Final Sins (2 page)

Abby wasn’t happy about it, but she returned to the table. Faust, she noted, had taken her seat. Apparently, like her, he preferred to have a clear view of the door.

She sat opposite him and pulled her coffee cup toward her. She still didn’t intend to drink it, but she wanted something to hold, and she didn’t need to keep her hand on her purse any longer.

“I’m gratified you elected to rejoin us,” Faust said. Those ice blue eyes were twinkling again. She wondered how her eyes—light brown and coolly serious—looked to him.

“I haven’t made any final decision.” She wrapped her hands around the mug, needing its warmth to counteract the chill of his presence. “But I’m willing to listen.”

“We ask nothing more.”

The waitress came by, and Faust ordered elaborate coffees for himself and his girlfriend. It was obvious he was a regular. The waitress even showed him a smile, revealing braces on her teeth that seemed to complement the studs drilled into her face. Abby wondered how she ever got through a metal detector at the airport.

When she was gone, Faust leaned forward, resting one arm on the table in a pose that seemed, paradoxically, both calculated and casual.

Abby took a moment to study him, and he waited, aware of her scrutiny and unfazed by it. He was in his
midforties
. His dark close-shorn hair was gray at the temples, but his clean-shaven face was unlined. Even so, there was nothing boyish about him, no roundness or smoothness anywhere. His features were sharp, his mouth a bloodless line, razor thin and ruler straight. He wore a black turtleneck that emphasized his long neck and well-defined trapezius muscles. His hands were bony and long fingered, the hands of a pianist, deft, flexible, and strong.

As far as she knew, he did not play the piano. He preferred other instruments. The branding iron. The leather strap.

“Moments ago,” Faust said, “you compared me to a freak in a sideshow. This comparison, I hope you will admit, was most unfair.”

“Yeah. To the freaks.”

Faust laughed, a surprisingly hearty sound.

Abby didn’t care for that laugh. It had too much merriment in it.

“By the way,” she added, “that’s the second time you’ve brought up the issue of fairness. Not exactly playing to your strength, are you?”

“It is your strength I play to, not my own.”

“You think you can get me to work for you by appealing to justice and fair play?”

“Something like that.”

“Justice, in my book, would mean putting you away for life. Not in a nice, cozy mental hospital, either. In a prison with sexually adventurous cellmates and guards who look the other way.”

Faust tilted his head back, allowing him to look down at her in an attitude of dominance, or perhaps simple arrogance. “And even this would not be justice, would it? A life for a life, that is justice. I should pay for my transgression with my very existence. I should die.”

“I’m not arguing.”

“You would perhaps be willing to administer the lethal injection yourself.”

Her voice, always throaty, dropped to a huskier tone. “Gladly.”

“You would punch the needle into my skin with a smile.”

“That’s right, Peter. I would.” She showed him a smile to prove it.

He smiled back—white teeth, feral against thin, pale lips. “So you see, we are not so very different from each other.”

Abby realized she had been led into a verbal trap. “There’s a difference between taking an innocent life—”

“And do you decide who is innocent? Who lives and who dies?”

She wasn’t used to being put on the defensive in a conversation. In this case there was no good answer. Say yes, and she had placed herself above the law. Say no, and she must bow to the law—and in the eyes of the law, Peter Faust was a free man.

“I decide who I’m going to work for,” she said after a moment’s hesitation, “and who I’m not. Right now, you and your main squeeze are in the second category.”

“Main squeeze?” Faust was unfamiliar with the expression.

“Your honey, your Kewpie doll, your death groupie. ‘Squeaky’
Fromme
over here.”

It was the girl’s turn to look puzzled. Lynette “Squeaky”
Fromme
, a member of the Manson clan, had been before her time.

Faust understood the reference. For the first time, he looked displeased. She saw his Adam’s apple jerk, a common response to stress. The Adam’s apple, its muscles mediated by the
vagus
nerve, often served as an indicator of emotional changes.

“You should not compare me with him,” Faust said.

Manson, he must mean. “With Charlie? Why not? You two have loads in common. Admittedly, you’re better dressed, and you do a better job of hiding your craziness—”

“There is nothing to hide. Mr. Manson is insane, just as you say. And his followers and admirers—there are some, even now—are sadly deluded. They have given over their lives to a madman. They are lost children.”

“While
your
followers, on the other hand, are models of mental health.”

“I have no followers.”

“Your fans, then.”

“Fans. I abhor the word.”

“You’re a celebrity, whether you like it or not.”

“Fame means nothing to me. I have no need of it, no desire for it. I am indifferent to such things. I have never sought a following. Those who admire me are drawn to my truth.”

“I don’t think you and truth go together real well.”

“There you are wrong. I do know truths, and I speak them. And others—a few enlightened souls—hear what I say.”

“What do they hear?”

“That modern life is a lie. Our deepest, most primal instincts are denied. We are cut off, alienated, from our animal selves. For we are animals, you see, and little more. The Romans knew it when they crowded into the Circus Maximus to see weaklings torn limb from limb for an afternoon’s amusement. They knew it when they pinned their vanquished foes to crosses that lined the Via
Appia
, each sacrificial victim squirming in exquisite pain like a bug on a pin. Think what a spectacle it must have made.”

“Yeah,” Abby said. “Good times.”

“Indeed they were. The old pagan ways were incontestably superior to the thin gruel of love-thy-neighbor. The ancients were ahead of their time. They were Darwinists two thousand years in advance of the
Beagle
’s voyage. They understood nature, red in tooth and claw. They admired power. They did not flinch from inflicting pain. They did not avert their eyes from cruelty. They reveled in it.”

