Текст книги "Frenzy"

Автор книги: John Lutz

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

5

New York, the present

When Andria Bell opened the door of her suite in the Fairchild Hotel in New York, she expected maid service or a bellhop. Instead, she found herself face-to-face with the worst thing she could have imagined.

She’d seen the man talking to Grace in the Museum of Modern Art earlier that day, and there’d been something about the way he was looking at Grace, the subtle smile, the lean of his body toward hers, that suggested predator and prey.

And here was the predator at her door.

Still standing in the hotel hall, he looked beyond Andria. She saw a quick movement of his head and darting of his eyes, to make sure they were alone.

His eyes.

The predator again.

Then he showed her a gun, which he drew out from beneath his light jacket that was still spotted with rain from the drizzle outside.

It was a stubby gun of the sort operated with both hands, and it had what Andria had heard referred to as a banana clip. An automatic rifle, she believed. Rat-a-tat-tat. . .

She knew little about guns, but she understood that the carnage could be astounding.

Andria had never had a gun pointed at her. She taught art, not war. Her legs went rubbery as she stared into the black hole at the end of the muzzle. It was hypnotic, the way the gun’s dark bore seemed like an eye gazing back at her with malicious meaning.

She retreated as if in a trance when the man pushed his way in and closed the door softly behind him. He raised a forefinger to his smiling lips in a signal—a warning—for her to remain silent. Then he clicked the gun onto a clasp on his belt so it dangled pointed forward. He smiled with his head cocked to the side, and shrugged while displaying turned up palms, as if to say, See. No problem here. Nothing to be scared of, lady.

And like that, he had her by the neck.

She knew immediately that she was in the hands of an expert, but it wasn’t a comforting thought. He knew exactly where to squeeze, and how hard. The room darkened, and Andria was aware that her hands had become fluttering, useless objects, as she clawed feebly at his iron fingers. She began to weaken, began losing consciousness. She knew she might never return to this world. This was it. The end of her life.

Her left hand closed on the gun and fumbled at it, played feebly with the immovable trigger to no avail. She had no mastery over her fingers. There would be a safety somewhere, but even if she found it she wouldn’t recognize what it was, wouldn’t be able to move it.

The darkness deepened.

Andria was aware that her assailant was still smiling at her, as if they were friends and this was pleasant discourse. He leaned in even closer to her and she smelled his fetid breath as he whispered, “Good-bye for a while . . .” He almost sang the words. She inanely thought the tune was the theme song of an old TV show.

His grip on her neck tightened painfully, and she became incredibly light-headed, as if she might rise like a balloon into a dark sky.

So this is how it is . . .

She became aware of movement, and as she lost consciousness saw that Grace had come in from the suite’s bedroom where the girls, her students, were watching TV before preparing to sleep on two double beds and a rollaway. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that left her midriff bare.

Grace . . . Grace . . . Grace . . .

Grace was standing frozen, her slender figure caught in an awkward pose, her wide blue gaze fixed in horror. Her right fist was raised to her mouth so that she was gnawing on a knuckle.

Andria had never seen anyone look so terrified.

As the darkness engulfed her, she felt that somehow she would remember Grace that way forever.

The killer unfastened his AK-47 from its belt clasp and kept it aimed at the thin blond girl from the museum. With careful conversational prodding, she’d told him all he needed to know—who the group was, why they were in the city, where they were staying.

The teacher leading the group was interesting, but not as much as the blond girl, Grace, who stood now in the doorway staring at him as if he were the tarantula at the party.

“Stay calm, Grace,” he said. “Remember me? We talked at the museum.”

“I remember,” she said in a barely audible tight voice. The throat tended to clench at times like this.

Grace had seen his face, so he had no choice other than to make her cease to exist. The killer really didn’t mind that there was no choice.

“Let’s go back into the bedroom,” he said. He tickled her navel with the tip of the gun barrel and made her gasp and bend at the waist.

“We’ll make it a kind of party.”

With the scary AK-47, the girls were easy to manage. Two of them lost control and dampness appeared in the crotches of their jeans. Those two should be the least likely to present problems. Fortunately, they all wore jogging shoes—recommended for walking around the concrete city—with long sturdy laces.

At his direction, Grace tied the wrists and ankles of her four friends tightly with their shoelaces, left lace for wrists, right for ankles. Then he tied Grace, and used the girls’ panties, which he stretched and sliced away from them, as gags that he stuffed tightly into their mouths. They could work such gags loose with their tongues after a few hours, but they didn’t have a few hours.

