Wolf's Trap (The Nick Lupo Series Book 1)

by W. D. Gagliani

  He’d used the Cornish hen reference just to test the odds, to challenge himself. He chuckled as he set the cell phone on top of the Sabatini mailbox and disappeared into the shadows of the neighbor’s overgrown hedges.

  This little gambit had been too easy, and way too much fun. The fun was addictive, and he hoped he could have more before he ended the game.

  Lupo

  His nostrils flared in the chill of the night.

  Damn it, the son of a bitch had stood right here, a phone in his hand.

  “Shit!”

  Lupo could smell him, could sense the lingering presence of the man he’d stalked in the tunnel at the mall. The same man who had been through his trash, and Corinne’s.

  And now the man who had offed some poor bastard for his phone, Lupo thought as he picked up the cracked plastic instrument with a clean handkerchief.

  He considered attempting a controlled Change, but only for a moment. Ben was huffing down the driveway, pistol in hand. The time wasn’t right for a face-to-face. Not yet.

  But soon, Lupo promised the night air. Soon enough.

  Then he remembered Rag’s silver slugs.

  He shivered.

  Martin

  Later, he replayed the scene in his mind, imagination furnishing those delicious details that he had missed because of the dangerous location and the fact that he was well aware it wouldn’t take long for Lupo to catch on. He had been confident in his ability to outwit the trace Lupo’s partner would attempt—after all, that was why he had gone through the trouble of obtaining a cell phone with a current account—but he had imagined that Lupo would catch on almost immediately. So Martin felt surprise—and some disappointment—that Lupo’s long experience as a cop hadn’t kicked in and led the freak detective out of the house earlier.

  Martin had enjoyed the catch of fear he heard in the old Sabatini broad’s voice when she realized that he was not the usual police caller. He had also enjoyed the freak’s wary tone as the woman had handed him the phone, and Martin would have given anything to have been there when the old cop realized that his sainted family was now in danger. Marked by a dangerous criminal such as himself. God, how he enjoyed the fear his victims felt when they first realized they were about to become his playthings—their fear would build nicely from there, of course, but nothing would ever match that first quaver in the voice, that verbal question mark hovering just this side of the all-out terror Martin would induce. Fear was delicious, he had realized at an early age, and a weapon to be feared. He loved the paradox.

  Now he sat in the center of his large downtown loft apartment.

  Well, not his, exactly. It belonged to the old man he had strangled and whose body was folded into the coffinlike freezer Martin had ordered and had delivered a day after. The old man was Dr. John Freiburg, a name from the past. Freiburg was Martin’s uncle, his mother’s older brother, and a psychiatrist though he had recently retired. Martin suspected that their uncle’s profession had had something to do with Caroline’s choice of career. When Martin showed up at his door, the old man remembered Martin quite well. After all, the juvenile Martin Stewart had killed his parents, one of whom was the old doctor’s sister. He should have slammed the door in Martin’s face. But Martin had played the card of his release from the Institute, and played it well. Freiburg was a true believer. He had staked his life on therapy and his psychiatric studies, and Martin was so clean-cut, so eloquent, and so quietly innocent, that the doc was bound to accept that Martin’s years under psychiatric care had indeed rehabilitated him. After a long and emotional session, Freiburg had consented to take Martin in as an assistant, especially when Martin had explained how he too was writing a book about his life in therapy. This had tickled the old doctor, who was writing a book on some syndrome or other. Martin’s acting had never been so convincing.

  The old man had no living relatives, which suited Martin just fine, but he did have neighbors—well-off neighbors he only saw occasionally, but nonetheless people who would likely see Martin. Considering the history of Martin’s family, Martin had little trouble talking the old man into introducing him as the doctor’s newly hired home caregiver. Martin, good old Martin who could be anyone, had looked the part—devoted home caregiver—with little or no effort. A pressed white shirt, buttoned to the collar. Shined shoes. Hair less than medium length and neatly combed. He was a poster boy for either home care or for Jehovah’s Witnesses. The old man had taken him in eagerly enough (maybe because Martin was sure he’d been gay and Martin reminded him of a lost lover) and within days had given him the run of the house, introduced him to the two neighbors who mattered most in this old loft building and shown him where everything of value was stored. Everything else Martin found for himself.

