by John Lutz
She clicked on her computer’s history and saw the familiar sites she’d recently visited. Various business networks. Matchmaking services. But were they in the same order as when she’d last left the computer?
They seemed the same. She didn’t know a lot about computers, but thought you had to go online in order to change your wallpaper. Then it struck her that someone might not have hacked into her computer remotely, but could have gone online here, in her apartment, and simply noted her browser’s history and visited the sites in the order in which she’d left them.
If they knew her passwords.
She reached over and tilted her heavy desk lamp sideways so that the weighted base lifted. There was her folded slip of paper with her handwritten passwords and screen names.
But was it folded in the same way? Hadn’t the quarter-folded sheet of printer paper been pressed perpendicular to the desk edge, rather than at an angle?
She couldn’t be sure.
She replaced the list beneath the lamp base, thinking how dumb it was to keep it hidden there. Probably half the people who used computers kept their passwords and screen names list hidden beneath the base of their desk lamp. It had to be the first place any self-respecting thief or hacker would look. Of course, as far as she knew, somebody who really understood computers could get to her sites without knowing the passwords. That was one of the reasons she’d decided on the desk lamp, with its heavy base. That, and the list was handy.
Who the hell would want to look at my computer?
Clinton Industrial Designs, maybe. Because they might want to know who she was contacting in her attempts to find another job. Lou Gainer had told her they didn’t want her taking trade secrets with her to use as leverage when interviewing for employment. The industrial design world was a shark tank.
She took several deep, calming breaths. This was silly, she told herself. Losing her lover and her job simultaneously was making her suspicious of everything. Wouldn’t anyone get a bit paranoid after such an experience?
She leaned back and considered the items on the desk. Her laptop computer, a green, leather-bordered desk pad; a pen holder with compartments for paper clips, stamps, and whatever; a phone and answering machine; an Edward Hopper print mug that held pens and pencils; a cork coaster borrowed from Ellie’s Lounge; and a small Rolodex. The symmetry of the objects’ placement seemed the same as always.
A quick check of her desk drawers revealed nothing even slightly different.
Ann sat very still, aware of her heartbeat, and after a few minutes she felt satisfied that nothing had been moved in her absence.
A sudden thought sent a chill through her. She got up from her chair and hurried to the door to the hall. After opening the door, she stepped into the hall and glanced both ways, making sure she was alone. Had a shadow moved near the banister’s turn in the stairwell leading to the foyer? Someone hurrying down the steps? In a far part of her mind she wondered if she’d been lured out of her apartment. Was it possible that someone very smart, and very malevolent, was manipulating her? Toying with her?
No, no, don’t be an idiot!
For a few seconds she forgot why she’d come out into the hall. Then she stretched up on her toes and felt along the top of the door frame. That was where she kept an extra key, in case she lost or misplaced hers and couldn’t get inside. Lou Gainer had returned his key to her apartment. Did he know about the spare key? She wasn’t sure.
Ann rubbed her fingertips over the lintel’s rough wooden surface, ignored by generations of painters-and there was the key.
She took it down and stuck it in a pocket, then went back into her apartment. Closing the door firmly, she worked the dead bolt and fastened the brass chain lock.
The rest of the world was outside now, and she was inside, with a better handle on reality. She was safe, and had been since arriving home and walking through the door. Imagination could be such a bitch.
I’m so paranoid!
She felt slightly ashamed and embarrassed. She’d really gotten herself going, and over nothing but suspicion. Why should that be a surprise? After what had happened to her, could she trust anyone ever again?
Don’t be a fool. You’ll get over it.
She did feel better now, after this evidence of her security. She was imagining the worst and working herself into a fearful state over nothing.
Ann returned to her desk and sat back down at her laptop. She clicked on Facebook and there was her home page, her familiar profile photo.
And a posting that was from her.
From Ann.
Right beneath her photograph. The one with her cocking her head to the side and smiling:
I have this feeling something bad is about to happen.
Facebook said the message had been posted slightly more than a minute ago. Ann hadn’t posted a Facebook message in over a week.
When I was out in the hall!
Suddenly the image on her computer screen faded and vanished. Her software programs began to appear, one after another, then roll and disappear, more and more rapidly, while she sat there stunned.
Some kind of virus!
… Something bad is about to happen.
“The best thing to do in a situation like this is unplug the computer,” said a voice behind her.
A hand rested on her right shoulder and squeezed hard enough to hurt.
John Lutz
Pulse
18
J ody Jason absently flipped her thick red hair and jogged up the wide concrete steps toward the impressive entrance to Jung Hall, known among students simply as the psych building.
It was warm in the building, but still a few degrees cooler than outside. Professor Elaine Pratt was waiting for her in her office. Jody doubted if the appointment had anything to do with her business psychology class, which the professor taught. Though Jody was majoring in law, the Vanguard program had assigned Professor Pratt to be Jody’s counselor. Besides, the B-Psych class was a snap for Jody, like most of her other classes.
