by John Lutz
“Not directed at her, if that’s what you’re wondering. And it is.”
Meg smiled and nodded.
“I’d be wondering, too. I don’t hate anybody except maybe myself. I’ve got no reason anymore to shoot people from hiding. In fact, these days the thought of it makes me physically ill.”
“Everything I’ve learned about the shooting on the bridge suggests it was accidental.”
“I notice you didn’t say it wasn’t my fault.”
“But it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t kill the woman deliberately.”
“No, I didn’t. It was more . . .”
“What?”
“Never mind. You’re a cop, not a psychiatrist.”
“Are you in analysis?”
“I was until about six months ago.”
Meg scribbled on her notepad.
“Jesus!” Reyals said. “You’re writing that down, getting me to hang myself. Sniper leaves analysis and turns into serial killer.”
Meg didn’t know if he was serious. “Mr. Reyals, you know how it works. I don’t think anything at this point.”
“I do know how it works, and it’s bullshit. And call me Alex.”
Meg was beginning to like this guy too much. “Alex, I’ve gotta say, some of your alibis aren’t worth diddly. People who thought they saw you taking a walk near the time of a murder that happened on the other side of town. A waiter who thinks he served you spaghetti in an Italian restaurant when a different murder was being committed.”
“I’ve got the charge card receipt for the spaghetti dinner.”
“Which proves somebody used your card and signed your name.”
“Forged my signature perfectly, too.”
“Our experts aren’t so sure that didn’t happen.” Meg didn’t know that. A little lie sometimes greased the skids.
Reyals stood up and paced over to the CD player. For a second Meg thought he might switch it on. Then he turned and came back to the sofa, but he stood beside it instead of sitting down. The way the light hit his eyes, they had the same haunted sadness in them she sometimes glimpsed in Repetto’s eyes. The two men were a lot alike, both in their own ways victims of bullets.
“You said I knew how it worked, Meg, and you’re right. We both know you have no solid evidence that I might be the Night Sniper, but that doesn’t matter. What you’re really here for is to size me up, to see if you get a feeling about me. It’s a kind of test.”
Meg closed the cover of her notepad and sat back. “Yeah, I suppose it is.”
“Do I pass, Meg?”
She stood up also. “You get an incomplete.”
He shot her his beautiful tragic smile. “That’s the best I could hope for. It means you might come back and we’ll talk some more.”
“That’s not the game we’re playing, Alex.” Isn’t it?
Still smiling, he said, “Well, I’m not going to go out and shoot somebody so I can see you again.”
“That’s reassuring.” She gave him one of her cards. “Call if you think of something that might help.”
He surprised her by reaching into his shirt pocket and producing one of his own cards. On it was his name, street address, phone number, and e-mail address, along with a red, artistic rendering of a handsaw. “And you call me if you think of something. Anything.”
She couldn’t help returning his smile. Responding. How can he see into me? What does he know about me? She tucked his card in a pocket.
When she moved toward the door, he went ahead to show her out. She noticed for the first time that he gave off a curiously appealing scent, as if he’d just taken a fresh shower and dried off in a steaming room. Meg knew she had to get out of there without looking into his eyes.
Christ! I don’t want this! I don’t!
“Good luck nailing this guy,” he said.
Without thinking, she looked.
She carried what she saw all the way downstairs and back to the car, where she sat behind the steering wheel and thought about what an idiot she might make of herself.
Meg didn’t glance up at Alex Reyals’s window as she drove away, afraid he might be watching. Afraid she might look back and this time turn into a pillar of mush.
She was sure he wasn’t the Night Sniper, but it had nothing to do with evidence. It was how she felt about him.
Maybe it was how he wanted her to feel.
Charm was definitely part of his arsenal.
18
New York, 1989
Dante sat on the edge of the sofa in the living room, smelling the onions his mother was cooking on the stove. He listened to the buzzing coming from the kitchen. That was how it sounded to him when his mother and father argued, how he wanted it to sound. He didn’t want to hear the things they said to each other.
But sometimes, like tonight, the words worked their way through the buzzing:
“. . . sold or pawned everything we owned!” His mother. Her hopeless voice, the one with fear in it. Dante recognized it because it was the same fear he felt. How a boat might feel breaking up on a vast and violent sea. Soon the protective shell would be gone and every fierce and terrible thing that lived in the wild ocean would have its way.
“Like you can’t get a fuckin’ job!” His father. Joel. Dante still worshipped Joel despite the things he’d said lately to his mother. His father was sick (he’d heard his mother say). Para . . . something.
“I don’t know anything, Joel! Not anymore.”
“And what I know how to do, the city won’t let me do!” The city. That was what was keeping his father from going back to work. The city. “Different departments went ahead and hired the other guys that got axed. Guys with less seniority than I have. Me, I didn’t just get axed, I also got knifed—in the back.”
“Nobody’s out to get you. It’s in your head, Joel. You’re paranoid and you need to get help.”
