by John Lutz
“And you don’t have to worry.”
“Like I said, you’ll be on a bull’s-eye again. I didn’t count on that.”
He said, “That’ll never happen. For one thing, anyone as rich and famous as this person’s bound to be is going to have plenty of security people of his own. He won’t need me. If he believes me—if I can convince him—then obviously he’ll take precautions to avoid the bomber. He won’t offer himself as a target.”
She ducked her head, squeezing her eyes shut, as if she found it physically painful to listen to his words. “Will, don’t go any further with this thing. Drop it right here. While there’s still time.”
“I can’t get over this. You encouraged me before. What’s changed?”
“I was all for you going to the Bureau. I think you’re right. But the shitheads wouldn’t listen to you. Let it be on their heads when something else happens. You did your best. Now drop it. Before it’s too late.”
Her fear for him was so strong he could almost sense it as a presence in the room. Try as he might to explain it away, it rattled him. Made him angry, the way fear often did. Instead of reassuring his wife, he reproached her. “Do you think this is just some little project, something to keep me busy, and I can bag it anytime I want? Laura, this is for real. The bomber’s out there. Lives are at stake. Maybe a lot of lives.”
Suddenly the tears were flooding her eyes, running down her cheeks. He stared at one as it dangled quivering from her chin, then dropped to make a dark spot on her shirt.
“Haven’t you saved enough lives?” she said brokenly. “This shouldn’t be your problem anymore.”
He put out his hand, but hesitated to touch her. “Laura—listen to me—you’re upset out of all proportion. I’m not running into any kind of danger. I’m going to Philadelphia to talk to Addleman. That’s all it is, for now. That’s all it may ever be.”
She angrily brushed away her tears with both hands. “Damn it, Will! Don’t patronize me. Don’t pretend you’re not going over the line. You couldn’t convince the people who should be going after this bomber to do it, so you’re going after him yourself. I know what’s happening, even if you don’t.”
She could control her voice, but the tears were still running from her eyes. Turning away from him, she started blindly across the room. Her left foot kicked over the open can and paint sloshed onto the canvas. Harper rushed to set it upright. Laura didn’t seem to notice what had happened. She crossed the room to the ladder and sat down on a lower rung. Undoing the kerchief from her hair, she used it to wipe her eyes and nose. She swallowed several times. When she spoke again, she was calm and self-possessed.
“Well, I can’t say you didn’t warn me going in. Remember that night four days before the wedding? You tried to talk me out of marrying you.”
He smiled. “I was never so glad to lose an argument.”
She didn’t return the smile. “You told me there’d be nights of waiting for the phone to ring.”
“Yes.”
She looked at his maimed hand. “And the phone did ring. Only it was in the middle of a busy day. They got me out of the operating room and this voice said there’d been an explosion and you were down. I didn’t understand. For about thirty seconds I thought you were dead. I remember those thirty seconds well.”
“Laura, if we can figure out who’s next on this madman’s list, I’ve got to try to warn him. You can see that.”
She sighed heavily. “Yes. I can see that.”
“Either he’ll believe me or he won’t, and that’ll be the end of it. He’s not going to offer me some bodyguarding job. If he does, I won’t take it. I promise you.”
Her face wore a wry and miserable expression he’d never seen before. Standing up, she said, “Don’t make any promises, okay? I remember what you’re like when you’re working a case, even if you don’t. You become obsessed. That won’t change. It’s your pattern.”
She left the room without looking at him again. He listened to her footsteps going up the creaking stairs. Then he picked up the lid and placed it back on the paint can.
He liked things neat.
11
Addleman had sounded so keyed up on the phone that Harper assumed he hadn’t slept since their appointment at FBI Headquarters. He expected to find him bleary-eyed and unshaven. But when Addleman opened the door of his apartment to Harper, he was as carefully groomed as he had been on Harper’s first visit, the black hair combed back from the widow’s peak, the jaw smoothly shaven, the white shirt neatly pressed, though threadbare at the cuffs. His black wingtips were polished to a gloss Harper hadn’t seen since the last cop funeral he’d attended.