The office was small and cluttered, and lined with enough books to make it smell musty. Books were shelved wherever possible, including above the windows and doors. Most of the books pertained to law, psychology, and psychiatry. But there were also biographies, medical tomes, sets of general reference books, textbooks… even popular fiction. Jody had long ago made note of the fact that the professor was an eclectic reader. Elaine Pratt wasn’t one of those indrawn academics constricted by narrow if long tunnels of knowledge.
She’d stood up behind her desk when Jody knocked and entered. Now she motioned for Jody to take a chair near the desk and sat back down. Jody cleared some books from the chair and moved it over so it was more directly facing the desk.
Professor Pratt was wearing a starched yellow blouse today with light gray slacks. Jody figured that the professor, if she wanted to dress for it, could achieve a stunning willowy attractiveness. Like a fashion model. Jody could imagine her strutting down a runway, drawing every eye like a magnet.
In the wall of bookshelves directly behind her desk was one of those huge two-volume boxed Oxford dictionaries, the kind that came with a tiny cardboard drawer that held a magnifying glass for reading the fine print. Staring at it, Jody decided you must really want to look up a word to wrestle with one of those mammoth, weighty volumes.
The professor smiled at Jody. “I can’t reveal anything about it at this time,” she said, “but I thought you should know that something good is coming your way.”
Jody was surprised. “Good how?”
“I can’t say, or I would. What I need to know is if you feel ready for a change in your life.”
“Ready?”
“I need to know that you don’t have plans for the rest of the summer that you’ve kept to yourself. That you’re not pregnant. That sort of thing.”
Jody laughed. “No other plans. And I guarantee you that I’m not pregnant.”
“And I need to know if you’re ready
in other ways. If you’ve absorbed certain knowledge between the lines of text.” Professor Pratt looked directly at Jody and didn’t blink.
“I’m confident that I’ve absorbed those lessons,” Jody said, knowing what the professor wanted to hear.
Telling people what they wanted to hear was a skill she’d mastered early and well.
“The chancellor and I have discussed you often,” Professor Pratt said. “We think you have special abilities.”
“I think I’m ready for whatever we’re talking about here.”
Professor Pratt stood up. “That’s fine, Jody. I don’t like keeping you hanging, but I needed to make sure you had that block of time free.”
“I’m available,” Jody said, smiling. “And thank you.”
She maintained an erect posture as she went to the door and opened it.
She didn’t glance back as she passed through into the anteroom and then into the hall. Nothing about her revealed her thoughts.
What the hell was that all about?
19
C hoking to death!
That was Ann Spellman’s first realization.
Then she began breathing deeply, noisily through her nose. Something-it felt to her tongue like tape-was clamped tightly over her mouth. She gagged, coughed, and worked the tip of her distorted tongue violently but couldn’t budge the taut and tacky surface.
She forced calm on herself, made herself breathe evenly through her nose. Her mind refused to function fully as she tried to remember. The man, the drink… he must have put something in her drink. She remembered walking with him, supported by him. She hadn’t been drunk-she knew that. She never drank enough to get drunk.
Had they walked to her apartment?
Had they just left her apartment?
Ann wasn’t clear on any of it.
She attempted to move her arms and legs, and shuddered with painful, wracking cramps.
Where am I?
When she screamed almost silently into the unyielding tape and opened her eyes wide, she realized everything was upside down. She was on a hard surface and staring at the night sky. She could see stars through the leaves of overhanging branches.
What an awkward, painful position she was in! How…?
A man’s voice spoke to her in memory: “The best thing you can do in a situation like this is unplug the computer.”
Standing behind her, near her, when she was seated at her crashing computer.
He must have gotten in somehow and been hiding in the apartment when I locked the door. All the time I was thinking I was safe.
And now she was paying for her carelessness. She remembered now that she’d lost consciousness, and he’d forced her to drink, not wine. He’d said it was wine, but it was something else. It had made her dizzy, made her feel small, smaller, so that she did what he said, went with him somewhere. To a car?
She craned her neck and looked around. There were planters with brown, dead plants, a surrounding stockade fence with vines growing up it. There was a brick wall-dark, old brick. She seemed to be in something like a small courtyard. There was a moon. Light from somewhere else-maybe a streetlight.
A slight scuffing sound near her, where she couldn’t see, made her muscles tighten with alarm. Her legs began cramping and she could do nothing to relieve the pain.
The fear, the dread knowledge she wanted so badly to deny, invaded her mind and body. Nausea expanded in her in waves and she had to swallow, terrified that if she vomited she’d choke to death. She began to tremble and felt her bladder release.
This is happening to me. To ME!
Make sense of it! For God’s sake, concentrate and make sense of it so you can deal with it!
I’m not alone, but he hasn’t done anything to me. Not yet. Maybe he won’t. Maybe this is it. He’s a sex nut who gets his jollies tying up women, then simply watching them, enjoying their helplessness.
It’s possible. There are such men.
By the time she’d gathered her wild and errant thoughts, the cramps had subsided. She determined that she was on her knees with her wrists bound tightly behind her. A short, taut rope led from her bound wrists to where her ankles were crossed and tied together, causing her knees to splay out, her back to arch painfully.
Hog-tied.
She’d been hog-tied and then positioned so her upper body stretched backward, leaving her staring at the sky. There was a constant tension in her backward arched body that was in itself painful.
