Darker Than Night fq-1

by John Lutz

  “You think that would’ve stopped him? Being one victim short?”

  “He’s always killed in pairs before. It seems to be the happy couple that sets him off.”

  “So he might come back when he figures hubby’s returned.”

  Quinn smiled. “You’re ahead of me, Pearl.”

  Keep it in mind.

  He moved away from her, into the child’s room.

  “Marvelous,” he said, glancing around.

  “When you turn out the lights, there are stars on the ceiling.”

  “Really?” But he didn’t try it to see. “If I’d had a room like this as a child, I might have grown up to be president.”

  “Probably happier, whatever you turned out to be.”

  Claire was back and had heard them. “Look,” she said, and flipped the toggle switch back and forth to demonstrate the stars set in the ceiling.

  “Ah, that’s something rare. You’ll be raising a future astronomer-”

  Quinn stopped talking when he heard Claire gasp and saw how pale she was. Pale, but her eyes were dark with terror.

  “Claire?”

  She was pointing at the love seat with its lineup of stuffed animals. “There! That stuffed bear! It wasn’t there! The brown-and-white bear!”

  “You’re sure?” Pearl asked, unable to help thinking Claire was sounding a little like Dr. Seuss.

  “Positive. I bought all the stuffed animals myself. Four of them. There are five now.” She moved closer to the love seat, so it was obvious she was pointing at a small brown-and-white bear with a toothy smile. It was wedged between a stuffed dog and a fuzzy alligator and was wearing a pinstripe baseball uniform and a Yankees cap. “It wasn’t there before!”

  “We believe you,” Quinn told her. He absently clutched her shoulder and squeezed gently to reassure her.

  Then he went to the bear and picked it up, wondering if the paw he couldn’t see, because of the way the bear was angled between the stuffed animals flanking it, would be wearing a fielder’s glove or catcher’s mitt.

  It was wearing neither.

  It was clutching a single yellow rose.

  64

  The Night Prowler rode the elevator up to his apartment, touching a fingertip to the hard steel surface of the knife taped to his chest beneath his shirt. He stood motionless but feeling the motion as he rocketed through the dark core of the building.

  He’d been ready for the unexpected, expected the unexpected. But Claire had been sleeping in the big bed alone.

  Where was her husband?

  Away somewhere, probably in some other city, some other world. He was an actor, so maybe he had to reshoot a scene in a movie or TV commercial, or had to attend a story conference. A business trip. But he’d return- Me! Home, dear! — to where the journey began and where it would end.

  No one could plan for everything, so tonight had been simply another night.

  It wasn’t yet time to act if Claire slept alone. She and her husband would understand that; being actors, they would surely know the entire cast had to be in place before the curtain was raised, lowered, and the lights came up, died. It was all necessary for effect, for illusion layered over illusion until it became reality.

  So, for a long time, he’d simply stood silently in their bedroom, a dark angel at the foot of the bed, and watched Claire sleep. Watched and listened to her breathe. Then he’d gone into the smaller bedroom, the room of the child that might have been, and lay on his back on the carpet and stared at the stars.

  He left the gifts, the stuffed bear for the child-to-have-been. Irony, the cuddly, smiling beast that rips with razor claws. And he’d fixed to its paw, with a piece of cellophane tape from the desk, the single yellow rose for Claire.

  He looked in on her before leaving, to make sure her sleep hadn’t been disturbed. How safe and beautiful she looked, the paleness of her flesh where her leg extended from beneath the white sheet, as if she were seeking in sleep a foothold in the waking world. The slow pink rhythm of her breathing was hypnotic…

  The elevator stopped its ascent. The door slid open. The Night Prowler didn’t move.

  Finally he pressed the down button.

  He couldn’t go home yet, not to needs unfulfilled and gray terrors that wouldn’t remain dead. Not to the buzzing he knew would begin and would become louder and louder.

