Текст книги "Slaughter"

Автор книги: John Lutz

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

11

“About half an hour before the fire in the Village,” Renz said, “there was a similar fire uptown.”

It was the next morning, and he and Quinn were in World Famous Diner on Amsterdam, having coffee and doughnuts. Renz had a large red napkin tucked under his chin so as not to get powdered sugar on his Ralph Lauren tie, tan silk suit jacket, or white shirt. Quinn could see the tiny roughness of sugar on the part of the shirt that showed, like lumps of something under a recent snowfall. Probably all the sugar would drop onto Renz’s pants when he stood up.

“Coincidence?” he asked Renz.

Renz shook his head, causing sugar to drop from his napkin to somewhere beneath table level. “Diversion. Same arsonist.”

“How do we know that?”

“The fire was in a dry cleaners only a few blocks from a firehouse. It didn’t get a chance to burn very long before the FDNY arrived in full force and extinguished the flames.”

“Start with an incendiary device?” Quinn asked.

“Yesh,” Renz said around a mouthful of chocolate-iced doughnut. “Alsho an alarm clock timer. The firebug didn’t splash a lot of flammable liquid—probably plain old gasoline—around the place. Enough, though, that the blackened clock didn’t yield any prints or anything else. It was the same kind of job as down in the Village, only on a smaller scale. Like a warm-up as well as a diversion that would rob the larger conflagration of firefighters and equipment.”

“Any casualties?”

“None.”

“Same amateur touch?”

“Oh, yes. Almost certainly the same arsonist. It was almost like a practice run.”

Quinn sipped from his white coffee mug. “Witnesses?”

“Not of any value. One guy in the building across the street claimed he saw somebody or something running from the fire about an hour before it even began to look like a fire.”

Hope moved in Quinn’s heart. Not a lot of hope, because he knew how much an eyewitness report from someone glimpsing something from a window across the street was worth.

“He just got a quick look, doesn’t know if there’s any connection with the fire. But the guy was moving fast, as if trying to get away from the area without drawing a lot of attention to himself.”

“You think this witness is worth talking to?” Quinn asked.

“Definitely.”

“Small guy?”

Renz stared at him. “Yeah. Somebody else see him?”

“Maybe somebody downtown.” Quinn looked into his coffee mug, as if for answers, found only questions. “Anything else your witness notice about the uptown guy?”

“That suggests he was also the Village firebug?” Renz glanced around as if to make sure they wouldn’t be overheard. No one else was in the diner except for three teenage girls giggling in a back booth, and a bearded guy at the counter almost embracing a mug of coffee as if he wished it were booze. “There is one thing,” Renz said. “The witness said the firebug’s ears stuck out.”

Quinn was interested. “Both ears?”

“I asked him that question,” Renz said. “He told me he doesn’t know. Might have been only one ear, pointed as it was.”

“Pointed?”

“Yeah. It stuck out and was pointed on top.” Renz took a huge bite of doughnut and chewed. “Newswoman called the firebug a gremlin, maybe because of the ears.”

“Leprechauns’ ears stick out, too,” Quinn said. Not actually knowing.

“But they don’t plant bombs,” Renz said. “They’re too busy looking for rainbows and pots of gold.” He swallowed masticated doughnut. Quinn could hear his esophagus working to get the doughy mass down.

“If they want to give this guy a tag,” Quinn said, “the Gremlin is as good as any.”

“I guess,” Renz said. “I wonder who thought it up?” He smiled like a croissant.

12

Iowa, 1991

Jordan Kray’s twelfth birthday hadn’t been mentioned except for the traditional birthday spanking, which was expertly applied to his buttocks and upper thighs with a leather whip. The flesh hadn’t been broken but was raised with fiery welts that would sting for hours. He didn’t think he’d sleep at all tonight.

