by John Lutz
He then pulled a wallet from the corpse’s pants pocket. Eighty-seven dollars.
Daniel smiled. He rummaged through the wallet for more, but there was none. He did discover that he’d killed Flora and Nathan Amberson. Nice to have met you folks.
He returned to the SUV, climbed in, and inserted the key in the ignition switch.
The vehicle started on the first try. Daniel studied the dashboard. Half a tank of gas. Good enough.
He returned to the woman and dragged her out so she lay on a flattened and shattered window. Then he set to work beating her body with a length of two-by-four from the house’s studwork. When he was finished, he threw some of the house’s wreckage over her.
Daniel didn’t like it, but he left her with her breasts still attached.
He carried his two-by-four to the husband and beat him in similar fashion. It would take at least a while for the bodies to be found, and longer before they’d be identified as murder victims rather than victims of the hurricane or one of its tornados that had destroyed their home.
Meanwhile, Daniel Danielle would be driving.
He poked around the wreckage for a few more minutes, looking for anything useful. There was an old shotgun, but it wasn’t loaded, and Daniel didn’t have time to search for ammunition, so he left it.
He considered siphoning gas from the overturned pickup truck’s tank, but found that almost all of it had run out.
Regretting again that he had to leave the woman with her breasts, he got in the four-wheel-drive SUV and maneuvered it onto the long driveway, then to the road that was cluttered with debris. He headed west. He liked trailing the worst of the weather. Its violence helped to divert attention from his violence.
As he drove, his clothes dried and his heartbeat slowed. If he could make it to Interstate 75 and get south to the heavy population around Fort Myers, he could lie low someplace while time passed. Daniel was resourceful; he’d think of something. Right now, everyone was concerned with what the hurricane was leaving in its wake. If he was a greater danger, the hurricane was a wider one. He was going to be all right. Being captured now wasn’t part of his destiny. How else had he been able to escape?
The world held more for him. He was special. If that weren’t so, he’d be lying back there with those dead cops. He wouldn’t have found Nathan and Flora.
Flora ...
He drove on, trailing the hurricane-like something spawned by its dark winds.
He let himself relax as much as he dared, thinking about Flora Amberson, how she’d tried to become mentally detached, waiting and praying for it to be over. But he’d seen that trick too often and knew how to deny Flora that final escape, how to delay it. How much longer had that hour they shared seemed to her than to him?
Somebody in the SUV laughed. Must have been the driver.
7
New York City, the present
“You sure you need all that mentholated goop under your nose?” Sal Vitali asked his partner, Harold Mishkin.
Sal and Harold worked for Quinn, but they’d been partners in the NYPD. That partnership more or less continued, as Quinn usually used them as a team. Harold had always smeared mentholated cream on his brushy, graying mustache so the fumes would keep his head clear and his stomach from getting upset by the various odors of homicide scenes.
But this wasn’t actually a homicide scene. Macy Collins had been murdered and butchered in the park.
“The killer only spent a short time here after he killed her,” Sal reminded his partner. He knew Mishkin had a delicate constitution, and over the years he’d become protective of him, often in sly and subtle ways. At the same time, Harold could get on Sal’s nerves.
No, that wasn’t fair. Harold could drive Sal crazy.
“Place still smells bad,” Harold said. “Blood and death smell the same. The odor hangs around.”
Sal thought maybe Harold had something there. He didn’t much like the air in the stifling apartment himself.
They were a Mutt and Jeff team, Harold being average height but a beanpole, and with the bush of a mustache that seemed large enough that it bent him slightly forward. Sal was short, stocky, and animated. He waved his arms around a lot when he spoke. Harold was in most matters oversensitive—especially in regard to his stomach, which was delicate enough that he couldn’t stay long at violent crime scenes. Sal pretty much took things as they came. Harold spoke softly, while Sal had a voice like gravel rolling around inside a bucket.
The CSU techs were gone. Since this wasn’t the actual crime scene there was a limit to what they could achieve. They had pretty much left things as they’d found them, only with smudges here and there from fingerprint powder or luminol spray.
As instructed, the two detectives began to look the apartment over, starting with the living room. The furniture there was mismatched and inexpensive. On a bookshelf there were stacks of magazines, which Sal examined and found to be mostly fashion and food publications, along with the weekly Times review of books. There were a few dog-eared mystery novels by writers like Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Joanne Fluke. There was a book by Stephen Hawking about ... well, Sal couldn’t understand it. What the hell was a quark? He figured at least one of the roommates for the intellectual type. Maybe the victim.
Near a window was a tiny wooden desk, its top bare except for a banker’s lamp with a green shade. Next to the lamp was a chipped white mug stuffed with pens and pencils. The shallow top drawer was full of mostly unpaid bills, some of them weeks overdue. The rest of the drawers contained nothing of interest—scissors, a box of yellow file folders, some blank paper and envelopes, a flashlight that didn’t work, colored pencils and a blank sketch pad, an unused or brand-new paperback dictionary, rubber bands, a stapler without staples.... Sal saw it as the desk of a procrastinator, not the intellectual roommate’s desk. He moved on.