Well, maybe. He should make the most of this rare gift from fate.

After making sure the girls were all firmly bound, he began to remove his clothes.

Andria could see the clock by the bed, but it was blurry.

Not just the green numerals were blurry, but the entire clock.

How in God’s name . . .

Then the realization of where she was, how she’d gotten there, what had happened, fell on her like an avalanche. It was like waking up the morning after someone you knew and loved had unexpectedly died. At first the recollection wasn’t real—then it was way too real.

My girls! My God, what’s happened to my girls?

Andria was on her back and still couldn’t move. Her throat was burning as if she’d swallowed acid, and her breath was ragged and loud.

She fixed her gaze again on the clock, and the phone next to it.

She had to get to that phone.

The clock’s liquid-diode figures did come into focus. Forty-eight minutes had passed since the killer had entered the suite.

He’s probably gone. Thought I was dead and left. Please make him be gone!

Andria rolled onto her left side, marveling at how every inch of her body ached. It took her almost ten minutes, but she managed to maneuver herself onto her hands and knees.

Where should she go now?

The door? The bedroom? The phone?

“There you are,” he said pleasantly. As if he’d momentarily misplaced her.

At the sound of his voice she dropped to her side again, drew her body into the fetal position, and squeezed her eyes shut.

“I’m particularly interested in chatting with you.”

She heard soft footsteps on the carpet.

Opened her eyes.

There he was, nude except for white rubber gloves, smiling, holding a large knife in his right hand. There was blood on the knife. There was blood on him.

“I was sure you could be brought around again by now,” he said, “but you made it back so fast on your own. That shows real determination. You should be proud.”

He came closer, and she saw that he had something in his left hand. It looked like a wad of shoelaces.

“C’mon over here,” he said, and bent and lifted her as if she were weightless. He was careful not to penetrate her with the knife.

She tried to scream but could only croak.

“Careful,” he said. “We wouldn’t want you to lose your voice completely.”

He laid her on her back on the hard walnut coffee table, then used the shoelaces to bind her arms and legs to the four table legs. Her head was off the table, lolling backward. She couldn’t control it. Her neck muscles were putty.

Like the rest of her. Painful putty.

He sat on the sofa by the table, leaned forward, and showed her the large, bloody knife. She saw that it had a yellowed bone handle.

“We need to talk,” he said. With surprising ease, he used the bloody knife to cut button after button from her blouse. “The only way you can get out of this mess is to talk your way out of it.” There went the front of her slacks. Then her panties. The sharp knife blade so close to her flesh. “You’ll need to tell me the truth. That won’t be as difficult as you might imagine. What they say about the truth setting you free . . . well, it’s true. At least in this case.”

She knew he was lying, but she wanted so much to believe him. His words were her only hope, and she couldn’t help but cling to them. That was the way it worked. He knew that.

The bastard knows that!

He also knows he doesn’t have the vital truth.

He’d heard part of what he wanted to know from Grace, at MoMA. Grace could tell him part because that was all she knew, all that Andria had told her. But Grace had revealed where the rest of the story might be found—with Andria.

Andria and the killer both understood that, at this point, understanding how fear and hope would work against her didn’t make much difference. He was sure she had a truth to trade, and they both knew that in exchange for even the slightest chance to live, she would trade it.

And he would renege.

6

“The maid came in this morning and found them,” New York Police Commissioner Harley Renz said. “I figured this was one for you.”

Former homicide captain Frank Quinn, now with his own investigative agency, Quinn and Associates Investigations (Q&A), simply nodded. His old friend and enemy the commissioner sometimes contracted Q&A in work-for-hire arrangements with the NYPD. Quinn was perfect to lead especially sensitive and perilous investigations. Cases that might do political harm to the ambitious and avidly unscrupulous commissioner.

Quinn did recognize that Harley Renz harbored a twisted kind of honesty. He not only ass-kissed and blackmailed his way up the bureaucratic ladder, he was proud of it. In fact, he cheerfully bragged about his abhorrent behavior, rolled in and reveled in his corruption.

Greed of every sort had helped to make Renz fifty pounds overweight. He was wearing his artfully tailored commissioner’s uniform this morning, knowing there’d be plenty of photographs and maybe a TV spot. The pink flesh of his neck ballooned over his stiff white shirt collar, lending him multiple chins.

