by John Lutz
“Sounds good when you say it fast.”
“It happens all the time. Strangers walk up and shoot someone, or a guy on the next bar stool punches somebody out, and the witnesses can’t pick the perpetrator they’ve been face-to-face with out of a lineup.”
Pearl smiled. “You should have been a public defender, tried that in court.”
“I guess it is a little theoretical,” Quinn admitted.
“Well, what I meant simply and directly is that it’s possible the killer is too smart for us again.”
“But our—”
“Shh!” Pearl slipped the loose headphone back on.
She kept her forefinger raised so Quinn would be silent, and she listened…listened…
The sound she heard might have been Allsworth, the veteran cop stationed in Myrna’s room. But it was the bedroom that was bugged, and Allsworth was in the suite’s outer room, on the other side of Myrna’s closed door.
The mikes were sensitive and might simply have picked up Myrna stirring in her sleep, turning over in bed, bumping an arm against the headboard. But Pearl was familiar with those sounds. What she’d heard hadn’t been any of them.
What she thought she’d heard.
Finally she began to breathe again. “I thought I heard something, but it was nothing.”
“I heard it, too,” Quinn said. “I think it was a vent or pipe rattling in the wall. What I was about to say is that our killer will show because of the woman in the room down the hall. This kind of compulsion doesn’t have anything to do with IQ.”
“Get me some coffee,” Pearl said, “and I’ll agree with you.”
She watched Quinn cross the room, then adjusted her headphones and leaned again over the desk. It was difficult to concentrate, listening to nothing. Difficult just to stay awake.
Gifted criminals, she thought. There weren’t many of them, but they could be hell.
66
Quietly…This had to be done so quietly.
He lay on his stomach in the duct and peered down through the vent cover into the dimly lighted bathroom. He could see an angled slope of white plastic shower curtain, falling away, a corner of a marble vanity top like the one in his own room, the pattern of the off-white tile floor.
Undoubtedly there would be someone standing close guard over Myrna, but they wouldn’t be in the bedroom with her. They’d have the suite bugged, though, and the slightest irregular sound would bring them running. Almost certainly Quinn himself was somewhere nearby, controlling the surveillance, maybe in another room on the same floor, listening. Sherman hoped so.
Of course there was always the possibility that Mom’s bedroom was unoccupied, that the bait wasn’t actually in the trap.
No, that would be risky for them. He might somehow tumble to it and bolt without making a try for the prize. After everything that had happened, they wouldn’t chance that. They were too smart.
He smiled and reassured himself. They were the way God made prey animals, just smart enough and no more.
Sherman turned his head, pressing his cheek against the steel grate of the vent cover, and lay listening.
Silence. Complete silence.
Then, very softly, someone breathing. The slow, steady rhythm of deep sleep.
His heartbeat kicked into high and he heard his blood rushing in his ears. For a moment he felt light-headed.
She was there. Like the queen in her nest.
He could feel her presence nearby.
He pressed his cheek harder against the cool steel and was surprised to find himself crying.
A tear worked its way through the grate and he heard it strike the tile floor.
It did nothing to lessen his resolve.
Sergeant Al Allsworth was twenty-six years on the force and had done this kind of duty before. Ten years ago, in a Times Square hotel, he’d taken a bullet for a state witness and preserved testimony that helped to put major organized crime figures in prison.
Fifty-one years old now, Allsworth wasn’t regarded as a genius and would never advance far in the NYPD, but he had a rarer and more valuable commodity than intelligence. He was one hundred percent certified reliable, a cop in every cell of his body. He would do his duty and would preserve Myrna Kraft’s life even if it meant giving up his own. That was what he was about and he was respected for it.
Allsworth sat now on the small sofa in the anteroom of Myrna’s suite, a People magazine fanned cover-up over his knee. He was a big man, bald but for a dusting of buzz-cut gray hair around his ears. He had bunched muscles, a stomach paunch, and a slab-sided face with a thin scar that ran through both lips near the right corner of his mouth.
His eyes were half closed but he was nowhere near sleep. The only light in the room was from the reading lamp on the table beside him. His uniform tie was loosened, as was the top button of his shirt, and his eight-point cap lay on the nearby table, alongside a half-full coffee cup.
Allsworth thrived on caffeine on this kind of duty; it was what kept him awake and alert while he was in the stand-down-but-aware state that every cop on steady stakeout duty learns to accomplish. He drank his coffee black and was on his second pot. The room reeked of overheated stale coffee, but he was used to the acrid aroma and didn’t notice.
It seemed he wouldn’t notice if a gunfight broke out in the room, but the part of Allsworth that listened was somehow made more alert and sensitive by the reduced activity of the rest of his body. He looked like a weary, middle-aged cop of the sort who might help lure a kid’s cat down from a tree, gone somewhat to seed and slumped almost dozing on a sofa, but Allsworth was much more than that.
He was ready.
Shifting her weight back and forth violently, Lauri managed to work the chair she was bound to across the carpet until she was within a few feet of the nightstand by the bed.
Now what?
She couldn’t reach the phone, but her fingers weren’t taped together, so maybe she could maneuver the chair around so she could clutch the cord and pull it closer.
