Frenzy

by John Lutz

  Sal said, “Let’s get out of here, Harold.”

  They left, Sal thinking you really never knew for sure about Harold.

  10

  England, 1940

  Tucker could see the bombs slung beneath the planes’ fuselages as the pilots brought the Stukas in single file, bow to stern above the Sondra. He hoped the German pilots would consider the small fishing boat too minor a target to waste bombs on.

  He got his wish, but that didn’t rule out the machine guns mounted beneath the planes’ wings.

  The little boat rocked this way and that as the captain attempted to zigzag. That helped some, but not much. A man in a French army uniform stood up near the bow and aimed his rifle at the incoming lead Stuka. He was cut nearly in half by machine gun bullets. Two of the crewmen hacked lines and launched a small dinghy the boat might tow, but no sooner had the dinghy hit the water than the crewmen both spun and dropped overboard beneath the hail of bullets. The boat’s grizzled old captain stepped halfway out of the pilothouse to yell some instruction, then fell in a red mist of blood.

  Immediately after the first pass, the planes wheeled to the left, maintaining their single file line, as they maneuvered for another run at the boat. This time, as the first plane approached and the winking muzzle blasts of its guns became visible, men began diving and jumping overboard.

  BEF Corporal Henry Tucker, huddled near the stern, decided it was time to abandon ship.

  He scooped up his backpack, leaving all other equipment and belongings behind, and jumped off the stern into the roiled water in the boat’s wake.

  Tucker had forgotten how heavy the backpack was. It began to pull him down into the swirling water. He tried to release it, but one of its straps was tangled around his wrist.

  He was actually underwater when a hand gripped the backpack’s strap and he felt himself lifted out of the water. He thumped painfully into the bottom of the wooden dinghy and was lying on top of the backpack.

  “Easy, mate,” a voice growled.

  Tucker raised his head to look around. There were two other men in the boat. Both were badly wounded. One in the chest. The other—the one who had rescued Tucker—was a young blond giant with a nasty head wound.

  Tucker realized that he himself was bleeding. His blood was turning the water sloshing around the bottom of the dinghy a deepening red. He raised a hand to touch his head, probing for damage.

  He was frightened by what he felt.

  He heard the persistent drone of aircraft and knew the Stukas were returning. Would they sink the fishing boat? Would they consider the dinghy too small and unimportant to strafe? A waste of ammunition?

  Of course it is! Of course! It’s nothing but a bleeding rowboat!

  The drone of the engines grew to a roar. Changed tone as the planes dropped lower and flattened out their trajectory.

  Tucker carefully raised his head again and saw an aircraft approaching alarmingly low over the water. Coming straight at the dinghy.

  His breath swelled cold in his chest and he prepared to die.

  But there was something different about this aircraft. It didn’t have the awkward gull-like wings of the Stukas and, unlike the Stukas, its landing gear was retracted.

  The plane waggled its wings and Tucker now clearly saw its markings—RAF markings. As it flashed overhead, the craft assumed the familiar silhouette of a British Hurricane fighter plane. Off in the distance, dark specks circled and climbed and dived in the sky. The Hurricanes had engaged the Stukas. The German planes were dive bombers and not fighter planes. Tucker felt some satisfaction in thinking they wouldn’t escape the Hurricanes. Not all of them.

  One of the other two men in the dinghy began to shout, then stood to cheer. It was the blond giant. Tucker could see the inside of his skull behind his left ear. The other man remained unmoving and silent.

  Within a few minutes the sky was clear of all but one Hurricane, which circled protectively over the dinghy.

  The water around the tiny dinghy was unbroken. There wasn’t even debris floating to show where the Sondra had sunk.

  The silent man in the dinghy’s bow looked dead to Tucker. The blond giant who’d cheered and shouted was still excited. He stared at Tucker with unnaturally bright blue eyes and said, “We gotta row, mate. We row and we’ll make it.”

  “Don’t be crazy,” Tucker said. “We’ll never make it all the way to England. If we just drift, one of the other boats might pick us up. That Hurricane’s marking our location.”

