Night bait, page 18
"Wouldn't that be a riot?" Dignazio chuckled. "The fucking Electrocutionist electrocutes himself. I'd laugh from here to kingdom come... . But what about the differences, Doc?"
Dr. Green lighted a cigarette and dropped, the match on the floor. "I'd say that the variances here may be significant, though the similarities are obvious. There are a few things about this seventh girl which are different than the first six victims. They're all little things, but you may find them interesting. The most obvious departure is the gag; it was a different brand of tennis ball. Next, there was no sodium pentothal in her system—he didn't knock this girl out first. And this girl was definitely tortured; a six-ounce apple juice bottle had been inserted and cracked in her anus, and a small wire brush was found in the vagina—typical sex killer stuff. Also, he used postal strapping tape to glue the lips together, rather than the adhesive-type duck tape found on the first six. This girl's body wasn't wrapped up in plastic sheets as the others were; instead, she was found in one of those plastic zip-up cleaners bags, and there was lots of blood inside—messy. Now, I know those things are so superficial that you might not even call them differences—The Electrocutionist just decided to do it another way. But my brilliant pathology skills revealed some other things which may take your interest. The Electrocutionist is a necrophile—no doubt about that. The position of the sexual organs on the first six girls indicated sexual penetration after death. That was easy to see. But this girl—girl number seven—was raped repeatedly before death. Next, my frontal left no question about the cause of death: spontaneous heart stoppage due to a charge of electrical current through the body, same as the others. But, there is a question about the degree of electricity introduced. On all the other bodies, hemorrhaging of the pleural and pericardial membranes was evident. This kind of hemorrhaging is commonplace with electrocution victims; the degree of hemorrhaging depends on the type and the amount of voltage used, plus the duration of electrical induction. On the first six victim, the hemorrhaging was minor and typical. But on this girl ..." Green placed a hand on the dead girl's leg ... "there was a slightly higher degree of pericardial and pleural hemorrhaging. Now, hemorrhaging of this sort will never be massive; death is almost instantaneous, but there was a shift, most definitely."
"What are you getting at?" Chet asked.
Green held out his hand to gesture attentiveness. "Okay, let me put it this way. All seven girls were electrocuted to death. There were no electrical burns on any of the bodies, which is why we believe they were dropped in a large container of water and electrocuted by two ends of a low-or medium-tension power source which had been immersed in the water. But due to the degree of pleural and pericardial hemorrhaging, I'd say it's a good guess that the power source which killed this girl was of a higher voltage or tension than that which killed the first six girls."
"What would cause that?" Dignazio sounded stumped.
"I don't know," Green replied. "I'm a doctor, not an electrician. There was soap film and other residue on her skin, so I don't think he used a different kind of conductant. However, I do know that household current shifts during different times of the day. Maybe he fried her when the electrical tension was higher than usual."
"Dave," Dignazio said, and turned to Elliot, "you know something about electricity. What do you think?"
Elliot adjusted his glasses on his face. "Well, it's true what Dr. Green said about tension shifts. Because there's a smaller demand for electricity during the night, household tension will fluctuate according to that demand. But that wouldn't drastically affect voltage. And I don't know how that might react on a human body."
Dignazio shook his head doubtfully. "This girl was raked over the coals. I mean, the bottle in her butt and the brush up her twat; that's the kind of shit they did in Nam. The first six were neat jobs, no blood, no mess. But he really went to town on this girl. And he didn't rape after death like the others. That's The Electrocutionist's bag, his big kick. Why didn't he do it to this Baker girl?"
Chet's head was tilted down, and he looked at Dignazio soberly. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
Dignazio frowned. "Yeah."
Throughout the entire discourse, Vickie had drifted back into a nightmarelike state of consciousness. There seemed to be a buzzing sound in her ears that no one else noticed. Her stomach was twisting into painful knots, and all she could think about was how much she wanted to leave. She could hear Dignazio talking again. His voice sounded a thousand miles away. "... Anyway, Mullins says he might have some suspects for us to check out tomorrow. Maybe we'll run into some luck there." He didn't sound very convincing. "In the meantime, you and Vickie get back on the block and do your stuff."
Chet gave Dignazio a professional nod, and he joggled Vickie out of her trance, pointed her toward the door, and they both left the building which Chet had laughingly referred to as the deli. She followed him out to the parking lot in slow, sluggish steps, as if she were wearing cinderblocks on her feet instead of high heels. The inside of her mouth was gooey, and she felt sick to her stomach in the aftershock of what she had just seen. Her head spun like a roulette wheel.
"You all right?" Chet asked, stopping in front of the car. "You're as white as a ghost."
"I almost threw up in there. It was awful. How can you stand being in that place without puking?"
"It takes getting used to. Just put it out of your mind; don't think about it. Think about baby bunny rabbits and teddy bears."
Vickie swallowed and tried to smile.
By the time they got to Vermont Avenue, she felt better, though she could never quite get the images of those dead faces out of her mind.
