In fiction, villains sometimes engineered elaborate devices and [117] schemes to kill people when a knife or gun would be much quicker and cheaper. Evil minds were apparently as complex as anthill mazes.
Or maybe some psycho killers were squeamish about blood. Maybe they enjoyed killing, but not if they were left with a mess to clean. Such murderous types might install a secret suffacatorium.
Certain elements of the room design, however, argued against this creepily appealing explanation.
For one thing, a lever handle on the inside of the door overrode the deadbolt lock operated by a key from the outside. Clearly, the intention had been to guard against anyone being trapped in the room by accident, but it also ensured that no one could be locked in here on purpose, either.
The stainless-steel hooks in the ceiling were another issue. Two rows of them extended the length of the room, each row about two feet from a wall.
Gazing up at the gleaming hooks, Fric heard himself breathing as hard now as when he?d just finished racing up eight flights of stairs. The sound of every inhalation and exhalation rushed and reverberated along the metal walls.
An itching between his shoulders spread quickly to the back of his neck. He knew what that meant.
This wasn?t merely rapid respiration, either. He?d begun to wheeze.
Suddenly his chest tightened, and he grew short of breath. The wheezing became louder on the exhale than on the inhale, leaving no doubt that he was having an asthmatic attack. He could feel his airways narrowing.
He could get air in more easily than he could get it out. But he had to expel the stale to draw in the fresh.
Hunching his shoulders, leaning forward, he used the muscles of his chest walls and of his neck to try to squeeze out his trapped breath. He didn?t succeed.
As asthma attacks went, this was a bad one.
[118] He clutched at the medicinal inhaler clipped to his belt.
On three occasions that he could remember, Fric had been so severely deprived of air that his skin had taken on a bluish tint, and he had required emergency treatment. The sight of a blue Fric had scared the piss out of everyone.
Freed from his belt, the inhaler slipped out of his fingers. It fell to the floor, clattered against the steel plates.
Wheezing, he stooped to retrieve the device, grew dizzy, dropped to his knees.
Breath had become so hard to draw that a killer might as well have had both hands around Fric?s throat, throttling him.
Anxious but not yet desperate, he crawled forward, groping for the inhaler. The device squirted between his suddenly sweaty fingers and rattled farther across the floor.
Vision swam, vision blurred, vision darkened at the edges.
No one had ever taken a photo of him in a blue phase. He?d long been curious about what he looked like when lavender, when indigo.
His airways tightened further. His wheezing grew higher pitched. He sounded as if he had swallowed a whistle that had lodged in his throat.
When he put his hand on the inhaler again, he held fast to it and rolled onto his back. No good. He couldn?t breathe at all on his back. He wasn?t in a proper position to use the inhaler, either.
Overhead: the hooks, gleaming, gleaming.
Not a good place to have a severe asthma attack. He didn?t have enough wind to cry out. No one would hear a shout, anyway. Palazzo Rospo was well built; sound didn?t travel through these walls.
Now he was desperate.
CHAPTER 17
IN A MEN?S-ROOM STALL AT THE SHOPPING mall, Corky Laputa used a felt-tip marker to write vicious racial epithets on the walls.
He himself was not a racist. He harbored no malice toward any particular group, but regarded humanity in general with disdain. Indeed, he didn?t know anyone who entertained racist sentiments.
People existed, however, who believed that closet racists were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have purpose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate.
For a significant portion of humanity, having someone to hate was as necessary as having bread, as breathing.
Some people needed to be furious about something, anything. Corky was happy to scrawl these messages that, when seen by certain restroom visitors, would fan their simmering anger and add a new measure of bile to their bitterness.
As he worked, Corky hummed along with the music on the public-address system.
Here on December 21, the Muzak play list included no Christmas tunes. Most likely, the mall management worried that ?Hark the Herald Angels Sing? or even ?Jingle Bell Rock? would deeply offend [120] those shoppers who were of non-Christian faiths, as well as alienate any highly sensitized atheists with money to spend.
Currently, the system broadcast an old Pearl Jam number. This particular arrangement of the song had been performed by an orchestra with a large string section. Minus the shrieking vocal, the tune was as mind-numbing as the original, though more pleasantly so.
By the time that Corky finished composing pungent racist slurs in the stall, flushed the toilet, and washed his hands at one of the sinks, he was alone in the men?s room. Unobserved.
He prided himself on taking advantage of every opportunity to serve chaos, regardless of how minor the damage he might be able to inflict on social order.
None of the restroom sinks had stoppers. He tore handfuls of paper towels from one of the dispensers. After wetting the towels, he quickly wadded them into tightly compressed balls and crammed them into the drain holes in three of the six sinks.
These days, most public restrooms featured push-down faucets that gushed water in timed bursts, and then shut off automatically. Here, however, the faucets were old-fashioned turnable handles.
At each of the three plugged sinks, he cranked on the water as fast as it would flow.
A drain in the center of the floor could have foiled him. He moved the large waste can, half full of used paper towels, and blocked the drain with it.
He picked up his shopping bag-which contained new socks, linens, and a leather wallet purchased at a department store, as well as a fine piece of cutlery acquired at a kitchen shop catering to the crowd that tuned in regularly to the Food Network-and he watched the sinks fill rapidly with water.
Set in the wall, four inches above the floor, was a large air-intake vent. If the water rose that high, spilling into the heating system and traveling through walls, a mere mess might turn into an expensive [121] disaster. Several businesses in the mall and the lives of their employees might be disrupted.
One, two, three, the sinks brimmed. Water cascaded to the floor.
To the music of splash and splatter-and thinly spread Pearl Jam-Corky Laputa departed the restroom, smiling.
The hall serving the men?s and women?s lavatories was deserted, so he put down the shopping bag.
From a sports-coat pocket, he withdrew a roll of electrician?s tape. He never failed to be prepared for adventure.
He used the tape to seal off the eighth-inch gap between the bottom of the door and the threshold. At the sides of the jamb, the door met the stop tightly enough to hold back the mounting water, so he didn?t need to apply additional tape.
From his wallet, he extracted a folded three-inch-by-six-inch sticker. He unfolded this item, peeled the protective paper off the adhesive back, and applied it to the door.
Red letters on a white background declared OUT OF ORDER.
The sticker would trigger suspicion in any mall security guard, but shoppers would turn away without further investigation and would seek out another lavatory.
Corky?s work here had been completed. The ultimate extent of the water damage now lay in the hands of fate.
Security cameras were banned from restrooms and from approaches to them. Thus far he?d not been captured on videotape near the crime.
The L-shaped corridor serving the restrooms led to the second-floor mall promenade, which was under constant security surveillance. Previously, Corky had scoped out the positions of the cameras that covered the approaches to the lavatory hallway.
Departing now, he casually averted his face from those lenses. Keeping his head down, he quickly blended into the crowd of shoppers.
[122] When security guards later reviewed the tapes, they might focus on Corky as having entered and departed the lavatory corridor in the approximate time frame of the vandalism. But they would not be able to obtain a useful image of his face.