by John Lutz
They threatened each other all the way down the hall to the elevator.
Claire was staring at her husband, still trying to grasp the metamorphosis. This man who looked exactly like her husband was one of the most brutal and dangerous killers in the city’s history. “Jubal? Can you explain? Will you tell me what’s going on? Please?”
“Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m okay.”
“I shouldn’t talk without a lawyer, Claire. You know that. I’m sorry. Just get me a lawyer.”
“We don’t even have a lawyer.”
Quinn knew Jubal was being smart, but he didn’t say so. “Do you want someone to stay here with you?” Quinn asked Claire.
“No. Really, I’m all right.”
“Take the suspect down to the elevator and wait for me,” Quinn said to Pearl and Fedderman.
Each of them gripped Jubal by an arm, and Fedderman used his free hand to bunch the back of Jubal’s collar. They marched him toward the door he’d been so anxious to exit.
They could have been more gentle.
69
When Quinn was alone with Claire, he went to her and rested a hand lightly on her shoulder. He’d expected her to be trembling, but she was steady. Strong inside, even if she looks frail as a bird.
“Can I go with him?” she asked.
“You can, but there’s no point to it at this hour. He’ll go through the booking procedure; then he’ll be moved to a holdover cell. You get referrals in the morning and contact an attorney. In the meantime I’ll see he gets a public defender to protect his rights. I promise you that.”
He could see her thinking about it, trying to sort out her allegiances. Should I take the word of the arresting officer? Who saved my life. Or should I stand by my husband? Who tried to kill me.
It took her longer than it should have to make up her mind.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Do you think you might need medical attention?” Quinn asked. “I mean, for your pregnancy.”
“No. I’d be able to tell if I were hurt that way.”
“Someone will call you tomorrow morning. We’ll send a car for you.”
She nodded.
“Sure you’re gonna be okay?”
“Okay as anyone can be, lost in all the questions.”
“We’ll sort things out and have the answers for you. Meantime, try to worry as little as possible.”
“Easy to say.”
“Yeah, I know. Like so many things.”
“I didn’t expect this!” she said, then bit her lower lip and stared up at the ceiling. She didn’t look as if she were going to cry, though.
Quinn glanced down at her pregnancy, which was beginning to show, and thought of what she faced alone. God help her.
“It’ll all be okay after a while,” he lied, and patted her gently on the shoulder. He felt suddenly cheap, conning her along, even though he was trying to help. “Better, anyway.”
He could find nothing else to say to this woman whose husband had been about to murder her, so he turned away.
After Quinn left, Claire went to the door and locked it, then trudged back into the bedroom.
Jubal! How could this be happening?
She’d never felt this way, as if she were alone at the edge of a cold hell. As if there were some dark inadequacy in her. As if this were all because of something she’d done.
Was it…was it something I did?
Or didn’t do?
She sat stunned on the edge of the bed and tried not to sob.
Was it?
She wanted to scream.
She wanted to throw herself on the bed like a child and beat the mattress with her fists until she was exhausted.
Her misery was a weight that would never lift. She felt beyond crying, but tears that were someone else’s tracked down her cheeks.
She wanted to die.
The baby!
She didn’t want to die.
She wanted chocolate.
In the dark closet near the door, the Night Prowler waited.
70
They were all gone. The Night Prowler was reasonably sure of that.
Better to make absolutely sure.
So Romulus, whose real name was Tom Wilde, stood in stifling heat and darkness, smelling the white acrid scent of mothballs, waiting for his breathing to even out, listening for movement or voices outside the closet.
He’d entered the apartment just before the husband, Jubal, and had been surprised in Claire’s bedroom by the big cop, the tough one. He’d gotten the cop with his knife, which was a damned good thing because it took at least some of the fight out of the determined bastard.
The cop had clung to him all the way down the hall and into the living room. In the mad struggle in the dark and the confusion after the other cops arrived, Wilde was shoved against the coat closet door and felt the knob jab him in the hip. He turned in the blackness and found refuge in the closet, just before the lights came on to show at the bottom of the door as a thin yellow line.
Certain he’d be discovered, he was about to make a hopeless, desperate break for freedom, when he heard the cops turn their attention to someone else.
It took Wilde a few seconds to realize what had happened—Hubby had flown home unexpectedly and surprised everyone.
And been surprised.
They must have caught Jubal at the door when the lights came on and assumed he was leaving instead of entering the apartment.
The Night Prowler almost fainted with gratitude.
He’s me! Tonight he’s me!
Wilde could have cheered when he heard Jubal insist on a lawyer before trying to explain himself to the police. A homicide charge was nothing to mess with unless you had counsel.
Damned right! Wilde had known that ever since Hiram, Missouri.
Since the night of the Sand murders.
He’d suspected Luther was still seeing Cara and followed him to the Sand house, waited for him to emerge, then realized he must be sleeping there. Years before, Wilde had lost his teaching job because of a secret affair with one of his art students, Cara Smith, who’d later married Milford Sand. The embers of that affair had never died, and they became flame again—at least in Tom Wilde.