“Come in, Will.” He smiled to show Harper he was glad to see him.
“Any progress yet?”
Addleman’s mouth set. After a moment, he said, “It won’t go like that. Don’t expect steady progress. It’ll seem hopeless and then suddenly we’ll make a breakthrough. Come along.”
Harper followed him on a zigzag path across the living room. Almost every square foot of floor space was taken up with books and stacks of paper. Some of them reached as high as Harper’s waist. Addleman explained, with a wave of his hand, “I’ve been downloading information from the ’net.”
They went into Addleman’s workroom. There were two other computers on the big desk with the computer Harper had seen before. One, an older model, consisted of a monitor atop a big, heavy cpu. The other was a laptop. All of them were displaying constantly changing data on their screens and emitting humming noises.
Addleman pointed at his original computer and explained what it was doing. “I’ve programmed that one with bios of all three victims. It’s doing word searches now to try to ferret out common denominators. Maybe their families drove Fords when they were kids. Or they had an Airedale once. Something as trivial as that could be the common factor.”
“Any luck?”
“No matches so far.” He pointed at the old computer.
“That one’s working on their birth dates. Factoring the numbers. Scrambling the letters in the months to see if it comes up with anything.”
Harper had an inspiration. “Would it be able to check if any of them were born on dates that were significant in history?”
Addleman gave him a melancholy look. “That was the first thing I tried. No luck.” He pointed at the laptop. “That one’s working on their names.”
“Find anything yet?”
“It’s gotten some amusing anagrams for Rod Buckner.” Addleman took out a cigarette but, mindful as ever of the well-being of his computers, he didn’t light it. “Let me show you what you can do.”
They returned to the living room. Addleman waved him to an overstuffed chair by the window, which was almost completely surrounded by stacks of printout. He took the top few pages off one of them. “Here’s what I was working on just now.”
Harper riffled through the pages. “Birth dates of the Popes?”
“I’m looking for some clue to the timing of the bomber’s attacks. The second date is when each pope was raised to the papacy. Wylie was killed on the hundredth anniversary of the elevation of Pius X, but that’s all I’ve got so far.”
Harper scanned the long column of dates. Behind the middle of his forehead, be could feel a headache begin to throb.
Addleman was holding up another page. “I’ve got the ecclesiastical calendar here, for when you get finished with the Popes.”
“Ecclesiastical calendar?”
Addleman nodded. “Feast days of the saints. I had a case once where this guy was killing three prostitutes a year—one on the feast day of each saint he’d been named after. He figured that without his patron saint looking after him, it wasn’t safe to do murder.” Addleman smiled reminiscently. “I interviewed the guy for five days when we caught him. Fascinating mind.”
“So you’re assuming the bomber’s Catholic?”
“Oh no.” Addleman pointed at the nearest tower of printout. “Y
ou’ll find the birth dates and coronation dates of all the British monarchs in there. And the emperors of Ancient Rome. And China. And the dates of decisive battles of both World Wars as well as the Napoleonic wars. There’s no telling what our guy considers important.”
“True.” Harper was daunted by the extent of the task Addleman wanted him to undertake. It seemed impossible. And futile. “He may be irreligious, you know. And totally ignorant of history.”
Addleman nodded. “That’s why I’ve got game schedules of the NFL, ABA, and the National and American Leagues in there too.”
“Uh-huh. What do you expect me to do with those?”
“Use your imagination, Harper. And when you get through with all that, we’ve got some calendars over here—Hebrew, Indian, Chinese, Aztec. I’ll be writing a program for my next computer search. Give me a shout if you find anything.”
“Okay,” said Harper. With a sigh, he sank down in the chair and began studying the birth dates of the Popes.
