فصل هجدهم

CHAPTER 18

When the time came, Graham surprised both Crawford and Bloom. He seemed willing to meet Lounds halfway and his expression was affable beneath the cold blue eyes.

Being inside FBI headquarters had a salutary effect on Lounds’s manners. He was polite when he remembered to be, and he was quick and quiet with his equipment.

Graham balked only once: he flatly refused to let Lounds see Mrs. Leeds’s diary or any of the families’ private correspondence.

When the interview began, he answered Lounds’s questions in a civil tone. Both men consulted notes taken in conference with Dr. Bloom. The questions and answers were often rephrased.

Alan Bloom had found it difficult to scheme toward hurt. In the end, he simply laid out his theories about the Tooth Fairy. The others listened like karate students at an anatomy lecture.

Dr. Bloom said the Tooth Fairy’s acts and his letter indicated a projective delusional scheme which compensated for intolerable feelings of inadequacy. Smashing the mirrors tied these feelings to his appearance.

The killer’s objection to the name “Tooth Fairy” was grounded in the homosexual implications of the word “fairy.” Bloom believed he had an unconscious homosexual conflict, a terrible fear of being gay. Dr. Bloom’s opinion was reinforced by one curious observation at the Leeds house: fold marks and covered bloodstains indicated the Tooth Fairy put a pair of shorts on Charles Leeds after he was dead.

Dr. Bloom believed he did this to emphasize his lack of interest in Leeds.

The psychiatrist talked about the strong bonding of aggressive and sexual drives that occurs in sadists at a very early age.

The savage attacks aimed primarily at the women and performed in the presence of their families were clearly strikes at a maternal figure. Bloom, pacing, talking half to himself, called his subject “the child of a nightmare.” Crawford’s eyelids drooped at the compassion in his voice.

In the interview with Lounds, Graham made statements no investigator would make and no straight newspaper would credit.

He speculated that the Tooth Fairy was ugly, impotent with persons of the opposite sex, and he claimed falsely that the killer had sexually molested his male victims. Graham said that the Tooth Fairy doubtless was the laughingstock of his acquaintances and the product of an incestuous home.

He emphasized that the Tooth Fairy obviously was not as intelligent as Hannibal Lecter. He promised to provide the Tattler with more observations and insights about the killer as they occurred to him. Many lawinforcement people disagreed with him, he said, but as long as he was heading the investigation, the Tattler could count on getting the straight stuff from him.

Lounds took a lot of pictures.

The key shot was taken in Graham’s “Washington hideaway,” an apartment he had “borrowed to use until he squashed the Fairy.” It was the only place where he could “find solitude” in the “carnival atmosphere” of the investigation.

The photograph showed Graham in a bathrobe at a desk, studying late into the night. He was poring over a grotesque “artist’s conception” of “the Fairy.” Behind him a slice of the floodlit Capitol dome could be seen through the window. Most importantly, in the lowerleft corner of the window, blurred but readable, was the sign of a popular motel across the street.

The Tooth Fairy could find the apartment if he wanted to.

At FBI headquarters, Graham was photographed in front of a mass spectrometer. It had nothing to do with the case, but Lounds thought it looked impressive.

Graham even consented to have his picture taken with Lounds interviewing him. They did it in front of the vast gun racks in Firearms and Toolmarks. Lounds held a ninemillimeter automatic of the same type as the Tooth Fairy’s weapon. Graham pointed to the homemade silencer, fashioned from a length of televisionantenna mast.

Dr. Bloom was surprised to see Graham put a comradely hand on Lounds’s shoulder just before Crawford clicked the shutter.

The interview and pictures were set to appear in the Tattler published the next day, Monday, August 11. As soon as he had the material, Lounds left for Chicago. He said he wanted to supervise the layout himself. He made arrangements to meet Crawford on Tuesday afternoon five blocks from the trap.

Starting Tuesday, when the Tattler became generally available, two traps would be baited for the monster.

Graham would go each evening to his “temporary residence” shown in the Tattler picture.

A coded personal notice in the same issue invited the Tooth Fairy to a mail drop in Annapolis watched around the clock. If he were suspicious of the mail drop, he might think the effort to catch him was concentrated there. Then Graham would be a more appealling target, the FBI reasoned.

Florida authorities provided a stillwatch at Sugarloaf Key.

There was an air of dissatisfaction among the hunters - two major stakeouts took manpower that could be used elsewhere, and Graham’s presence at the trap each night would limit his movement to the Washington area.