His twin brother, Kent, hadn’t minded his birthday at all. He was given a Timex watch and allowed to stay up and watch television. Their father had told him it was for work done around the house and small farm, work that was seldom done by Jordan. Kent and Jordan’s mother smilingly agreed while she wielded the whip and her husband watched, fondling himself.

It was a fairly normal night for the Krays, while five-year-old Nora slept peacefully in her bed in the far bedroom. Kent had told Jordan he’d heard their mother and father talking about moving Nora in with him and sending Jordan to Nora’s shoebox-size room. Alice and Jason—their mother and father—had talked about moving different kinds of equipment into the room with Jordan, but Kent, overhearing this, had no idea what they were planning.

Whipping required exertion, and Alice stopped and stepped back, breathing hard.

“Leave yourself alone and use this for a while,” she said, tossing Jason the coiled whip.

Jason obeyed, but didn’t whip hard. Jordan knew this wasn’t an act of kindness; his father was simply more interested in other things. Kent lay on his stomach, pretending sleep while facing the wall.

Jordan knew his brother was the better looking of the twins. His features were even and he resembled his mother, with her bold features and curly hair. Jordan had small, pinched features, and one of his ears stood straight out like an open car door and was kind of pointed. This, along with his diminutive size even for his age, lent him an elfin quality that would stay with him the rest of his life. The other ear—his left—stuck out a little and wasn’t pointed. The midwife who’d delivered the twins had learned from the firstborn, Jordan, who was a few minutes older than his twin, that identical twins weren’t alike in every respect. The protruding, pointed ear seemed to become even larger and more pointed after a schoolyard bully held Jordan in a headlock and rubbed the side of his face over and over on concrete. It was decided that Jordan had started the fight.

Kent tried to explain to his mother that the accusers were lying, but Jordan received a harder than usual whipping, and was made to stand in a corner for yelping and waking up Nora.

A week later Jordan tried to change the oil in the car but confused it with transmission fluid. He enjoyed working on things mechanical, large and small. He had a driving curiosity. Jordan liked to think that anything he took apart he could reassemble. He was as wrong as he was confident, but that didn’t stop him from tinkering.

He saved his money and bought a model airplane he had to construct by hand. When it was finished, it looked more like a Russian MIG than the sleek American Saber Jet pictured on the box. When he tried to glide it, the plane looped and then nosed hard into the ground. He would have rebuilt it and tried again, only his father stomped on the plane, laughed, and said he’d thought it was a big bug.

That was how Jordan’s childhood went, except for his dreams where he went to hide. Except for his nighttime hours of lying in the silence and thinking until early morning, when he was forced to get up and do his chores before walking down to the road and waiting for the school bus.

Kent sometimes walked with him, but usually had been sent on before Jordan. Nora, too young for school, lay dozing in her crib and was treated like a princess.

Jordan knew she wouldn’t always be treated like a princess. Sometimes he found himself looking forward to that and felt guilty.

He was thirteen when he came upon an old Movie Spotlight magazine that was mostly pages of beautiful women posed various ways in various skimpy costumes. Some of the women Jordan was familiar with, like Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan. Others were more his friends’ grandfathers’ age; Sophia Loren and Ava Gardner. Others had names that were only vaguely familiar.

Jordan turned a page and was surprised to see a photo of a man. Bing Crosby. Jordan knew he had been a singer and a movie star—had been famous for some time. There was a black-and-white photo of Crosby leaning on the fender of a car. A newer photo, in color, had him leaning on a tree and looking straight at the camera. He was, in fact, looking straight at the camera in both photos. In the earlier one, his ears stood straight out, not so unlike Jordan’s. In the newer, color photo, his ears were almost flat against his head. Beneath both photos was the caption “Bing’s Secret.”

Jordan read the accompanying short text. It seemed that Crosby’s ears did stick out, but there was this tape that was sticky on both sides that the movie star used when he was in front of the camera. Supposedly, Clark Gable used it, too.

Jordan couldn’t help but smile. If famous people used the special tape, he shouldn’t be embarrassed by his ears. He could find where the tape was sold and buy a roll.

