Midnight Read

The last page was shorter than I had expected.

It was a single sheet, pale and brittle, folded once down the middle and tucked into the back cover of the folder like a letter into a book. The paper had yellowed along the crease. One corner was stained brown, in a pattern that might have been coffee and might have been something else. Across the center, in red ink, in a hand that bore almost no resemblance to the calm black script of the preceding pages, someone had written three lines.

The letters were large and hard and slanted forward. They had been pressed into the paper so firmly that the nib had torn it in two places. I could see where the writer had paused, and where the ink had pooled, and where, midway through the last word, the pen had skidded off the line in a long ragged tail, as though its owner had been interrupted, or had not wished to stop.

They did not die of natural causes.

They did not kill themselves.

Someone is behind this.

Beneath, in smaller letters, two initials. M. K.

I sat looking at it for the better part of a minute.

Leo had gone. He had left at about half past eleven, when I told him, quietly, that I would like to read the rest of the folder alone, and he had looked at me for a long moment, nodded, and said, "I'll leave the lamp on." He had taken his cigar and his coat and gone down to the squad room to wait. There was no one else on the floor. It was a quarter to midnight in the dead of a wet August, and the new office they had given me, a narrow room on the fourth floor with a window that looked out on a brick wall, was as quiet as a church.

The air-conditioning hummed. The desk lamp threw a bright round pool onto the blotter. Outside the glass the rain ticked.

I took off my spectacles, wiped them, and put them on again.

Right, I thought. Let us see.

…

It took me four hours.

I should explain that I am not a pathologist. I am a psychologist, which is a different thing, a lesser thing in the eyes of the pathologists, who regard us as a sort of cheerful guesser at the margins of their trade. I can read a slide. I can follow a toxicology report. I can tell the difference between a bruise and a lividity mark, as long as no one is watching me do it. But I read the rest of Magnus Kane's folder that night with a fierce, narrow, plodding concentration that I have not brought to anything since my doctoral examination, with a medical dictionary open at my elbow and a pot of tea going cold at my left hand.

I will spare you most of it.

There were the autopsy diagrams, which I have described. There were the lab sheets, pages of numbers in tight columns, with Magnus's pencil marks in the margin. There were three envelopes of glass slides, each labeled in the same firm hand, each containing a thin slice of a dead person's heart stained pink and purple like the petals of some unwholesome flower. There was a letter to a laboratory in Baltimore, never sent. There was a draft of a paper whose title page read Catecholamine-Mediated Myocardial Injury in Sudden Death Under Extreme Emotional Stress: Three Cases. The abstract had been crossed out so many times that the paper beneath it had worn thin.

And there were the highlights.

Magnus Kane had gone through the blood work of each victim with a yellow marker, and had singled out three lines in each. Epinephrine. Norepinephrine. Dopamine. The three catecholamines, the body's alarm bells. Beside every figure he had written, in the margin, the maximum value recorded in the living human body under conditions of extreme stress, and then, in red, the figure for the dead.

I laid the pages side by side.

For Arnold Kowalski, thirty times the ceiling. For Daisy Mallory, twenty-five.

I sat back.

You will forgive me if I say that I had not understood it until that moment. I had read the numbers. I had followed the logic. But numbers on a page are not a thing one understands; they are a thing one is told. What I understood, at that instant, was the meaning of thirty. It meant that Arnold Kowalski's body, in the last hour of his life, had been flooded with more of its own alarm chemistry than a man can produce in the worst terror of a lifetime. It meant that every cell of him had been screaming. It meant that the thing which killed him had not been a blow, or a poison, or a stranger in the room.

It had been him.

…

I shut my eyes.

It is a technique I use when a problem will not resolve. I stop looking at it, and I let the problem look at me. I sat in the lamplight in the dead of the night with my hands on my knees and my eyes closed, and I let the three deaths come, one at a time, and walk through the room.

A man alone in a locked bedroom. He wakes. He is lying in a safe, bolted room in a house with three layers of security. He lies there. And then, slowly, over the course of some minutes, something begins to happen. I did not know what. A sound. A shape. A conviction, seeping up from the bottom of the mind, that he is not alone. That the walls are closer than they were. That the door has been welded shut. That there is no way out. His heart begins to race, pushing blood faster through a body that wants to run, and cannot, because the only exit is the one he has locked himself. The adrenaline surges. The pupils dilate. The skin goes cold. He claws at the wall, four deep grooves, a man trying to dig his way out of the one place he had believed to be safe.

