Darker Than Night fq-1

by John Lutz

  But Claire had a vision for the room: bright yellow paint, a white picket fence flush with one of the walls, with stenciled daisies and red geraniums peeking through the slats. There would be new blinds and white curtains. It would be a well-lit, cheerful room, a place of optimism and beginnings. And at night, when the switch was thrown and the new ceiling fixture winked out, artificial stars-invisible during the day-would twinkle across the ceiling in an accurate representation of the heavens. Something for her baby to gaze at from earliest infancy.

  Her baby.

  Her child-hers and Jubal’s-was beginning to occupy her thoughts more and more, even though she also had her wedding to think about. At the oddest, most unlikely times during the day, she would dream or wonder about the child she would bear. These thoughts of the baby and its future had even begun happening onstage, though thank God they hadn’t interfered with her performance.

  Her pregnancy didn’t show yet. If she had to get pregnant, her timing couldn’t have been better. She could act weeks longer in Hail to the Chef, she was sure, maybe even for a while after the baby began to show. Her reviews had been that good and the box office was holding up. Then a long break from show business would be welcome. Time to play mommy.

  Sometimes she could hardly wait for her pregnancy to be far enough along that she might have an ultrasound done and could determine the baby’s sex.

  Or did she and Jubal really want that information?

  It was something to be decided later. Claire was happy now and she lived for now; that was the important, overriding thing. She hadn’t dreamed her pregnancy would mean so much to her. There must be something in all that talk about hormonal behavior.

  Sometimes she felt guilty for not looking forward more to her and Jubal’s wedding. It was going to be a small, brief ceremony in a church in the West Village, and would be attended only by a few friends and family. Claire’s longtime friend from Wisconsin, Sophie Murray, was flying to New York and would be her maid of honor, and a fellow actor of Jubal’s, Clay Simms, was to be best man. It wasn’t that Claire felt blase about the wedding; it was just that the ceremony was only a formality. She and Jubal might as well have been married the past four years.

  It was the baby that was everything to Claire now. Even more than her career. (And that was something she never would have predicted!) She knew she couldn’t explain that adequately to Jubal. He wouldn’t understand. But he might after the baby was born. In fact, she was sure he would.

  That certainty was something else that made her happier than she’d ever been. Her acting, her relationship with Jubal, her pregnancy. Everything in her life seemed to be falling into place.

  All the way across the board, Claire was on a gambler’s roll.

  Time after time, coming up roses.

  46

  Somewhere in the chaos must be something useful.

  Quinn sat back in his kitchen chair and looked at the spread of handwritten notes, computer printouts, and copies of forms and records Nester had given him. What was laid out on the table had all been contained in a large folded brown envelope the retired cop and sheriff’s deputy wrestled out of a back pocket.

  An envelope content that hadn’t been wrinkled or folded, though, was a copy of a black-and-white snapshot of Luther Lunt taken by Cara Sand. It had been discovered in the bottom of one of her dresser drawers when the Hiram police searched the house after the murders. Luther was outdoors, barefoot, wearing faded jeans and a white T-shirt, a slender but muscular kid with tousled hair, leaning with one hand against the trunk of a large tree and smiling at the lens. He looked wholesome and innocent. While his body might have passed for twenty-one, his face could have been fourteen. Cara Sand must have known what she was doing when she’d decided to have an affair with him.

  Quinn stretched out an arm and reached for the diet Coke on the table. He sipped and thought. This Luther Lunt was some pumpkin despite his appearance of naivete. He’d led a tough, impoverished life, which must have suddenly become heaven when he moved in with the Sands and had his way with the willing wife. And from reading newspaper clippings and Nester’s notes, Quinn was sure Luther had indeed led a phantom life in the attic, descending into the real world only when the master was away, or occasionally at night for a secret tryst with Cara or for food. Food in the kitchen, where he’d apparently been interrupted around three A.M. while eating a sandwich and drinking milk from the carton.