Harold switched on the TV to see what channel the victim had last been watching. A free movie channel—no clue there. A TV Guide sat on top of the TV. Harold leafed through it to see what movies had been playing on that channel the previous night: They Drive by Night, starring Humphrey Bogart. If victim and killer had been here during that time, had the movie been the victim’s choice, or the killer’s? Or had the TV been switched off before the killer entered the apartment? Or had it been on mute and used as a night-light while love was being made? Or something like love.
Harold joined Sal in the kitchen. The refrigerator held some basic foods like milk, a head of lettuce, a white foam box containing some tired-looking pasta. No meat. Had the victim been a vegetarian?
All in all, it was the kind of apartment you’d picture four young women sharing. A comfortably sloppy, temporary kind of place. A stopover on the road to the good life.
The bathroom was a mess. Bloody towels were on the floor and in the bathtub. The faucets were smeared with blood. Here must be where the killer had seriously cleaned up after the murder in the park.
“No point in both of us going in there,” Sal said. “Why don’t you start on the bedrooms?”
Harold nodded and moved on down the hall. He was holding his hand cupped over his nose.
Sal left the bathroom as they’d found it. Maybe Macy had fought back, and some of this blood was the killer’s. It might be enough to establish his DNA profile. Even if his DNA wasn’t in any of the data banks and couldn’t identify him, it could be matched with a sample from the suspect himself—if they could find him.
Sal went into the first bedroom he came to after leaving the bathroom. Harold was in there. Sal noticed that Harold held a hand on his stomach as they examined the bedroom. There was blood smeared here and there, too, as if deliberately. Nothing like the bathroom. Sal hoped Harold wasn’t going to be sick or make some kind of fuss.
“Why don’t you look around the other rooms some more?” Sal growled. “I’ll check out the drawers and closets in here.”
“I’ll be okay,” Harold said, swallowing hard and crossing the room
to open a closet door.
Harold, Harold, Sal thought.
“These clothes,” Harold said, with his head still in the closet, muffling his words, “they’re pretty good-sized. And here’s something, Sal. She wore a lift in one shoe.”
“That’s her roommate’s closet,” Sal said.
“Ah!”
“You notice something’s missing?” Sal asked.
“The lift in the other shoe?”
“No, Harold. A computer. How many people do you know who don’t own a computer? Especially if they’re the victim’s age.”
“I could count them on one thumb,” Harold said. Then he thought. “Maybe CSU took it.”
“It wasn’t on the list,” Sal said, though he hadn’t seen any list. It was just that Harold was beginning to irk him.
“Ah,” Harold said.
They finally left the apartment with some sense of who the victim had been—which was part of their purpose. They also hadn’t discovered anything in the nature of a clue that Quinn, Pearl, and Q&A’s fifth associate, Larry Fedderman, might have overlooked during a previous visit. No surprise there. They were an effective trio; even the lanky, potbellied Fedderman, who dressed like a bewildered refugee in a suit he had found, had a mental gear for every problem.
Now for the main purpose of their visit to the building: interviewing the dead woman’s neighbors.
That could be a waste of time, but not always.
As Harold was fond of saying, it was surprising what they didn’t know they knew.
8
Central Florida, 2002
Daniel was finishing topping off the SUV’s tank at the gas pump he’d managed to get working at the storm-damaged service station. The few people who drove past glanced at him but saw nothing unusual in what he was doing. The station obviously wasn’t open, but this wasn’t an ordinary time. People did what they must in order to survive.
“Have you seen a brown and white dog?” a female voice asked, causing Daniel to jump.
“Didn’t mean to scare you, mister.”
Daniel finished replacing the nozzle and turned around to see a thin girl about fourteen standing around ten feet from him. She was wearing a thin white T-shirt with MARLINS lettered on it, cut-off Levi’s, and brown leather sandals. The T-shirt was wet and her nipples were visible as dark nubs pressing out against the fabric.
“You didn’t scare me, sweetheart,” Daniel said. “Just startled me, is all. What’s wrong, you lost your dog?”
“Candy. I haven’t seen her since ...” Her eyes teared up and her breath caught in her throat. “... since me and my mom got under the bed at home.”
“Where is your mom?”
“She wasn’t moving when I left her. I’m sure she’s—”
“That’s okay, sweetheart.” Daniel went to her and hugged her. “And now you’re looking for Candy.”
“I saw her run away when the hurricane hit.”
“How far away did—do you live?”
“A good ways.” She pointed toward some wrecked houses that had been lined like soldiers on a side street.
Daniel looked at the girl more closely. “You never did tell me your name.”
“I’m Gretchen.”
“Nice name.”
“Whatever your name is, I think you get used to it.”
Daniel shrugged and smiled. “I’m Dan. Pleased to meet you.” He rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth and glanced around. “When a dog runs away in a storm, it’s usually the same way the wind was blowing. They do that to survive. You say Candy ran that way?” He pointed west.
Gretchen nodded.
“I’ll tell you what. I’m going that direction. You wanna hop in the SUV and I’ll drive you that way? Maybe up and down some of these streets where houses used to be, we can spot Candy.”
The girl didn’t hesitate. She smiled. “That’d be good.”
