Pulse

by John Lutz

  Rory did. His mother was out of town, in Milwaukee with a new boyfriend, and he and Sherri could make good use of her house. Rory simply had to be home now and then in the evening, so he could answer the phone if his mother called to check on him. And he would be home. With Sherri.

  That was the plan.

  They were standing now outside Rory’s mother’s Chevy, parked near where Duffy had died and been buried. Where that other girl—the one only Rory and the killer knew about—had been tortured, murdered, and then buried. It gave Rory a kind of chill when he walked holding hands with Sherri and stood kissing her over the dead girl’s grave. It was a feeling he found he liked.

  Sherri thought she was having that effect, and kissed him back hard, using her tongue.

  Rory almost immediately had an erection. Beneath him was a closely kept secret only he and one other person knew. And the other person—the killer—thought only he knew what had happened here.

  Rory remembered how the girl had been bound and gagged, staring straight up at nothing. The expression on her face when the killer began to do things—such small, delicate things at first—to her with the knife. The faint movements she made. Her quivering, unfeeling fingers. The pleading sounds emanating from her taped lips. The way her nude body vibrated near the end. Most of all, her eyes ... her eyes ...

  What really got him was that she looked something like Sherri. Same type, anyway. Different hair, but definitely the same type.

  “... Take one,” Sherri was saying. “They’ll definitely make you feel good.”

  He looked down and saw that she was holding those same pills from her mother’s medicine cabinet.

  “I feel good already,” Rory said. If you only knew ...

  “Don’t be such a pussy,” Sherri said, and pushed the vial of tablets toward him.

  His manhood having been questioned, Rory shoved them away, causing several to spill out onto the ground.

  Sherri punched his shoulder, a glancing blow, but it hurt. “Now look! You dickhead! You spilled them!”

  She was angry with him. How angry will she be when she figures out I killed her precious dog? Rory knew she was smart. She would eventually find out about Duffy.

  He bent down and began picking up the small white tablets, digging some of them out from beneath dead leaves.

  “Get them all!” Sherri demanded.

  When he had all or most of the dropped tablets in his cupped hand, Rory straightened up and threw them out toward the deeper woods.

  “What the fuck, Rory?” She came at him in anger, batting at him, and the nail of her little finger scraped the corner of his left eye. The sharp pain enraged him.

  He slapped her face hard, thinking about the girl beneath them in the earth, how she’d died. When she’d died.

  How she’d died.

  When Sherri, stunned, bent over to spit out blood, Rory brought up his knee and drove it into her midsection. He caught her to break her fall.

  He hadn’t actually planned any of this. It was simply a sort of alternate sequence of things he could do. A work of imagination, really.

  But damned if that imagined sequence hadn’t begun. And he knew he would let it play out. It was like it was meant to be.

  If it wasn’t meant to be, why had he prepared for it without even thinking about it?

  Maybe it had something to do with what he’d seen in the clearing, the god, and the girl in the ground.

  Maybe he now had the secret knowledge and was acting on it. Nothing in this world really mattered compared to this.

  The girl in the ground, she didn’t matter anymore. All she was now was memory. Secret memory.

  He went to the Chevy and opened the trunk, got the rope he’d brought, and the roll of thick electrician’s tape.

  It had only taken seconds, and Sherri was still curled on the ground, still struggling to catch her breath.

  Rory stood over her, listening to her labored, gasping breathing, thinking about the dead girl. He bent down, lashed her ankles together, and cut the long end of the knotted rope with his pocket knife. Odd that he didn’t recall taking the knife from his pocket and opening it. He maneuvered Sherri’s body around on the leaves and tied her wrists tightly behind her back. Hurts? Too bad. He yanked her up and adjusted her body so she was kneeling, then ran a rope between the knotted ropes on her ankles and wrists. Thinking about the dead girl. He pulled that rope tight, bending back Sherri’s body like the dead girl’s had been. She’d almost recovered enough to scream, so he picked up the tape he’d gotten from the trunk, reeled off a long strip, and wrapped it firmly over her mouth, around to the back of her neck, thinking about the dead girl.

