Red String

From six feet away it was a mass of paper.

From three it began to resolve. The wall was not covered at random. It had been laid out, I saw, with the same cold care as everything else in that place, in tiers and clusters, with an eye for proportion and a sense of the rhythm of the whole. Newspaper cuttings, yellowed and soft as cloth. Photocopied court records. A page torn from a school yearbook. A map of the city with a hundred small blue pins. A sheet of lined paper covered in a cramped, upright, careful handwriting, a list of dates and times and what looked like weights. A child's drawing, folded in four.

And across it all, binding it into a single structure, ran the string.

It was red wool. Plain, thick, ordinary wool, the sort that a grandmother might use to knit a scarf. It had been pulled from pin to pin in long taut lines, crossing and recrossing, so that the wall seemed caught in a vast red web. Some strands were thick and some thin. Some came together in knots. Some ran off the edge of the brick and out of sight.

I followed the nearest with my eye.

It began in the top left-hand corner, at a photograph I knew at once. A man on a bed, with his face turned to a wall.

Arnold Kowalski.

I looked at the top right. A woman in a bath.

Daisy Mallory.

Bottom left. A schoolmaster at the foot of a wall.

Paul Hensley.

Bottom right. A girl in a white dress, in the corner of a polished box.

Kaylee Rhodes.

The four of them stood at the corners of the display like the four gospels at the corners of an altarpiece, each in its own pool of pinned and annotated paper, each ringed with cuttings that seemed to me, as I scanned them, to be the very worst things that had ever been said about them. And from each of the four corners, red string ran out across the brick toward the center of the wall, drawn tight as a bowstring, thinning as it went, until all four lines met in a single place.

…

It was a photograph.

It was large, much larger than the others: a glossy color print perhaps two feet by three, mounted on foam board and pinned at all four corners with brass tacks. It had been taken at some kind of banquet. One could see the end of a long white-clothed table, and a glittering crowd of men and women in evening dress, and behind them, hung from a lofty ceiling, the swag of a great gold banner. At the center of it all, on a low stage, in the full beam of a spotlight, stood a young man.

He was perhaps thirty-three. He was tall, and fair, and beautifully made, in a dinner jacket cut so exactly to his shoulders that it seemed to have grown there. He had a wide and open face, a straight nose, a strong chin, and the kind of thick, burnished, carefully careless hair that is the work of a very good barber. He stood with one hand on the lectern and the other lifted in a gesture of modest thanks. A heavy glittering award, a crystal in the shape of a flame, was cradled in the crook of his arm.

He was smiling.

It was a wonderful smile. It was wide and warm and perfectly sincere, and it lit up the whole photograph, so that the crowd behind him seemed to lean toward it like plants. I looked at it for a long time. I have seldom seen a human face so perfectly adapted to being loved.

Around his neck, in red marker, someone had drawn a circle.

It was a single heavy line, drawn freehand, twice round, with the ends overlapping in a small hard loop at the throat. It sat on the white collar like a noose. The ink had run a little in the damp, so that thin red threads dribbled down the paper toward the lapel.

Under the photograph, on a strip of white tape, someone had written in neat black capitals:

DOMINIC HARGROVE.

…

I heard Leo come up behind me.

He did not speak at first. I heard his breath, heavy and rough. I heard a faint wet sound as he wiped his bloody hand on his coat. When at last he spoke, his voice had the flat, cautious tone of a man testing a floor.

"That's Hargrove."

"Yes."

"Dominic Hargrove." He said the name as one says the name of a church. "Chairman of Hargrove Capital. The guy that gave the money for the burn center at Temple. The kids' wing at Children's. He's on the bus, Doc. He's got his face on a bus." He moved closer. "That's the Philanthropist of the Year thing. That's the Union League. I was in that room. I mean—not in it. I was working the door."

"Were you?"

"We had a hundred uniforms out. He won the city's big prize." Leo's pupils had contracted to pinpoints in the dim light. "He's a goddamn saint. What does a guy like that—what the hell does this lunatic want with—" He stopped. "He's lost his mind."

"No," I said.

I stepped nearer to the wall, and looked at the face.

I will tell you honestly that I do not believe in intuition. I have a great respect for the human capacity to notice things without knowing it, and I have spent my life training that capacity to a fine edge; but I do not think there is anything magical in it. A hunch is only a rapid sum that the mind has not shown its working on. And what my mind did, in the light of that dying fire, with the smoke curling round my shoulders, was add up a column of small things.

