“You know your hair is the color of the molasses that my mama used to cook with,” Noah said. “And your voice sounds like the water that whooshed by in the river outside our windows late at night.”
“You are shameless.”
“I’m smitten. I have been since I first met you. And even more than that since the other night. I didn’t think you’d be so hard to get over.”
“You make me sound like a flu.”
“Nope. The opposite. Being with you makes me wide awake, more aware of everything—of colors, tastes, even the smell of the air. After we’re together, when I’m alone again, there’s this sad riff that settles on me.”
I looked down, not wanting him to see the flush in my cheeks.
Smart man, he went back to what he’d been saying about Dulcie. “So do you think it’s a good idea for your daughter to see her mama give up on men? For her to see you throw yourself into your work and her? It’s too much pressure on a kid. It’s inhibiting to a teenager to have to worry if Mama is lonely and sad.”
“When did you get a degree in child psychology?”
He ignored the attitude in my voice. “Is her father dating?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Not good for another reason. Makes it look like men are stronger than women.”
This was like needles under my nails. Paper cuts on my fingerpads. Insects biting at my cheeks and neck. A dozen tiny unpleasant feelings erupted in me at once.
“How dare you,” I accused.
“What? Too close for comfort?”
“I am as strong as any woman she will ever meet. She sees that every day. I didn’t fall apart when my marriage did. I didn’t go running after a dozen men just so that I wouldn’t be alone. I didn’t start drinking or taking tranquilizers or doing anything unhealthy. I slept through every night. I never even intimated how lonely I was.”
He let my last few words linger in the air. It embarrassed me when I realized what I’d inadvertently said.
“Like who? Who told you how lonely she was and put all that pressure on you?”
My head jerked of its own accord. The sudden rush of tears that came to my eyes shamed me. He’d fooled me again. Once more getting me to tell him things and express feelings that I’d never admitted to before.
With one hand under my chin, he turned my face toward his. Reaching out with the forefinger of his other hand, he stopped a tear that was sliding down my cheek.
“You don’t have to tell me, Morgan. I can guess. But I want you to know you can tell me. It’s this crazy thing between us. I know things about you without knowing how. Will it help if I tell you it scares me as much as it scares you?”
“If it scares you, why don’t you go?”
“Because feeling scared like this is a big part of being alive.” And then without giving me a chance to object or move, he leaned forward and kissed me.
It was generous. Sustaining. He took nothing. Gave all.
Through my lips he transferred his want. His willingness to wait. His utter helplessness in the face of his desire. I accepted it all. Gave nothing back. He didn’t fight for it. Or try to pull it out of me. It was enough for him to offer it up to me.
“One day you’ll want to give it back,” he said in a deep, low voice that was like darkness falling. “I know you will. I don’t think I’m wrong. About other things, yes. But not you. Don’t ask me why. There is no reason on earth except I just know. It’s like when I have an idea for the piano. Sometimes it can take months for me to search out the whole composition. But that’s okay. The idea of it keeps me going. Because I know in my fingers, in my inner ear, in my soul, that the rest will come if I can just give it time.”
He kissed me again, this time putting a hand on each of my shoulders and pulling me very close to him and enfolding me in his arms.
For thirty seconds … forty-five … I just forgot. I wasn’t there. Not a woman sitting on a couch in her den with her daughter sleeping in another room. Not a therapist who had information that this policeman would do anything to get.
The sound of his blood beating in my ears and the feeling of his arms sheltering me blocked out any world that I knew or was used to.
Finally, before I could pull away, because that was what I knew I had to do, he did. Standing, he smiled down at me, a little wistfully. “You make me ache,” he said, and, without giving me a chance to say anything, left me there, sitting on my couch, looking around my den as if I’d never seen it before.
Fifty-Eight
The bad news came at noon the next day, like it always does with a phone call.
“Shit,” Perez said with such vehemence and anger that Jordain had no doubt what had happened. “Shit, shit, shit. Damn.”
“Another one?” Jordain asked.
Perez nodded at his partner as he continued on the phone. “Don’t go anywhere, we’ll come there.” He hung up. “That was Douglas. Young got another package this morning. We’re gonna have to let Lessor go.”
“He could have mailed them before we got him.”
“Nope. The lock of hair isn’t just in a bag. This time it’s wrapped up in a nice little cut-out of today’s New York Times article saying we have a suspect in custody.”
Jordain felt sick to his stomach, but there was no time for that. Grabbing the bottle of Pepto from his top desk drawer, he unscrewed the cap and chugged the viscous pink liquid while Perez waited.
“Where was Young last night?”
“Home all night.”
Jordain threw the empty bottle into the garbage pail and they left.
Fifty-Nine
The detectives spent the afternoon examining the photographs that Betsy Young had received that morning. Every detail of these new shots matched up to all the previous ones. Five portfolios of brutally graphic images of five men who had been defiled and killed.
How?
That remained a mystery.
Why?