  He couldn’t and wouldn’t.

  As on so many nights lately, he’d roam the colorless, early-hour streets, where there were few to see him. Sometimes he’d wear his sweatpants and jogging shoes so he wouldn’t arouse suspicion as he ran faster and faster and farther until the needs and terrors were left behind, at least for a while. Some of the terrors had faces only glimpsed. Quinn’s broad, powerful face. Quinn, the god of the law; Quinn, the chess master, red and black.

  Quinn the hated and feared. One can’t exist without the other.

  Hate, fear, frustration, needs. A recipe that boiled in the brain.

  Quinn knew that and was counting on a mistake, an opening, a checkmate, and a death.

  Soon the husband half of the acting team would return to wife and apartment, his final destination. Home, dear!

  And soon enough, when the cast was reassembled, the Night Prowler would return to his stage and play the role he was born to and borne to. Destiny from the womb. There was a birth order worldwide, not only within families.

  Chess has nothing to do with fate.

  He wasn’t wearing jogging shoes tonight, but he would run.

  Anna ran in the building’s basement on the industrial-model treadmill her overweight neighbor Mr. Jansen had offered. It helped him to run off stress, he’d told her, so maybe it would do the same for her.

  And it did help. This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where people jogged along city streets for their health. For their health they went most places in pairs and avoided certain street corners. For their health they stayed indoors most nights and kept their drapes closed and their shades down and minded their own business.

  Mr. Jansen called his treadmill “Mr. Torture.” Joking, of course. He was diabetic and his doctor said he had to get his weight down, so it wasn’t as if he had much choice. It was the kind of treadmill that had a digital display showing how far you’d gone and how many calories you’d burned. And you could put a headband on with a wire that plugged into the display so you could observe your pulse rate in red digital numbers. Anna’s heart rate was well over a hundred. More than it should have been, according to the table stuck on the treadmill’s control board.

  She was winded. Her legs ached and her sides hurt with every breath, but she continued to run. She felt oddly detached from her discomfort, her legs and arms pumping mechanically. Physical exhaustion could do only so much to alleviate stress. It was the mental friction that set thoughts on fire and burned away the soul, and that you could never really outrun. But you could try, so the treadmill growled along while Anna’s jogging shoes beat out their weary, relentless rhythm on its unforgiving rubber belt.

  While she ran nowhere she thought about Quinn.

  She thought about her gun.

  Finally she pressed the off button and the treadmill slowed and then stopped. She leaned forward with both elbows resting on the steel handrails, her head bowed, and tried to catch her breath.

  This was, she realized, quite literally getting her nowhere.

  She thought about her gun.

  65

  Jubal and Dalia showered together to cool down and relax, but wound up having sex again in the tiled shower stall of their Chicago hotel room.

  When finally they were soaped, satiated, rinsed, and dried, they decided there was another atavistic desire to appease-hunger. Jubal phoned down to room service for a late supper of club sandwiches and French fries, a beer for him, an iced tea for Dalia, who was worried about her weight.

  By the time they were dressed, the food had arrived. The bellhop set everything up on the table by the window that looked out over downtow
n, and Jubal tipped him and ignored the way he glanced sideways at Dalia, who had a kind of glow about her.

  Since there wasn’t much to see out the window at night unless they switched off the room lights, and they didn’t particularly want anyone to see in, Dalia closed the drapes before they sat down to eat.

  “Claire called my cell phone number again a few minutes before you got here,” Jubal said, and took a huge bite of his sandwich. Plenty of mayonnaise. Good!

  Dalia looked a bit surprised. It wasn’t like him to bring up the subject of his wife during meals. She simply stared at him, slowly stirring her tea, until he was finished chewing and could continue.

  “She’s got things stirred up in New York. Called the cops. For some reason she thinks the Night Prowler’s after her.”

  Dalia looked blank for a moment. “The serial killer who’s got every woman in New York scared shitless?” It was a rhetorical question. “Why would she think that?”