Though Crawford’s judgment told him this was the best move, the whole procedure was too passive for his taste. He felt they were playing games with themselves in the dark of the moon with less than two weeks to go before it rose full again.

Sunday and Monday passed in curiously jerky time. The minutes dragged and the hours flew.

Spurgen, chief SWAT instructor at Quantico, circled the apartment block on Monday afternoon. Graham rode beside him. Crawford was in the back seat.

“The pedestrian traffic falls off around sevenfifteen. Everybody’s settled in for dinner,” Spurgen said. With his wiry, compact body and his baseball cap tipped back on his head, he looked like an infielder. “Give us a toot on the clear band tomorrow night when you cross the B&O railroad tracks. You ought to try to make it about eightthirty, eightforty or so.” He pulled into the apartment parking lot. “This setup ain’t heaven, but it could be worse. You’ll park here tomorrow night. We’ll change the space you use every night after that, but it’ll always be on this side. It’s seventyfive yards to the apartment entrance. Let’s walk it.” Spurgen, short and bandylegged, went ahead of Graham and Crawford.

He’s looking for places where he could get the bad hop, Graham thought.

“The walk is probably where it’ll happen, if it happens,” the SWAT leader said. “See, from here the direct line from your car to the entrance, the natural route, is across the center of the lot. It’s as far as you can get from the line of cars that are here all day. He’ll have to come across open asphalt to get close. How well do you hear?” “Pretty well,” Graham said. “Damn well on this parking lot.”

Spurgen looked for something in Graham’s face, found nothing he could recognize.

He stopped in the middle of the lot. “We’re reducing the wattage on these streetlights a little to make it tougher on a rifleman.”

“Tougher on your people too,” Crawford said.

“Two of ours have Startron night scopes,” Spurgen said. “I’ve got some clear spray I’ll ask you to use on your suit jackets, Will. By the way, I don’t care how hot it is, you will wear body armor each and every time. Correct?” “Yes.”

“What is it?”

“It’s Kevlar - what, Jack? - Second Chance?”

“Second Chance,” Crawford said.

“It’s pretty likely he’ll come up to you, probably from behind, or he may figure on meeting you and then turning around to shoot when he’s passed you,” Spurgen said. “Seven times he’s gone for the head shot, right? He’s seen that work. He’ll do it with you too if you give him the time. Don’t give him the time. After I show you a couple of things in the lobby and the flop, let’s go to the range. Can you do that?” “He can do that,” Crawford said.

Spurgen was high priest on the range. He made Graham wear earplugs under the earmuffs and flashed targets at him from every angle. He was relieved to see that Graham did not carry the regulation .38, but he worried about the flash from the ported barrel. They worked for two hours. The man insisted on checking the cylinder crane and cylinder latch screws on Graham’s .44 when he had finished firing.

Graham showered and changed clothes to get the smell of gunsmoke off him before he drove to the bay for his last free night with Molly and Willy.

He took his wife and stepson to the grocery store after dinner and made a considerable todo over selecting melons. He made sure they bought plenty of groceries - the old Tattler was still on the racks beside the checkout stands and he hoped Molly would not see the new issue coming in the morning. He didn’t want to tell her what was happening.

When she asked him what he wanted for dinner in the coming week, he had to say he’d be away, that he was going back to Birmingham. It was the first real lie he had ever told her and telling it made him feel as greasy as old currency.

He watched her in the aisles: Molly, his pretty baseball wife, with her ceaseless vigilance for lumps, her insistence on quarterly medical checkups for him and Willy, her controlled fear of the dark; her hardbought knowledge that time is luck. She knew the value of their days. She could hold a moment by its stem. She had taught him to relish.

Pachelbel’s Canon filled the sundrowned room where thev learned each other and there was the exhilaration too big to hold and even then the fear flickered across him like an osprey’s shadow: this is too good to live for long.

Molly switched her bag often from shoulder to shoulder in the grocery aisles, as though the gun in it weighed much more than its nineteen ounces.

Graham would have been offended had he heard the ugly thing he mumbled to the melons: “I have to put that bastard in a rubber sack, that’s all. I have to do that.” Variously weighted with lies, guns, and groceries, the three of them were a small and solemn troop.

Molly smelled a rat. She and Graham did not speak after the lights were out. Molly dreamed of heavy crazy footsteps coming in a house of changing rooms.