrong turn before he found the stairs. They did not creak.

  Now he stood in the doorway of the master bedroom. He could see faintly without the flashlight. A digital clock on a nightstand projected the time on the ceiling and an orange night light burned above the baseboard by the bathroom. The coppery smell of blood was strong.

  Eyes accustomed to the dark could see well enough. The madman could distinguish Mr. Leeds from his wife. There was enough light for him to cross the room, grabLeeds’s hair and cut his throat. What then? Back to the wall switch, a greeting to Mrs. Leeds and then the gunshot that disabled her?

  Graham switched on the lights and bloodstains shouted at him from the walls, from the mattress and the floor. The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room full of dark stains drying.

  Graham sat on the floor until his head was quiet. Still, still, be still.

  The number and variety of the bloodstains had puzzledAtlantadetectives trying to reconstruct the crime. All the victims were found slain in their beds. This was not consistent with the locations of the stains.

  At first they believed Charles Leeds was attacked in his daughter’s room and his body dragged to the master bedroom. Close examination of the splash patterns made them reconsider.

  The killer’s exact movements in the rooms were not yet deterrnined.

  Now, with the advantage of the autopsy and lab reports, Will Graham began to see how it had happened.

  The intruder cut Charles Leeds’s throat as he lay asleep beside his wife, went back to the wall switch and turned on the light—hairs and oil from Mr. Leeds’s head were left on the switchplate by a smooth glove. He shot Mrs. Leeds as she was rising, then went toward the children’s rooms.

  Leedsrose with his cut throat and tried to protect the children, losing great gouts of blood and an unmistakable arterial spray as he tried to fight. He was shoved away, fell and died with his daughter in her room.

  One of the two boys was shot in bed. The other boy was also found in bed, but he had dust balls in his hair. Police believed he was dragged out from under his bed to be shot.

  When all of them were dead, except possibly Mrs. Leeds, the smashing of mirrors began, the selection of shards, the further attention to Mrs. Leeds.

  Graham had full copies of all the autopsy protocols in his box. Here was the one on Mrs. Leeds. The bullet entered to the right of her navel and lodged ii] her lumbar spine, but she died of strangulation.

  The increase in serotonin and free histamine levels in the gunshot wound indicated she had lived at least five minutes after she was shot. The histamine was much higher than the serotonin, so she had not lived more than fifteen minutes. Most of her other injuries were probably, but not conclusively, postmortem.

  If the other injuries were postmortem, what was the killer doing in the interval while Mrs. Leeds waited to die? Graham wondered. Struggling withLeedsand killing the others, yes, but that would have taken less than a minute. Smashing the mirrors. But what else?

  TheAtlantadetectives were thorough. They had measured and photographed exhaustively, had vacuumed and grid-searched and taken the traps from the drains. Still, Graham looked for himself.

  From the police photographs and taped outlines on the mattresses, Graham could see where the bodies had been found. The evidence—nitrate traces on bedclothes in the case of the gunshot wounds—indicated that they were found in positions approximating those in which they died.

  But the profusion of bloodstains and matted sliding marks on the hall carpet remained unexplained. One detective had theorized that some of the victims tried to crawl away from the killer. Graham did not believe it—clearly the killer moved them after they were dead and then put them back the way they were when he killed them.

  What he did with Mrs. Leeds was obvious. But what about the others? He had not disfigured them further, as he did Mrs. Leeds. The children each suffered a single gunshot wound in the head. Charles Leeds bled to death, with aspirated blood contributing. The only additional mark on him was a superficial ligature mark around his chest, believed to be postmortem. What did the killer do with them after they were dead?

  From his box Graham took the police photographs,lab reports on the individual blood and organic stains in the room and standard comparison plates of blood-drop trajectories.

  He went over the upstairs rooms minutely, trying to match injuries to stains, trying to work backward. He plotted each splash on a measured field sketch o
f the master bedroom, using the standard comparison plates to estimate the direction and velocity of the bloodfall. In this way he hoped to learn the positions the bodies were in at different times.

