Pulse

by John Lutz

  He began using the knife with delicate skill, making tiny, twisting cuts. The humming changed little in volume but was more desperate and slightly higher pitched, almost a monotone that yet expressed what must be going on in the helpless and doomed woman’s mind.

  Rory’s own body was almost vibrating.

  He couldn’t stop watching.

  The man with the knife began to work on the woman with intensity. Rory’s hand moved to his crotch. He couldn’t stop watching. This was wrong, he knew, and he’d never be able to tell anyone about it. He’d be some kind of accomplice if he did. He knew that all he had to do was remain silent and unmoving, and he’d see everything. Probably even the man burying the woman not far from where Rory had buried Duffy.

  The all-encompassing power of the killer was stunning. Watching him was like watching God at work. Who wouldn’t kill to exercise such power? Who wouldn’t idolize such a creature?

  Even the woman in the clearing—especially the woman in the clearing—must in her terror submit to and pray to the ultimate power of life and death, at the point when death would become a gift.

  The humming grew more desperate and the woman’s body shimmied with pain in the moonlight. Almost like an engine racing and vibrating toward an explosion. The man shifted position slightly, then crooked his elbow and turned the knife blade sideways. He began to remove the woman’s breasts. Rory didn’t blink, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t move.

  He couldn’t stop watching.

  65

  New York City, the present

  Jerry Lido said, “We’ve got a problem.”

  Quinn and Pearl were in the office with him. They stopped what they were doing at their desks and looked at him.

  “Someone’s been here,” he said.

  Quinn glanced around as if to find what Lido was talking about.

  “Not here,” Lido said. “But here virtually. Our virtual here.”

  “On our computers?” Pearl asked.

  “Of course.” For Lido the virtual world of computers was the real world. Then there was Lido’s world where other people lived. And his world when he was drinking.

  “My computer’s been acting a little funky,” Pearl said, wondering how Lido kept it all straight.

  He grinned at her. “Exactly! We’ve been hacked. In fact, we’re in the process of being hacked right now.”

  Helen the profiler entered the office, looking tall and lean as a fashion model, only a little too muscular. As usual, there was a fine sheen of perspiration on whatever bare flesh showed, as if she’d been working out. She’d caught the tail end of the conversation. “Somebody wants to know what’s on our computers,” she said.

  “Somebody knows,” Lido corrected her. He explained to her about having been hacked.

  “Can you find out who he was?”

  “Is,” Lido said. “And that’s what I’ve been trying to do the last two hours. He’s put up Chinese walls, firewalls, indestructible walls. Our computerized information is going only one way—out.”

  “He’s toying with you,” Helen said.

  Pearl immediately started to close down her computer.

  “Better unplug it, too,” Lido said.

  She did. Quinn and Helen went around unplugging the other desk computers.

  “You think he could turn them back on if they were plugged in?” Helen asked.

  Lido grinned. “He might have installed the software to do that without us knowing about it. He might be online here at two in the morning, for all we know.”

  “If he can do that kind of thing to us,” Quinn said, “can we do it to him?” Like Quinn to go on the offensive.

  “If we knew about him what he knows about us, yes,” Lido said. He stood up from his darkened computer screen.

  “Where you going?” Pearl asked.

  “Home, where I don’t have to work using this limited equipment.”

  “I thought you installed new memory in our computers,” Quinn said.

  Lido gave him a pitying look.

  “Doesn’t Q and A have virus protection and firewalls and Chinese walls and all that stuff?” Helen asked.

  Lido’s expression turned to one of contempt. Not for Helen, but for whoever had trespassed in his world and made his skills seem minor. “The hacker got in somehow, then deleted all possible links, so a trace, even by an expert like me, is impossible. Supposedly.” He snatched up a few items from his desk and then stalked out.

  “His alcohol-tainted blood is up,” Helen said.

  “I wouldn’t bet against him learning everything about this hacker,” Quinn said.

  Helen went to the desk Lido had just vacated and perched on the edge. Quinn couldn’t help noticing her legs could use a shave. “Think about this,” she said. “The hacker might have been secretly browsing your computers for information for a long time.”

  “He probably has been,” Quinn said. “But Lido inevitably caught up with him.”

  Helen gave him her thinnest of smiles. “That’s one way of looking at it. Another is to figure that if the hacker had the skills to hack into your system without being noticed, then circumvent your high-tech security and learn what you were doing, wouldn’t he also have the skills to withdraw unnoticed?”

  “Probably,” Quinn said. “But that would mean—”

  Helen’s smile widened. “That the intruder wants you to know your computers have been hacked.”

  At two minutes to midnight Lido called Quinn’s cell phone and woke him up. His words were slurred, and it took him a while to arrange his sentences with enough order for Quinn to understand that whatever precautions the mystery hacker had employed, they had worked. Lido gave Quinn a lot of tech talk he wouldn’t have understood even if Lido was sober and speaking clearly. The message was, there was no way to backtrack the hacker’s online footprints to the source.

  Quinn lay awake in the dark for a long time after the phone call, wondering who would have the ability to outfox Lido on a computer.