The natural urge to straighten her upper body to the perpendicular was in constant battle with the tautness of the rope that ran between wrists and ankles. She was drawn backward like a bow, as if to shoot an arrow into the night sky.
And it hurt. Her spine felt as if it might snap.
Now what?
A sole made a scuffing sound beside her. Nearby.
He loomed above her, and cold terror ran like a chill through the marrow of her bones. The violent cramps returned as her body strained again for its unattainable release. Her agony worked its way through the rectangle of duct tape over her mouth as a drawn-out keening plea, like the muted wail of a siren. Another soft wail, the tape playing in and out.
He showed her the knife, rotating the long silver blade so it caught the starlight, and smiled down at her.
“Let me know if you’re uncomfortable,” he said softly through the smile.
The knife’s sharply honed blade found flesh, and then blood.
The muffled human siren wailed longer, louder, but not so loud that anyone nearby would hear.
Not that it mattered. The building was unoccupied. There was no one nearby.
They were in the small, brick courtyard of an East Village six-story walkup that was being rehabbed. Dawn had broken. CSU techs were busy doing their white-glove ballet, staying well away from Quinn, Pearl, Nift, and what was left of Ann Spellman.
“Shock, shock,” said Nift, the pugnacious little M.E. “The victim has dark hair and eyes, and a great body with a terrific rack. Well, obviously had a terrific rack.”
“I can see that,” Quinn said, “even through the blood.”
Nift, leaning over the awkwardly bound corpse, glanced sideways and let his gaze flick up and down Pearl. He didn’t say what he was thinking, that the dead woman facedown on the hard paving stones, her back arched so drastically that she might have broken it in her death throes, was very much the same type as Pearl.
Pearl said nothing, but she stared unblinkingly at him in a way that would have embarrassed a man with the slightest sensitivity or consideration.
“After hog-tying her, he must have gripped her under the jaw and lifted so her breasts dangled. Then held her under the jaw and gone to work with the knife,” Nift said. He was grinning. “Then he rocked her back on her knees and left her like she is, stargazing.”
Quinn rested a huge and powerful hand on Pearl’s shoulder, gently, but in a way that restrained her.
“She still has her panties on,” Quinn said.
“Sure does,” Nift said. “All pink and lacy, too. Dolled up to screw or die.”
Quinn felt a sudden embarrassment for the dead woman, the way they were talking about her when she was right there with them. He was surprised. He’d thought he was past that. Somewhere in his mind it registered that this killer could get to him, make him feel that way.
“Rigor mortis has come and gone,” Nift said, not seeming to notice that Pearl had almost sprung on him and sunk her teeth into his arteries-and still might do so. “I left her like this so you could see her before the paramedics removed the body. Her tits, incidentally, seem nowhere to be found. Like with the previous victim.”
Quinn lifted his hand from Pearl’s shoulder and patted her, then stepped forward and more closely examined the arched body on the redbrick pavers. The freeze-frame of terror in the woman’s bulging eyes was something he’d dream about, even twenty years later, from time to time. If he made it that many more years in a world where people did things l
ike this to each other.
“You should have seen the funny grin on her face before I removed this. It was jammed crossways in her mouth. I didn’t know what it was till I got it out.”
Quinn stared at a flat half circle of steel and then saw that it was marked. It was a protractor, used by draftsmen to calculate and draw angles.
“You should have left it where it was,” he said.
“I know,” Nift said. “Curiosity got the best of me. And I knew it was going to the morgue one way or the other. I found it interesting what the killer did. After everything that happened, he made her smile.”
Both men looked down again at the dead woman.
The knots binding her were simple square knots of the sort anyone might tie. The rope itself looked like ordinary clothesline, impossible to trace even in this era when hardly anyone actually hung clothes out to dry. Here and there, the victim was cut for what seemed like pure meanness. The raw flesh and blood where her breasts had been made Quinn swallow bile and anger.
The rope and hog-tie were something new in Daniel’s repertoire-and Quinn was becoming more firmly convinced that the killer was Daniel-but Quinn didn’t find that surprising. Serial killers, even locked as they were in their obsessions, sometimes introduced variations in their methods. Often that was to mislead the police, but it could also be that Daniel had thought about ways to increase his pleasure and his victim’s pain and fear, and come up with the hog-tie restraint. Classic serial killers were works in progress. That was what made them so terrifying.
Some of the simple knots were double tied, as if to make sure that rope crossed rope correctly. Simple but effective, like double tying your shoelaces. Quinn knew he was looking at precaution and not expertise.
“Our man’s not a sailor,” he said.
“Or Boy Scout,” Pearl added.
“Depends on the kind of merit badge we’re talking about,” Nift said.
Fedderman came out the door into the courtyard, moving carefully so as not to interfere with the techs. He had on one of his cheap brown suits with the coat open and flapping. As he moved in his awkward gait, the coattails swung like pendulums, brushing and almost knocking over a pot of dead flowers on a rusty plant stand. He’d been talking to the super of the building next door, who’d discovered the body early this morning while searching for his runaway cat.