by John Lutz
Luther’s mother had already been dead for more than a year. She’d died on the same day and in the same way as his sister, Verna, beneath the thunder and buckshot hail of his dad’s Remington twelve-gauge. Luther had hunted with the gun twice and knew what it could do to a rabbit. What it had done to his mom and Verna was lots worse.
Seeing it, hearing it, smelling it, even listening to the slowing trickle of blood from his mom’s ruined throat, was the kind of thing that stayed in the mind.
Luther cried almost nonstop for days and nights, wondering why Verna had to go tell their mom what she and Dad had been up to. He shouldn’t blame her, Luther knew, as she was only twelve, and it was his father, after all, who’d squeezed off the shots from the old double-barrel.
But the fact was, Luther did blame Verna, as well as his mother. They all knew anyway, and it was Verna and his mom who brought it all into the open, who uttered the words that made it real so something had to be done about it. Everything had been going along fine until then. Going along, at least.
And since his father had taken it on himself to start going into Verna’s room, he’d stopped coming into Luther’s.
Verna’s fault.
Verna and his mom’s.
Then his father’d been taken from Luther to rot away in a cell in Jeff City, waiting to die when his appeals ran out.
Leaving Luther alone.
“He’s suffered something terrible,” Luther’s great-aunt Marjean from Saint Louis had said of him after the murders, “but I’m eighty-seven years of age and get by hardscrabble on my Social Security. No way I can help the poor thing.”
So Luther had gone into the foster-care system, and was taken in by the Black family, Dara and her husband, Norbert. The Blacks had temporary custody of three children besides Luther, who was the oldest. Dara Black, a stout woman with an apple-round face who almost always wore the same stained apron, watched over the children in the old farmhouse, while Norbert was away painting barns and houses in the surrounding countryside.
Luther used to watch her bustle around the house, smiling too much and even sometimes whistling while she got her work done. Luther was aware that she knew and didn’t know that Norbert was molesting the children. Nobody ever talked about the subject. Luther thought that was best.
The state paid the Blacks a stipend for their foster care, and Norbert’s painting brought in some more money. And it was true Luther would someday have to learn a trade, which was the excuse Norbert came up with to take Luther in as an unpaid apprentice, meaning Luther would do a lot of the heavy work, lugging five-gallon paint buckets, moving ladders and scaffolding, scraping weathered paint off hardwood with Norbert’s good-for-shit tools. What Luther learned mostly was how to work all day in the boiling sun.
The day after his father was executed, he ran away.
And eleven months and three days later he was found sleeping behind a Dumpster in Kansas City and returned to the Black farm.
Life as Luther knew it, with its hardships and terrible, intricate balances, began again.
12
New York, 2004.
Anna Caruso remembered.
She had no choice, because now he was back, and they were reminding her of him in newspapers, on television, in conversations overheard in subways and at bus stops and in diners. Frank Quinn, her rapist.
They were also reminding people of his past, of the terrible thing he’d done to her a little over four years ago, but Anna could already sense the drift of the story. Quinn, who had never even stood trial for what he’d done, would be forgiven. After all, he’d never been charged, much less found guilty. And wasn’t a rapist innocent until proven guilty? Even a child molester? It was in the Constitution.
That was what the prosecutors had told Anna and her mother and family, how they couldn’t arrest and try Quinn because, in the minds of the prosecutors, there simply wasn’t enough evidence for an arrest. A big man, a stocking mask, a scar seen by a terrified child in her dim bedroom, a button like one missing from one of Quinn’s shirts and a thousand other shirts. Evidence, but not solid. Then there were the child porn sites visited on his police computer. It would all make for emotional but not really substantial testimony, so said the prosecuting attorney. It was a shame the rapist had been smart enough to use a condom, or they’d have DNA to use against him.
On the other hand, Anna might be pregnant.
What the hell kinds of alternatives were those, when whichever happened to you, you’d be wishing for the other?
