Chill of Night n-6

by John Lutz

  “Six so far,” Tina said. “New Yorkers are getting frightened.”

  “Or the media wants us to see it that way.” Martin sipped the vodka martini he’d brought with him out to the balcony. The greed and paranoia of the media were subjects he could talk on for hours.

  “Anybody who’s served as jury foreperson in the past ten years has reason to worry,” Tina told him.

  “Only if the defendant got off in court, but was convicted in the media.”

  “That list of forepersons could include a lot of people.”

  Martin smiled. “It includes me, counselor.”

  “I don’t find it particularly amusing,” Tina said. She didn’t like it when Martin called her counselor. It was as if he had little respect for her profession.

  An emergency siren sounded far below, a police car or ambulance shrieking protest at the uncooperative traffic.

  “You worry too much,” Martin said, reaching across the glass-topped table and squeezing Tina’s delicate hand. He was careful not to squeeze too hard; his wife was one of those women addicted to rings, and wore three on each hand.

  “You haven’t met some of my clients.”

  “You get them off,” Martin said. “Sometimes when they don’t deserve to walk.”

  “They all deserve legal representation.” This was a discussion Tina and Martin had almost worn out.

  Martin released Tina’s hand and leaned back in his chair. He wished she’d practice some other form of law. Four months after his acquittal, ten years ago, the acquitted Maddox had pushed a woman into the path of an oncoming subway train. It had shaken Martin’s faith in the legal system, his faith in the world. He’d felt responsible for the woman’s death, and for six months he was clinically depressed. He was in analysis for years. Even as he and his fellow jurors had voted Maddox out of legal jeopardy and back onto the streets, they’d strongly suspected he was a killer.

  But “suspected” wasn’t enough. The defendant’s confession had definitely been made under duress, and was disallowed by the judge, who’d had no choice. So the jurors voted to acquit, because they had no choice.

  That was what his doctors had finally gotten Martin to realize: he’d had no choice. It was the system.

  Martin brushed back the long hair over his ears as a high breeze washed over the balcony. A week after the trial, he’d phoned the tiny, dark-haired juror he’d so admired in the assembly room and asked her for a date. Their relationship had developed into love, and she stayed at his side throughout his troubles. She’d somehow realized in the beginning what it had taken Martin over a year to understand.

  Six years ago they were married. Tina had attended law school and become an attorney, while Martin continued to regain his mental equilibrium. It had been a step by step, painful passage, but Martin made the journey. He had moved on with his business career, with his life. Day by day, he’d built a better world for himself.

  Now old wounds were being probed, but he refused to acknowledge any pain. He really did understand that the system and not the jury had freed Maddox. Martin Portelle, personally, was not responsible for Maddox after Maddox walked free from the courtroom.

  Martin had to smile again as he sipped his martini. Tina had barely changed since he’d first laid eyes on her almost ten years ago, and here they were, still thinking about discussing the late Dan Maddox. Like a time machine. Hell of a world, Martin thought, but if you kept scrapping, you got your reward. At least some people did.

  “I think you might be in danger,” Tina said.

  “From who? Maddox? He’s long gone.”

  “From somebody who loved his last victim.”

  “It’s been almost ten years, Tina.”

  “That might not seem long if you’ve lost someone you love. It might only seem like days, if you want vengeance.”

  “The killer we’re talking about wants justice. Or his idea of it.”

  Tina stroked her small, pointed chin, as she often did when she thought. “Justice? Did we play our role in trying to see that Maddox got justice?”

  “Yes. We did what we could.”

  “Does the Justice Killer know that?”

  I’m glad you don’t cross examine me in court. “I’m not sure. I’m not inside his mind, thank God. But I’ll put my faith in percentages. You said it yourself, if I’m in trouble, so are lots of other people. Tells you something about our justice system, doesn’t it?”

  Tina knew that it did, but she didn’t admit it.

  Like a good attorney, she changed the subject. Outwardly, anyway.

  If Martin only knew…

  Number six had been fun.

  The Justice Killer sat in a brown leather easy chair in his apartment, sipped Jack Daniels from the bottle, and looked at the window. It was nighttime and the window had become a mirror reflecting the room-an ordinary room, well decorated and well kept, with its traditional brown easy chair as the center of gravity.

  The man in the chair was not ordinary, nor did he want to be. He had a cause. A cause had him. A just cause.

  But now he also had doubts.

  Not doubts, actually, but a niggling discomfort.

  The unexpected had occurred. He couldn’t deny he’d enjoyed killing Beverly Baker.

  There had even been in the act an unanticipated sexual component. He recalled in vivid imagery her eyes when she’d noticed him in the mirror, the very instant when she understood that hope had run out and she was about to die. That was when her will turned to ice, when mind and body were frozen and there was no resistance.

  His time.

  Our time.

  Something, an arc of cold emotion and sacred knowledge, had passed between Beverly and her killer, something as true and old as hunter and prey. As old as the human race.

  You’re drunk.

  Am I?

  Not that drunk.

  He knew what his quest was also about, he begrudgingly admitted to himself. Not only life and death and retribution, not only justice-but power.