  Here was a row of three bloodstains slanting up and around a corner of the bedroom wall. Here were three faint stains on the carpet beneath them. The wall above the headboard on Charles Leeds’s side of the bed was bloodstained, and there were swipes along the baseboards. Graham’s field sketch began to look like a join-the-’lots puzzle with no numbers. He stared at it, looked up at the room and back to the sketch until his head ached.

  He went into the bathroom and took his last two Bufferin, scooping up water in his hand from the faucet in the sink. He splashed water on his face and dried it with his shirttail. Water spilled on the floor. He had forgotten that the trap was gone from the drain. Otherwise the bathroom was undisturbed, except for the broken mirror and traces of the red fingerprint powder called Dragon’s Blood. Toothbrushes, facial cream, razor, were all in place.

  The bathroom looked as though a family still used it. Mrs. Leeds’s panty hose hung on the towel racks where she had left them to dry. He saw that she cut the leg off a pair when it had a runner so she could match two one-legged pairs, wear them at the same time, and save money. Mrs. Leeds’s small, homey economy pierced him; Molly did the same thing.

  Graham climbed out a window onto the porch roof and sat on the gritty shingles. He hugged his knees, his damp shirt pressed cold across his back, and snorted the smell of slaughter out of his nose.

  The lights ofAtlantarusted the night sky and the stars were hard to see. The night would be clear in the Keys. He could be watching shooting stars with Molly and Willy, listening for the whoosh they solemnly agreed a shooting star must make. The Delta Aquarid meteor shower was at its maximum, and Willy was up for it.

  He shivered and snorted again. He did not want to think of Molly now. To do so was tasteless as well as distracting.

  Graham had a lot of trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty. There were no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched everything else he knew. Some of the combinations were hard to live with. But he could not anticipate them, could not block and repress. His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved. His associations came at the speed of light. His value judgments were at the pace of a responsive reading. They could never keep up and direct his thinking.

  He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. There was nothing he could do about it.

  Graham turned off the lights in theLeedshouse and went out through the kitchen. At the far end of the hack porch, his flashlight revealed a bicycle and a wicker dog bed. There was a doghouse in the backyard, a dog bowl by the steps.

  The evidence indicated the Leedses were surprised in their sleep. Holding the flashlight between his chin and chest, he wrote a memo: Jack—where was the dog?

  Graham drove hack to his hotel. He had to concentrate on his driving, though there was little traffic at four-thirty A.M. His head still ached and he watched for an all-night pharmacy.

  He found one on Peachtree. A slovenly rent-a-cop dozed near the door. A pharmacist in a jacket dingy enough to highlight his dandruff sold Graham Bufferin. The glare in the place was painful. Graham disliked young pharmacists. They had a middle-of-the-litter look about them. They were often smug and he suspected that they were unpleasant at home.

  “What else?” the pharmacist said, his fingers poised above the cash register keys. “What else?”

  The Atlanta FBI office had booked him into an absurd hotel near the city’s newPeachtreeCenter. It had glass elevators shaped like milkweed pods to let him know he was really in town now.

  Graham rode up to his room with two conventioneers wearing name tags with the printed greeting “Hi!” They held to the rail and looked over the lobby as they ascended.

  “Looka yonder by the desk—that’s Wilma and them just now coming in,” the larger one said. “God damn, I’d love to tear off a piece of that.”

  “Fuck her till her nose bleeds,” the other one said.

  Fear and rut, and anger at the fear.

  “Say, you know why a woman has legs?”

  “Why?”

  “So she won’t leave a trail like a snail.”

  The elevator doors opened.

  “Is this it? This is it,” the larger one said. He lurched against the facing as he got off.

  “This is the blind leading the blind,” the other one said.

  Graham put his cardboard box on the dresser in his room. Then he put it in a drawer where he could not see it. He had had enough of the wide-eyed dead. He wanted to call Molly, but it was too early.

  A meeting was scheduled for eight A.M. at theAtlantapolice headquarters. He’d have little enough to tell them.

  He would try to sleep. His mind was a busy rooming house with arguments all around him, and they were fighting somewhere down the hall. He was numb and empty and he drank two fingers of whiskey from his bathroom glass before he lay down. The darkness pressed too closely on him. He turned on the bathroom light and went back to bed. He pretended Molly was in the bathroom brushing her hair.

