Chill of Night

by John Lutz

  “Anything new on the Aimes postmortem?” Beam asked.

  “He was shot just behind the ear at point blank range,” da Vinci said. “His hair was singed.”

  “I wonder if a sound suppressor could make for singed hair,” Nell said, “even held close.”

  “I asked the ME that,” da Vinci said. “He said it depends.” Da Vinci glanced at the light breaking through the blind slats. He made a face as if it hurt his eyes.

  Helen had on gray slacks today and was sitting with her chair turned around, straddling the seat and resting her bare forearms on the top of the wooden back. She had graceful but strong looking arms, as if she might play a lot of tennis or racquet ball. She was looking at da Vinci with a concerned expression. Then she looked at Nell in a way that puzzled Beam. Back to da Vinci.

  “We’ve got a new development,” da Vinci said. “A note from the killer. It came in the morning mail. The envelope was sent care of the NYPD, addressed to Beam.”

  68

  “You opened the envelope?” Beam asked da Vinci.

  “Yes. Only because it was from the killer”

  “How did you know that beforehand?”

  “I held it up to the light.”

  “But you were going to open it anyway.”

  “You were going to keep the contents secret?”

  Leaning forward in her chair, Helen rested her chin on her muscular forearms and smiled.

  Beam knew da Vinci was right to have opened the envelope. The Killer and his deadly games had them all edgy enough to play gotcha with each other, rather than with him.

  “As you might expect,” da Vinci continued, “paper and envelope are the common sort, not easily traced. The message was brief and printed in such a rudimentary way it doesn’t provide much of a handwriting sample. No prints on any of this, of course, and no DNA sample on the stamp or flap. Our killer’s as careful as he is vicious.”

  “He’ll get careless,” Helen said. No one seemed to have heard her. She was looking at Nell.

  Da Vinci handed the folded note to Beam. It was plain white typing paper, twenty weight, not quite transparent. Printed on it was a simple message:

  For whom the bell tolls its death (k)Nell.

  Justice

  Beam read it aloud, complete with parentheses.

  “Jesus!’ Looper said. “He’s coming after Nell.”

  “No question about it,” da Vinci said.

  “Telling us ahead of time.” Looper’s tone suggested he could hardly believe this. He touched all his pockets and picked up his pacing. “Some ego this bastard has.”

  “Taunting you again,” Helen said. “Trying to rattle you the way you’ve rattled him. It’s to be expected.”

  “You mean he might not mean it?” Beam asked.

  “He means it,” Helen said.

  “What are we gonna do about it?” Looper asked.

  “Let him come after me,” Nell said. “Be ready for him.” She sounded angry and confident.

  “Don’t doubt he’ll come,” Helen said.

  “I don’t,” Nell said. “Unless he’s using me as a diversion. Maybe he’s really going after Beam.”

  “Or me,” da Vinci said.

  “He wouldn’t lie in the note,” Helen said.

  Looper paused in his pacing and looked at her. “Huh?”

  “He’s essentially an honest man,” Helen said. “A killer but, in his way, honorable. At least, that’s how he sees himself. That ego you mentioned. The killer’s locked onto Nell.”

  “Why me?” Nell asked.

  “You’re a woman. He sees you as the weakest link. The place to start. My guess is, if he succeeds with you, he’ll come after Looper. Then Beam. Then Andy—Deputy Chief da Vinci.”

  “Working up the chain,” Nell said.

  “What about you?” Beam asked Helen.

  She rested her chin again on her forearms, which were still folded on the chair’s back. “He doesn’t see me as part of the team. I don’t strategize. I don’t actively pursue him. I’m just a scientist. He has no more against me than he does against a tech in the fingerprint division.”

  “Even with all your face time on television?”

  “The media have interviewed countless people regarding the Justice Killer. It goes on around the clock. Maybe you don’t watch enough TV to know that, Beam.”

  “I hope not, having other things to do. Anyway, none of us has been on camera much since Adelaide came on the scene.”