  Rory used his knife to cut away Sherri’s clothes. He watched her dark and desperate eyes, thinking about the dead girl. Then he straightened up and looked around. The moon was almost full, and there was plenty of light in the clearing. But no one around to see what he was doing. Not out here in this desolate part of town, on this remote road.

  He moved around in front of Sherri and looked intently into her face, seeing the terror and incomprehension there. She stared back, pleading. He smiled, thinking about the dead girl.

  He stood where she could see him wipe the knife’s blade on the thigh of his jeans and then test its sharpness with his finger. He rolled her forward, onto her stomach, and began using the knife on her back as he’d seen the killer do to the dead girl. Sherri made the same horrified, muted noises the dead girl had made.

  After a while, he put her back on her knees, her body bowed in an almost impossible arch. Perhaps someone with a powerful telescope, on some distant star, could see the horrified expression in her staring eyes.

  There must be someone out there in the cosmos who can help you.

  Well, maybe not.

  He began working again with the knife, keeping his thumb and forefinger low on the blade, the way the killer had done with the dead girl. The screams she made now were like the dead girl’s had been, full throated but able to travel only as far as her taped mouth before changing to a frenetic low humming that barely escaped into the night.

  He worked on her for quite a while there in the otherwise silent, isolated clearing, thinking about the dead girl. Her body began a frenetic bouncing and vibration, her bare breasts jiggling and heaving. This wasn’t a surprise. Rory got comfortable and watched her eyes, watched them very carefully until all light and comprehension went out of them. Like the dead girl’s eyes.

  Then he used the knife to remove her breasts. It was easier than he’d imagined, no bone or gristle to cut, only soft flesh.

  He considered throwing the severed breasts into the woods, letting the animals dispose of them. Then he had a better idea and decided to keep them.

  Breathing hard, he stood up and went back to the car. He wrapped the breasts in an old wadded plastic cleaner’s bag tightly, so they wouldn’t leak. Then he got a shovel from the trunk.

  The earth was soft, and it didn’t take long to bury Sherri.

  Standing in the middle of the clearing, Rory looked carefully around him. It was as if he and Sherri had never been here. He would get back in his mother’s car and drive away, and all of this might never have happened.

  It might never have happened, so it didn’t happen.

  There would be a big fuss over Sherri, but she’d left on the bus and not come back. Not the first girl like her to do that. Things would quiet down after a while. The world would go on. People would forget.

  He wouldn’t forget Sherri, though. Not ever.

  The dead girl.

  68

  New York, the present

  Quinn decided to talk to someone about Dr. Grace Moore’s files himself. After all, hadn’t her patient Linda called on him for help? Hadn’t there been dozens of other women who called Q&A or the NYPD recently maintaining that they were in danger, requesting protection? There simply were too few people to protect them, even if most of their calls weren’t legitimate and they weren’t in act
ual danger.

  The trouble was, some of them were in danger, and it was impossible to know which. It was a small percentage, but they were real. Linda Brooks and Grace Moore had been real, and the danger had been real, and here Quinn was investigating their deaths when he felt he should have known or sensed something that would have prevented them.

  That was the problem; he couldn’t predict the future, and the killer could forge it.

  The building containing Dr. Moore’s office was a haven from the heat. Everything seemed to be made of marble other than the occasional potted plant. Quinn found himself wondering what it would feel like to lie down on the cool lobby floor.

  Per Quinn’s instructions, Pearl and Fedderman were helping Sal and Harold canvass two square blocks of the neighborhood around where Linda Brooks and the doctor had been murdered. Old-fashioned, irreplaceable police legwork. Quinn wasn’t sure where Weaver was; she was Renz’s special conduit to the commissioner’s office, which made her something of an independent operator. Quinn liked it that way. Pearl and Weaver were better kept apart. They could be fuse and explosive.

