Blood Music Read online

  Blood Music

  A T H R I L L E R

  Jessie Prichard Hunter

  Dedication

  To my mother, Lois Hartley

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from The Green Muse by Jessie Prichard Hunter

  Excerpt from The Silent Girls by Eric Rickstad

  About the Author

  Also by Jessie Prichard Hunter

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  The air was very still. If you sang a “fa,” say, in the key of A—that would be a D—if you sang a D it would simply hang there on the air, without an echo, for as long as it took to slide the knife in.

  The young woman was kneeling in the grass with her back to the man, playing with a baby. The baby was just learning to walk. The man couldn’t tell whether it was a boy baby or a girl baby. It would walk two or three steps and fall down, on its butt, on its knees. The young woman was laughing.

  The man would play a game: If the woman turned around and saw him he would kill her. Not do what he usually did—not with the baby there—but just use the knife. If she didn’t turn around he wouldn’t kill her.

  He looked at his watch. If it was a game there had to be rules; there had to be a time limit. The woman was playing with the baby about thirty feet away from the manicured hedge around the president’s house. This was a secluded part of the campus, overlooking the river. A lot of students didn’t even know about it. Even though it was one of those March days that are an early taste of spring to come, there weren’t any young couples half-hidden in the grass or looking out at Manhattan across the river. Ten forty-eight. If the woman didn’t turn around and see him in three minutes he wouldn’t kill her.

  The woman turned her head. He could see the slope of her cheekbone, her downturned mouth. Her face was calm but her mouth turned down anyway, she had a pout like somebody, some old black-and-white actress. She seemed to be listening. The knife handle was sweaty; he didn’t like that. He couldn’t afford to lose his grip.

  The baby mewed like a cat and the woman turned away without seeing him. Blond hair. He’d always loved blond hair. An image rose in his mind: blond hair matted with blood. Long blond hair matted with blood.

  The Circle Line tour boat was going by, sightseers on the river. Why had he thought of that? It seemed almost like a memory, but he had no such memory. Not of hair just that color. The memory seemed sepia-tinted. The woman was pointing at the Circle Line, showing it to the baby. The skyline of Manhattan shimmered like a mirage in the morning sun. Two minutes and forty seconds to go.

  The baby was looking at something, it had picked up a rock. It looked at it as though it had never seen such a thing in its life. For some reason that struck the man as funny. He wiped the handle of the knife along his pants leg while he laughed silently, holding the blade carefully so he wouldn’t cut himself. He couldn’t bear the sight of his own blood.

  Two minutes and fifteen seconds. The baby was sitting quietly, looking at its rock. The Circle Line was gone. The woman was looking out toward the water, at the sunlight shimmering on the water. He could image what she looked like full-face, the pouty mouth.

  Bloody blond hair matted across an open mouth. He roused himself, he was dreaming under the warm sun. One minute and forty-two seconds. He saw the woman’s back tense, a fine light shiver like a ripple across the coat of an animal. She knew somebody was watching her. It was funny how women knew. Stare at them long enough and they always know it, as if sight were a weapon, a burning beam.

  The woman reached out and touched the baby, a light caress down its back. To make sure it was okay. One minute five seconds. The baby looked up and chortled: a butterfly. The woman’s stiff back relaxed—a butterfly. Small and yellow, they were called cabbage butterflies. The Finnish say that if the first butterfly of the season is yellow that means it’s going to be a good summer. He remembered that from books he’d read as a child, they were called the Moomintroll books. One minute even.

  The butterfly fluttered above the baby’s head. Maybe it was the white ones that were called cabbage butterflies. He didn’t know what the yellow ones were called. Bette Davis. A mouth like Bette Davis’s.

  The baby was delighted. The man could see part of the woman’s face again, the fine line of her nose, her mouth widening in a smile as she looked from the baby to the butterfly and back to the baby. He couldn’t see what color her eyes were; he wondered what color her eyes were.

  One blood-spattered blue eye, staring at the low ceiling. Forty-five seconds. The woman turned her head; she saw him. She had a pretty face.

  The man tightened the muscles around his jaw: a smile. Her own smile was like the beat of a butterfly’s wing, tenuous, afraid. Then broader, because she was with the baby and she expected indulgence. He bared his teeth. He hoped that was an indulgent smile. He would have liked to spring, like a leopard, to show her his true essence. To come at her like a bolt of clawed lightning out of the clear blue sky.

  Her eyes were blue. He walked toward her; what would be the last thing that she saw? “Little bookus,” she was saying to the baby. She had already forgotten him. “Little bookus.” The leaves of the tree above her head, in a pattern against the sky, a white cloud. That would be the last thing.

  He walked behind her and she didn’t see the knife in his hand. It was so easy. He jerked her head back so fast she didn’t have time to cry out, and he slit her throat. The green leaves, a white cloud.

