by John Lutz
“Like climbing right back up on a horse that’s thrown you,” Harold said.
They all looked at him.
“That’s exactly what it’s like,” Helen said.
She moved back and forth gracefully, muscles working smoothly in her lanky body. There was about her an equine quality that Quinn hadn’t noticed before. Maybe he saw it now because of Harold’s horse remark.
Quinn’s desk phone jangled. He snatched up the receiver and turned his back on the others for partial privacy.
“Nift,” the caller said simply, identifying himself.
“It’s Quinn.”
“You wanted me to call.”
“You got something?”
“Yes, and probably.”
Quinn knew Nift was talking about Jody’s vodka question.
Nift went on. “The victim had a fair amount of alcohol content in her bloodstream, and had ingested some not long before her death. I can’t say for sure that she’d recently drunk vodka, but it’s certainly possible. As for the brand name, I wouldn’t even be able to recognize my favorite drink.”
“That’ll have to do,” Quinn said.
“If I’d gotten to her sooner . . .”
“But you didn’t. None of us did.”
“Something else,” Nift said. “There were traces of dopamine in her blood.”
“How much?”
“Again, it’s difficult to say. My guess is not very much, but combined with the vodka, or whatever alcoholic drink, it was enough to cause a sudden drop in blood pressure, and then unconsciousness. Dopamine and the alcohol would have made her drowsy and easy to handle. For a while. Then, when she awoke, stripped and bound up like a Thanksgiving turkey, she would have been helpless and well on her way to a memorable experience—for the killer.”
“Anything else?” Quinn asked. He didn’t like being on the phone with Nift unless useful information was being passed. Pearl was right—there was something repellant about any sort of contact with the little bastard.
“Tell Pearl I said hello.”
Was he reading my mind? “I’ll do that.”
Quinn replaced the receiver more violently than he intended.
“Nift,” he explained.
He repeated for them what the nasty little ME had said, though he didn’t pass on Nift’s personal greeting to Pearl.
“So we’ve got Gant solid as the man who was with Gigi Beardsley shortly before her murder,” Helen said. “What with the vodka and dopamine cocktail, the liquor store identifications are now completely credible.”
“It’s a case,” Jody said, “but not air tight.”
“We’ve got everything but the killer,” Pearl said.
“We’ll have him soon,” Helen said softly. “We’ve got precisely what he needs now more than ever. What he’ll no more be able to stay away from than a junkie from his fix.”
No one asked what she meant.
They all knew and were afraid she was right.
“Carlie,” Helen said.
63
Let them look for him.
Urban cops were trying to find him, and he was a country boy—or could revert to one whenever he chose. He could feel relatively safe here.
Dred Gant was wearing Levi’s, so he didn’t mind boosting himself over the low, time-darkened stone wall that bordered Central Park along Central Park West. The country here in the city.
On the park side of the wall, he paused to take in the scene. The sun was low and the shadows long. There were people over on a trail. A couple lying next to each other beneath a tree. A homeless man in tatters, seated like a lone sentinel on one of the benches.
Was he a sentinel? An undercover cop?
The man didn’t seem to be aware even of the pigeons pecking away at the ground in front of him. One of the birds was damn near sitting on his shoe.
Dred trusted no one at this point—no one. Even though his photo and the idiotic police sketch of him had been shown on TV and printed in the papers, he thought it unlikely that anyone would recognize him in his faded jeans, Mets T-shirt, and baseball cap and sunglasses. His jogging shoes gave him a way to run like hell if he so chose, without attracting a great deal of attention. Especially here in the park, where runners were plentiful.
He walked along a path edging the woods, head bowed, kicking at pebbles. knowing that Carlie was radioactive. What really bothered him was that Quinn and company knew that he knew.
And they knew he wouldn’t, that he couldn’t, stay away from her. Dred himself knew that.
It was what the game had come down to, and both men understood it. They had both, in their ways, cut angles and blocked avenues so that they were operating in a smaller and smaller universe.
So that something had to happen, because the status quo was unbearable.
A squeezable air horn beeped, and a woman in Spandex shorts swerved around him and rode up ahead on a bicycle. She gave him a wave over her shoulder without looking back, letting him know she’d sounded only a friendly message with the horn to alert him she was bearing down on him.
He watched her, following her progress. She was pedaling hard, causing the bike and her hips to dip left, then right, left, right, left, right . . . a rhythm as old as time.
She glanced back, and he knew she’d been aware that he was watching her. All that ass swishing had been for him. Look at me, look at me . . .
So he looked. Her long blond hair was in a ponytail that swayed in contra-measure time with her hips.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
He thought it might be possible to begin jogging, not to catch up with her, but to keep her in sight so he could know when and where she stopped. When the trail curved, he could run straight cross country and more or less maintain the distance between them.
And draw attention if anyone was tailing him.
He’d checked carefully before leaving his apartment in the Village. He was in a defensive, not a predatory, mood. If he were going to stalk Carlie today, he would have waited for her outside her apartment, or latched on to her when she left work.