He stood before the bathroom mirror, holding both ears back with his forefingers.

Yes, it made a difference.

He was almost as handsome as Kent.

He got a role of white adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet, and unrolled about an inch of tape, tore it off the roll, and then doubled it so it was sticky on both sides. He tried it on his right ear.

It worked for a few seconds, then the ear pulled lose and sprang out from his skull.

When he attempted to tear off another piece of tape, the metal and cardboard spool came apart. That and the roll of tape flew from his grasp and clattered to the tile floor.

The door opened. His mother. She looked at him, then at the clutter on the floor.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked.

Jordan was too surprised and frightened to reply.

She grabbed him by the right ear, squeezing hard, and walked him out of the bathroom. He could feel tears streaming down his cheeks.

His father was standing in the hall, holding a sheet of newspaper—the sports page. “What the hell you catch him doing?” he asked Jordan’s mother. “Jerking off again?”

“Who knows or cares?” his mother said. She released his ear and slapped him hard on the left side of his face. His cheek burned.

“What’d he break now?” his father asked. “Was he taking that tape dispenser apart?” He clucked his tongue at Jordan. “You ever see anything you didn’t wanna take apart and screw up?”

Jordan knew when not to answer.

His mother shoved him toward the bedroom, scraping his bare elbow against the wall. “I’ll take care of him.”

Jordan’s father studied Jordan’s face, which Jordan studied to control, and then shook his head. “You really do need to learn to behave.”

“I’ll teach him.” Another push toward the bedroom. His mother and father’s room.

There was motion off to the side, and Kent peeked around the corner. His face paled. “What’s goin’ on?”

His mother glared at him, and he pulled back and disappeared.

The noise had awakened Nora, who screamed in her crib.

“I’ll take care of her,” Jordan’s mother said, “soon as I’m done with you.”

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Jordan’s father said.

She laughed at her husband and looked at him a certain way, until he turned away from her.

13

New York, the present

“Have a nice night, Margaret.”

The woman, Margaret, returned the good wishes of the man in the suit and tie who had come out of the office building she had just left. A fellow worker drone, no doubt.

Jordan watched her as she crossed the street at the signal. How could she move that way? The precision of her stride, the rhythmic sway of her hips, the swing of her free arm with its opposite resting lightly on the purse that was supported by a leather strap slung over her shoulder. Why wasn’t she like the other women he saw every day? How was she different?

Whatever the answers to those questions, he knew it was fate and not chance that had brought them together. And that would bring them ever closer to each other.

She descended the steps to a subway platform without losing her distinctive rhythmic gait that was almost a dance. He followed her down the narrow concrete steps.

Jordan observed her from farther down the platform. She was looking away from him, idly watching and waiting for the push of cool air and the gleam of lights that meant a subway train was coming. While she was momentarily distracted, he wandered along the platform toward where she was standing. Her hand tightened on her purse strap, as if she wanted to be sure she wouldn’t lose her bag in the rush of riders leaving the train, and those traveling in her direction to board.

The train, a dragon of gray metal and reflective glass, roared before them and appeared for a moment that it was going to speed past and keep going. Then, with a screaming of steel on steel, it slowed rapidly and smoothly almost to a halt. It stopped and sat quietly. It was the 1 train, headed downtown, and like everyone on board, it had rules to obey.

Those waiting to board pressed forward. The woman, Margaret, had to assert herself and back up a step so she remained behind the yellow line. One of the pneumatic doors had stopped exactly in front of her and then hissed open. She was one of the first to board as the flow of passengers both ways met and then broke into two distinct lines, moving in opposite directions.

Jordan was near a door in the same car, only farther down the platform. He stepped inside just as the door was about to close.

There were no seats, so he stood with several others in the crowded car, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He could see Margaret seated near the door she had entered.

By the time the train stopped at West 42nd Street, in the theater district, it had taken on more passengers, and Jordan had to crane his neck now and then to catch sight of her.

