Darker Than Night fq-1

by John Lutz

“What?”

  He told her about the bullet holes appearing in the shop window.

  She drove for a while without saying anything.

  Then: “He’s stalking you, Quinn.”

  “Us, maybe.”

  “More likely just you. That macho thing.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right, but we can’t be sure. The three of us need to be careful.”

  “You’re just the guy to talk about being careful.”

  “Put it away, Pearl.”

  “God! A heart attack.” Afraid again. He’s made me afraid of losing something again. “Did they give you any medicine or instructions?”

  “Some pills. Put me on a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet. That means low food.”

  “Jesus, Quinn! You’re eating a doughnut!”

  “I’m a cop, Pearl. I’ve got a right.”

  “Don’t you make light of this, Quinn!”

  “I’m starving, Pearl. This is breakfast. It’s all I’m going to eat.”

  “Believe it,” Pearl said.

  Quinn decided to be quiet the rest of the way to Abigail Koop’s apartment.

  “Acid reflux, my foot…,” Pearl said under her breath.

  Koop was a fleshy but attractive woman with beseeching brown eyes peering out from beneath dark bangs. Quinn wondered where he’d seen such soft eyes before, then remembered a dachshund gazing at him when he was on the ground with his heart…event. Unlike the dachshund, Koop had a slightly crooked nose, an uncertain smile, lots of jewelry, and a manner suggesting she yearned desperately to be liked.

  Her West Side apartment was like her, overfurnished and with a tentative decor that didn’t know quite what it wanted to be. A traditional gray sofa squatted on a maroon-and-black Persian carpet and faced an Early American TV hutch on top of which was a lineup of Harry Potter novels anchored by large bookends that were busts of Lincoln. Everything in the room seemed to be of different heights and placed next to everything drastically shorter or taller than itself. A small, bucolic landscape was mounted on one wall, a large, modern museum print on another. Please like something about me, implored the room. Or maybe Quinn thought that because of how he’d sized up Abigail Koop.

  “Please call me Abby,” she told them as soon as he’d announced they were the police detectives who’d phoned for an appointment.

  They agreed to do that, then sat side by side on the gray sofa while Abby sat down on a delicate little chair that was possibly French Provincial. Abby perched with her thighs pressed tightly together beneath the skirt of her gray business suit. Her hands were folded in her lap. She stole a glance at a clock on a table, then seemed sorry about it. Pearl figured Abby was going in late to work in order to have this conversation.

  “We won’t take up much of your time,” Pearl said.

  “It was a shock, what happened to Lisa.” Abby began nervously twisting the forefinger of her left hand with the thumb and forefinger of her right, as if testing to see how firmly the finger was screwed into its socket.

  “You were good friends?” Quinn asked.

  “I suppose you’d say so. We were good friends in college, anyway. But time passed and we lost touch. I moved back to New York from Connecticut last year and didn’t even know Lisa was in town until we ran into each other about a month ago and exchanged phone numbers.”

  “The other woman you had lunch with, Janet Hofer, did you know her the same way?”

  “Yes, I did. In college. Janet and I kept in touch enough to exchange Christmas cards, photographs, that sort of thing. Then she called and told me she was coming in to the city for a jewelry convention and I suggested we have lunch with Lisa and talk about the old days.”

  Quinn and Pearl glanced at each other. Jewelry. Like Leon and Lisa. “What kind of jewelry?” Pearl asked.

  “Nothing expensive. Janet sells it part-time, sets up a booth at shows, holds jewelry parties, that kind of thing.”

  “Paste?”

  Abby looked at him, not understanding at first. “Oh! Yes, I suppose. Nothing with real stones in it, or real gold or silver, unless it’s plated. She and Lisa joked about that at lunch, how they had the high and low ends of the market covered. Not that Janet didn’t carry some very attractive items. I bought some from her.” She held up an arm on which dangled several gold hoops. “These bracelets.”

  “Nice,” Pearl said. Pearl, who thought of bracelets as handcuffs.