  “It’ll run low on fuel and have to leave,” the man said.

  Tucker hadn’t thought of that. It was a possibility.

  As if its pilot had overheard their conversation, the Hurricane waggled its wings again, then flew away toward the direction of England.

  “Pick up a bloody oar and row!” the blond man in the boat said.

  Tucker figured he should do that. The man was twice his size and might throw him overboard if he didn’t comply.

  He worked his way up to a sitting position, and was behind the big man and couldn’t take his eyes off the back of his head. It was a wonder he could even sit up, considering the terrible wound that he seemed not to know about.

  Tucker sat facing France and rowed in the direction the Hurricane had gone, toward England, praying his head wound wasn’t as bad as the one he was looking at.

  Far away, to the north, it was clouding up as if a storm was brewing.

  11

  New York, the present

  Quinn dreamed again of Maine, of a dark and ominous shadow shape that blocked what slanted sunlight lanced between the planks of the rickety dock. Beneath the dock as he was, he could smell the dank scent of the rotted wood at the waterline, the decaying life-and-death cycle of the lake. The almost casual slow footfalls of the dangerous thing above him, plotting his death. Quinn shuddered in his sleep. Death was so near. The long gun the killer carried might as well have been a scythe.

  The lake began moving with a private tide. The dock began to creak. Water lapped at wood. One by one the thick cross planks were lifted and flung away, like boxes being opened and their lids tossed aside.

  And when the box containing Quinn was opened, the killer would smile down at him. And death would—

  Quinn was awake. All the way back in the real world. It seemed a magician’s trick. He was no longer about to scream in pain despite his efforts to be silent. Hiding, fearing.

  Pearl lay sleeping beside him, covered with a light sheet. The curvature of her form beneath the thin material, the rhythm of her breathing, reassured Quinn that he wasn’t at the lake in Maine. He was on the West Side of New York, and no one was stalking him with a rifle.

  He glanced at the glowing numerals of the alarm clock beside the bed. Only 3:00 A.M.

  Faint recognizable sounds made their way into the bedroom from beyond the tall windows. Some of them were barely loud enough to hear. The city that never slept, resting. Human sounds. Death seemed far away.

  Reassured, Quinn rolled over and felt himself drifting again toward sleep.

  He dreamed again of Maine.

  When Quinn was alone in the office, Helen Iman, the NYPD profiler, came in.

  “One fun day after another,” she said, observing that he must not have gotten much sleep last night. “Except for the occasional disembowelment.”

  Quinn wasn’t surprised to see her. All six foot plus of her. Helen, with her short cropped red hair, lanky build, and minimal makeup, put Quinn in mind of a women’s basketball coach. She seemed always to have a slight sheen of perspiration on her freckled flesh, as if she’d just come from a strenuous workout. In fact, she had more intellectual than athletic ability or desire. And she had that essential that so many profilers lacked—a track record. Helen had provided the psychological insight that had helped Quinn mold his own reputation. She was the only profiler he believed in.

  Renz had sent her around, not as a spy, but because he, like Quinn, appreciated her abilities and knew he
r history.

  “I hear you’re working on the big one,” Helen said. She stood near Pearl’s desk and crossed her arms. “Six victims.”

  “So far.”

  Each knew the other was sure the killer would try to take more victims. Otherwise, Helen wouldn’t be here.

  “I don’t think he’s a mass murderer on purpose,” Helen said. “Mass murder wasn’t his plan when he entered the hotel.”

  Quinn leaned back in his desk chair and smiled at her. “Go ahead,” he said, “See if we read it the same way.”

  Helen moved farther into the office and perched with her haunches on the front edge of Pearl’s desk. She was wearing blue-and-white running shoes with her jeans. The jeans looked a little baggy on her, and were an inch or so too short for her long legs, so her rolled white exercise socks showed.

