Now or Never (2 page)

“Funny thing, Frank, that guy just speeding outta here,” Jess Douglas said to his friend.

“Like a bat outta hell,” Frank Mitchell marveled. “Must’ve been some heavy pettin’ goin’ on tonight.”

Their guffaws echoed over the slur of the waves as they hefted their fishing tackle, heading for the jetty and their boat.

The beam of Jesse’s flashlight shortened as it struck the girl’s spread-eagled, naked body, illuminating, like a black and white horror movie, the dark patches on the sand around her hands and the blood still leaking from her wrists.

“Dear God,” Frank said shakily. “Oh, my dear lord, will you just look at that.”

Jess dropped his fishing tackle and put his fingers to her neck, felt the flutter of her pulse. “She’s still alive,” he muttered. “The bastard slit her wrists. Give me your bandanna, Frank—quick, quick.”

Frank ripped the red-spotted cotton scarf from his neck and handed it to him.

“Thank the lord for Eagle Scouts,” Jess muttered, fashioning a clumsy tourniquet on her left wrist, instructing
Frank to bear down on the pressure point on the girl’s vein—for all he was worth.

“Jesus God,” he said, wiping the sweat of fear and horror from his brow. “No wonder the bastard was outta here like that. He just about killed her. We gotta get help, Frank. You hold on to that girl’s arm for dear life while I run to the pay phone down the beach.”

“What if he comes back?” Frank peered uneasily into the blackness.

“You scared?” Jess demanded, clambering to his feet.

“You bet your goddamn I am,” Frank muttered.

“Me too.” Jess was already lumbering away down the beach. “Get the bastard good if he comes back, Frank. Remember, it’ll be you or him. Just keep your finger on that pressure point is all I ask.

“Until help comes.”

T
HE DOG
, a large silver and white malamute with astonishingly pale blue eyes, slithered from under the bed. It sat alert, ears pricked, tongue lolling, staring intently at the flickering green digital display on the clock radio: 4:57—4:58—4:59—5:00.

Its paw shot out, zapping the snooze button on the first ring.

Boston Homicide Detective Harry Jordan rolled over onto his back, eyes still tightly shut. The dog watched him, waiting expectantly for his next move. When nothing happened, it leaped onto the bed. It lay down with its head on Harry’s chest, its eyes fixed on his face.

Ten minutes later the alarm went off again. This time the dog let it ring.

Harry’s dark gray eyes snapped open and stared straight into the malamute’s pale blue ones.

The dog’s tail wagged slowly, but it did not move its head from his chest.

Harry groaned. In his dreams the eyes he had been gazing into did not belong to a malamute. “Okay, I’m up,” he said, ruffling the dog’s thick neck fur.

Swinging his legs from the bed, he stood up and stretched luxuriously. Then he padded across the polished-wood floorboards to the window to inspect the pewter dawn.

Harry Jordan looked great naked. He was forty years
old, six foot two and a lean one hundred and eighty pounds of solid muscle, despite a steady diet of junk food at Ruby’s diner, around the corner from the precinct. He had unruly dark hair, level gray eyes, and usually a day-old stubble.

His colleagues called him the Prof because of his Harvard law degree, but they were more impressed by his football record at Michigan State, where his record-breaking 105-yard touchdown was still spoken of with awe. What they didn’t know, because he had kept it to himself, and besides he no longer found it important, was that Harry had inherited a great deal of money.

His grandfather had left him a trust fund that he finally came into at the age of thirty, plus the beautiful old brownstone in Boston’s Beacon Hill. Harry thought he might have enjoyed the money more when he was twenty instead of thirty-five, but he guessed his grandfather was right and if he’d gotten his hands on it earlier, it would be gone by now, spent on fast cars, fast women and finding himself. As it was, he had had to “find himself” the hard way.

He had never forgotten the words of his father when he almost flunked out that first year of law school.

“Why the hell don’t you get your brains back from your prick and put them to use,” he’d snapped angrily. “Zip up your pants, Harry. Give me back the keys to the Porsche. Get your ass into that seat in the lecture room, and get yourself to work.”

In the end Harry had straightened out. He’d graduated from law school and gone to work for the family firm, until he could stomach it no longer. Then he’d quit and become a rookie in the Boston Police Department.