“Like you.”

He nodded. “I am a throwback, if you will. Or perhaps a bridge to the new age to come.”

“You’re looking more like Manson every minute.”

“Only to one who cannot see. I am no madman. I am, perhaps, a visionary.” His eyes narrowed. “An artist,” he added in a lower voice.

His change of tone and expression made her wary. She wondered if he was serious or just shining her on.

“What is art,” he continued softly, “but reassembling reality on our own terms? All creativity consists of the manipulation of things in the world to create new combinations, new arrangements.”

“Things, not people.”

“People, things ...” He shrugged, and in his sublime indifference she knew she was facing a pure sociopath. “To take the elements around us and remodel them along the lines of our thought, our will. I took a living human being and made it a corpse.” Abby noted the word
it
. “In so doing, I re-created the world.”

“You didn’t create anything. You destroyed—”

“Destruction and creation are the two faces of Janus. There is not one without the other.”

“Tell that to Emily Wallace.”

His nostrils flared, a sign of arousal. “I did—before I killed her.”

“Tell it to her family.”

“I have. They didn’t listen.”

“Neither will I.” She started to get up.

His arousal had told her everything about him that she needed to know. He was a typical anger-excitation sadist. For all his superficial polish, he was really no better than any back-alley rapist.

“A man has been stalking Elise,” Faust said, with a nod toward his companion. “I believe he means her harm.”

Abby hesitated, then resumed her seat, knowing that Faust was playing her—and ordinarily she was not the type to be played.

“Give me the details,” she said.

Faust complied. He and his girlfriend, Elise
Vangarten
, had first spotted the man at Cafe Eden ten days ago. They had assumed he was a fan, a “
lookie
-loo,” as Elise put it. Abby thought the expression was appropriate.
Lookie
-loos were bystanders at crime scenes and accidents, drawn by morbid curiosity.

When the man began appearing at other locations, Faust pegged him as a stalker. Two nights ago he shadowed Elise through a Century City parking garage. The experience left her rattled.

“So call the cops,” Abby said.

Faust frowned. “The police will not assist me. They seem to regard me with distaste.”

“Imagine that.”

“I am a legal resident of this country. I am entitled to certain rights. But the authorities see me only as the Werewolf. That was my nickname in the tabloid press, you know.” He sounded faintly proud of it.

“I remember.” Abby’s nose wrinkled in disgust.

“They cannot look past such labels and superficialities.”

“It’s hard to look past the murder of an innocent woman. How old was she? Early twenties? About Elise’s age?”

She hoped to draw a reaction from the girl, but there was none.

Faust waved off the question with an airy flutter of his hand. “You in this country are so provincial. You cling to the simplistic morality of small-town burghers. Good versus evil, right and wrong. You are children who will not grow up.”

“Thanks for the sociology lesson. I assume it was after the parking garage incident that you decided to try a private operative?”

“Operative.” Faust pronounced the word slowly as if tasting it. “Yes.”

“It’s not like I advertise in the Yellow Pages. How’d you find out about me?” This was a question she normally wouldn’t ask, but she couldn’t imagine which of her former clients would travel in Faust’s circle.

“That is best left unstated.”

“Is it? Why?”

“I was sworn to secrecy.”

“So?” She tried turning his own logic against him. “Right and wrong are only childish concepts. Violating an oath must be okay.”

“I have my own code of conduct. It is not imposed on me by deities or traditions. It is my choice, my will.”

Logic hadn’t worked. She tried begging. “Give me a hint, at least.”

A smile played briefly at the corners of Faust’s mouth. “It was someone in the law-enforcement field,” he said finally.

Law enforcement. That was weird. Abby couldn’t recall ever having had a client with a job in that line.

Of course, Faust might be putting her on. He didn’t strike her as a guy who had a lot of connections with officers of the law.

“That doesn’t help me too much,” she said.

“It was not meant to.”

She dropped the subject. “I assume your friend gave you some idea of how I conduct business.”

“Indeed. You are a stalker of stalkers. You make them your prey.”

She wasn’t sure she cared for the word
prey
. “Let’s just say I identify a stalker, infiltrate his fife—”

“Determine his whereabouts,” Faust said.

“And assess his threat potential. That’s really the most important part.”

“Yes, certainly,” he added as if it were an afterthought.

“Tell me about the guy. What he looks like, where else you’ve seen him. That kind of thing. It’s what the folks in the writing game call exposition—boring but necessary.”

“He looks like anyone else. He’s just a man.”

“That description is less helpful than you may think. Nobody is just a man. Everybody has something distinctive about him.”

“Not this man.”

“Try harder. Short, tall, fat, thin, young, old ...?”

“Average height, average build, nondescript appearance.”

“You’re trying to make this as hard as possible, aren’t you? How about hair color?”

“Brown.”

“More blond than brown,” Elise said.

“I would say brownish,” Faust amended.

“Great. Is he Caucasian?”

Faust nodded. “Yes, this much I can say with certainty. He is Anglo.”

“Well, that helps a little. But not much, because most stalkers are Anglos. As a pastime, stalking hasn’t caught on in the minority community in a big way. Sort of like serial killing. But then,” she added with a nod toward Faust, “I guess you would know about that.”

“I am not a serial killer. I killed just once.”

“Once that we know about. Ever miss it?”