by John Lutz
He hadn’t been running blind. He had some sense of where he was and had to be close to the dock.
He glimpsed movement through the trees and stopped running immediately, standing stock still and trying to quiet his breathing.
Ahead of him, his back to the water, was Quinn!
Regret and anger flashed through the killer’s mind: It had all gone as planned, except for the damned sheriff. If he hadn’t come along with Quinn, and somehow remained alive long enough to call in a nearby tracker with dogs, this would all be working out very well.
Then he saw that his luck wasn’t all bad. Quinn was bent over with his hands on his knees, out of breath. His rifle was leaning against a tree, beyond his immediate reach.
The killer watched Quinn straighten up and stretch, raising his arms high and twisting his body so he momentarily faced the lake. As if he couldn’t resist another glance back at the rickety pier, where the last thing he expected was docked.
Then he turned back to look around on shore, no doubt to find shelter from which to ambush his prey. Obviously, he assumed he’d won the race to the lake.
Excellent! If the killer’s first shot didn’t hit home, he had time to pump another bullet into Quinn before the doomed cop could reach his rifle. He moved to the base of a large tree where he’d be difficult to spot, even after firing at Quinn.
The killer couldn’t help smiling slightly and thinking, Checkmate.
4
Sarasota, 1992
The cabana with the blue-and-white striped sides was off to the east, so it didn’t spoil the view from the house.
Dwayne, if he was careful, could make his way through trimmed shrubbery and around to the back of the cabana. The way the bay curved, he could only be seen from the water, and that didn’t pose much of a problem. He could crouch unseen there and listen to nearby conversation, and whatever sounds filtered through the cabana’s thin wall.
It was almost sunset, and he waited for it to get dark before he went to his spot behind the cabana. Now not even someone out on the bay on a boat, with a telescope or binoculars, was likely to notice him.
His father was in Augusta on business, and Dwayne was supposed to be bent over his homework. Maude and her lover, Bill Phoenix, wouldn’t suspect that Dwayne wasn’t in his room, but behind the cabana’s back wall. Dwayne knew from experience that they would talk to each other inside the cabana, thinking that outside the sound might carry over water. Not to mention that Bill Phoenix had voiced a fear of being observed and eavesdropped on by the neighbors.
Dwayne suspected it wasn’t really the neighbors Phoenix worried about. Not them personally, anyway. But they might gossip, and he was doing things with the wife-to-be of one of the richest, most powerful men in Florida. The kind of man who might hire detectives.
Or worse.
Maude was not only rich, she was sizzling hot. Phoenix was a guy who maintained swimming pools for the rich.
Figure it out.
Dwayne, who knew about his father, was sure he didn’t suspect Maude of seeing another man, especially at their home. Not many men would be so stupid.
But Maude had a way about her.
Dwayne nestled closer to the cabana wall. Even pressed his ear to it.
“I’ve talked him into setting a date,” Maude was saying, her voice easily understandable on the other side of the thin wall. “When we get back to town, we’ll tell people we’re married. Maybe we’ll even throw a big party.”
“Jesus!” Bill Phoenix said. “Next week.”
“It’s gotta be that way. There’s a window of opportunity and we gotta get through it. The old windbag is in a trance that won’t last forever. With his wife dead, he’s gonna make a new will, and his new wife—that would be me—will be the beneficiary of his fortune.”
“What about the kid?”
“The entire fortune.”
“I don’t follow. He’ll still want the kid to have some of it.”
“Being dead, he won’t have a say in it. He’ll trust me to give a fair share to Dwayne. He really thinks I love the little prick. That I’m like his actual mother. Anyway, I’ve got him convinced the kid is mentally deficient, according to his tutor. Just can’t learn. Might never learn how to handle real money. We’ve already made arrangements for a private school in Kentucky to take him. Big surprise for the kid.”
“What about the tutor? She go along with this?”
“She’ll get hers.”
“But won’t she hold it over us?”
“Not when she realizes what we’ve done, and that she’s done it with us. She’ll take her reasonable commission and lose herself.”
“And the kid?”
“Don’t make me laugh.”
“He might make trouble, Maude.”
“Not to worry. I’ll take care of it. I took care of the wife, didn’t I? Cokehead bitch got the biggest and last heroin trip of her life.”
Dwayne knew what she meant. His mother had been murdered. No doubt about it. His body began to shake so hard he feared they might hear him.
Then a calm came over him, like a cool breeze off the sea. He was in a real predicament. But Mrs. Jacoby herself had taught him how he should keep his head and not be overwhelmed by the facts. He should stay calm and think.
Think.
After all, he wasn’t sorry his mother was dead. He didn’t have to pretend otherwise, even to himself, after the things she’d done to him. Especially he didn’t have to pretend to himself. He wasn’t sorry she was dead. That her death wasn’t an accident didn’t make that much difference, did it? Maude was planning on marrying his father and then killing him so Maude could inherit his fortune. Then Maude and Bill Phoenix would be rich and live happily ever after.
That wasn’t all bad either, was it?
It didn’t have to be.
