Mrs. D’Amato moved beside him and he buried his face in the folds of her housecoat, wrapping his small arms around her thick waist.
“Did you see him, Jake? Did you see what he looked like?”
He turned from the housecoat.
“He had a knife, like doctors use on TV.” The boy’s mouth hung wide with terror. “He showed it to me, touched me with it here.” He lifted a finger to his left cheek.
“Jake, did you see his face?”
“He was all dark,” said Jake, his voice rising in hysteria. “There was nuh–nuhthin’ there.” His voice rose to a scream: “He didn’t have no face.”
? ? ?
I told Mrs. D’Amato to take Jake into the kitchen until Walter Cole arrived, then sat down to examine the gift from the Traveling Man. It was about ten inches high and eight inches in diameter and it felt like glass. I took out my pocket knife and gently pulled back an edge of the wrapping, examining it for wires or pressure pads. There was nothing. I cut the two strips of tape holding the paper in place and gently removed the grinning bears, the dancing candy canes.
The surface of the jar was clean and I smelled the disinfectant he had used to erase any traces of himself. In the yellowing liquid it contained I saw my own face doubly reflected, first on the surface of the glass and then, inside, on the face of my once–beautiful daughter. It rested gently against the side of the jar, now bleached and puffy like the face of a drowning victim, scraps of flesh like tendrils rising from the edges and the eyelids closed as if in repose. And I moaned in a rising tide of agony and fear, hatred and remorse. In the kitchen, I could hear the boy named Jake sobbing, and mingled with his cries, I suddenly heard my own.
? ? ?
I don’t know how much time elapsed before Cole arrived. He stared ashen faced at the thing in the jar and then called Forensics.
“Did you touch it?”
“No. There’s a phone as well. The number matches the caller ID but there won’t be any traces. I’m not even sure he was at that phone: that number shouldn’t have come up on the cell phone ID. His voice was synthesized in some way. I think he was running his words through some form of sophisticated software, something with voice recognition and tone manipulation, and maybe bouncing it off that number. I don’t know. I’m guessing, that’s all.” I was babbling, words tripping over one another. I was afraid of what might happen if I stopped talking.
“What did he say?”
“I think he’s getting ready to start again.”
He sat down heavily and ran his hand over his face and through his hair. Then he picked up the paper by one edge with a gloved hand and almost gently used it to cover the front of the jar, like a veil.
“You know what we have to do,” he said. “We’ll need to know everything he said, anything at all that might help us to get a lead on him. We’ll do the same with the kid.”
I kept my eyes on Cole, on the floor, anywhere but on the table and the remains of all that I had lost.
“He thinks he’s a demon, Walter.”
Cole looked once again at the shape of the jar.
“Maybe he is.”
As we left for the station, cops milled around the front of the building, preparing to take statements from neighbors, passersby, anyone who might possibly have witnessed the actions of the Traveling Man. The boy, Jake, came with us, his parents arriving shortly after with that frightened, sick look that poor, decent people get in the city when they hear that one of their children is with the police.
The Traveling Man must have been following me throughout the day, watching my movements so he could put into action what he had planned. I traced back my movements, trying to remember faces, strangers, anyone whose gaze might have lingered for just a moment too long. There was nothing.
At the station, Walter and I went through the conversation again and again, pulling out anything that might be useful, that might stamp some distinguishing feature on this killer.
“You say the voices changed?” he asked.
“Repeatedly. At one point, I even thought I heard Jennifer.”
“There may be something in that. Voice synthesis of that kind would have to be done using some sort of computer. Shit, he could simply have routed the call through that number, like you said. The kid says he was given the jar at four P.M. and told to deliver it at four–thirty–five P.M. exactly. He waited in an alley, counting the seconds on his Power Rangers digital watch. That could have given this guy enough time to get to his home base and bounce the call. I don’t know enough about these things. Maybe he needed access to an exchange to do what he did. I’ll have to get someone who knows to check it out.”
The mechanics of the voice synthesis were one thing, but the reasons for the synthesis were another. It might have been that the Traveling Man wanted to leave as few traces of himself as possible: a voice pattern could be recognized, stored, compared, and even used against him at some point in the future.
“What about the kid’s comment, that this guy with the scalpel had no face?” asked Walter.
“A mask of some kind, maybe, to avoid any possibility of identification. He could be marked in some way, that’s another option. The third choice is that he is what he seems to be.”
“A demon?”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t know what a demon was, if an individual’s inhumanity could cause him to cross over in some way, to become something less than human; or if there were some things that seemed to defy any conventional notion of what it meant to be human, of what it meant to exist in the world.
When I returned to the apartment that night, Mrs. D’Amato brought me up a plate of cold cuts and some Italian bread and sat with me for a time, fearful for me after what had taken place that afternoon.
When she left, I stood beneath the shower for a long time, the water as hot as I could take it, and I washed my hands again and again. I lay awake then for a long time, sick with anger and fear, watching the cell phone on my desk. My senses were so heightened that I could hear them hum.