Lawrence Block - Scudder 16 - All the Flowers Are Dying(2005) by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

17

In a Kinko’s on Columbus Avenue, he sits at a computer terminal, where a small hourly fee provides him with utterly anonymous Internet access. He goes to the Yahoo website and, at no cost and in a matter of minutes, he opens an account with a user name that is just a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers. It would be difficult to remember, but he won’t need to remember it because he’ll never use it again. It’s a one-time-only account, almost certainly untraceable, but if they trace it they won’t get any farther than this computer, open to the public and used by dozens of people every day.

He remembers wondering how anyone was ever caught and convicted a century ago, in the absence of forensics. But didn’t science aid the criminal with one hand while it aided the criminologist with the other?

He’d come across a line somewhere that had always struck him as the perfect explanation of Darwinian evolution: If you build a better mousetrap, Nature will build a better mouse.

He meditates upon this principle for a spell, then brings himself reluctantly back to the present moment.

He clicks on WRITE MAIL and begins typing:

I am writing to you because it troubles me to think of the unfortunate parents of Jeffrey Willis, for whose murder Preston Applewhite recently paid the ultimate penalty. Hard as it is to lose a son, it must be harder still when his body is never recovered. One hates the thought of one’s own flesh and blood lying forever in an unmarked grave, although, on reflection, I can’t see that I’d much prefer lying in a marked grave. It is, I should think, one and the same to the person lying there.

Still, it seems only right for me to tell you that the spirit of Preston Applewhite (may all curse his memory!) came to me last night in a spirit of profound contrition. “You must tell the good people at the Richmond Times-Dispatch ,” it said, in an appropriately spectral tone, “that I deeply regret what I’ve done, and seek to make amends by telling you just where to look for all that remains of the Willis boy.”

And here is where it said to look….

He writes out detailed instructions, creating a perfect verbal treasure map that will lead whoever follows it to the very spot in the old family graveyard where he had such a pleasant time with young Jeffrey, who’d not had a terribly pleasant time of it himself. It brings it all back for him, and he’s tempted to add a precise description of Jeffrey’s last moments, but that would be inconsistent with the letter’s content and tone.

Though it would surely be fun. He’s reminded of Albert Fish, the deranged cannibal who murdered young children and ate them. After killing and devouring one Grace Budd, he wrote a note to her parents describing the murder and attesting to their daughter’s succulence on the dinner table. But, he swore to them, “I never fucked her. She died a virgin.

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