Dante clamped his hands over his ears. He knew what was going to happen now. When his mother called his father paranoid, his father almost always went wild. That was when the real shouting began, when the neighbors might complain, when Dante heard fists striking flesh with a sound like he heard in the butcher shop; then the police would come.
It was happening again, now, and he didn’t know if he could stand it. When his parents weren’t fighting about money, about what the city had done to his father, they were fighting about him, how he was skipping school and his grades were terrible for a boy so smart. It was such a waste, they always—
“Joel! . . .”
His mother. There was a new horror in her voice.
Dante waited for it to begin.
But his father was silent for a long time.
“Joel! . . .”
Joel had been finished arguing, finished fighting, finished with her, with everything, with life in a world that was so devious and unfair, unfair. He didn’t want to hit her. Not this time. He saw himself as if he were standing off to the side, watching, and he was somebody else at the same time, and that was how he understood. He understood it all, that there was no hope, it wasn’t going to change, nothing was going to change unless he changed it by ending it. Let them win. He surrendered. Let them win.
He had no idea how he’d gotten in the bedroom, didn’t remember going there, opening the closet door, and finding the gun behind the folded winter sweaters on the top shelf, the gun he’d found in someone’s trash, and tell me that was an accident and see if I believe you, the gun he’d wanted to use on Dugan and Sal but didn’t and shouldn’t have because it wasn’t them, it was the city and the gun was no accident. Try and tell me that was an accident.
Back in the kitchen.
“Joel! . . .”
The explosion in the kitchen was deafening.
Dante stood up from the sofa and dropped his arms to his sides, his hands clutched in fists. He was rooted to the carpet with shock, with the terrible certainty that something awful had happened and was rushing toward him.
And he had to
go to meet it. Had to see it, to know what it was he feared. It was a dark kind of duty.
He made himself walk to the kitchen door, made himself open it.
The smell of the burning onions almost overcame him, making his eyes water. There was his mother lying curled on the kitchen floor. One of her eyes was gone, and the side of her head was missing. On the floor near her head was uncooked meat that had somehow dropped from the frying pan. That was what it was. That must be what it was.
His father said his name once, Dante, as if he loved him.
Dante saw the sadness and pain in his father’s face, the kindness. He did love him. Saw the gun his father was aiming at him. The gun must be a toy, though it sure looked real. What would his father be doing with a gun, like people on TV or in the movies?
Then he looked again at his mother and knew the gun was real, and knew what had happened. What he feared.
“You’ll be better off out of it,” his father said. He began to cry, to sob, trying to hold the gun steady. “Evil everywhere! Everywhere in this city. Goddamn this city!”
Dante didn’t know what he meant, what had happened to him, and why he’d done such a thing. Such a wrong thing.
His father wasn’t evil.
Dante saw the gun’s hammer draw back as his father’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Saw the cylinder with the snub-nosed bullets like dull jewels slowly rotate.
Saw and heard the hammer drop.
The firm metallic click! struck panic in him. He saw his father staring down at the gun with a betrayed expression. It was no surprise that the gun would misfire, that it would trick and taunt him like everything else in his life.
Dante ran from the kitchen, through the living room, and toward the door to the hall. The hammer would be drawing back again and this time the gun would fire; he knew it. He was dead. He was dead. His father was close behind him. He was dead.
He was in the hall. There were the stairs. He could fly down the stairs. Escape.
The gun exploded again, a sound like the one that had killed his mother, only not as loud, not as close.
Dante didn’t break stride. He did almost fly down the stairs, barely touching the banister, stumbling, almost tumbling—landing, steps, landing, steps, foyer, and outside into the cool city air. The dark city air that smelled like onions.
He wasn’t going back. He couldn’t. He knew he was never going back.
He found a dark doorway and lay in it exactly the way his mother had lain curled on the hard kitchen floor. The darkness wasn’t so bad. It sheltered him. His mother and father were part of the darkness now.
Dante barely moved all night. Not when the roaches crawled on him, or when the men and women passed nearby, laughing and cursing.
In the morning, in the cold light, he knew he’d have to get to his feet and move and keep moving or someone would stop him, report him, make him go back to where he never wanted to go again, where, like every place else, there was nothing for him but loss.
By noon in the city it was easy to find a slightly used New York Times in the trash receptacles that stood like ragged sentries at busy intersections.
Dante was lucky. He not only found a paper, he found a wrapped, half-eaten hamburger someone had thrown away last night.
The morning was sunny but chilly. Dante had on a long-sleeved shirt, but he was still cold.
Trying not to shiver, he sat on a low stone wall, people and traffic streaming past him, and read in the paper what he knew had happened last night: The news item was brief, on a back page. A man in an apartment that had the same address as Dante’s apparently shot and killed his wife and then himself. Neighbors said they were a troubled couple who often argued. The man had recently lost his job with the city.
They had a twelve-year-old son, the neighbors told police, who was missing.
19
The present
In Repetto’s mail was another note containing what was assumedly a theater seat number: 9-D. Nothing more. Same typewriter, same envelope and paper stock and postmark. The Night Sniper.
When he showed them the note, Meg and Birdy looked at Repetto.
