The lights came on, suddenly, blinding them.
The terrible weight was dragged from her, and Kate was no longer struggling alone. Dazed and breathless she was dragged to her feet by Stryker’s strong and impatient grasp. She stood in the space between the shelves, swaying and gasping, blood on her hands and face and in her hair. Richard lay in blood, and he lay so very still.
She looked at Stryker, whose eyes were filled with fury and the beginnings of relief. He patted her all over as he’d pat a dog, searching for wounds or broken bones. He thought the blood was hers. He kept saying over and over, ‘Are you all right? Are you all right?’
She tried to speak, to tell him she was fine, but nothing came out except a sort of croak. He stood there with his jacket open and his sweater torn, his hair on end and dripping wet snow, his eyes and nose red in a white face.
He looked wonderful.
He held her together because she started to fall, he kept telling her that it was all right, now that it was all over, that she was safe. But even his voice couldn’t drown out the terrible, tearing, endless sounds of Jane Coulter’s screams as she writhed and kicked and struggled between Toscarelli and Neilson.
They went on and on and on and on and on.
THIRTY-TWO
‘Where is this?’ Kate asked, looking around in confusion at the gleaming antiques crowded into the small room.
‘My place,’ Stryker said, brusquely, taking her coat and throwing it over a chair. ‘You weren’t fit to go home alone.’ He turned away from her bewildered face. ‘I’ll make some coffee. You should eat something. When you’ve had a rest you’ll feel better. Anyway, there’s the storm.’
‘Oh, yes – the storm.’ She nodded, vaguely, as if he’d explained everything.
When he came back from the kitchen he found her sitting on the end of the chaise longue, staring into space. She looked at him when the mugs clicked on the coffee table. ‘Richard will be all right,’ she assured him, as if he’d been worried.
‘Yeah, I know.’ He thrust a steaming mug at her and walked away to straighten a picture, taking his own coffee with him, unable to settle, yet.
‘What will happen to Jane?’
‘What usually happens to people who are nuts. Not my problem, really. I only catch them, get them off the streets.’
‘Or out of the ivory towers.’
‘Whatever.’
Kate sipped at her coffee. ‘I didn’t even know she was writing a book about the Crucifixion.’
‘Wayland did. He’d helped her with some of the editing. Sometime in the past year he must have mentioned it to Adamson, perhaps only in passing. But enough to make Adamson curious.’
‘She must have realised something of what he’d done when he thanked Richard in the car that day, going downtown. Thanked him for making him famous,’ Kate mused. ‘I wasn’t paying attention. I never did, when Aiken went on like that.’
‘Dr Coulter paid attention, all right. And then she got that letter from her publisher, on Friday. She simmered about it and when the taxi was taking her back to the parking lot after her other meeting, and she probably saw his light on. It was like a beacon, that light, drawing all the moths to his flame. There was a lot of traffic at Grantham Hall, that night.’
‘And I was sitting at home, eating cookies with Liz,’ Kate said. ‘Do you have any cookies?’
‘I’ll look in a minute. You know, she saw Richard running away. At first she must have thought he had knocked Adamson out. When she saw Adamson, her enemy, lying there, she went crazy. When it was over, then she began to think. She got everything out of his files and hid them in her own files – ’
‘Like The Purloined Letter . . .’ Kate mused.
‘Yeah. I think it was after that was done that she decided to go back and cut out his tongue. She was tough enough to do that, but too much of a lady to unzip his pants and cut off what should have been cut off if she wanted to convince us it was a homosexual killing. I should have realised then that it might have been a woman.’
‘But she was fine the next morning.’
He scowled at her. ‘You were all fine the next morning. You threw words around and performed like troupers, dazzling the dumb cops.’ He was gratified to see a fleeting smile cross her blank face, and went out into the kitchen to find some cookies. He came back with some bread and butter, the best he could do. He hadn’t had a chance to go to the supermarket to stock up, had he? He watched until she took a bite, then resumed his walk around the room.
‘You can imagine her shock, and Pinchman’s, when they got those blackmail notes on Monday morning. He fell apart, and your kindly Richard took him home. By then Richard was in a pretty bad state, himself. He knew he was on the verge of a binge – he’d been fighting it off since Friday night, when he’d come down to undo the trap he’d laid for Adamson.’
‘What trap?’
He told her about the insulin. ‘I think he just wanted to make him sick, to tell you the truth. Anyway he saw Adamson lying there and probably thought he’d already taken the “insulin” and was in a coma. He ran off. Then your dear sweet Jane came along.’
‘We thought she was wonderful.’
‘Maybe she was – once. But her work had become an obsession, and her jealousy of Adamson was the last straw. With every set-back, she got worse. Poor Wayland didn’t realise he was handing Pinchman’s keys to a killer – he just wanted her to go along and make sure the old man was all right.’
‘He would have given them to me, I suppose, if we hadn’t quarrelled,’ Kate said, sadly.
‘Maybe. But he had no reason not to trust Jane Coulter, she was a good friend. He went off on his binge thinking he’d done the right thing. And she went to Pinchman’s apartment and tried to pin the thing on him by making it look like suicide.’
