Darker Than Night fq-1

by John Lutz

  Thought she was alone.

  The buzzing…

  He swallowed, steadying himself for what was to come, maintaining control.

  Soon.

  The police would have taken the knife, but there were others in the kitchen. Lots of them.

  Very soon.

  Night. Black. Red.

  The elevator arrived at the end of the hall on the twenty-ninth floor.

  When the door opened, Pearl and Fedderman guided the handcuffed Jubal inside, and the three of them stood huddled as far to the rear as they could move.

  Quinn stood facing away from them and pressed the button for the lobby. In the reflection of the polished steel control panel, he watched his two detectives and Jubal Day. Quinn seemed relaxed, but he was tensed and ready to help if Jubal panicked or for some other reason got rambunctious. That happened sometimes. The suspect, facing a hopeless future, suddenly decided to lash out at his fate, his past, his sickness, at anyone close enough to reach. The demon in him trying one last time to escape.

  The door slid closed, and the elevator began to drop.

  71

  Now!

  The Night Prowler soundlessly rotated the knob and opened the closet door about six inches.

  The living room was still dark, but there was a light on somewhere in the back of the apartment, the bedroom.

  For several seconds he stood without moving, listening, listening…

  Then he stepped from the closet and silently made his way toward the kitchen.

  Claire would be in the bedroom, still trying to figure everything out, nursing her grief and pain, too much of it to allow sleep.

  She’d be awake and alone.

  That was best, that she be awake. If it’s going to be just the two of us.

  In the kitchen he tried to decide between a boning knife-perhaps too flexible and fragile-and a serrated bread knife with sharp twin points.

  And, of course, the sturdy, all-purpose chef’s knife. Hail to the Chef!

  Did he want her to come here, to the kitchen, or should he go to her?

  Where will you die, Claire?

  He decided on the bedroom. Enough had gone wrong tonight already, so why take chances?

  It would be quick. He’d be careful not to make any noise on his way to the bedroom, then when he entered she’d be astounded and paralyzed with terror. Her throat would be solid. She’d be unable to breathe for a moment, much less cry out.

  Then it would be too late.

  No one spoke as the elevator descended. Quinn resisted the temptation to stare upward, as people did out of habit in elevators, instead keeping his gaze fixed on Jubal’s reflection in the shiny control panel.

  Suddenly he saw an arm extended alongside him.

  Pearl pressed the emergency stop button, and the elevator slowed, lurched, and was still.

  Fedderman said, “What the hell, Pearl?”

  Quinn turned and looked at her. “Why?”

  She jerked a thumb toward Jubal. “He’s just been in a fight for his life with a tough cop and made a run for freedom.”

  “And?” Fedderman said.

  “He isn’t breathing hard.”

  Quinn stared at Jubal.

  It was true. Jubal’s complexion was pasty and he was obviously distressed, frightened, but his chest wasn’t heaving and his pale lips were pressed together. His breathing was even. After going several rounds with Campbell? And he wasn’t marked up from his struggle with Campbell and then with Campbell’s reinforcements.

  He isn’t the Night Prowler!

  Which meant…

  “Good Christ!” Fedderman said.

  All three of them had figured it out and were reaching for the 29 button. It was Pearl who pressed it, with Quinn’s finger mashing down on her thumb.

  The elevator began its slow ascent back toward Claire’s floor.

  72

  “Cara?”

  Claire gasped and looked up from where she sat slumped on the edge of the bed, her elbows on her knees.

  In that instant the Night Prowler hesitated.

  So beautiful in her sadness, in her secret knowledge. Not now, not yet…

  She sat up straight. It took her a few seconds to recognize the man standing in her bedroom doorway. The decorator. “Romulus…” Then she said automatically, “Not Cara. It’s Claire.”

  He smiled as if embarrassed. “Yes. Claire.”

  “What on earth are you-” And she noticed the knife in his hand, pressed flat against his thigh. From the kitchen. Her own knife.

  Her right hand rose to touch her lower lip. “My God! You’re-”

  “Don’t scream, Cara.”

  Cara again?

  She couldn’t move or look away from him. Her breath wouldn’t come. Her heart went wild and seemed about to explode.

  He sighed and moved toward her.

  Not Cara! I’m not Cara!

  When finally the elevator door slid open, the three detectives left a baffled Jubal Day standing alone in handcuffs and ran down the hall toward the apartment door.

  “Hey!” Jubal called after them.

  They didn’t turn around; their hurried feet made a desperate shuffling sound on the hall carpet.

  “Hey! What is this? What’s going on?”

  They ignored him.

  The door glided shut and the elevator began to descend before Jubal could stop it.

  Claire found the strength to move and scooted back across the mattress, staring at the knife, then up into Romulus’ eyes. They were such a beautiful blue, so sad and serious. And intent. Terrifying in their certainty.

  He’s ahead of me. He knows what we’re going to share and he’s going to make it happen. There’s no changing his mind.