  The blood flew out in a perfect arc and he laughed aloud. The baby watched but made no sound. That was good. That had been a risk.

  The woman gurgled, once. He felt it, like always, like love. There was blood in her blue eyes. Just that one small sound, a trapped cry, an unfinished note. He walked away without looking back. When he got a little way away he started to whistle.

  The baby was looking at its mother. The butterfly had come back. The baby put out a tiny hand. The butterfly dipped for a moment to the blood at the woman’s neck. The baby reached up to touch the butterfly; its hand was covered with blood. The baby laughed. The melody, hanging on the air without an echo, of Schubert’s Quartetsatz.

  2

  Hoboken is haunted by its waterfront. Forty years
ago the waterfront breathed like an anthill, it heaved and pulsated with working men. The boys went off to World War II from the Hoboken waterfront, and to its dirty grandeur they came home. Marlon Brando filmed On the Waterfront here, down by the Hudson River, by the Maxwell House plant. The Maxwell House sign is famous. It can be seen from across the water: GOOD TO THE LAST DROP.

  Hoboken is without grace; it is a very friendly dog with mange. It is the proud hometown of Frank Sinatra. All the Italian restaurants (and there are many) boast little shrines to Frankie, walls full of pictures signed, “To my favorite chef.” The two cappuccino cafés on Washington Street play Sinatra music all the time. Hoboken is made up largely of three- and four-story tenement row houses; there is always garbage in the street. West of Washington the streets have flowery names: Bloomfield, Garden, Park. Where the old Italians and young couples from across the river give way to Hispanics and Indians and blacks, where the one project is, the streets have presidents’ names: Jefferson, Madison, Monroe.

  The tiny parks are full of dog droppings. There are many, many children and new babies. For two weeks in April the short oval poplar trees bloom, and the town is almost pretty. White flowers cover the trees like a mist, and then they fall off and blow through the streets, collecting in milky puddles in the gutters.

  The whole spread of the Manhattan skyline lies across the river from Hoboken, a gentle, taunting, undulating curve of beauty and success. Stevens Institute of Technology lies along a promontory above the river. Couples come to Castle Point Overlook on the weekends, often with baby carriages. They can see the World Trade Centers at Battery Park, and all the way south to the Verrazano Bridge, which shimmers like distant medieval battlements. From farther up the campus they can see north to the George Washington Bridge.

  In spring, when the temperature sometimes goes to ninety, people come out of their apartments like prairie dogs; they head up to Stevens and lie on the grass in their bathing suits, watching tour boats from the Circle Line go by.

  Many of the Stevens students live in dorms on campus or in the beautiful Victorian homes that line the streets directly around the grounds. These the college has converted into frat houses. There are great hundred-year-old stone houses with bedrooms enough for twelve children. There are stone towers, flights of stone steps up to front doors, stone lions guarding the front doors, bay windows. Inside there are fancy moldings on the living room ceilings, and big, overheavy chandeliers.

  Zelly Wyche liked to go walking in that part of town, liked to look in the windows and think about other people’s lives. She and her husband, Pat, liked to take the baby up to the Stevens campus on the weekends and look at the river. Zelly had grown up on one of those streets, in her mother’s house, a great big rambling warren with five cherry trees in the backyard.

  One weekday morning in late April, Zelly was sitting at the dining room table reading The New York Times. She wished she were sitting at a table in a big, airy kitchen, looking out the windows at the fruit trees in the backyard. But there was no table in the kitchen, and no window, and no backyard. There wasn’t even a dining room; the table was in the living room, in front of the bookcases. Pat’s books, mostly. And she’d really rather be reading the Post; it was a rag but it was more fun than the Times. Pat had the Times delivered so Zelly could read it in the mornings the rare moments she wasn’t tending to the baby, but by afternoon she usually gave in and bought the Post.

  Today she would certainly buy the Post. WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN THE WEST VILLAGE, read the Times. The Post would have a screaming, satisfying headline: SLASHER STRIKES AGAIN! That was the fifth one. One of the murders had actually happened in Hoboken, fifteen minutes from the West Village by the PATH train. Zelly was sure it was the same killer.

  There had been five murders in four months: one in Hoboken, three in the Village, and one just below the Village, in SoHo. The one in Hoboken wasn’t the first, and it didn’t really seem to be the work of the same killer: the woman wasn’t raped. She was found knifed to death in broad daylight; her baby boy was found sitting next to her. The baby had blood on it. The Post had had a field day with that; if the baby hadn’t had blood on it the Post would never have covered a murder in New Jersey.

  The other four victims had been found with their throats slit and their bodies repeatedly stabbed, raped right before or right after they died. Even the Post was reticent on that point. All but one of the women had been blond. Even the Hoboken woman was blond. “Attractive,” as though that were a prerequisite for getting yourself killed.

