Pulse fq-7

by John Lutz

  Quinn did.

  “I’ll call you later,” Renz said.

  “No doubt.”

  Ignoring Pearl altogether, Renz nodded to Quinn as he turned, ducked his head into the folds of fat beneath his chin, and left the tent.

  Quinn and Pearl followed Renz and breathed in fresh morning air.

  The CSU guy in charge was still standing outside the tent, smoking a cigarette. Quinn almost said something to him about fouling a crime scene and then saw that it was one of those battery-operated cigarettes that look like the real thing.

  He was a short man, built like a miniature bull, with a thick neck and sloping shoulders. Quinn had worked with him before. His name was Bronsky. He waited with patient brown eyes for what Quinn had to say.

  “What’ve we got so far?” Quinn asked, thinking that after Renz it would be a pleasure talking with somebody like Bronsky. Crime Scene Unit types were almost always all business and no bullshit.

  “Looks like the killer wore rubber gloves, so we might as well forget about fingerprints,” Bronsky said. “So far, he didn’t leave much if anything behind. We might pick up more on him from the victim herself, try for some of his DNA.” He pulled a cell phone from his pocket and held it up for Quinn to see. “I just got off this,” he said. “We got her address from her purse, and we’re going through her apartment.”

  “Great,” Quinn said, wondering again why Renz wanted this one in the worst way.

  “There are signs of the killer washing up some in the bathroom, but still with the gloves on. Plenty of smudgy prints here and there throughout the apartment, some bloody. He musta gone there after the murder.”

  “He was letting us know that,” Quinn said.

  “We did lift other prints from the apartment, but they’re probably what you’d expect-the victim’s, neighbors’, former tenants’, the super’s…”

  Quinn waited until Bronsky finished with the list. All the prints would have to be matched with the people who’d made them. The prints that couldn’t be matched would be placed in a separate file, in the faint hope that someday they’d help to convict the killer. Tedious work, but necessary.

  “The bloody prints. Could you say if they were a man’s or a woman’s?”

  “No way to tell. Because of the gloves.”

  Quinn sighed. “So maybe the lab will come up with something.”

  “Maybe. We’ll get the usual hair samples from the carpet. A few nail clippings from the bedroom. But my guess is they probably won’t amount to anything useful.” He rotated his head on his thick neck. “Not as much blood here, or in her apartment, as you’d think.”

  “M.E. said she probably went into deep shock when she saw what he’d done to her. Her heart must have stopped shortly after that.”

  Bronsky pulled a face that made him resemble Edward G. Robinson in an old tough-guy movie. “Jesus! Not a nice man.”

  “The M.E. or the killer?”

  “Killer. I already know the M.E. is a prick. You going in now to look over the apartment?” The question sounded almost like a warning about what was waiting inside.

  “I was about to,” Quinn said.

  Bronsky took a drag on his cigarette that meant nothing. “Two bedrooms with two twin beds in each. I heard somebody say the victim shared the place with three other students. The roommates all went home for the summer. What if they’d been here, though? All four girls?”

  “Richard Speck,” Quinn said.

  “That’s what I was thinking. Would this creep have killed all of them?”

  “Why not?” Quinn said.

  “Those other girls should know that,” Bronsky said. “Realize how lucky they are to be young and still alive. They might be more careful the rest of their lives. More appreciative.”

  “It’ll give them something to talk about,” Quinn said. “Then in a few days or a few weeks they’ll go back to being themselves.”

  Bronsky made his Edward G. Robinson face again. “Why do you figure that is?”

  “We’re all who we are,” Quinn said.

  “Yeah, I guess we have to live with that.”

  “And die with it,” Quinn said.

  He left Bronsky, who continued puffing on his faux cigarette, blowing faux smoke. Six feet away from the dead woman who was real.

  6

  Central Florida, 2002

  It was barely audible but growing louder. Something was striking metal, over and over. It was like a steel drumbeat, and he walked to it.

  Daniel Danielle kept his head down and his eyes squinted almost closed as he trudged west. The wind blasting from behind him was fierce, and the heavy rain obscured his vision.

  The joy of escape filled his mind. He would make it all the way, he knew. Fate was on his side. Destiny belonged to him.