  She decided to pick up a pillow and throw it at him, thinking that in the few seconds he was blinded when it struck his face, she’d make a run to get around him and reach the door. The element of surprise. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it was everything.

  It was as if he’d read her thoughts.

  He simply sidestepped the pillow and began moving around the bed toward her, his expression unchanged.

  Smiling, he gave her the angle to the door now, and she knew he wanted her to run for safety so he could intercept her, so she would come to him. He was waiting for her nerve to break. Giving her a slight chance. Knowing she’d take it as he got closer, because what else could she do?

  What else could she do?

  “Fast and hard,” Quinn said, thinking the noise might help, might stop or at least delay what was surely about to happen.

  If it hadn’t happened already.

  Fedderman, huffing like a winded bull, knew what he meant and lowered his shoulder as they neared the apartment door.

  Pearl already had her gun drawn.

  Claire had taken her first running step, and the Night Prowler his, when the sudden crash of the apartment door flying open made them both freeze.

  There was no thought of fighting them this time. Instinct and logic were the same. The Night Prowler bolted toward the window. If he could smash through the glass, reach the fire escape!

  Claire knew what he was doing and picked up the other pillow on the bed and hurled it at him as she had the first, with all her might.

  This time it struck him in the face and he paused, brushing it aside.

  The cost of his hesitation was only a second or two, but it was the ultimate price.

  Quinn was through the bedroom door first, Pearl and Fedderman almost running up his back.

  The Night Prowler lifted his right arm and at first Claire thought he was raising his hands, giving himself up. But his hand held the knife, his arm drawn back as if he were about to throw it at her.

  Giving them no choice!

  She knew somehow he wasn’t going to throw the knife. She didn’t even bother trying to get out of the way.

  The bedroom roared with the thunder of gunfire and the Night Prowler dropped the knife and staggered backward, hu
gging himself as if cold. He stared at Claire for a long moment.

  As if I betrayed him.

  Rolling his eyes in what might have been sudden panic, he dropped to a sitting position, then keeled over and lay curled on his side as if preparing to take a nap.

  His cheek was pressed against the carpet and he knew he was dying. His final horizon was only inches away.

  The last thing he saw was the vivid scarlet of his blood clashing with the blue carpet fibers.

  It was wrong, all wrong!

  73

  “His name’s Romulus,” Claire said, standing numbly and staring down at the corpse in her bedroom. “He decorated the baby’s room. Painted it.”

  Quinn didn’t have to bend down and examine the dead man on the floor to know he wasn’t Luther Lunt.

  “He called me Cara.”

  Quinn stared at her. “Cara?”

  “Never before. But when he first came into the bedroom. And just before you got here. Is he-”

  “Dead?”

  “No. I know he’s dead.”

  “He’s the Night Prowler,” Quinn said.

  “And Jubal? Where’s Jubal?”

  Quinn glanced at Fedderman. “Take her to her husband, and get the cuffs off him.”

  When Fedderman and Claire were gone, Quinn and Pearl looked at each other.

  They’d read a few things wrong. They both realized now that the victims who scratched at the freshly painted door and wall were trying not only to leave dying messages but to direct attention to the paint itself, and to the painter. Mary Navarre’s inverted V, or caret, that Quinn thought might be the first two strokes of an M or A scrawled in blood on the wall, was actually the first, vertical stroke of an R; death had come just as the second, horizontal stroke was about to begin, and her lifeless hand dropped almost straight down.

  And they hadn’t delved deeply or soon enough into suspects who might have duplicated keys to the murder apartments. The decorators obviously regarded their specialists, people like Romulus, as unlike the other tradesmen they employed, and above suspicion because they were fellow artists.

  “We should have figured it out,” Pearl said.

  “Maybe,” Quinn said. “Unless the name Romulus is on this guy’s birth certificate, we’re going to find out who he really is, and what might have made him do what he did.”

  “And who Cara is.”

  “Was,” Quinn corrected, recalling the information in Nester Brothers’ crinkled brown envelope.

  Pearl had gone over to the window near the body and was looking down at the street. “Everybody’s gathering down there. More cruisers, unmarkeds, media wolves. And I think I see Renz. There’s somebody down there that might even be Egan. Can’t be sure, though. One asshole looks pretty much like another from this height.”

  Quinn grinned at her, loving her just then the way maybe Jubal Day loved Claire. A couple of actors, not acting.

  “Bring ’em on,” he said.

  74

  Two days later, Quinn learned what Pearl had whispered in Egan’s ear that day at the hospital, what had infuriated Egan so and made him back away from his threat.

  Using the hard drive Pearl had given her, Michelle had matched the incriminating e-mails and Web site visits on Quinn’s NYPD computer with days, and even times, when police records showed Quinn was somewhere else.

  Someone had learned Quinn’s password-easy enough to do with a glance over Quinn’s shoulder when he was signing on-and had used Quinn’s computer.

  Of course Michelle was implicated in stealing the computer’s hard drive, and the actual crime had been committed by Pearl. But if Egan wanted to charge either of them, they could take him down with them. They could take him down even further than they’d fall.