  Then Dr. Freiburg had “taken ill” and the neighbors saw only Martin, who did the old man’s laundry regularly and made sure he was seen carrying prescriptions and food and other home medical goods to his “patient.” Martin had strangled Freiburg in a most matter-of-fact way. Like the cell phone guy and Rag the gun dealer, the old man meant nothing to him. He wasn’t even a connection to Caroline. He was just something in the way that had to be moved (or removed) and then Martin could carry on with the rest of his plans. He took no real pleasure in these acts of violence. They were necessary and he tried to remain pragmatic about them. Now, the hooker in the photo booth, that was fun. In some ways that had been even better than Lupo’s friend Corinne. He thought it was because they’d almost been caught. He wondered why they hadn’t found the woman yet, but it didn’t matter. They’d find her soon now.

  Before killing him, Martin had forced Freiburg to send email to his friends and colleagues to tell them that he would be traveling abroad for a year. Martin learned how to forge Freiburg’s signature, took control of the old man’s finances, then dyed his hair a blond shade that seemed a closer match to Freiburg’s license photo. He added clear glasses bought from a Walgreens store, and outside the building—began to live Freiburg’s life, turning it into his own. He told Freiburg’s building manager (with the help of a letter from the doc himself and a five-hundred-dollar “tip”) that his uncle would be residing in a clinic for a while and that he was home sitting. Slowly sinking into his Freiburg/Freiburg’s nephew persona, Martin now drew cash from the old man’s accounts, into which mutual fund and stock dividends poured automatically along with pension and royalty checks. Martin’s forgery of Freiburg’s signature allowed him to access the checking accounts he’d opened at different banks, and to access the rest of the accounts he found that the bank card worked quite well at ATMs, which couldn’t detect his more intense Freiburg disguise when he used them at night. For all intents and purposes, Martin had become both Freiburg and Freiburg’s nephew, as well as his home caregiver. Martin was thrilled with the acting job that went along with the various personas—he’d built a career out of playing parts, and this allowed him to stretch himself as an amateur thespian.

  He found that sometimes he talked to the old man, his uncle. He’d open the freezer and slap the old man’s ice-crusted head like one might a small child’s or a dog’s. “Hey, Uncle,” he might say, “you should see what I did today! Thanks for giving me another chance!”

  “You’re welcome,” he’d reply for the old man, who clearly was in no mood to talk. “You’re such a good boy! Such a good example of the power of therapy!”

  “Yes, Uncle,” he would say, closing the freezer. “Don’t go anywhere!”

  He enjoyed his new life, Martin did, because it allowed him to become so many new people when he needed to.

  But right now, in the loft, Martin wanted to enjoy the afterglow of his visit to the Sabatini household. Oh, yes, Uncle! That was a beauty! He steeped in the memory of the fear he had induced. The remote control held in one hand and the flickering screen before him, only six feet away.

  On the screen, limbs were sweatily entangled in a tableau that the bright lighting eventually revealed as three persons, two male an
d one female, engaged in various sexual acts of the sandwich variety. Martin thumbed up the volume slightly, smiling at the throaty moaning that came from the blonde woman, whose extremities were being penetrated by one male’s aroused fullness and the other’s slithery tongue. While one male thrust rapidly in and out of her loins, the other smothered the blonde’s mouth with his, lipstick smearing on the skin of both.

