Deadly Rich (43 page)

“Got it—barely.” He emptied his briefcase over Cardozo’s desk. Documents rained down.

Cardozo’s eyes lifted to look at him. “What’s wrong, Sam? You been running?”

Sam Richards stood catching his breath. “Xenia Delancey is one fearsome lady. She showed up with a restraining order. Luckily she served it on herself.”

WILKES FINISHED READING
. He rested his forehead against the palm of his hand, as though his thoughts were weighing down his entire head. In the window behind him blinds slatted the afternoon sun.

“One hundred and four times,” he said. “One hundred and four times during a four-year period, the father abused his kid. What the hell was the mother doing, keeping score?”

“Every other Thursday she worked late at the department store,” Cardozo said. “One of those Thursdays she happened to come home early. She just counted up all the late Thursdays.”

“That’s what she says, but I don’t buy it. Nine times out of ten, the nonabusive parent knows and doesn’t want to face it. Was the father ever charged?”

Cardozo shook his head. “She wouldn’t let the kid testify. She settled for divorce and custody.”

“That’s exactly what I would have figured.”

“I’ve seen this woman in the boutique. Image matters to her.”

“I’ve seen her too. Many, many times.” Wilkes closed the file and sat drumming his fingertips on the folder. “Okay. If you want my judgment, the kid fits. Made to order.”

The words fell heavily into the silence. The two men faced each other across the heavy, uncluttered wood desk.

“But if it’s him,” Cardozo said, “he’s faking. He’s a multiple murderer trying to pass as a serial killer.”

“Sure. But there’s only one way to fake serial killing—do it. Which makes you a serial killer. And how do you tell if the claim to be faking isn’t just an unconscious rationalization?”

“I don’t know how. Do you?”

“You don’t. Rationality is the most common mask that compulsion wears. Look at the military. Or the police. There are compulsive killers in uniform, but we don’t see them as compulsives. Neither do they. Look at drug killings. A quarter of today’s drug enforcers have the drives of serial killers—and the opportunities. So what do they do? They kill—serially. But we see the slaughter as business-related. If we can find any motive at all, we prefer to deny the compulsive element. So do they.”

“Would you call our man a compulsive?”

“If the drive’s controlling him and not vice versa, absolutely. And there are plenty of indications that it is. So far we have three killings. After the first he waited eleven days. After the second, nine days. The interval shrank. Each time he kills he loses a little of the ability to hold off.”

“So what happened to the minimax cycle?”

“In this case it’s accelerating. It happens in twelve percent of the cases.”

“When is he likely to kill next?”

“The last interval was nine days, so right now he’s in a seven-day interval.”

“Come on. The interval keeps shrinking by exactly two days?”

“If it wasn’t consistent, it wouldn’t be compulsion. It’s too bad you don’t have time to study the database.” Wilkes tossed a nod toward the computer terminal. “Chances are damned good Society Sam will kill next on …” He leaned forward and touched a pencil tip to his desk calendar. “Two days from now. Friday, June seventh.” The pencil skipped forward. “Then there’ll most likely be a five-day interval before the next killing. Then three days. Then one. And then …”

Wilkes left the statement unfinished.

“What happens then?” Cardozo said. “The interval shrinks from five to three to one to nothing. What next?”

He saw it, the look in Wilkes’s eyes, there and then quickly covered over.

“There’s no way you’re going to let him get that far,” Wilkes said.

“But what if we don’t stop him before the next killing? Or the next? Or the next? What happens?”

For a moment Wilkes sat absolutely still, and then his feet hit the floor and he was standing. “Remember what Son of Sam was planning when the cops caught him?”

“He was going to go into a Long Island disco with a submachine gun.”

“Same principle here. Pile-up. Our man runs amok.”

“
THE THIRD NOTE GIVES US
another source.” There was a kind of glow in Lou Stein’s voice. “Sam clipped letters from
US
magazine, April second.”

“April second again.” Cardozo shifted the receiver to his left hand and flipped back in his desk calendar. The big events of that week, according to the calendar manufacturer, were the first quarter of the moon and Palm Sunday. “What’s so special to this guy about April second?”

