In for the Kill

by John Lutz

  Though not the way his pursuers anticipated.

  The hotel renovation plans had made it simple. Many of the building's original air vents had been retained, and additional ductwork was installed to facilitate air-conditioning. The ceiling vent in the bathroom was twenty-eight by thirty inches, and led to a steel duct that connected to other ductwork, including that for the bathroom vent in the room one floor below and one over, room 620. The rectangular ducts were lined on the outside with insulation beneath three-quarter-inch wallboard, so not only were they spacious enough to crawl through, they would allow for fairly quiet passage.

  Sherman stood up on the chair and used his screwdriver to remove the vent cover, then propped the steel enameled grate against a wall.

  With knife in pocket and gun and screwdriver tucked into his belt, he took a long last look at Lauri, whose eyelids were fluttering.

  She'd make the perfect hostage, if he needed one. But either way, later, at his leisure...

  With the brimming confidence of the chosen, he lifted himself into the vent.

  64

  Lauri opened her eyes wide and watched the dark pants and socks disappear as Joe wriggled his way up into the ductwork.

  She was exhausted but able to stay awake--mostly due to fear. That time she'd drunk too much with Joe and gotten sick had stayed in her memory. No way was she going to let it happen again. She'd thought they were not only going to have sex tonight but that it would be something special. He'd told her as much, took her to a swank restaurant, then a hotel room. She didn't want to mess things up by getting so drunk she'd be sick. So before and during dinner, when he wasn't watching, she'd transferred most of the contents of her vodka martinis into her water glass.

  Most but not all.

  She understood now the missing segments of her memory, her unnatural weariness, her nausea. She'd been drugged, and it wasn't the first time. If she'd consumed all the contents of tonight's drinks, she'd probably be unconscious now.

  Lauri had no idea what Joe Hooker was up to, but she knew who he was. She'd heard Pearl and her father mention the Meredith Hotel. And of course she knew what case they were working on.

  She decided not to use what energy she had blaming herself and trying to figure out how she got here, how she could have been so naive. She'd instead use her time and energy trying to get away.

  She was taped so tightly she couldn't move her arms or legs even an inch, and there was no way she could use her tongue or jaw movement to work the tape across her mouth loose.

  The Butcher was a professional. She'd heard her dad, Pearl, and Fedderman speak of him almost in admiring terms. She shuddered, cold even though he hadn't yet undressed her. That would come later. Whatever his plans, they wouldn't include her surviving the night.

  She craned her neck and saw the phone on the nightstand by the bed. It seemed far away.

  Desperately she tried to shift her weight, rocking the wooden chair back and forth. Several times she almost toppled, making her catch her breath, but eventually she captured the knack of using momentum to move the chair gradually across the carpet, toward the phone, inch by inch.

  And when she got there?

  She'd worry about that when--if--it happened.

  He was cautious moving through the ductwork, occasionally using his penlight to see ahead of him. Progress was slow, but it wasn't difficult for him to propel himself forward using his elbows and knees. Mainly, he didn't want to make too much noise.

  And he didn't. He soon developed the knack of not lifting his elbows and knees, only sliding them and then increasing and decreasing pressure, as he used them to gain traction. Once he heard voices from below, a man and woman arguing, like a distant radio or TV playing too loud. Another time he heard a phone faintly ring, once, twice, then silence. He reasoned that if he could barely hear these sounds, anyone near them wouldn't be able to hear the slightest of sounds he might make in the ductwork.

  While the duct provided enough space for movement, it was still cramped. Confining. No place for someone claustrophobic. Or less determined.

  There was some difficulty in quietly dropping to the ductwork for the floor below, but he was careful, bracing with his arms against the sides of the duct so he didn't lower himself too quickly, breaking his fall with his hands. There was no way to change position; everything had to be done headfirst. He began lowering his weight.

  Quiet! Knees or toes mustn't bounce...

  There! Perfect! Hardly any noise at all.

  He was just above the sixth floor now, and could see yellow light where bathroom fixtures glowed up through the ceiling grates. His mother's room should be the first haze of light, about twenty feet away. It was late and she should be sleeping. Was she awake, with the light on, afraid of the dark? Of monsters from the past?

