Darker Than Night fq-1

by John Lutz

  He continued his tale of seduction and sexual adventure while Rita pretended to take notes.

  “Two people were never closer than we were,” Blank was saying. “We hardly ever went outside the apartment for the next month, only sending out for…”

  Rita moved the pencil steadily, noticing that her squiggling, meaningless marks were for some reason beginning to resemble Arabic script. The session with David Blank had settled into its usual pattern, and she was only half listening to him, thinking lies, lies, lies…

  Except for the first ten minutes.

  When he’d gone, she would rewind the tape and listen to the first part of the session carefully. It hadn’t been so much what he was talking about, but rather the relieved, buoyant tone of his voice, as if some great pressure were no longer exerting its force on him.

  Blank still hadn’t revealed the real reason why he was coming to see her, his actual problem. But his wasn’t the usual game of diversion and deflection that tentative patients played. She understood what he was doing: He was setting the riddle out there for her to unravel. And a part of him wanted desperately for her to succeed, because he understood the terrible pressure would return and he was afraid. Buzzing. Order and color. Fit and finish. The psychosis as car. And David Blank knew he was speeding toward another collision.

  The cross-sensory perception, now that was interesting. If true.

  He did seem sure that Dr. Rita Maxwell was his answer, that she could and would eventually help him, perhaps save him. But first she had to know what he was concealing. Who was Carol?

  Sooner or later, Rita would know. However and why ever he’d found his way to her, David Blank-whoever he was-whoever Carol was-had chosen the right analyst.

  Patience was in order. Progress was being made. Rita was slowly learning, always learning, and would find the answer to the riddle of David Blank.

  Quinn sat on the hard wood and concrete bench just inside Central Park and watched the joggers and cyclists. An attractive woman in her early twenties pedaled past on a mountain bike, something everyone needed in a city as flat as a Monopoly board. Quinn watched her graceful form recede as she stood high on the pedals to pick up speed, her hips swaying with her effort, her long brown hair catching the sunlight. He wondered about her life. She might be a student at NYU, or a young professional, a wife, a mother, an actress, a musician or artist, a hooker or an off-duty cop. The human mystery.

  He decided maybe it was time to use the media.

  Dave Everson was a journalist with the Times who had long ago given Quinn his direct-line number at the paper. Everson was a journalist Quinn trusted, and he remembered the number. Quinn drew out his cell phone from the pocket of his sport jacket folded on the bench, and for the first time in years he called it.

  “I’ll be damned,” Everson said when Quinn had identified himself. “It’s been a while.”

  “Too long,” Quinn said.

  Everson was no fool; he knew Quinn had something in mind. “So what do you need?” There was the slightest tremor of excitement in his voice.

  “Heat.”

  Everson laughed. “You’ve already got that, Quinn.”

  “For somebody else,” Quinn said.

  “Ah… With conditions, I assume.”

  “You’ll be first in line as things break, Dave.”

  “And you want to be an anonymous source.”

  “No, I want the bastard to know I’m at his heels.”

  “Hey, that’ll be a much better story. Mano a mano. I do like you, Quinn.”

  “I can be a likable sort. We dealing?”

  “Proceed.”

  Claire Briggs frowned and checked again for the chemical reaction.

  Blue. Again. No mistake.

  She was pregnant. So said her home-testing kit.

  She had to tell someone, but not before Jubal. He must be the next to know.

  At four o’clock Jubal was back from his two o’clock audition for the role of the sensitive hero in the Lincoln Center production of the Vietnam play Winding Road, which was set to open in three months.

  “So how’d it go?” she asked, but she knew from his expression how it had gone.

  He wore a light blue sweater like a cape, its arms knotted at his chest, though the weather had been too warm for a sweater when he’d left the apartment. Now he unfastened the loose knot and tossed the sweater onto the sofa in a heap.

  “It went like shit!” He flung himself down next to the sweater in a similar heap and sat frowning.