“Maybe nothing. April second was a Monday. Weekly magazines always come out on Monday.”

“You haven’t found any source later than that?”

“Not so far.”

“So he could have written all three notes nine weeks ago.”

“Possibly. Or April second might just have been the day he decided, Hey, let’s compile us an inventory of cut-out letters.”

LEIGH WAS TRYING TO DECIDE
which toiletries absolutely had to go with her to Paris. On the marble-topped bathroom counter, she set out the soaps, the bottles of colognes and mouthwash. She arranged them into two groups: take and leave. At the back of the cabinet, behind the toothpaste and dental floss, she found a cache of prescription medicines she thought she’d thrown out years ago. She examined the labels and recognized her old pills for sleeping, pills for waking up, pills for anxiety, pills for depression.

Odd
, she thought,
they have pills for all that and nothing for loneliness or for fear, or hurt, or guilt or anger
…

A calendrical card of contraceptive pills had only two of the pills popped out. She couldn’t remember when her doctor had taken her off them.

“Oh, well, you’re prehistory now.” She dropped the card into the wastebasket.

And then she found herself staring at a barely touched tube of spermicidal gel. She had to smile.
Hope springs eternal.

“Sorry, you’re not getting a trip to Paris.”

And then she thought,
But you never know …

“Yes, you do,” she told her reflection. “You know.”

Why do I think I’m talking to a teenage girl
? she wondered. She smiled at the reflection.
Don’t you wish
!

Her eye went back to the tube. Her hand tightened with sudden force. It took her a moment to catch the thought that had flashed through her mind.

Sex to end all sex.

And she knew where she had seen those words before.

THE PANTRY SMELLED OF CHEMICALS.
The maid, in long rubber gloves, was polishing silver.

“Mabel,” Leigh said, “have you seen my policeman? He’s not in front.”

“He went for cigarettes.” The maid set the soup ladle down on a counter covered with that morning’s
Trib.
“He said he’d be right back.”

Leigh glanced at her wristwatch. “If he’s back before me, would you tell him I’ve gone to the Jefferson Storage warehouse over on West Sixty-sixth?”

A CON ED CREW WAS DRILLING
a crater in the street, and traffic had jammed the intersection. Leigh asked the taxi to let her out on the corner. She walked quickly along West Sixty-sixth. Jefferson Storage, an Art Deco building with restored facade, stood a half block from the Metropolitan Opera. She pressed the buzzer and waited.

A guard in khaki work clothes finally let her in. His eyes were cold and bloodshot. She had a feeling she’d interrupted his drinking, and he resented her for it.

She showed her storage receipt and signed the register. “Nice that it’s turned cooler,” she said.

The guard’s shoulders shaped a nowhere-to-go shrug.

“If a man asks for me, you can send him up.” She took the self-service elevator up to the eighth floor. For a moment it didn’t open and she thought it was going to hold her prisoner, but then the lights dipped and came up, and the steel grille heaved itself open.

She pushed the door open and hurried down a long, echoing corridor.

It took her two wrong turns to locate Room 812. She unlocked the door and switched on an overhead light. The light bulb, swinging naked from a chain, sent shadows leaping across dark, clumsy old steamer trunks and a polychrome pile-up of brand-new-looking luggage. Movers’ cartons had been stacked among the suitcases, and there was hardly space to stand or move.

She sat down on a trunk, looking around her, pressing her lips together, trying to remember where she had packed what.

There was a sound of glass shattering somewhere else on the floor. It was a dead-of-night street noise, like a tossed bottle or a window breaking, and her nerves told her it had no business indoors in the middle of the day.

She tried to open the carton marked
books.
It was sealed with reinforced movers’ tape, and her bare hands got more tears from the tape than they managed to inflict on it. Finally it occurred to her to take out her housekeys and use the key with the sharpest serrated edge as a saw.

After ten minutes of jabbing she managed to break into five cartons without finding what she had come for.