  “My guess is that he didn’t realize the schoolgirls and Andria Bell were all staying in one interconnected suite,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want to be alone after putting up with a gaggle of young girls most of the day? When he knocked on the door and Andria opened it, he assumed they were alone together. His mental scenario pictured two adults.”

  Quinn knew what she meant by “mental scenario.” Serial killers had two plans to deal with two possibilities: victim cooperating or victim resisting. Those plans weren’t the same when more than one victim was involved.

  “That’s how I see it,” Quinn said. He absently reached for the desk drawer where he kept his Cuban cigars, then drew back his hand. Helen would rat him out to Pearl. “Of course we might be wrong. He might have planned on killing six women even before entering the hotel.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Me, too.”

  “He probably had a gun,” Helen continued. “It would be hard to keep all those girls in line with only a knife—not impossible, though. However he was armed, it’s easy to talk people into thinking you won’t harm them if only they’ll do as you say. They’ve got nothing against you personally that you know of, so it’s easiest for them to cooperate. With a knife he could have been in charge. With a gun he would’ve been king.”

  “You think he tied down and gagged Andria first?” Quinn asked.

  Helen rubbed her long chin. “Maybe. I’m guessing he had a gun and was in complete control, so he could’ve done anything he wanted. He most likely held all the girls at gunpoint and had one of them—or maybe Andria—tie up and gag the others. It wouldn’t have taken long, using their shoelaces and panties.” She paused, looking up at the wall clock as if she were being timed. “Using the panties would have humiliated the girls as well as quiet them. Seems like it’d be a male thing to do.”

  “Agreed,” Quinn said.

  “So I figure our killer used a captive helper to secure everyone, then he used his knife on the girls that were bound and gagged lying side by side on the bed.”

  “That must have been hell for all of them,” Quinn said. “Especially for the last few, who had to watch their friends suffer and die.”

  “It wouldn’t have been quick for any of them,” Helen said. “The killer had plenty of time, and he used it to enjoy himself.”

  “What about Andria Bell?” Quinn asked. “Why was she tortured the most and killed last?”

  “Because she’s the reason the killer was there.”

  “And that reason is?”

  Helen grinned and shrugged her bony shoulders. “Wouldn’t we like to know?”

  She uncrossed her long arms and straightened up from where she’d been supporting herself on the desk, looking as if she was getting ready to try a free throw. “I dropped by the morgue,” she said. “Talked to Nift and saw the photos. Did it look to you as if the killer got whatever he wanted from Andria?”

  “You mean did she tell him all her secrets?”

  “Yes. Her big secret, anyway.”

  “And then he stopped torturing her?”

  “Sure. He’d have accomplished his purpose. And he wouldn’t have wanted to hang around forever in the middle of all that damning evidence.”

  Quinn thought about Helen’s question. “There’s no way to be sure,” he said. “My guess is Andria died during torture, probably from shock rather than loss of blood. But that doesn’t mean the killer didn’t get what he wanted. He might have decided to make sure. Or simply to amuse himself by drawing out his victim’s death.”

  “But what’s your gut feeling?”

  They both knew this was a serious question to put to a cop. Especially at this stage of an investigation.

  Quinn said, “I think she told him what he wanted to hear.”

  Helen leaned back against the desk edge and crossed her arms again. Quinn found himself wondering if she would have a temporary crosswise crease in her ass from the desk.

  “You think D.O.A. is still alive and did these killings?” she asked.

  “The experts said nobody could have survived that plane crash,” Quinn reminded her.

  “No human remains were found at the scene of the crash,” she said.

  “Tracks indicated predators probably dragged the body away,” Quinn said. But he recalled Weaver’s witness, Lettie Soho, saying the man she saw at the Fairchild Hotel had a slight limp. Slight. Maybe.

  “What about a parachute?” Helen asked.

  “The plane was too low, and a chute would have been seen. The medical examiner and the court decided D.O.A. died in that plane.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was a careful killer,” Quinn said. “He thought ahead. Made contingency plans.” Quinn watched Helen chew the inside of her cheek. “Maybe we’ve got a copycat,” he added. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “Hmm.”

