Текст книги "Frenzy"

Автор книги: John Lutz

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

50

Prentis, 1995

Dwayne waited for a proper time, then he determined to get out of town when few people noticed him leaving. It was spring break. Honey wasn’t mentioned much in the news these days. Especially with the college kids rolling in and partying all over Florida. Already, an Illinois sophomore in Clearwater had fallen to his death from a third-floor balcony while drunk and convinced he could leap to the next balcony. He had boldly announced his intention so there would be plenty of photographs and YouTube videos. A record of his feat.

Nobody had seemed able or willing to talk him out of it. As the photos showed, he only missed by a few feet, which made for even more public interest and tons of news coverage for a subject other than Honey.

For someone so financially secure, Dwayne didn’t have a lot of worldly goods that weren’t in real estate or in trust. So it was easy to pack some large suitcases, a few cardboard boxes, and drive to the opposite coast, and then north.

It occurred to him one sunny morning that maybe he should continue driving north, all the way to New York. The city teemed with the activity of people on the make, on the way up, down, sideways, drowning. Probably Honey’s death hadn’t even been covered in the news there. Or if it had, it would have been in a simple sidebar.

Under the fold, as they say in newspaper biz. Dwayne’s women wouldn’t give him any trouble once they were under the fold.

Just outside St. Augustine, he stayed in a motel with a red tile roof. It was designed to look old but was actually built only a few years ago. Its king-sized bed was amazingly comfortable and conducive to dreams. He thought he heard the sea whispering to him that night, but couldn’t be sure. In the morning, he drove into town and located the main library.

It was easy to research New York City, and easy to understand how people could lose themselves in such a place.

Or find themselves.

He took the next several days driving to the City, skirting the East Coast and taking his time. For an hour in the Carolinas the killer drove through heavy rain, and occasional hail the size of peas. During a break in the downpour, he stopped for gas and was told there were hurricane warnings beyond Cape Fear. He ignored the warnings. He was from Florida and gave not a damn for hurricanes.

During the next half hour, trees bent with the wind and shed some of their leaves and small branches, but there was no hurricane. A man’s voice on the car radio said the weather on that part of the coast had been downgraded to a tropical storm. He sounded disappointed.

When the killer arrived, he was amazed. Every direction he looked was sensory overload. Was that a celebrity he’d just walked past on the sidewalk, or was he simply someone who resembled a person Dwayne had met along the road? Faces seemed to glide past him. There were celebrities on signs, billboards, and almost certainly in the throngs of people on the wide sidewalks. Odd that in the city of anonymity, a person could become famous overnight.

There was media of every kind here, all over the place. It struck Dwayne that this was the ideal city in which to practice and perfect his craft. There was an endless supply of potential victims.

Not just any woman would do. They would be blond, preferably with blue eyes, and on the fleshy side. Such women would be in the most danger. But there would be other potential victims. He’d know them when he saw them. Innate victims. Prey for the predators. He knew them already. They recognized in him something perilous that drew more forcibly than it repelled.

The city had a police force numbering in the tens of thousands, but as far as Dwayne was concerned, that was simply lots of cops to get in the way of other cops. They were no match for him. Now and then they screwed up and did something right, but not so often that it did more than amuse him.

Which was why Dwayne was glad to find in his research a police lieutenant named Francis Quinn, who had made his reputation tracking and apprehending (or destroying) serial killers. Dwayne would strain forward and read more closely whenever he came across information about Quinn.

The guy was a throwback. He played straight, but he was more interested in justice than in legalities. He was tough, smart, and could be mean as hell. Sometimes he heeded red tape; sometimes he ripped it to shreds. Purportedly, he loved the theater and had even been spotted at the ballet. Odd, that. He looked more like a thug than a cop—a definite advantage in his world.

The only way to win a great war was to choose a great adversary. Quinn, who was practically worshipped by the New York media and, it seemed, by the NYPD, provided the ideal pursuer to match someone like Dwayne.

Did the man have experience and street creds? Dwayne read three times a piece about Frank Quinn in the New York Post. The journalist who interviewed and wrote about Quinn could hardly have drawn a meatier assignment. Some of the most gruesome homicides in the city’s history had been solved by Quinn. The photographs alone gave Dwayne an erection.

The Times saw Quinn as a human thinking machine, who was always two steps or more ahead of his adversary, and whose toughness and relentlessness never failed.

This man would be Dwayne’s principal opponent. His opposite number on the game board of New York.

Dwayne would kill in such a way that it quenched—at least for a while—his desire to kill certain women. The women he needed to kill, and those he knew when he saw them the first time. Women like Maude. Like Honey. It had come to him in a nighttime revelation that from the beginning he’d known he would kill the women.