  “Jubal…” Claire moved toward him as he hung his head and his shoulders began to quake.

  Then he looked up at her, grinning. “I got the part!”

  Claire stood still and took a deep breath. “Oh, damn, you had me!”

  Jubal shrugged, still with the grin. “Well, I can act!” He jumped up and hugged her, lifting her off the floor and spinning her in a dance across the room.

  When he put her down, she was almost too dizzy to make her way to a chair and fall into it, gasping and laughing.

  “It’s a day for good news,” she said when she could talk without choking or coughing.

  Jubal was pacing, too excited to sit. “Actually, it’s only a callback, but I can be sure of the outcome. Everything fell into place, as if I trained all those years just for the part. I was last to audition. I’m one of three choices and the other two aren’t even close. One’s Victor Valentino.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He was in Back Alley last year. Guy looks like a thug, but he can act. He might wind up playing the tough sergeant.”

  “Who’s the other guy?”

  “Randy Rallison.”

  Claire had acted with Rallison. He had difficulty remembering his lines, and many in the cast suspected he had a drug or drinking problem. “A zombie onstage compared to Jubal Day.”

  “I’m positive the producer feels the same way. He gave me the wink as I was leaving. I’m sure he gave me the wink.”

  Claire sighed and rested a hand on her stomach. She couldn’t stop smiling.

  “We’re going out for dinner and celebrate!” Jubal said.

  “We have more than one thing to celebrate.”

  “I know we do! The way your career’s going. And this apartment is great! We’re lucky, Claire. Damned lucky!”

  “I’m glad you think so, Jubal. But we’re luckier than you know. I’m pregnant.”

  He stopped pacing and stood still. His features rearranged themselves into a mask. She had no idea what he was thinking. Doubt flashed through her mind like a lightning bolt.

  “I shouldn’t have surprised you like that.” She heard the quaver in her voice and hated it. Her stomach began to ache. She knew then what she needed, what she had to have.

  “You know this for sure?”

  “I’ve missed two periods and my home test says I’m pregnant. I’m sure. I feel…different. There isn’t any doubt.”

  Now he was grinning. “My God! You’re pregnant!”

  He came to her, lifted her gently to her feet, and kissed her.

  “We can turn the spare room into the baby’s room,” he said. “We can spoon-feed the kid and change his diapers-”

  “Or hers.”

  “Hers. And push him-her in the park in a stroller.”

  “We can watch her-him take her-his first step.”

  “Teach him-her how to grip a baseball.”

  “And how to say please and thank you. ”

  “And not spit the spinach.”

  “We can get married,” Claire said.

  37

  “New computers,” said Sergeant Rudd, who was manning the precinct desk when Pearl walked in. He was an aging, broad-shouldered man, with white hair, a whiskey nose, and eyes the color of lead bullets. “We need to keep up with the feds when it comes to technology.”

  Pearl looked over to where the clerk sat and saw him wrestling a keyboard out of a box. The computer on his desk did indeed look new, and had a m
onitor featuring an impressively large flat screen.

  “How are they preserving our information?” Pearl asked.

  Rudd stared at her.

  “I mean, are they transferring all the data from the old computers to the new ones?”

  “Oh, sure. I overheard the technicians talking about some kind of ZIP drive thing. Nothing to it, according to them. But far as an old cop like me’s concerned, a computer makes a good boat anchor.”

  “Dinosaur,” Pearl said, walking on toward the squad room.

  “You too,” Rudd said behind her. “You’re just a smaller, prettier one. ’Specially this morning.” She turned and saw his seamed face split into a grin. “There some kinda reason for that?”

  Holy Christ! Was it that obvious to the trained eye? Pearl felt herself blush and pressed on, ignoring Rudd’s chuckle.