It was slow, difficult work, making her perspire heavily, which at least somewhat loosened the tape. And it was delicate work, because if she didn’t manage enough control over her movements, the chair would tip over and she’d never be able to right herself.
Finally she managed to angle the chair correctly, then she worked desperately to move it the final six inches she needed if she might touch her fingertips to the tantalizingly dangling cord.
Each time the chair tipped toward the phone, she scissored her right middle finger and forefinger. She felt the tips of the fingers brushing the cord. One more rocking motion might be all she needed.
She held her breath, and shifted her weight to tip the chair as far back as she could without falling.
Now forward.
She felt the cord between her fingers and brought them together hard and held them, gripping the elusive cord.
As the chair’s momentum reversed and it began to tip back the other way, she worked her fingers so the cord was wrapped partly around one of them.
Something wrong!
She knew immediately that in her eagerness to draw the cord closer and hold it, she’d thrown her weight back and to the side too vigorously.
The chair was tipping too far.
Toppling.
Oh, God! Falling…
Turning!
She clenched her eyes shut and bumped her shoulder and head on the floor as the chair swiveled on one rear leg and hit hard on its side.
But she’d held on to the cord. In fact it was wrapped even more tightly around her forefinger.
She remembered a brief dinging sound as she’d fallen, and knew what it meant. She’d pulled the phone off the nightstand. The receiver had bounced out of its cradle and was lying on the carpet. Her shoulder felt broken. Her head ached and throbbed, but she could move it to the side and see the phone’s base.
The problem was that it was at the other end of the chair, near her feet.
; Lying in a seated position on her left side, she struggled to move her left foot closer to the phone. The force of her fall had caused the tape to loosen even more, and she managed to clench her toes and wriggle the foot until she’d worked off her left high-heeled shoe.
It was a small accomplishment, but now she didn’t feel completely helpless. She had a real shot at alerting someone to her plight, at getting free. She had actual hope.
She adjusted position to take as much weight as possible off the left chair leg and dug her toes into the carpet.
It took her several minutes to find the technique that would let her edge her taped nylon leg over near the phone’s base. The way she was lying she couldn’t actually see the phone’s keypad, but she could reach it with her heel.
Drawing a deep breath, leaning her upper body as hard as possible into the carpet, she fought the pain in her shoulder and used her nyloned heel to press again and again on the phone’s keypad.
Though it wasn’t likely, she told herself she might coincidentally tap out a number that was valid, that would somehow summon help. The numerals nine and one, she remembered, were diagonally opposite each other on the keypad, so she tried to adjust each press of her heel to increase the chance that she’d hit the right keys. After a while, she moved her heel in patterns of three with a pause between each effort. Nine-one-one.
She hoped.
As she fought her bonds and pain and the cramping of her muscles, Lauri wondered what the odds were that she’d actually reach the emergency number with her thumping heel.
She decided they were long enough that they didn’t merit thinking about, but they were the only odds she had so she went with them.
In room 624, Pearl leaned slightly forward, rested a fingertip on her right earphone, and smiled.
“What’s funny?” Quinn asked. He’d dragged one of the upholstered armchairs over to the window and was slumped in it with his legs extended and crossed at the ankles.
“She snores,” Pearl said. “Not very loud, but at last she snores.”
“So what?”
Pearl looked over at him, thinking he’d better not mention that she also snored, though not very loud. Quinn seemed to know what she was thinking and looked away. Did the bastard smile?
“It isn’t fair,” Pearl said, “that somebody looks like Michelle Pfeiffer and snores and men think it’s sexy, but when other women snore it’s a turn-off.”
“Myrna Kraft doesn’t look like Michelle Pfeiffer.”
“I wasn’t talking about Myrna Kraft, I was talking about Michelle Pfeiffer.”
“It isn’t fair,” Quinn said, “that somebody looks like Michelle Pfeiffer.”
God, we’re getting tired. Too tired.
He stood up from the chair, stretched, and worked his arms back and forth to get up his circulation, then stepped over to the window to observe the dimly lit street below with its sparse vehicular and pedestrian traffic that never disappeared altogether. New York at night.
“Looks innocent enough out there,” he said, not turning around.
“We know what that means.”
“Uh-huh.” Quinn glanced at his watch and sat back down.
Pearl thought they were probably wasting their time, but she knew better than to say so.
Four floors beneath Quinn and Pearl, Jeb Jones sat in a chair he’d moved over to his window. He was watching the homeless man across the street. The police had allowed Jeb to be in the same hotel as his mother, but they didn’t want him to be any part of what might happen if Sherman came calling. They wanted him out of the way.
Jeb wanted to be here. As far as he was concerned, he had every right to be here. He’d pretended to go along with the idea that he wanted to be nearby so he could comfort his mother only after Sherman had been captured. But only pretended.
He already knew the route he’d take to her room four floors above his own. Out his door, turn left, and run up the stairs. There was a cop on the sixth-floor landing, but Jeb knew that if Sherman was thought to be near his mother all of the cops would converge on her room as fast as possible.