And then, at the end of thirty minutes, the muscle of his heart, soaked in its own panic, seizes.

I opened my eyes.

A woman in a bath. She wakes up warm, in a shallow pool, unable to move her arms. Not paralysis; terror. Her body has simply folded. She lies there with her ears under the water and hears her own breath, loud as a bellows, and every muscle will not respond, and she knows she is drowning in a bath that would not reach her ears. She cannot lift her head. And the adrenaline pours.

A man on a ledge. Gripping. Hanging. Dangling over a long drop by ten fingers that tear. He does not want to die. He wants, with every cell, to live, and the only thing in the world is the lip of a wall under his nails. His heart is a trip-hammer. He holds on for ninety seconds, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, until his body gives out and lets go.

Three rooms.

I reached for the pen.

I wrote nothing at first. I only sat holding it, and then, with great care, I began to draw. A bedroom. A bathtub. A window. And between them, with a thin black line, a connection that had nothing to do with geometry.

Kowalski: trapped, with no exit.

Mallory: helpless, unable to act.

Hensley: hanging, with no ground.

Three men and women. Three deaths. Three different fears.

Not one fear. Three.

"They aren't copies," I said aloud.

The room was empty. My voice sounded odd in it, flat and hollow.

"They aren't copies of one another. Every one of them was tailored."

…

I stood up.

I walked to the window and looked at the brick wall and the rain running down it in dark glistening threads. My heart was beating faster than it should have. I put two fingers on my wrist, from habit, and counted: eighty-eight. A good deal for a man standing still.

Because the thing I had arrived at was not a theory. It was a method. And it frightened me in a way that no ordinary murderer ever had.

A murderer with a knife is a simple creature. He is in a hurry. He is clumsy, afraid, moved by ordinary hatreds. He leaves a mess behind him, and the mess can be read. But whoever had done this had not been in a hurry. Whoever had done this had chosen each victim as a jeweler chooses a stone. He had studied them. He had found out, by some means I could not imagine, what each of them feared most in the world: the one terror, buried since childhood, that sat at the foundation of the personality like a stone at the bottom of a well. Kowalski, a man who lived in fortresses, who feared the loss of every exit. Mallory, who had made her fortune from other people's helplessness. Hensley, who had spent his life dangling over consequences.

Then he had built a room.

Not a real room. A room made of terror: a constructed space in which each person would find the walls closing in around his or her own particular dread. He had put them inside it. And he had let the body do the rest.

No knife. No gun. No poison, in the sense that a coroner understands the word. He had simply arranged for a human being to be frightened to death.

I leaned my forehead against the cool glass.

He doesn't kill them, I thought. He designs a place where they kill themselves.

It was a horrible idea. It was also, in its way, a work of extraordinary elegance. Magnus Kane had seen it before I did; he had seen it, and had understood that if he said it aloud nobody would believe him. A man cannot be charged with scaring someone to death. Not unless he leaves the knife on the floor.

Why so clean?

That was the question he had written in red ink. And the answer, I thought, was that the cleanness was the point. The killer wanted his work to look like nothing. A heart attack. A slip in the tub. A jump from a window. He wanted the world to say natural causes, and to go on saying it, and to send the bodies to the earth with its blessing.

He wanted to be invisible.

And I had, I thought with a lurch, been invisible in his service for three months.

…

I do not know how long I stood at the window.

When I turned, the folder was still open on the blotter, with its cargo of dead faces. The lamp had begun to flicker. The tea had grown a skin. I looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was ten minutes to four.

And I heard, at the door of my office, a knock.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

It was not a loud one. It was three flat, measured raps, dry and unhurried, on the pebbled glass of the door. They came in quick succession, with no rhythm to speak of. Someone who wanted to be heard but not afraid of being.

I was across the room before I had decided to move.

I stood in the dark of the corridor wall, with my back to the cinderblock, and my hand, to my own surprise, closed around the steel pen in my pocket as though it were a weapon.

"Atticus?"

It was Leo's voice.

"Open up, Doc. I've got my hands full."