  “A few objects she can’t explain-probably because she doesn’t remember-have turned up around the apartment. This Night Prowler jerk leaves his intended victims anonymous gifts before he kills them, like he’s courting them or something.”

  “Can you explain the gifts?”

  “Not other than Claire’s hormones are running wild with the pregnancy. Her mind’s fucked up.”

  Dalia, who’d never been pregnant, mulled that over and came to no conclusion.

  “She does say when she called the cops, she found an extra teddy bear in the room she’s got decorated for the baby. Said she bought four and now there’s five, and the new bear was holding a yellow rose.”

  “Is that significant?”

  “According to the news, the Night Prowler likes to leave his victims-to-be yellow roses.”

  Dalia delicately placed a few fries on her sandwich plate, then pushed the rest of them away, where they wouldn’t tempt. She sipped her iced tea and sat back. “Sounds creepy.”

  “Sure. She’s probably imagining it. That’s all I can think of.”

  “And she wants you to come home so she’ll feel safe?”

  “No, she told me I should stay here and do my work. She said the cops’ll be looking out for her.”

  Dalia gave him a level, questioning look. “You worried about her?”

  “Sure. I don’t want some crazy killer to carve her up.”

  “I mean really worried?”

  Loaded question. Jubal wished now he hadn’t mentioned Claire’s phone call. Women were…women. Careful here… “Not really worried,” he said, “because I don’t think anything’s really going to happen to her.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I know Claire. And I know Claire pregnant. She could let her imagination get the best of her and one thing would lead to another. Right now, it’s how she is.”

  It wasn’t how she was, not really, and Jubal knew it. It was probably the ruby necklace that had started Claire’s mind whirring. She might not have entirely believed his lie, and he didn’t like the cops involved. He knew how to handle her. She needed reassurance. He should bolster his story, maybe surprise her, and soon, with a matching ring or bracelet.

  His explanation was good enough for Dalia. She opened her mouth wide, cocking her head sideways in a way that reminded Jubal of a shark about to close on its prey, and attacked her club sandwich.

  Jubal thought there was something wonderfully carnal about her.

  The next night that the stakeout was in place, Quinn ran it from the vestibule of an apartment building across the street that had a clear view of the entrance to Claire Briggs’s building. They were going on the assumption the Night Prowler hadn’t noticed Pearl starting to follow him last night in the unmarked car. Or if he had seen the car, as far as he knew, it had been innocently parked down the street, or was accelerating after turning a corner.

  Fedderman was inside the building across the street, Claire’s building, positioned in a storage room with its door propped open a crack so he had a view of the lobby. He had a hard wooden chair to sit on, which would help keep him awake, and a thermos full of strong coffee. He’d been on a lot of stakeouts during his years as a cop, and he knew how to maintain a kind of not-quite-asleep awareness that allowed him to survey an area for hours effectively without moving and without missing anything. He thought when he retired, he might find a job as a human security camera.

  Pearl was parked in the unmarked half a block down, near where she’d been last night, using binoculars to help her keep an eye on Claire’s apartment windows. It was warmer than last night, without much of a breeze, and she was uncomfortable even with the windows down. She knew she couldn’t start the engine and switch on the air conditioner; noise and exhaust fumes might give her away. She, too, had a thermos full of coffee, and also her portable plastic potty. She’d considered telling Fedderman about the device, then figured it wouldn’t be worth the grief.

  A couple of undercover cops were nearby, one in a closed dry cleaners a few doors down the street, another dressed as a homeless person in a doorway. In Claire’s living room, reading by one of those lights you clip on a book, was a tough, reliable cop named Ryan Campbell. Quinn knew him from the old days, when Campbell had once taken two bullets in the arm and still hauled down a stickup artist who’d just shot a bartender. Campbell had held the man in the iron vise of his uninjured arm until help arrived.

