Chill of Night

by John Lutz

  Minskoff looked slightly embarrassed. “I guess that’s why I do my job and you do yours. Need anything else on prelim? Like cause of death?”

  Beam thought Minskoff was probably joking, but he simply shook his head no. About ten years ago he’d investigated to see if someone had been pushed out a high window, and an autopsy revealed a bullet in the mess the victim had become.

  “Safety belt wouldn’t have saved her,” Minskoff said, with a glance at the Saab behind the yellow tape. He gave Beam a little half salute, then walked away toward the city car he drove.

  Beam figured the last word must be important to Minskoff in crime scene humor, so he let him have it.

  Beam beckoned Nell and Looper over. He told Looper to go into the terminal and start a check on passenger lists to see if anyone named Flitt was booked out of the airport for that evening.

  Then he walked over to the car that was surrounded by crime scene tape. Three techs from the crime scene unit remained. “Check the car out all the way,” Beam said. “Photograph it, check for prints, black light it, vacuum it, then have it towed in so it can be gone over again. The bastard we’re looking for was in the backseat, probably waiting for the victim to get in. He must have left something. A bloody footprint, maybe a hair. We get a hair, we got a DNA sample.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” the tech said, sounding miffed. Beam didn’t care.

  “You want the whole purse bagged for evidence?” one of the other techs asked.

  “The purse and everything in it. And make sure you bag the set of keys on the floor by the accelerator.”

  Tina Flitt not only hadn’t had time to fasten her safety belt, she hadn’t even gotten the car key in the ignition before the killer had struck. He’d been ready for her. Eager for her.

  Beam glanced around, noticed a small object affixed to a nearby post, and smiled.

  Security camera.

  24

  The next morning, da Vinci’s office: Hot. Stuffy. It smelled as if someone had recently smoked a cigar in there.

  The scene on the TV looked like one of those slow dissolves that French directors love to use.

  “He stood out of sight and squirted wasp killer on the security camera,” Beam said. “Stuff sprays a stream about twenty feet so you can get outta the way and not get stung when the wasps get pissed off.”

  “Hell of a way to take out a camera,” da Vinci said.

  “Attracts less attention than shinning up a pole with a can of spray paint. It messed up the lens, but not all the way, so we got some images on tape.”

  “Anything that’ll help?”

  “It’s doubtful,” Beam said. “Security guy inside the terminal didn’t notice right away that the picture was blurred on his monitor, and when he did, he assumed it was equipment failure.”

  “Naturally,” da Vinci said. “Much easier to deal with than vandals or serial killers.”

  Both men were silent, staring at the screen.

  As Beam had said, the insecticide didn’t do a perfect job. Blurred human figures came and went on the black and white tape, but not many. The light was dim in the parking garage, and the airport hadn’t been busy at that time, so traffic was at a minimum. The upper right part of the screen was where things were less blurred.

  “What was that?” da Vinci asked, pointing as a dark, uniformed figure briefly appeared on the screen.

  “Airport security,” Beam said. “They patrol the area. Unfortunately, they weren’t at the right place at the right time. Fact is, there aren’t enough of them.” Beam fast forwarded the tape, then slowed it to normal speed. “This is the approximate time of the murder.”

  Da Vinci sat forward. “Hell, you can’t even see the car.”

  “There!” Beam said. He stopped the tape, backed it up, slow motioned forward, stopped it again. “That’s it.” Beam pointed to a light-colored sedan halfway down a row of parked cars. A figure behind the steering wheel was definitely visible, and so was a dark form in the back seat. The picture blurred again into meaningless patterns like paint splashed on a window.

  “That was him?” da Vinci asked. He sounded awed, but also disappointed.

  “We think so. He was visible, so he musta been raising up from where he was crouched behind the driver’s seat. And the victim was in the car. This had to be seconds before he looped the wire around her neck. As you can see, the time marked on the tape is eight sixteen. Her ticket’s got her in the lot at seven forty.”

  “Thirty-six minutes in the airport,” da Vinci said. “She musta been dropping off someone. Or picking them up.”