Jeb would be right behind the cop on the landing.
The key was the homeless man across the street. His clothes were ragged and he was seated on a blanket in a dark doorway, slouched backward against the closed door, his head bowed as if he were sleeping. There was a begging cup on the corner of the blanket, but Jeb knew the man wasn’t a beggar. He was an undercover cop.
Jeb had even seen the beggar speaking into a brown paper bag that was supposed to contain a bottle, and once he was sure the man had used a cell phone.
Like all the cops in and around the hotel, the beggar would get the word as soon as something was happening. They were all in touch with each other, ready to act in unison, ready to converge like a trap springing closed. The beggar was a tooth in a trap’s jaw.
The beggar who was a cop.
The instant he moved, Jeb would move.
67
Working only by light filtering in from below, Sherman slowly and quietly used the blade of his long screwdriver to begin prying loose the grate covering the ceiling vent. He knew it was held by a large screw at each corner of its steel frame. Experimenting with the vent cover in his own room, he’d learned he could pry out one side, then move the cover back and forth so the two opposite screws would bend and work as makeshift hinges.
But he wouldn’t use them as hinges more than once. They’d soon break anyway.
After prying loose the nearest side of the vent cover, he delicately removed the loose screws and worked them into his pocket. Then he twisted his wrist while holding the partly lowered grate, extended his other arm, and loosened the first of the bent screws, catching it so it wouldn’t drop to the tile floor.
Carefully he removed the remaining screw with his fingers, clasping the steel vent cover so it wouldn’t drop.
He deftly put the screw in his pocket with the others and held the cover with both hands. He rotated it diagonally so he could lift it and place it on the bottom of the duct, on the far side of the vent where it would remain out of his way.
The white tile floor of the bathroom was just below him now, easily accessible. All he had to do was lower himself carefully headfirst from the duct, catch himself with his hands, then land silently in his stocking feet on the tiles.
He poked his head over the opening and then down into the bathroom. The door was open about six inches to allow illumination to spill into the bedroom, a night-light so Mom could find her way if she had to get up during the night.
He lay silently waiting, wanting to make sure the slight sounds he’d made hadn’t been noticed. With the vent cover removed he could hear Mom’s light snoring. Good. He hadn’t disturbed her sleep. Or was she pretending? He knew she of all people wasn’t above pretending.
He’d come this far, so he forced himself to take the time to be careful. He continued to lie motionless, listening to hear if there was any sound other than Mom’s soft snoring coming from the bedroom. Watching to see if a light appeared on the other side of the door.
The judgment and the blood were near. It would soon be time to act.
He wasn’t even thinking about what might come after. His knife was a silent killer, and he would simply leave quietly the way he’d arrived.
If something went wrong and he couldn’t get near enough to use the knife, he’d use the gun, then make his escape back into the bathroom, leaving the door locked behind him to slow down his pursuers just enough so he could climb back into the ductwork. He would lay the vent cover over the opening and they might not even notice he’d escaped that way. Not at first, anyway, and he only wanted to divert and delay. That was the heart of his secondary escape plan—divert and delay. Once he made his way back to his room and down out of the ductwork, he would replace the vent cover. After that he would improvise. And, if necessary, use his hostage. If the police thought this was going to be a suicide mission, they’d learn otherwise.
&nbs
p; For Sherman there was only the firm belief that the next few minutes would go exactly as planned.
And the desire that was like pain.
He’d wait a few minutes while he managed to stop breathing so hard from the effort and tension of working with the heavy steel vent cover. He had the situation under control now. He simply wanted that control to be complete before the next step.
Or maybe he wanted to savor the moment, the anticipation. This was an opportunity he’d never dreamed would come. Of course he was breathless with anticipation. Who among those who understood could blame him?
Mom, just on the other side of a door partly open.
Mom!
He was, after all these years, surprised to be so close to his mother.
68
In the lobby, Gerald Goodnight, the aptly named night desk clerk, noticed the switchboard blinking. Not a regular, steady blink, but intermittent and frantic.
Probably nothing to get excited about. The switchboard had the high-tech heebie-jeebies and was always sending crazy signals. The blinking would probably stop soon.
It wasn’t a real switchboard, but a simulated one on the computer screen. Goodnight, a tall, gray-haired man with a receding chin and a drinker’s bulbous red nose, had been at the Meredith for more than ten years. He didn’t drink, and for that matter didn’t sleep well, so his looks and his name were both deceptive.
Goodnight was, however, good at his job. He was diligent and provided the deft touch of inoffensive snobbery the management desired.
His diligence was the reason why he was about to walk over to the computer and check to make sure all the wake-up calls for the coming morning had been entered correctly. Even though it was years ago, he remembered well the apoplectic anger of a wealthy corporate type who’d left a wake-up call for his room at 8:00 A.M., and received it just before he’d checked out in a rage in the P.M. He’d later tried to sue the hotel because he’d missed a crucial business meeting across town. The Meredith had settled with him and avoided litigation. Goodnight thought the man should have backed up his wake-up call with his own travel alarm clock or even wristwatch alarm. That was what Goodnight always did. He knew about hotel staffs.