Quinn, though he was the same age as Renz, was still lean and muscular, with a face so homely it was handsome, and unruly straight brown hair parted at the side. He appeared as if he needed a haircut, even immediately after a haircut. With his height, broad shoulders, plate-sized rough hands, and nose broken one time more than it had been set, he came across as a thug. Until you took a second look into his steady green eyes, at the intelligence that lived there. Intelligence and something else that most people didn’t want to look at too closely.

“They were all killed the same way,” a nasty nasal voice said. It belonged to Dr. Julius Nift, the medical examiner. He was a short, fashion plate of a man, best described as Napoleonic. He used some sort of a shiny steel instrument to poke at the end girl on the bed, a slender redhead who looked about sixteen years old. Most of all the girls’ clothes had been cut away, some of the remnants used to cover where their throats had been cut, to minimize arterial blood being splashed around during their death throes. “Same knife, and probably its point was used for the torture leading up to their deaths.”

“Same knife used to slice the initials in their foreheads?” Quinn asked. The letters D.O.A. had been neatly carved into the foreheads of all the victims.

“Don’t know for sure, but probably.”

“Old friend of yours,” Renz said to Quinn, and just like that Quinn was back at the lake in Maine, listening to—feeling—the reverberation of a rifle shot.

The scar where the bullet had ripped into the right side of his back began to burn, as it often did when he thought of that day at the lake. Unfinished business. It drove a man like Quinn. He often revisited Creighton Lake in his memory.

Memory was a powerful engine that drove him. He would never forget, but there was one way to lessen the pain.

“My dead friend, we hope,” he said. “This could be a copycat killer, a secret admirer.”

Nift glanced at the row of dead, all-but-nude young women. “He left the good parts alone, anyway.”

Quinn felt a surge of anger but pushed it away. It was Nift’s impulse to try getting under people’s skin. “What about the victim in the other room?” Quinn asked. “Why was she tied down on the coffee table?”

“Maybe the killer just ran out of room on the bed,” Renz said.

“No,” Quinn said. “She got special attention.”

Nift was grinning at him lewdly. “You have a good eye.” There were stories about Nift, about his attitude toward the dead. Especially if they’d been attractive women. Quinn thought some of the stories were probably true. “She was older, too,” Nift said.

“Thirty-seven,” Renz said. “According to her Ohio driver’s license.”

“You got all the IDs?” Quinn asked.

“Yeah. The special one on the table was Andria Bell. She was chaperone and guide for the others. The young girls were art students at some academy in Cleveland.”

“Andria was an artist?”

“A teacher, anyway.” Renz propped his fists on his hips and shook his head in dismay. “Damn it all. Those young girls, never had much of a chance to get to know life. Imagine how the news media’s gonna be all over this mess. High school yearbook photos of those girls, beautiful and smiling. Interviews with the families. Awkward questions. The media assholes will pull out all the stops.”

“Why shouldn’t they?” Quinn said.

“Oh, no reason in the world. The bastards are doing exactly what I’d do. Only there’s only one of me. They’re like a pack of wild dogs, gonna ravage everything and everybody in the way of a juicy story. A police commissioner who can’t catch a killer who’s like a local Richard Speck who’s been on vacation, and now he’s back. Now there’s a story. All it needs is some poor sacrificial schmuck to rip to pieces on news programs and in the papers.”

“There are five dead women here,” Harley said. “Plus we’ve got two killed in Maine, plus at least four in New York prior to Maine. And you’re feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Isn’t that just the point? I’m still alive.”

And still wants to be mayor someday.

Quinn pushed the thought from his mind. He knew Renz was right. The voracious New York news media would make the most of what was a sensational story anyway. The dead women would get more than their fifteen minutes of fame, and then, except for the memories of those who’d loved them, they would be forgotten.

He looked around at the carnage. “Any computers?”

“If there were any,” Renz said, “the killer took them with him. But that’s doubtful.”

“Why?”

“Everybody here has an iPhone, or something like one. Damned things are like little computers themselves.”

Renz gave Quinn a steady look with his flesh-padded eyes. The commissioner has a busy day ahead of him, the look said. It was time to make it official. “Are you on this one, Quinn? Usual arrangement?”

“Yes and yes,” Quinn said. No hesitation.

“It’s yours, then. Keep me apprised, and I’ll handle the media unless I tell you otherwise.”

So I can take the serious media shots and be blamed for every day the killer isn’t caught. “Of course,” Quinn said. He’d known the second he saw the letters carved on the victims’ foreheads that this was his case, whatever the painful memories and dark deceptions.

He’d been chosen, and not only by Renz.

Renz moved toward the door. “I’ll get the papers to you to sign. And appoint some kind of liaison.”