Anna at eighteen wasn’t much bigger than she’d been on her fourteenth birthday. She had breasts now, and her legs and hips were those of a woman rather than a child. But she was still thin, frail, and afraid. Still, in many ways she was the same narrow-faced, brown-eyed girl Quinn had molested, but now made even more beautiful by the sweep of her jaw and her slightly oversize but perfect nose. She was a raven-haired, Hispanic child-woman with a bold, even hawk-like look in profile. But when she turned, you saw in her eyes that she was haunted and, in her way, would always remain young and in pain.
Sometimes she wondered if it would have been otherwise except for Quinn. Had he actually somehow altered her exterior as well as interior growth? Had he cursed her for all time?
She looked away from the cracks in her bedroom ceiling and closed her eyes. This was not fair! Especially this morning. This is not goddamn fair!
For the past several days she hadn’t been able to control her thoughts. The dreams were back, which meant he was back, his hunched form as he squeezed through her stuck bedroom window in her mother and father’s apartment-her mother’s now, since her father had left. Quinn, when she’d first seen him. A big man who appeared huge in night and shadow, wearing a stocking mask that disfigured his face and made him other than human. His bent spine had scraped the metal window frame through his shirt, making the only sound in the quiet room. A sound that remained to this day in Anna’s mind, that played over and over and begged for meaning and release. She knew it was in her music sometimes, and she tried to stop it.
Anna, a month shy of her fourteenth birthday, had been too terrified to scream. She was paralyzed; her throat was closed, so she had to struggle for breath. There in her perspiration-soaked bed, her panties and oversize T-shirt seemed so little cover and protection.
And they were.
Some of the details of what followed she still chose not to confront. They were hidden somewhere she never wanted to revisit.
She did recall that her attacker’s sleeves were rolled up and she noticed the jagged scar on his right forearm. Something told her to remember the scar. Remember.
She knew even through her terror and agony that he was being deliberately rough, trying to hurt her.
Why? What had she done? She didn’t even know this man.
Or did she?
She rejected the notion as soon as it entered her mind, and she concentrated on being somewhere else, someone else, until this was over. Someone else was being humiliated, soiled forever, ruined forever. The sisters at school had warned her, had warned all the girls.
Whores! A whore in the Bible! What could be worse?
You know you’re sinning. You know and don’t care!
When finally he rose from her, leaving her destroyed and unable to move on the sweat-soaked bed, she saw something pale in the night and knew he was wearing a condom.
She realized later it wasn’t for her-it was for him. He didn’t want to catch some dreadful disease from her. That made what happened all the more demeaning.
“Anna!”
Her mother’s voice.
Anna had dozed off again, lost in the old dreams she thought were gone. No, not gone, but finally confined in a place in her mind where they couldn’t escape.
But they had escaped. Like tigers. Quinn was back.
“You’ve overslept, Anna. Get up. This is your big day. What you’ve been slaving for the past four years. You don’t want to be late.”
Anna
made herself roll onto her side, then sat up gingerly on the edge of the mattress, as if the old pain would be there with the old shame. She was thirteen again. Unlucky thirteen.
That was the problem-Quinn had the power again. When she saw his photograph, his name in print, heard people talking about him, she was thirteen even though she was almost eighteen.
She wished she could kill him. The nuns would tell her she shouldn’t think such thoughts, but she’d graduated and she could think whatever she wanted now.
She wished she could kill Quinn. That was her almost constant thought.
“You don’t want to be late,” her mother warned again.
And Anna didn’t. She had to concentrate on the present, not the past. Her first day of summer classes at Juilliard. The first day of her music scholarship.
What she’d been slaving for. Her therapy and escape that, as it turned out, hadn’t quite worked.
She stood up unsteadily and made her way toward the bathroom.
Unlucky thirteen. Unlucky Anna.
At least she had her scholarship. That was all that was left for her, all that was left inside her…her music. Thirteen. A child.
She knew she wasn’t going to kill anyone.