  The squad room was a mess. Half a dozen technicians who looked like teenagers in pale blue blazers were setting up new computers on the old steel gray desks, or on typing tables beside the desks. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries were colliding here. There were only two detectives around, a smarmy little creep named Weatherington, and a large, potbellied man she knew only as “Big Mike.” They were both undercover vice, which as far as Pearl was concerned was exactly where they belonged.

  She stood still for a moment, taking in the electronic carnage. Then she went back to the booking area.

  “Looks like some kinda college frat prank goin’ on in there, don’t it?” Rudd said.

  “Maybe it is.” Pearl motioned toward the squad room with her thumb. “Which of those desks used to be Quinn’s?”

  Rudd returned his attention to the paperwork that occupied him. It was almost as if he expected the question; he’d been day desk sergeant for over five years and had the answers. “Second on the left as you walk in the door.”

  He didn’t ask Pearl why she’d asked. She thanked him and returned to the squad room.

  She went to the second desk and saw the new computer on it, but there was no old one sitting on the floor to be removed later.

  “What happened to the computer that was on this desk?” she asked the young technician who was working at the desk two over.

  “Didn’t replace that one,” the young woman said. She weighed about seventy pounds and had glasses the size of CD-ROMs. “It was new enough that we just ramped up the memory. Five-twelve RAM now.”

  “Wow,” Pearl said. “How new?”

  “Three or four years old is all.”

  “Any of the others like that? New enough they were kept?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” the young woman said, and began undoing a tangle of cables.

  Pearl thought about going back and asking Rudd where Quinn’s old computer might be, but she decided against it. She had a pretty good idea.

  She sat down at one of the new computers and booted it up. “Programs the same on all of these?” she asked another of the teenage techies. This one was a boy with a bad complexion and a bushy unibrow over watery brown eyes.

  “Just like your old one only bigger and faster, ma’am. Sort of like a second marriage to a younger man.”

  Pearl looked at the pimply punk, wondering if he might be coming on to her. But he seemed oblivious as he did something to the back of one of the tower units with a screwdriver. He removed the cream-colored metal shell case which was apparently attached only by a few small screws, then began tinkering with the computer’s electronic guts.

  Pearl leaned to the side so she could see. “That the hard drive?”

  “Hard as you like it, ma’am.”

  Pearl stared at the kid. He smiled and went back to his work.

  What’s with me this morning? Does the male sex somehow smell recent activity?

  Pearl keyed in her PIN and went to the software program that matched items in the evidence room with dates and case numbers. As soon as she typed in Quinn’s name, a reference number came up that would act as a guide, much as the Dewey decimal system helped to locate library books.

  She copied the number on a Post-it, then shut down the computer and walked back to the evidence room.

  A sleepy-eyed sergeant was on duty behind a counter, sitting down and engrossed in a New York Post. Pearl flashed her shield and logged in, and the sergeant went back to reading what looked like yet another piece on Anna Caruso.

  Pearl pushed through a wooden swing gate and entered a caged-in area in a windowless room built onto the back of the precinct house over twenty years ago.

  It wasn’t hard to find the computer, wrapped in plastic on the second shelf of a tier of metal shelves. Pearl glanced around. At this hour she was alone. She had privacy.

  She made sure the tag on the computer matched the reference number, then dragged it over to the edge of the shelf and turned it around. After peeling back about a yard of masking tape, she slipped the plastic wrapping from the computer.

  Pearl had been afraid to borrow a screwdriver from one of the techies, but she’d brought the Swiss Army knife she carried in her purse.

  Its screwdriver worked just fine. It took her less than ten minutes by her watch to detach and lift off the computer’s rectangular metal case, remove the hard drive, then replace the case. Within another few minutes she had the computer rewrapped and taped, and back in its original spot on the steel shelf.

  The hard drive was shiny steel and about the size and shape of a paperback book. She tucked it into her waistband beneath her blouse, then returned to the squad room.

  “Going out,” she said to Sergeant Rudd, who was still busy with his paperwork.

  “Why? Those kids making you feel dumb?”