  “What does ‘Hmm’ mean, Helen?”

  “We’d all like it to be a copycat,” she said. “Easier all around.”

  “Except for the victims,” Quinn said. “If our killer’s a copycat, he really went to school on the earlier murders. The real and original D.O.A. couldn’t have been more vicious and sadistic.”

  They looked at each other, waiting for what had to be said.

  “Of course you’re right,” Quinn said. “We do want it to be a copycat. And it well might be. The more sensational the killer, the more likely some twisted animal will emulate him. That’s how these monsters think.”

  “We forget sometimes they’re individuals,” Helen said. “They don’t all think alike all the time about everything.”

  “The killings stopped after the plane went down,” Quinn pointed out.

  “Or paused,” Helen said.

  “Or paused,” he agreed.

  As she knew he would.

  12

  Loose talk at the hotel bar, overheard by Harold, yielded another witness who might have glimpsed the killer entering Andria Bell’s suite. He was still registered at the Fairchild Hotel. He’d complained about something he’d seen or heard and the management had moved him up a floor at his request.

  Sal had phoned from down in the lobby, so the witness, a middle-aged man with thin brown hair and a thick waist, was standing with the door open so Sal and Harold would notice him waiting a short way down the hall from the elevator.

  He was about five foot ten and all soft angles, with his scant hair neatly combed straight across. Pink tie, white shirt, and gray blazer. He didn’t fit his name, which was Duke Craig, if Harold had it right.

  The man introduced himself as Craig Duke.

  “Nice room,” Harold commented, though it was nothing special. “Spacious and clean.” Starting the interview on a positive note.

  “I guess it’s okay,” Duke said. “I’ve stayed here before.” There was a small gray sofa and a matching armchair in the room. And a desk with a wooden chair. Duke motioned for Harold and Sal to sit in the sofa and armchair. Sal took the uncomfortable desk chair before Duke could get to it. Duke eschewed the armchair and sat on the edge of the bed.

  People. Sal thought he’d never get tired of watching them. The older he got, the
more predictable they became. Yet now and then there was somebody . . . something. . .

  Harold got his worn black leather notepad from a pocket, along with a stubby yellow pencil. He’d take copious notes during the interview, but Sal knew Harold often was merely sketching little fish. None of them the same size, but all swimming in the same direction. He had asked Harold about that once, and Harold had given some complex explanation involving salmon that Sal found incomprehensible.

  “You said you’ve stayed here at the Fairchild before,” Sal said to Duke in his voice that was more like a growl. Then waited.

  “The annual convention’s here,” Duke said. “Glow View Paint. You’ve heard of us?”

  “No,” Sal said.

  “I sure have,” Harold said. “You guys are nationwide.”

  “That’s right!” Duke seemed buoyed about Harold knowing that. “What we cover stays covered. I’m a sales rep. Reps and other Glow View employees are here from all over the—”

  “Where are you from?” Sal interrupted.

  “St. Louis.”

  “East?”

  “West. Missouri.”

  “About last night,” Sal said. “How did you happen to be looking out your door and see—most likely the killer—enter Andria Bell’s suite?”

  “I’ve been reading all about that in the papers,” Duke said. He seemed suddenly ill at ease. A paint salesman from Missouri caught up in murder in New York.

  “That doesn’t exactly answer the question,” Harold said.

  “Well, I heard this knocking and thought it was on my door.” Duke looked off to the right, the way people are supposed to be doing when they’re lying. Harold didn’t think that common belief was true. Or is it to their left?

  “And . . . ?” Sal asked, looking straight ahead.

  “I mean, I thought . . .”

  “You can speak freely, Mr. Craig,” Harold said.

  “Why shouldn’t I be able to?” Duke asked. “And it’s not Mr. Craig, it’s Mr. Duke.”

  “Mr. Duke,” Sal said, “you’re not in any way a suspect in this.” But even as he spoke, Sal wondered. Duke was a male in the same age group as D.O.A., and like a lot of other men, he fit D.O.A.’s general description.