  “What we managed to piece together, from witnesses and airline records, is she dropped off her husband for a flight to Chicago. Flitt used her maiden name. He’s Martin Portelle.”

  “And she musta gone inside the terminal with him,” da Vinci said, “since she was in the short-term garage.” Da Vinci looked thoughtful. “Wait a minute!”

  He moved aside the scale model sculpture of the motorcycle he’d ridden as a young cop, then rooted through some papers on his desk. Beam saw on the wall behind the desk a framed photo of an even more youthful da Vinci posed seated in full uniform on an identical cycle.

  “Ah!” Da Vinci had found a computer printout. “These are the jury forepersons from ten years of the trials we think might get the killer’s blood up.” He ran down the page with his forefinger, then slapped the desk with the flat of his hand. “I thought it sounded familiar. Here it is—Martin Portelle was the foreman of the jury that let Dan Maddox, the subway killer, walk six years ago.” Da Vinci flipped the paper in reverse across the desk so Beam could read it. “We were concentrating on the victim, not her husband.”

  “It looks like our sicko’s changed tactics and is killing family members of forepersons,” Beam said. He not only didn’t like this development, it didn’t make any kind of sense to him, not even twisted sense.

  “Not exactly,” da Vinci said. “Read on and you’ll find that Tina Flitt was one of the jurors in the Maddox trial. That’s where she and her future hubby met.”

  “So she was an ordinary juror?”

  “Uh-huh. Which means our killer’s broken the mold.”

  “Only cracked it,” Beam said. “He’s still killing within the justice system. But he’s changed his pattern. It’s happened before. Some serial killers are damned smart, and they read the literature. They know their vulnerabilities, and what the police are looking for, so they deliberately vary their behavior.”

  “They can’t vary everything,” da Vinci said. “Not according to our police profiler and psychiatrists.”

  “They’re right, generally,” Beam said, “but sometimes picking up the thread isn’t so easy if the killer’s a smart one. And this one is.”

  “I don’t wanna make you blush,” da Vinci said, “but you’re smart, too. That’s why I wanted you for the job.”

  “There’s something else about the Flitt murder I don’t like,” Beam said, not blushing. “Another reason JK might have varied his method. It seems to me he’s beginning to enjoy what he’s doing.”

  “Like he never did.”

  “I mean, whatever his original motive is or was, killing’s providing sexual pleasure for him. He took the time to diddle with Flitt’s nipple while dipping for blood to write with.”

  “Sexual…I’m not so sure about that. It doesn’t seem to be what motivates this puppy.”

  “One way or another, it motivates all of them. Or that’s the way it turns.”

  “Sexual is just what the media loves.”

  “It motivates them,” Beam said.

  Da Vinci thought about it, looked stricken, and spun 360 degrees in his swivel chair so he was facing Beam again. “This is a bunch of shit we don’t need.”

  “The possible upside is, he’ll start enjoying killing so much that in his excitement, he’ll make a mistake and we’ll nail him.”

  Da Vinci didn’t seem interested just then in the upside. “I don’t
mean only his sick enjoyment is a bunch of shit. I mean everything he’s doing different, assuming he’s the one that did Tina Flitt. You understand how this complicates things?”

  “Sure,” Beam said.

  “I mean the politics of the case?”

  “I’m not thinking about politics, just my job.”

  “And I’m thinking about my job. Which I might not have if this case goes sour. This city’s justice system’s gonna go bonkers when it finds out all twelve of the jurors might be targets. Nobody’ll wanna do jury duty.”

  “Nobody wants to now,” Beam said. “Nobody ever did.”

  Da Vinci stared across the desk as if Beam were responsible for everything that had happened. “Have you, for Chrissakes, got any good news?”

  “Lab got six human hairs from the back of Tina Flitt’s car,” Beam said. “We’re waiting now for possible DNA matches.”

  “That’d be too simple,” da Vinci said, but not without hope in his voice.

