Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Richard Montanari
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Delirium
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part Two: Tantrum
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part Three: Furore
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Epilogue
Copyright
About the Book
Andrea Heller has been married for seven years, but still likes to pretend she’s single. She enjoys sitting on her own in bars, and watching what happens. But there’s another couple watching too. They call themselves Saila and Pharaoh, but only after sundown. And it is after sundown that some terrible things are happening in the singles clubs in Cleveland.
In six months, three women in their twenties have been brutally murdered. And each step that Homicide Detective Jack Paris takes to find their killer draws him closer to the heart of his own forbidden impulses.
As the stakes become increasingly personal, Jack knows only one thing for certain. To enter the minds of Saila and Pharaoh is to enter a world from which no one ever fully returns …
About the Author
Richard Montanari is the Top Ten Sunday Times bestselling author of The Echo Man, The Devil’s Garden, Play Dead, The Rosary Girls, The Skin Gods and Broken Angels, as well as the internationally acclaimed thrillers Kiss of Evil, The Violet Hour and Don’t Look Now (previously published as Deviant Way). He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Also by Richard Montanari
The Violet Hour
Kiss of Evil
The Rosary Girls
The Skin Gods
Broken Angels
Play Dead
The Devil’s Garden
The Echo Man
For Dominic and Darla, who said I could
I feel so good I’m gonna break somebody’s heart tonight,
I feel so good I’m gonna take someone apart tonight,
They put me in jail for my deviant ways,
Two years, seven months and sixteen days,
Now I’m back on the street in a purple haze,
I feel so good, I feel so good,
I feel so good I’m gonna break somebody’s heart tonight.
– Richard Thompson, ‘I Feel So Good’
One
Delirium
1
SHE WAS A redhead, tall and slender, a libertine in training if I ever saw one: Calvin Klein suit, twenty-three, Prius owner, loved her job, hated her boyfriend, never been properly fucked. Regard the redhead, she said from across the room. Regard the regal redhead who doesn’t just give it away.
Eyes like a cat.
We had watched her for the better part of an hour as she fielded the advances of the happy-hour boys, dancing the occasional dance with the ones who looked well-heeled, her expression alternating between the bored-and-too-beautiful-for-you look that women like her worked hard at in such a setting, and the working-girl ennui that inevitably made its way to the top.
There were thousands like her across the city that night, this night, every night. Budget microwave meals for dinner, a quick shower and meet the girls for a drink. To wear the good lingerie or not, that was the question. She was strangling her twenties and she wasn’t married and she had no children and she read a lot and she masturbated a lot and wondered what was wrong with the world that she didn’t yet have the American dream.
She was bored and beleaguered.
She was ready for the beast.
* * *
Saila leaned forward. ‘She wears a rose,’ she said, a hint of lace peeking around the bodice of her dress. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think I can smell her,’ I said. ‘It’s bohemian sex she’s wanting. Mr Goodbar. Very exciting.’
‘She looks so young. Like a child.’
The redhead glanced at me. Or did she? She gazed in my direction, then quickly looked away. She was talking to one of her suited throng, laughing at all the funny parts, trying to fill in the multitude of lulls. Sip, sip, sip. A chardonnay now. She looked at her watch until the suit got the message. The music changed into a slow song.
‘Do you think her legs are strong?’ Saila asked.
I really didn’t know the answer, but I knew my cue when I heard it. I turned my drink in its napkin, straightened my tie.
Saila put her finger into the middle of my back, stiffly, like a gun. ‘Bang-bang, kitty-cat,’ she said. ‘I want to know every detail when you get back.’
‘Bang-bang, dirty mother,’ I said.
And took my leave.
I made my way across the crowded bar, drawing admiring looks from the women, along with a medley of sneers from the men. I was used to it, though. This envy.
As I neared the redhead I noticed that her teeth were perfect, her breasts were small and firm, her legs shapely. She regarded me with a half-smile in the moment before I spoke to her.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘You’ve been watching me.’
‘I have.’
She regarded me further. ‘And why is that?’
Chit-chat-chit-chat.
‘It’s purely physical, I assure you,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘I mean, let’s face it, you could have any woman in here. Why me?’
She was going to press me on this. I would break her with her own mindless cocktail chatter. I leaned very close and said: ‘Does the rose question the advance of the honey-bee?’ It was bad Broadway and the redhead lapped it, like the cat she was.
‘Who are you?’ she asked, looking me up and down.
‘I’ll show you.’ I extended my hands as another slow song began. ‘Dance with me.’
She looked into my eyes, then at my lips, then back into my eyes. She smiled fully and I knew then that I had her. Without a word she took my hand and led me to the dance-floor. I glanced at Saila. She was stirring her drink, looking at the floor, smiling.
We began to slow-dance, the redhead and I.
‘Are you with her?’ she asked, nodding in Saila’s direction.