They took up their positions, and Vickie stood on her dark corner of Vermont and K, anticipating another wasted night. It was more than obvious now that a good percentage of the prostitutes were keeping off the streets. News of the seventh murder victim was out. Panic on the block had set in. Fear was in the air. Most of the time, she found herself to be the only person on the street. Only a few hookers passed her during the night, the few who weren't running scared, the scattered handful of girls who wouldn't be thwarted by fear. They stalked the streets as though they were predatory beasts, looking for meat, the hunger in their eyes, the look of stubborn want stamped onto their painted faces. The fact that their lives were in jeopardy wouldn't stop them from searching. And by the looks of things, that's all they would do: search. Search but not find. There didn't seem to be a single John on the block. The Electrocutionist had rendered the red light district a No Man's Land. No John in his right mind was so sex-desperate that he would venture into the killing ground of a mass murderer.
The night passed quickly for Vickie. Though she stood at her post under the streetlight almost without moving, dozens of thoughts came to her mind and made time fly. It appeared that for every night that went by, the morning would bring another body. It was frightening to think that somewhere in the depths of the city lurked a killer. And not just an ordinary killer, but the most devastating killer D.C. had ever known. The Electrocutionist had become a household word. The newspapers accused the police of being incompetent, and since the chief source of news to the populace was the newspapers, eight hundred thousand subscribers were also accusing the police. Pressure was apparent everywhere. The atmosphere of the city was like a boiler on the verge of exploding. Horror held dominion over everything, and no girl in Washington felt safe. All this because of one man.
Next, Vickie's thought turned to herself. There she was, one girl, standing in the middle of it, waiting for that same man who had sent Washington into a tailspin of terror. One girl against one man. She didn't ask herself why this time. Her quarrel with Chet had answered that. If The Electrocutionist were caught, there was a good possibility that she would be part of it. So at least there would be some fulfillment for her, if only a thread. The fear didn't bother her; she had been scared before; she could .handle that. Her hatred of The Electrocutionist stepped above her fear. She knew it was the right thing to do. Earlier, what Chet had told her had been correct: even though she wasn't obliged to anyone to help, it was her duty as a human being to volunteer for this. The lab photos of Diane Slezak and the abominable recollection of the remains of Mary Elizabeth Baker had convinced her of that. Maybe Chet's existential hogwash wasn't hogwash after all. She had little to gain personally by assisting the police, but she could not see the link between personal desires and selfishness. A couple of hundred bucks per week for laying her life on the line didn't bother anymore. She thought perhaps that getting so little for so much risk was, in itself, a genuine personal achievement, like the kind Chet had mentioned. She wanted meaning in her life, and doing whatever she could to stop a psychopath might effectuate the kind of meaning she was looking for.
But still, something was missing. She felt hollow inside, empty, and she knew something was wrong. It took her several moments to realize what caused this sudden sense of despair.
She was lonely.
Now, she found herself alone in the world. Losing Jennifer had been bad enough, but now she had lost Steve too, the only man who ever loved her, the only person who offered any promise for happiness. Now, she had no one. But she had nobody to blame but herself. Chet had also been right about Steve's leaving her. Blaming the incident on the police was a bogus rationalization. Steve had left because he had discovered the truth. And truth is absolute; it never dies, and it never fades away. It's always there, and it always would be whether she was masquerading as a hooker for the cops or not. The truth had caught up with her, and now she was paying for it. It was a heavy price, but she realized she had it coming all along. Steve would have found out someday; she couldn't keep it from him forever. She should have told him in the beginning, and if he loved her the way she loved him, it wouldn't have made any difference. Because love, true love, is unrestricted and absolute also. The loneliness in her life was her own fault because she had backed out on her part of the deal. She had kept the truth out of her love for Steve.
She knew it would take time to get over, but that was one thing she had plenty of.
Time.
EIGHT
"The prisoner is ready in the interrogation room, sir," the dark, young sergeant said in his own tongue when the colonel entered the prison blockhouse.
The colonel nodded sternly, and without saying anything, he pointed to the door which led downstairs. The sergeant rushed to it, unsnapping his keys from his garrison belt and unlocking the iron-framed door, all in a single motion of speed and obedience. The colonel nodded again, and then passed through the doorway and descended a flight of stone steps, which shimmered like oil from unnumbered layers of shiny, gray paint. The military click of his heels echoed and bounced off the cinderblock walls of the corridor as he approached the last door on the left. This was the underground floor of the prison; it consisted of four cramped rooms in which subversives were interrogated, per se. Of course, that was a joke in itself. The prisoners were never interrogated—they were tortured. If the colonel found them guilty of their alleged charges, he would judge the extent of their guilt, punish them in his own way, and send them to cells upstairs where they would rot out their prison sentences, which, incidentally, were also designated by the colonel. And if a given prisoner's crime was a serious enough offense against the state, that prisoner would be executed. That job, too, was handled by the colonel.