  “Did Lisa tell you anything that suggested she or her husband might be in any kind of danger?” Quinn asked. It was probably only a coincidence that both women dealt in different sorts of jewelry. And it wasn’t as if Janet Hofer had been murdered. Now, if any of the other victims had sold jewelry…

  “No,” Abby said. “Lisa talked as if everything in her life was going well. She showed us pictures of her husband, her apartment-showed Janet, anyway, since I’d seen them when we’d run into each other last month. She seemed…oh, I would say, well, normal.” Twist, twist went the finger. Must hurt, Pearl thought.

  “You never met Leon?” Quinn asked.

  “Never. Just saw his photo. Nice-looking man, but older than Lisa. Not that that isn’t okay…with me. Especially since he seems-seemed-to be something of a romantic.”

  “How so?” Quinn asked.

  “Lisa said he’d been leaving her presents, but not letting on they were from him. Playing games with her, in fact. Sex, love, were all about games, she said.” Abby was looking away from Quinn and directly at Pearl. Woman to woman.

  Pearl nodded. Lisa was right about that. She hadn’t known how right.

  “What kinds of gifts?” Quinn asked, not letting on that he felt like grabbing Abby and shaking the information out of her.

  “Oh, candy. A blouse she’d admired once when they were shopping together for something else. Caviar real recently. Lisa was wild about caviar. Myself, I just see it as fish eggs.”

  Quinn didn’t recall seeing caviar or an empty caviar container in Lisa and Leon’s kitchen.

  “Flowers-”

  “What?” Pearl asked sharply.

  Abby stared at her. “Flowers. Lisa said Leon had given her flowers. Not officially from him, of course. Like he was a secret admirer. Playing his romantic games.”

  “What kind of flowers?”

  “Roses, I think she said.”

  “Yellow ones?” Quinn asked almost lazily, not wanting to lead her.

  “They might have been yellow.”

  Abby absently twisted her finger harder, then must have hurt herself, the way she looked down and stopped and folded her hands in her lap.

  “Yellow. Uh-huh. In fact, I’m pretty sure she said they were yellow.”

  Back down in the unmarked, Pearl started the engine and switched on the air conditioner while Quinn used the cell phone.

  “I’m busy this morning,” Harley Renz said when Quinn had identified himself. “Everybody’s on my ass from the mayor to the guy who can’t get close enough to kiss the mayor’s ass. Say you got something for me, Quinn.”

  “Stomach contents,” Quinn said.

  “Jesus, I just ate. Talk plain.”

  “Did the ME list the postmortem contents of Lisa Ide’s stomach?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Caviar?”

  “Among other things. How’d you know?”

  “I’m a detective. It’s my job to find out things. You told me that yourself.”

  “About the caviar?”

  “About finding out things.”

  “Dammit, Quinn!”

  Quinn waited.

  “All right, all right, maybe I rag you too hard. It’s in me, and you sure as hell deserve it. What does this caviar mean, other than the late Lisa had a hoity-toity dinner before she died?”

  “It means she really did love caviar and that she and Leon were definitely done by our guy. He left caviar in their apartment recently, somehow knew Lisa was crazy about it and made it one of his gifts to her. He also gave her yellow roses. This makes thre
e out of four Night Prowler murders where yellow roses were or had been somewhere around.”

  “Maybe the husband, Leon, really left her the gifts. He musta known she liked caviar, and he mighta given her the roses.”

  “Not the husband.”

  “Why not?”

  “He and Lisa are dead.”

  “Yeah. That might be convincing to a jury.”

  Quinn related what else they’d learned from Abby Koop.

  “So now we got our solid link,” Renz said, warming to the information and obviously pleased. “Think we should feed the information to the media? It’d take some pressure off me.”

  “And put more on the Night Prowler,” Quinn said. He made a mental note to call Everson and give him a heads-up on the information Renz was going to give out. “Make sure the media know about the other anonymous gifts, too. I want this asshole to think we’re pounding at his heels.”

  “Like you were last night?”

  “How’d you find out about that?”

