Frenzy

by John Lutz

  The black leather man purse he’d carried rested on the pavement beneath the table. Its contents would have been of extreme interest to the police presence down the street.

  He sipped his beer and watched the police milling about in practiced consultation, trying to fit together whatever small and confounding pieces of the crime they possessed. Or thought they possessed. There were emergency vehicles, radio cars from several precincts, plainclothes detectives moving about and deferred to like royalty. Flashing lights of various hues defied the brightening morning and faintly painted the surroundings. A TV van with large station letters on its sides and a satellite antenna came on the scene. A TV crew spilled out of it and worked to set up for one of the local stations. Everything seemed to center around a newscaster wearing a tight skirt and low-cut blouse. The wind mussed her hair, and an assistant ran forward and rearranged it, then shot it with aerosol spray to keep it in place.

  Ah, the aftermath of murder. If there could be such a thing as a delicious sight, this would be it.

  There was the body, not so long ago a beautiful woman within his hands, now being wheeled to a waiting ambulance with its doors standing open. The paramedics were moving with precision but not with any sense of urgency. “Action! Action!” he felt like shouting, as if he were a silent movie director spurring on his cast. Few arranged dramas could be more invigorating. More deeply arousing. This must be what it felt like to be an arsonist observing a fire he’d started. Or to be God.

  Action! Let’s have her die trying to claw her way out of the ambulance! One last burst of life.

  But he knew that had been impossible for hours. His plan had taken it into consideration.

  He saw the rotund cop in the tailored blue suit leave, driven away in an unmarked black Ford with a uniformed cop at the wheel. So the higher-ups in the NYPD were visiting the crime scene—a measure of the impact the murders were having on the city.

  The killer gave silent thanks to the media. He really should call in to Minnie Miner ASAP and thank the woman who cracked the whip at that circus.

  Another car, unmarked but obviously a police vehicle, even down to a stubby aerial on its trunk, remained where Quinn and the other plainclothes cop, Pearl Kasner, had left it, angled in at the curb. Next to it was another anonymous black Ford, this one badly dented. Two uniformed cops, belonging to a patrol car parked nearby, were stationed at the apartment entrance.

  A little barrel-chested guy in a dark suit got out of the dented black Ford. He was toting a large black bag. Obviously, he was the ME. Running a little late, the killer thought.

  Perhaps a letter of complaint would set him right for the next murder.

  A dusty van that the CSU working drones had arrived in was almost squared away with the building’s glassy entrance. A woman in a white outfit, including white gloves, got something from the van, then hurried back inside the building. In front of the van was a second ambulance, this one with its back doors closed, waiting but not in any rush to leave. If there was another victim inside the building, probably he or she wouldn’t require haste.

  This was a lot of excitement for the quiet East Village neighborhood. On the sidewalk opposite the apartment, knots of people stood about watching. Other people at the round metal outdoor restaurant tables were obviously distracted by whatever was going on down the street, but weren’t so interested that they were going to stop eating or drinking and walk to get a closer look. This was New York. Like the bumper stickers said, Shit Happens.

  The killer sat and watched it all unfold, like fate that he’d decreed. Honor Tripp hadn’t made a grand exit, being in a body bag. That was a little disappointing, what with her face being covered.

  With the star of the show gone, things began to wind down. The crowd of onlookers had lost its center and was beginning to thin. One by one, the police and emergency vehicles departed.

  Soon only Quinn and Pearl’s car remained.

  There was little going on inside the apartment now other than predictable routine. Neighbors would be interviewed. Statements would be taken. Honor Tripp’s apartment, already minutely examined by the Crime Scene Unit, might be given another cursory examination.

  Toiling and toiling over a crime scene—that was a large part of police work. Until, gradually, they’d find something interesting. Though not necessarily immediately helpful.

  The killer had been careful about what he’d touched before donning his latex gloves. He was certain he hadn’t left fingerprints, or any bodily fluids. He’d even worn a condom, just in case. Sorry, NYPD, no DNA.