He’d been their fate. And he would be the fate of more women.

New York would be his killing field, and he’d devise a calling card so the police would attribute each murder to him. He wanted them to know who was commandeering these women’s lives, putting them in hell, and flirting—only flirting—with the concept of dying with them.

He would, from time to time, feed the press information. That might seem to be a help to the police, until further thought would remind them that most if not all early initial information could be used to foul up an investigation.

Dwayne smiled at the idea of his “calling card,” the letters D.O.A. Those hunting him would assume the initials stood for Dead on Arrival, and not Dwayne Oren Aikens. Probably they would never become aware that there was a Dwayne Oren Aikens.

He would kill with increasing frequency and viciousness, this D.O.A. killer. Quinn and his minions would never find or stop him.

The police—Quinn—would come to respect him. Eventually they would envy him. He knew the police by now. He knew how they thought. And he knew the inevitable realization that would creep into their minds.

Secretly at first, even to themselves, they’d understand that they envied him. That they wished they could do what he did. That they were who he was.

They’d sample only an inkling, mostly at night in dreams, but that would be enough to inform them of what they were missing.

But of course they wouldn’t have the courage to expand, to experience. They would not act out what played in the theaters of their minds.

They could only guess how it was. Could be. Would never be. For them.

Dwayne paused to sit for a while on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum and watch the women walk past. Women of every sort and dressed in any fashion. There went the casual sophisticate in slouchy disdain and denim; the prim and businesslike in the costume of commerce (except for shoes made for walking); the twentyish undergrad type with unkempt hair and minimal makeup; the fashion model striding with crossover steps as if on a runway; the intellectual charmer, perhaps a researcher or book editor; the counterculture teenager new to drugs and sex, afraid and on the make.

They thought they were beautiful, these women, but they were not nearly as close to perfection as the women on canvas and in marble inside the museum. In timeless repose, displayed for the admiration of all who passed, their beauty was forever.

There, at an ascending angle to the steps, went a small blond girl with a pert way about her. What used to be called a vest-pocket beauty.

Dwayne realized he was smiling. He had so enjoyed his role in Honey Carter’s death. The manner of her death intrigued him. She had died slowly, inch by inch, breath by breath.

His only regret was that he hadn’t been there to observe her.

51

New York, the present

“So that’s where we are,” Helen the profiler said to Quinn.

Sal and Harold had just left to take over the watch on Weaver. Jody was with Pearl. Helen and Quinn were alone in the office. Fedderman was off someplace with Penny, trying to preserve his marriage.

Quinn poured himself half a cup of atrocious but hot coffee from the gurgling brewer and walked over to stand near Helen.

“Where is that?” he asked. “The that where we are, I mean.”

“A family—or what passes for one these days—finds purpose in its existence by searching for a missing piece of art.”

“Bellezza,” Quinn said. “Maybe it’s of great enough value that it’s worth the search.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, it’s not the Holy Grail.”

“It is to them,” Helen said.

“Most of them aren’t even blood relatives.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“No. And I’m afraid to start counting.”

“Maybe not being blood relatives makes them need a cause all the more,” Helen said.

Quinn thought there was a kind of twisted logic to that. But then “twisted” was his game.

“One thing’s for sure,” he said, “ when they’re talking, as often as not they’re lying. We can’t believe anything we hear unless it’s been substantiated.”

“They simply have a different slant on what’s factual,” Helen said.

“Those are the kind of distinctions that tend to disappear in courtrooms.”

“Has it been firmly established that Michelangelo sculpted Bellezza?” Helen asked.

“The church would say no, that Bellezza never existed in flesh or stone. But we know she exists. Rumor had it that a collector named Samuel Gundelheimer had her in his private collection when the Germans occupied France in World War Two.”

“He was also a very successful banker in Paris.”

“You know this how?”

“I’ve looked into the Gundelheimer family,” Helen said.

“Seems out of your bailiwick,” Quinn said.

Helen shrugged. “I’m Jewish.”

She said it in a way that Quinn knew meant something. He waited. Helen crossed her long arms, fought a mental conflict that showed on her face, and decided to share.

“Samuel Gundelheimer and his wife, Rebecca, were sent to Bergen Belsen in 1944,” she said, “and there is no firm record of them or of any of the Gundelheimer family after that. There was a daughter, Elna, thirteen; and twin sons, Jacob and Isador, eight years old. The girl was of no use to the Nazis, and the boys were too young for forced labor. There is some indication, but no firm knowledge, of Samuel and Rebecca Gundelheimer dying of typhus in 1945. The children seem to have been transported to other camps, where they simply became part of the missing dead. They might have been gassed, or used for medical experimentation—especially the twins—then possibly incinerated. They might have become part of a mass grave near the camp that contained several thousand.”