I pulled back and looked into her eyes. She was beautiful. Her face was delicately featured, absolutely symmetrical. Her eyes were an emerald green. ‘Now, do you think I’d be up here dancing with you if I was on a date?’
Another smile.
‘You never know,’ she said. ‘There’s all kinds of people.’
She really had no idea. ‘Well, if she was my girlfriend and she saw me up here danc
ing with a beautiful woman such as yourself, I think she’d be rather upset, don’t you?’
The redhead blushed. I loved it when they blushed, it meant there was still some girl left. She pulled me closer and I started to get hard, the warmth of her body and the tease of her perfume running roughshod over my senses.
‘I think you’re full of shit,’ she said. ‘But don’t stop, okay?’
A few moments later this woman – this beautiful young woman who had not laid eyes on me one hour earlier – put her head on my shoulder and kissed me on the side of my neck.
Softly, like a lover.
And thus she was ours.
I fucked her in the back seat of my car, in a dark corner of the parking-lot, while Saila drove to the motel and waited. I pushed her skirt up around her waist and brought her to just this side of orgasm, promising her the rest and more if she’d only come to the motel with me for an hour. Just an hour.
She came with me. They always did when they let me inside their minds, even for a few moments.
By the time I got the redhead to the motel, Saila was ready for her: wet and flushed and violent, her eyes blazing with the thrill of the game.
Out came the cameras, the make-up, the steel.
Out came the animal.
And the redhead – she of the pale complexion and wild auburn mane, she of the promising career and Nordstrom charge-card – died screaming.
And coming.
Just like the others.
2
‘AND SO YOU chased him?’ the woman asked.
‘Yep,’ Paris replied.
‘And you were …’ She waved her hand in front of his face as if saying the word out loud might cause him to lose control and sexually assault her right there in the bar.
‘Naked,’ he said.
The woman covered her mouth with her heavily jeweled hand. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘Nope,’ Paris said. ‘Buck-shriveled-naked, running down the middle of Carnegie Avenue at two in the morning.’
The woman threw her head back and laughed. For the moment it erased a few of the hard years she’d spent holding down bar-stools. Jack Paris had seen her up and down the avenues for at least a decade – on the job, off the job, sometimes doing the job. She had this style that was right out of the eighties: leg-warmers, stirrup pants, oversized tops, Ocean Pacific T-shirts. Paris was sure that over the years she’d slept with a lot of cops, been abused by a lot of cops. She was sweet, but she was used up in a way that only the corner-tavern life could impose upon a woman. It was a shame.
But she still hung out where the cops hung out. Because sometimes they drank free and, if the lighting was right, so did she.
Her name was Nedra.
‘So, did you get him?’ she asked, posing with an unlit cigarette.
Paris grabbed a pack of matches off the bar, struck one and lit her cigarette. He took one for himself, hesitated, put it in his mouth, then returned it to the pack. ‘No,’ he said, blowing out the match. ‘But I got three offers of marriage.’
Nedra laughed again.
The Caprice Lounge was starting to fill up with second-shift cops from the Third District. They all looked tired to Paris, browned around the cuffs. Cleveland had been averaging a homicide every five days for three years, and although it was only mid-March, it looked like they were going to beat the quarterly stats by a half-dozen. At least, that’s the way it looked from Paris’s perch at the Homicide Unit. Drive-bys were up, robbery homicides too. The Brick City Lords – a drug gang that Paris had battled for almost five years in a zone car – had recently declared war on a Jamaican posse, part of Cleveland’s Caribbean crimewave. And then there was the other shit: the car-jackings in broad daylight, the stabbings over who spilled what drink on whose fucking pant-leg, people getting shot because they looked at somebody wrong or because somebody bitch-slapped somebody else five years ago. Lucasville and Mansfield were busting at the seams and there seemed to be a never-ending train that kept dropping the new criminals on Public Square.
But even though the Caprice was located at Fifty-fifth and Superior, ground zero in the combat zone, it remained a virtually crimeless area. No cars were ever stolen from its unprotected, poorly lit parking-lot. There were no drug sales for at least three blocks in every direction. At times, it was even considered to be a rap-free zone, with boom boxes and car stereos being dutifully dimmed out of respect for the aesthetic sensibilities of the dozen or two law enforcement types who seemed to be permanently rooted inside.
In the thirty or so years the Caprice Lounge had been a cop bar, it had only been robbed once. Needless to say, that incident didn’t end well for the guy with the mask and the gun.
Danny Lawrence, a patrolman from the Fourth District, stopped by and shook Paris’s hand. Paris motioned to Victor to set them up again.
‘What’s doin’, Danny?’ Paris asked.