  The apartment building down the street seemed almost back to normal. A sloppily parked car remained at the curb. Another, a patrol car, was parked half a block down. Some yellow-orange Crime Scene ribbon surrounded the scene.

  Things were pretty quiet on the outside of the area the tape encompassed. And they were quiet on the inside. Everyone had left, other than a stoical uniformed cop standing watch, and detectives Quinn and Pearl.

  Everything was as it should be. As the killer had planned and wrought.

  Not the first time, it occurred to him that what he was doing was almost biblical. “Playing God,” as Minnie Miner had described it on her nightly newscast.

  Tilting back his head, he finished his beer. God allowed him a belch.

  He left, satisfied.

  55

  New York, three years ago

  While he was eating breakfast, Quinn’s cell phone beeped. He glanced at it and saw by the number that the caller was Renz. Quinn didn’t want to talk to him just now, but he knew he’d better, or the busy and ambitious Renz might make himself difficult to contact. Though Renz had the capacity to ruin a good breakfast, even over the phone, Quinn pressed the proper button and said good morning.

  “You won’t think so after talking with me,” Renz said.

  “Big surprise.”

  “What was that?”

  “How are you going to ruin my appetite, Harley?”

  “If I’d known you were at breakfast, I wouldn’t have called.”

  “Go ahead, Harley, ruin my eggs Benedict.”

  “In 1993 a murdered woman name of Linda Bracken was found tortured and murdered in a Sarasota, Florida, hotel. There was some carving on her forehead that might have been the letters D and O, then something indecipherable. She’d also been tortured with a knife and a lighted cigarette. In December 1995, outside a flyspeck town called Prentis, also in Florida but north of Sarasota, a woman named Honey Carter was found killed by a giant python—”

  Quinn lowered his fork full of eggs Benedict. “A what?”

  “Python, as in snake. People down in Florida keep them as pets, then turn them loose in the swamp when they get too big to feed or handle. Damned things grow to over twenty-five feet. They can even kill and eat an eight-foot gator. So they thrive there, and one of them somehow got wrapped around this Honey Carter. Squeezed her to death. Had a start on trying to swallow her. Those things can displace their jaws and expand, swallow whole animals.”

  Quinn dropped his fork on his plate. “Jesus! You saying the snake killed her?”

  “Looks that way, but unless the snake smoked cigarettes, somebody else participated. There were cigarette burns on her body, applied in an effective, familiar manner. Touched to her closed eyelids and the corners of her lips, behind her ears.”

  “So it seems to be the same killer that did in Linda Bracken,” Quinn said, “minus the snake, in Linda’s case.”

  “Looks like Honey was tortured by the killer and left for dead in the swamp, then along came the snake,” Renz said.” The ME says it was the snake that did her in. Crushed her to death. I guess you could say the snake was an accomplice. It’s not talking, though. The guy who found her shot it.”

  Quinn found himself thinking it was too bad somebody hadn’t come along and shot Honey Carter before she had to die in the tightening grip of a twenty-five-foot snake.

  “Linda Bracken, Honey Carter . . .” Renz said.
“Put it all together it means Dead on Arrival. Seems we got ourselves a traveler serial killer.”

  “And one who’s in town,” Quinn said. “And maybe claimed more victims than the four we know about. He’s been here awhile and may have hidden some of them where they haven’t been found.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “According to Helen, not likely, but possible. Like an artist who doesn’t want to lose his touch. They’d simply be listed as missing persons.”

  “Maybe he’ll keep traveling north, toward Toronto. That’d put the crazy bastard in another country so we wouldn’t have to screw around with him.”

  “Predators go where there’s the most prey,” Quinn said. “He’s ours.” He sipped his coffee, but it didn’t taste very good. “Media wolves know this cigarette torture thing?”

  “Minnie Miner probably does. She finds out everything even before it happens. She’ll be trying to get hold of you for an interview.”

  “I’ll refer her to you.”