“Good God!”

“He was nowhere to be found at the time,” Helen said.

Quinn was surprised to see she that she’d teared up. “You see this shit on the Internet and it becomes real again if you let it. My great grandmother . . . my . . .” She could no longer force the words out.

Quinn snatched up a tissue and moved out from behind his desk. He gave the tissue to Helen, who folded it into quarters and dabbed at her eyes.

Quinn patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, dear.”

She shook her head. “Men into monsters. How does it happen?”

We’re supposed to know.

He gave her another tissue, then sat on the desk corner. “You’re not assuming this case has something to do with the Holocaust . . .”

“Nothing and everything,” Helen said. She dabbed twice at each eye and then slipped the wadded tissue into a pocket. “Samuel and Rebecca Gundelheimer didn’t want to surrender any of the world’s beauty to the enemy.”

“The enemy got a lot of it,” Quinn said, “though plenty of it was recovered, too.”

“The Nazis didn’t get our girl,” Helen said, “thanks to the Gundelheimers and some others.”

Quinn almost smiled at her, then realized she might not understand. “We’re thinking the same thing, I’ll bet.”

Helen nodded. “A serial killer talks with Grace Geyer, setting her up to be a victim, and out of the blue she says something that piques his interest. After pumping her for more information, he realizes he might have stumbled onto something big. He decides to cut himself in on what might be a valuable missing piece of art.”

“But he needs to know more,” Quinn says.

“Right. He follows Grace and the others to the Fairchild Hotel, intending to torture and question Andria Bell, being alone with her, taking his time. After all, she’s the expert in the group. Then he discovers Andria’s suite adjoins another, where five art students are staying, including Grace Geyer. Mass murder ensues, as well as skillful and agonizing torture, and the passing of information. That’s when the killer and our overactive family intersect.”

And what began as a vendetta chess game between the killer and Quinn develops into a treasure hunt and murder spree.

“Grace wouldn’t have known much,” Quinn said. “And Andria would have resisted talking.”

Helen said, “Under certain kinds of torture, everybody talks.” Her voice was sad. “No exceptions.”

Quinn had seen enough of the tortured and dead not to differ with her.

Helen waited, eyes dry now. Her face was still flushed, making her freckles less obvious.

“Are we still thinking the same thing?” she asked.

“Henry Tucker’s backpack,” Quinn said.

Helen managed a ragged smile. “You’ll find whatever was inside it. You’ll find the letters.”

“How can you be so certain?” Quinn asked.

“I’m certain of you.”

52

Honor Tripp looked at the man across the table and counted herself among the lucky.

So far.

They’d had only three dates, eaten three dinners together, and attended two off-Broadway shows. Neither show had been very good, but they didn’t much mind. That was because they did get along. This man, unlike so many others, seemed truly interested in her. What she was, who she was, what she thought. And he seemed to like her.

Well, more than like her.

The one thing about James Bolton that gave Honor pause was that he seemed somewhat secretive. He was skilled at deflecting questions.

So he was wary, she told herself. Like most men. Like most people in the singles society. A person gets hurt so many times and then puts up defensive walls.

Honor understood that and was patient.

Still, she wondered. She probed. It was in her nature.

“You’re not a native New Yorker, are you?” she asked, sitting across from Bolton in Beaux Arts Espresso in the Village.

Bolton gave her the slow smile that had first attracted her to him, the way it crinkled the faint scar on the side of his face. That and the way he was dressed—casually, with dark slacks, a gray shirt with its long sleeves hiked up almost to his elbows. And there was something about his hands, so strong yet sensitive. He was always unconsciously caressing things, his coffee cup, the small table’s centerpiece vase, the backs of her hands and fingers.... That was why she was drawn to him, she realized. He was so very tactile.

Bolton hadn’t answered. Honor cocked her head in what she fancied was her puzzled but pleased look. “So where are you from?”

“Around. Right now I’m living over on the East Side, near First Avenue and 57th Street.”

“That’s a nice neighborhood, but I wouldn’t say it’s nearby. What are you doing here in the Village?”

He sipped his coffee, smiling at her with his eyes through the steam wafting up from the cup. She thought it made him look kind of mystical.

“I followed you when I saw you the other day,” he said.

Honor was flattered but puzzled. She wasn’t ugly, and did have a trim figure, but she wasn’t the kind of femme fatale who drew men along behind her as if they were attached by a string.

Or am I?

“Why follow me?” she asked, and sipped her own coffee. “Didn’t you have better things to do?”

“There are no better things to do.”

“But why me?”

