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Killing the girl was worth forty-nine points. In a lot of ways, it was the easiest job the man called Ben Fry had ever had.
The victim was no problem. It could've been anyone: a man, a child. A young woman alone just seemed right to him somehow. And it was simple to pick her out. He went down to the Pennywise Supermarket by the freeway. Haunted the aisles for a few minutes. Spotted her in the produce section finally. Young, attractive, small, shapely. Wearing a business suit, shopping for one. Exactly the kind of thing he had in mind. He followed her home from there.
He watched her off and on for the next three days. Tailed her to the art gallery south of Market where she worked. Observed her through the large front window. She seemed to sit at a desk most of the day, at the back of the room but in plain view from the street. Sometimes another, older woman joined her in the place. Sometimes visitors would come in and she would show them around. Sometimes she went into a back room out of sight. But mostly she sat at the desk alone.
When the gallery closed at six o'clock, she would set the security system, pull down the steel shutter and walk up to Market to catch a homebound trolley. She watched television at night, talked on the phone a lot curled up on the seat by her bay window. She didn't seem to go out much.
One afternoon while she was at work, the man called Ben Fry let himself into her apartment. He went through her clothes, her papers, her computer files and the rest. Her name, he found out, was Penny Morgan. She was 23. Engaged to a young man named David Embry who was working on his MBA down at UCLA. Her mother and father lived with her younger sister in San Mateo. She wrote a lot of e-mails to them and to David and to a large circle of female friends. The man called Ben Fry found these e-mails to be very warm and affectionate. He formed an impression of Penny as an enthusiastic and cheerful person. In photographs around the apartment, he noticed she was always smiling or laughing, her eyes bright and glistening with pleasure.
He figured he'd need another two or three more weeks before he was ready to kill her.
So while Penny Morgan went to work at the art gallery, wrote e-mails to her friends, spoke to her fiance for long, romantic hours over the phone, the man called Ben Fry prepared for her murder. He did this, as he always did, with elaborate caution. Flew to five different places under five different names. Gathered some of his materials in one location, some in another. He never used anything but pay phones. He rarely used computers. He rarely returned to the same source twice. He never left a trail.
He practiced anonymity like a religion. No one alive knew the name he was born with. A plain man to look at, he seemed so average he was almost invisible. Thirty-five or so. Five-ten or five-eleven. Dull brown hair, dull brown eyes. Soft, uninteresting features. His body was stooped and podgy. He didn't look strong, but he had a broad, powerful chest and muscular arms and he was rattlesnake-quick when he wanted to be. He didn't look intelligent either, but he was, he was very intelligent in a relentlessly analytical sort of way. He was always taking a situation apart, examining it piece by piece, calculating the odds of this or that, assessing the possibilities of this or that. He thought it kept him sane.
When he'd gathered the materials he needed, he returned to the city. He had no home but he'd taken a shabby studio in the Mission district for the job. There, one Saturday night, he sat nude on the edge of his metal cot. There were several kidney-shaped stainless steel tubs on a table beside him. There were needles and blades in the tubs, soaking in disinfectant. There was plastic sheeting on the floor and the furniture to prevent bloodstains.
He pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. Removed a syringe from one of the tubs. It was already loaded with Lidocaine. He slipped the hairthin needle into a shaved patch on his inner thigh, the soft flesh just beneath his balls. He slowly drew the needle out as he pressed the syringe's plunger so the anaesthetic would spread through all the layers of his skin. He repeated the process three more times. Then, when the area was numb, he reached into another of the kidney-shaped tubs. This time, he drew out a scalpel.
The man called Ben Fry paused with the blade in his hand. He closed his eyes. He imagined a tower. He had learned to do this over the years. Whenever he was idle and his thoughts strayed beyond his work and his analytical planning and he suddenly found himself clutched by some emotion that unsettled him, he would imagine the tower and trudge up into it. He would stand at the top and look out over the parapet, out over the plains below. Down there was the red turmoil of life. Purple nakedness and silver tears, agonized cries and pitiless laughter. But in the tower he felt cool and blue and far away. In the tower, he became himself again.
It was a good technique. It worked every time. Every time, that is, but once.
He climbed into the tower now. He drew a breath. Opened his eyes. Then he pressed the scalpel into the numbed flesh of his thigh and sliced himself open. He let out a strangled grunt. The incision was barely an inch long but even with the Lidocaine it was agony, his nerves burned white hot. He pulled out the blade. The wound stayed clean for a moment, then it began drooling blood. The blood ran down the inside of his leg. Staring at it, breathing hard, the man called Ben Fry let the scalpel fall from his trembling fingers. It thudded and crackled softly on the plastic sheeting.