  Lines from the autopsy protocols sounded in his own voice, though he had never read them aloud: “…the feces was formed… a trace of talcum on the lower right leg. Fracture of the medial orbit wall owing to insertion of mirror shard…”

  Graham tried to think about the beach at Sugarloaf Key, he tried to hear the waves. He pictured his workbench in his mind and thought about the escapement for the water clock he and Willy were building. He sang “WhiskeyRiver” under his breath and tried to run “Black Mountain Rag” through his head from one end to the other. Molly’s music. Doe Watson’s guitar part was all right, but he always lost it in the fiddle break. Molly had tried to teach him clog dancing in the backyard and she was bouncing… and finally he dozed.

  He woke in an hour, rigid and sweating, seeing the other pillow silhouetted against the bathroom light and it was Mrs. Leeds lying beside him bitten and torn, mirrored eyes and blood like the legs of spectacles over her temples and ears. He could not turn his head to face her. Brain screaming like a smoke alarm, he put his hand over there and touched dry cloth.

  Having acted, he felt some immediate relief. He rose, his heart pounding, and put on a dry T-shirt. He threw the wet one into the bathtub. He could not move over to the dry side of the bed. Instead he put a towel on the side where he had sweated and lay down on it, propped against the headboard with a stiff drink in his hand. He swallowed a third of it.

  He reached for something to think about, anything. The pharmacy where he bought the Bufferin, then; perhaps because it was his only experience all day that was not related to death.

  He could remember old drugstores with soda fountains. As a boy, he thought old drugstores had a slightly furtive air. When you went in, you always thought about buying rubbers whether you needed any or not. There were things on the shelves you shouldn’t look at too long.

  In the pharmacy where he bought the Bufferin, the contraceptives with their illustrated wrappings were in a lucite case on the wall behind the cash register, framed like art.

  He preferred the drugstore and sundry of his childhood. Graham was nearly forty and just beginning to feel the tug of the way the world was then; it was a sea anchor streamed behind him in heavy weather.

  He thought about Smoot. Old Smoot had been the soda jerk and manager for the pharmacist who owned the local drugstore when Graham was a child. Smoot, who drank on the job, forgot to unroll the awning and the sneakers melted in the window. Smoot forgot to unplug the coffeepot, and the fire department was summoned. Smoot sold ice cream cones to children on credit.

  His principal outrage was ordering fifty Kewpie dolls from a detail man while the store owner was on vacation. On h
is return, the owner fired Smoot for a week. Then they held a Kewpie doll sale. Fifty of the Kewpie dolls were arranged in a semicircle in the front window so that they all stared at whoever was looking in.

  They had wide eyes of cornflower blue. It was a striking display and Graham had looked at it for some time. He knew they were only Kewpie dolls, but he could feel the focus of their attention. So many of them looking. A number of people stopped to look at them. Plaster dolls, all with the same silly spit curl, yet their concentrated gaze had made his face tingle.

  Graham began to relax a little on the bed. Kewpie dolls staring. He started to take a drink, gasped, and choked it onto his chest. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and fetched his box from the dresser drawer. He took out the autopsy protocols of the threeLeedschildren and his measured field sketches of the master bedroom and spread them on the bed.

  Here were the three bloodstains slanting up the corner, and here were the matching stains on the carpet. Here were the dimensions of the three children. Brother, sister, big brother. Match. Match. Match.

  They had been in a row, seated along the wall facing the bed. An audience. A dead audience. AndLeeds. Tied around the chest to the headboard. Composed to look as though he were sitting up in bed. Getting the ligature mark, staining the wall above the headboard.

  What were they watching? Nothing; they were all dead. But their eyes were open. They were watching a performance starring the madman and the body of Mrs. Leeds, beside Mr. Leeds in the bed. An audience. The crazy could look around at their faces.

  Graham wondered if he had lit a candle. The flickering light would simulate expression on their faces. No candle was found. Maybe he would think to do that next time. . .

  This first small bond to the killer itched and stung like a leech. Graham bit the sheet, thinking.

  Why did you move them again? Why didn’t you leave them that way? Graham asked. There’s something you don’t want me to know about you. Why, there’s something you’re ashamed of. Or is it something you can’t afford for me to know?