by John Lutz
Back in the kitchen.
“Joel!. .”
The explosion in the kitchen was deafening.
Dante stood up from the sofa and dropped his arms to his sides, his hands clutched in fists. He was rooted to the carpet with shock, with the terrible certainty that something awful had happened and was rushing toward him.
And he had to go to meet it. Had to see it, to know what it was he feared. It was a dark kind of duty.
He made himself walk to the kitchen door, made himself open it.
The smell of the burning onions almost overcame him, making his eyes water. There was his mother lying curled on the kitchen floor. One of her eyes was gone, and the side of her head was missing. On the floor near her head was uncooked meat that had somehow dropped from the frying pan. That was what it was. That must be what it was.
His father said his name once, Dante, as if he loved him.
Dante saw the sadness and pain in his father’s face, the kindness. He did love him. Saw the gun his father was aiming at him. The gun must be a toy, though it sure looked real. What would his father be doing with a gun, like people on TV or in the movies?
Then he looked again at his mother and knew the gun was real, and knew what had happened. What he feared.
“You’ll be better off out of it,” his father said. He began to cry, to sob, trying to hold the gun steady. “Evil everywhere! Everywhere in this city. Goddamn this city!”
Dante didn’t know what he meant, what had happened to him, and why he’d done such a thing. Such a wrong thing.
His father wasn’t evil.
Dante saw the gun’s hammer draw back as his father’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Saw the cylinder with the snub-nosed bullets like dull jewels slowly rotate.
Saw and heard the hammer drop.
The firm metallic click! struck panic in him. He saw his father staring down at the gun with a betrayed expression. It was no surprise that the gun would misfire, that it would trick and taunt him like everything else in his life.
Dante ran from the kitchen, through the living room, and toward the door to the hall. The hammer would be drawing back again and this time the gun would fire; he knew it. He was dead. He was dead. His father was close behind him. He was dead.
He was in the hall. There were the stairs. He could fly down the stairs. Escape.
The gun exploded again, a sound like the one that had killed his mother, only not as loud, not as close.
Dante didn’t break stride. He did almost fly down the stairs, barely touching the banister, stumbling, almost tumbling-landing, steps, landing, steps, foyer, and outside into the cool city air. The dark city air that smelled like onions.
He wasn’t going back. He couldn’t. He knew he was never going back.
He found a dark doorway and lay in it exactly the way his mother had lain curled on the hard kitchen floor. The darkness wasn’t so bad. It sheltered him. His mother and father were part of the darkness now.
Dante barely moved all night. Not when the roaches crawled on him, or when the men and women passed nearby, laughing and cursing.
In the morning, in the cold light, he knew he’d have to get to his feet and move and keep moving or someone would stop him, report him, make him go back to where he never wanted to go again, where, like every place else, there was nothing for him but loss.
By noon in the city it was easy to find a slightly used New York Times in the trash receptacles that stood like ragged sentries at busy intersections.
Dante was lucky. He not only found a paper, he found a wrapped, half-eaten hamburger someone had thrown away last night.
The morning was sunny but chilly. Dante had on a long-sleeved shirt, but he was still cold.
Trying not to shiver, he sat on a low stone wall, people and traffic streaming past him, and read in the paper what he knew had happened last night: The news item was brief, on a back page. A man in an apartment that had the same address as Dante’s apparently shot and killed his wife and then himself. Neighbors said they were a troubled couple who often argued. The man had recently lost his job with the city.
They had a twelve-year-old son, the neighbors told police, who was missing.
19
The present
In Repetto’s mail was another note containing what was assumedly a theater seat number: 9-D. Nothing more. Same typewriter, same envelope and paper stock and postmark. The Night Sniper.
When he showed them the note, Meg and Birdy looked at Repetto.
He shook his head no. “Lora and I are staying away from Broadway these days.”
