He creeps along the side of the house into the backyard. The grass runs down to the water where a pier is rotting into the lake. A monster oak stands in the center of the lawn, an elaborate tree house built twenty feet up upon its staunchest limbs. A rope swing hangs from a branch overhead and on this calm October night is absolutely still, like the minute hand of a watch that no longer keeps time.
Luther kneels down in the grass below the boy’s window, thankful that the old oak shades him from the brilliant harvest moon. He unzips his backpack and removes the latex gloves. After pulling his hair into a ponytail he slips on a hairnet and rises.
The window comes to his waist.
He peers inside.
The boy lies asleep in bed. A nightlight spreads soft orange illumination upon the wall beside the open doorway.
Caricatures of stars shine weakly from the ceiling.
Luther aims the laser pointer and a red dot appears on the boy’s pillow. The laser moves onto his face and holds against the eyelid. The boy jerks his head, rubs his eyes, and is still again. The pinpoint of bloodlight finds the eyelid once more. The boy sits up suddenly in bed.
With his middle knuckle Luther raps twice against the glass.
Seven-year-old Ben Worthington regards the dark shape of the man at the window.
The laser shines on Ben’s pajamatop.
In the blue darkness the boy looks down at the glowing dot on his chest, then back at Luther, smiling now, remembering.
Luther smiles too.
Ben waves to Luther and climbs down out of bed. He walks in pajamafeet through scattered Legos to the window. Sleeplines texture the left side of his face.
“Hey!” he says at full volume.
Luther touches his index finger to his lips, dangling the laser pointer between his thumb and forefinger.
And boy and man whisper plans to make their rendezvous at the back door.
11
FOUR hours later Horace returned the manuscript to the drawer. He sat for a moment in Andrew’s chair in sheer shock. If he were to believe the preface, that this manuscript was true, then Andrew Thomas was one damned unlucky human being.
He climbed down from the loft, laced his boots, buttoned his jacket, and stepped out into the premature darkness of the afternoon.
On the way back to his Land Cruiser, he couldn’t stop thinking about Orson Thomas and Luther Kite, how they’d destroyed Andrew Thomas’s life.
A splinter of pity worked its way in.
Having grown up with all those terrible stories about Andrew Thomas, that manuscript was hard to believe. Maybe it was full of lies. But why would a man living in the middle of nowhere in assumed anonymity have any reason to lie? What if the monsters were really Orson and Luther?
He was running through the woods now, eyes watering from the cold.
When the idea hit him, Horace laughed.
But by the time he’d reached the Land Cruiser, he knew what he would have to do for his book.
Next time he came out here, he would drive right up to Andrew Thomas’s cabin, knock on the door, and politely ask the alleged serial killer for an interview.
12
BEN Worthington turns the deadbolt as Luther grins at him through a pane of glass. When the boy has opened the backdoor, Luther extends an arm from behind his back and unfurls his long slender fingers to reveal the coveted laser pointer.
“All yours,” Luther whispers.
The boy steps through the doorway onto the deck, bigeyed as his little fingers grasp what has been foremost on his mind since midafternoon.
Luther gently places his right hand against the back of the boy’s skull and his left palm flat against his forehead.
“You’re a bad boy, Ben,” Luther says, and twists his little head around one hundred eighty degrees.
The warmth of the house envelops him as he closes and relocks the backdoor. He stands in the kitchen holding the dead boy in his arms, the linoleum Kool-Aid-sticky beneath his feet.
The sink blooms with dishes.
The odor of burnt popcorn permeates the air.
Two greasy Tupperware bowls sit on the Formica table beside him, the unexploded kernels still pooled in the bottom.
The liquid crystal display on the stove turns to 1:39.
He hesitates, listening: the muted breath of warm air murmurs up through vents in the floor. A water droplet falls every fifteen seconds from the faucet into a slowly filling wineglass and in another room the second hand of a clock ticks just on the edge of audible. The refrigerator hums soothingly. As the icemaker releases new cubes into the bin, the sound is like a great glacier shelf calving into the sea.
Luther kneels down, stows the boy beneath the table. Then he moves on into the dining room, turns right, and passes through a wide archway into the den.
Plushycushioned furniture has been arranged in a semicircle around the undeniable focal point of the room: a gargantuan television with satellite speakers positioned strategically in every corner for a maximum auditory experience. A third Tupperware bowl has been abandoned between two pillows on the floor. Bending down, he scoops out a handful of popcorn and crams it into his mouth.
He walks to the edge of the hallway, eyes still adjusting to the navy darkness. The electronic snoring of the kitchen cannot be heard from this corridor of the house. But there are other sounds: the toilet runs; a showerhead drips onto ceramic; three human beings breathe heavily in oblivious comfort. Beneath this soundtrack of suburban sleep the central heating whispers on and on, safe as his mother’s heartbeat.
Luther stands in the hallway scraping chunks of popcorn from his molars, thinking, They need this noise. They would go mad without it. They think this is silence…they have never known silence.
He steps through the first doorway on the right, a bathroom. Opening the medicine cabinet above the sink, he takes out a box of grape-flavored dental floss. When his teeth are clean to his satisfaction he returns the floss to its shelf and closes the cabinet. Stepping back into the hall he tiptoes across the carpet into the first room on the left.
A black and orange sticker on the door reads “Private—Keep Out!” and below it in stenciled characters: “Hank’s Hideout.”
The room is tidy—no toys on the floor, beanbags pushed into the corners.
A dozen model airplanes and helicopters hang by wires from the ceiling.
A B-25 sits near completion on a desk. Only the wings and the ball turret remain to be affixed.
He smells the glue.
A bevy of Little League trophies lines the top of a dresser, each golden plastic boy facing the bed, frozen in midswing. Luther reads the engraving on the base of one of the trophies.
Hank’s team is called The Lean, Mean, Fighting Machine.