Lawrence was knee-walking drunk. ‘Fuckin’ McGuinn, man,’ he said. He tried to light a cigarette, but it fell out of his mouth, on to the floor. He kept talking anyway. ‘Upstairs is up my ass about these smash-and-grab punks at the Galleria. Three months they’re in my face. If I see ’em I’m gonna fucking cap ’em. Swear to God.’ Danny turned to Nedra, tried to focus his eyes, unsuccessfully, and slurred, ‘If you’ll ’scuse my French, ma’am.’ Danny Lawrence was twenty-six and fair, ocean-blue eyes, lean and handsome. Nedra blushed like a schoolgirl.
‘Certainly,’ she said.
Paris steadied Lawrence, guiding him to a bar-stool. ‘Don’t worry about it, Danny. How long can McGuinn have? Another fifteen, twenty years, tops.’ Carl McGuinn was a captain at the Fourth District. Hardass lifer. Nobody trusted him because he didn’t drink, which was hard to believe about a man named Mc-Anything. ‘Doesn’t matter anyway. Eighteen months, you’re gonna make detective.’
Danny sat down hard and zeroed in on the glass that Vic Ianelli had placed on the bar in front of him. After a few moments, he knocked it back in one gulp. ‘So tell me, Jack,’ Danny said. ‘How’d you know when it was time?’
‘Time? Time for what?’
‘You know. Time to give it up. Time to get married.’
‘Me? You’re asking me that question?’
‘You were married, right?’
‘Twelve years.’
‘You had to be happy for a while, no?’ Danny tried a second cigarette, but that one fell out of his mouth too. ‘Weren’t you?’
‘Yeah, we were,’ Paris said. ‘But things change. People change. And it takes a certain kind of woman to be a cop’s wife.’
‘Yeah? What kind of woman?’
‘I’m not really sure. All I know is I didn’t find her,’ Paris said. ‘Why? Are you in love, Danny? Is that what this is all about?’
‘Head over high heels, Jack.’ He clutched his heart with what looked like real pain.
‘Live with her first,’ Paris said. ‘That’s my advice to you. Live with her. Spend a couple of years in the same bathroom, the same kitchen, the same car, the same bed. See how enchanting she is when she snores and farts and makes noises when she eats and uses your razor to shave her legs. If you still think that’s cute after a couple of years, go for it.’
‘But I know now, Jack.’
‘No, you think you know now.’
‘I do too know,’ Danny slurred, trailing off, sounding unconvinced. He looked balefully at Nedra, who reached out and smoothed the hair across his forehead.
‘Sure you do,’ Paris said, catching Victor’s eye.
The barman nodded. He would start watering Danny’s drinks.
Paris left the lovesick Danny Lawrence in Nedra’s more than capable hands and made his way to the men’s room. As he washed his hands he caught his reflection in the barely silvered mirror, or what passed for a mirror at the Caprice. At least a dozen times Paris had told Vic and Marie Ianelli, the owners, that cops were probably the vainest people on the planet, they needed a better mirror. There was even loose talk about a fund
to improve the lighting in the Caprice’s johns, in the hope that Vic would get the message. Regardless, a bare bulb on a bare wire remained, and looking into the mirror at the Caprice was like looking into a flattened-out saucepan.
Paris noticed with a spike of dismay that some of the silver that was missing from the mirror was starting to show up in his hair. He brought himself close to his reflection; a droopy, fun-house face stared back. Bleary eyes, heavy lids, midnight shadow. He poked at his hair.
He knew that all men, regardless of race, color, religion or country of origin, have one thing that they rely upon to get them laid throughout their lives. For some guys it’s an athletic ability or a talent of some sort. Rock stars and jocks who are ugly enough to clog a drain get laid all the time. For some guys it’s their intellect. For others it could be their shoulders, their cars, their dicks, their apartments, their eyes, their attitudes – who the hell knows with women?
The point was, if you’re a man, and you get laid more than once in your lifetime, there’s a reason. And for Jack Paris, it was his hair. He had great hair. And a quick sense of humor. He could always make a woman laugh.
Except, of course, a woman named Beth Shefler-Paris.
The day he lost the ability to make her laugh was the day she walked.
On his way back to the bar Paris saw Angelo Tucci, an old-time player from Murray Hill. They shook hands, embraced. Paris also spotted a pair of new recruits, female rookies, hovering around the video games. One of them, a pixieish but solid-looking little blonde in her early twenties, smiled at Paris when he walked by.
Before he could spin around his cell phone rang.
He looked at the number in the light thrown by one of the neon beer signs. At first he didn’t recognize it, but two and two added up in short order. Paris answered.
‘Tommy, what’s up?’
‘Hey, Jack, how ya doin’?’
Paris could hear Tommy’s signature hump music in the background.
‘From two hours ago? I’m fine, Tommy. What’s up?’ He knew very well what was up.
‘Good, good.’
‘I’m not doing it.’
‘I didn’t say a fuckin’ thing.’
Don’t Look Now Page 1