For the rest of the day and into the evening the two men worked. The ache behind his brow grew to occupy Harper’s entire head. He found no plausible system in the dates, and Addleman found no common factor linking the victims.
At nine, they broke for a meal. From the stack of frozen dinners in the freezer, Addleman chose Salisbury steak, Harper pork chops. Since every inch of table space in the apartment was covered with papers, they ate in the armchairs in the living room.
Munching on thawed succotash, Harper remembered that yesterday Laura had found the first asparagus of the year at the farmer’s market in Grand Army Plaza. She’d told him she planned to have it tonight, with new potatoes and lamb. Harper wondered if she’d gone ahead and made the meal for herself alone. Probably. Otherwise the asparagus would go bad, and Laura hated waste.
Harper didn’t realize how long the silence had been going on until Addleman broke it. “Anything the matter?”
“No, nothing. The pork chops are good.” Which they were—at least, compared to the vegetables.
“Thinking about your wife? I guess she feels you’re getting too deeply involved in this case.”
The all-too-accurate probing annoyed Harper. He looked down at his half-eaten dinner. “Your psychological training makes it possible for you to read minds?”
“Not my training. Personal experience.” Addleman was chuckling dryly. “Some experiences I wish I’d never had.”
Harper didn’t want to talk about it. Putting the tray aside, he got up and turned to look out the window. Behind Addleman’s building was a vacant lot, and on the other side of it, facing a busy street, stood a KFC outlet. There was a long line of cars at the drive-through. The neighborhood being what it was, the restaurant and its lot were brightly floodlit. It almost hurt Harper’s eyes. He raised them to the sky. The night was clear, but here in the middle of the city he couldn’t see any stars, only a quarter moon high in the east.
“I suppose you’ve checked whether the timing of the bomber’s attacks has anything to do with the phases of the moon,” he said.
“Yes. No connection.” Addleman paused and then went on. “I did download some stuff from the National Observatory that we ought to take a look at sometime.”
“Oh?”
“I was thinking we ought to consider the possibility that our man is interested in stars.”
Harper didn’t have to turn around to see if Addleman was smiling. He could hear it in the voice. “Stars like celebrities?” Harper asked. “You think the bomber has a weakness for bad puns, too?”
“We all make puns, whether we mean to or not. And the ones we make unconsciously tell the most about us. That’s basic psychology. Read your Freud.”
“Don’t think I’ll read him right now, if you don’t mind.” Harper still had the headache. Massaging his brow, he turned away from the starless sky. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “It’s late. I’d better arrange for a hotel room and a cab.”
Addleman blinked up at him. “You’ll never get a cab to come down here this time of night. I was assuming you’d stay here. We can get another couple of hours’ work in, then get started first thing in the morning.
Harper wagged his head, smiling ruefully. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Not much.” Addleman thought for a moment and added, “I don’t think the bomber does, either.”
When he lifted his bead from the pillow in the morning, Harper found that his headache was still in place. Though Addleman’s sofa bed was comfortable, he had slept badly. The window shades did not keep out the glare from the KFC, which seemed to stay open most of the night. And the noise was continuous. Harper’s Brooklyn neighborhood was far from quiet, but the noise was nothing compared to this street. The parties and quarrels went on all night, punctuated by wailing sirens and occasional gunshots.
He found Addleman at his desk. Coffee and cigarettes appeared to be his idea of breakfast, so there was nothing to delay Harper from returning to his chair and his lists and calendars. He’d forgotten their talk about the stars last night and did not ask Addleman for the data from the National Observatory. He worked all morning on the pro sports schedules and found nothing.
By noon, the apartment seemed stuffy. Outside it must be getting warm, unusually warm for the middle of April. Harper raised the window behind him, sat down again, and returned to work.
“Welcome to KFC, may I take your order?” The words, spoken through the intercom at the drive-through window, came to Harper with surprising clarity. It was one loud intercom. Either that, or the wind was blowing in his direction.
