Styx (6 page)

“Why not? I can see you.”

“Yes, but I can't see
you
, and that's not the way we do things.”

“I can imagine,” the voice said, suddenly tinged with irony.

“Excuse me?”

“I can imagine that's not the way you do things.”

“How do you mean?”

“You like to have the upper hand.”

Styx said nothing, looked straight into the lens. He jerked on Shelley's leash to settle the dog down.

“I'm sorry?” he said, as if he hadn't heard Spilliaert's last comment.

“I said, Chief Inspector Styx, that you're a man who doesn't like to be messed with. But that's exactly what's been going on these last months, isn't it? It must be frustrating for you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“These serial murders. The Stuffer.”

Styx edged a bit to one side, tried to move out of the camera's field of view. “And what do you know about the case?”

“I read the papers, Inspector. You haven't gotten anywhere, have you? That's why you're here. You're
hoping I can help you, but all I can tell you is what I saw when I came out of the sea this morning.”

Styx forgot the stiffness in his side. “Do you always take an early swim?”

“You don't need to act like you still don't know who you're talking to, Inspector.”

“I'm talking to Mr. Spilliaert, aren't I?”

Styx heard a knowing laugh, distorted by the intercom's speaker.

“If you like.”

“Just a second,” said Styx. “Is your name Spilliaert or not?”

“What do you think? You know the masters, don't you? You know that Léon Spilliaert, one of Ostend's Surrealists, has been dead for more than sixty years?”

There was the taste of bile in Styx's mouth, and he finally realized what was going on.

“I'll be whoever you want me to be, Inspector.”

Styx swallowed. He was about to reach for his cell and call the squad, until he remembered that he never carried a phone when he was out with Shelley. A matter of principle, a rare chance to relish being cut off from the world. Meanwhile, Spilliaert-but-not-Spilliaert could see him, and would be gone long before backup could get there.

“Okay,” said Styx. “Let's start over.” He pressed the buzzer and said, “Who am I speaking with, please?”

“I told you I just got home from work, Chief Inspector.”

It wasn't the words the man said or even the words he
didn't
say. It was the way he said them—and didn't say them. No other man would laugh with such confident abandon. Styx pushed the entry door, but it held fast.

“I'll let you in when I'm good and ready.”

“Open up, you fuck!” Styx yelled.

He beat on the door.

“And we were getting along so well,” the voice said sadly.

“Let me in!”

And then the voice took on a new tone—harder, more dangerous. “Come on, Styx, you don't expect me to sit here waiting while you send out for a battering ram?”

“Why did you call us?”

“I was getting bored,
Monsieur l'Inspecteur
. I thought you'd all forgotten about me and gone on to other playmates. A true artist has to make himself heard from time to time. He's got to get through to the stupid zombies who waste their lives staring at a computer screen. In this society we've created, he can't afford to lock himself up in an ivory tower.”

Styx pounded on the door with his fist. With his other hand, he rang every buzzer on the board. A confusion of voices came through the speaker, each wanting to know who was there. There was no time to explain the situation. He yelled out his name, but there was no answering click. One resident announced: “If you don't go away, I'm calling the police.”

“I
am
the police!” screamed Styx. “Open the fucking door!”

And at that moment, he finally heard the click. He flung the door open and, vaguely, behind him, heard the voice of the man who couldn't be anyone else but the Stuffer:

“What's taking you so long, Styx? Come on up. You think I'm going to wait all night?”

There was no time to
think. He unclipped Shelley's leash and jumped into an elevator, leaving the pit bull behind.

“Go home, Shelley!” he ordered, pressing the button for the fifth floor. If only he had his phone, he could call John Crevits, call the squad, call that dashing young prick Delacroix, who at this moment
was probably standing before a full-length mirror, primping and pimping himself up for a night on the town.

“Come on,” he urged the creaky machinery. “Come
on
!”

The numbers above the door blinked on and off slowly. Two . . . three . . . four . . .

“Goddammit!”

He'd just risen above the fourth floor when, through the Plexiglas window in the door, he saw a sudden movement. A shadow flickered past, and he heard rapid footsteps on the stairs. Going down. The bastard was getting away! He'd waited just long enough to make sure that Styx had boarded the elevator, and then
he'd
taken the stairs. From below, he could hear Shelley barking. Styx swore and beat impotently on the elevator door.

“Christ, this is bullshit!”

The door slid open. At
the end of the corridor, Spilliaert's apartment door gaped wide.

Downstairs, his fool dog was still howling.

“Shelley!” he bellowed.

Styx raced down the hall into the apartment and searched wildly for a telephone, a cell phone, a tablet or computer that could send an e-mail, anything—but there was nothing. The apartment was completely empty. He stood stock-still before the broad window that gave out onto a balcony with a view of the North Sea. On the horizon, a brilliant orange sun extinguished itself in the water. Four stories down, a figure in what looked like a yellow fisherman's oilskin jacket and sou'wester hat hurried out of the building and away to the west.

The Stuffer.

There were two alternatives. He could find a neighbor who would
let him call the station, but by the time the police turned up, the Stuffer would be long gone. Or he could go after the man himself.

Styx didn't hesitate. Within a minute, he burst out of the elevator at ground level and gave chase. The farther he got from the city center, the fewer people were out and about. The beachgoers—at this time of year mostly older couples and families with small children—had packed it in for the day hours earlier. Gone were the surfers and sailboarders. Styx couldn't see the Stuffer, but he knew the man was out there somewhere and quickened his pace. With each passing minute, his shadow lengthened on the dike's pale-yellow tiles.