The executions had slackened off since the power change. So had the entire routine in general. He remembered not too long ago when the prison was constantly filled to its 616-person capacity. Sometimes they would have to execute prisoners solely to make more room for others. And when the overcrowding got to be a real problem, they would have to cut rations and increase the time of the prisoners' work detail. Before long, there would be plenty of vacancies from those who had starved, and from the ones who had dropped dead from long hours in the sun with no rest. But that had been a long time ago, when the colonel wasn't a colonel, before the overthrow. In those days, his work had been cut out for him. It wasn't easy, but he enjoyed it. But when the revolution had taken place, everything had changed. The original commander of the prison had been shot, along with all high-ranking officers of the old regime. And suddenly, he was the new commander, promoted to the rank of colonel, and recognized as an important official in the new government. So now, even though the new government had toned down their treatment of political prisoners, his devotion to the party had paid off. Now, he held the reins.
That day, there were only twenty-five or so prisoners upstairs. Arrests were rare; the police no longer enjoyed the freedoms of old; they could not longer do anything they wanted. So whenever a serious offender was brought in, it was almost a treat. It had been weeks since the last execution. He longed for it, and even before he had gone into the interrogation room to see the prisoner, he knew it would end with an execution.
From his own key ring, he singled out the proper blank and opened the door. Instantly, he was hit with the dense stench of sweat, urine, and vomit, the human odors which he had grown quite accustomed to from so many years of working at this place. A single, unshaded lightbulb dangled from the ceiling, filling the small, windowless room with shafts of hot illumination. To-his right rested the bare, wooden platform, equipped with metal fetters for the hands and feet, where the prisoners could be raped and punished. A human ghostshape had been embedded in the wood, forming a spread-armed, spread-eagled outline from the perspiration of countless hundreds of occupants. Beside the platform, there was a table which contained a host of instruments used for torture: clubs, glass rods, razors, thumbscrews, nylon cords, a mallet, pliers for removing nails and pulling teeth, boltcutters for clipping fingers and toes, lock needles, a blowtorch, and a soldering iron. They were not lacking the means for punishment here. A metal drug cabinet with glass windows sat in the far corner. Its contents provided for the more sophisticated forms of torture. They had drugs which would induce temporary or permanent psychosis, cause blindness and internal bleeding, produce embolisms .and infections like hepatitis and peritonitis, and any other mode of physical or psychological horror they might want to effect. For the few occasions when they would have to really interrogate a prisoner, there was a well-stocked supply of truth serums at their disposal. They had used sodium pentothal for that purpose for the longest time. But recently the Americans had perfected another truth serum called sodium amytal which brought about superior results. The drug completely erased all mental blocks the prisoner might have, forcing him against his will to reveal anything they wanted to know. So, the supply of sodium pentothal was large from disuse. But it still had its uses in producing quick unconsciousness. They even had a small refrigerator for the drugs which needed to be kept cool. Truly, the room was a modern chamber of horrors.
The vat was on the other side of the room.
The prisoner had been chained to the wall in the far corner of the room, the space mockingly referred to as the waiting area. The colonel did not show his excitement; the prisoner was a girl, young and thin, the kind he liked so much. The shackles had been mounted on the floor, but only her wrists were locked up. That way she could not stand up.
He stood with the light behind him, feet apart, arms angled at the elbows, hands on hips, and he looked down at her like an angry god. His shadow fell out in front of him, making him appear as a military giant, and it ran along the floor and up the wall so to cover her completely. He could hear her desperate pants and the race of her heart. Weedlike strands of hair hung in front of her face, but he could still see her eyes, wide open, never blinking, the eyes which unveiled the fear in her mind.
"You are charged with political subversion," the colonel said in monotone. "You have advocated overthrow of the government, and that makes you a traitor. We have found you guilty of this charge."
She shook her head back and forth in a wild plea of innocence.
The colonel's face remained emotionless. "You have been sentenced to ninety days in prison. The sentence begins immediately. I will take you upstairs to your cell after you have bathed."
Her face flushed with relief, and she let out a long, grateful sigh, as if she had just been granted her salvation.
He unstrapped his belt holster and withdrew his pistol. With his other hand, he unlocked the iron cuffs on her wrists and ordered her to stand. He kept the pistol leveled at her chest, just in case she tried something, and he told her to remove her clothing. She pulled the soiled dress over her head and let it tumble to the floor, unashamed at her nakedness. His gunhand gestured her to move to the other side of the room. She glanced over there for a moment, hesitated, then did as he instructed.
He didn't consider any of the ghoulish instruments on the table; those were for his mindless subordinates. Personally, he didn't care for torture. Torture was distasteful and mundane, and he would only do it when he had to. That would not be necessary here. Though he received no pleasure in watching a prisoner get tortured to pulp, he did enjoy watching them die. He didn't know why this pleased him so. He thought that maybe the thrill derived from the feeling of absolute power, where he could dictate life and death as he pleased. It didn't matter why. The power was there, regardless.