  Zelly considered herself something of an expert on serial killers. The Son of Sam killings had happened in New York City in the seventies, when Zelly was twelve. That’s what started it for her. A postal worker in his twenties named David Berkowitz called himself Son of Sam and shot girls with long dark hair. Sometimes he couldn’t see properly and shot boys with long dark hair. He killed three people and left one woman paralyzed and one man with a steel plate in his head before the police caught him.

  Zelly followed every detail of the Son of Sam case as it developed. It wasn’t every day that a serial killer operated right across the river, with stories daily in the papers and reports nightly on the television news. Son of Sam even sent letters to Jimmy Breslin at the Daily News, vaguely poetic, terrifying maunderings that Zelly spent hours trying to decode.

  One night Zelly and her cousin went with his father to an apartment building in Forest Hills where his father worked as a doorman. They were going to pick up some things from an apartment where somebody had died, a chair and some books. Zelly waited in the car while her cousin and her uncle went upstairs to get the stuff. Sitting alone in the car under the streetlight, she realized that the street on which the car was parked was the very same street where Son of Sam had shot and killed a nineteen-year-old girl a month before. Zelly didn’t know how far away it had happened, two blocks or a mile or three doors down. She got a comb out of her purse and started to comb her long blond hair, thinking, sending a message to Sam: It’s blond, Sam, look if you’re out there, this is blond hair, it’s not dark at all, it’s light. She was scared to death. Lots of girls cut or dyed their hair that summer.

  From that time on, Zelly had found her avocation. The body in the wood, the vampire invisible among the daylight crowd, became her area of expertise, until by the time Pat met her she was a party-talk encyclopedia on the intricacies of the sociopath’s desires, the psychopath’s will.

  When Zelly had begun her reading, serial killers had still been called mass murderers. Now mass murderers were people who killed a lot of other people all at once, the way that man did down in Texas, aiming his gun at random but shifting the muzzle away and firing whenever he caught sight of a woman out of the corner of his eye. Serial killers usually killed women or little boys or teenagers—almost never fully grown men—and generally they raped or mutilated their victims. Zelly knew all about it, Dean Corll down in Houston—she couldn’t even think about that—John Wayne Gacy in Chicago, the Green River Killer in Seattle, still uncaught eleven years later.

  Son of Sam wasn’t like those; he was simple, elemental. He never touched the people he killed. But the West Village Slasher, as the papers were calling him, raped and he knifed. There hadn’t been any mutilations in these killings; Zelly thought of Dean Corll even though she didn’t want to. They found one victim with his penis gnawed almost in half; he was thirteen years old. When the Slasher killed he held the head back, exposing the jugular vein like an offering. And then he stabbed, eight wounds, five wounds, eighteen. Morton Street, Greenwich, the West Side Highway.

  The first of the Slasher murders had occurred back in January. The woman had been twenty-two, of Riverside in the Bronx, and she was supposed to meet some friends at a surprisingly elegant Spanish restaurant down near the old docks on the icy, run-down riverfront. Her body was found one block over and two blocks in, next to a flight of iron steps leading down to a deserted basement in an otherwise occupied building; the steps w
ere covered with debris—black plastic garbage bags and broken bottles and used condoms—and the frayed rope that hung across the entrance had been neatly cut. The woman’s face was frozen in a puddle of shiny, blood-scummed water; the body had to be pried free with ice picks.

  The second victim was found on Morton Street in late February, many blocks over and down, in an entirely safe part of the neighborhood. Her body lay naked inside the narrow vestibule of her apartment building, her hand clutching a set of bloody keys. Eighteen years old, and she’d arrived in the city less than a year ago to study art at Parsons. The papers love a murder like that one.

  The third was the March murder on the Stevens campus. Few of the newspaper articles included this one in their lists of the killings. She’d been twenty-six, just two years younger than Zelly.

  In the first week of April there was a killing in SoHo, just south of the West Village, in which the victim had had brown hair. She had been murdered the same way, raped and then knifed, and left half-clothed next to a construction Dumpster. She had been cut with particular ferocity. Thirty-four years old, older than the others. Not blond, not young enough. The papers had hesitated: she wasn’t the Slasher’s type. But Zelly had known immediately that she was a Slasher victim. And now Cheryl Nassent, only three weeks after the last killing, proving Zelly right; why would he kill again so soon, if not to make up for his mistake?

  Zelly knew all the victims’ names. The first was Belinda Boston, a beautiful name; she was the worst for Zelly, who could not get out of her mind the image she had seen on television, police workers bundled against the January cold, wielding long-handled ice picks and talking to one another as they worked. The second was Elizabeth Moscineska, a strange name, Zelly thought, for Nebraska. Rosalie Howard on the Stevens campus; then Linda Swados, damned by the press for dying too dark and too old, as though she had cheated a more deserving young blonde out of a particularly American death. Of course none of the women resembled the others in the least, their hair ranging from Midwestern corn-colored to ash. And plain brown for Linda. But to the killer they had probably all been the same woman.