“Might work,” Daniel said.
He climbed in on the driver’s side and unlocked the door for Gretchen, then helped her climb up into the SUV.
“You keep a sharp eye out,” Daniel said, starting the engine. “So will I.”
He drove west, meandering some to get a closer look at a ruined building, or simply a pile of wreckage.
After about ten minutes he saw a house that was leveled, near a barn that was damaged but still standing. Nobody was in sight in any direction.
“Think I might have caught a look at a brown and white dog,” Daniel said, stopping the SUV. “Mighta gone behind that barn. Why don’t we—”
But Gretchen was out of the vehicle and running toward the barn.
Daniel drove after her, making sure he didn’t run over anything sharp. He parked the truck where it couldn’t be seen from the highway.
He was smiling.
“I don’t see her,” Gretchen said. “She mighta gone inside the barn.”
“Then let’s go in and look,” Daniel said.
He got down out of the SUV and followed Gretchen into the barn. It was dim inside, and there was nothing there but some old rusty tools and a tractor that looked as if it hadn’t run in years. And a length of rope draped over a peg in a supporting beam.
“Take a look there behind the tractor,” he told Gretchen.
While she was doing that, he went to the broad wooden door and tried to pull it shut. It wouldn’t move much, and jammed a couple of feet short of closing. That was okay, if there was a little light beyond what was leaking in through the separated wooden slats.
“How come you’re shutting the door?” Gretchen asked.
“If Candy’s in here, we wouldn’t want her running outside,” Daniel said.
Something in his voice must have alerted Gretchen. She gave him a wide-eyed look and bolted for the barn door.
Daniel tripped her, then lifted her and held her upright by her hair and marched her toward one of the stalls. She was surprisingly light and it was no effort.
He snatched the rope off the peg with his free hand along the way.
Gretchen was trembling with fear.
Daniel with anticipation.
9
New York, the present
The city was still in the sweaty grip of summer heat and humidity. Sal and Harold didn’t find much relief inside Macy Collins’s apartment building, but it was better than outside.
Macy had lived in 5E. Harold knocked on the door of 5D, and Sal took 5F. They would work their way in opposite directions around the hall. Usually old apartment buildings like this one smelled like urine, disinfectant, and over-fried bacon, in various mixture and degree. This building made a different and less offensive olfactory impression that Sal couldn’t quite place.
Nobody answered the knock on 5F’s door. Sal moved along to 5G and heard Harold meet someone and enter 5D. “Are you baking something?” Sal heard Harold ask, after identifying himself. “It smells wonderful.”
“Carrot cake,” said the voice of an older woman.
“I love carrot cake.”
“Your nose seems to be running. Do you need a handkerchief, detective?”
“That’s not—”
The door closed. That was fine with Sal.
The door he’d just knocked on opened, and a woman in her thirties smiled out at him. She was short and plump, and her dark hair, combed straight back as if she were standing in a stiff breeze, emphasized a sweet, fleshy face. She was perspiring heavily, and her apartment didn’t smell as good as the one Harold had drawn. “You’re with the police,” she said.
“I’m usually the one who says that,” Sal said.
“But I’m not,” the woman said. “I mean, with the police. You see, if you said—”
“I understand,” Sal said, wishing Harold had knocked on this door.
“I’m Charmain Graham,” the woman said, stepping back so he could enter. “Do you want to know if I was home last night? Did I see or hear anything unusual? Did I know the dead woman well? Do I have something to say that might provide
information about the murder?”
“Do you want me to sit under a bright light while you question me?” Sal asked.
She appeared puzzled. “Why would I—” A wide, wide grin. “Oh, I see. You wondered, was I going to hamburger you.”
“Hamburger?”
“You know—grill you. That’s police slang.”
“I’ve never heard that one,” Sal said.
“It was on one of those CSI programs.”
Sal knew he was going to have difficulty with this woman. She seemed to see conversation as a kind of oblique jousting with rubber lances. She motioned for Sal to sit on a small sofa with a worn green slipcover. A ginger cat glared at him and then skulked away. “I won’t do anything with a telephone directory,” she said.
She had Sal there. Again. He sat and looked at her.
Charmain grinned. “Isn’t that what the police do sometimes with a stubborn suspect? Whack him in the head with a phone directory? So there are no marks?” She acted it out, swinging hard with her arms parallel to each other.
“That’s right,” Sal said, playing along. “The more serious crimes get the biggest boroughs.”
“Now you are joking with me.” Charmain Graham laughed. She had a nice, musical laugh. Sal found himself liking her, despite that fact that she might be certifiably insane.
“So did you?” Sal asked. “See or hear anything last night?”
“Anything suspicious, you mean?” She sat down in a small upholstered chair angled toward the sofa. The chair creaked a warning, but she ignored it. There was a low wooden coffee table between them, bare except for some back issues of New York magazine fanned out like a hand of cards. The apartment was cheaply furnished but impeccably clean and ordered. There was nothing superfluous. No gewgaws, no photographs. Sal had talked to plenty of potential witnesses like this; Charmain Graham was lonely and glad for the company, even if it meant there’d been a murder next door.