  The elevator in Dr. Moore’s building was warm and slow and seemed to stop at every other floor before Quinn got out of the stifling little car. A woman in the elevator had been wearing too much perfume, and he was still trying to fight the urge to sneeze.

  When Quinn entered the doctor’s office, he found himself in a small anteroom with cream-colored walls and beige furniture. There was a rounded walnut desk with a computer, a printer, and phone on it. He heard nothing but the faint rushing sound of traffic in the street below.

  He called hello.

  A few seconds later, a door to what he assumed was a larger office opened. A distraught-looking young woman with frizzy dark hair pulled back to make her round face seem even rounder, peered out at him through dark-framed glasses. “Help you?”

  Quinn thought she looked like the one who needed help. Maybe with her midterm exams.

  He flashed his identification and explained who he was and why he was there.

  The young woman, who said her name was Cleo, looked confused and started gnawing her lower lip with large white teeth. “I’m not sure if I should even talk to you about one of Dr. Moore’s patients, much less let you see the case file.”

  Quinn gave her a smile that surprised her with its kindness. “What were you to the deceased, dear?”

  “I was Dr. Moore’s part-time assistant and receptionist,” Cleo said.

  “Did you ever meet Linda Brooks?”

  “A few times. When she came in for appointments.”

  “Do you know why she was being treated? Her ... issue?”

  “Not exactly. And like I said, I’m not sure I should be discussing—”

  “You don’t doubt my identity, do you, dear?”

  “Of course not. I’ve seen you in the papers, on TV news. But don’t you need a warrant or something?”

  “I can get one, if you want to go on record as being uncooperative.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean to be uncooperative. I just don’t know what the patient’s rights are, even though ...”

  “The patient is dead,” Quinn finished for her. “I suspect that if Linda Brooks could somehow communicate with us, she’d want you to let the people investigating her and Dr. Moore’s deaths examine her file.”

  “Probably,” Cleo conceded.

  “While you’re making up your mind,” Quinn said, “can you tell me why Linda Brooks was being treated?”

  Cleo fought with her indecision for several seconds, then said, “I guess. She was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic.”

  “Meaning?” He wanted to keep Cleo talking.

  “She suspected people of being out to get her. And she had hallucinations. Heard voices.” Cleo looked around helplessly. “I don’t know the details. Dr. Moore didn’t talk much to me about her patients.”

  “Still, you learned things.”

  “I learned things,” Cleo agreed.

  “Had Linda Brooks been getting better?”

  “There was no getting better for her. She had to learn to adjust to being ... disturbed.”

  “Was she disturbed about anything in particular lately?”

  Cleo held on to the back of the desk chair and looked away from Quinn. Then back at him. “She thought someone was following her. A man. She’d thought that before.”

  “Was he someone she knew?”

  “No, but he’d follow her, and sometimes when she’d get home, she’d know he’d been in her apartment.”

  “How?”

  “That I don’t know. You’d have to consult the file.”

  Neither of them spoke for what seemed a long time. Quinn knew when to hold his silence. He made a bet with himself.

  “The files are in those brown cabinets behind the doctor’s desk,” Cleo said.

  Quinn smiled slightly but said nothing.

  Cleo stood straighter. “I’m going down and around the block for a coffee. Do you mind keeping an eye on things while I’m gone?”

  “You can trust me,” Quinn said.

  Cleo had been clutching a key chain. She laid it on the desk. Without looking at Quinn, she hurried from the office and closed the door behind her, leaving him alone with the ghost of Dr. Moore.

  It was easy enough to find the key that unlocked all the drawers of the file cabinet, and it was easy enough to find the file on Linda Brooks.

  Quinn had been hoping for some DVDs or cassettes, recordings of the doctor’s sessions with Linda. Instead he found copious notes. Pages of them. Apparently Linda had talked, and Dr. Moore listened as a psychoanalyst should, and made notes.