Which meant someone else, or maybe the Night Sniper himself, had sat in seat 9-D. Only maybe. It was always possible the Sniper was simply choosing seats at random, on his way out of the theater, and unobtrusively affixing the notes in passing.
“It would help if the bastard gave us the name of the theater,” Meg said.
“It wouldn’t be a game then,” Birdy pointed out.
“One we’ve got no choice but to play,” Repetto said.
They began working the phones.
Locating the theater took almost an hour.
Stuck to the bottom of seat 9-D in the Circle One Theater, where a musical comedy titled Little Miss Muffet was playing, they found the carefully folded and taped note: Your move, Detective Repetto.
“Gamesmanship again!” Meg said in disgust.
Repetto said, “Zoe Brady would tell you it’s a male thing.”
“She’d probably be right.”
“Children,” Birdy said.
They turned to look at him.
“This theater’s playing Little Miss Muffet,” Birdy said. “It’s a nursery rhyme, and the killer mentioned rhymes in his first note: Rhyme and reason. .”
“And?” Meg said, cocking her head to the side, suspecting where he was going.
Birdy didn’t disappoint her. “You suppose the Night Sniper’s gonna shoot a kid?”
“It isn’t likely,” Zoe told Repetto later that afternoon, “that the Sniper will change his pattern and begin shooting children.”
They were in her One Police Plaza office. It was dimmer than it had to be. The vertical blinds behind her desk were still only barely cracked, admitting light but not much of a view. It was as if she might turn around now and then in her chair and see the world outside in vertical cross sections, slices of life.
“We can’t ignore the reference to rhymes,” Repetto said, “and that the theater where the last note was found is playing Little Miss Muffet. And the Night Sniper probably sat in the seat where he taped the note.”
“All true,” Zoe said, brushing back a strand of her long red hair that was interfering with her vision. “But it doesn’t add up to him killing kids. It does suggest that whatever’s compelling him to kill is connected to an incident, or at least circumstances, in his childhood. But there’s nothing new in that. Virtually all serial killers had wretched childhoods.”
“That’s hardly an excuse,” Repetto said.
“No, it isn’t. Most people who have wretched childhoods don’t grow up to be serial killers. The difference between them and the ones who do kill is something that’s still being studied.”
“By people like you,” Repetto said. “My job’s to stop the ones who kill.”
“Mine too,” Zoe said. “I told you what I think. This killer seems more hung up on game playing than on children. It’s probably simply coincidence that the theater where the Night Sniper decided to leave his note was playing a version of a nursery rhyme.”
“You know what cops think of coincidence?”
“Sure. That’s why I work for the city.” She smiled at Repetto. He thought a little smugly. “If the next note turns up on a seat where The Lion King’s playing, maybe we’ve got a pattern.”
Repetto left the office, his opinion of profilers unimproved.
Meg knew she could dismiss Alex Reyals from her mind until the investigation suggested otherwise. F
or some reason she simply couldn’t imagine him as the killer, whatever the evidence. Anyway, the evidence pointing to him was indeed thin.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to talk to Reyals again. To make sure of a few things.
This time after buzzing her up, he wasn’t standing with the door open, waiting for her. But as soon as she drew back a fist to knock, a voice called from above:
“I’ve been painting. C’mon up.”
Reyals was leaning over the banister of the stairs leading to the landing above. He was holding a small, tapered paintbrush in one hand, a wadded towel in the other.
Remembering he’d said that he used the upstairs apartment as his workshop, she climbed the creaking wooden steps. She could smell something now-turpentine or thinner.
“Putting on finish?” she asked.
“No, actually painting,” he explained. “One of my customers ordered an enameled piece.”
As she stepped inside, she saw that the floor plan was exactly the same as the apartment below, but one of the walls had been removed. There were paint cans and various bottles on metal shelves, an electric mixer of the sort you saw in paint stores, a steel locker, a circular saw and another sort of table saw, and an entire wall that was Peg-Board on which were mounted various woodworking tools-chisels, hammers, jigsaws, several old-fashioned wood planes with glistening steel edges. Her gaze went to an ornate wooden rocking chair with a light oak finish. Its spindles were delicately turned, and there was a tapering grace to the chair’s long runners. It really was a work of art, as well as furniture.