  Domestic murder in the early-morning hours. Every cop knew that was the prime time for it, if not in the bedroom, in the kitchen. Home, sweet…yeah.

  Murder could be prosaic, so why not in the middle of a late-night snack?

  Quinn let his chair tilt forward so its front legs contacted the floor, then looked again at the photograph of Luther Lunt. The boy standing and smiling, in what was probably his victims’ backyard, would look much different now. He might have gained weight, lost some or all of his hair, grown a mustache or beard. The subtle rearrangements of time.

  But whatever his appearance, Luther was out there somewhere in New York.

  Staring hard at the photograph, Quinn could feel his presence. There was always a moment when hunter somehow made a mysterious connection with quarry, whether each or only one of them realized it. This was the moment for Quinn, the instant he’d been waiting for, perhaps prompted by Nester’s visit and Luther’s photograph. Quinn was now locked on to Luther in a way he hadn’t been before. Luther grown older…thirty-one now, if his recorded birth date was correct. Luther an adult and a fugitive who’d adapted and led what might seem an outwardly normal life.

  Quinn knew he was out there, and knew he was feeling the vise tighten as he killed more often, and increased with each murder the odds of his being caught. Luther Lunt, feeling the pressure, irritable, not sleeping well lately, off his appetite because of the ache in the pit of his stomach.

  And there was no reason he shouldn’t feel even more pressure.

  Quinn decided to give Dave Everson a call at the Times. The Luther Lunt photo should be in the papers and on TV news. The media would make sure the prime suspect in the Night Prowler murders would have his photograph appear all over the city and beyond. They’d do a better job than a police artist in aging Luther, giving him no hair or shorter or longer hair, facial hair, a double chin, lines in his face, experience in his gaze. Though still a young man, his hard years would show on him, scars inside and out.

  Quinn knew this kind of media blitz worked sometimes. Someone out there would see the original photographic image or one of the artists’ renderings and decide maybe they did know Luther Lunt, though that wasn’t what he’d be calling himself these days. They wouldn’t be sure at first; then they’d think about it-whether they wanted to or not-and eventually they’d phone the police.

  Usually they’d be wrong about whoever it was they suspected; any photograph, especially an old one in black and white, resembled a lot of people.

  Then one day one of the callers would be right. The adult Luther Lunt would be identified. And at Quinn’s convenience, he and Luther would meet.

  Quinn stood up and stretched until his aching spine made a soft popping sound and he felt better. Then he went to the phone in the living room, where he could sit down again but in a softer chair.

  It was time for Luther Lunt to become a celebrity.

  The Night Prowler watched the television screen in horror and rage. First the photograph had been in the newspapers, stopping and momentarily paralyzing him as he walked past a news and magazine kiosk on Broadway. Now the long-ago image was on seemingly every channel broadcasting the evening news. There stood a young Luther Lunt, leaning against the tree in the backyard that had been part of his home. Time made it seem like a photo of someone else, all part of a world the Night Prowler wanted to remain in the past. The photo had been taken by Cara, obviously on the spur of the moment, then put somewhere and forgotten.

  And now here it was, an instant, a reality, preserved and displayed years and y
ears later, as if a page in an album had been turned. Photo by Cara, a fraction of time in our bubble of time, in which we lived, loved, feared…

  The buzzing began again, a gray cacophony of every color, not loud now, but growing louder.

  As the Night Prowler watched the TV, a retired FBI profiler was explaining Luther’s mental illness in pseudomedical terms and talking about what kind of man he’d be now. An artist’s conception of how Luther might appear at different weights and with varying hairstyles and beard and mustache styles showed on split screen while the former profiler yammered away in her strange combination of scientific and media speak.

  She knows nothing about her subject! Nothing!

  Neither does the pathetically untalented artist!

  Some of the media gave credit to the journalist who “broke” the story, a man named Everson. But the Night Prowler knew who really found and loosed the relentless demons from the past. It was the demon of the present-Quinn!