  Da Vinci said, “Try not to mention that name in this office.” He leaned forward, meeting Nell’s gaze. “I think you should be publicly taken off the case, Nell.”

  “Seconded,” Looper said.

  Beam turned to face Nell directly. “How do you want to play this, Nell?”

  She aimed her words at da Vinci. “I don’t want to go anywhere. If I did, it’d only be delaying the inevitable. The killer would go after Loop, then Beam. Why not stop this before it picks up momentum?”

  “Remember Knee High,” Looper said. “Cheese in the trap.”

  Da Vinci looked away from Nell. “I put Beam in charge of the investigation. It’s his call.”

  “You know my wishes,” Nell said to Beam.

  “And I know you well enough to figure there’s something more to it.”

  “You’re right. There’s something about this cop costume thing that’s eluding me, but I know I’ll grab hold of it. And I don’t like this prick thinking of me as the weakest link in the chain just because I’m a woman.”

  “You’re a damned good cop,” Beam said. “One of the best I’ve come across.”

  “And one who knows when she’s being set up to get cut out.”

  “No,” Beam said. “I think we should do it both ways. We’ll announce you’re off the case, that you’ve been put on indefinite leave and are no longer in New York. But you won’t leave town. You’ll live in your apartment, and leave it occasionally for routine reasons—to buy food, take a walk, maybe even meet someone for lunch. It will all look casual and unplanned. In fact, every step you take will be observed by undercover cops assigned to protect you, and to close in immediately on the Justice Killer when and if he appears.”

  “It can work,” Nell said, too fast.

  “We might be able to stop him in time,” Looper said. “He’ll have to move in on Nell. He kills at close range.”

  Beam thought about Aimes’s singed hair around the ugly entrance wound, the smell of it in the stifling tile vestibule. Close range. “Loop’s right. Other than shooting Dudman in a drive-by, he hasn’t been a distance killer.”

  “You really think the asshole will go for this?” da Vinci asked.

  “He’ll go for it,” Helen said. “He’ll assume Nell wouldn’t really leave town, and that he’s outsmarting us. Winning the game. He’ll try for her.”

  “Will he also know she’s being guarded?”

  “Probably,” Helen said. “He’ll enjoy the challenge.”

  “If we play it right, and make Nell’s actions seem casual and spontaneous rather than planned out, he might have his doubts,” Beam said. “He might get careless.”

  Helen nodded. “There’s a chance. As I’ve been saying, he’s coming undone, and he’ll eventually take too large a risk, make a mistake. Accidentally on purpose. Deep down, but not as deep as before, he wants to be stopped.”

  “Why?” Beam asked, knowing the profilers’ stock explanation involving the killer’s inner conflict, but wanting Helen to say it in all its pop psychology glory, for the record. In case this went horribly wrong.

  But Helen knew a thing or two about Beam. She smiled thinly, not at all like the other redhead, Adelaide.

  She said, “He believes in justice.”

  69

  “Are you out of your mind?” Terry asked.

  They were in Nell’s apartment, where he’d come to see her after learning from the news that she was being taken off the Justice Killer case. He’d seemed glad about it until she t
old him her plans.

  She was near the living room window, using a small green plastic pitcher with a long spout to water a potted fern. Maybe she could bring the damned thing back to life, now that she had more time to nourish it.

  “I was so glad you were getting out of that madness,” he said. He’d been working, and he had on jeans and a black golf shirt, brown leather moccasins. She knew he expected to shower and change here, then they’d go out, have dinner, maybe take a walk and have a few drinks someplace, and he’d spend the night.

  “You’re talking about the madness I’m trying to stop,” she said. She put down the empty pitcher on the glass-topped table next to the fern. The plant still didn’t look well, the tips of its fronds curled and tinged with brown.

  “I’m talking about you risking your life.”

  “Everyone does that, every day. It’s just that they don’t always know it.”