He shook his head no. “Lora and I are staying away from Broadway these days.”
Which meant someone else, or maybe the Night Sniper himself, had sat in seat 9-D. Only maybe. It was always possible the Sniper was simply choosing seats at random, on his way out of the theater, and unobtrusively affixing the notes in passing.
“It would help if the bastard gave us the name of the theater,” Meg said.
“It wouldn’t be a game then,” Birdy pointed out.
“One we’ve got no choice but to play,” Repetto said.
They began working the phones.
Locating the theater took almost an hour.
Stuck to the bottom of seat 9-D in the Circle One Theater, where a musical comedy titled Little Miss Muffet was playing, they found the carefully folded and taped note: Your move, Detective Repetto.
“Gamesmanship again!” Meg said in disgust.
Repetto said, “Zoe Brady would tell you it’s a male thing.”
“She’d probably be right.”
“Children,” Birdy said.
They turned to look at him.
“This theater’s playing Little Miss Muffet,” Birdy said. “It’s a nursery rhyme, and the killer mentioned rhymes in his first note: Rhyme and reason . . .”
“And?” Meg said, cocking her head to the side, suspecting where he was going.
Birdy didn’t disappoint her. “You suppose the Night Sniper’s gonna shoot a kid?”
“It isn’t likely,” Zoe told Repetto later that afternoon, “that the Sniper will change his pattern and begin shooting children.”
They were in her One Police Plaza office. It was dimmer than it had to be. The vertical blinds behind her desk were still only barely cracked, admitting light but not much of a view. It was as if she might turn around now and then in her chair and see the world outside in vertical cross sections, slices of life.
“We can’t ignore the reference to rhymes,” Repetto said, “and that the theater where the last note was found is playing Little Miss Muffet. And the Night Sniper probably sat in the seat where he taped the note.”
“All true,” Zoe said, brushing back a strand of her long red hair that was interfering with her vision. “But it doesn’t add up to him killing kids. It does suggest that whatever’s compelling him to kill is connected to an incident, or at least circumstances, in his childhood. But there’s nothing new in that. Virtually all serial killers had wretched childhoods.”
“That’s hardly an excuse,” Repetto said.
“No, it isn’t. Most people who have wretched childhoods don’t grow up to be serial killers. The difference between them and the ones who do kill is something that’s still being studied.”
“By people like you,” Repetto said. “My job’s to stop the ones who kill.”
“Mine too,” Zoe said. “I told you what I think. This killer seems more hung up on game playing than on children. It’s probably simply coincidence that the theater where the Night Sniper decided to leave his note was playing a version of a nursery rhyme.”
“You know what cops think of coincidence?”
“Sure. That’s why I work for the city.” She smiled at Repetto. He thought a little smugly. “If the next note turns up on a seat where The Lion King’s playing, maybe we’ve got a pattern.”
Repetto left the office, his opinion of profilers unimproved.
Meg knew she could dismiss Alex Reyals from her mind until the investigation suggested otherwise. For some reason she simply couldn’t imagine him as the killer, whatever the evidence. Anyway, the evidence pointing to him was indeed thin.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to talk to Reyals again. To make sure of a few things.
This time after buzzing her up, he wasn’t standing with the door open, waiting for her. But as soon as she drew back a fist to knock, a voice call
ed from above:
“I’ve been painting. C’mon up.”
Reyals was leaning over the banister of the stairs leading to the landing above. He was holding a small, tapered paintbrush in one hand, a wadded towel in the other.
Remembering he’d said that he used the upstairs apartment as his workshop, she climbed the creaking wooden steps. She could smell something now—turpentine or thinner.
“Putting on finish?” she asked.
“No, actually painting,” he explained. “One of my customers ordered an enameled piece.”
As she stepped inside, she saw that the floor plan was exactly the same as the apartment below, but one of the walls had been removed. There were paint cans and various bottles on metal shelves, an electric mixer of the sort you saw in paint stores, a steel locker, a circular saw and another sort of table saw, and an entire wall that was Peg-Board on which were mounted various woodworking tools—chisels, hammers, jigsaws, several old-fashioned wood planes with glistening steel edges. Her gaze went to an ornate wooden rocking chair with a light oak finish. Its spindles were delicately turned, and there was a tapering grace to the chair’s long runners. It really was a work of art, as well as furniture.
“That’s beautiful,” she said.
He smiled. “I’d invite you to sit down in it, but the finish is still tacky.”
“Thanks for the warning.” She sat instead on a small green leather sofa. She saw then what he’d been painting, a coffee table with a tiled top and knobbed legs. Each knob was a different color. Meg didn’t like it as well as the chair. “Is doing this kind of thing relaxing?” she asked.
Reyals laid the paintbrush across a small, open can of red paint on the floor near the table. He tossed the towel aside and ran his hand over his dark stubble haircut. “Relaxing? Oh, you mean therapeutic? That’s why I started it, and maybe part of the reason I’ve stayed with it.” He smiled, and it hit her in the heart . “And of course, it’s nice to sell some of my work now and then.”
