Signature Kill (27 page)

Behr continued past the car, drove out of the lot, and parked on the street. He took a page out of Abler’s book, got a baseball cap from the trunk, and pulled it down low. He had to assume
there were security cameras in the lot. That was the assumption he labored under in almost every public place these days. He wasn’t stealing anything, so there’d be little reason for the footage to be reviewed before it was recycled, but since he was illegally entering a vehicle, he didn’t want to be easily identified. He got organized with a few other items he kept stored in his trunk, slammed it shut, and started walking with bland purpose toward the Park Avenue.

No one who saw him from a distance of more than five feet could see the clear vinyl gloves that covered his hands, nor could they see the slim jim he slid out of his sleeve when he reached the driver’s door. He hadn’t worked a car lock in a while, but it wasn’t a skill that took a lot of maintenance, and the age of the car helped. He fed the slender piece of metal between the window glass and the rubber seal, down into the door panel, and fished around for a moment before he was able to pop the lock. Then he opened the door and got in. He slammed the door behind him and breathed in pine-scented air freshener before he found what he was looking for: the automatic garage door opener, clipped on the passenger-side visor.

Behr took out his Horizon-net, a device the size of a key fob. Technically a backup or replacement remote, for all intents and purposes it was a code grabber. If Abler’s opener was part of a high-end modern system, with a rolling combination that created a completely new code each time it was used, Behr would be at a dead end because he’d need access to the main unit in the garage in order to duplicate the frequency. But the more basic brands of garage door openers, especially older ones, created codes with the same basic values, and the Horizon-net was able to run a simple resynchronization protocol that basically cloned the remote. Behr took Abler’s from the visor and saw it was a Genie that was a good ten years old. He opened the Horizon-net and set the brand jumper switch to Genie. He pressed Abler’s remote and then the Horizon-net. His unit blinked red a few times and then went green.

He was done with his business in the car. He put Abler’s remote back on the visor and opened the door. He was ready to walk away, but then couldn’t resist doing one more thing: he pressed the trunk
release button next to the steering column and heard the latch disengage. He got out, circled around to the back, and took a look. The trunk was completely empty, immaculate. Behr didn’t know what he expected—handcuffs, knives, bloodstains, a body? There was nothing inside but factory-installed industrial carpet like the day it rolled off the assembly line. He closed the trunk and walked back across the lot toward his car. A tall blonde, about Susan’s height, maybe a few years younger, caught his eye as she exited the building, but she peeled off in the opposite direction.

When Behr got back in his car, the sun was already disappearing from the building’s side, and he dialed a call on his cell phone.

“Good afternoon, MM&E,” a bright-voiced receptionist answered.

“Yeah, this is John Daniels from Lucas,” Behr said, naming the biggest petroleum company in town. If MM&E didn’t handle them, they wanted to. “I’ve got some P&Ls to drop off for an Abler in accounting. How late are you folks around?”

“Would you like me to connect you?” she asked.

Behr considered chancing it and actually getting the man on the phone, but decided it wasn’t worth the risk.

“Nah, that’s all right. What time does he usually clear out of there?”

“Usually about quarter to six, six.”

“Great, I oughtta just be able to make it,” Behr said, hanging up. He glanced at the clock on the dash. If he drove fast he’d have just shy of ninety minutes.

I oughtta just be able to make it
, he said, this time to himself.

The street was quiet and the light was going day’s-end flat when Behr arrived. The shadows thrown from the trees and light poles were being swallowed by everything around them. Behr rolled to a stop a good distance down the street from Abler’s place and doused his headlights. He saw one window illuminated upstairs in the house, but the wife’s car wasn’t out front, nor was there any movement inside. A neighbor four houses over walked toward home with a large mixed-breed dog on a leash and disappeared inside. Behr felt his heart hurtling around his chest. His mouth went slightly dry. He had to go in.

At least wait until dark
, he bargained with himself, which was mere moments away, the gloam falling all around the car, but there was no deal to be made.

Come on, do it
, another interior voice urged.

What if the Horizon-net doesn’t work?
Behr pushed the doubt from his mind.

Do it now
, that other voice demanded.
Do it for Pam Cupersmith
. She was inside, and every moment could mean the difference to her.

That voice won.