When asked why, he gave the same answer both to his father and to the recruiting officer: “Lawyers don’t deal in justice anymore. They just deal in legal conundrums, getting guilty men freed on technicalities and pocketing huge
fees. At least this way I’ll have the satisfaction of catching the criminals.”

And he did. Harry was a good cop. He had worked his way up from the patrol car via the rescue services, the fraud squad, the drug and vice squads, to senior detective. He had been married once, when he was twenty-eight and she was twenty, but she hadn’t liked the change from attorney’s wife to cop’s wife. He had been devastated when she left him. He had held her in his arms and kissed her, but it was too late. For her, the feeling had gone.

He converted the Beacon Hill house into apartments and rented out the three top floors. His own apartment was on the garden floor, and when he moved in, he’d bought himself a pup. The malamute. He looked like a wolf and was the closest to a wild creature he could get. He called him Squeeze and the dog went everywhere with him.

Harry paced through the hallway and opened the back door leading into a good-sized walled yard. With a joyful growl the dog shot past him. Squeeze stood for a moment or two sniffing the fresh morning air, then began his usual perambulation around the lavishly untidy pollen-laden garden.

Harry sneezed loudly as he padded to the bathroom. “Got to get that grass taken care of,” he promised himself as he did every morning. His only problem was time, or rather the lack of it. Still, he liked his garden, and he liked his bathroom too.

It was huge, square and old-fashioned, with the original black-and-white-tiled floor, a fireplace with a cast-iron grate, a mahogany-paneled tub big enough for a giant, and a Victorian water closet with a blue-flowered bowl and a pull chain. The old marble washstand was big enough for a man to splash around in and it made up for the lack of counter space to put his stuff. He liked it that way.

From the bathroom he walked back through the hall. A Nautilus machine stood incongruously next to the ebony grand piano in what had once been the elegant drawing room of a rich nineteenth-century Boston lady. The Nautilus was his next chore, but first he needed a cup of coffee.

There was nothing old-fashioned about Harry’s kitchen—it was all black granite and brushed steel, but these days he never seemed to find the time to cook or entertain. The coffee machine was the only piece of kitchen equipment that ever got a workout. Now it gurgled and coughed, and the red digital timer blinked, announcing it was brewed. Harry thought impatiently that his life was ruled by digital timers; even his watch had one.

He filled a plain white mug with coffee, spooned in two sugars and was on his way to the Nautilus when the phone rang.

His eyebrows lifted resignedly as he answered it. At 5:10
A.M.
it could only mean trouble.

“What happened, Prof? Squeeze miss the alarm button this morning?”

Harry took a sip of the hot coffee. It was Carlo Rossetti, his partner on the force and his buddy. “He didn’t go for the extra five minutes. I guess he just wanted up and out.”

“Sorry to call so early, but I knew you’d want to know right away. There’s been another one, a young woman raped and stabbed. Only this one didn’t die. At least not yet. She’s in Mass General. It’s pretty much touch and go.”

Harry glanced quickly at the digital watch that had irritated him only a few moments ago. “I’ll meet you there. Tell the chief we’re on our way. Is she conscious? Has she said anything yet?”

“Not that I know of. I just got here myself. The night shift was having a slow one when the call came in at about
three
A.M.
A couple of fishermen found her on the beach near Rockport. The emergency rescue squad helicoptered her down from there. The duty officer was McMahan. He and Gavel are over there now, but this is our baby, Harry. I knew you’d want in on it.”

Harry remembered the brutally mutilated young bodies of the two previous victims. “I’ll be there in ten,” he said grimly.

There was no time for a shower or even to brush his teeth. He flung cold water on his face, rinsed his mouth with Listerine, threw on jeans, a denim shirt and an old black leather bomber jacket, and whistled for the dog. In three minutes flat he was out the door.

Harry still hadn’t gotten over his passion for fast cars. The souped-up 1969 E-type Jaguar in British racing green was parked in his usual spot across the road. The dog hunkered down on the beautiful tan coach-hide-leather backseat, and a minute later they were speeding out of Louisburg Square to the hospital.

M
ASSACHUSETTS
G
ENERAL WAS
a massive limestone block set back from a busy avenue. Traffic rattled around it, and the morning air vibrated with the perpetual wail of sirens from ambulances and emergency rescue-squad fire engines and the clatter of rotor blades as helicopters landed and took off from the roof.

