The Face

shot hit her not in the heart, but in the foot.
        Mrs. Reynerd had begun to scream in pain. For reasons that Corky still didn’t fully understand, instead of proceeding with the gun, he eventually discovered himself flailing away furiously with an antique marble-and-bronze lamp, which he severely damaged.
        Later, he had apologized to Rolf for diminishing the value of this lovely heirloom.
        True to his word, the actor had subsequently kidnapped Maxwell Dalton. He delivered the professor, unconscious, to this bedroom, where Corky had been waiting with a stock of refrigerated infusion bags and a supply of drugs required to keep his captive docile during the early weeks when Dalton still possessed the physical potential for resistance.
        Since then, he had methodically starved his colleague, providing him with only sufficient nutrients, by intravenous drip, to keep him alive. Evening after evening, sometimes in the morning, he subjected Dalton to extreme psychological torment.
        The good professor believed that his wife, Rachel, and his ten-year-old daughter, Emily, had been kidnapped as well. He thought that they were being kept in other rooms of this house.
        [299] Daily, Corky regaled Dalton with accounts of the indignities, abuses, and torments to which he had most recently subjected lovely Rachel and tender Emily. His reports were graphic, exquisitely crude, gloriously obscene.
        His talent for pornographic invention surprised and delighted Corky, but he was more surprised that Dalton so readily accepted his stories as truth, withering with grief and despair when he listened to them. Had he been tending to three captives in addition to the demands of daily life, had he committed a fraction of the atrocities on Rachel and Emily that he claimed to have enjoyed, he would have been nearly as thin and weak as the starving man in the bed.
        Corky’s mother, the economist and vicious academic infighter, would have been astonished to know that her son had proved to be a greater terror to at least one colleague than she had ever dreamed of being to one of hers. She would not have been capable of devising and executing such a complex and clever scheme as the one with which he had brought down Maxwell Dalton.
        Mother had been motivated by envy, hatred. Free of envy, free of hatred, Corky was instead motivated by the dream of a better world through anarchy. She wanted to destroy a handful of enemies, while he wished to destroy everything.
        Success often comes in greater measure to those with a greater vision.
        Here at the end of an unusually successful day, Corky sat on his stool, overlooking the shrunken professor, and took small sips of his martini for perhaps ten minutes, saying nothing, letting the suspense build. Even during his busy hours in and out of the rain, he’d found the time to concoct a fabulously brutal story that might at last crack Dalton’s sanity as if it were a breadstick.
        Corky intended to report that he had murdered Rachel, the wife. Considering Dalton’s extremely fragile condition, perhaps that lie, if well told, would precipitate a fatal heart attack.
        [300] Should the professor survive this hideous news, he would be informed in the morning that his daughter had been killed as well. Maybe the second shock would finish him.
        One way or another, Corky was ready to be done with Maxwell Dalton. He’d squeezed all the entertainment value out of this situation. The time had come to move on.
        Besides, soon he would need this room for Aelfric Manheim.

CHAPTER 46
        
        NIGHT ON THE MOON, CRATERED AND COLD, could be no less lonely than this night in the Manheim mansion.
        Within, the only sounds were Fric’s footsteps, his breathing, the faint creak of hinges when he opened a door.
        Outside, a changeable wind, alternately menacing and melancholy, quarreled with the trees, raised lamentations in the eaves, battered the walls, moaned as if in sorrowful protest of its exclusion from the house. Rain rapped angrily against the windows, but then cried silently down the leaded panes.
        For a while, Fric believed that he would be safer on the move than settled in any one place, that when he stopped, unseen forces would at once begin to gather around him. Besides, on his feet, in motion, he could break into a run and more readily escape.
        His father believed that