  Of course the Night Prowler knew why. He was supposed to think now that Quinn was on his heels, ready to run up his back if he made the slightest mistake.

  Or if he had made a mistake!

  Quinn was a tracker, a stalker who dealt in the past and eventually closed on a present where he and his prey would meet. And it was the pressure he could exert that made his prey slow down, hesitate, and make a seemingly innocuous wrong move that could lead to disaster. It was like an obscure code, the rules of this game, which Quinn assumed he knew better than his quarry. Advantage, Quinn: The pursuer could make many mistakes and the game would continue, while the pursued could afford only one miscue and it would be game over. The increasing pressure on the hunted would inevitably lead to that fatal oversight or miscalculation.

  So Quinn thinks.

  The Night Prowler used the remote to switch off the TV. He smiled grimly. Different people felt pressure in different ways, and found different ways to relieve it. White powder, pink sex, green money, red vengeance, the blue eyes of the gods…

  The Night Prowler went to the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink and groped in darkness for the handgun that was hidden behind the plumbing and wrapped in an oily rag.

  He got the gun out and stared at it. An ugly, functional thing, manufactured to kill. Black forever… It had belonged to a man the Night Prowler knew sold drugs and would not report its theft. He absently ran a fingertip over the rough texture of its checkered grip, an indecipherable topography of its past.

  A gun like this, who knew its history?

  Who knew its future?

  He rewrapped the gun and carefully wedged it back in its hiding place beneath the sink.

  But out of sight wasn’t necessarily out of mind. Just as Quinn was now never completely out of the Night Prowler’s thoughts, which condition was certainly and precisely what Quinn intended. That was his strategy. That was part of how the pressure was applied.

  That was how it was supposed to work. Ask any TV pundit or armchair psychologist who’d never shed anyone’s blood and who never dreamed their own might be shed. There were well-documented ways to understand and hunt down the serial killer. Millions of words had explained the who and how of the phenomenon and even the why. Book after book had been written on the subject.

  But not all prey were alike. Sometimes the hunter wasn’t fully aware of what he was tracking.

  Sometimes the hunter wished that somewhere along the trail, he’d missed a turn.

  Black forever…

  Lisa Ide’s Visa card showed a charge for lunch the afternoon before her murder. She’d dined at an East Side restaurant Quinn had never heard of, Petit Poisson. Fifty-nine dollars with tip for a salad, pastry, and drinks. Nothing petite about the price.

  He doubted that Lisa had dined alone, so he sent Pearl to see what she might learn from the restaurant’s staff.

  47

  When Quinn had first brought up the subject of Petit Poisson, Pearl assumed he was inviting her to lunch, and someplace expensive. But this was work, the Job. They were being colleagues, not lovers. She wondered if it was possible to be both.

  When she walked into the restaurant, she understood why the prices were high. This was a premier rent area, and there was room for only about a dozen tables.

  What Petit Poisson lacked in size, it made up for in elegance. Pearl could imagine sitting at one of the smaller round tables with Quinn, next to thick red drapes over leaded windows facing the street. Chairs and a large sideboard were elaborate and gilded. Light was furnished mainly by candles and an ornate brass chandelier dangling low on a thick chain from the center of the beamed ceiling. The restaurant tried, but it wasn’t a cute place as its name suggested; it was more as if a rowdy peasant tavern had been bought and redecorated by decadent dandies just in time to beat the revolution.

  Pearl dealt firmly with the imperious maitre d’, who referred her to a waiter named Chan, who pronounced his name as “Shawn.” He spoke with what sounded like a genuine French accent.

  Chan was amiable and cooperative and of indeterminate lineage. Yes, he must have waited on that table at the time on the charge receipt. Yes, he recognized the charming woman in the photograph Pearl showed him. (Here if he had a mustache, Pearl was sure he would have twirled it.) No, he hadn’t realized she was the latest victim of the Night Prowler. He shook his head sadly at the waste and the pity. No, she hadn’t dined alone. There were two women with her, approximately her age. Of course there would be a record of their presence if they paid by charge, and who paid with cash these days?