  Egan had no bargaining chips and knew it. The only way he could prevent the hard-drive information from being made public was if he revealed who’d really raped Anna Caruso, which would clear Quinn. Mercer, the actual rapist, had duplicated the scar on Quinn’s forearm and made sure Anna saw it. And he’d stolen a button from Quinn’s shirt in Quinn’s locker and left it at the scene of the rape. Mercer would try to implicate Egan. But without the hard drive, there was no solid evidence that Egan was involved.

  The purpose of the rape was to get rid of Quinn and stop an internal affairs investigation into a narcotics kickback scheme involving Egan, Mercer, and half a dozen other cops.

  That investigation would become active again, and the chips would fall wherever.

  What Egan would have to do even before that happened, if he wasn’t fired, was resign from the NYPD with his skin intact but not his reputation.

  He was, in short, where Quinn used to be.

  Well, maybe in a worse place.

  Anna Caruso made a public apology to Quinn, who was reinstated in the NYPD. There were photographs in all the papers of them hugging each other while NYPD brass smilingly looked on.

  Only the day before, Anna had thrown away in a storm sewer her father’s gun she’d used to shoot at Quinn on First Avenue. The night he’d chased her on foot and almost caught her before his heart acted up.

  Anna decided life was a series of near misses, and sometimes hits, and the thing to do was to forget about them and live on.

  And play music.

  Dr. Jeri Janess was gratified to be making progress with her new patient. He’d come to her and confessed what was plaguing him: his drug addiction and increasing desire to enter into sadistic relationships with willing participants. As was inevitable, the victimization of his subjects was working its internal destruction in him. He sought now to escape his compulsion, and had come to Dr. Janess for help. So much confidence was he placing in the doctor that he’d finally offered up his real name: Lars Svenson.

  After Svenson had left her office, the doctor leaned back in her desk chair and couldn’t resist a satisfied smile. She switched on her recorder to make a brief oral summation, as she always did immediately following an appointment. She recited the patient’s name and the date, then heard the hope in her voice as she said, “We’re getting somewhere…”

  May Quinn married Elliott Franzine in a small, private ceremony in a seaside chapel on the California coast. Quinn didn’t know whether he should send a wedding gift. Pearl told him only if it might explode.

  They settled on a silver serving platter. Quinn received a polite thank-you note, and a month later a note from Lauri complaining that “Elliott” was seriously dorky and way too strict.

  Quinn decided May’s new marriage was going better than he’d expected.

  Quinn and Pearl worked smoothly in the NYPD for a while, then they broke the rules again and moved in with each other.

  The Village apartment they rented needed painting, but instead of hiring someone they decided to do the work themselves.

  Jubal Day didn’t get the West Side Buddies sitcom role. And after As Thy Love Thyself ’s run in Chicago, the roles he landed came further and further apart.

  “It’ll get better,” Claire would assure him. “Something always comes along. Some perfect part, or one that doesn’t seem perfect but turns out to be. You know how this business is.”

  Jubal did know, and knowing didn’t help.

  His days grew longer, and so did his black moods and frustrations.

  On nights when the baby let them sleep, and the only sound was the high breeze down the avenue playing at the windows, he would lie in bed desperately missing Dalia, finding his life more and more intolerable. With misery came sleeplessness and contemplation.

  It was odd the way people thought, the way destiny directed their minds and lives. They assumed they had free will, but sometimes they didn’t. They were simply rushed along by fate, making up their minds the only way they could, helpless even though they sensed what was happening.

  That was how Jubal felt, moved by dark powers he couldn’t understand, much less escape. If this was true evil, it was irresistible, and indistinguishable from fairness, from what he de
served. It masqueraded as hope. That was why it would win in the end.

  He couldn’t help thinking back on what happened the night he returned to New York unexpectedly to smooth over the necklace situation with Claire. When he opened his apartment door, it was as if he found yet another door. Whether he opened that door was now his choice. It was a choice he was terrified to make, though he knew that on a certain level he’d already made it. In something like this, there were really no surprises.

  So, here he lay beside Claire, wondering if the baby he didn’t want would again begin to bawl, missing Dalia, missing the life he’d envisioned for himself. Trapped like so many poor fools. Resigned like most of them. Thinking the forbidden thoughts.

  Suppose there’d been no necklace, and no Jubal Day or Arnold Wolfe on the passenger list of the late-night flight from Chicago. Suppose he’d flown to New York under an assumed name, using identification he could buy at half a dozen places in Times Square or the Village. Suppose he’d arranged for an alibi in Chicago with Dalia. She’d swear to anything for him, for the two of them to be together. Suppose he’d been in his apartment for what the police had first assumed.

  Suppose…

  One intolerable gray morning, when Claire unfolded the stroller and left the apartment to take the brat for a walk in the park before it started to rain, Jubal phoned Dalia.

  The moment she heard his voice, she realized she’d been expecting his call, and knew what he was going to suggest.

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