Not if you turned it this way and that in your mind, like Mrs. Jacoby had preached. Dwayne was grateful to Mrs. Jacoby, even if she was going to take money from Maude and Bill Phoenix to help lie to him and put him in a prison-like distant public school.
She thought.
Dwayne scooted back away from the cabana. Careful to keep to the shadows of the shrubbery, he made his way back to the house.
He lay in bed most of the night without sleeping, thinking about what he’d heard.
Next week. Like Bill Phoenix had said, that wasn’t much time. Dwayne was sure that if Maude wanted his father to take her to Las Vegas and marry her, that’s what his father would do.
Then what?
Dwayne refused to be trapped again in the games adults played.
He knew Maude, and knew his father. He didn’t want to go to a private school where life would be miserable. And he knew that when his father and Maude were married, and Maude was sleeping in the bed where Dwayne’s mother had slept, things would eventually become the same as when Dwayne’s real mother was alive.
Then, after a long enough time that it wouldn’t seem too suspicious, Dwayne’s father would die.
That was how it seemed to work.
The family would be together again, at least for a while.
5
New York, the present
When Andria Bell opened the door of her suite in the Fairchild Hotel in New York, she expected maid service or a bellhop. Instead, she found herself face-to-face with the worst thing she could have imagined.
She’d seen the man talking to Grace in the Museum of Modern Art earlier that day, and there’d been something about the way he was looking at Grace, the subtle smile, the lean of his body toward hers, that suggested predator and prey.
And here was the predator at her door.
Still standing in the hotel hall, he looked beyond Andria. She saw a quick movement of his head and darting of his eyes, to make sure they were alone.
His eyes.
The predator again.
Then he showed her a gun, which he drew out from beneath his light jacket that was still spotted with rain from the
drizzle outside.
It was a stubby gun of the sort operated with both hands, and it had what Andria had heard referred to as a banana clip. An automatic rifle, she believed. Rat-a-tat-tat. . .
She knew little about guns, but she understood that the carnage could be astounding.
Andria had never had a gun pointed at her. She taught art, not war. Her legs went rubbery as she stared into the black hole at the end of the muzzle. It was hypnotic, the way the gun’s dark bore seemed like an eye gazing back at her with malicious meaning.
She retreated as if in a trance when the man pushed his way in and closed the door softly behind him. He raised a forefinger to his smiling lips in a signal—a warning—for her to remain silent. Then he clicked the gun onto a clasp on his belt so it dangled pointed forward. He smiled with his head cocked to the side, and shrugged while displaying turned up palms, as if to say, See. No problem here. Nothing to be scared of, lady.
And like that, he had her by the neck.
She knew immediately that she was in the hands of an expert, but it wasn’t a comforting thought. He knew exactly where to squeeze, and how hard. The room darkened, and Andria was aware that her hands had become fluttering, useless objects, as she clawed feebly at his iron fingers. She began to weaken, began losing consciousness. She knew she might never return to this world. This was it. The end of her life.
Her left hand closed on the gun and fumbled at it, played feebly with the immovable trigger to no avail. She had no mastery over her fingers. There would be a safety somewhere, but even if she found it she wouldn’t recognize what it was, wouldn’t be able to move it.
The darkness deepened.
Andria was aware that her assailant was still smiling at her, as if they were friends and this was pleasant discourse. He leaned in even closer to her and she smelled his fetid breath as he whispered, “Good-bye for a while . . .” He almost sang the words. She inanely thought the tune was the theme song of an old TV show.
His grip on her neck tightened painfully, and she became incredibly light-headed, as if she might rise like a balloon into a dark sky.
So this is how it is . . .
She became aware of movement, and as she lost consciousness saw that Grace had come in from the suite’s bedroom where the girls, her students, were watching TV before preparing to sleep on two double beds and a rollaway. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that left her midriff bare.
Grace . . . Grace . . . Grace . . .
Grace was standing frozen, her slender figure caught in an awkward pose, her wide blue gaze fixed in horror. Her right fist was raised to her mouth so that she was gnawing on a knuckle.
Andria had never seen anyone look so terrified.
As the darkness engulfed her, she felt that somehow she would remember Grace that way forever.
The killer unfastened his AK-47 from its belt clasp and kept it aimed at the thin blond girl from the museum. With careful conversational prodding, she’d told him all he needed to know—who the group was, why they were in the city, where they were staying.
The teacher leading the group was interesting, but not as much as the blond girl, Grace, who stood now in the doorway staring at him as if he were the tarantula at the party.
“Stay calm, Grace,” he said. “Remember me? We talked at the museum.”
“I remember,” she said in a barely audible tight voice. The throat tended to clench at times like this.
Grace had seen his face, so he had no choice other than to make her cease to exist. The killer really didn’t mind that there was no choice.
“Let’s go back into the bedroom,” he said. He tickled her navel with the tip of the gun barrel and made her gasp and bend at the waist.
“We’ll make it a kind of party.”
With the scary AK-47, the girls were easy to manage. Two of them lost control and dampness appeared in the crotches of their jeans. Those two should be the least likely to present problems. Fortunately, they all wore jogging shoes—recommended for walking around the concrete city—with long sturdy laces.
