by John Lutz
When Maria regained consciousness she was lying on her back on her bed, where the box had been.
The white box…
She had a headache, and she was cold. Something else…Why was she having difficulty breathing?
She could only breathe through her nose. Something was clamped over her mouth, sealing her lips.
Maria panicked and tried to cry out, to rise from the bed, and realized she couldn’t move her arms or legs, couldn’t make a sound loud enough to be heard more than ten feet away.
Calm! Damn it, be calm!
Her struggles, which had rocked the bed violently but gained her nothing, gradually stopped, and she lay still, taking stock.
I’m taped! Tape over my mouth, around my legs and arms, wound tight enough to stop circulation. Head still hurts, not thinking clearly yet, I know it…
Maria had read about the Butcher, and there’d been plenty of speculation about him at John Jay, but she refused to make any connection with what had happened to her. It was the sort of thing she studied, that happened to other people. Lecture material or newspaper grist for reading over breakfast. She craned her neck, staring around her, listening. She appeared to be alone in the bedroom.
But not in the apartment.
She could hear something…a soft, persistent sound. Water running in the bathroom.
It stopped.
The light changed in the bedroom and suddenly someone was there. Maria raised her head from the mattress and saw a medium-size, muscular man enter the room. He was reasonably handsome, mid-thirties, and also nude.
Mustn’t be. Can’t be.
He smiled at her, then bent over her and worked his arms beneath her back and bound legs.
Mustn’t be!
He lifted her gently and held her as if she were a bride about to cross a threshold, and carried her toward the bathroom. Her mind was still numbed by pain and confusion, and she had the crazy idea he was rescuing her. She knew it was crazy but clung desperately to it.
Until he placed her in the almost full bathtub, lifted her ankles, and pushed her head down and some of the cold water went up her nose.
Full awareness came then. An awareness more acute than any she had known.
Please!
She tried to raise her head, but his hand was on her forehead, as if he were checking for a fever, and she had no leverage whatsoever. The laws of physics were on his side. He lifted her ankles slightly higher and she felt her nude buttocks slide on the slick tub bottom as she went deeper. The man held her head steady inches beneath the surface.
Please! It isn’t fair! Why are you doing this? For God’s sake, why?
Through cold, clear water, drowning, she watched him watching her.
Please!
51
Jeb Kraft said, “I told you I wouldn’t need a lawyer.”
The interrogation room was getting warmer, from body heat and because the precinct detectives liked to keep it warm in there. Desperation seemed to rise with the temperature, and desperation struggled to find its voice.
“Don’t be so sure,” Pareta said to Jeb. “I might as well stay here. You’re still talking to the police and need legal counsel, and I’m here pro bono.”
He smiled. “I guess you’re right. You’re a bargain.”
Pearl knew he was turning on the charm for his lady lawyer, and knew she was falling for it.
Quinn shifted his weight in his uncomfortable chair, making wood creak, and looked expectantly at Jeb. “We’re waiting for the truth, and God help you if it isn’t.”
“There’s no need for that kind of talk,” Pareta said.
Quinn didn’t have to tell her she was there because she’d been the on-call attorney next in line. Pareta had been overjoyed to find that she might be defending one of the city’s most notorious killers until a high-priced, high-profile criminal attorney inevitably displaced her. Now she was simply defending a man wrongly charged. Everyone ignored her. She acted as if she’d expected to be ignored. Just getting in her licks.
Moving forward slightly and resting his elbows on the table, Jeb cleared his throat, and began:
“My name is Jeb Kraft, and I was born in nineteen-eighty-one in Slidell, Louisiana. My mother is Myrna Kraft. My father was Samuel Pickett, now deceased. I attended Yale, not Princeton. My mother’s other son, ten years older than I am, is Sherman Kraft. When we—Mom and I—read in a Louisville newspaper about the Butcher murders, we knew it was Sherman. It had to be. He was…never what you’d call normal. Mom said he liked to kill animals and cut them up, dismember them and clean their body parts, as if he were purifying and justifying his act. We knew we had to do something, but we didn’t want to see Sherman killed, or kill himself rather than be captured. Blood really is thicker than water, even thicker than the blood of women we never knew. We came to New York to find him and stop him, Mom and I.”