13
Quinn sat in the sun on a bench just inside the Eighty-sixth Street entrance to Central Park and watched them approach.
Fedderman looked the same, only a little heavier, the coat of his rumpled brown suit flapping, his tie askew, the same shambling gait. He had less hair to be mussed by the summer breeze, and he seemed out of breath, as if he was trying to keep up with the quick, rhythmic strides of the small woman next to him.
Pearl Kasner seemed to generate energy even from this distance. She was economical, deliberate and decisive in her movements to the point that there seemed something robotic in her resolute walk. She was a study in contrasts of light and dark, a mass of black hair framing a pale face from which dark eyes glared, lips too red, a gray skirt and a black blazer despite the warm morning. It was as if a small child had been given only black and white crayons and told to draw a woman, and here she was, with a compact completeness about her and a vividness almost unreal.
Quinn stood up from the bench, feeling the sun warm on his shoulders. “Hello, Feds.”
Fedderman smiled. “Quinn! Back in harness where you belong!”
The two men shook hands, then hugged. Fedderman slapped Quinn on the back five or six times before they separated.
“Make the most of this chance, buddy!” he said.
“Count on it,” Quinn told him.
“I’m here,” Pearl said.
Quinn looked at her. “So you are. Sorry if we ignored you. Fedderman and I are old-”
“I know,” Pearl said, “you go back a long way. You’ve watched each other’s backs, broken bread together, flirted with the same waitresses, fought the same fights. Fedderman filled me in.”
Fedderman grinned at Quinn. “This is Pearl. She’s a fighter.”
Quinn stepped back and regarded Pearl. Despite her sarcasm, she was smiling with large, perfect white teeth. “I’ve heard that about you, Pearl. A fighter. Also that you have talent as a detective.”
“And I’ve heard about you, Lieutenant.”
“Just Quinn will do. Officially, I’m only doing work-for-hire for the NYPD.” Quinn buttoned his sport coat to hide ketchup he’d already dribbled on his new tie. “So, everybody’s heard about everybody else, except maybe for some things I might tell you about Fedderman. And we all know why we’re meeting here.”
“Because your apartment’s a shit hole,” Pearl said.
Fedderman shook his head. “Pearl, dammit!”
“Mine’s a shit hole, too,” Pearl said. “Tiny, hot as hell, and thirsty for paint.”
“Roaches?”
“They won’t tolerate the place.”
Quinn grinned at her. She was still smiling, a dare in eyes black enough to have gotten her burned as a witch four hundred years ago. Probably, Egan would like to burn her now. There was something in her favor. What kind of pain is driving you?
“Am I the boss?” he asked her. “Or are we gonna have a contest?”
“It’d only be a waste of time,” Pearl said.
Quinn decided not to ask her what she meant. “You two go ahead and sit down,” he said. “I’ve been sitting awhile.”
When they were on the bench, Fedderman slouched with his legs apart. Pearl sat stiffly, with her notepad in her lap, looking as if she were about to take dictation.
Quinn told them what he’d learned from the Elzner murder file, and what he speculated.
Pearl made a few notes and listened intently. He got the impression her eyes might leave scars on him.
“The jam bothered me, too,” she said when he was finished. “An almost full jar in the refrigerator, and they bought two more identical jars when they went grocery shopping.”
“Which means they didn’t know how much jam they had,” Fedderman said, “or they were gonna hole up in their apartment for a few weeks and live on strawberry jam, or someone else did the shopping for them. Someone who didn’t know what kinds of foods they were out of.”
“Or someone who thought they just couldn’t have enough gourmet jam,” Pearl said. “I lean toward your possibility number three, that somebody else bought the groceries.”
Fedderman leaned forward and scratched his left ankle beneath his sock. Quinn wondered if he still wore a small-caliber revolver holstered to his other ankle. He looked up at Quinn, still scratching. “So, we working on the assumption somebody killed both Elzners?”