A car horn sounded on the street outside. Night rain pattered at the windows. His chest heaving, the man called Ben Fry went on. From another of the steel tubs, he removed a capsule. It was about the size of the top joint of his thumb, made of some sort of soft, gel-like plastic, like the stuff they use for contact lenses. But this was hard and sharp around the edges as if someone had forgotten to file away some excess material. One half of the capsule contained something red, the other half something blue. He had had it made in one city, and purchased its contents in two others.
Inserting the capsule into himself was even more painful than making the incision. At one point, as he worked it deep into the fatty tissue, the agony seemed to sweep down over his eyes like a curtain and he was almost blind with it, almost gone. He gave another strangled grunt. Imagined the tower, looked down at his scarlet suffering from the cool, blue tower far away.
Finally, it was done. There was a wet, sucking noise as he drew his finger from the bloody hole in his leg. The capsule was in.
He had to wait a few minutes for his hands to stop shaking before he could manage to sew himself shut. Then, when that was finished, he reached quickly - almost frantically - for another syringe, this one full of morphine.
A short while later, he lay curled up on his side like a child, his two hands resting beneath his cheek. He slept a long time. All his dreams were nightmares.
A week later, he took the stitches out. The scar was clean, the hair beginning to grow back over it. But even after another week, it was still too red and raw, too noticeable. So he waited. One week more, taking antibiotics against infection. March was over, April had begun, before he returned to Penny Morgan's apartment.
He went on a Monday evening. It was a little after six PM. The girl, he knew, would be home around 6:30. Seated at the bay window, he would be able to see her coming, to make sure she was alone. Then he would stand by the kitchen so he would be hidden from her until she'd closed the front door. He was wearing a navy blue track suit, easy to move in. His gun sat comfortably under the waistband. He could draw it in one stride and in another he would be close enough to shoot Penny in the head. When she was down, he'd shoot her twice more just to be certain.
He'd taken no caution in getting the gun. It was a street .38 someone had sold him out of the trunk of a car. There was no suppressor. It would be good and loud when he fired. A neighbor was sure to hear it. And in a respectable part of town like this, a neighbor was sure to call the police. That was the way the man called Ben Fry wanted it. No chase, no long, drawn-out investigation. They'd arrest him a block or two from the scene.
While he waited for Penny to arrive, he rifled her apartment. Dumped the drawers, stripped the bed, pulled the books from the shelves. He found some gold jewelry, a pearl necklace; some cash, about forty bucks. He stuffed whatever he found in a plastic bag he'd brought along with him. Stuffed the bag in one of his pants pockets.
Then it was time to go to the window. He sat there on the same window seat where Penny sometimes sat when she talked to her fiance on the phone. He was hidden from the street by the sheer privacy curtains but he could see out through them. He studied the pedestrians passing on the sidewalk three stories below. She wasn't there. It was still a little too early for her.
He settled in with a waiting sigh. He watched the street. Once his glance drifted to the framed snapshots on the lampstand. Penny with David, his arm around her, she laughing. Penny's kid sister with her golden retriever. The whole family, Mom and Dad, Penny, the sister, the golden, smiling in front of a lighted Christmas tree.
The man called Ben Fry looked away, back down at the street again. Automatically, he began to think about the next phase of the operation, going over his plans, rechecking them. It soothed him.
Then there she was. It was 6:27 and there was Penny Morgan walking up over the hill from the trolley stop. She was carrying the oversized purse she used as a briefcase. The white gauze of the curtain made her figure hazy to him but he could still follow her approach. He sat there and watched until she turned into the building. Then he got up off the window seat.
He stood waiting in the kitchen doorway exactly as he'd planned.
Penny Morgan paused in the vestibule to pick up her mail. She leafed through the envelopes as she climbed the stairs. She climbed slowly. She was tired and a little depressed. She was beginning to feel that working at an art gallery was not as glamorous as she'd hoped it would be.
She sighed. The mail: all bills and flyers. She tucked them into her purse's outer pocket. Worked her keys out of the same pocket as she reached the third floor landing.
She went down the hall to her door. She unlocked her three locks, the dead bolt, the inter-grip and the police bar. She decided she would call David before dinner. She promised herself she wouldn't complain or anything. She just needed to hear his voice to cheer her up. She didn't like these dull evenings at home. She wished he would hurry and finish his degree already so they could get married and start their life together.
She pushed the door open. It was nearly Easter, she reminded herself. In another few weeks, David would be coming home for the holiday. They'd have almost a whole month together.
She was beginning to smile a little as she stepped into the apartment.
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