Quinn unconsciously fingered the Cuban cigar in his shirt pocket. (Not that he could smoke it here.) “This is the same Sherman Kraft who was found wandering alone in Harrison County, Florida, in nineteen-eighty, and became a ward of the state?”
“It is,” Jeb said.
“Where’s your mother now?”
“She’s staying at the Meredith Hotel, on the East Side.”
Quinn knew the Meredith. It was a large hotel and old, but still elegant, the kind of place where mid-level diplomats and airline personnel stayed, as well as tourists who wanted to see the United Nations, which was only a few blocks away. He glanced at Fedderman, who nodded and slipped from the interrogation room. Jeb Kraft didn’t seem to notice, but Quinn was sure he had. Jeb didn’t miss much.
“Why did you use an alias in your search for your brother?”
“We decided it would be easier that way, for us and for Sherman. We didn’t want to attract attention if the police learned his name and it became public. We wanted to get to him first, to talk him into surrendering to the law, to keep him from killing again or being killed himself.”
“So you found a way to monitor the investigation,” Quinn said. “You established a relationship with one of the detectives.”
Jeb glanced at Pearl. “I guess you could call it that. Or I let her establish a relationship with me. I pretended I’d known Marilyn Nelson so I might pique Officer Kasner’s interest, and…our friendship developed into something deeper.”
Pearl felt her stomach turn over.
“While pretending to give Officer Kasner evidence, you were secretly eliciting evidence from her,” Quinn said.
“You could say that.”
“Do you say it?”
Another glance at Pearl. “Yes, I do. You have to understand, the entire purpose of our visit was to find Sherman before the police did. To save his life. I’m not saying I wasn’t—I’m not—fond of Pearl.”
“And all the while Sherman continued to kill.”
“We wanted to save the lives of any future victims, too. Of course. We thought we were going about it the right way, letting the police lead us where they were going anyway, then maybe there’d be something we could do for Sherman, make taking him into custody easier and no one would be hurt. Our intentions were good.”
“Have either you or your mother had any contact with Sherman since you arrived in New York?”
“No. I swear we haven’t.”
Quinn wearily dry-washed his face with his big hands and sat back. The wooden chair creaked forlornly again under the strain of his weight. “Do you have any actual proof that your brother Sherman Kraft committed the Butcher murders?”
Jeb blinked at him. “Proof? In the legal sense? No.”
“Then why are you so sure of his guilt?”
“Because Mom is.”
Pearl saw a subtle change in Quinn; he’d picked up on something. He no longer seemed tired.
“Are you still single, Jeb?”
“Yes. I’ve had live-in relationships with women, but I never married.”
“Any special someone now
?”
Jeb looked everywhere other than at Pearl. “No. I’m afraid not anymore.”
Pearl wondered how she could ever have been in love with this creep.
“Do you still live with your mother, Jeb?”
“Of course not. I live in an apartment in Boston, where I have my office. I mean, I work out of my apartment. I’m an arbitrageur.”
“What is that?”
“It’s complicated. I make money off the differences in the exchange rates of currencies and in the fluctuating prices of certain commodities.”
“You’re a trader.”
“Put simply, yes.”
“Your mother lives alone in Louisiana?”
“Yes, but we’re close in ways other than geographical. We talk on the phone almost every day.”
“Why is she staying at one hotel and you at another?”
“I wanted to stay somewhere more suited to my identity as a struggling journalist.”
“Your cover.”
“Yes. Is there something illegal about that?”
“About inserting yourself in the middle of an active homicide investigation? You bet there’s something illegal about it.”