  He took a sip of bourbon. So what? Were power and justice necessarily separate entities? Certainly they were all of a piece. Ask any helpless defendant in a courtroom. And if the Justice Killer found titillation in his revenge, what substantive difference did it make?

  Why shouldn’t I enjoy it?

  He sipped his booze and let his mind chew on the question.

  His mind extrapolated. Why must he be bound by the conventions of the archetype serial killer? He certainly wasn’t typical.

  The problem was the judicial system-the callous, damaging, arrogant, heartless system that did not work-that he was attempting to change. And there was more than one way to change it. There was no reason why he shouldn’t expand his pool of potential victims beyond those who’d chaired juries. The ordinary jurors themselves were equally guilty of setting free the guilty. Their vote was their own. In a criminal trial, the guilty verdict had to be unanimous. But if the verdict was for acquittal, the jury was usually polled. How each juror voted was a matter of public record. For the purposes of the Justice Killer, simple jurors as well as forepersons were fair game. And the effects of such victims’ deaths would be much the same-perhaps even more potent. Fear times twelve.

  Many jurors, of course, were women.

  The Justice Killer raised his glass in a silent toast to the seated figure reflected in the window, and the toast was acknowledged.

  He was beginning to comprehend that in the world he lived in, on the far side of the law, beyond human abhorrence, he couldn’t expect to be understood. So be it. What did it matter? No one really understood anyone else, anyway. And in the world he had chosen for himself, there were advantages. There were no taboos, no walls, roadblocks, fences, rules or limits, because he decided what was moral and permissible. More and more he was realizing he had every right to enjoy the power that was his, and that anything was possible

  More and more.

  He leaned back in the soft chair and closed his eyes.
<
br />   And saw Beverly Baker’s terrified, resigned, and understanding eyes. Heard her silent, pleading voice that he had never heard: Get it over with! Do it! Do it!

  And smiled.

  Why shouldn’t I enjoy it?

  19

  St. Louis, 1988

  Justice seldom slept. His life had become as fragmented as his thoughts. Even if he took a sleeping pill, within a few hours he was awake, his mind darting and exploring like that of an insect confined in a matchbox. During the day, exhausted, he found himself dozing off when he least expected. Not only was it embarrassing, but the increasing lack of control he had over his life was terrifying. Time lost all but its literal meaning. Day was like night to him. Night became his day.

  He lay in the night beside April in the bedroom of their shabby south side apartment and wondered if they both might be better off dead. Overhead, a slow moving ceiling fan, almost invisible in shadow, ticked dreamily as it turned. His wife’s breathing was shallow and labored, and he couldn’t be sure what kind of drugs were in her body. She’d become devious in her addiction, lying to him skillfully, and artfully concealing her stash made up of old prescription vials and hoarded pills.

  How did it come to this? How did it happen? Will…

  Her breath caught like a blade in her throat and she woke suddenly, staring over at him as if surprised to find him beside her. Seeming, in fact, not to recognize him at first.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Why are you awake?” Her hair was wild, her tone accusatory.

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “You were watching me.”

  He propped himself up on an elbow, leaned over, and kissed her forehead. “Because I love you.” What you were, what you are…

  “People don’t spy on people they love.”

  “I wasn’t spying.” She’d lowered her head and he couldn’t see her face clearly enough in the dim room to know its expression, but he imagined her heavy-lidded eyes, the dull, barely comprehending look of the seriously medicated, the genuinely hopeless. It was like his heart being cleaved sometimes, seeing that expression. “I was watching you, that’s all. To make sure you were okay.”

  “Neither one of us is okay and we both know it.”

  He dropped his head back on his pillow, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling that was like a gray sky with no stars. The hate, the fear, the agony, combined to create a sour, distinctive odor that permeated the sheets and April’s sweat-damp nightgown. Sometimes he could smell the odor briefly when she was near him during the day. He had smelled something like it in hospital wards for the dying.

  “We can’t go through the rest of our lives like this,” he said.

  “I’ve come to the same conclusion.”

  “We’ve got to change things.”

  “Things have changed us.”

  “I’m tired of these goddamned word games, April.”

  She laughed low in her throat in a way that horrified him-almost a death rattle. “I’m just goddamned tired,” she said.

  Justice lay still in the warm, humid bedroom that stank of mortality, hoping that if he said nothing she’d remain silent.

  After a while her breathing evened out, then slipped into its familiar shallow rhythm. He was the only one awake and alone again in their dark world.

  Their bright world had been shattered, but began its complete and irreparable disintegration when Elvis Davison, the rapist and killer of their son Will, walked smiling from the courtroom a free man, and soon dropped out of the news. The trial was over; he had his life back.

  Justice and April would never have their lives back, because Davison had taken away their son.

  “If someone killed Davison, we’d be the first people the police would suspect,” April said.

  It startled him that she was awake, and it frightened him. Is she privy to my thoughts? My night thoughts?

  “I don’t want to kill him,” he lied.

  “You do. We both do.”

  “It isn’t Davison, anyway. It’s the system.”

  “System?”