After a few seconds, the delicious smell of frying chicken began to fill Harper’s nostrils. It was the wind, all right.
“Welcome to KFC, may I take your order?” said the clerk to the next car in line.
Harper tossed aside his list of Roman emperors and stood up. He paced across the room, placing his feet carefully among the piles of paper. He felt useless—was useless. Playing mind-ticklers with an insane killer was Addleman’s game, one he was brilliant at. But Harper had no talent for it. He wasn’t going to find anything among these lists and schedules, no matter how long he looked.
Putting his hands on his hips, he turned in a slow circle, surveying the room full of paper. There had to be a more useful way to occupy his time.
12
Addleman didn’t emerge from the computer room until it was almost nightfall. The long, hot day had taken its toll on his neat appearance. His jaw was stubbled, his eyes red-rimmed. Strands of black hair trailed over his forehead. He’d taken off his shirt, revealing an undershirt, one of the old-fashioned kind, with skinny straps. Harper was surprised to see how muscular his chest and shoulders were. Addleman’s stoop-shouldered posture made him appear hollow-chested. But he had hidden strengths.
He looked first at the chair by the window where he had left Harper. He was surprised to see it empty.
“Over here,” Harper said. He was sitting across the room, on the floor, beside stacks of plastic folders that reached almost as high as his head.
“What are you doing?” Addleman demanded testily.
Harper raised the file in his lap. “I found these old case files you downloaded from the NCIC—”
“That’s ancient history, Harper, that won’t do us any good now. I thought I told you to concentrate on the timing of the attacks.”
Harper smiled. “Harold, you can’t program me like one of your computers.”
Addleman smiled back. He gave a shrug. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“But I still think you’re wasting your time. Those are old cases I downloaded when I was first trying to find out if there even was a serial bomber targeting celebrities. But you’ve got the rejects there. They didn’t fit my criteria. Buckner, Wylie, and Sothern were the only three I could be sure of.”
“We know more about his bomb construction methods now. Or I do. There’s a chance I can spot his handiwork. And if we could find an earlier st
rike by him, it would give us more data. We’d have a better chance of figuring out his pattern.”
“Any luck yet?”
Harper shook his head. “Some possibles, but none I can say for sure is him.”
Addleman grunted. “That’s the kind of job that can only be done by the Bureau.” He glanced around the room. “Christ, what I’d give for twenty or thirty keen young agents. For a few hours on one of the Bureau’s supercomputers.”
Harper didn’t comment. They’d failed to interest Frances Wilson. There was no point in talking about the Bureau anymore. He said, “You had any luck?”
“I discovered Wylie had three sevens in her Social Security number. So did Sothern. Amazing, huh? Can you imagine the odds against that? I thought it had to be significant.”
“And Buckner?”
“No sevens at all. Another promising theory bites the dust.” Addleman combed his errant hairs back into place with his hand. “You want to break for dinner?”
Harper had been waiting for that suggestion for hours. He said, “Tell you what, Addleman. Let’s go over to the KFC.”
“The KFC?” Brilliant floodlight from the restaurant was pouring in the back windows, illuminating half the apartment, but Addleman sounded puzzled, as if he had never noticed the KFC before, had perhaps never heard of chickens themselves.
“Why not? It won’t hurt us to get out of here for a while.”
The suggestion seemed to agitate him. “But we can’t go to the drive-through window. We haven’t got a car.”
“True,” said Harper, smiling. “So let’s go in. Let’s even eat there.”
But Addleman plunged his hands deep into his pockets, his chin sunk to his chest and his shoulders bowed. It was as if an icy gale, rather than a balmy chicken-scented breeze, was blowing through the window. Harper had forgotten what a confirmed recluse the former profiler had become. “Why go all the way over there when I’ve got a freezer full of TV dinners? You can take your choice. Me, I’m going to have the Salisbury steak.”