  “I got a connection at the hospital who saw your name on the patient list and did some checking. But don’t worry about it, Quinn, my source won’t say anything if he doesn’t wanna go to prison for drug theft. And I’m not gonna pull you off this case. By the way, we recovered the bullets.”

  “What bullets?”

  “The ones that were fired at you last night on First Avenue. Thirty-two caliber. I sent somebody around to recover them and had ballistics run a quick, confidential test. In case we might wanna make a match in the future when he tries for you again, or maybe shoots somebody else.”

  “But he’s still using a knife on his victims.”

  “He won’t try to use one on you. He doesn’t wanna get close enough. And he almost got you last night. You mighta died from a heart attack, even though he missed you. You hear the shots?”

  “No, but that’s not surprising. He fired from across the street-maybe even out a window-and there was a lot of traffic noise.”

  “So he mighta used a silencer.”

  “I suppose.” The silencer again. “But like I said, it was noisy on the street, and I took right after him. The people on the other side of the street might have heard a shot. I didn’t take time to ask.”

  “I still say he’s using his silencer. Speaking of which, the only silencer of that model unaccounted for in our neck of the woods was bought three years ago by a Wilhelm Whitmire, eighty-nine years old, who lives on West Eighty-seventh. He said he decided last year he was too old and shaky to have guns around, so he sold all his. Nobody wanted the cheap-ass silencer, so he tossed it in the trash five or six months ago.”

  “So you hit a dead end.”

  “Not necessarily. One of the other silencers might have been bought somewhere else and transported to the New York area. Maybe even from another country.”

  Quinn didn’t bother to say he’d pointed that out to Renz weeks ago. Enough about the silencer.

  “You sure nobody else knows about my hospital stay?” Quinn asked.

  “Not in the department, no. And I won’t tell anyone. It’s not that I don’t have a heart myself, but I’m thinking of the greater good. It’s my duty to protect the public, and you’re our best bet to nail this fucking Night Prowler.”

  “You were born to command, Harley.”

  Renz chuckled. “To serve, you mean.”

  “Whatever you’re doing, the condition of my heart’s the last thing you better discuss with the media or anybody else.”

  “Not to worry, Quinn. It’s between you, me, and your arteries.”

  Quinn broke the connection.

  Pearl looked over at him. “What was all that heart talk?”

  “Renz knows about my night in the hospital. He’s got a connection there who told him.”

  “Is he pulling you off the case?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. He doesn’t know what a heart is, because he doesn’t have one.”

  “He’s not going any further with the information,” Quinn said. He gave Pearl a look she hadn’t seen before. One that scared her. “And neither are you.”

  Pearl nodded and put the car in drive.

  She thought about the expression on Quinn’s face, what was in his eyes. Her breathing was coming a little hard. She’d been on the Job long enough to know people, and men in particular. The genuinely bad guys. The flip side. This Quinn had healed stronger where he’d been broken and was not a man to be messed with. The real and dangerous deal.

  Pearl rather liked that about him, but she decided it would be wise to pull in her horns.

  Until he loosened up, anyway, with her help. And she could help him because she knew how guys like him thought, and they all thought the same way. Quinn couldn’t throw away the rage because he thought it made him strong.

  It was something she’d have to change.

  That and some other things.

  49

  Fedderman joined Quinn and Pearl for lunch at the Diner on Amsterdam. They had a booth that looked out on the street. The sun blasting through the spotted window made the place too warm. It was also noisy and the food wasn’t very good. There were dead flies on the windowsill.

  Pearl was afraid to eat the tuna sandwich she’d ordered. Quinn picked at his egg-white omelette. Fedderman voiced doubts about his meat loaf sandwich but devoured it, anyway. Pearl suspected it would make him sick. She said they weren’t coming back here-ever. Neither man disagreed with her.

  “So what’d you get out of Janet Hofer?” Quinn asked Fedderman, sipping diet Pepsi through a straw, certain the guy behind the counter had screwed up and given him the real stuff.

  “Nice woman, sells jewelry. I bought this from her.” Fedderman lifted his wadded brown suit coat from the seat beside him and held it out to show a bejeweled red, white and blue top hat pinned to the lapel.