“That’s beautiful,” she said.
He smiled. “I’d invite you to sit down in it, but the finish is still tacky.”
“Thanks for the warning.” She sat instead on a small green leather sofa. She saw then what he’d been painting, a coffee table with a tiled top and knobbed legs. Each knob was a different color. Meg didn’t like it as well as the chair. “Is doing this kind of thing relaxing?” she asked.
Reyals laid the paintbrush across a small, open can of red paint on the floor near the table. He tossed the towel aside and ran his hand over his dark stubble haircut. “Relaxing? Oh, you mean therapeutic? That’s why I started it, and maybe part of the reason I’ve stayed with it.” He smiled, and it hit her in the heart. “And of course, it’s nice to sell some of my work now and then.”
“I can see why your work sells. It’s original and impressive.”
“I have a feeling you mean that. Thanks.”
She was momentarily at a loss for words, as she sometimes found herself when in his presence.
“Is this official?” he asked.
“Huh? Oh, my being here. Yes, official. Some more questions. Ones I forgot.”
“Detective Meg, I don’t think you forget anything.”
“When’s the last time you were at the theater?”
“Movies?”
“Plays.”
He seemed disturbed by the question, or maybe she was imagining it. “Been years,” he said. “I never was much of a playgoer. But if you like the theater and you’re free tonight. .”
“Do you own a typewriter?”
“Ah! I get it. This is about the Night Sniper notes.”
Meg felt something cold crawl up her spine. The Night Sniper notes were one facet of the case that hadn’t been released to the media.
“You okay?” he asked, concerned.
“Yeah, sure.”
He gave her his smile again. “You’re probably wondering how I know about the notes. I’ve still got lots of contacts in the NYPD, Meg. Once a cop, always a cop. And you might have noticed, the NYPD leaks like the Titanic.”
That was true. She had noticed.
Jesus! I’m trying to reassure myself.
“Don’t worry,” Alex said, “I don’t leak.” He walked across the room and moved a folding screen aside to reveal a rolltop desk with something beneath a plastic cover on it. He lifted the cover and stood aside. “My typewriter.”
It was an old IBM Selectric, the kind with the replaceable lettered ball. Any police lab could identify one from the typeface immediately. Meg was relieved. The Night Sniper’s typewriter was an ancient Royal manual.
“You actually came to see me, right, Meg?”
“Detective Meg-Doyle. And of course I came to see you. You’re the only one who lives here, right?”
“Right. Please don’t get pissed at me, Detective Meg.”
“Doyle.”
“Meg, we both know this is primarily a social call. I have alibis for the Night Sniper murders.”
“You think they’re tight ones? Remember, you used to be a cop.”
“They’re tight as could be expected. Like you said, I’m the only one who lives here. So there’s nobody else to say for sure that, yes, I was home watching TV or reading a book or sanding a piece of furniture.”
“What about copycat murders?” Meg asked. “Who’s to say you didn’t commit one, on one of those weak-alibi nights?”
He frowned at her. “This is all hypothetical, of course.”
“Sure.”
“It’s possible that I could have committed one, or even more, of the Sniper murders. But I didn’t, and you know it.” He shot his smile at her again. “Tell me you know it, Meg.”
“I don’t regard you as a strong suspect,” Meg admitted.
“But you do have a point about copycat murders. The sniper used a different rifle for each murder-that was in the papers, Meg. Have you guys figured out that one yet?”
“We thought he might be a dealer or a collector, only we’ve gone down the list and checked all of them out, and they look clean.”