  “Corey Diamond” had made this video only two months earlier, according to the Certificate of Compliance printed on the box. It was a local production, but there was not much in its eighty-seven minutes to prove it. All the sets were generic interiors—an office, a hotel room, two bedrooms, and a variety of cheap fantasy stages constructed in the Third Ward suite that housed Luxury Productions, Incorporated. The plot, such as it was, consisted of a woman’s search for an elusive diamond stolen from a museum, and allowed her to bed a variety of cops, security guards, private eyes, insurance investigators, chambermaids, thieves, and even several museum patrons at once. This was one of Corinne Devereaux’s pro videos, one of the better ones. Martin had stacked some others near the flat-panel television and VCR/DVD cart—the room’s only other furniture, which he’d bought to upgrade his uncle’s ancient television. Martin forwarded the disc at 2x speed, slipping back into regular-speed Play when the two museum guards positioned Corinne between them and began to perform what the industry called a “DP,” a double penetration, which had become a staple of the porn world. Here the cinematography was crisp and unflinching, switching between two cameras to capture the physical aspect of what was happening to Corinne and her facial responses as recorded in close-up by a third camera just inches from her sweat-slick face.

  Martin stopped the disc in Still mode when the image was of Corinne’s face bloated with lust—lids half-closed, mouth open halfway between a moan and a scream and with pink lipstick smeared in blushing lines across her chin and cheeks. This was his favorite spot on the video, and he couldn’t get enough of it. The director was clearly a man whose tastes meshed perfectly with his. Balancing the remote on the arm of his chair, he picked up his hand mirror with one hand and the open lipstick, an expensive Revlon pink, with the other. Eyes shifting between the frozen image on the screen and his own magnified reflection, he applied the lipstick. The result was a pouty look not unlike the one Corinne had worn at the beginning of the scene, until one guard’s erection had been pushed into her mouth and dragged across her willing face.

  Martin watched the frozen image and remembered his father’s games, flashing into some of the games he himself had played in the last year. And he also remembered Caroline, whom Dominic Lupo had taken away from him. As he remembered, he massaged himself with long, oily strokes.

  He watched and remembered and worked himself into a frenzy of lust and anger and anticipation. He shuddered in waves and then it was over.

  When he was finished, Martin sat in the dark and let the harsh colors of the television screen wash over his own distorted features. His shame and disgust were matched only by his anger and lust for revenge.

  He smeared the lipstick onto his chin and cheeks until his face resembled Corinne’s after the two men were finished with her and she was covered with globules of semen. For a second, Martin identified with her to such an extent that he might as well have been her—he could almost see his own face there, on the flickering screen.

  And one of the two men, now busy stuffing himself back into the cheap guard’s uniform, was his own father. Yes, Martin remembered well the games his father had taught him. They still brought him the only relief he could find.

  Damn his father. Damn his mother. Damn them all.

  He felt the tears course down his smudged cheeks. He hadn’t felt them squeeze out of the corners of his eyes, but he felt them now as they slowly ran through the sticky streaks. The Martin who resided in the hand mirror cried too.

  Very soon he would tighten the screws on Detective Dominic Lupo once again.

  He forced himself to smile, to will the tears away.

  For the first time that night, Martin’s smile finally reached into a well of sincerity and his mood was past. There was planning to do, and now was as good a time as any. He started the disc again and got dressed as the late Corinne Devereaux aka Corey Diamond stared into the camera and pouted after her partners had evidently brought her to orgasm. Her face was beautiful, bathed in thin strands of pearly semen. She looked into the lens and smiled right at him, licking her lips seductively.

  He smiled back.

  Video was just like being there.

  Lupo

  The blood on the cellular phone belonged to one Harry R. Singer.

  At least, that was the assumption. No one had heard from Mr. Singer for two days. Known to spend weeks at a time traveling on business, his absence had not yet raised suspicions when Lupo and Ben traced him through his cellular phone number. Unfortunately, no other calls had been made from his phone recently.

  The lab had picked up a perfect set of prints, but like those from the gun shop they seemed to be a dead end.