  Claire had shown herself several times at her apartment windows so it would be evident she was home. Home and vulnerable. She was being brave about this. Or acting brave.

  Quinn checked with his two-way to make sure everyone was in position; then he settled down and smoked a cigar, making sure its glowing ember was shielded from sight by his cupped hand.

  Stakeout mode. One of the things about police work he hadn’t missed. Wait, wait, wait…and almost always nothing happened until the next night, or the next, or the next.

  Then suddenly everything might happen.

  66

  Sometimes Quinn sat, and sometimes he stood so he wouldn’t fall asleep.

  But even standing and leaning against the wall in the black vestibule, he was in danger of dozing off.

  He looked away for an instant, changing position to rest his weight on his other leg, and didn’t notice the darkly dressed figure that appeared from deep shadow beneath a neighboring awning and entered Claire’s apartment building.

  Pearl had seen the man, almost rubbing her eyes to convince herself she was awake and hadn’t imagined him. He’d suddenly appeared out of darkness, strolling casually but quickly, and entered the building as if for the thousandth time, as if he belonged there. Cops can move like that after a lot of years on the job, as if they belong wherever they happen to be at the moment. Pearl knew she hadn’t yet reached that point and wondered if she’d be a cop long enough to achieve such natural invisibility.

  She used her two-way to contact Quinn.

  He came awake all the way and alerted everyone: “Somebody in the building. Might be our guy.”

  Who else, at two forty-five in the morning?

  “Got him,” Fedderman said softly from his vantage point in the storage room. “He’s crossing the lobby.”

  He watched as the man pressed the up button and stood seemingly relaxed, absently rolling something minute between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, waiting for the elevator to arrive.

  It must have been on a low floor, because it didn’t take long to reach lobby level.

  Fedderman was patient and waited until the elevator door had slid closed behind the man before making any more noise.

  Fedderman, louder: “He just stepped into the elevator.”

  Quinn made sure everyone else knew what was happening, then left the shelter of the dark vestibule and crossed the street.

  Half a block down, Pearl climbed out of the unmarked and moved toward him at a fast walk. This part made her nervous. The Night Prowler would be out of the elevator soon, might even glance out on
e of the windows at the ends of the halls and check the streets below. Pearl definitely didn’t belong in the neighborhood, a lone woman cutting across the street diagonally to save time.

  Don’t fuck up now.

  Quinn was already in the building. She picked up her pace.

  Campbell, likewise, knew what might be coming and was ready for it.

  He left the lights out in the apartment, and in the dimness moved quietly down the hall and into Claire’s bedroom. He didn’t want to wake her, have her hysterical before anything happened. Most of all, he didn’t want her harmed. He’d make damned sure she wasn’t harmed!

  But he wanted this asshole to actually enter her room and make it official, wanted him nailed in the courtroom the way Campbell was about to hammer him here in the bedroom.

  He took up position in a corner, close to the wall the door was on. When the sick fuck entered- if he enters-if he even comes to this apartment — Campbell would be like God Himself meting out rough justice.

  When the elevator had risen several floors, Fedderman pressed the button to bring the other elevator down to the lobby from where it was high in the building.

  The elevators were the old, slow kind, and the one containing the Night Prowler suspect was still rising when Quinn and Pearl entered the building. Quinn looked tired but alert. Pearl looked so eager she reminded Fedderman of a wirehaired terrier he’d owned long ago. Better not tell her that.

  Quinn looked at the glowing elevator button, then glanced up at the floor indicator light. The rising elevator was only a few floors below Claire’s.

  “He had a building key,” Fedderman said. “Didn’t even hesitate opening the inner lobby door and coming in.”

  “Maybe one of the tenants,” Pearl suggested, not believing it.

  “We’ll have a better idea in a few seconds,” Quinn said.

  The indicator light stopped at twenty-nine. Claire’s floor.

  “Jesus!” Pearl said.