  The restaurant manager, who wore a silky, flawlessly tailored blue suit, sashayed over and introduced himself as Yves with a silent S. He politely inquired if there was a problem. When Pearl flashed her ID and explained that the problem was a homicide, he guided them to a far corner of the restaurant in case one of the few early diners might glance over and be gastronomically upset by police presence.

  Pearl was polite but gave the impression she might any second draw her weapon and shout “Freeze!” Yves was cooperative, though not as friendly as Chan, and without nearly as convincing an accent.

  He used the accent to instruct the waiter to return to his station. Yves said it as if he meant Chan’s station in life.

  When Chan had departed, Yves ushered Pearl into a tiny, cluttered office. It wasn’t nearly as elegant as the dining area, or as Gallic, though there was a big color photo of the Eiffel Tower framed and mounted on the wall behind the desk. It was taken on a misty night starred by the many lights of Paris, and the famous landmark had probably never looked better.

  Yves said the charge and debit forms from the date of Lisa Ide’s lunch hadn’t yet been transferred to the bank, so there should be a record of who shared the table with her, assuming of course they paid separately by card.

  He got several banded reams of receipts from a safe alongside his desk and sat rummaging through them, flicking them rapidly with his thumb like a gambler counting money. The receipts were apparently in chronological order, because when he got to the desired date and time, he slowed his rampage through the forms and settled on one, then two more, and separated them from the others.

  Pearl already had a copy of Lisa Ide’s signed receipt, so she waited while Yves duplicated the other two forms on a printer hooked up to his computer.

  She looked at the copies after he handed them to her. Chan’s name and the same table number were at the top of each copy, along with the printed date and time. And there were the signatures of the women who’d dined with the dead: Abby Koop and Janet Hofer.

  Pearl thought Chan should have drawn a smiley face alongside his signatures-lent some cheer to the place. But it wasn’t that kind of restaurant. Pearl smiled and thanked Yves as she stood up and shook his hand. “Montand,” she said.

  He appeared puzzled.

  “That’s why your name was familiar to me. The famous French actor, Yves Montand. He starred with Marilyn Monroe in something or other.”

  “I’m afraid I never he
ard of the man,” Yves said. “Marilyn Monroe, though.”

  “Are you or were you ever French? This is the police asking.”

  “Not really.” Yves smiled, but the admission seemed to pain him.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Pearl said.

  And she meant it. She was happy. She had names. Soon she would have addresses. Soon she would talk to the two women who were friends, or at least acquaintances, of Lisa Ide.

  Wouldn’t Quinn be pleased? Mon Dieu!

  At the office door she turned and said, “Au revoir.”

  “I hear that all the time,” Yves said.

  Quinn agreed to meet Pearl at the Nations Cafe, a multi-cultural eatery on First Avenue near the UN Building. She’d phoned and told him she had the information she needed and they could question the two women who’d lunched with Lisa Ide at the West Side French restaurant near the time of her and her husband’s murders. They were, as it turned out, old college chums of Lisa.

  Quinn thought the three women probably spent most of their lunch conversation reliving the past, unaware of how short Lisa’s future was, and would have little to add to the investigation. But Pearl seemed proud, and she had a right. There was real satisfaction in doing detective work and knowing you’d inched forward. And talking with the two women would explore a lead that should be investigated, even if it came to nothing.

  The more Quinn saw of Pearl’s work, the more impressed he was by her insight and thoroughness. And the more he understood the underlying fear and loneliness that had created her protective shell. Or might his newfound emotions be affecting his judgment? Might Pearl be deliberately playing him? It had been so long since Quinn felt this way about a woman.

  How the hell could a man know?

  Quinn did know Pearl played hard and for keeps. And Pearl could be tricky. That was what attracted him to her in the first place. Well, maybe not in the first place…