He went to the Sand house late one sleepless night to talk Luther into leaving, for the boy’s own good, and had seen lights and heard shouting coming from the kitchen. When he investigated the source of the commotion, he found opportunity as well as pain.
In his rage it had seemed so simple, the desperate logic that had moved countless men before him: if Cara couldn’t be his, she’d belong to no one.
The scene in the kitchen, the brilliant colors, remained vivid in Wilde’s memory; the blood, the interrupted meal that he could taste, the interrupted lives…. How suddenly everything could change, could stop.
When Luther regained consciousness and was still in shock, it hadn’t been difficult to convince the intoxicated and naive young man that he’d committed the murders. And, of course, his good friend and mentor, Tom Wilde, would help him to escape, would send him downstream to safety in his boat.
And that part of it was God’s truth; Wilde did want Luther to get clear and free.
But Luther must have recalled what had really happened in the Sand kitchen, and in a fury tried to kill Wilde but botched the attempt. It was Wilde who took the boat out from the bank. A mile downriver, Luther’s weighted body sank to the bottom and was never found.
Wilde had taken the advice he’d given Luther: lose yourself in a large city and become another you. Be a different man living a different life.
It hadn’t been easy, this creation of another self. It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened. Wilde had found in himself a resourcefulness and talent he’d only faintly known existed.
But over the years Wilde-Romulus came to realize that the past was always there, as if it were upstream and around the bend in a winding river, invisible but there, always there, while
time flowed on. Cara!…Claire!…
Now, hiding in the dark closet, Wilde thought enough time had passed. Besides, the police might soon realize their mistake and return.
Timing…so important.
He was sure he’d heard the faint shuffling of feet, probably Claire walking back to the bedroom. Since then, no sound from the other side of the closet door. She was alone.
Thought she was alone.
The buzzing…
He swallowed, steadying himself for what was to come, maintaining control.
Soon.
The police would have taken the knife, but there were others in the kitchen. Lots of them.
Very soon.
Night. Black. Red.
The elevator arrived at the end of the hall on the twenty-ninth floor.
When the door opened, Pearl and Fedderman guided the handcuffed Jubal inside, and the three of them stood huddled as far to the rear as they could move.
Quinn stood facing away from them and pressed the button for the lobby. In the reflection of the polished steel control panel, he watched his two detectives and Jubal Day. Quinn seemed relaxed, but he was tensed and ready to help if Jubal panicked or for some other reason got rambunctious. That happened sometimes. The suspect, facing a hopeless future, suddenly decided to lash out at his fate, his past, his sickness, at anyone close enough to reach. The demon in him trying one last time to escape.
The door slid closed, and the elevator began to drop.
71
Now!
The Night Prowler soundlessly rotated the knob and opened the closet door about six inches.
The living room was still dark, but there was a light on somewhere in the back of the apartment, the bedroom.
For several seconds he stood without moving, listening, listening….
Then he stepped from the closet and silently made his way toward the kitchen.
Claire would be in the bedroom, still trying to figure everything out, nursing her grief and pain, too much of it to allow sleep.
She’d be awake and alone.
That was best, that she be awake. If it’s going to be just the two of us.
In the kitchen he tried to decide between a boning knife—perhaps too flexible and fragile—and a serrated bread knife with sharp twin points.
And, of course, the sturdy, all-purpose chef’s knife. Hail to the Chef!
Did he want her to come here, to the kitchen, or should he go to her?
Where will you die, Claire?
He decided on the bedroom. Enough had gone wrong tonight already, so why take chances?
It would be quick. He’d be careful not to make any noise on his way to the bedroom, then when he entered she’d be astounded and paralyzed with terror. Her throat would be solid. She’d be unable to breathe for a moment, much less cry out.
Then it would be too late.
No one spoke as the elevator descended. Quinn resisted the temptation to stare upward, as people did out of habit in elevators, instead keeping his gaze fixed on Jubal’s reflection in the shiny control panel.
Suddenly he saw an arm extended alongside him.
Pearl pressed the emergency stop button, and the elevator slowed, lurched, and was still.
Fedderman said, “What the hell, Pearl?”
Quinn turned and looked at her. “Why?”
She jerked a thumb toward Jubal. “He’s just been in a fight for his life with a tough cop and made a run for freedom.”
“And?” Fedderman said.
“He isn’t breathing hard.”
Quinn stared at Jubal.
It was true. Jubal’s complexion was pasty and he was obviously distressed, frightened, but his chest wasn’t heaving and his pale lips were pressed together. His breathing was even. After going several rounds with Campbell? And he wasn’t marked up from his struggle with Campbell and then with Campbell’s reinforcements.
He isn’t the Night Prowler!
Which meant…
“Good Christ!” Fedderman said.
All three of them had figured it out and were reaching for the 29 button. It was Pearl who pressed it, with Quinn’s finger mashing down on her thumb.
