Chapter 6
After Bob had left, after the sound of the car had faded away in the distance, Stan stood alone in the silence of the room, finished his cigarette and crushed it in an ashtray.
Bob has said, "You're a lazy sonofabitch."
He'd said it half-jokingly, but was it the truth?
In the past few years he'd had at least half a dozen jobs. There had always been something to end every one of them. His last job, as a laborer with the Ajax Chemical Company, had lasted less than a year. The work had been hard and mostly outside-freezing in the winter and sweating in the summer.
When they'd laid him off because of a curtailment due to lack of sales, he'd tried only halfheartedly to find another job. This was a bad time of the year to find' employment and he'd been without work for two months. Most of those two months he'd spent in the house, simply reading, eating, sleeping or lying in the cot by the window and watching the snow fall. Was he lazy?
Maybe. But maybe he had a reason to be lazy. He wasn't like Bob-he didn't have a wife and four kids to support. He didn't have a mortgage and he didn't have car payments. The house had been built by his father, so there never had been a mortgage on it.
His car-five years old, but still in good condition-had been paid for in cash. He didn't need many clothes and his largest expenditure was the food he ate. He had calculated recently-he had enough money in the bank to buy enough food to last four months.
Was he lazy? Maybe. But maybe it was because he had the opportunity to be lazy. Most men didn't.
He wandered into the kitchen and saw the two glasses on the table. Ellen's glass had lipstick on the rim. In the ashtray her stubbed cigarettes had lipstick....
Something like that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life. If Bob had wandered into the kitchen and seen that glass with the lipstick, the cigarettes with the lipstick....
He dumped the ashtray into the trashcan, carried Ellen's glass to the sink and carefully washed away the lipstick. He remembered Irene's keys. They were still in his pocket-another item that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life.
If Bob had seen the lipstick on the glass and the cigarettes, if Bob had decided the lipstick could have come from only one source, if Bob had searched him, the keys would have clinched the case. Bob, a life-long friend but still a policeman, would have got help and they would have torn the house apart until they found the secret room.
He went to the storage room and got the Luger from the box of old clothes where he'd stuffed it, went to the cellar and unlocked the door.
Ellen and Emma were asleep on the bed. Janie sat against one wall, her legs askew. For a moment he saw an expanse of her young thighs and then, noticing him, she quickly drew her knees together and pulled her skirt down. Irene had been standing near the bed, studying her face in a small mirror and combing her hair. When she saw him, she dropped mirror and comb in a red pocketbook near her feet and walked toward him.
She frowned and Stan decided Ellen's estimation of her character had been accurate. She didn't look frightened, she didn't look angry. More than anything else, she looked indignant.
"May I go to the bathroom?"
He stood to one side and allowed her to walk past him. He locked the door and followed her to the bathroom. When she came out, he studied her and tried to imagine how she would feel beneath him when he raped her.
She was tall, but not quite as tall as Ellen. She was slender, large-breasted, slim-waisted, with long, tapering legs. There was no strength in her hands, no strength in her arms or her legs. Her arms looked as devoid of muscle as the arms of a child, her hands smooth and soft as the hands of an infant.
She wore lizard-skinned shoes of a fiery red and he remembered the red coat she had worn, the red pocketbook she had been using. In her pearl-gray dress, with silver earrings and a silver bracelet, she looked expensive and sleek and poised. Her cheeks were slightly sunken and as he studied her closer, he saw the slight mounds of her hips against her dress. Naked, he guessed, her stomach would be more than flat-it would be slightly sunken so the edges of her hips would protrude ... a little.
"Can I talk to you for a minute?" she asked.
"Go ahead. Talk."
"How long are you going to keep us here."
"I don't know."
She moved closer. "Perhaps we could ... make some kind of agreement. If you keep us here, you'll be caught sooner or later. I'm sure they're searching for us now. Kidnapping is a serious charge. You could spend a number of years in prison. But, if you agree to let us leave, we could agree not to tell you held us here."