They didn’t know where he lived, so he didn’t think they would be on his tail unless he got near Carlie.
To be on the safe side, he’d taken a number-three subway train uptown, lost himself in the crowds of Times Square, then gone to the Port Authority Terminal and ridden another subway before surfacing on Seventy-ninth Street.
Was he going mad? It had been mentioned in the newspapers and on television (the bitch Minnie Miner). How could these people who had never seen him, who had no idea who he was, sagely pronounce him insane?
Part of the game. They want me to think I might be insane.
Paranoid?
How can I be paranoid when someone is really after me?
It seemed natural to strike out from the subway stop toward the park. He felt more secure above ground now, walking on the surface of the planet. Dred could usually sense when he was being followed. At least, he liked to think so.
If anyone had been on his tail, he was sure he’d eluded him. Or her.
He thought about Pearl Kasner and her daughter, Jody. Nancy Weaver. Helen Iman. The women who were Quinn’s allies. His hunting buddies. Dred knew he couldn’t underestimate them, but he didn’t fear them. He saw them more as the potential objects of his game than as worthy opponents.
For Chrissakes! They were only women!
The object he now wanted, needed, would have, was Carlie Clark.
It would be dark soon. The sky was clouding up in a mockery of rain. Dred was walking among towering old trees, and shadows were growing along the path. As everyone knew, it was dangerous in the park at night. Killers could lurk in the thick foliage. In the blackness of shadows.
Dred smiled. He might be seen as a possible predator if he didn’t get out of the park soon. He’d laid the groundwork for that kind of suspicion, turned the city into a kill zone.
He crossed to a main trail and began moving in the dire
ction of the familiar skyline along Central Park West.
Out of the jungle, into the jungle.
Minnie Miner on TV. Damn her! He hated her now, the way she was talking about him.
The killer leaned forward in his ruined antique wing chair and turned up the volume with his remote.
“Is it true,” Minnie was asking Helen the profiler, “that the killer’s mental affliction has reached an explosively extreme level?”
“The stress on him certainly has,” Helen said. “Notice the murders are closer together and more violent and vicious.”
Minnie looked interested. “His mind is unraveling?”
“In a sense, yes. A killer like this, who carries the memory weight of such a large number of victims, eventually becomes mentally affected by what he knows are crimes. Sins, if you will. He sees himself sometimes for what he is and can’t deny. He knows we’re in the end game. He wants to be stopped, but in some startling, newfound manner.”
“He wants fame and anonymity,” Minnie said. “That must set up quite a conflict.”
“His mind is a jumble of conflicts. Not just one. He’s a sick man as well as an evil one. At this stage, he’s coming apart inside, knows it, and can’t prevent it.”
“The frustration must be driving him mad.”
“Considering that he was mad to begin with, we probably can’t imagine his deteriorated state of mind.”
“Do you think it’s possible that he’ll give himself up?” Minnie asked.
“Possible, but I doubt it.”
“He’d have all the drama of a trial ahead of him,” Minnie pointed out.
“But not his cloak of anonymity.”
“But he’s a mental case,” Minnie said. “A psychopath. How can the police predict any of his moves if he might not know what he’s going to do himself ?”
What do you mean, mental case? I don’t see “doctor” in front of your name.
Gant was on his feet without remembering exactly how he’d gotten out of his chair. Why does she refer to me as a psychopath?
He knew where the program was shot, could go directly to it in the maze of the city.
“He’s not that sort of mental case,” Helen said. “He’s actually quite intelligent and knows exactly what he wants and how he’ll go about trying to get it.”
“But he’s twisted.”
“Yes, somewhere along the line he became twisted. And dangerous.”
Very good, Dred thought. Twisted. Another way of saying I’m smarter than you are.
He sat back down, calmer. Then he stood up and went into the kitchen, got a bottle of sipping bourbon and a glass from the cabinet. He put ice cubes in a glass, then the bourbon with a splash of water.
By the time he’d gone back into the living room there was an attorney’s commercial on TV, about various kinds of prescription medicines with horrible side effects that would be the basis for highly profitable lawsuits.
Dred switched it off. Sat in the silence. Drank.
Thought.
It struck him that there were two things wrong with using his mother’s money. First: It was her money, an undeniable bond between the two of them. Second: He should be thinking about Carlie Clark.
She was bait, of course.
But bait was frequently stolen.
It was time to stop agonizing with the same thoughts over and over again, to stop acting them out in his mind.
It was time he approached Carlie again.
64
Rain.
How dare they predict rain! The people of the city knew better than to fall for another cruel prank.
Yet some of them carried umbrellas, or even wore light raincoats. Hope sprang as eternal as evil in the human breast.
It had thundered distantly all that day. Clouds sailed past like ghostly galleons. Lightning flashed.
All show.
That evening, with the sky still rumbling, Dred stood on the subway platform where Carlie would board a train that would carry her to a stop near her apartment. It would be the first leg of her trip to hell.
He glanced at his watch. Carlie would have left her office in Bold Designs. She should be here in another fifteen or twenty minutes.