  The ground couldn’t absorb the rainfall, and half the time he was splashing through pooled water. A few times the howling wind knocked him off his feet, but he always struggled to a hunched standing position and continued his trek west, away from the wrecked prison van and the dead guards. He was armed now, with the small-caliber gun that had been taped to the ankle of the one who’d pretended to be a fellow con, and with a nine-millimeter Glock handgun from the holster of one of the dead guards. He’d managed to find the right key on the cluster of keys dangling from a dead guard’s belt, and he was no longer handcuffed. He was still wearing the prison’s orange jumpsuit, and that could be a problem.

  The metallic banging sound was ahead of him now. Much closer. Curious, he altered course slightly and moved toward it.

  An angular dark shape loomed ahead in the driving rain. As he drew near, he saw that it was what was left of a house. Most of the roof had come down, and part of what remained was flapping violently in the wind against what looked like a section of steel ductwork. The mad drumbeat got louder as Daniel approached.

  The central part of the house hadn’t collapsed. A man appeared from the wreckage, bent forward against the wind, and motioned with his arm for Daniel to come to him. He was a tall, rangy guy with a hawk nose and gray hair. His shirt was torn half off him and flapping like a flag.

  As Daniel got closer, he saw the man’s gaze fix on the orange jumpsuit.

  “You here to rescue us?” he called, cupping his hands around his mouth so Daniel could hear. Daniel could see the dread knowledge and doubt in the man’s eyes. Rescue workers didn’t wear that kind of uniform.

  “Sure am,” Daniel said. “From everything.”

  He used the Glock to shoot the man in the chest. He went down hard on his back. A blast of wind rolled him to rest against part of the wrecked roof that was jammed up against the base of the house.

  In the wind, the bark of the Glock had been barely audible.

  Daniel smiled… Rescue us? Dumb cracker!

  He picked his way through the wreckage to the central core of the house, what used to be the bathroom.

  His luck held. A woman was there, huddled tightly beneath a white porcelain washbasin. It was somewhat quieter in the enclosure, and the wind was partially blocked.

  The woman was in her fifties, overweight, and frightened as hell. Through a curtain of rain-plastered hair, she studied Daniel with wide blue eyes. Had those eyes seen what happened outside in the wreckage?

  Daniel smiled. “I killed your husband.”

  The woman said nothing. Didn’t even change expression. In shock, Daniel decided. His fault? Or the hurricane’s?

  He left her and made his way to what used to be the kitchen, rooted through the wreckage until he located the right cabinet and found the drawer where the knives were kept. He chose the largest one, testing the blade’s edge with his finger to make sure it was sharp.

  He returned to the makeshift shelter and found that the woman hadn’t moved. He squatted down next to her and began to cut away her clothes with the knife. She put up no resistance. The maelstrom of storm and events had stolen any sense of reality. She was having a bad dream that would eventually end. This
man was here to save her; he was a doctor, cutting away her clothes so he could treat her injuries. There was no other explanation. None that she wanted to explore, anyway.

  She couldn’t hear him over the wind, but could see that he was laughing. He twisted her around so she was on her stomach and skillfully sliced the tendons behind her knees. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  Then he began having fun.

  An hour later, the wind had died down. At least it was no longer yowling. It was still coming out of the east, and was hard enough to drive curtains of rain when it gusted.

  Daniel left the woman and found in the house’s wreckage what used to be a bedroom. It was easy to locate some of the husband’s clothes.

  He stood naked in the searing rain for a while and let it wash most of the woman’s blood from him. Then he put on the farmer’s clothes. The guy had been well over six feet, so Daniel had to roll up the pants cuffs. The short-sleeved shirts were a little baggy but fit okay. The orange jumpsuit he wadded and shoved into what was left of a dresser drawer.

  These people couldn’t have lived in this isolated ranch house or farmhouse or whatever it was without some kind of transportation. He walked the perimeter of the house and saw what might have once been a garage. There was a vehicle near it, lying on its side.

  Daniel walked over and saw that the wind-tossed vehicle was an old Dodge pickup truck. He considered trying to shove it upright, but he found that he couldn’t budge it.

  That was when he noticed chrome grillwork peeking out from under the wreckage of the garage. He walked over and saw that it was the front end of a late-model Ford SUV. Suffused with a new strength, he began throwing wreckage this way and that, digging the vehicle out.

  When he was finished, and the SUV had a path out to where the gravel driveway was clear, he went to the dead man and found keys in his pocket. One of them was a car key. Good. That meant there’d be no need to hot-wire the ignition.

  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

  “Y ou 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.