Harry swung into a parking spot in the reserved zone. He left the back windows open a crack for the dog, hurled himself through the doors of Emergency and collided with a white-coated doctor.

“My, my, you’re in a hurry this morning, detective,” the doctor said mildly, adjusting his horn-rimmed eyeglasses.

Still running, Harry threw an apologetic glance over his shoulder. “Sorry, doc. Oh, hi—it’s you, Dr. Blake. Excuse me, I’m in a hell of a rush.”

The doctor shook his head, smiling. “Never saw you when you weren’t,” he called. “Anything I can do to help?”

Harry waved his hand dismissively as he sped round the corner. “Not your department, doc. At least, not yet.” His face grew grim as he thought of the implications of what he had just said. Dr. Blake was head of pathology at the hospital and a medical examiner for the Boston PD.

The Nursing Sister at the desk knew Harry too. “First floor, trauma ward, last on the right,” she said, when he
paused in front of her. “They’ve given her fifteen pints of blood. She’s comatose and critical. And no, I don’t know if she’s going to make it.”

Harry’s bleak eyes met hers. “Jesus,” he whispered.

The sister crossed herself quickly. “Believe me, she needs Him.”

Skirting the crowd waiting for the elevator, Harry took the stairs two at a time. He paused at the top. He took a deep breath and ran his hands through his uncombed hair. He closed his eyes for a moment, steadying himself.

The smell of hospital corridors still got to him. The only time he had ever been an inmate was when he was five years old and had had his tonsils and adenoids removed. They had fed him a steady diet of ice cream for a week. He couldn’t remember being traumatized by it, but the childhood fears still stuck.

He swung through the fire door and it whooshed silently shut behind him.

Rossetti was leaning up against the wall, arms folded, one leg crossed lazily over the other. His glossy black hair was slicked flat, his white shirt was immaculate and his black trousers had a fresh crease in them. He was filing his nails and whistling
“Nessun dorma”
through his perfect teeth. He looked like the early version of John Travolta ready for a night on the town instead of a Boston homicide detective on duty at 5:25
A.M.

Despite the tough circumstances, Harry grinned. Carlo Rossetti was thirty-two years old, long jawed, dark-eyed, and a serious ladies’ man. He had probably come direct from the previous evening’s rendezvous but he looked as though he had stepped straight from his good Italian mama’s house: clean, well-fed, and ready for action.

“She’s not gonna make it,” Rossetti said flatly.

Harry looked startled. “How d’you know?”

“I’ve seen her. Seen that look before, that otherworldly thing.” He shrugged. “Take a look for yourself.”

A uniformed cop stood guard outside the door. He saluted and said good morning, standing aside to let Harry in.

Harry took in the scene at a glance: the nurse hovering over the machinery, the monitors flickering in the corner, and the young woman lying motionless on the narrow bed with IVs pumping fluid into her arms. Her bandaged wrists were propped stiffly out in front of her on top of the sheet. And her young face was pale as death beneath the halo of shorn hair.

The nurse glanced at him. “She’s in shock. Maybe she’ll come out of it,” she said softly.

Harry wanted to believe her and not Rossetti. “Any chance she might wake up and be able to talk to us?”

“If she does wake up, the last thing she’ll want to do is talk to
you.”

“We need her. She’s our only hope of catching the killer. She might have seen his face. Maybe she even knows him.”

The nurse sighed. She had heard of the mutiliation of the other young victims. “He didn’t cut off the nipples this time.”

Harry stared at the young woman with the tubes in her arms, at her severed wrists and bloodless face. The memory would stay with him forever; or at least until he had done his job and the killer was caught. He turned and walked out the door.

Rossetti had finished filing his nails. He was sipping black coffee from a paper cup. He held a second one in his other hand and offered it to Harry.

“So? What d’you think?”

“I think we had better start praying.”

They sipped the coffee silently.

“What’s with the fishermen?” Harry asked finally.

Rossetti shrugged. “Local police took a statement, faxed it through to the boss. They said they didn’t see
nothin’ that meant anything, just heard a car taking off in the dark. Then they saw the body—excuse me,
the victim
. A few minutes earlier, and they would have caught him in the act. Unlucky for her.”