“You can make a murder into art,’’ Sting and the Police sang from the car radio. The irony was not lost on him but the heat was cranking and his legs were getting cramped. He rubbed his eyes and put the copy of With a Vengeance by Lydia Strong in his lap. The cover was bent and cracked and the pages coming loose from the binding, he’d read it so many times. But he had been looking at the same page for the last hour.
He knew that for many killers, Jed McIntyre included, stalking was half the game. But he hadn’t been enjoying it. He found it boring. He’d been waiting in front of Maria Lopez’s small dilapidated apartment building in the barrio for almost three hours and he was starting to lose his patience. He stared at the plastic Madonna and Child his wife had stuck to his dashboard years ago.
“‘Please God,’’’ he said, “‘how long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart. How long will my enemy triumph over me?’’’
He turned off the ignition and was glad for the silence. A moment later, like an answer to his prayer, he saw the man that the whore Maria had taken home leave through the front door, get into his black pickup truck, and speed off. He waited a few minutes, let the adrenaline stream through his veins. Then he donned a pair of surgical gloves and a black ski mask. From a plastic bag on the passenger-side seat he took a terry washcloth that had been soaking in chloroform. He patted his pocket, checking for the scalpel and the picklock he would use to get in the building door.
But when he got to the building, the door had been left ajar so there was no need to pick the lock at all. He walked up the one flight to her apartment, and then knocked lightly on the door, knowing she would assume it was the man who had just left.
He stood to the side.
“Forget something?’’ she called, and flung the door open carelessly. He grabbed her by the throat, almost lifting her small body off the ground with one arm and shoved the washcloth covered in chloroform over her nose and mouth with the other, before she even had a chance to scream. When he felt her body grow limp, he uncovered her face. But it must not have been for long enough, because her eyes fluttered, she saw him, and she started screaming and thrashing. He threw her hard through the imitation Oriental screen that separated her bed from the rest of the small studio apartment. But she got up and scurried away from him as quick as a mouse, her face a blank mask of terror.