  “Handles on the garrote he made were probably sections of a wooden broom handle. They’re manufactured in China and sold by the tens of thousands. After looping the wire around Tina’s neck, he used the handles to gain leverage so he could twist harder.”

  “I know the method,” da Vinci said, raising his hand in a motion for Beam not to explain further.

  “Looks like he got the handles from a broomstick using a fine-toothed saw.”

  “Also sold by the tens of thousands. Any fingerprints?”

  “No. He wore gloves again.”

  “You’re really sure it was our guy?”

  “I’m trying to make sure,” Beam said, “but we can’t rule out copycat. We can rule out the husband. Portelle did board the plane, and security cameras did record him and his wife inside the terminal at the passenger checkpoint. And according to the time stamp on this tape, the plane was taxiing for takeoff at the time of the murder.”

  “Is he back in town?”

  “Flew back from Chicago a few hours ago. Nell and Looper are interviewing him. I talked to Nell. She says he’s an emotional mess.”

  The desk phone rang. Da Vinci picked it up, then said, “Put him on.” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and dropped it below chin level. “It’s the commissioner. Anything more?”

  “No You want me to leave the security tape?”

  Da Vinci shook his head no. “Put it in the murder file.”

  As Beam was removing the tape from the machine and leaving the office, he heard da Vinci behind him: “Yes, sir. How are you, sir?”

  Practicing the politics of the case.

  The Justice Killer had ordered lunch at Admiral Nelson’s, a new restaurant in lower Manhattan with an improbable sailing ship theme, and was seated in a booth resembling a cutaway lifeboat, waiting for his food to arrive. He sipped his gin martini and wondered what the police laboratory would make of the wire he’d used to kill Tina Flitt. He’d seen it protruding from an old lamp shade at an outdoor flea market in SoHo, glinting in the sun. The wire had been part of a beading design at the base of the shade, running its entire circumference.

  Why the glint of sunlight at the base of the drab yellowed shade had given him the idea, he wasn’t sure. But he realized he’d been considering a different way to kill Tina, a way more…personal than a bullet from ten feet away, or simply fired into her head or the base of her spine from the backseat of her car. After the moment of ice, when she was paralyzed by what was about to happen, he wanted her literally to die at his hands. He wanted to feel her death like a message in the wire.

  That was it; he wanted to experience the vibrations of her death, and of his vengeance.

  He sipped his drink.

  More than vengeance.

  So he’d bought the old brass and ceramic lamp for twelve dollars, and a block away deposited it in with some trash at the curb, and kept only the shade. It had been easy, that evening, to cut away part of the shade’s fabric and beading and remove the wire.

  The garrote he’d fashioned had worked more efficiently than he’d anticipated. Too efficiently, perhaps. Tina Flitt had died within seconds, and the wire had been so deeply imbedded in her neck that he hadn’t even attempted to remove it.

  Still, he’d felt her die, heard her die, even heard the rush of her blood as it spilled from her.

  It was like nothing so much as sex.

  He pushed away the thought.

  Yes, he was enjoying his mission now, but that made it no less a mission. He’d joined the fraternity of serial killers that murdered women for sexual thrall. But it was a fraternity he’d long misunderstood, and one whose members were distinguishable from each other.

  He had reasons beyond the thrill of the hunt and the primal satisfaction of the kill. He was meting out justice to a system that had failed and was failing and must be changed. And of course he didn’t always kill women. Jurors were his target, not women, though every jury included women. He didn’t fall into the classic serial killer pattern he’d read and heard so much about. He wasn’t like the rest of them. Not at all.

  He had his reasons to kill, and they were good ones.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of his food, brought by an attractive young woman wearing some kind of nautical outfit. Her blond hair was chopped short and she wore one gold hoop earring, pirate style. Her top was horizontally striped red and white and had a square, low-cut neckline.

  As she smiled and bent low to place his dishes on the table, the Justice Killer was aware of a nearby booth full of businessmen observing her generous breasts.

  He couldn’t stop looking at her neck.

  25

  Melanie couldn’t look away.