There she was, standing up and edging toward the door.

He pushed toward her, using his elbows. Someone in the crowded car elbowed him back, but he ignored it. A little pain was a tonic to the system, as his mother had often told him.

He left the subway behind and followed Margaret toward the concrete steps leading to the sidewalk. As she pushed through a black iron revolving gate that looked designed to eat people, she didn’t glance back, but he doubted if she’d recognize him anyway. He’d let his hair grow, and it was combed back like dark wings over his ears.

Soon they surfaced into the loud, warm night. The sidewalk was almost as crowded as the subway, and he stayed close behind her.

After a block, she cut down a side street that was a mix of businesses, most of them restaurants, and residences. Some of the old brick and brownstone buildings had been subdivided into apartments. A few of them looked vacant.

Margaret paused in the glare of a streetlight, in front of a dentist’s office. She rummaged about in her purse until she found what looked like a key ring, then continued to the stoop of the next building. As she went up the steps, he watched her, mesmerized, listening to the clack of her high heels on the concrete steps. The rhythm and precision of her movements captivated him. The click and clack and sway and roll and rhythm and click and clack had a hypnotic effect on him that he couldn’t understand but must.

As she entered the building through an oversized oak door, he resisted a glance to the side.

He walked past her building and continued down the street, but he used his ballpoint pen to write her address on the palm of his left hand.

He pressed hard enough to make the hand bleed.

Margaret Evans stood leaning with her back pressed against the inside of her apartment door to the hall. She knew the man had been following her, picked up on the fact when she’d gotten on the subway and noticed him waiting, then timing his movements as he entered the same subway car before the doors closed and the train moved away.

It wasn’t all that unusual in Margaret’s life that a man might follow her to see where she was going. Usually they were harmless. Lonely guys killing time and looking for something to do. Dreamers who moved in her wake, waiting for their dreams to come true. With those guys, they were mostly too timid to approach her. Her late aunt Clara had told her more than once that women had little idea of the power they held over men. Men didn’t know it either, but were moved by it, sometimes even believing that they were the agents of change.

“You’re beautiful and will grow up to be even more beautiful,” her aunt had said. “You’re special and will have to understand more about men, how one day you are their friend and the next day their goddess.”

Clara had been dead for three years now. Margaret wished she’d listened more to what her aunt had said. There was a lot that the pancreatic cancer had cut short, or Margaret would have understood more about what made her special, and more about men. Such as why they sometimes need to destroy their goddesses.

Margaret was sure she’d never before seen the man who’d followed her to her apartment building. And probably he’d never seen her.

But sometimes, as Clara said, it was all in a look, or a certain movement in a certain light. Or . . . who knew what else? A person could glimpse another through a bus window and be in love for life.

Or something like love.

Jordan couldn’t get Margaret out of his mind. She was a mystery he had to explore. He pushed her away from his thoughts. There would be time for her. He would make time.

A mist closed in on him as he walked. Soon it became a light drizzle. He walked faster, then turned up his collar and broke into a jog. At the end of the block he turned left and climbed steps to the porch of a white-stone and brownstone building and went inside to a small foyer. A long, narrow stairwell ran to the second floor. Jordan climbed the stairs quickly, then stood before the single door at the top of the steps.

He waited for a count of fifty, then knocked on the door, as instructed. He didn’t look up at the camera mounted at a downward angle near the ceiling.

“Come in,” a woman’s voice said, almost bored.

He opened the door and stepped inside, aware of a scent of jasmine. The woman was sitting in a chair near the foot of a bed. Something had been done to extend the chair’s legs to make them longer. The chair resembled a throne. The tall, lean woman in black leather, seated calmly in the chair, brought to mind royalty and authority.

“Have you behaved yourself since we last met?” she asked.

“No, I have not.”

They both smiled.

“Go to my closet and open it,” she said. “Hanging on the back of the closet door is a whip. Bring it to me.”