At his direction, Grace tied the wrists and ankles of her four friends tightly with their shoelaces, left lace for wrists, right for ankles. Then he tied Grace, and used the girls’ panties, which he stretched and sliced away from them, as gags that he stuffed tightly into their mouths. They could work such gags loose with their tongues after a few hours, but they didn’t have a few hours.
Well, maybe. He should make the most of this rare gift from fate.
After making sure the girls were all firmly bound, he began to remove his clothes.
Andria could see the clock by the bed, but it was blurry.
Not just the green numerals were blurry, but the entire clock.
How in God’s name . . .
Then the realization of where she was, how she’d gotten there, what had happened, fell on her like an avalanche. It was like waking up the morning after someone you knew and loved had unexpectedly died. At first the recollection wasn’t real—then it was way too real.
My girls! My God, what’s happened to my girls?
Andria was on her back and still couldn’t move. Her throat was burning as if she’d swallowed acid, and her breath was ragged and loud.
She fixed her gaze again on the clock, and the phone next to it.
She had to get to that phone.
The clock’s liquid-diode figures did come into focus. Forty-eight minutes had passed since the killer had entered the suite.
He’s probably gone. Thought I was dead and left. Please make him be gone!
Andria rolled onto her left side, marveling at how every inch of her body ached. It took her almost ten minutes, but she managed to maneuver herself onto her hands and knees.
Where should she go now?
The door? The bedroom? The phone?
“There you are,” he said pleasantly. As if he’d momentarily misplaced her.
At the sound of his voice she dropped to her side again, drew her body into the fetal position, and squeezed her eyes shut.
“I’m particularly interested in chatting with you.”
She heard soft footsteps on the carpet.
Opened her eyes.
There he was, nude except for white rubber gloves, smiling, holding a large knife in his right hand. There was blood on the knife. There was blood on him.
“I was sure you could be brought around again by now,” he said, “but you made it back so fast on your own. That shows real determination. You should be proud.”
He came closer, and she saw that he had something in his left hand. It looked like a wad of shoelaces.
“C’mon over here,” he said, and bent and lifted her as if she were weightless. He was careful not to penetrate her with the knife.
She tried to scream but could only croak.
“Careful,” he said. “We wouldn’t want you to lose your voice completely.”
He laid her on her back on the hard walnut coffee table, then used the shoelaces to bind her arms and legs to the four table legs. Her head was off the table, lolling backward. She couldn’t control it. Her neck muscles were putty.
Like the rest of her. Painful putty.
He sat on the sofa by the table, leaned forward, and showed her the large, bloody knife. She saw that it had a yellowed bone handle.
“We need to talk,” he said. With surprising ease, he used the bloody knife to cut button after button from her blouse. “The only way you can get out of this mess is to talk your way out of it.” There went the front of her slacks. Then her panties. The sharp knife blade so close to her flesh. “You’ll need to tell me the truth. That won’t be as difficult as you might imagine. What they say about the truth setting you free . . . well, it’s true. At least in this case.”
She knew he was lying, but she wanted so much to believe him. His words were her only hope, and she couldn’t help but cling to them. That was the way it worked. He knew that.
The bastard knows that!
He
also knows he doesn’t have the vital truth.
He’d heard part of what he wanted to know from Grace, at MoMA. Grace could tell him part because that was all she knew, all that Andria had told her. But Grace had revealed where the rest of the story might be found—with Andria.
Andria and the killer both understood that, at this point, understanding how fear and hope would work against her didn’t make much difference. He was sure she had a truth to trade, and they both knew that in exchange for even the slightest chance to live, she would trade it.
And he would renege.
6
“The maid came in this morning and found them,” New York Police Commissioner Harley Renz said. “I figured this was one for you.”
Former homicide captain Frank Quinn, now with his own investigative agency, Quinn and Associates Investigations (Q&A), simply nodded. His old friend and enemy the commissioner sometimes contracted Q&A in work-for-hire arrangements with the NYPD. Quinn was perfect to lead especially sensitive and perilous investigations. Cases that might do political harm to the ambitious and avidly unscrupulous commissioner.
Quinn did recognize that Harley Renz harbored a twisted kind of honesty. He not only ass-kissed and blackmailed his way up the bureaucratic ladder, he was proud of it. In fact, he cheerfully bragged about his abhorrent behavior, rolled in and reveled in his corruption.
Greed of every sort had helped to make Renz fifty pounds overweight. He was wearing his artfully tailored commissioner’s uniform this morning, knowing there’d be plenty of photographs and maybe a TV spot. The pink flesh of his neck ballooned over his stiff white shirt collar, lending him multiple chins.
Quinn, though he was the same age as Renz, was still lean and muscular, with a face so homely it was handsome, and unruly straight brown hair parted at the side. He appeared as if he needed a haircut, even immediately after a haircut. With his height, broad shoulders, plate-sized rough hands, and nose broken one time more than it had been set, he came across as a thug. Until you took a second look into his steady green eyes, at the intelligence that lived there. Intelligence and something else that most people didn’t want to look at too closely.