Raymond Sheffield held the electrical extension cord tight for a full minute after the woman stopped struggling. Held it taut and then released it. He checked her pulse. None.
He had been in the car for only about a minute when she came back. He had jimmied open the passenger door and had just climbed into the backseat when he heard her walking back to the car. He’d thought she would be gone for at least an hour. An hour with whatever stooge she was lined up with.
But she came back and it had been a near thing. He had ducked down in the backseat and was unwinding the extension cord as he heard her get in, felt her weight press back against the driver’s seat. When she started the car, he pounced. And soon it was over.
Well. It had turned out okay after all. She had surprised him, coming back out sooner than he had expected. But he had reacted well under pressure. And that was a good sign.
Raymond got out of the Camaro on the passenger side. Hmmm. The car was still running. Raymond looked about the motel parking lot. Three or four cars but no one around. He ducked back into the Camaro and turned off the ignition. The engine cut.
He remained in the front passenger seat. He regarded the woman. He looked out at the parking lot, put it in context. He was hesitating . . . aware of the danger of being caught, but getting a kick out of it too. If he left now, without a memento, without a trinket, he knew that he would feel cheated. He was entitled to a prize. He took another look at the woman. Then he reached over and pulled one of her earrings off. It took a piece of her ear with it. He would wash the flesh and blood off when he got home.
Raymond closed the door and walked back to his Ford. He left the extension cord in the Camaro.
Two miles away from the Thunderbird Motel, he began to feel a certain pride. The unexpected had happened. She had come back to the car within a couple of minutes of leaving it. But he had still been ready. He had reacted not with panic but with cool professionalism. Any butcher could handle the predictable. Make an incision, remove the appendix, close, and suture. Who couldn’t do that? Take a mediocrity from a med school in the West Indies, he could do it. But something more was required of the professional. A cool head. A finesse.
Raymond drove the Ford on Manchester to Interstate 270. He took that south to Interstate 44, past the Chrysler plant, and then south on a winding road into the hills. No one knew about the Ford except him. He had bought it with cash from some clodhopper in Arnold, and he had not told the seller his real name. The car was “unlisted,” so to speak. A phantom’s car.
Raymond Sheffield owned a small barn on a defunct horse farm. He had purchased the property with cash. He parked the Ford in the barn next to his Mercedes E350. The Mercedes was black. It was his “doctor’s” car. Raymond backed it out of the barn, left it running while he got out and locked the barn doors. Then he got back into the Mercedes and drove back to his house in Sunset Hills.
It was almost two in the morning when he turned on his living-room light. He didn’t feel tired. He went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. While the kettle boiled, he cut pieces of sharp cheddar cheese on a wooden cutting board. Then he transferred the cheese slices to a dish and placed wheat crackers next to them.
He felt better after having a snack and tea. When it was done, he set the dish into the sink. Then he removed Adele Sayers’s earring from his coat pocket, washed it in the bathroom sink, and dried it with a towel.
He sat in his reclining chair in the living room and examined the earring. A cheap piece of costume jewelry. She had not been high-class at all. Raymond felt a disappointment. Maybe it was because the earring was no longer attached to the girl. He would know what it was. Whenever he looked at it, he would know. But now that it was clean, it seemed inanimate. Not the prize he had thought it was. You hit a squirrel with your car, you don’t mount its head above your fireplace. It’s just a squirrel, for heaven’s sake.
He sighed and set the earring on an end table. Maybe he would feel better about it tomorrow. Maybe he would see it and know what it should’ve meant; maybe the memento would come to have meaning in time.
Raymond sipped his tea and thought back to the party.
Helen Krans had not been there.
She had asked him at the end of their shift if he was going, and he had said that he probably was. She said that she had plans and couldn’t go. Her disappointment appeared genuine. Raymond did not ask her what her plans were. But he knew she was going out with Harry Tassett. Raymond showed no hostility or displeasure at this. Indeed, he hadn’t really felt any at that time. He believed that her relationship with Tassett—if you could call it that—would be short-lived. Tassett was an oaf. And though that probably wouldn’t matter to someone like Helen Krans, she would come to see that Tassett was going to continue to chase other women and that she was just part of that collection. Raymond could recognize another predator when he saw one. Tassett was that. He was the sort that would take a certain pleasure in seducing a nice girl like Helen. But she would figure him out. Tassett made little attempt to hide what he was about, considering his lifestyle for the most part harmless. There would be a breakup, an undramatic one at that.
And Raymond Sheffield would be there when it happened.
He was being patient. For he knew how to be patient. He knew how to wait when waiting was necessary. Not that he planned to add Helen Krans to his collection. That would not be her role.
He planned to marry her.
He knew that in time she would come to trust him. Confide in him and be drawn to him. She was already seeing the Raymond that he wanted her to see. The decent, compassionate, thoughtful physician. She would round him out. She would be part of his daytime persona. The Dr. Sheffield persona. She would make a good wife. For who would suspect a physician? Particularly a physician who was married to such a nice, guileless girl like Helen Krans?
Raymond rubbed his eyes. He was coming down off the high now, and he found that, in spite of the tea, he was tired. He retreated to bed. He tried to read a chapter of an Anthony Trollope novel but gave up after a page. He turned off the light and went straight to sleep.