Chill of Night (5 page)

She managed to start breathing again and turned to gaze back and up at the figure she'd glimpsed in the mirror. At the hand that held the object that was indeed what she'd first feared. A gun, a small one with some kind of bulky cylinder fitted to its barrel. She'd seen enough TV and movies to know what the object was—a silencer.

Seated on the padded vanity chair, staring up at the intruder, she was aware of her insides melting away, heard a slight trickle, felt a warmth, and knew she'd wet herself. She began to cry, tightening her grip on the chair back with one hand, on the lipstick tube with the other. She begged with her eyes. It was unmistakable, her silent pleading. He did nothing, drawing out the moment. She managed to speak, but her voice caught in her throat and the words came out as a sob.

“What'd I do? For God's sake, what'd I do?”

Then she knew.
Floyd! Floyd must have hired someone to pretend—

The silencer spat and a bullet
thunked!
through the thinly padded wooden chair back and clipped her spine before smashing through her heart.

The way she dropped and her chin hit the edge of the vanity on the way down, it would have hurt like hell if she'd been alive.

The killer gently pried the lipstick tube from her dead right hand.

Beam silently watched the NYPD computer genius da Vinci had sent.

He looked about fourteen and seemed to know everything. It was obvious from the way the kid—actually in his twenties—had handled Beam's five-year-old notebook computer that he knew his stuff. Soon there'd been talk of RAM and giga and mega and pixels while Beam looked on in gray mystification as his computer was upgraded and brought into the present world of tech.

By the time the kid was finished, Beam was patched into the NYPD system and had gone wireless so he could use his computer anywhere in the apartment, or—the computer kid had assured him—various places outdoors, or in certain restaurants and entire areas that were set up for wireless.

“That's damned amazing,” Beam told the kid.

“I don't understand why anybody'd ever use a typewriter,” the kid replied. “Or how they ever got that complicated machinery to work at all.”

“I don't type, either,” Beam said.

With a pitying shake of his head, the kid gathered up his bits and bytes and left. Beam watched him out and down the hall to the elevator.

Beam closed the door and looked at his watch. Almost four o'clock, when da Vinci had told him by phone that detectives Nell Corey and Fred Looper were coming to the apartment to meet Beam to get acquainted and have a strategy session.

Moving out to the middle of the living room, Beam looked around. It was a pleasant room with a hardwood floor, throw rugs, a comfortable overstuffed cream-colored sofa, a tan leather armchair, smaller, rose-colored upholstered chair, green marble-top coffee table, some oil paintings on the walls, bought more as decorative pieces than as art. Lani's touch. For that reason, maybe, Beam didn't want to settle down in the room with Corey and Looper.

He used both hands to lift the rose-colored chair—Lani's chair—and carried it down the hall and into his den.

The chair didn't go with the den's decor, but that was okay. Three of the den's walls were oak paneled, the fourth painted off-white and covered with framed photos or department commendations. A baseball trophy sat on a table with some other framed photos. Some of the photos were of Beam and Lani, sometimes with their son Bud, who'd played All American minor league ball in the Cincinnati farm system in Florida and been struck in the head by a pitched ball. He'd died the next day of massive subdural hematoma. Only nineteen years old, and his death had killed something in Beam and Lani, in their marriage. The pitcher who'd hit Bud, a retread player named Rowdy Logan, had also aimed for his head on the previous pitch, so it was a deliberate beaning. Logan had been demoted from the majors for similar headhunting, and this time charges were brought against him. Charges that were going nowhere. Murder on the baseball diamond was a difficult thing to prove.

That was something Beam owed da Vinci. Da Vinci said he had connections in Florida and could help to actually prosecute Logan. As it turned out, that wasn't necessary, as Logan was found a few days later full of barbiturates that had given him the courage to shoot himself in the head. The bullet had struck with the same effect that the ninety-mile-per-hour fastball had on young Bud Beam.

Justice, delivered not by the legal system but by the killer himself. Beam's faith in the system he served had been severely shaken. As had his faith in everything.

Seven years ago. First Bud gone, now Lani.

Beam placed the rose-colored chair at an angle facing his large mahogany desk. There was already a brown leather chair in a similar position at the other corner of the desk. Beam would have the two detectives sit in the chairs, facing him across the desk. They would talk. They would plan. They would take the first step in finding and stopping the maniac who was killing people in his city.