  Sherman had been holding his breath. He let it out now and began breathing evenly. He wasn't afraid. He was part of the dark. He was the monster.

  She had created him.

  He tucked the penlight into his pocket and worked the screwdriver from beneath his belt, holding it before him as he began squirming again toward destiny and toward the light.

  Twenty feet.

  Ten.

  Blood calling to blood.

  He was almost there.

  Down in the lobby, Neeson was saying to the real bellhop, "Did you hear the one about the bellhop who..."

  It was late, and the bellhop, a middle-aged Asian man named Vam, was the only one on duty. Not that he had anything to do except listen to this red-faced cop tell bad jokes, after each of which Vam would laugh politely.

  "...tip? I thought you said 'trip,'" Neeson said, and grinned hugely.

  Vam laughed. "Good. Very funny!"

  He was a part-time student at NYU, going for a psychology degree. Neeson interested him in a way the blustery cop wouldn't have liked.

  Across the street, in the dark doorway of a luggage shop, undercover officer Frank Weathers, part of the NYPD's Fugitive Apprehension Team, sat on a blanket in his ragged mismatched suit and raised a brown paper bag to his lips. The bag didn't contain a bottle, though; it concealed his two-way, which he could slip up an inch or so out of the bag. The reception wasn't good enough to carry on a real conversation, but he could report in to Quinn and let him know everything outside the front of the hotel looked okay. It was late enough that most of the activity in and out of the lobby had slacked off.

  Weathers was tired. He'd been at his observation post for hours and wasn't due for replacement until 3:00 A.M. He bowed his head so his ear was near the mouth of the bag and he could hear Quinn's static-marred reply: "...'Kay.'"

  He heard a car engine and glanced to his right. There'd been no need to contact Quinn. Fedderman was approaching in his unmarked.

  The car barely slowed as it passed Weathers' OP, and the two men exchanged looks and slight nods. Myrna Kraft was still safe in her bed.

  In her bed, anyway.

  Staying in character, just in case he might be under observation himself, Weathers pretended to take a long pull from the imaginary bottle in the bag.

  The night was warm, there were roaches on the sidewalk, and Weathers was sweating profusely and itched under the ragged clothes.

  He wished he could have a real drink.

  65

  "Maybe he isn't going to show," Pearl said. She slid one of the earphones back a few inches so she could hear Quinn's reply. He was still at the window, where he spent almost all his time except for when he was pacing restlessly or using the bathroom. Pearl thought he must be feeling the same doubts that had crept into her mind.

  Quinn turned away from the view outside to look at her. His face, never a thing of beauty in the conventional sense, was a series of rugged, worn planes that would have put Lincoln to shame on Mt. Rushmore. "You think all of us are wrong?"

  "All of us being us two, Feds, and Renz? That's not so many."

  "You forgot Helen," Quinn said.

  "Yeah. The profiler. I
thought you distrusted those people."

  "She's got a pretty good track record," Quinn said. He turned back to the windowsill and picked up the cup of coffee he'd made with the brewer that came with the room. He took a sip, regarding Pearl over the rim of the paper cup. When he lowered the cup and swallowed, it made a noise suggesting that his throat was dry. "Remember Haychek?"

  Pearl remembered, though it hadn't been her case. Three years ago, Brian Haychek had killed six women in New York and New Jersey. He also turned out to live in the same building as Helen Iman, had even served with her briefly on the co-op board. "Helen had him wrong," Pearl said.

  "She had him right, far as the profile went. She just didn't know it was Haychek."

  "Her neighbor," Pearl said. "They knew each other. Helen should have figured it out."

  "That's why she didn't figure it," Quinn said. "You can be so close to somebody you don't see them."

  "That's awful metaphysical for"--Pearl glanced at the bedside clock--"well past midnight."

  "Not at all. It's like you're sitting alongside somebody and observing them from only a few inches away, then trying to identify them from a distance. From so close up, you haven't really seen the symmetry of them, and it can blind you as to who they really are."

  "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.