NightScape

Nothing would hurt him, Angela Lansbury had sung to the boy her character thought of as a son in Sweeney Todd, and the night before when Chad had listened to the lilting near-lullaby, he had been briefly reminded of his own and only child, dear sweet Stephanie, when she was a tot and he had read to her at bedtime, had sung nursery rhymes to her, and had taught her to pray.

"Now I lay me down to sleep," his beloved daughter had obediently repeated. "I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take… Daddy, is there a bogeyman?"

"No, dear. It's just your imagination. Go to sleep. Don't worry. Daddy's here. Nothing will hurt you."

"Not While I'm Around," the song had been called. But two years earlier Stephanie had gone to New Haven, for a B.A. in English at Yale, and last night there had been a bogeyman, and despite Chad 's long-ago promise, he had not been around when the bogeyman very definitely hurt Stephanie.

"When did it…" Chad struggled to breathe as he stared at Lieutenant MacKenzie. "What time did she…"

"The body was discovered at just before eleven last night. Based on heat loss from the brain, the medical examiner estimates the time of death between nine-thirty and ten p.m."

"Nine forty-six."

The lieutenant frowned. "More or less. It's difficult to be that precise."

"Sure." Chad bit his lip, tasting tears. "Nine forty-six."

He remembered the odd compulsion he'd felt to glance at his watch the previous night when Angela Lansbury had sung that nothing would hurt her friend.

While the bogeyman killed Stephanie.

Chad knew. He was absolutely certain. Nine forty-six. That was when Stephanie had died. He'd felt the tug of her death as if a little girl had jerked at the sleeve of his suit coat.

"Daddy, is there a bogeyman?"

"Not while I can help it."

Chad must have said that out loud.

Because the lieutenant frowned, asking, "What? I'm sorry, sir. I didn't quite hear what you just said."

"Nothing." Sobbing uncontrollably, holding Linda whose features were raw-red, dripping with tears, contorted with grief, Chad felt the terrible urge to ask the lieutenant to take him down to the morgue again-just so he could see Stephanie one more time, even if she looked like, even if her…

All he wanted was to see her again! Stephanie! No, it couldn't be! Jesus, not Stephanie!

Numbness. Denial. Confusion. Chad later tried to reconstruct the conversations, remembering them through a haze. No matter how often he was given details, he needed more and more clarification. "I don't understand. What the hell happened? Have you any clues? Witnesses? Have you found the son of a bitch who did this?"

The lieutenant looked bleak as he explained. Stephanie had gone to the university library the previous afternoon. A friend had seen her leave the library at six. On her way back to the dormitory, someone must have offered her a ride or asked her to help him carry something into a building or somehow grabbed her without attracting attention. The usual method was to appeal to the victim's sympathy by pretending to be disabled. However it was done, she had disappeared.

Afterward, the killer had stopped his car at the side of a road outside New Haven and dumped Stephanie's body into a ditch. The absence of blood at the scene indicated that the murder had occurred at another location. The road was far from a highway. At night, all the killer had to do was drive along the road until there weren't any headlights before or behind him, then stop and rush to open the trunk and get rid of the body. Twenty seconds later, he'd have been back on his way.

The lieutenant sighed." It's only coincidence that a car on that road last night happened to have a flat tire where the killer left your daughter. The driver's a farmer who lives in the area. He switched on his flashlight, walked around the car to check his tire, and his light picked up your daughter. Pure coincidence, but clues, yes, because of that coincidence, this time we've got some. Tire tracks at the side of the road. It rained yesterday afternoon. Any tracks in the dirt would have to be fresh. Forensics got a very clear set of impressions."

"Tire tracks? But they won't identify the killer."

"What can I say, Mr. Dolan? At the moment, those tire tracks are all we've got – and believe me, they're more than any other police force involved in these killings has managed to get, except of course for the consistent marks on the victims."

Plural. On that point, at least, Chad didn't need an explanation. One look at Stephanie's body, at what the bastard had done to her body, and Chad knew who the killer was. Not the bastard's name, of course. But everybody knew his nickname. One of those cheap tabloids at the supermarket checkout counter had given it to him. The Biter. And reputable newspapers had stooped to the tabloid's level by repeating it. Because in addition to raping and strangling his victims (eighteen so far, all Caucasian females, attractive, blond, in their late teens, in college), the killer left bite marks on them, police reports revealed.

The published details were sketchy. Chad had grimly imagined teeth impressions on a neck, an arm, a shoulder. But nothing had prepared him for the horrors done to his daughter's corpse, for the killer didn't merely bite his victims. He chewed on them. He gnawed huge pieces from their arms and legs. He chomped holes in their stomachs, bit off their nipples, nipped off their labia. The son of a bitch was a ca

Sweeney Todd.

Nothing will hurt you.

Imagining Stephanie's lonely panic, Chad moaned until he screamed.

In a stupor, he and Linda struggled through the nightmare of arranging for a funeral, waiting for the police to release the body, and collecting their daughter's things from her dormitory room. On her desk, they found a half-finished essay about Shakespeare's so

"I'm sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Dolan," Stephanie's roommate said. She had freckles and wore glasses. Her long red hair hung in a ponytail. She looked devastated. "I really am. Stephanie was kind and smart and fu

"I understand," Chad said bleakly. His father had died from a heart attack at the age of seventy, but that death hadn't struck Chad with the overwhelming shock of this death. After all, his father had battled heart disease for several years, and the massive coronary had been inevitable. He'd passed away, succumbed, joined his Maker, whatever euphemism hid the fact best and gave the most comfort. But what had happened to Stephanie was cruelly, starkly, brutally that she'd been murdered.

Dear God, it couldn't be!

Chad and Linda carried Stephanie's things to the car, returned to the police station, and badgered Lieutenant MacKenzie until he finally gave them directions to the road and the ditch where Stephanie had been found.

"Don't torture yourselves," the lieutenant tried to tell them, but Chad and Linda were already out the door.

Chad didn't know what he expected to find or feel or achieve by seeing the spot where the killer had parked and dumped Stephanie's body like a sack of garbage. As it turned out, he and Linda weren't able to get close anyhow -a police officer was standing watch over a section of the side of the road and a portion of the ditch, both enclosed by a makeshift fence of stakes linking yellow tape labeled POLICE CRIME SCENE: DO NOT ENTER. On the grass at the bottom of the ditch, the outline of Stephanie's twisted body had been drawn with white spray paint.