He could have simply gone to her apartment, but he knew it was being watched. Quinn had made it quite clear that he and his detectives knew Carlie Clark would be the next Liberty Killer victim. Taunting him. Daring him. They were using Carlie for bait, and her apartment was a trap.
Dred also wanted to follow Carlie on the subway so he could spot who else might be following her, watching over her. How many angels did she have? He knew by now what they looked like. He wanted to know which of them he had to deal with this evening, so he could plan. Fate would tell him when, and how, to act.
The heat wave and drought might soon break, and the darkening sky foretold rain, giving Dred an excuse to carry an umbrella. Just in case. It wasn’t the sort of precaution that would be taken by a man planning to kill a woman that night.
This evening he was Mr. Executive. Mid-level at best. Wearing a plain brown suit, cream-colored shirt, and wildly patterned tie that people would glance at and remember instead of his face. He was also carrying his scuffed brown leather briefcase. In short, he looked like thousands of other career men on their way home from the office.
He casually stood. He sat. He paced the platform. He watched.
Carlie didn’t show.
Maybe she’d gone home by cab because of the predicted rain. Or been driven to her apartment by the police or a coworker. She was getting special treatment these days, sometimes without even being aware of it.
Most likely, he decided, she was working late. She did that often. Brownie points. Dred smiled. What a waste of time those were.
The killer waited almost an hour, moving from place to place on the platform and looking for signs that someone might be observing him. Then he went up on to street level and walked up and down the block, pretending to gaze into show windows. All the while, he kept the entrance to the subway in sight.
It was getting late. Thunder still rumbled in the distance. A few drops of rain fell, like miniature artillery shells gauging trajectory. Dred didn’t bother opening his umbrella. Instead, he fell in with some other people hurrying to the corner and the steps down to the subway platform, where it was now stifling, noisy, crowded, but dry.
He followed them down, getting his heel stepped on, and slumped on one of the wooden benches along the tiled wall. Ordinarily he would have said something to the man who’d stepped on his heel. Or later, on the subway train, might “accidentally” have ground his heel into the man’s foot. Dred knew how to do that in a way that broke some of the small bones.
But this evening promised more important satisfactions than settling petty grudges.
Over the next hour or so, he watched trains come roaring in, disgorge and take on passengers, and then lurch and glide away into the dark tunnel.
He glanced at his watch and frowned. His act was that he might be waiting for someone who hadn’t shown up. Which, in its way, was true.
He was about to give up when here she came, down the concrete steps to the platform.
Dressy, dressy. For work. Quite a show of ankle and calf.
The arrival of a subway train coincided with her arrival. The train screeched and squealed to a stop and the doors slid open. Dred joined the press of people waiting to board. Carlie boarded along with a knot of people at the rear of the car. Dred wedged himself in through a different door and moved farther in, toward the center of the car and away from the sliding door. He stood facing away from Carlie, but he could see her reflection in the window, and would be able to see it more clearly when the train entered the dark tunnel and the windows became mirrors.
No doubt someone else was on the train, protecting her, according to plan. The killer had one huge advantage. He knew precisely what Quinn and his minions looked like. He’d stood unnoticed and watched them come and go at the Q&A offices.
It took him only a few minutes to spot the one called Fedderman, tall and lanky but with a potbelly, and a decent enough suit that looked like rags on him because of his disjointed build. There was a flash of white that the killer knew was an unbuttoned shirt cuff.
Fedderman, all right.
It took him longer to spot the one called Sal. He of the short, stocky build and gravelly voice. Might Harold, the other half of the comedy team, be on the train? The killer doubted it. Mr. Mild, Harold—maybe along with some of the others—was probably already up ahead. The detectives could stay in touch with each other via cell phone.
Though she was easy to find, Carlie Clark was certainly well protected. Like an expensive painting on display in a museum. Easy to look at, even up close, but touch it and immediately there would be trouble.
The killer knew that in his business, such paintings were stolen with regularity. A surprisingly large percentage of famous paintings were actually skillfully wrought duplicates. The real paintings, if they could be traced and validated, would be found in the private collections of the very rich.
The train was slowing, about to brake for the stop where Carlie would leave the subway and walk the rest of the way home.
The killer managed to join a group of people standing to leave the car as soon as the train lurched to a stop.
It slowed, coasting now. Then it braked with the scream of steel on steel. The passengers stirred this way and that as momentum ceased, then abruptly reversed to a full stop.
Dred didn’t so much as glance at Carlie. He did keep an eye on Fedderman, who left the car via a middle sliding door. Because he was tall he was easy to spot. The detective Sal was nowhere in sight, but Dred didn’t doubt he was also getting off at this stop.
The crowd filed through the reversible turnstiles and made for the steps leading to street level.
Halfway up the steps, the killer heard a loud clap of thunder. He stopped, with several other people, just learning that the weather above might be getting serious. He unsnapped the restraining strap on his black folding umbrella, so he could open it in a hurry if he must, then continued climbing the concrete steps leading to the world above.