She peered around through dust floating in the dimness, trying to think where she could have packed it.

The shattering-glass sound came again. It seemed closer this time, and her heart gave a painful jump against her ribs.

Her eye fell on a carton with the grease-pencil-marking
china.

She stabbed her key through the tape and pried up the lid. She peered down into the carton. A small leather-bound book had been placed as a buffer between a stack of saucers and a stack of cups.

She pulled it out.

The word
diary
was embossed in gold script on the cover.

She opened it. She skimmed through the pages, looking for those five words. She found them at the very bottom of a right-hand page.

January 11, Thursday

In counseling today I suggested to Jim we smoke a peace pipe. He was reluctant when I told him it was crack, but curiosity got the better of him and he tried it. Two tokes and we were off to the races.

He is the greatest lover I have ever had, bar none. Nothing short of sensational. It was yummy sex to end all sex …

Waves of icy unreality seemed to come off the lines of neatly looping handwriting. When Leigh was finally able to keep her hand from trembling, she turned the page.

Above her head the light went out.

She jumped up. Her leg struck the edge of a trunk. She groped her way to the wall. Her hand found the light switch. She jiggled it up and down.

Nothing happened.

Her hand explored and finally found the door handle. She turned it and pushed. There was no light in the hallway. In the pitch-blackness, she thought she heard someone. “Officer … is that you?”

No one answered.

With one hand grazing the wall, she felt her way back along the corridor. Finally she saw light: the emergency-powered red
EXIT
sign above the elevator.

She stood patting the wall, feeling for the call button.
This is ridiculous. There’s got to be a button.
She found it and pushed.

Cables squealed and machinery hummed. She pushed again. The squealing and humming went on … and on … She kept her finger on the button.

The squealing and humming went past the floor.

“No!” she shouted. “Come back!” She pounded the door.

The humming stopped. There was a sound like a truck changing gears on a steep hill.

The humming began again and stopped again. She could hear the grille slam itself open. She gripped the handle of the elevator door and yanked it toward her.

She stood there, facing blackness.

“Hello … is anyone there?” It occurred to her that the right question would have been,
Hello, is there an elevator around here
?

She crouched and reached into the darkness. Her fingers touched the floor of the corridor, and then the edge of the shaftway, and beyond it—emptiness.

Her heart gave a sharp contraction. Her fingers reached farther, and her hand struck the corrugated steel of the elevator cabin.

Thank God.

She straightened and stepped into the elevator. The door closed. She patted the cabin wall till she found the button panel. She felt for the lowest button and pushed.

The grille slammed shut, almost catching her dress. She pulled herself back into the clear. The humming and squealing started, and the elevator began its crawling descent.

There was a click passing the seventh floor. A click passing the sixth. Two clicks.

“Is someone here?” she said.

No one answered.

The clicking came again.

She stretched a hand in front of her. Her hand struck something. Her fingers repeated the touch. She felt cloth. The cloth pulled away. She followed it. A jacket. Beneath the jacket, an arm.

A man’s voice said, “It’s me.”

“Officer?” In her relief she forgot his name. “You’re certainly quiet today. You frightened me.”

The elevator stopped. The grille slammed itself open. He held the door for her.

She stepped out into darkness. She stood trying to find her sense of direction. To the left her eyes gradually made out a slanting shaft of gray. She went toward it.

The gray brightened. As she rounded a corner into the lobby a wall of daylight blinded her.

“Sign out, please,” the guard said.

She took the pen from him and scribbled an initial in the register.

“Is your friend coming down?”

“My friend?” She saw her policeman waiting beside the lobby door. “He’s right over there.”

“Not him. The guy that went up looking for you.”

“I don’t understand.” She called across to the officer. “Weren’t you upstairs with me?”

He sauntered across the lobby. The name came to her. Dan. Dan with the blue eyes and the round, unlined face that looked all of eighteen years old.

“Beg pardon, ma’am?”

“Miss Baker said she was expecting someone.” The guard’s tone was defensive. “She said send him right up.”

“You sent someone up?” the officer said.