“One reason is I liked your looks when I saw you coming out of the Marlborough Book Shop. You paused at the curb and waited for traffic, standing almost as if you were posed. You would have made a perfect photo. That image rang some inner bell in me. I had to walk across the street and try to get to know you better. To see what you thought.”

“Thought about what?”

“Oh, you know. Did Shakespeare write all his plays?”

“You need to know what I think about that?”

“Desperately.”

“So what do you think?”

“I have no idea,” he said.

She mock clapped her hands. “Finally! Do you realize how rare you are?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re a man who understands he doesn’t have all the answers.”

He smiled. “There are more and more of us gaining that insight.”

She cocked her head at him and looked inquisitive. Was he serious? Or was he painting a picture of himself he knew she’d like?

Why not come right out and ask him?

“Are you playing the feminist card?” she asked.

“To what end?”

“To get what you want from me.”

“To be honest with you, I’ll play all the cards in my hand, if it means I get more acquainted with you.”

“But you wouldn’t lie?”

“I don’t think I’d have to lie to you. Soul mates don’t harbor secrets. Not from each other. They can’t.”

She studied him even more closely, as if looking for some telltale sign somewhere on his clothes. Some giveaway stain. They hadn’t talked too much before.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll tell you the truth.”

“I wouldn’t expect any less from you.”

“I wasn’t in that bookstore to buy books. I went there to see if they had any of mine on the shelf.”

He didn’t understand at first, and then he beamed. “You’re a writer?”

“Indeed.” She immediately felt like a numbskull. “I mean, yeah. Yes, I’m a writer.”

“How many—”

“This is my first novel.”

“Where do you—”

“I get my ideas from life. Experiences like this one.”

“What’s the—”

“Title?” they said in unison.

“Strange on the Range,” she said. “It’s an occult western cooking mystery.”

“I heard women were writing more and more mystery novels,” he said.

“Have you read any?”

“I will now.”

“You really should. There are some great female mystery writers—Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Linda Barnes, Nancy Pickard . . .”

“You know these people?”

“I’ve met them at conventions.”

He sat back and grinned. “Neat! I know a real writer.”

Her smile was tentative. “I’m not sure it will change your life all that much.”

“Nonsense. You’ve changed it already.” He reached across the table and lightly touched the backs of both her hands. His fingers seemed to emit low-voltage electricity. “I’ve often thought of writing a book myself.”

She drew her hands back, cocked her head again the way she did. “Tell me something. You didn’t plan all this as a way to get to meet me so I could help you get published, did you?”

He looked flabbergasted. Actually stuck out a forefinger and crossed his heart. “Not a chance. Do people really do that?”

“More often than you’d think.”

“All I’ve done is thought about writing a book. I’d never attempt one.”

She appeared curious. “Why not?”

“Well, I guess because I’m not a writer. I mean, when did you know you were a writer?”

“I’ve always known.”

“Well, I’ve never known and don’t know now.”

“But you’d like to write.”

“Well, somewhat.”

“Maybe you won’t know till you try.”

He laughed. “I wouldn’t even know how to try.”

She said, “I have an apartment full of books that teach people how to write.” The words had come from her mouth automatically. She was embarrassed now, wishing desperately that she could snatch them back.

His hands were touching her again. He said, “The least I can do is look at them.” He shrugged. “Who knows, I might be another Nancy Paretsky.”

“Anything’s possible,” Honor said. “Maybe we’ll even solve that mystery you asked about.”

“Mystery?”

“Was Shakespeare a phony?”

“You probably could tell me more than your books about that.”

“If you asked the right questions, maybe.” She felt the blood rush to her face and hoped he didn’t notice. She sipped some more coffee as a diversion.

“You could show me what questions to ask,” he said.

“I’m no expert on the bard,” she said.

“I wouldn’t know the difference.”

Honor flipped a mental coin, knowing even as she did so that it was the same on both sides.

“I’m only a few blocks from here,” she said.

The killer knew where she lived but decided not to mention that. No reason for her to know he’d followed her home one evening. He’d even thought, momentarily, of paying her a visit. But he’d known the time wasn’t right.

He left a tip and they walked from the coffee shop. She noticed he had a black leather case, almost like a purse, slung by its strap over a shoulder. It must have been out of sight beneath the table.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“It’s sometimes called a European wallet.” In truth he’d seen such cases called that only in an advertisement. “Or a man purse.” He grinned over at her. “I prefer ‘European wallet.’ ”

“I kind of like man purse,” she said. And she did. She liked a man who dared to be different. “What do you keep in it?”

“Oh, just things that I use.”

“For what?” she asked coyly.

“This and that.”

“Like maybe staying the night someplace and still being able to have a fresh shirt and shave?”

“That, too,” he said, and felt to make sure the black leather flap was locked.