  Every possibility he came up with was a worry.

  66

  After an uneasy night of patchwork dreams, Quinn was eating a late breakfast with Pearl in the brownstone’s kitchen. Waffles and sausage patties, all pre-prepared, and the finished issue of toaster and microwave. Pearl’s idea of cooking. It didn’t smell bad, though. The faint haze suspended in the warm kitchen was pungent and conducive to the appetite. But it didn’t fool Quinn or Jody. They’d been tricked before.

  Jody had already left, explaining that she wasn’t hungry and would stop on the way to her job at Enders and Coil for a bagel. Smart young woman, Quinn thought, not unlike her mother.

  He wondered if, when he left the brownstone, he’d smell like waffles and sausage. And if so, for how long?

  Quinn’s cell phone played a cavalry charge trumpet tune and he dug it out of his pocket to see who was calling. Nift at the morgue. Quinn swallowed what he suspected would be his last bite of sausage and pressed the talk button.

  “Mornin’, Nift. Whaddya got?”

  The annoying little M.E. didn’t bother saying hello. “You talking with your mouth full, Quinn?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I was you, I know what it would be full of,” Nift said. Quinn could somehow hear the nasty grin on the little bastard’s face.

  “This a business call?” Quinn asked, with a hint of warning.

  A hint was enough to scare Nift into a strictly business mode. “Linda Brooks died from a heart attack, no doubt caused by shock. Like the other victims when the killer played his games with them. By the time he got around to administering the coup de grâce, she was already dead.”

  “I hope that was a disappointment to him.”

  “No doubt it was. But he worked clean as usual. No usable prints, no DNA traces. Not even indefinite ones like with Macy Collins.”

  Quinn had never had much hope for the meager Collins sample that might have been mostly her own blood.

  “There was a sli
ght residue of condom lubricant in the vagina,” Nift said. “The murder weapon was probably the same knife. Also used to remove Linda’s substantial knockers. No sign of those, by the way.”

  “What about Grace Moore?”

  “Probably not enough of a rack to interest our killer. He’s definitely a breast man with high standards.”

  “At least she wasn’t mutilated,” Quinn said. He looked across the table and saw Pearl watching him intensely, interested in his end of the conversation.

  “My guess is her death was comparatively easy,” Nift said. “A quick choke to silence her, then a single, accurate stab wound to the heart. I think she was simply in the way. Unlucky in the extreme.”

  “Torture wounds have any commonality with the other victims?”

  “You saw them. They almost had to have been the result of the same knife, the same killer. And they resemble morgue photos of Daniel Danielle’s work so many years ago. He loves to carve.”

  “Yet he left Grace Moore untouched in that regard.”

  “She wasn’t in his plans,” Nift said. “I can understand that.”

  My God, so can I, Quinn thought. What’s it doing to me, getting into the heads of these sickos? Hunter thinking like prey, a part of him living inside their skulls. The killer is doing that with his potential victims. It’s part of his game. But I’m not playing a game. Am I?

  “Speaking of commonalities,” Nift said, “the panties on Linda Brooks were the same size and brand as the previous victim’s. We even found a pubic hair for analysis that confirms the fact they were hers. Also, elastic marks, the lay of the material, looks like he temporarily untied the victim’s legs and did the panty exchange postmortem, but before rigor mortis set in.”

  Quinn couldn’t help imagining the killer maneuvering dead limbs into various positions to work off and on the panties. A complicated task, but it might be a chore he for some reason immensely enjoyed. One he was compelled to do as an exercise in total control. Quinn’s stomach did a loop.

  Pearl was giving him her narrowed eye look. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?” Nift asked on the phone.

  “Anything else we might deem important?” Quinn asked.

  “No. Let me know if you happen to find the boobs. And say hello to Pearl.”

  Quinn flipped the phone shut without replying.

  “Nift?” Pearl asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Want some more sausage?”

  “ No.”

  Jody stopped for a bagel at a Starbucks near Enders and Coil. She’d often had lunch with Sarah Benham, but this was their first breakfast. The two women had become even closer friends, though Sarah was still something of an enigma to Jody.

  They were at a table near the back. Sarah had a cinnamon scone, Jody a toasted everything bagel with cream cheese and strawberry jam. Both had tall lattes. Jody couldn’t help thinking how much better this was than her mother’s toasted frozen waffles and microwaved sausages.

  “So how’s your mom doing on the Daniel Danielle investigation ?” Sarah asked, and took a cautious sip of her steaming latte.

  The question caught Jody off guard. “I’m surprised you’re interested?”

  “Why?”

  “You never seemed interested before.”

  “The killer’s apparently branching out,” Sarah said. “He killed two women this time, according to the news. I was just wondering what that might mean.”

  “We didn’t have time to talk about it this morning.”

  “I thought you were intrigued by your mom’s work.”

  “I am.” Jody took a bite of bagel and chewed.

  Sarah smiled. “But you’d still rather be an attorney than a cop.”

  “As of now, yes.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a very strong commitment.”

  “It’s not.”

  Both women sipped their lattes, thinking about the answer that had popped out.

  Jody, not committed?