“He was searching for his brother,” Pareta said. “Attempting to help.”
Quinn laughed. “Spare us, counselor. But please tell your client that his best chance of extricating himself from the mess he’s in is to tell the truth.”
“My advice to my client would be to say nothing more. You’ve threatened to charge him with a crime.”
“He’s still charged with a crime—homicide.”
Pareta saw this as her turn to laugh. She made a pretty good show of it. “And where’s the evidence of that?”
“The point is,” Quinn said, “the murder charge hasn’t been dropped.”
“Then as Mr. Kraft’s attorney—”
Jeb raised his hands for silence and as if to calm everyone. “It’s okay. The police know about us now. If talking helps to find Sherman, I want to talk. He has to be stopped.”
He looked down the table at Pearl, this time meeting her gaze directly. Trying to con her again, she knew.
She looked at the new Jeb the way Quinn was looking at him.
“What do you think, Pearl?” Jeb asked sincerely.
“I think you’re guilty as hell. Of a lot of things.”
“Let’s get back to where we were,” Quinn said.
“Which was where?” Pareta asked.
“Mom.”
52
An hour later, Quinn and Pearl met Fedderman in the cavernous lobby of the Meredith Hotel. Aside from poor acoustics, it featured lots of gray-veined marble and darkly polished paneling, a field of maroon carpet, and fern-adorned groupings of brown leather armchairs. You had to look closely to notice the fine cracks in the marble, patched areas of carpet, and that some of the armchairs were slightly worn. The ferns, which were artificial, looked new and not very much like ferns.
“She’s not back yet,” Fedderman said. He’d informed them by phone on the way over that Myrna Kraft, registered under her own name, wasn’t in her room. “The desk clerk’s going to give me a nod when she comes in.”
Quinn glanced around the lobby. One of the elevators opened and a couple who looked like teenagers emerged and headed giggling for the street exit. Two elderly women were sitting in armchairs and talking on the far side near a closed shop that sold incidentals and travel supplies. The desk clerk, a slender African American man in advanced middle age and going bald unevenly, was standing and leafing through some papers. A uniformed bellhop lounged just inside the revolving-door entrance.
“Let’s wait for her here, then let her go up to her room before we confront her,” Quinn said.
The three of them sat in armchairs. Quinn’s sighed and enveloped him seductively, and a nearby reading lamp warmed one side of his face. If he weren’t so pumped up he might have fallen asleep.
“How long—” Pearl began impatiently, and was quiet as a tall, slim woman in tan slacks and blazer with a yellow blouse pushed in through the glass revolving door. Pearl noticed she wasn’t wearing heels; she was simply tall. Her long arms swung freely and she wasn’t carrying anything. Not even a purse.
Fedderman, who’d looked over at the desk clerk and gotten the nod, said, “That’s her.”
She didn’t notice them among the almost-ferns as she strode past. Though she was well into her fifties, she moved with a natural grace that couldn’t be taught in modeling school, and she had the kind of cheekbones and jawline that aged well. Her dark hair was slightly touched with gray. Her eyes were dark, deep, and widely set. Movie star eyes.
“Jesus!” Fedderman whispered.
Quinn and Pearl knew what he meant.
“She looks like the Butcher’s victims,” Pearl said. “The same type.”
“Almost the same damned woman,” Fedderman said. “If ever a serial killer was offing his own mother over and over…”
They watched as Myrna stood at the elevators and waited. She didn’t seem at all nervous or on guard. Quinn guessed she hadn’t seen or heard the news about her son Jeb being arrested.
When she’d entered the elevator and its door slid shut, the three detectives stood up.
“Room six-twenty,” Fedderman said.
They crossed the lobby toward the elevators. The desk clerk was back to shuffling though his papers and didn’t look up at them.
“He gonna warn her we’re on our way?” Quinn asked Fedderman.
“Not unless she’s got a third son. This isn’t the kinda hotel where the policy is to warn clientele about the police.”