  “Seems like somebody’s already referred her to you.”

  “I wonder who.”

  “Enjoy your eggs Benedict.”

  Quinn broke the connection and shoved his plate away.

  Hugged to death by a snake.

  God Almighty!

  56

  New York, the present

  Fedderman hadn’t slept much last night, but this morning, over breakfast, he and Penny had talked like adults. At least that was how she’d described it. That shaky gyroscopic balance that unkillable marriages somehow achieved had been regained.

  All in all, it was a reason for Fedderman to feel pretty good.

  The morning’s conversation had even prompted him to dress neatly before leaving the apartment, knowing Penny would notice. He was wearing yesterday’s baggy dark pants, but a clean white shirt, and the jacket of the Armani suit she’d advised him to buy. He had his usual mismatched look about him, but still, who could complain? It was his style.

  He was on his way to interview a neighbor of the late Honor Tripp.

  There was no sign that the building had recently housed a crime scene. The tape was gone from downstairs, as well as the cop on duty. Honor Tripp’s apartment was still sealed, but that seemed to be the only visible irregularity in the hall.

  Fedderman knocked on the door of the apartment adjacent to the one where Honor Tripp had died and waited for her neighbor, Justin Beck, to answer.

  Beck responded to Fedderman’s knock almost immediately. As if he’d been waiting at the window and seen Fedderman approach the building.

  Beck was average height and weight, about forty, and handsome if you were a woman who liked squared-up guys with buzz cuts who appeared to have just been mustered out of the military. He was spiffed up in a gray business suit and looked ready to leave for some gray business. He made a nice contrast to Fedderman. However, as he stepped back to let Fedderman in, he did a double take on the Armani jacket. Fedderman smiled inwardly.

  Beck’s apartment was identical to that of Tripp’s. Small entry hall, midsized living room, short hall to bathroom and bedroom. Gallery kitchen off to one side, bathroom to the other. It was a prewar building, as someone selling New York real estate would have been quick to point out. Meaning you couldn’t hear through the walls.

  Which, to Fedderman, cast a faint shadow of doubt on Beck’s account of why he’d called 911.

  Beck seemed loose and amiable enough, despite the fact that he looked like part of a toy soldier set. Fedderman declined an offer of coffee—it would have been his fourth of the morning—and sat down on a sofa that creaked like vinyl rather than leather and was cold even through the seat of Fedderman’s out-of-season wooly pants.

  While Beck was in the kitchen getting coffee for himself, Fedderman looked around. The wood floor was highly polished. There was a square rug in the center of the room. Furniture that looked like luxury Ikea was placed as if by the giant hand of a decorator.

  Beck returned with coffee in a plain white mug and sat down in an angular wood-armed chair across from Fedderman.

  “Sure you don’t want a cup?” he asked with a smile. Precise white teeth. “It’s exquisite and comes from a country in South America nobody has heard of.”

  “It all tastes pretty much the same to me,” Fedderman said.

  Beck nodded. “You’ve got a point.”

  “You off work today?”

  “I took a day off,” Beck said. “I guess I’m still shook up about the murder. Right next door. I about had a cow.”

  “You told the uniformed officer who talked to you that you were an engineer of some sort.”

  “Yeah. Structural engineer. I subcontract out to various developments.”

  Fedderman didn’t know quite what that meant but let it pass. The scent of the coffee was stronger and started to make Fedderman hungry.

  “I’m sure you get tired of going over your account of Honor Tripp’s murder,” he said, “but—”

  “Not at all,” Beck interrupted. “Sharing the experience kind of eases my mind.”

  This presented a problem for Fedderman. He had a copy of Beck’s statement and sure didn’t want to sit through hearing it read out loud.

  “Read this,” he said, taking the three folded sheets of paper out of one of the Armani jacket’s inside pockets. “I want to make sure it’s accurate, then we can talk about it.”