  The printer near the computer out in the anteroom was one of those multifunctional ones that also scanned, faxed, and copied. Quinn was glad to see it held plenty of paper.

  It took him a few minutes to get onto it; then he got to work making copies of Dr. Moore’s notes.

  He hoped Cleo would take her time over her coffee.

  An hour later, at his desk at Q&A’s headquarters, Quinn began to read.

  There wasn’t much more to learn about Linda Brooks. She did hallucinate. She did hear voices. As Quinn read, he could empathize with the agony the young woman had been enduring, the loneliness. And he got a sense of the courage she must have had in order to adjust as well as she had and build some kind of life despite her persistent illness. He found himself liking this woman he’d let be tortured and murdered.

  Jesus! Don’t do that to yourself!

  There wasn’t much in life Quinn hated more than self-pity and its destructiveness. It was an emotion Linda Brooks seemed to have for the most part avoided. She’d been a fighter.

  And a fatalist.

  That was what this killer knew about his victims—they were fatalists. At a certain point something would break in them and they would give themselves to him. That was the moment the monster in him lived for, the moment they were completely his.

  Fedderman came into the office, swiping his forearm across his forehead. He was carrying his suit coat draped over his shoulder and he looked beat. In his right hand was a small brown paper sack.

  He nodded a hello to Quinn as he crossed from the door to Quinn’s desk. Then he opened the bag and spilled out a dozen or so small plastic tubular objects on the desk top. They looked like cigarette lighters and for an instant Quinn’s hand moved toward his shirt pocket where he used to carry his cigars, when he’d smoked them more frequently.

  “What are those?” he asked.

  “Thumb drives. Or flash drives. I dunno; I can’t keep up with tech talk.”

  Quinn stared up at him.

  “You plug them into a USB port in your computer and they hold all kinds of information. Like a disk drive, only they’re not.”

  “What the hell’s a USB port?”

  “You gotta be kidding.” Fedderman pointed to a tiny port on the tower of Quinn’s computer.

  “Oh, yeah,” Quinn said. “I use those al
l the time.” He pushed the plastic cylinders around with his finger. “So where’d you get them?”

  “Dr. Grace Moore’s apartment. They’re videos of the doctor’s sessions with some of her patients.”

  “Including Linda Brooks?”

  “Yeah. I watched her latest session on the doctor’s computer before I came here. She said she was being followed by someone who looked like Frank Sinatra.”

  “Ring-a-ding-ding,” Quinn said.

  “The doctor was going with Linda to her apartment to prove to her nobody was following her or waiting for her there.”

  “This was the day of the murder?”

  “ ’Fraid so.”

  Quinn bowed his head and let out a long breath.

  “Things get on tracks,” Fedderman said, “and it’s like there’s no way to stop the train wreck.” He didn’t tell Quinn he was actually thinking about Penny and him, where they might be heading.

  “Anybody else know you took these thumb drives?”

  Fedderman shook his head. “Just the two of us. There are little squares of tape on the bottoms of them, listing the patient’s names. You’d be surprised by some of those names.”

  “I’ll make a copy of Linda Brooks’s, and we won’t watch the others. Then you better wipe them and put them back where you found them.”

  “You don’t think we should hand them over to Renz?”

  “Are you kidding?” Quinn asked.

  “Actually,” Fedderman said, “I am.”

  That night at the Hamaker Hotel near Times Square, Harley Renz leaned over and kissed Olivia good-bye. She was sleeping deeply, snoring lightly, and didn’t notice.

  Renz walked lightly even though he was sure he couldn’t wake Olivia with a gunshot. She’d taken something, and he hadn’t asked what. After dressing carefully, he used a washcloth from the bathroom to wipe the glass he’d used to drink Jack Daniel’s; then he slipped the bottle into his briefcase that was propped on a chair. He was sure he hadn’t touched anything in the bathroom or the rest of the hotel suite that would leave a legible print. He was always careful to touch almost nothing but Olivia, but especially so since his conversation with Jim Tennyson.