Jordan obeyed.

14

Renz dropped by the Q&A office with what he described as new information. He drew a plain brown folder from his recently acquired calfskin attaché case, and plopped it on Quinn’s desk in front of Quinn.

“Lab come up with something new?” Quinn asked.

“In a way. Those five women who were among the dead in the Off the Road fire. Two of them were in bathtubs and weren’t killed by the flames.”

Quinn leaned back in his desk chair, listening to its familiar squeal, and holding a pen lightly level with the thumb and index fingers of both hands, as if taking a measurement. “What? Did they fill the tubs with water so they might submerge holding their breath and wait the fire out?” Quinn had seen this attempted, ten years ago, and recalled that it hadn’t worked. The victims who thought they might find enough time to submerge and let the fire rage over and past them had been boiled alive. He experienced a vivid memory with an image that still haunted him. One of the boiled, a woman, hanging halfway out of the bathtub, her hair reduced to white ash, her eye sockets hollowed by the flames.

“You thinking about that Clovis Hotel fire?” Renz asked Quinn, which jolted Quinn. That was exactly the fire that was occupying his mind. Renz, a younger, slightly slimmer Renz, had also been at the Clovis fire.

“I think about it from time to time,” Quinn said.

Renz emitted a low, guttural laugh. “Some of those victims, you could stick a fork in ’em and serve ’em at a fancy restaurant. Tell the diners it was gourmet fare. You ever heard of lamb amirstan?”

“No,” Quinn said, “and I don’t want to.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Renz said, leaning forward and sliding about a dozen sheets of paper out onto Quinn’s desk blotter. “Helen and a police sketch artist created this.”

Quinn looked at a detailed drawing of the suspect in the Off the Road and crosstown dry cleaners fires, keying off the scant eyewitness accounts. Staring back at Quinn from the sketch pad was a man, slender judging by his neck and shoulders, who was quite handsome until a certain something came through. His pinched features were faintly rodent-like. The effect was enhanced by an oversized, pointed right ear that jutted almost straight out from his head. It gave the man a kind of intense feral look, which lent his elfin features a sinister air. He seemed halfway between a leprechaun and a gargoyle. A small, blithe spirit of evil that tinkered and turned mishap into catastrophe. A gremlin.

“DNA samples are still being worked up, but so far blood taken out of the pipes beneath the tub drains provides no conclusive evidence that the Off the Road and Clovis Hotel fires were set by the same person.”

Quinn laid the photos and sketch on his desk.

He said, “Something’s wrong here.”

“I see it,” Renz said. “The drainpipes under the bathtubs were clogged with blood. Some of the bathtub victims weren’t burned to death or died from smoke inhalation. They were tortured to death while their blood ran down so thick it clogged the drains.”

“It looks like the killer did his routine on both hotels.” Quinn could imagine the women lying awkwardly in the bathtubs, losing blood and so losing the strength to resist. They probably knew they wouldn’t leave the bathtubs alive, but assumed they were going to drown.

When the killer was finished with what he’d come to do, he probably left in a way he’d planned, careful not to be caught in his own trap of flames and smoke. The victims would have been too weak to claw their way up and climb out of the tubs. They probably kept trying harder and harder as the water kept getting hotter and hotter. Each of their attempts to escape would have been more feeble than the previous ones. Then the smells of charring flesh, the hopeless screams. The boiling.

Then silence except for the crackling of the flames.

Quinn looked up from the material on his desk. On the other side of the desk, Renz sat staring at him.

Quinn got up and crossed the office to a cabinet, which he unlocked. He withdrew a bottle of Jameson’s and poured two fingers into a couple of on-the-rocks glasses. He didn’t add ice or water before carrying the two glasses back to his desk, setting one on the blotting pad, and handing the other glass to Renz.

Renz tossed down most of his drink in a series of gulps.

Quinn sipped his drink slowly, thinking things over.