  Cold Cat smiled. Or almost smiled. She couldn’t really be sure. He had this way of slightly curling his upper lip so he might be smiling. But whatever message his lips were sending, the look in his eye was for her.

  It took real force of will for her finally to avert her gaze.

  Every day in court, since the outburst from the defendant’s mother, Cold Cat and Melanie had made some sort of contact she was sure no one else in the crowded courtroom noticed. And often she’d seen him exchange looks with his mother, who was always present. But they weren’t the same kind of looks.

  The defense was presenting its case, and slick Bob Murray was standing directly in front of the table where Cold Cat sat, so both men were in the witness’s line of sight. The witness was a man named Merv Clark, whose appearance in court was over the strenuous objection of the prosecution.

  “Would you tell us where you were at approximately two fifteen on the afternoon of February the sixteenth?” Murray asked politely, as Clark was his witness.

  “No approximate about it,” Clark said. He was a well-groomed man in his thirties, with puggish features and slicked-back curly blond hair cut short on the sides and neatly parted in the middle. He’d said he was a cook but was presently between jobs. “I was out walking and happened to be passing the Velmont building on East Fifty-second Street. High-class apartments there, uniformed doorman, the whole bit. I know the time for sure because I’d told my wife I’d be back within an hour, and she’s a stickler about that kind of thing. I didn’t wanna be late, so I checked my watch a lot. I was checking it when I looked up and saw him.”

  “Who was it you saw?” Murray asked.

  “That man. The defendant.” Clark pointed. “Seen him coming out of the building.”

  “Let the record show that the Velmont Building is where Mr. Knee High lives.”

  Melanie sat forward in her chair so she had an unobstructed view of Clark. She was aware of some of the other jurors also leaning forward. Already the testimony of the funny little man Knee High made it unlikely that Cold Cat had the opportunity to murder Edie Piaf. If Merv Clark was telling the truth about seeing Cold Cat on the East Side at quarter past two, he corroborated Knee High’s testimony. There was no way the defendant could have killed his wife on the West Side between two and two thirty,
as the prosecution claimed.

  Murray asked that the court record the fact that the witness had pointed to the defendant. Then, moving away from the table, he asked, “How did you know the man you saw emerging from the Velmont Arms was Richard Simms?”

  “You mean Cold Cat? I recognized him right off. I know him, man, what he looks like. I buy his music. I’m a music fan, never miss the Grammys, all that stuff.”

  “And you’re sure of the time?”

  “Positive.” Clark held up his left wrist so his suit coat sleeve slipped down to reveal a silver watch. “New watch. Birthday gift from the wife. Keeps perfect time. So does the wife.” The jury and courtroom onlookers rewarded Clark’s humor with a ripple of laughter. That seemed to encourage him. “I knew if I was late she’d whap me upside the head with a skillet.” Too far. No laughter this time.

  In the silence, Judge Moody cleared her throat.

  “What’s a skillet?” a young woman in the gallery whispered.

  Murray jumped in, addressing the witness. He didn’t want his examination to become an unintentional comedy routine. “And did you attempt to approach Richard Simms in front of the Velmont Arms at the approximate time of his wife’s murder?”

  Farrato, the Napoleonic little prosecutor, rose from his chair, standing erectly with his chest thrust out. “Objection, your honor. Leading question.”

  Almost unnoticeably, Murray shrugged. “Mr. Clark, did you talk to—”

  “Leading!” Farrato was still on his feet. “Leading, leading, leading!”

  Judge Moody sighed. “Sustained.”

  No Murray shrug now. He was all business. “What happened after you saw the defendant?”

  “I wanted to approach him. I was gonna ask for his autograph, but he turned and walked the other way on the sidewalk.”

  “Did you call out or follow?”

  “No. I mean, I was so surprised to see him. I always admired him. And there he was right in front of me. I mean, he’s a celebrity and a great artist. I guess I was kinda paralyzed. Then, before I got my wits about me again, he was gone, kinda lost in the crowd. There were lotsa people out walking that day, and the sidewalks were crowded. I missed my chance to talk to him, one of my idols.”