  “Something about Enders and Coil?” Sarah asked.

  “About one of their cases. A woman refusing to move out of her apartment so the client, a big development company, can tear down her building.”

  “Sounds like the plot of a movie.”

  “Or a novel.”

  “Why do they want to tear down the apartment building ?”

  “They want the entire block for some big project. Office buildings, condos ... they have no moral—or possibly legal—right to just plow this poor woman under.”

  “What about eminent domain?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Jody said. “Believe me.”

  “Lots of times, when you’ve finally finished thinking things through, they are simple. That’s when you make up your mind.”

  Jody laughed. “I’m not there yet.”

  Sarah looked at her more seriously. “How important to you is this woman’s plight?”

  “Very.”

  “But why? Do you know her?”

  “I feel that I do.”

  Sarah frowned. “Does anyone at Enders and Coil know how you feel?”

  “To a degree.”

  “I think you should give this a lot of thought before siding with a woman who’s going to have to move out one way or the other. You might be risking your career, your future.”

  “How do you know she’ll have to move?”

  Sarah shook her head, her expression sad. “They always do, in these kinds of cases. It’s in almost everyone’s best interest.”

  “Everyone’s but hers.”

  “There’s no denying that. But maybe they’ll offer her a large settlement to agree to move.”

  “They’ve done that and she’s refused.

  “Did she say why?”

  “No. But it isn’t about money.”

  “What money can’t do, maybe more money can. Or some other kind of persuasion.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  Sarah leaned closer across the fake marble table. Steam from the lattes rose as if the two women were engaged in some sort of alchemy. “I know someone who has a connection at the developer, Jody. I can’t recommend strongly enough that you disassociate yourself from this case, and this woman’s hopeless cause.”

  Jody was surprised, but she realized she shouldn’t be. She actually didn’t know much about Sarah Benham. “You know something Enders and Coil doesn’t?”

  “Probably.” Sarah studied Jody and then shook her head. “You know I can’t tell you, Jody. It would be betraying the confidence of a friend. I wouldn’t betray our confidences that way.”

  Jody sampled her latte and still found it too hot to sip. “See?” she said.

  “See what?”

  “It really isn’t that simple.”

  Fifteen minutes later Sarah left the coffee shop first.

  Through the window displaying pastry, Jody watched her join a sunlit crowd of people massed on the sidewalk, waiting for the traffic light to flash a walk signal so they could cross the intersection. The signal appeared like a silent command. After an aggressive cab bullied its way through a right turn, Sarah disappeared in the flow of pedestrians.

  Jody still had time to spare, so she opened her laptop. But she didn’t tap into the coffee shop’s Wi-Fi. Instead she inserted a thumb drive containing copies of Enders and Coil files and began rummaging through them. If someone from the firm, which was only a few blocks away, happened to enter the coffee shop and saw what she was doing, it would probably mean immediate dismissal. And less immediately, but just as likely, prosecution.

  Well, life wasn’t without risk.

  Jody thought about Mildred Dash trapped and terrorized in her apartment, waging the good fight against an evil manifestation of capitalism, and pressed on.

  She enjoyed the challenge and couldn’t help becoming engrossed in what she was doing. She came across no actual evidence of criminality, but she was surprised to find e-mail exchanges with Waycliffe College. All th
e e-mails were encrypted, and she was unable to break the code. But she did notice that some of the messages bore Elaine Pratt’s email address. That surprised her, and kept her at her task longer than she’d intended.

  Futilely trying to decode the e-mails made her almost twenty minutes late when she arrived at Enders and Coil.

  That didn’t seem to matter, though, in light of more important events. Word had arrived that Mildred Dash had been terrorized by an intruder last night and had been found by a watchman early this morning in a coma. She was hospitalized and in intensive care.

  Associate attorneys were dashing about or yammering on the phone. Jack Enders and Joseph Coil both appeared somber and determined, and totally in control. Jody had never before seen or been part of an event of such urgency at the firm.

  She was assigned to continue calling the hospital and family to learn the seriousness of Mildred’s condition. Meanwhile, litigators at Enders and Coil would be busy discussing the legal ramifications of razing her apartment building while her unit was unoccupied.

  Here was opportunity, if they seized it.

  Hours counted. Maybe minutes.

  No one actually came right out and said it would be best if Mildred Dash died, but it was on the tips of a lot of tongues.

  Jody was disgusted, but like everyone else at the firm, hanging in suspense. The mood was contagious and oddly, undeniably, pleasurable. She could see it on the faces of her coworkers. They loved being part of the drama.

  Suddenly Jody wondered, was this what Sarah Benham had known about when she’d cautioned her at breakfast?

  67

  Leighton, Wisconsin, 1986

  “You’re sure your mother thinks you went to visit your aunt in Milwaukee?” Rory asked Sherri.

  “She saw me get on the Greyhound bus. What she didn’t see was when it stopped to pick up more passengers, and let some off, down the road in Grantville. I got off along with some other people. Nobody noticed.”

  “So how’d you get back here?”

  “Hitchhiked.” She flashed him a wicked grin. “And you know why.”