He reached for the handle of his car door, and in an instant his
feet were on the pavement and he was walking through the quiet twilight toward the garage. Each step he took closer to the property spelled potential disaster for his case. If Abler had returned home before him somehow and was hidden behind those shades or in the garage itself, and he discovered Behr, he would be flushed like a game bird and able to disappear, or at the least dispose of any evidence inside. Or, if he had the nerve, he could even call the cops, and Behr would be the one who ended up in jail for breaking and entering. But Behr continued on, feeling as if his feet belonged to another.

He paused when he reached the big bay door, trying to blend in with the corner of the structure, and then came the moment of truth: he hit the Horizon remote in his pocket. The low grinding of the opener’s motor and chain that escaped from underneath the lifting door as it moved upward told him the code grab had worked. No light spilled outside from the customary bulb attached to most automatic garage doors—it had been shut off. Behr dropped to the ground and rolled underneath the rising door and into the blackness of the garage, hitting the remote again and closing the door behind him before it had gone up three feet.

He knew immediately, before he even shined his flashlight around, that he was both right and wrong in his assumptions. He lay there in the dark and quiet once the door settled, and sensed the place was empty, at least of anyone living, and that if Pam Cupersmith were there, he was too late. Yet all the confirmation he needed was in the air, which hung heavy with the scent of oxidized blood and entrails. An undertone of bleach and other chemicals stung his nostrils. He recognized the smell from when he was young and worked in a meat-processing plant. He knew right away he had entered a slaughterhouse.

He sat up and took out his Mini Maglite, which he’d fitted with a red lens, and when he clicked it on, a swath of the garage was bathed in a crimson light. There was no car inside. Instead a long couch covered by an old blanket took up the center of the space. He went and checked, quickly, hopelessly under the blanket, and then below some workbenches, and in the corners, which were the most likely places a person could’ve been hidden, but he was alone.

There was a low chest along one wall that he supposed could’ve been used for such storage, but inside it he found multiple stacks of pulpy pornographic magazines. Across the space was a carpenter’s table, and above that a pegboard covered with tools, both manual and electric. They were not of the automotive variety though, rather the array was of knives, cleavers, machetes, saws, chisels, awls, and all manner of other pointed and bladed instruments. They were items of torment, of annihilation.

As Behr walked toward the wall to get a better look, he stumbled over a depression and saw that the floor was angled slightly toward a rusted metal drain. A channel was cut into the concrete that led from the drain to a large slop sink against the opposite wall, and then something caused him to look up and shine his light. Above him was a set of iron hooks suspended from the ceiling just like the kind livestock and game animals were hung from to drain before butchering. There was also a block and tackle rigged to it, for hoisting carcasses. Behr’s head swam as he tried to process all he saw, and his eyes fell upon a set of shelves and cabinets and a large battered refrigerator along the deep wall of the garage opposite the bay door.

He walked with dread toward the shelves, and as he drew closer to them, the weak beam of his light began to pick up the shapes of cardboard banker’s boxes. He went to the nearest one, lifted the lid, and found photo-developing supplies inside—chemicals, trays, tongs. The same with the next one. But inside the third he found something else: prints.

Behr had never seen anything like them. With the Maglite clamped between his teeth, he flipped through eight-by-tens of highly stylized yet gruesome images of women, shot extremely close up for the most part, their faces obscured, and their bodies cut into pieces. The photos were an abomination of the human form and all that was decent in the world, and even still the power and the artistry in them struck him. They were masterful for how they made his soul churn. In a strange way, Quinn would’ve truly appreciated them. One print bore text that appeared to have been scratched into the negative. The words, covering the image of a woman, her head
nearly severed and twisted all the way around her torso so her eyes looked out over her back, were the same, repeated over and over:
I am death. I am death. I am death. I am death. I am death …

Finally, he came upon the last picture in the pile, and it was slightly different from the rest. In it, reflected from a mirror that had been placed on the floor beneath an intact naked female, who was hanging from the hooks by her hands, blood running down her thighs, was Abler himself, wearing only a too-small leather jacket. Hers, he guessed. Erect and drooling, the camera dangling by a strap around his neck. Finally, Behr got a good look at the man with neither cap nor toupee on his head, bald and strange, with his drawn-on eyebrows. Behr couldn’t identify the victim because of a black hood over her head, sprigs of blond hair protruding from the bottom.

He finished with the pictures, and felt his breath come heavy with dread as he looked over at a refrigerator and practically staggered toward it. His hands sweating inside his latex gloves, he reached for the handle and peeled the door open. The clean light from the bulb inside glowed with menace, and when he saw what the refrigerator held, it caused his legs to go weak.