They didn’t have a single clue. In fact, the list of the unknowns was one hundred times longer than the list of things they knew.
Louis Fenester was, like the others, laid out on a hospital gurney. The light source hit him evenly so that there were few harsh shadows, but that did nothing to soften the hard edges of the man’s angular physique.
He had been thin enough to start with—his girlfriend had delivered photographs of him eight days ago when he hadn’t come home after going to the gym. Now his ribs were protruding, his cheekbones arched over deep hollows in his face. He looked as if an overeager sculptor had gouged out too much of the marble with his chisel. Fenester no longer looked human; he could have been a stone effigy on top of a sarcophagus. His skin was like white marble, without the luminosity.
Around the man’s wrists and ankles were the same rings of green-and-blue-and-purple bruises that all the men had exhibited.
Like the four others before him, plus Paul Lessor, Fenester had the identifying tattoo on his right foot. But what did that mean? Lessor had steadfastly refused to tell them anything about the mark.
Fenester lay in what seemed to be the same room with the same dull gray backdrop behind him that had been in all the other shots. Nothing revealed the nature of the chamber of horrors beyond that sweep of even, toneless color.
The pallor of death had overtaken Fenester’s body so that although it was a color photograph, there was none in the man’s skin. The only vividness in the shot were the number 5s on the man’s feet. Bright red. The same hue as the leaves that were decorating the park and the city streets that time of year. What did Young call the color in all her articles?
Jordain tried to remember.
She never just said red, she was more specific.
Yes, scarlet.
When Officer Butler came in, both detectives looked up. She had a satisfied smile on her face. After the deep disappointment of the day’s events—of having to release Lessor, of knowing that Young wasn’t looking like a suspect, either, of having to inform Fenest
er’s girlfriend and family of his grisly murder, of dealing with the fury of their boss that they were back to square one—Butler’s expression buoyed them.
“You have something?” Jordain asked. “What is it?”
She nodded as she approached the table, littered with photographs of the dead man, and put down a computer printout that had squiggles of blue ink all over it.
“We got Fenester’s phone book keyed into our ever-growing database and we have one number that is showing up in all six.”
“The restaurant?”
She nodded. “It’s called S’s in one. Shel’s in one. It’s in Lessor’s phone book but he had it listed in the P’s and identified as ‘Pete’s friend’s place.’ Now, in Fenester’s PDA, it’s listed under S. No notation. Just the number.”
“So you checked it out?” Jordain asked, leaning forward, fingers frozen on the desk, body rigid, waiting.
“It’s a cell phone. Listed to Pine Realty. We’re working on getting the billing information.”
“Give me the number.”
Jordain punched the speaker button on his phone and dialed.
The three of them listened to the hollow sound of the phone ringing twice and then they heard a click. Butler’s sharp intake of breath was audible in the split second between the phone being picked up and the announcement starting.
“There’s no one here right now, but please leave your name and number and someone will get right back to you. Appointments and schedules of events can also be found online.”
Jordain hit the button to end the call.
“Appointments I can understand from a realty company. But events? What kind of events?” Perez asked.
“Open houses for other real estate agents?” Butler offered.
“Neither of you actually think that is a real estate office, do you?” Jordain asked.
“How long will it take to get the name and address of whoever pays the bills?” Perez asked Butler.
“About an hour. If we are lucky.”
“Well, let’s not bet on that. We haven’t been lucky so far. Not with one damn thing,” Jordain complained. “We have had five corpses, no idea of where they are hidden, a man with a mental disorder whose glee at the killings makes my blood run cold and who refuses to help us with one piece of information. Oh, I almost forgot, we have a red tattoo that links everybody up to one another.” Jordain got up, walked to the window and opened it. He leaned out, pressing the palms of his hands into the rough surface of the brick sill.
Horns honked, people shouted, cars roared by. The afternoon traffic was at its peak. Even though the air was tainted with the city smells, it was fresher than what was inside the office. He breathed in. Deeply. The end of October was usually colder than this. Or was it just that the air wasn’t even close to being cold as compared to the case?
Ice.
He was not used to coming up short. But he couldn’t think of a single case he’d ever worked on without a body or a crime scene. That was where leads came from. The body and the place the body was found.
Once you dealt with the concept that the victim was a man or woman who had a job, a family, a spouse, sibling or child who would be bereft, whose life would from this day forward never be the same, once you swallowed hard a few times—even though you’d been through this so many times you should be inured to it—you dealt with the clues. The hair and fibers. The skin trapped under the fingernails. The weapon. The blood on the floor. Or the sheets. The bullet casings. The contents of the victim’s stomach. The note in his pocket. The torn picture in her purse.
You could get somewhere with just one find. And you had a hundred places to make it.
But this insanity? Photographs and hair in sanitized plastic bags that mothers slipped sandwiches in, that were sold in every damn supermarket in the whole United States? Manila envelopes that couldn’t be traced because every office supply store in the damn country sold them?
“Hey, look at this,” Butler said, interrupting Jordain’s thoughts. She was leaning over and examining one of the shots of Fenester’s midsection that had been enlarged.
