They viewed the complete works of Peter Lane in a shabby Times Square building filled with second-rung prop and costume houses and seedy rehearsal halls. A stale smell in the corridors of greasy take-out food and sweat. "It's either this," said Aaron, leading Janek into the screening room, "or our spotless Police Academy auditorium."
Ripper; Magenta; Hairdresser; Mezzaluna; Winslow Road; Film Noir: the movies flickered by in a twelve-hour marathon that included short breaks for coffee, quick trips to the lavatory, a fifteen-minute lunch at an eggroll place across the street. "We're going for total immersion," Janek announced, which was what he and Aaron got.
The movies exhausted them and hurt their eyes. Axes, razors, shears employed at pounding rhythms with repeated strokes. Moans of pain. Pants of ecstasy. Agonized stalking released in sudden vicious assaults. Janek couldn't reconcile the tony language of the critics with the gruesome stuff he was seeing on the screen. And he noticed Aaron becoming strange, sometimes mumbling to himself.
"See, basically there're two kinds of spatter films. The crummy, obnoxious drive-in stuff, like someone's got rabies and is going around biting people in the neck, and the class acts by Hitchcock, De Palma, guys like that. Thing about Lane you got to remember, he's in the second category. Has his following, almost like a cult. His stuff gets shown at festivals."
The next movie was Winslow Road. The killer kept a garden behind his house on a middle-class suburban street, where, it turned out, he grew exemplary vegetables fertilized by the remains of the whores he lured to his potting shed and killed. There was a long sickening sequence set during a lightning storm during which he sliced up a girl with a pruning shears, then lovingly ground her into compost.
"There! Hear it on the sound track?" asked Aaron in the middle of this scene. "There's a chorus singing behind the thunder. Guess what? We're in a cathedral, Frank."
In the end, Janek decided, the stories were pretty much the same. A ritual set of killings. A cat-and-mouse game with a stupid cop. An elaborate chase and an inconclusive finale—the killer disappearing, the cop left looking like a jerk.
But there was more. He sensed something deeper, a basic cryptic tale that stood behind these stories and gave them weight. Strange long silent looks between killers and cops, peculiar references to unexplained past events. It was as if there were some kind of back story known only to Lane, as if his characters shared the burden of a traumatic past.
Janek leaned forward trying to concentrate. Perhaps it would be possible to enter Lane's mind. If he relaxed, just let himself slide into the films, then he might catch it—the same coiled anger he'd felt in Amanda's tub behind the curtain, the fury he felt some nights at Hart, the mad-dog killer part of himself he'd always feared and had tried to kill when he shot Terry years before...
Late that night, his mind still cluttered with murderous images, there came a searing thought: that the movies were about the past—guarded, stylized, heavily masked renditions of an old and haunting crime. A real crime.
He crawled out of bed, went to Caroline's darkroom, picked up the wall phone there and dialed Aaron at home. "Couldn't sleep either," Aaron said. "You got an idea?"
"He's concealing."
"We know that."
"Remember how much trouble you had getting the basic facts."
"Still don't have them."
"He's covering up."
"Sure. So what else is new? All psychos have backgrounds and try to conceal them." Silence. He could feel Aaron's resistance. "You sure this isn't just desperation, Frank?"
"No, I smell something real. And that it's the subject of the films."
"Well, they got to be about something, don't they?"
"Right. So let's find out."
"You talking about a deep background check."
"The deepest. Track the past, Aaron. There's a crime back there. In the movies he tries to tell us about it but can't quite get it out. What we got to do is find out what it is. Then, maybe, we can use it to open him up."