“No,” Kimball said carefully. “It’s not about the missing boys. Both cases did begin around the same time, at or near the beginning of summer, but we don’t believe they’re connected.”
I did not feel the need to tell Kimball that the beginning of summer was when I first arrived in this town. “What’s going on?” I asked.
Kimball cleared his throat. He skimmed a page in his notebook and then turned it over to inspect the next page. “A Mr. Robert Rabin was killed on June first on Commonwealth Avenue at approximately nine-thirty in the evening. He’d taken his dog out for a walk and was attacked on the street, and stabbed randomly in his upper body area and his throat was cut—”
“Jesus Christ.”
“There was no motive for the crime. It was not a robbery. Mr. Rabin had no enemies as far as we could ascertain. It was just a random killing. He was—we thought—simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He paused. “But there was something strange about the crime besides the viciousness of the attack and its apparent lack of motive.” Kimball paused again. “The dog he was walking was also killed.”
Another pause filled the office. “That’s . . . also terrible,” I finally said, guessing.
The length of Kimball’s next pause was painting the room with a distinct and palatable anxiety.
“It was a Shar-Pei,” he said.
I paused, taking this in. “That’s . . . even worse?” I asked meekly, and automatically took another sip of vodka.
“Well, it’s a very rare breed of dog and even rarer in this neck of the woods.”
“I . . . see.” I suddenly realized I had not hidden the vodka bottle. It was out in the open, sitting on my desk, half-empty and with its top off. Kimball glanced at it briefly before looking down at a page in his notebook. Sitting across from him I could make out a chart, lists, numbers, a graph.
“In the Vintage edition of American Psycho,” he said, “on pages one sixty-four through one sixty-six a man is murdered in much the same way that Robert Rabin was.”
A pause in which I was supposed to locate something and make a connection.
Kimball continued. “The man in your book was also walking a dog.”
We both breathed in, knowing what was coming next.
“It was a Shar-Pei.”
“Wait a minute,” I automatically said, wanting to stop the fear that kept increasing as Kimball neared the information he wanted to impart.
“Yes?”
I stared at him blankly.
When he realized I had nothing further to say he looked back at his notes. “A transient—named Albert Lawrence—was blinded last December, six months before the Rabin murder. The case remained unsolved but there were certain elements that kept bothering me.” Pause. “There were certain similarities that I couldn’t quite put my finger on at first.”
The atmosphere in the room had flown past anxiety and was now officially entering into dread. The vodka was not going to work anymore and I tried to set the mug back on my desk without trembling. I didn’t want to hear anything else but I couldn’t help asking, “Why?”
“Mr. Lawrence had been inebriated at the time of the attack. In fact he was passed out in an alley off Sutton Street in Coleman.”
Coleman. A small town about thirty miles from Midland.
“Mr. Lawrence’s account was considered somewhat unreliable due to the amount of alcohol he’d consumed, and we had very little to go on in the way of an accurate physical description of his assailant.” Kimball turned a page. “He said the man who attacked him was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase but he couldn’t recall any physical characteristics as to the man’s face, his height, weight, hair color, etcetera.” Kimball continued studying his notes before looking up at me. “There had been a couple of articles about the case in the local press but considering what was happening in Coleman at that time—the bomb scares and all the attention those were receiving—the attack on Mr. Lawrence didn’t really register, even though there were some murmurings that the attack had been racially motivated.”
“Racially motivated?” And bomb scares? In Coleman? Where had I been last December? Either drugged out or in rehab was all I could come up with.
“According to Mr. Lawrence, his assailant apparently used a racial epithet before leaving the scene.”
Kimball kept pausing, which I was now grateful for since it was helping me put myself back together after each new byte of information was handed out.