Quinn nodded.

Liaison. Another word for informer. Just what Quinn needed.

A man in white coveralls appeared in the doorway. The crime scene unit had arrived. Usually they arrived at crime scenes about the same time as the ME. Quinn wondered if Renz had purposely delayed them so Quinn could get a better look at the victims. Make him really want this case. Quinn knew that was the way Renz thought. Always there was more than one reason for whatever he did.

“Where’s Pearl?” Nift asked. Working the love-hate thing they had going but without the love.

“She’ll be here,” Quinn said. “It’d be a good idea if you were gone by then.”

Nift grinned. He was too insensitive to scare. “A threat?”

“Yeah. You’d be surprised what Pearl’s capable of if you piss her off.”

There was something to that, and Nift knew it. He began putting away his instruments in a compartment of his black valise where they’d be separated from those that were still sterile. “Tell Pearl I said hello. I’m done here, anyway. Got a hot date with all these beautiful ladies, down at the morgue.” He shrugged. “Well, not so hot.”

Quinn didn’t bother answering.

“Let’s get some breakfast,” Renz said. “Let the CSU do its thing without us in the way.”

“I already ate breakfast,” Nift said.

“Good,” Quinn and Renz said simultaneously.

Nift didn’t seem to notice their obvious gratefulness that he wouldn’t be joining them.

“One thing,” Quinn said. “I want any iPhones, regular cell phones, or anything else that’s tech, set aside for Jerry Lido.”

Lido was the alcoholic but brilliant tech analyst for Q&A.

“No problem,” Renz said. “So let’s go get some waffles.”

“I’m gonna wait for Pearl,” Quinn said.

“Soon as the CSU people and photographer give the word, I’ll send these dead folks to the morgue,” Nift said. “If that’s how you wanna do it.”

“That’s how,” Quinn said. He’d looked enough at the dead women.

“Or I could wait around for Pearl with you,” Nift said.

Quinn gave him a look. “I think not,” he said.

He went outside with Renz and watched the corpulent and corrupt commissioner lower himself into the back of his personal limo. Watched as the long black vehicle drove to the end of the cordoned-off block. A uniform moved a blue wooden sawhorse to make room for the limo to glide through and continue on its way.

Quinn stood in the sunlight and leaned against the stone face of the Fairchild Hotel, waiting for Pearl.

He thought about the D.O.A. initials carved in the victims’ foreheads. The same bloody initials had been the “signature” of the infamous D.O.A. killer who’d murdered four young women in Manhattan two years ago.

That killer was the one that had flown away from Quinn. Had shot him and left him for dead beside a lake in Maine. And then died himself when his plane went down.

That had been the assumption.

Now the killer—or a copycat—was back. That was why Renz was so sure Quinn would take the case. That Quinn would jump at it.

With Renz the case was political. With Quinn it was personal.

Quinn caught familiar movement among the knot of pedestrians crossing with the signal down at the corner. He pushed away from the sun warmed stone wall and his day immediately brightened.

Here came Pearl.

Pearl saw Quinn right away, standing in front of the Fairchild Hotel. When she strode closer to him, she could see the look on his face, and she knew why it was there and what it meant. It took a lot to make Quinn look like that. Like a Mt. Rushmore figure only pissed off.

She’d heard what was upstairs in the hotel. And she knew what it would mean to Quinn. “The last time you and this killer met, he almost made you one of his victims,” she said.

“Almost,” Quinn said.

“I don’t want that to happen,” Pearl said.

Quinn smiled. “Neither do I.”

“Would it do any good to beg you not to get involved with this killer again?”

“In all honesty, no,” he said. And then, “I’m sorry.”

She knew that he was. Which made her want to curse him and cling to him and kiss him all at the same time. “You know you’re obsessive,” she said.

“Persevering.”

“Obsessive.”

“You’ve been talking to Renz.”

“Of course I have. He doesn’t mind if you get yourself killed.”

“More than you might think.”

Pearl felt herself approaching the point where frustration would become ire. Men! she thought. Some men!

“I’m going upstairs to the crime scene,” she said.

For a second she thought he was going to advise her against that, for her own good. Forbid it, in fact. But he knew her better than that.

“Nift is still up there,” he said.

“So are maggots.”

“Pearl . . .”

“Screw Nift.”

Pearl pushed through the tinted glass revolving door, somehow not missing a step, as if dancing in concert with its myriad moving images.

She noticed how cool the lobby was.

Like the morgue.