“What is it?”
“He’s got some kind of shadow on the underside of his left thigh. Or is it a shadow? Whatever it is—this is something I haven’t seen before.”
Jordain went back to the table, bent over her shoulder and looked down at what she was pointing to.
It didn’t look like anything in any of the other shots. One deviation from the exactness, but, just to make sure, he picked it up and carried it the length of the photo-papered room, holding it up and comparing it to the other shots taken from the same angle.
To him, the collage of death-scene shots didn’t look macabre—he was used to it. But to anyone who might have walked in who wasn’t with the department, the wall would be something they would never forget. There were hundreds of photos of male body parts. The same section in a dozen different magnifications. Some recognizable, others enlarged to the point of abstraction.
“No, nothing like this on any of the other men’s legs.”
Returning to Butler, he put the photograph down and pointed at the oblong irregular pattern she’d noticed.
“I don’t think it looks like a bruise. But it sure does look strange. What’s wrong with it? What is that splotch?”
Jordain picked up two other shots at random, turned them over, and used the blank white paper to create a frame around the area so that there was nothing distracting them from it.
All three of them stared down.
“What the hell is it?” Perez asked.
Jordain squinted. He put his hand down and moved the white frame in just a little closer so he could focus even more clearly.
“Holy shit,” Jordain muttered.
Butler looked up.
Sixty
The dosage of Thorazine had been easy to administer. Pills crushed in water. Water taken greedily. Zombies willing to lie down and sleep. Everything about them subdued. The walking dead. The sleeping dead. The dead. Nothing woke them. That was right. Nothing could wake the dead. But the dead would strike fear in the hearts of those who knew about them. The dead would warn the living to stay away. To be better than these men had been. To behave.
Behave.
Such an easy word. Such a luscious concept.
Easy, the photographer thought, everything had been easy. Blessed. The whole plan had been blessed. The men did not see a stranger waiting for them. You do not fear someone whom you know. They came willingly. Too willingly, in fact. They were actually accommodating.
There was nothing to worry about. The monitor was on. If anything went wrong, the photographer would hear it.
But what could go wrong with the sleeping dead?
Each man had been a study in color, shape and form. To light each of them, to capture the image, to get the angles right, to develop the film carefully had taken talent. The result had been professional, even though the photographer was only an amateur.
Arrrrg.
A sound?
Arrrg.
A moan?
Arrrrrrrg.
What was wrong?
Work tools, dropped without thought. A splatter of red spilled on the floor. It didn’t matter. Not now.
Arrrg.
Run, faster. It was so many steps from the studio, through the hall, down the steps, through the cool brick-lined room, past the thick steel door built to withstand invasions and hold a family of six for days or weeks.
Arrrrrrrrrrg.
Getting closer. Closer. Closer.
The man writhed on the stretcher. Beat against the restraints. His face was pale, sweat dripped from his forehead into his eyes. He was screaming into the gag.
It had been important to memorize the side effects of Thorazine in case of emergency. Few were serious. Only one was deadly: a heart attack. And the photographer knew what a man having a heart attack looked like. He looked like the man strapped to the gurney.
Fingers fumble
d to unbuckle the restraints.
It had been hours since their last cocktails. His drugs would just be wearing off. Why would the attack come now? It didn’t matter.
“Can you get up? Let me help you up.”
Arrg.
He was moving, sitting up. In pain and slow, but thank God he was standing.
“I’m going to take you to the hospital. You’ll be fine. Hold on to my arm. Let me help you.”
Prayers? Yes, prayers said silently that the man would be able to traverse the distance from here to the car. He was walking. Doubled over in pain. Slow. But putting one foot in front of the other. Lifting his legs. Step. Up. Step. Up. Prayers said silently that the man would be okay during the ride to the hospital. Because the man couldn’t die. That would be murder.
Sixty-One
My appointment with Nicky and Daphne was a welcome interruption to my week. Since the resurrection of my argument with Nina the day before, I was uncomfortable at the institute. We’d had two—no, three—fights in as many weeks, and each pushed us further apart. I found myself staying in my office. Avoiding walking in the halls. I knew sooner or later we were going to have to figure out how to work out our differences and that my avoidance of her was cowardly and childish, but that didn’t make it any easier for me to confront her. To do that, I would have to confront how I felt about Noah Jordain. And I wasn’t prepared to do that. Not yet.
At least in the car, I’d have forty-five minutes to clear my head on the way up to Connecticut.
I took the North Street exit off Merritt Parkway, drove for ten minutes, took one turn, then another, drove five minutes, and finally pulled up in front of Daphne’s house. I was fifteen minutes early, but I didn’t care.
I parked in the driveway.
There were orchards to the right of the house and I didn’t think that anyone would mind if I took a walk.
Everywhere I looked, a tapestry of leaves obliterated the grass and changed the distant landscape into a fauvist painting.
9 More Killer Thrillers Page 202