At first, hesitant to take on the case, Beam now was beginning to feel the old eagerness take hold. He was on the job again. He was a cop. He was a hunter set to stalk his prey.

Exactly what da Vinci wants.

 

“You home, Bev?” Floyd Baker called.

He stood just inside the apartment door, his golf club bag slung over his shoulder. Something about the place wasn't right. It wasn't just that it was twilight and the apartment was dim without a lamp on. Or that his wife Bev wasn't yet home from work. She often stayed late on the job.

It was something else making him uneasy.

It was the stillness.

Floyd Baker had been an Army Ranger in action with UN troops in Kosovo. He and another ranger had once come across a house with its front door hanging open, and investigated to find an entire family of five slaughtered inside.

The feeling, the stillness, the subtle scent he was experiencing now made Floyd think of that house, that day, what they'd found.
Jesus, what we found!
His heart clawed its way into his throat.

“Bev!” There was a note of desperation in his call.

He leaned his golf bag against the wall by the door and moved farther into the dim apartment, then switched on a floor lamp.

Still no sign of Bev, but there was her purse on the table near the door. He hadn't noticed it before. It meant she was probably home.

The sight of the purse filled Floyd with even more dread.

He made his way across the living room, down the hall, past the kitchen to the bedroom, and looked inside. He noticed immediately that, though the bedroom was dim, the bathroom light was on.

When he went to investigate he found his wife in the alcove between the bedroom and bathroom, where she had her mirrored vanity set up. She was sprawled on the floor, and at first he thought she'd possibly fainted. Prayed she'd fainted.

Then he saw the red letter
J
smeared on the vanity mirror with what looked like lipstick.

Nothing Bev would do.

He moved nearer, looked closer.

“Ah, Jesus! Bev!”

He leaned toward her to touch her, then realized he shouldn't. And his right foot was planted in blood. His wife's blood. He did lean forward slightly so he could see beneath her right arm that was raised so her hand was near her head. He could see darkness on her breasts, see the exit wound.

See into her!

Floyd stood up and staggered backward. He swallowed the bile that rose bitter in his throat, then wiped his sleeve across his mouth and chin. He realized his mouth was slightly open, his lips rigid. He licked his lips with a dry tongue and pressed them together.

Turning away from the horror, he made himself trudge back into the living room.

Must be a dream. Has to be…

He stood at the phone and slowly lifted the receiver.

The voice of the 911 operator from the outside world made it all real.

It wasn't a dream; it was real. It would stay real.

 

The buzzer sounded. Beam went to the intercom and called down for confirmation that Corey and Looper were downstairs, then buzzed the two detectives up.

Not knowing quite what to expect, he stood with the apartment door open so they wouldn't have to knock.

A short, slender woman wearing dark slacks and a rumpled gray blazer emerged from the elevator. She had dishwater blond hair combed back in a convenient rather than flattering hairdo. Her eyes were dark, her chin defiant. Her shoes were black and sensible, with low heels, and she walked with a slouchy kind of determination, as if with a certain slow eagerness she might be heading toward a fight.

She was followed by a tall, sallow man in a suit that didn't fit his angular body. Beam thought it was a fairly expensive and well cut suit—it was the body that was the problem. Looper was built like a mannequin assembled from spare parts. He looked a little like an awkward Fred Astaire, or maybe that was because Beam knew his first name was Fred.

They did the introductions. Both detectives looked Beam in the eye as they shook hands. He noticed that Nell Corey's hair had dark roots. Looper was holding the murder files tucked beneath his left arm, thick brown folders, each fastened with cord over a metal clasp.

“Want something to drink while we talk this over?” Beam asked.

Looper declined.

“Bottled water, if you've got some,” Nell said.

Beam excused himself, got her a bottle of Zephyr Hills from the refrigerator, then returned to usher the two detectives into his den. One of them smelled strongly of peppermint—Looper, Beam thought. He wondered if the man was covering for a drinking habit.

When they were seated, he saw how Looper, in the leather chair, glanced around to see if there were any ashtrays. Then he noticed the detective's yellow-stained index and middle finger on his right hand. Not a drinker, a smoker. And if Beam was any judge, badly in need of a cigarette.