‘She used the gravy baster,’ Kate said.
‘Yeah, I know she did. We had the bulb tested and found traces of coffee and barbiturates. You figured that out the day you came to the apartment, didn’t you? You squeezed the bulb and smelled the coffee – but you thought Wayland had done it. You handled it all over, made certain no fingerprints were on it but yours, knowing I’d seen you pick it up.’
Kate looked at the floor. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Are you?’ Stryker clenched his fists. ‘I suppose I might have done the same thing in your place. All she had to do was make up a strong solution of coffee and barbiturates, stick the thing into Pinchman’s mouth, and squeeze hard. He was asleep – even if he’d choked a bit the stuff would have gushed down his throat.’
Kate sighed. ‘There was no roasting pan in the drainer, you see. Why a baster if he’d had nothing to baste?’
‘Uh-huh.’ He looked at her bleakly. ‘He was asleep, but he might have caught the scent of lilacs, as he had the previous Friday night. It didn’t register then – but I gather he called the station today and tried to tell me about it. I might have put it together from that, but by then I’d gone after the Guard. Too late, though. She got him.’
‘Poor man,’ Kate said, softly.
‘Stupid man,’ Stryker said, harshly. ‘Adamson was one kind of blackmailer, he was another. She got them both.’
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘And she was trying to frame your precious Richard,’ Stryker said, harshly. ‘When the typist turned up with that manuscript she knew she couldn’t strike again without another scapegoat. She had to get it back before anyone read it. She didn’t want to hurt Dan or you, so she tried for this weird “Three Monkeys” thing. Maybe she caught sight of those three monkeys on your desk, I don’t know. Anyway, she did what she had to do, then knocked herself around and screamed for help. She knew damn well I’d never buy her description of her “assailant” – she was counting on me not accepting it and assuming she was covering up for Wayland. You thought so, too.’ Kate nodded, miserably,
as he went on. ‘Then Wayland walked into her trap by calling her up after you’d told him about the manuscript. I don’t know how she convinced him to go to the Library with her . . .’
‘She didn’t,’ Kate said. ‘She went in first. I saw her – and then a few minutes later I saw Richard following her. He must have gone to her office, found the things of Adamson’s she’d hidden in her files, and known the truth. He followed her to confront her or maybe she’d told him about the Guard. But I thought he was going to kill her. You’d convinced me, by then, that he was the killer. You really had.’ Her eyes filled with tears, and she blinked them back.
‘She would have gotten to Richard eventually,’ Stryker said. ‘If not at the Library then later – but she had to kill that Guard, and kill him in a way that connected with the other two attacks. She kept trying to force things into a pattern she’d thought up after the first killing. That’s why it rang so false, somehow. If it had been a true pattern, she should have killed Stark and you. But she didn’t.’
‘She liked us,’ Kate said, and the tears ran over. ‘She liked us.’ She looked up. ‘She liked Richard, too.’
‘Yeah, but in her eyes he was the cause of it all. If he hadn’t talked about her work, her precious work, to Adamson, none of this would have happened. That justified his execution. Everything she did was justified in her eyes because it was done to protect Her Work. I think she actually thought that if she plugged all the holes, she’d eventually be able to go ahead with her own book and never be caught. That’s what gets me about you people – words mean more than reality to you. Ideas come before people.’ He went over to stare out at the snow. The wind had dropped, somewhat, but still the snow fell thickly, and already had coated his car into a white hump by the kerb. He could just make out the uneven dips in the snow that had been their footprints as he’d helped her from the car to the house. They’d been hours at the hospital, waiting to hear if Wayland would live. He supposed Richard would look like a big hero to her, now. A man Worth Saving while he was just another of her Golden Boy’s persecutors. The mean cop, as always. He could have taken her home, he supposed. It had been a selfish impulse to bring her here. He’d just wanted to see what she looked like with his furniture.
Kate joined him at the window. ‘We seem to be marooned,’ she murmured.
‘No – it will stop soon, and the ploughs will be out. I can run you home, then. No problem.’
She moved away. ‘I see. Everything over. No problem.’
‘That’s it.’
She glanced at him, standing so stubbornly by the window. His shoulders were slumped. He looked tired. Her eyes fell on his reading glasses, lying on a table by what was obviously his favourite armchair. There was a book of poetry beside them. So this was the big, bad terrifying cop who’d chased her through all those dreams. Rilke said that perhaps all our dragons were really princes waiting to be kissed. This particular dragon hadn’t been kissed, except by time. He was no prince, either. Just a man, doing a job that had to be done. She’d hated it, once, but she understood it a little better, now. She still didn’t like it, but it was what he did, and he did do it well. He cared about doing it right. That was important.
And what about herself? Still ready to right the world’s wrongs, was she? With her double chin and a few grey hairs and practically no ideals left to warm her through the night? What right did she have to call him a dragon?
‘You said that this was making a gap between us,’ she said.
He turned. ‘This and everything else, Kate. There’ll always be a gap between us. I am what I am, I’ll never change.’
‘Maybe that’s because what you are is what you should be,’ she said. ‘I’m not certain what I am, yet.’