  Lupo had not officially connected the gun shop murder to Corinne’s, and he hated considering the possible slaying of Harry Singer a third connecting point. It might raise too many questions about his inside knowledge. No one but Ben really knew Corinne had been his friend. The bloody message on the wall was directed at him, but the word was out that Satanists were involved. Ben probably suspected the original message was meant for Lupo, but he hadn’t said a word. Now that Ben had been dragged into it, maybe somebody would spot the connection, but for now they were playing it as if the psycho knew they’d been assigned and was pulling a Jack the Ripper, goading the police. If Lupo stated the gunsmith’s murder was connected, what then? Surely no serious cop would see the significance of the silver bullets. Or might someone? It seemed that someone already had.

  And what about prints? This guy made no effort to keep his prints off crime-scene items. Obviously, he didn’t have a record, or he had found a novel way to hide one. Lupo had to admit, he was stumped. Not only because the guy’s identity was a mystery, but also because it seemed unlikely that someone could kill so easily, so enthusiastically, without having done it before. And if he’d done it before, then there should have been a record of it. Somewhere.

  Lupo sat at his desk and doodled on a legal pad. His drawings all had a tendency to turn into guns or airplanes—it had been like that since his childhood. His grandmother had always said that he’d become either a soldier or a pilot, though she would have preferred a priest.

  Ha! Hell of a priest I’d have made! Half of my friends are misfits and rejects, and the other half spend most of their time chasing down the first half.

  Almost incongruously, the ELP song “Welcome Back My Friends To the Show That Never Ends” popped into his head. If only he could think.

  How might there not be a record of the perp?

  He fashioned a Luger P-08 pistol into a supersonic jet fighter and then back again, with the addition of a shoulder stock. Guns and planes, planes and guns. Maybe he did have a one-track mind. But then, perps didn’t usually leave messages for the cops, except in cheap B-movies. That is, unless you counted bullet-riddled corpses and blood splatters as messages.

  Secret messages, that only cops could read.

  Secret messages.

  Lupo found himself doodling the figure of a man in a trench coat. He drew in dark glasses and scrawled FBI underneath, then added an arm carrying a manacled briefcase. The other arm he added held a silenced Walther PPK in its surrealistic fist. The figure was just enough out of proportion to be funny, almost like a caricature, but Lupo wasn’t laughing. It had just occurred to him that federal intelligence agents might well have their prints kept off the record, and it was a cinch they loved your basic torture and murder scenario. Lupo snorted—every fed he’d ever met had given him the creeps, like when you pick up a rock in the park and there’s something dead smeared under it and insects are crawling all over th
e dead matter, and you drop the rock because you don’t care about being macho, that stuff’s just too damn disgusting to look at.

  Too far-fetched. His guy wasn’t a fed gone rogue.

  Who else? Who else could keep his prints off the record?

  Lupo smiled grimly. If it wasn’t intelligence or law-enforcement agents, what about people who had friendships or connections to such agents? He drew a line from his FBI caricature to a shadowy figure he concocted out of squiggly lines, and whose face he obscured with a cartoon cloud. Witness protection programs had been known to harbor criminals who were still a menace to society after their identities were changed or buried. Some became an even greater menace precisely because they were thus protected, and the system often granted them immunity. Lupo scrawled WPP with a question mark under his unknown-man caricature, then he drew another line from the FBI agent and sketched in a raincoat and bowler hat-wearing figure brandishing a closed umbrella—diplomatic immunity? A renegade foreign diplomat? Possible, but not likely. He hadn’t actually felt the aura of a cover-up, at least not yet, and something like this would have left a vacuum as the lid was pushed into place. No, that scenario was no more than a remote chance. It was another bad movie script, not everyday reality.

  There had to be other habitual criminals who had somehow wiped their prints from all known databases. It was just a matter of time and running down all the possibilities. But he had to do it without revealing what he knew, or what the perp seemed to know.

  Lupo checked his watch. It was almost time for their appointment with Lieutenant Bowen. The lieutenant had been in his office all day, a steady stream of visitors—mostly suits from city hall—slithering their way in and out in unusually quick shifts. Lupo wished he could peer through the closed blinds behind the old-fashioned reinforced glass of Bowen’s door.