"What would you tell the police?"
"We'd tell them we were lost in the forest near here. We could tell them we were-"
"It wouldn't work," he interrupted.
"It would!"
"I couldn't trust you-or the others. If you were free, you wouldn't have any reason to keep any promise you might make."
He remembered he would participate in the search for their bodies tomorrow-and would have a good opportunity to mislead the police. He raised the barrel of the gun until it pointed directly at her face, until he knew she could look into the black pit of the bore.
"Take off your panties," he ordered.
Her face paled. "Are you...? "
"No. I'm not going to hurt you. I just want your panties."
"But-why...? "
He decided not to tell her the special use he had for them. He said, "I have a reason."
She stared at him, her face turning crimson. She started to move toward the bathroom.
"No. Take them off here!"
She turned her back to him and raised her dress. As she removed the undergarment, he had a brief glimpse of the backs of her thighs and the lower portion of her buttocks. The undergarment fell around her ankles, she stepped out of it and let her dress fall back in place.
After he had returned Irene to the cellar, locked the door, and walked back to the areaway near the bathroom, he picked up the panties and held them in the palm of his hand. They were black lace and he could still feel the warmth of her body in them....
A glow on the horizon became the sun and the sun became a round ball of fire. The world changed from stark black and white to subtler shadings of gray, and here and there were colors.
They had lined along the shoulder of Route 882, facing Sellers' Park and waiting for the signal to begin the search. They had been instructed to maintain a distance of at least three yards between each two men but, Stanley noticed, some of the men had clustered in twos and threes and larger groups. There were state police, Trenton City Police, and dozens of men such as himself.
He wondered how the men had been sleeted. Were they all friends of police officers as he was a friend of Bob's-had the invitation been extended to all of them as casually as Bob had asked him?-or had there been some sort of official request for volunteers? As he looked up and down the road, he saw three or four women in the line and wondered why a woman would participate in such a search.
Supposedly the bodies of Irene, Emma, Janie and Ellen were somewhere in the park. Last year, when they searched the forests south of Trenton, they'd found little Cathy Renslow's naked mutilated body in a clump of bushes. He remembered now-two or three women had been in that search also.
Irene's panties and keys were in his left pocket. He would have to be careful when he hid them. If anyone saw him....
When the search began, there was a sensation of unreality as there had been the night he walked home after leaving Irene's car near the park. The men walked slowly, heads bowed and eyes alert for a footprint, an article of clothing, a bloodstain. There were no conversations, no sound except the sound of footsteps, the occasional sharp cracking of a broken twig.
When he looked to his left and right, he saw some men had lit cigarettes. There was an atmosphere of anticipation, but there was no tenseness in the group. A few reporters were busy with their cameras. They moved faster than the searchers, running at times to get in the right position at the right time to take the exact photograph they wanted.
They photographed the searchers, running here, running there and, Stan realized, watching them it was easy to understand how the term "newshounds" had originated. They were like hounds. If the searchers stumbled across a corpse, they would probably be little concerned about the fact itself, but very concerned about the photographing and reporting of the fact. Some of the reporters would probably be elated if the searchers found a corpse. It would sell more newspapers.
In a few hours his legs began to ache and the line of searchers became more and more uneven. He slowed and, when he was sure the line of men were ahead of him, he pulled the panties from his pocket, stooped and thrust them beneath the snow. He regained his position before anyone noticed and, later, when he passed through a cluster of bushes where there was no danger anyone would see him, he pulled Irene's keys from his pocket and dropped them in the snow.
When the searchers reached the Brandywine
River, they turned and retraced their path through the park, toward the road. He maneuvered until he passed a considerable distance from the spots where he had hidden the keys and panties, then waited for the shout that would mean someone had discovered them.
There was no shout of discovery. The searchers reached the road again and he knew his plan had failed.