He looked at her and tried to shrug off the things that were shackling him. Her fight to protect Richard, Richard himself, always there and no doubt more than ready to go on leaning if she’d let him, her ‘ivory tower’ world, even her vulnerability and her insecurity. So much held him back, and he didn’t want to hurt her. Not again. ‘It’s very risky, Kate.’
‘Because of the gap?’
‘Because of the gap.’
She took a deep breath and measured the distance with her eyes. ‘I make it about ten feet. I’m willing to chance it if you are.’
They met halfway.
If you enjoyed Monkey Puzzle don’t miss the second book in Paula Gosling’s Jack Stryker trilogy:
BACKLASH
Four cops, from four precincts, all shot dead. A chaotic wave is erupting through the American police force in Paula Gosling’s second Jack Stryker novel, Backlash.
When a federal investigator appears on the killer’s hit list, the simple answers seem to be disappearing way too fast and time is running out. Are these homicides linked? Or is the killer choosing victims at random? Can the police department computer make any connections that stick?
Detective Lieutenant Jack Stryker is on the case with his partner Agent Dana Marchant, and together they must track a marksman with an uncanny criminal brain and a ruthlessly persistent purpose.
Turn the page to read the captivating first chapter now . . .
One dead last night.
Maybe another, tomorrow.
The killer smiled.
Mirror, mirror on the wall –
Who’s the cleverest one of all?
The gun lay on a white cloth below the window, its parts dismantled, ready for cleaning.
The killer stood beside it, waiting for the day.
In the dark streets below, traffic lights blinked red, yellow and green over empty intersections. No cars passed. Department store windows glared their wares at one another across the long, silent avenues. A newspaper skittered by in the gutter, caught by a sudden, secret breeze.
Somewhere in the park a bird sang.
The day was coming.
Gradually, the rising light revealed the surrounding buildings, standing like a silent crowd of alien, angular beings. Hundreds of blank windows reflected stratified clouds riding high over the horizon, their undersides incandescent. The snaking curves of the river that cut the city in two slowly turned to old mercury, hazed and dully gleaming.
Suddenly, from the far side of the city, a jumbo jet knifed upward, seemed to hang motionless for a moment, then turned away in a long, graceful curve, trailing a spider’s thread of white vapour that caught fire from the rising sun.
Now the light was stronger, brighter, filling the apartment. It glowed back from the polished surfaces of the furniture, the rich colours of the upholstery, the glass in the photograph frames, the silver trophies on the mantelpiece, the other guns in the wallrack, and the empty circle of the mirror above the carved mahogany desk.
The killer went to the mirror and gazed into it.
The face within was bland, unremarkable.
That was what made it special.
Nobody knew, nobody even guessed.
ONE
Stryker watched the plane lift from the runway, so big, so heavy, that it seemed impossible it could break from the earth and soar free. But soar it did, until it became a small dot curving away into the sky. For a moment there was a glint, a spark of sunlight from it, and then it became dull, dark grey, and – nothing.
Gradually he became aware of the airport around him – shops, ticket counters, seats for the weary and the waiting, restaurants, snack bars, and the constant flow of human beings from place to place, restless with the sense of travel that permeated every corner of the vast building.
‘Heraclitus,’ he muttered.
‘Go on,’ Tos said, beside him, in that flat tell-me-another voice he had begun using lately whenever Stryker spoke some impenetrable and pseudo-academic piece of rubbish. ‘Him? Never.’
Stryker looked up and grinned, ‘said the world and everything in it was in a constant state of flux, chan
ging and flowing.’
‘No kidding. What with going bald, changing my underwear every day, and having to cut the lawn regularly, I never noticed. Is there a cure or do we just have to put up with it?’
‘He didn’t say.’
‘That’s the thing about those old Greeks,’ Tos said. ‘All questions and no answers.’
‘A bit like police work?’
‘I was just going to say that.’
Stryker nodded. ‘I thought you were.’
They moved away from the observation windows and started across the concourse, dodging the darting children, the occasional suitcase corner, and the uniformed flunkies with clip-boards who scuttled from one place to another to relay more very vital statistics.
Half-way across they met Pinsky coming the other way.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Tos asked. Pinsky looked grim, and was sweating slightly, as if he had been running.
‘Kate get off all right?’ he asked Stryker.
‘I’m afraid so – despite an impassioned last-minute plea,’ Stryker said.
‘Mostly about dirty shirts and how to load the dishwasher,’ Tos put in. ‘It was very moving.’
‘Moving is what I came to get you about. We’ve got another one.’ The other two waited. ‘Plain-clothes, this time,’ Pinsky went on, quietly. ‘In the parking lot outside his own precinct house.’
‘Like the others?’ Tos asked.
Pinsky nodded. ‘Like the others. In the head.’
It had started about ten days before.
First victim, a cop named Richard Santosa, shot in the head while investigating a prowler report in a perfectly respectable neighbourhood. His own precinct detectives began investigating the case – following up Santosa’s private life, looking into recent arrest involvements, anything that might give them a reason for his murder. This was the reasonable pursuit of routine.
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