The man in the photograph was smiling with his mouth.

That was all. It was a perfectly good mouth. It was wide, and warm, and the corners were turned up at precisely the right angle. But the muscle that raises the cheeks and crinkles the corners of the eyes, the one that cannot be commanded by the will, was still. The skin beside his eyes was smooth. The smile had been manufactured. It had been put on, as one puts on a coat.

He was holding the award in his left arm, tight against his ribs, as one holds something that might be taken.

His right thumb, on the lectern, was pressed hard against the side of the wood.

"Look at his hand," I said.

Leo looked.

"He's afraid," I said.

…

"Of what?"

"I don't know." I kept my eyes on the photograph. "But he is. It's there. He's standing in front of three hundred people, in a blaze of light, being given the highest honor in the city, and he's clutching it like a drowning man." I paused. "That isn't how a man looks who's pleased with himself. It's how a man looks who is waiting for something to fall."

"You can tell that from a photo?"

"I can tell it from a good one." I touched the edge of the board, very lightly, with the tip of one finger. "This is a very good one. It's been taken, I should say, by someone with a long lens and a great deal of patience. At the moment when the subject believes himself unobserved. At the moment of the greatest exposure. I don't think it was taken for the newspapers."

"Then who for?"

"For this." I moved my hand across the wall: the cuttings, the dates, the endless red lines. "He's been watching him. For months. Perhaps years. Look at the quantity. Look at the care. This isn't a victim in a row of victims. This is the center. Everything else was a rehearsal."

I turned to Leo.

"He's the next one. And he's hiding something."

"Hiding what?"

"I don't know yet." My voice was very quiet, and, I noticed, a little cold. It had gone cold of its own accord. "But I intend to find out."

…

"Captain."

It was Ryder, from the door.

He stood in the opening with the smoke swirling round his knees, a lanky dark figure in a respirator, holding in one hand a squat gray instrument like a child's toy gun. A small screen on its back threw a green light onto his face. His voice was careful. It was the voice of a man who has said I think I've found something very many times, and been wrong, and has learned to say it as quietly as possible.

"I've got a heat source," he said.

"Where?" said Leo.

"Up. It's—" He swung the little instrument in an arc, and I saw a pale smear of orange and red wriggle across the screen. "Above us. I'd say, uh. Forty feet. Forty-two. It's in the tower. It's body temperature, or close." He swallowed. "It's moving."

Silence.

We all looked up.

There was nothing to see. Above us the ceiling of the machine shop was a low rough sheet of corrugated steel, black with soot, hung with cables. Beyond it, through the dark, I could feel the bulk of the old church rising: the nave, the roof beams, and at the western end the tall square shaft of the tower, a hollow stone throat, a hundred and thirty feet of cold air and spiral stair. Very faintly, from far above, from the top of everything, there came a sound. It was a low single note, dull and cracked, swung out of the dark by the wind.

The bell.

…

There were two ways to go.

I saw them both with perfect clarity, as one sees a fork in a road at dusk. Neither of them was good. Neither of them was bad. They were simply two doors, and behind each, I knew, stood a different version of the night.

The first was the obvious one. It was the thing that every instinct in my body, every cell, was clamoring for. A man was in that tower. A man with a body temperature, in the dark, moving. The man who had built the machine that killed a girl in an elevator. The man who had written to me, in his courteous, rasping, metallic voice, and called me his successor. He was forty feet above my head. If I went up the stairs now, fast, with the tactical team at my back, I might stand face to face with him within three minutes.

And the second was the sensible one. I knew that too. I knew that we stood in a room that had been made, with enormous care, to destroy itself the moment it was entered. I knew that the fire was spreading, that the racks were smoldering, that every sheet of paper on that wall was a piece of testimony which might be gone in an hour. I knew that the notebook on the table, and the forty ampoules in their straw, and the strings of red wool, were all that stood between us and a man who could not be touched. I knew that if I ran up the tower after a shadow, I might lose the room. And that the shadow had been, perhaps, exactly what he wanted.

He wants me to chase him.

I thought it very clearly, in so many words.

I looked at Leo, and Leo looked at me. I saw in his face that he had thought the same. His mouth was a hard flat line. His bloody hand opened and closed at his side.

And above us, in the dark, the bell rang once.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

A heat signature is moving through the tower, forty feet above you. Behind you, the wall of red wool is the only map of the killer's mind you have ever seen, and the fire in the racks is creeping toward it. The man who wants to be chased is waiting at the top of the stairs.