The elevator began its slow ascent back toward Claire’s floor.
72
“Cara?”
Claire gasped and looked up from where she sat slumped on the edge of the bed, her elbows on her knees.
In that instant the Night Prowler hesitated.
So beautiful in her sadness, in her secret knowledge. Not now, not yet….
She sat up straight. It took her a few seconds to recognize the man standing in her bedroom doorway. The decorator. “Romulus…” Then she said automatically, “Not Cara. It’s Claire.”
He smiled as if embarrassed. “Yes. Claire.”
“What on earth are you—” And she noticed the knife in his hand, pressed flat against his thigh. From the kitchen. Her own knife.
Her right hand rose to touch her lower lip. “My God! You’re—”
“Don’t scream, Cara.”
Cara again?
She couldn’t move or look away from him. Her breath wouldn’t come. Her heart went wild and seemed about to explode.
He sighed and moved toward her.
Not Cara! I’m not Cara!
When finally the elevator door slid open, the three detectives left a baffled Jubal Day standing alone in handcuffs and ran down the hall toward the apartment door.
“Hey!” Jubal called after them.
They didn’t turn around; their hurried feet made a desperate shuffling sound on the hall carpet.
“Hey! What is this? What’s going on?”
They ignored him.
The door glided shut and the elevator began to descend before Jubal could stop it.
Claire found the strength to move and scooted back across the mattress, staring at the knife, then up into Romulus’ eyes. They were such a beautiful blue, so sad and serious. And intent. Terrifying in their certainty.
He’s ahead of me. He knows what we’re going to share and he’s going to make it happen. There’s no changing his mind.
She decided to pick up a pillow and throw it at him, thinking that in the few seconds he was blinded when it struck his face, she’d make a run to get around him and reach the door. The element of surprise. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it was everything.
It was as if he’d read her thoughts.
He simply sidestepped the pillow and began moving around the bed toward her, his expression unchanged.
Smiling, he gave her the angle to the door now, and she knew he wanted her to run for safety so he could intercept her, so she would come to him. He was waiting for her nerve to break. Giving her a slight chance. Knowing she’d take it as he got closer, because what else could she do?
What else could she do?
“Fast and hard,” Quinn said, thinking the noise might help, might stop or at least delay what was surely about to happen.
If it hadn’t happened already.
Fedderman, huffing like a winded bull, knew what he meant and lowered his shoulder as they neared the apartment door.
Pearl already had her gun drawn.
Claire had taken her first running step, and the Night Prowler his, when the sudden crash of the apartment door flying open made them both freeze.
There was no thought of fighting them this time. Instinct and logic were the same. The Night Prowler bolted toward the window. If he could smash through the glass, reach the fire escape!
Claire knew what he was doing and picked up the other pillow on the bed and hurled it at him as she had the first, with all her might.
This time it struck him in the face and he paused, brushing it aside.
The cost of his hesitation was only a second or two, but it was the ultimate price.
Quinn was through the bedroom door first, Pearl and Fedderman almost running up his back.
The Night Prowler lifted his right arm and at first Claire thought he
was raising his hands, giving himself up. But his hand held the knife, his arm drawn back as if he were about to throw it at her.
Giving them no choice!
She knew somehow he wasn’t going to throw the knife. She didn’t even bother trying to get out of the way.
The bedroom roared with the thunder of gunfire and the Night Prowler dropped the knife and staggered backward, hugging himself as if cold. He stared at Claire for a long moment.
As if I betrayed him.
Rolling his eyes in what might have been sudden panic, he dropped to a sitting position, then keeled over and lay curled on his side as if preparing to take a nap.
His cheek was pressed against the carpet and he knew he was dying. His final horizon was only inches away.
The last thing he saw was the vivid scarlet of his blood clashing with the blue carpet fibers.
It was wrong, all wrong!
73
“His name’s Romulus,” Claire said, standing numbly and staring down at the corpse in her bedroom. “He decorated the baby’s room. Painted it.”
Quinn didn’t have to bend down and examine the dead man on the floor to know he wasn’t Luther Lunt.
“He called me Cara.”
Quinn stared at her. “Cara?”
“Never before. But when he first came into the bedroom. And just before you got here. Is he—”
“Dead?”
“No. I know he’s dead.”
“He’s the Night Prowler,” Quinn said.
“And Jubal? Where’s Jubal?”
Quinn glanced at Fedderman. “Take her to her husband, and get the cuffs off him.”
When Fedderman and Claire were gone, Quinn and Pearl looked at each other.
They’d read a few things wrong. They both realized now that the victims who scratched at the freshly painted door and wall were trying not only to leave dying messages but to direct attention to the paint itself, and to the painter. Mary Navarre’s inverted V, or caret, that Quinn thought might be the first two strokes of an M or A scrawled in blood on the wall, was actually the first, vertical stroke of an R; death had come just as the second, horizontal stroke was about to begin, and her lifeless hand dropped almost straight down.