“It’s the only assumption we’ve got, “Pearl said, “if you don’t want to finish your career doing crap assignments, I don’t want to be out of work, and Quinn doesn’t want to go back to being a-”
“Pariah,” Quinn finished for her.
She nodded. “Okay, pariah. I like that. It’s so Christian.”
“It isn’t biblical,” Fedderman said, “it’s ancient Greek.”
She stared at him. “That true?”
“I have no idea. You’re so naive, Pearl.”
“That I doubt,” Quinn said. He made a show of glancing at his watch. “So as of now, we’re on the job.”
“We don’t have anything new to work with,” Fedderman pointed out.
“Then we’ll work with what we have. Again. You two go back over the evidence and see if there’s anything I missed. Then we’ll talk to the Elzners’ neighbors again. Anyone in the adjoining buildings who might have seen anything. See if there wasn’t a dog that didn’t bark in the night, that kinda thing. You do the murder file again, Pearl. Fedderman and I will work on the witnesses.”
Pearl looked as if she might say something about being assigned to paperwork, but she held inside whatever words she wanted to speak. She knew Quinn was assessing her, testing her. Something told her it was one of the most important tests she’d ever have to pass.
“We’ll meet back here at six this evening. If it’s raining, the meet’ll be at the Lotus Diner on Amsterdam.”
“That place is a ptomaine palace,” Pearl said.
“I know,” Quinn said. “I chose it because I don’t think it’s gonna rain. Where’s your unmarked?”
“Parked over on Central Park West,” Fedderman said.
“Let’s go, then. Pearl can drop us off at the Elzners’ building, then take the car on to the precinct house and get busy with the murder file.”
Pearl and Fedderman stood up. Fedderman stretched, extending his back and flailing his arms, which still looked abnormally long even though he’d put on weight. Then he and Pearl walked in the warming sun toward Quinn. They all knew they were probably wasting their time, but nobody objected.
Quinn was pleased with the way their first meeting had gone. Beneath the bullshit and hopeless humor was the beginning of mutual understanding, maybe even respect.
Maybe the beginning of a team.
14
He
lay curled in a corner, a folded white cloth clutched in his left hand. He was smiling.
Slowly he raised the saturated cloth to his nose and inhaled deeply of the benzene fumes. Benzene was a solvent not often used these days, but he’d become accustomed to it a long time ago, adapted to it. His drug of choice for the visions and memories long and short.
He inhaled again, his eyelids fluttering. He was back in the Elzners’ kitchen, carefully, silently, removing groceries from plastic bags and placing them on the table before putting them away. As usual, he was wearing flesh-colored latex gloves. He giggled, looking down at them in his dream; they were like real fingers, only without fingernails. He reached for the tuna can.
And there was Martin Elzner, the husband. This time he’d been willed there, but he appeared as he had that night-that early morning. Elzner was stunned, his mouth hanging open, surprise, anger, fear…all flashing like signs in his eyes. His sandy hair was mussed from turning in his sleep. Had it actually stood up in points like that? It made him look even more astounded to find this stranger in his kitchen, busy at a domestic task.
The stranger-who wasn’t a stranger-set the tuna can on the table. The husband’s sudden presence in the dim kitchen was a surprise to him, too. Yet not exactly a surprise. He was doomed to disappointment and betrayal and knew this could happen, would happen, and he was prepared for it. Wanting it?
He smiled.
He inhaled.
Back to Elzner, too astounded even to speak. More fear in his eyes as he saw the gun with its bulky silencer. A terrible understanding. He grimaced and turned sideways, raising a hand as if to wave some irritating insect away if it buzzed near again. Death could be such a pest.
Step close… Don’t shoot the hand… They must think he died last…a suicide, poor deranged creature.
The betrayer would die second.
Close enough. Up came the gun, steady in seconds, inches from his head. The satisfying putt! of the silenced gun, like a tiny engine trying once to turn over. Martin Elzner, down with a loud double thumping sound on the kitchen floor.