  “Everyone doesn’t play target for a killer,” he said, pacing silently in the moccasins. “I thought you were really leaving the city, like they said on the news. I came by to see if you wanted to go with me to Cozumel. The airlines have a great special fare.”

  “There’s always a special fare to Cozumel.”

  “I have a friend there who owns and operates a parasail business.”

  “Those things scare the holy hell out of me.”

  He stood still and held his palm to his forehead, had to laugh. “And you’re not afraid of this? This thing you’re doing?”

  “Sure, I’m afraid. Like anybody who wants to continue breathing.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “It’s my job, Terry. I thought you understood.”

  “I try to understand, Nell. Honestly.” He came to her and held her, kissed the top of her head. “I’ve found you. I don’t want to lose you. That’s what I’m afraid of. Simple as that.”

  “I’ll have plenty of police protection.” She extricated herself from his grasp and explained the details of the plan, how an army of uniformed and undercover cops would be stationed around her no matter where she went; how the Justice Killer preferred murder at close quarters, which would allow time for her protectors to move in, or for SWAT snipers to stop him from a distance with well placed shots.

  Terry seemed unconvinced. “Your police protection won’t be any closer to you than I’ll be.”

  “No, Terry, that’d make him less likely to try for me. Or maybe he’d decide to kill us both. If we forced him to do that, he might think he has to do it from farther away, or maybe use some kind of MO he hasn’t yet tried. This sicko likes to experiment. We think he’s coming apart, that we have him on greased skids, and we don’t want to slow him down till he hits bottom.”

  “If he’s so unpredictable, why won’t he decide to shoot you from a distance? Or plant a bomb in your apartment?”

  “Even though he’s varying his methods, we think he’ll continue trying to kill close-up.”

  “But why?”

  “He’s enjoying it more and more. And even if he doesn’t know it, he’s a creature of compulsion.”

  “Oh, Christ! Who’s doing all this psychoanalysis? Is it Beam? Is that what Beam thinks?”

  “It’s what we all think. Especially Helen Iman.”

  “Who is?”

  “Police profiler.”

  “Good Lord! What can a profiler understand? It isn’t like movies or TV, Nell. I know, I’ve done both. Every real cop I ever met thought profiling was a lot of crap.”

  “You haven’t met them all, then.”

  “And now I’ve met one who’s betting her life on profiling.”

  “It’s more than that. It’s what we all feel, what we know in the gut.”

  “The gut’s gotten a lot of cops killed.”

  “You don’t know that, Terry. You’re talking bullshit. You’ve only ridden with cops for a while, and played a cop onstage.”

  “And slept with a cop.”

  “Well…that, too.”

  He paced around again for a few seconds, then faced her. “You’re pissed at me for caring so much about you.”

  “Whatever the reason, I’m getting pissed.”

  What’s with you, Terry? Why is this more difficult than it should be?

  “I’ll stay here with you tonight, Nell.”

  Tempting, tempting… “No, you have to leave and stay away. Until this is over.”

  “You’re asking a lot of me.”

  “Don’t think I don’t know it.” She placed her hands on his chest and kissed him lightly on the lips. “It won’t be long, darling.” Try a little tenderness.

  He held her close, almost tight enough to hurt her.

  When he released her, she saw the stress on his features, the now familiar vertical tracks above the bridge of his nose that told her he was thinking hard, agonizing.

  Then she saw resignation.

  A tenseness seemed to leave him all at once, changing the energy of his body though he hadn’t moved a muscle.

  “You’re right,” he said. “But even if you were wrong, it’d be your decision. I’m not going to oppose you on this, Nell. If I have to accept it, I will. I love you that much.”

  They kissed. Nell didn’t want him to release her this time, ever; but when he did, the resolve in her tightened.

  “Will you change your mind about tonight?” he asked.

  “No. You have to go, Terry. And stay away for a while. I don’t like that part of it, but it has to be that way.”