Beam, who enjoyed an occasional cigar, started to open a drawer to get out an ashtray, then paused. “Mind if we smoke?” he asked Nell.

“Tell you the truth, I do.”

Looper shot her an annoyed look.

Beam smiled and pushed the drawer closed. “Okay. We can save it for outside.”

Looper leaned forward and laid the murder files on Beam's desk. “Your copies,” he said. “We each have ours.”

“You've studied them?” Beam asked.

Both detectives nodded.

“And?”

Nell spoke up first. “Same gun, same letter
J.
”

“An anti-Semite killer?” Beam asked.

She surprised him. “I don't think so. It's too much of a stretch.”

“I agree,” Beam said.

She swallowed, nervous, as if about to take a plunge. “I was up late working my computer,” she said, “checking into various databases. There's something stronger linking these victims, something that can't be coincidental. At one time or other, they all served as jury forepersons in the city of New York.” She glanced at her partner. “I already filled Loop in on this.”

“There doesn't seem to be any other common denominator among the victims,” Looper said, coming to her defense. “Different parts of town, different occupations, different circles of friends and acquaintances, different sexes.”

“There's something the juries they presided over had in common, though,” Nell said. “In all the cases, the defendants were almost certainly guilty but got off.”

“Were any of the prosecutors or defense attorneys the same?” Beam asked.

“Nope,” said the blond woman with dark roots, now with a certain confidence. Beam was taking her seriously, buying into her theory.

“Anybody Jewish in all this?”

“Not so's you'd notice,” Nell said. “What you'd expect in New York, a royal mix. And some of the trials were years apart. The most recent was last year, the one longest ago happened…” She leaned forward to pick up one of the files and refresh her memory.

“Six years ago,” Looper said.

Nell sat back and took a swig of Zephyr Hills.

Beam leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “So whaddya think?”

“Serial killer, obviously,” Looper said. His hand went to his shirt pocket, then quickly withdrew. Smoker's arm. “He doesn't seem to have a hard-on about the defendants, though; it's the juries that set him off, especially the jury forepersons.”

“The jurors are the ones responsible for the defendants going free,” Nell pointed out. “And if you had to hang it on any one of them, it would be the foreperson.”

“So it's the system our killer doesn't like,” Beam said.

“You could say that,” Nell told him, “unless there's a common thread we haven't discovered yet.”

“What about a common thread connecting the freed defendants?”

Nell and Looper glanced at each other.

Looper emitted a volley of hoarse coughs, raising a yellowed finger to implore Nell and Beam to be patient. Each time he coughed, the scent of peppermint wafted across the desk.

Finally he stopped coughing, cleared his throat twice, and swallowed phlegm before trusting himself to speak. “The defendants: One wife killer; one gang member making his bones by shooting three people in a diner; one kidnapper-torturer who did a twenty-year-old NYU student.”

“Female student?” Beam asked.

“Yeah. The victims are three females and two males. Females are the dead wife and dead student. And of the three victims in the diner shooting, one was a woman.”

“So by way of defendants who got lucky and walked,” Nell said, “we got a jealous husband killed his wife, a gangbanger trying to impress his peers, and a sex maniac who liked college girls. Not much in common among defendants.”

“Except that they went free,” Beam said.

“Not for the same reasons. The gangbanger had a phony alibi that couldn't be disproved, the sex maniac hadn't been sufficiently informed of his rights, the wife killer simply got off even though the evidence against him was overwhelming.”

“So they all
should
have been convicted,” Beam said.

Nell took another swig of bottled water. “Read the court transcripts and you'd have to say that.”

Beam unlaced his fingers and sat forward, causing his swivel chair to squeak. “What we're gonna do,” he said, “is pore over these murder files again—I haven't had a chance to read them yet. Then we'll revisit the crime scenes, talk again to witnesses, go over ground already covered, see if anybody's memory can be jogged.” He looked at Looper. “You say it was the same gun used in all three murders, so what do we know about it?”

“Thirty-two caliber. That's about all they can tell about it so far, with just the slugs to work from. No ejected cartridges were found.”

“So he cleans up after himself. What about the possibility of him being a professional?”

“Maybe,” Nell said, “except for his choice of victims and that red letter
J
he always leaves at the scene. That's not very professional.”

“
J
for
justice
?” Beam asked.