  “Patriotic,” Pearl said.

  “It cost less than you think.”

  “You have no idea what I think.”

  “Hey! Easy, Pearl.”

  “Stick to the job, Feds, so we can get outta this shit hole as soon as possible. I don’t wanna hear about goddamn lapel pins.” She looked at Quinn, who was obviously struggling not to laugh. Pearl frowned.

  “She’s right,” Quinn told Fedderman. The wink was in his voice, and it made Pearl even madder, but she said nothing.

  Fedderman told them about his interview with Janet Hofer. It didn’t add anything, but it corroborated Abby Koop’s account of the conversation the three women had at lunch. Lisa Ide had been receiving anonymous gifts, including expensive jewelry and her beloved caviar. Lisa Ide had received yellow roses. Lisa Ide was dead, along with her husband.

  Since it was no secret, and was going to be in the news if it wasn’t already, Quinn told Fedderman about the shots that had been fired, and how he’d almost caught up with Luther Lunt last night. He didn’t mention the chest pains or the night in the hospital. Neither did Pearl.

  “Renz is feeding the information to the media,” Quinn said. “Along with details about clues left behind in the Lisa and Leon murders.”

  “That’s gonna pressure Lunt,” Fedderman said in a concerned voice, “and he’s already hunting for you.”

  “That’s another way of saying he’s being flushed out into the open.”

  “Or that he’s doubled back on his trail like a tiger and is about to ambush the hunter.”

  Pearl looked at Fedderman. “I didn’t know you knew anything about hunting.”

  “I do about hunting people,” Fedderman said, “and the people I hunt. And our Night Prowler’s about ready to crack. News reports that we’re practically inside his clothes with him are gonna drive him up the wall.”

  “Nothing there but the ceiling,” Quinn said.

  Fedderman nodded. “That’s my point. No place to go next but out the door, and we’re between him and it. Especially you, Quinn.”

  “That’s the idea,” Quinn said, “to bring him and us tog
ether.”

  “I hear you,” Fedderman said. “And for the first time I think it’s really gonna happen.” He shook his head. “But, at this point, who can predict what this sick freak is gonna do? All that pressure-”

  “On everybody involved,” Pearl said. She took a sip of her iceless iced tea and made a face. “Something’s gotta crack someplace soon.”

  “Or somebody,” Fedderman said, giving her an appraising look.

  Another of those composite drawings, all distressingly black and white. They thought they knew everything about him now, Quinn and his loathsome companions. They did know about the anonymous gifts, what the anchorwoman called my- his — sick obsession. The Night Prowler made a mental note of the woman’s name and the local channel she appeared on, and the red, red of her full lips carefully shaping her black vowels. Maybe someday he’d demonstrate to her about obsessions, make her obsessive about dying because it was better than living another moment under his hand.

  He knew what Quinn was doing, trying to increase the pressure on him to crack, like those serial killers in all the films and novels. Didn’t the fools ever stop to think it seldom happened in real life? Almost always it was chance that led to such a killer being caught-unpaid traffic tickets, official black on white, an improbable crossing of paths with an unknown witness, a call to jury duty, a neighbor’s complaint about noise… Minimize those kinds of risks and the police might chase their blue tails forever.

  But he knew it was true that the dark, cold pressure, the unreasonable fear that was being brought to bear, might lead to one of those minimal risks actually working for the law. What might not have been a mistake early in his magnificent run of victims might be a fatal error further down the road of rage and redemption.

  And maybe it didn’t have to be a mistake. Yesterday on Columbus Avenue the Night Prowler had encountered an old man he used to play chess with in Central Park. Wilhelm Whitmire had been old when they’d first met, and seemed ancient now. In their conversation he mentioned that the police had talked to him recently about a silencer he’d bought and then thrown away months ago.

  The Night Prowler recalled hearing about the silencer when it had been discarded, then secretly digging it out of Whitmire’s trash still piled at the curb. It was the silencer he’d used when he’d shot the Elzners. He was sure it wasn’t traceable, but still the law had talked to Whitmire. They’d gotten that far. They were in the neighborhood.