  “I suppose it does, if your mind’s made up as only you can make up a mind. Did the police see me come in?”

  “They saw you come in,” Nell said, walking to the door and standing by it. “And now they’ll see you go out.”

  As he left, he said glumly, “I think your fern is dead.”

  Terry had been gone less than an hour when Nell’s cell phone chirped.

  She went to where it was lying on the desk next to her purse, then picked it up gingerly and saw by the caller ID that it was Jack Selig.

  The musical chirping persisted.

  She laid the phone back down and didn’t answer.

  Beam sat in a battered white Chrysler minivan half a block down from Nell’s apartment. The van had been confiscated in a Brooklyn drug raid last month and pressed into service by Narcotics. It had been used by the bad guys as a portable crystal meth lab, and there was still a faint chemical scent to its interior.

  The evening was finally beginning to cool, so Beam had the engine and air conditioner off and the windows down. A pleasant breeze was moving through the van’s interior. Traffic swished and honked in the background. Music was playing somewhere, wafting through the lowering dusk, a bastardized Beatles tune he couldn’t place though it was hauntingly redolent of his past. Beam knew it was all deceptively reassuring. Mucking around in one’s own contentment often ended badly.

  But he couldn’t help being somewhat reassured. They were as ready as they could be, for now. It would take a few days, and nights, to get Nell’s protective net perfect, but he’d see that it became perfect. He could have stopped Nell from doing this—maybe he was the only one—so it was more his responsibility than anyone else’s to see that nothing bad happened to her.

  The way to do that was to make sure that when she moved around the city, pretending she was leading a normal life, out of the investigation and no longer a player, she was shadowed by undercover cops. When she was in her apartment, like now, the main thing was to keep track of everyone entering or leaving the building. Everyone.

  Beam knew numbers were important, but they wouldn’t get the job done by themselves. The killer might even figure out a way to use numbers against them. A lot of cops were a good thing, but they weren’t necessarily a lot of protection; they multiplied the possibility of someone being spotted or identified as police, of making a mistake.

  Usually a suspect couldn’t afford even one mistake, but a mistake by the police could be rectified and might only delay the payoff. The Justi
ce Killer had managed to reverse that dynamic, to flip the odds so they favored him. One mistake by the police, and Nell would be dead. And the stalker was choosing time and place, biding his time for a sure kill. He could wait. Numbers were no match for patience.

  The patience of a hunter.

  70

  Like she hadn’t a care.

  Justice watched Nell stroll down the street toward a knot of people waiting to cross at the intersection, then stand on the fringes of the group. She was wearing Levi’s, sandals, a gray golf shirt, and had her hair tucked under a blue Yankees cap. And she was carrying what looked like one of those collapsible two-wheeled wire carts many New Yorkers used to transport light loads such as clothes or groceries.

  She’s looking kind of yummy today, in those tight jeans.

  Not that it matters.

  West-and east-bound traffic squealed and rumbled to a halt, except for vehicles making right turns. The backup of people building at the intersection broke from the curb and began to cross. Some hurried, glancing warily from side to side, while others walked slowly and seemed casually unaware of traffic. Nell was a typical New Yorker and crossed briskly, her head up, her gaze shifting for oncoming traffic or other urban dangers.

  For the urban danger standing unseen across the street, watching her.

  Justice smiled. He wasn’t at all surprised that Nell hadn’t gone to Los Angeles to visit friends, as the media reported. That had been a cover story floated by the police. She remained in the city, where Justice, unfooled, was supposed to discover her. A trap.

  Unfooled and unfooled.

  He stopped near a window display of electronics and observed the reflection of the street behind him.

  There went Nell, into a D’Agostino’s grocery store.

  Justice studied the moving, reflected scene made vivid by bright sunlight. Who was the young tourist type, complete with jeans and backpack, who’d been walking behind Nell but now slowed down and moved back against a wall, then ostensibly began searching for something in his pockets? He finally found a map, unfolded it, and began to study it.