  “Judicial. The judges, the juries-especially the juries. They didn’t have to find him not guilty.”

  “They were following the letter of the law. Or thought they were.”

  “Juries are the law,” Justice said. “They can do what they want. They had to know Davison, what he…” His voice failed him. Neither of them could speak directly about what Davison had done to Will. “They knew he was guilty.”

  “Reasonable doubt,” April said wearily.

  “Do you have any?”

  “No.”

  “Then how could they?”

  “I would like to kill each and every one of them,” April said. “Only it wouldn’t bring Will back, and it would put us at the mercy of juries.”

  “I simply don’t understand their reasoning, their lack of understanding.”

  “They were led. They got into that damned jury room and somebody took charge and led them to their verdict.”

  “The jury foreman? You think he’s responsible?”

  “He was part of the system we know was responsible.”

  “The jury foreman…” Justice said. He remembered the man, a wiry redheaded CPA named Coburn. He’d always worn the same brown suit to court; probably had it cleaned and pressed on weekends. Maybe April had something. Maybe as jury foreperson, Coburn bore a disproportionate responsibility for the verdict. A disproportionate amount of guilt.

  “If we killed Coburn,” April said, “It’d be like we killed Davison. The police, the system, would know who did it. Then they’d kill us. I wouldn’t care.”

  “I would. I don’t want you to die. I don’t want to be alone.”

  “Be honest.”

  “All right, I don’t want to suffer alone. I don’t think I could bear it.”

  “You’re a coward,” she said. “You’d be able to bear it if you weren’t a coward.”

  “I’m hearing pills talking,” Justice said, turning on his side to face away from her. There was a burning in his belly that drew up his knees. “I hear somebody who wants to pick a fight to rid herself of her rage. Pills talking.”

  “I’d like to pick a fight with the system that allows a monster to walk freely away from the pain he caused.”

  “We can’t kill the monster without losing our own lives,” Justice told her.

  “I don’t mean the monster Davison. He isn’t part of the system.”

  “You mean Coburn? He’s not much of a monster.”

  “Oh, he is. But we couldn’t touch him or anybody else involved with Davison’s trial without arousing suspicion. So I’m generalizing. Maybe I’ll blow up the goddamn courthouse.”

  “Pills talking.”

  He hoped.

  “Pills’re going to sleep now,” April said, and fluffed her pillow.

  She would be asleep soon. She could find refuge in sleep for hours at a time and escape her agony. Sometimes he envied her, but the cost of her ability to escape was her addiction to her medication, and if she didn’t get it under control, it would kill her.

  Staring hard at the shadowed ceiling beyond the rotating fan blades, Justice knew April was right. If Davison were killed, they’d be prime suspects. But the truth was that Davison wasn’t the problem-it was the system. April was right about that. The system didn’t know how rotten it was, didn’t seem to understand that an act like Davison’s created poisonous ripples that seemed never to end and became all the more toxic as they spread. And if the perpetrator escaped justice, the ripples became wider and spread more destruction with each passing day, month, year.

  The secondary victims, the survivors of the slain, simply died more slowly.

  That was what April knew, and what Justice was learning.

  “You awake?”

  April, awake again herself.

  “I’m asleep,” Justice said.

  He wondered how many other people were out there suffering the same way he a
nd April suffered. The obviously guilty too often went free, but the families of their victims would never again be free.

  The wrongness of it overwhelmed Justice, and he lay beside April and wept.

  April heard him but didn’t make a move to comfort him. He had to suffer so he would come to understand what she already knew.

  It seemed he never would fully comprehend. There was only one way for April to make sure that he might.

  One final duty.

  20

  New York, the present

  Three days after Beverly Baker’s death, the Justice Killer sent Beam a letter, care of the NYPD, copy to The New York Times.

  There it was in da Vinci’s sunny office, on da Vinci’s desk. Everyone in the office had read the note but not touched it. The brief message was neatly printed in pencil:

  Hunter Beam:

  I know about your exploits and what you have for breakfast and what you dream. It is my pleasure that you’ve been assigned to track me down. Great men are judged by the quality of their enemies. We need each other. God provides for the just.

  You can no longer screw your wife. Are you screwing Officer Nell?

  JK

  “At least there’s one thing he doesn’t know about you,” Nell said.

  Looper was sitting next to her, smiling. Beam was standing off to the side, his hands in his pockets. Da Vinci sat in his big black swivel chair behind his desk. The fifth person in the room was police profiler Helen Iman. She was a tall woman, athletically curvaceous and attractive, who would have looked right at home playing beach volleyball. She had slanted emerald eyes and the kind of bony, ageless features that would look the same at sixty. She was about twenty years shy of that now. She stood on the opposite side of the desk from Beam.

  “We got us a madman for a perp,” Looper said, sitting back after reading the note.

  “I think we can all agree on that,” da Vinci said.

  “Techs looked at this yet?” Beam asked.

  “Of course,” da Vinci said. “It didn’t take them long. There’s nothing in the way of prints that might be brought out on either the envelope or paper, and both are from stock sold in office supply stores, drugstores, and even grocery stores.”