  Beck plunked wire-framed reading glasses on the bridge of his nose and read studiously, as if seeing the material for the first time. Fedderman watched his concentration, how Beck’s pupils danced line to line over the three sheets of paper.

  Finally Beck placed his coffee mug on the floor, on a Home Progress magazine where it wouldn’t leave a ring. He took two steps up out of the chair and leaned halfway across the living room, passing the rolled-up statement toward Fedderman as if it were the baton in a relay race. Fedderman leaned forward, accepted it, and fell back into the sofa.

  “Summarize,” he said.

  “I’d fallen asleep about ten o’clock,” Beck said, “reading a book about how the Panama Canal was built.”

  Was this guy serious? “Is that anyplace near where your coffee came from?” Fedderman asked.

  “Probably,” Beck said with a straight face, and that was when Fedderman knew Beck was messing with him. Making sport of him.

  That made Fedderman mad, but he wasn’t going to let Beck see that side of him. He’d play right along. It interested Fedderman that a murder next door and a statement to the police, and now a police interview, didn’t seem to cow Beck. It seemed instead to give him a welcome chance to play games. Overconfident killers—which most of them were—thought that way. They were the smartest guy in the room, even if it was full of Nobel Prize members.

  Fedderman got his black leather notepad out of his pocket. Dug deeper and found a chewed-up pencil. He settled back and pretended to take notes.

  “You’d fallen asleep about ten o’clock . . .” he reminded Beck.

  “Yes, and around midnight I was awakened by what sounded like screaming, only . . . kind of muffled. Then, in between screams, what sounded like whimpering.”

  “No one else heard any screams,” Fedderman said.

  “I’m not surprised. These screams wouldn’t carry very far. I told you, they were muffled by something, and I’m—I was—her closest neighbor.”

  “Your bedrooms are precisely side by side, I believe,” Fedderman said.

  “I suppose they are.”

  “You share a wall. And a heating and air-conditioning duct.”

  “I guess we do. What’s that supposed to mean?” Beck seemed more annoyed than afraid of where Fedderman might be taking the conversation. And slightly embarrassed. Yes, his bold warrior’s features were definitely flushed. Fedderman knew why. Honor Tripp’s sex life was part of Justin Beck’s, too.

  Make sport of me now, you voyeuristic toy soldier bastard.

  Fedderman smiled and shrugged. “Means you do what thous
ands of other New Yorkers do when they happen to find themselves side by side with an attractive neighbor, separated by only a vent. If that neighbor has any kind of sex life . . . well, it’s inevitable that you’re going to hear things. Sometimes it must seem almost like being a participant.”

  Beck took a deep breath. He seemed to think about that.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “The night of the murder, Honor was with a man in bed. I thought what I was hearing were sounds of sexual thrall. Instead . . .” He swallowed.

  “You overheard the murder,” Fedderman said.

  Beck nodded. “I didn’t know it at the time. Not at first, anyway.”

  “Of course not.” Fedderman didn’t want this guy to go dry. “Listen, Justin, you could be a help to us. You must have been able to hear just about everything through that vent. Did you hear either one of them say anything?”

  “No. Like I told you, she was gagged.”

  “And it never occurred to you that this was something more than sex?”

  “There are all kinds of sex practiced by all kinds of people.”

  True enough, Fedderman thought. “What about him? Did you hear a man’s voice at all?”

  “Now and then. He told her . . .”

  “What?”

  “That he was going to do this or do that. With the knife and the cigarette. I couldn’t make out the words through the wall. That’s when the muffled screaming would start.”

  “Was he interrogating her?”

  “I don’t think so. It was difficult to be sure. He seemed more into issuing orders. Now and then he’d give a cold kind of laugh. The bastard was enjoying himself. I thought they both were. I never imagined what he was doing, how far he was taking it.”

  “So that’s why you didn’t call the police, or try to stop what was going on.”

  “Right. I figured what was going on might be perfectly normal for them. The usual S&M behavior. Sexual games. Far as I knew, he wasn’t doing anything Honor didn’t like.”