“Lots of people collect guns and don’t let anyone know. Especially long guns. They’re easier to buy outside the law because they’re mostly used as collectibles or for hunting, not for holding up convenience stores.”
“It could be somebody like that,” Meg said. “There are all sorts of gun nuts.”
He shook his head. “Not a nut, necessarily. Just a collector, a lover of precise mechanisms.”
She looked around at all of his precision tools that he used so precisely. “By nut I didn’t mean wacky, I meant he could be a gun enthusiast.”
“Yeah, enthusiast is better.”
He seemed mollified. Was he a gun nut? It wouldn’t be a surprise-he’d been a SWAT sniper.
Meg knew she shouldn’t be talking about the case this way with Alex. It was because he’d been a cop. That was why, once he got her talking, she couldn’t seem to shut up. She told herself that was the reason.
She stood up from the sofa.
“Not going so soon, I hope,” Alex said. He seemed genuinely disappointed.
“I got answers to my questions,” she said.
“About the theater and typewriter?”
“More or less.”
He moved closer to her, not much, but enough that his presence affected her just the way he planned. Clever bastard. Seducer. Paint thinner never smelled so good. “I’d like to see you again,” he said, “on an unofficial basis.”
“Not wise. Especially not while the Sniper case is hot.”
Now he put on a sad expression. “You don’t even want to see my rocking chair after it gets its final coat of finish?”
She did. Very much. But something told her it was time to leave. It was an instinct she’d learned to trust.
“Sorry, but I don’t have time.” She moved toward the door.
“You’re the first person other than me who’s been in here in months. Usually I don’t show people my work before it’s finished. I don’t want their reaction to influence me.” He reached out and touched her shoulder ever so lightly. “But for you I made an exception.”
“Don’t think of me as an exception,” Meg said. “It doesn’t make sense for either of us.”
“Yet you came here.”
“Yet I did.” She went to the door and opened it. “Thanks for your cooperation, Mr. Reyals.”
&n
bsp; He was grinning.
“If you ever want to take in a play. .” she heard him say as she went out.
Her heart was banging away like the percussion section of a symphony orchestra as she made her way back downstairs and outside. Seeing Alex had been a mistake, made her infection worse.
I screwed up, coming here, she told herself over and over, crossing the street toward her parked car.
What would Repetto think if he knew about this visit? He wouldn’t buy that additional questions crap any more than Alex had.
I really screwed up!
20
Candy Trupiano cleared work in progress from her desk and switched off her office lights. It was past seven o’clock in the evening, and workaday New York had wound down. Towering buildings had dropped thousands of people to stream from lobbies and join the rush and roar of the homeward bound. The sun wouldn’t set for more than an hour, but except for the pale fluorescent glow leaking in from the hall, the office was dark.
Everyone else at Hamilton Publications had gone home. Candy’s was one of the few offices that didn’t have a window. She didn’t mind. Until a few months ago she’d been Army National Guard Corporal Candice Trupiano, Second Maintenance and Combat, stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Her unit hadn’t left the country, but she’d served nonetheless and was proud of it. And apparently Hamilton Publications was proud of her. Not only had they saved her job while she was away, when she’d returned they awarded her with a sizable raise. This for a twenty-five-year-old associate editor. Old man Hamilton, who owned and ran the company, believed in her, and Candy was happy working hard in her windowless office in order to repay his faith and generosity.
She’d been a more than competent soldier, and the army had tried to convert her to a regular, but she was convinced she’d be a better editor. Besides, it was really what she wanted to do. She loved books and knew the marketplace, had a feel for what people wanted to read. She knew line editing, and she knew how to deal with writers, who could be a persnickety bunch.
Candy was a tall, lanky brunette, with bright blue eyes and a lean jaw. She was reasonably attractive in repose, and when she smiled she became incandescent. In the army she’d learned how to keep herself in top physical condition, and these were habits she didn’t want to lose in civilian life. She worked out three times a week in a gym, and she jogged at least five evenings a week.