Quinn wasn’t so sure about that, but he let it go. Myrna Kraft probably wouldn’t try to avoid them anyway, even if she knew they now had her identity and her son. She had the appearance of a woman who had never run from much of anything.
They rode the other elevator to the sixth floor. A maid pushing a linen cart with a squeaky wheel passed them with a shy, polite smile. Otherwise the carpeted hall was deserted.
Quinn knocked softly on the door to room six-twenty. Light behind the peephole changed, then the door opened, and Myrna Kraft looked out at them inquisitively.
He was surprised that she wasn’t as tall as she’d appeared from across the lobby. It was an illusion because of the way she was built, her regal posture. There was something else about her, a kind of energy that was almost palpable, and her dark eyes were the kind that would hold whatever they were fixed on. Pearl thought that as a younger woman Myrna Kraft must have been quite something.
“Yes?” she said. In that single, drawn-out word was a trace of Southern accent.
“Myrna Kraft?” Quinn asked.
“I am.”
“We’re police, ma’am.” Quinn showed her his shield, which she looked at carefully. Then she looked expectantly at the other two detectives, who also showed her their identification. Only then did she invite them inside. Quinn was hit with a faint acrid scent, almost like insecticide or disinfectant. The room was orderly and spotless. He remembered the maid in the hall.
“We have your youngest son, Jeb, in custody,” he said, not mentioning that Renz had only promised he could detain Jeb a few more hours, with Pareta nipping, niggling, and threatening.
Something changed in Myrna’s eyes, but you had to look closely and quickly to notice. A good actor, Quinn decided, like her son. Probably like both sons. Talent in the family.
“You have my son Jeb? Why? On what charge?”
“Murder.” Quinn was still technically correct, still legal, until informed that the warrant was officially withdrawn.
Myrna didn’t respond at all to his shock tactic. “That would be impossible. I know my son. Why, Jeb wouldn’t harm anyone, much less take their very life.” Laying on the southern charm now. The accent was still subtle, but what there was of it was pure molasses and used sparingly. She could turn it on and off. How much of Myrna Kraft was real?
Pearl and Fedderman
remained silent, letting Quinn drive the conversation.
He decided to drive right over Myrna.
“Apparently you haven’t seen the news lately.”
“Tell you true, I’m usually not interested in the news. It’s nothing but unpleasantness.”
“Jeb Kraft is under arrest for the murders of six women, but the charges will be dropped. We know your oldest son, Sherman, is the killer.”
She looked thoughtful rather than alarmed, and took a few steps back then sat down hard in the wooden chair that matched a small desk.
“That can’t be.”
“But it is, and you knew it before we walked in here.”
She aimed her wide-set eyes at Quinn, full wattage. “If we all know that, then why hasn’t my Jeb been released?”
“He will be, Mrs. Kraft. His attorney’s working out the technicalities.”
“Attorney?”
“The court appointed one. She’s looking after your son very competently.”
“I’ll take your word for that, Detective Quinn.” She smiled. “You have an honest face.”
“Faces can be deceptive,” Pearl said.
Myrna turned her head slightly and stared at Pearl. Faces might be deceptive, but Pearl thought the message in Myrna’s eyes was clear. It was a kind of detached hatred remote from any kind of empathy, much less mercy; the exterminator observing the insect. It made Pearl’s flesh break out in goose bumps.
I slept with this woman’s son.
“We know about Sherman’s time in the swamp, and your disappearance after he was found,” Quinn said. “We know quite a bit about Sherman.”
“Not enough to find him, to stop him. You don’t know him like his own mother does, Detective Quinn.”
“Maybe I know him better.”
He thought he might get a rise out of her, but she remained calm. “I do doubt that. Blood ties are the strongest, you know, especially between mother and child.”
“Jeb told us about how you and he came to New York, and how he dogged the investigation into Sherman’s murders.”