At last he was forced to stop, gasping for breath, propped up against a stone pillar in the Venetian Galleries. The pain in his hip was excruciating.

“Goddamnit!” he swore.

It would be pointless to try to continue. The killer had several minutes' head start, and there was no guarantee he'd come this way in the first place. Styx's choice of direction had been a wild guess. The Stuffer could have turned off the dike down any of a dozen side streets and by now might have lost himself in Ostend's shopping district.

And yet . . .

And yet Raphael Styx had a feeling he was close by. He staggered forward—and saw a long shadow painted on the marble flooring.

“Hello?”

He approached the figure half-hidden behind a column, but then saw a second shadow, the two of them woven together confusingly. It was the magic hour, between nine and nine thirty. The sun was down, and a golden glow bathed the Venetian Galleries, enchanted them, turned them into the perfect backdrop for a photo shoot.

“Spilliaert?”

Styx barely had time to draw his weapon before the two shadows were upon him, and he saw that it was only a couple of teenagers.

“Sorry,” he said, but the boy and girl—young lovers, perhaps, saying their last good-byes before heading off in separate directions for the summer—were already gone, strolling arm in arm toward the sea.

“Shit,” Styx muttered.

He holstered his gun and turned back in the direction he'd come.

Styx crossed the dike and took the first wooden staircase down to the beach. He sat on the bottom step and pulled off his shoes, then began the slow walk back through the soft sand.

Léon Spilliaert
, he thought.

Of course.

Spilliaert the painter might well have left descendants behind, but Styx was willing to bet that the Stuffer wasn't one of them.

He walked between two rows of rental cabanas, all shut up tight for the night. You could almost shoot a Western here, with beach sand instead of desert sand and the cabanas standing in for saloons.

He saw the gun sticking out between two cabanas just a moment too late.

“Why do I have the feeling you're trying to avoid me, Chief Inspector?” a voice said. “Aren't you supposed to be trying to catch me?”

Styx stared at the gap, the opening, the space between the two wooden huts. He saw the Stuffer's silhouette deep in the shadows, the face concealed beneath the yellow sou'wester hat.

“You're just making it harder on yourself,” he began carefully. “First you call in this morning to invite us to the showing of your latest piece, then you disappear for the rest of the day, and then you lead me out here. Why didn't you just come to the station if you wanted to talk?”

“Who says I want to talk?” said the Stuffer.

“Then what are we doing here?”

“We're talking
now
, true.”

Styx kept his eye on the gun. The Stuffer had committed all three of the murders with his bare hands. The women had either been
strangled or stabbed to death. There'd been no shell casings, no gunshot wounds.

Yet now he was standing eye to eye with a revolver. Even serial killers sometimes change their patterns.

“So you'd like to have a little chat?” the Stuffer continued, his tone casual. “Fine, then. What should we talk about?”

“How about pointing that thing somewhere else?”

“You think I'm an idiot? If you can't come up with more stimulating conversation than that, I'm going to use it.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“You know too much, Styx. I'm beginning to understand you. You've got anger-management issues. You're not like the rest of them. You're an outsider, like me. An outlaw, who plays the game by his own rules.”

“With a few differences.”

“Really? Name one.”

“I'm not a murderer.”

“You're a stubborn bastard, Styx, I'll give you that. You're as committed to stopping me as I am to carrying on, and that's dangerous. You're starting to get in my way, and it's time to do something about it. Plus, I'm getting bored. I need a little action.”

Styx knew he had to keep the madman talking. They were at the far end of the beach, but sooner or later someone would come along. An old man with a metal detector, a dad coming back for a beach ball or kite his kid had left behind.

Through the space between the cabanas, he saw people walking along the dike in the distance. He could shout and attract their attention, but he had a feeling the Stuffer would pull the trigger if he did.

“I don't mean why did you get me out here,” he said. “I mean, why the whole thing? The murders. The sand sculptures.”

“Sand sculptures?” the Stuffer chuckled. Styx saw the gun barrel bob up and down. “I like that. You mind if I use it?”

“Be my guest,” said Styx. “But your exhibition is just about over.”

“You think so? I beg to differ. I've got at least twenty more projects in mind. It's going to be a really
big
show.”

“What's the point?” Styx demanded.

“What are you, an art critic? What's the point of
your
life, Chief Inspector Styx?”

“I don't know.”

“Well,
this
is the point of mine. It reminds me that I'm alive. It makes my life interesting. What have
you
got?”

Styx shrugged. In principle, he could draw his own gun in one swift motion, and then they'd be on equal ground. But there was a problem: his hip. He wasn't a cowboy, it wouldn't let him get away with a quick draw.

“What keeps my life interesting?” he said.

“Right—and stop stalling for time.”

His first thought was:
my wife, my son, my family
. But he couldn't bring himself to say it. He wanted it to be the truth, but he knew that it wasn't.

“My job,” he said. “That's all I have. My job, and my body.”

“I figured. And your body's not looking too good. The body's a machine, Styx, like a car. How many years have you got on your odometer? Forty?”

Shit, how did the fucker know so much about him?

“You need to look at yourself in the mirror from time to time,” said the Stuffer, “compare today's you with the you that you used to be. That's what I want to show the world with my, I like the way you put it, my ‘sand sculptures.' Each one of them's a mirror. We're all works of art, Styx, every single one of us. We're each unique, but, you know what? We're better looking when we're dead. Only after death does our true beauty really—”