  “’Fraid so.” She grinned.

  “Used to be,” Rudd said, “people got smarter as they got older.”

  “That was always just a rumor,” Pearl told him as she pushed open the heavy door and went out into the morning heat.

  As she walked toward her unmarked, she glanced at her watch. Not yet eight o’clock. If she remembered correctly, the stock market didn’t open till nine-thirty. If she drove fast and didn’t get bogged down in traffic, she should have time.

  Of course she could make her destination in plenty of time if she used the light and siren. Trouble was, she wasn’t on a call, and it wasn’t an emergency, so strictly speaking, it was against regulations.

  Pearl decided to use the light and siren.

  When she turned the car onto Michelle Quinn’s block, the dashboard clock said it was eight-fifty. The stock market wouldn’t open for another forty minutes, so it was possible that Michelle was still in her apartment.

  Pearl left the unmarked in a no-parking zone and jogged across the street toward Michelle’s building. It was the first time she’d seen it. Her other meetings with Michelle had been at a coffee shop near her office in the financial district. It was an obviously expensive building, with a uniformed doorman who looked like the dictator of a small country. Michelle must know her stuff as a stock analyst. In fact, from what Pearl had heard, any analyst out of prison and still employed after the recent bear market must know his or her stuff.

  She gave the doorman her name and told him who she was here to see. He studied the tiny screen of a personal digital assistant he produced from a secret pocket in his tunic. One of his eyebrows arched.

  “She isn’t expecting me,” Pearl said.

  She stood back and admired his epaulets as he phoned upstairs to see if Michelle Quinn was home and receiving visitors dressed like Pearl.

  She was, and she was.

  Quinn’s sister was standing with her door open so Pearl would locate the apartment easier. Michelle was dressed for work in a pinstripe gray skirt and blazer, a lighter gray blouse, with a red-and-gray tie-or rather dressed for going to work, with her white sneakers sharply contrasting with the somber outfit. Pearl knew that like many New York career women, Michelle would carry her conservative, uncomfortable shoes in her purse until she reached her office.

  When Pe
arl approached, Michelle smiled and extended her hand. “Something important?”

  “Maybe. I don’t want to take up a lot of your time,” Pearl said as they shared a handshake.

  “If it’s about Frank, go ahead and take it up.” Michelle ushered her into a spacious and tastefully furnished apartment with a magnificent sun-touched vista of the city and the Hudson River beyond. The air, which seemed fractured by the crystalline light made somehow more intense by passing through the slanted panes, carried a faint, pleasant lilac scent.

  “Nice place,” Pearl said, wincing inwardly at her understatement. Most people in Manhattan would kill to live here. Pearl, maybe.

  Michelle offered her coffee, which Pearl declined; neither woman had time to waste.

  They went through the living room into a book-lined den furnished in rich wood and soft leather of the sort that looks worn-out the day it’s bought. On a wide walnut desk sat a blue-and-gray computer-it might have been lifted from the control panel of the starship Enterprise. Michelle motioned toward a chair, but Pearl declined again and reached into her purse. She drew out the hard-disk drive she’d removed from Quinn’s old computer. “This is-”

  “I know what it is,” Michelle interrupted. Caution had crept into her voice. She gave Pearl a look, something like the one Quinn sometimes gave her.

  “I won’t tell you how it came into my hands,” Pearl said, seeing Michelle’s problem, “but I will tell you where it’s from. It was part of the computer that was on your brother’s desk in the squad room when he had his problem.”

  Michelle stared at the tiny steel rectangular box and frowned. Pearl wasn’t sure what she was thinking, but she felt like telling Michelle not to fret so much. This was something she was getting from a cop; it wasn’t Enron all over again.

  Of course, on a personal level, it might be worse.

  Michelle moved closer and reached out and accepted the hard drive, gripping it firmly, obviously keenly aware that her fingerprints were now on it. This was a woman who sized up the game and didn’t make a move lightly.