Slaughter

by John Lutz

  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.

  15

  “There was a similar mass murder in Florida about five years ago,” Helen the profiler said. She was standing in front of Quinn’s desk with her arms crossed, rocking back and forth on her heels. “Two women found dead in their bathtubs, after a fire in a hotel on Pompano Beach. They’d been tortured, then boiled to death. Fire was deliberate, most likely set by the same person who killed the women. Three other people—all men—were killed in the fire. Firebug was never caught.”

  “The men were collateral damage?”

  “Looks that way. Men often are.”

  Quinn was thinking about that when Jerry Lido came in through the street door. The air stirred with a faint scent of gin. Lido’s stained white shirt was unbuttoned and hanging out over wrinkled pants. His eyes seemed focused, though, and he was walking straight. Fedderman, over by the coffeepot, and himself no fashion plate, looked at Lido and said, “You look like something the cat dragged in.”

  “I fought the cat all the way,” Lido said.

  Quinn said, “I need you to find out what you can about a hotel fire five years ago in Pompano.”

  “Sandy Toes Hotel?”

  Helen shifted her feet and stood up straighter. She and Quinn looked at each other.

  Lido caught the subtle exchange and smiled. He placed a wrinkled yellow envelope on Quinn’s desk.

  The charred debris in the Sandy Toes photos was surprising. The burn victims’ bodies were shriveled black horrors. Breasts had been removed from some of the women. Quinn recalled another case, long ago, involving an urban cannibal who dined on breasts.

  He was almost relieved when he saw that here most of the breasts—what was left of them—were lying near the victims’ bodies.

  None of the male victims of the Sandy Toes Hotel fire seemed to have been tortured, and only one of them, possibly coincidentally, was found burned to death in a bathtub.

  They seemed to have simply been in the way.

  Collateral damage.

  The women, however, were a different story. What was left of them—including their severed breasts—that was too large to fit down a drain was lying in a jumble at the bottoms of the tubs.

  Preliminary autopsy reports on the women suggested they were killed and dismembered swiftly. The killer had known he had minimum time.

  “He made every second count,” Quinn said, leafing through the autopsy sheets, which were complete with photos.

  “He must have known he had a way out without being trapped by the flames or smoke,” Fedderman said as the detectives passed around the files with photos.

  “Looks like he went from point to point, killing and dismembering the women, then starting or feeding the fires.”

  “Those women didn’t run because they were terrified,” Pearl said. She looked angry, but calm.

  Quinn, reading further, said, “And with their Achilles tendons sawed through, right above their heels, there was no way they could stand up, or even crawl, out of a bathtub. Then, when the fire reached a certain point, the killer quickly finished his butchery and moved on in search of more victims.”

  “How did he find them?” Pearl asked. “Look in every bathtub?”

  “Listening for screams or calls for help,” Harold said. “Bathtubs are where lots of people trapped by fire take refuge. They fill them with water, climb in, and hope for the best.”

  “And have their pleas answered by a gremlin with knives and saws,” Pearl said. “Nightmare stuff.”

  Helen studied the postmortem report. “A figure of authority heard their calls and appeared, probably a fireman in a slicker and helmet. That’s why they didn’t run. They thought a rescuer had arrived. One of the first things he did was saw through their Achilles tendons. Then they couldn’t stand up or climb out of the tub. He’d have had to waste a move disassembling them as they got weaker and weaker from loss of blood. He probably eviscerated them last and then unwound and stacked their intestines.”

  “Think of it without the blood,” Harold said, “and he sure does neat work.”

  “Neat enough to be a doctor or a med-school student doing extra homework,” Sal said.

  “Like a project,” Harold said.

  Nobody spoke for a moment, thinking that one over.

  “Nift says no,” Quinn said. “Our killer doesn’t possess that level of efficiency.”

  “And there’s no sign of him having used power tools,” Fedderman said.

  “Our guy wouldn’t do that,” Helen said. “That would depersonalize it.”

  “Power tools might be noisy, too,” Harold said, and made a buzzing sound with his mouth to demonstrate.

  Sal gave him the look, cautioning Harold not to get on a roll.

  “The killer in Florida might have used the surf to cover up the sounds,” Jerry Lido said with a sideways glance. He’d been working on his computer while the others talked.

  “Drowned them out,” Harold said.

  “And the murder in Florida had an element of cannibalism.”

  “Dinner is surfed,” Harold said.

  Sal came within an inch of telling him to shut up.

  “Not the s
ame as the murders we’re investigating,” Sal said with raspy moderation. “The killer six years ago wasn’t nearly as proficient with his instruments as our killer.”

  “Our gremlin tinkers,” Fedderman said. “Like he’s taking apart a robot to see how it’s put together.”

  “How do we know he tinkers?”

  “That’s what gremlins do,” Helen said. “And he was in a hurry, so he had the victims get in their bathtubs for him to protect themselves from the fire. In a rush, our Gremlin, as if he was on an assembly line doing piecework.”

  “A sexual thing?” Fedderman asked.

  “Gadgetry and efficiency as applied to flesh and bone,” Helen said. “We’ve all known people who’ve conducted stranger secret sex lives.”

  Harold looked at her. “We have?”

  Pearl said, “Shut up, Harold.”

  Fedderman said, “I knew a guy with an enormous collection of Barbie dolls, and each one had a—”

  “Forget it, Feds,” Pearl said.

  “You guys,” Helen said, “are pathetic.”

  “But they might be right,” Quinn said. “Especially when you put firebugs in the mix.”

  “The hell with firebugs,” Sal grated in his bullfrog voice.

  Quinn made an effort not to smile. He liked it when his detectives squabbled. Oysters and pearls.

  16

  When she studied him through the peephole and then opened her door to his knock, he hardly looked like a threat. A jockey-size man in built-up shoes to make him appear taller. His dark hair was long on the sides and combed back in wings that obviously existed to cover his ears. For all of that he was somehow physically appealing. There was a force about him. A certainty that drew a particular sort of woman.

  Men like this, Margaret thought. They somehow know about women like me.

  “You’re the man who’s been following me,” she said.

  He smiled. “You’re the woman who’s been observing me following. You’ve got a lot of nerve, buzzing me in and answering my knock.”