“… wrong?”
Jennifer blinked and looked at E.L. again. “What did you say?”
“I asked if something was wrong. You had a funny look on your face.”
“No,” she said, “nothing’s wrong. I was just thinking.”
“Anything you want to talk about?”
An urge to tell him about Zach and the baby came over her. She fought it down. Too personal, too painful—no. She had never told anyone about that period in her life; the last person to tell would be this man. Keep it superficial, she thought. He’s enough of a threat already.
“It’s not important,” she lied.
He held her gaze for a moment, the way he had over lunch. As if he were trying to peer through her eyes to see what thoughts lay behind them. Other men had looked at her that way, but not quite so penetratingly. There was a kind of implacability in his look, the eye of authority that refused to be denied knowledge—a man who laid out dotted lines for himself and then followed them. He wanted to get inside her mind as well as her body, and she was not sure she could keep him from doing that, keep herself from giving in. And that, even more than the seeds of caring, was what made her afraid of him.
She looked away, through the windshield. They were just turning onto Ninety-eighth Street now. The sky was a bright blue and hot sunshine bathed the crowded street, made the air shimmer with heat waves; and yet the brownstones had a shadowy, vulnerable look, crouched together like frightened animals. Imagination, she thought. But a coldness had touched her and would not go away.
E.L. drove past a remote camera crew from one of the TV stations that was filming on the block, a knot of curiosity seekers watching them, and slid the car to the curb just ahead of her building. He set the handbrake, but made no move to shut off the engine. Jennifer knew what that meant, and she thought: Damn, damn— because the heat in her loins was demanding and she did not want to spend the rest of the afternoon alone. But she let none of that show in her expression. And she made the invitation anyway, because it was part of the game she had established between them.
“Come upstairs with me, E.L.”
“I can’t, not right now. I still have work to do.”
“Yes, I know you have. I’ll be home this evening. Or will you be working all evening too?”
“That depends,” he said slowly. “Maybe not. If I can get away … do you want me to call first?”
“That’s not necessary. Just come by.”
“All right. If I can.”
“If you can. I enjoyed the lunch, E.L.”
“So did I,” he said.
Jennifer got out of the car and walked around the front, letting him look at her through the windshield. When she stopped on the sidewalk on his side, his eyes met hers again, briefly; then he nodded and pulled away. She watched the car until it swung out of sight on West End Avenue. The heat in her loins and the heat from the sun made her feel as though she were burning.
As she turned toward her building she found herself looking across the street at 1279, where Cindy Wilson, a woman she had not known at all, had been shot to death last night. The coldness she had felt in the car touched her again, like something made of ice being pressed against the fiery skin of her neck.
Preying on women now, she thought. Just like Zach. Four men and one woman so far.
And who’s next?
Which of us will he go after next?
3:55 P.M. — E.L. OXMAN
The call came in ten minutes after Oxman returned to the Twenty-fourth.
He was sitting in Lieutenant Smiley’s office, listening to Manders bitch. About the media—there was a copy of the Post on his desk, with a scare headline that read: POLICE STYMIED IN WEST 98TH MURDERS. About the flack he was getting from the mayor’s office and the commissioner’s office. And about the lack of any positive leads. Vernon Wilson seemed to be off the list of suspects. So did Wally Singer; Tobin had phoned in a negative report earlier. The checks on known criminals and individuals with a history of mental disorders who had lived on West Ninety-eighth during the past ten years had also proved negative. As had the lab analysis of the clothing of Cindy Wilson and Jack Kennebank. As had the minute examinations of both murder scenes.
“The citizens over there are scared shitless,” Manders was saying. “Half of them have called in here or to the commissioner’s office demanding protection. And I don’t blame ’em. If I lived on that block I’d feel the same way myself.”
“What about putting in another undercover man?”
“Yeah. I’ve already made the arrangements—two men, not one. I pulled Tolluto off another case, and the Six-seven is loaning us one of their best men.” Manders lit a cigarette, coughed, and glared at it. “Goddamn coffin nails,” he said.
“So why don’t you give them up?”
“I’ve been trying for months. I could do it if it wasn’t for things like this that keep coming up. Everybody shits in the Two-four these days and all the shit gets dumped on me.”
Oxman didn’t say anything. Manders was a chronic complainer; if you didn’t encourage him, his individual tirades were usually short-lived. Besides, Oxman had enough on his mind as it was. The investigation, mainly, but also Jennifer Crane. Images of her kept flickering across his mind like slow-motion film clips, at least half of them vividly erotic.
“Maybe the undercover team will do some good,” Manders said. “Kennebank, poor bastard, flushed that psycho once; it could happen again. But don’t count on it.”
“Why not?”
“Because the commissioner ordered me to step up patrols in the neighborhood,” Manders said. “The residents want all the protection they can get, and that means they want to see blue uniforms. So we’re giving them blue uniforms—three patrol cars cruising the area at staggered intervals, round the clock.”
“For how long?”
“Hell, who knows? We can’t keep it up indefinitely; we just don’t have the manpower to spare. Fact is, too much police visibility is liable to drive the psycho into a hole somewhere until we back off. Then if he hits again, we’d be right back to square one. But the commissioner says undercover cops aren’t enough, we’ve got to minimize the risk to public safety, and who am I to argue with the goddamn commissioner? If it was up to me—”
There was a knock on the office door and one of the other detectives, Ed Slater, poked his head inside. “Call for you, Ox,” he said to Oxman. “Might be important—some guy who says he wants to talk about the shootings on Ninety-eighth.”
“He give his name?”
“No. Just asked for you and wouldn’t say anything else.”
Oxman got to his feet. Manders said, “It’s probably another goddamn crank. But go ahead and take it in here, Ox.” He pushed the phone across his desk.
“Line four,” Slater said.
Oxman picked up the receiver, punched the lighted Lucite button for line four on the unit’s base. “Detective Oxman speaking.”
“Ah, yes, good afternoon, Detective Oxman.” Male voice, soft-spoken, cultured. “This is God calling.”
“What?”
“You heard me correctly. I am the Lord God and Conscience of West Ninety-eighth Street. I am the Angel of Mercy and the Angel of Death. Cindy Wilson found that out last night. So did Jack Kennebank, when he attempted to interfere in the Lord’s work.”
Oxman clapped a hand over the mouthpiece and said in a sharp whisper to Slater, who was still standing in the doorway, “Trace this.”
Manders came up out of his chair, scowling around his cigarette, as Slater disappeared. “Who is it, Ox?”
Oxman shook his head. The voice in his ear was saying, “Don’t bother to put a tracer on this call. I know all about tracers; I know approximately how long one takes. I won’t be on the line that long.”
“Just who are you?”
“I told you that. I am God—the Angel of Mercy and the Angel of Death.”
“Did you kill all those people on West Ninety-eighth?”
/>
Manders said, “Christ! If it’s another nut—”
Oxman flapped an impatient hand at him. Manders shut up, but he came out from behind the desk and lumbered into the squadroom. He went straight to Oxman’s desk, jabbed at the phone, and hauled up the receiver. Oxman could hear the faint click on the line, and so could the caller; but the voice was talking again and it didn’t pause.
“Yes, I killed them. I executed them. You think I’ve done murder but I haven’t; I have sent down my wrath in the name of righteousness, I have punished them for their sins. Vengeance is mine.”
“Why? What did Cindy Wilson and the others do to you?”
“They offended the universe in which they live; they offended me. They were sinners, and the wages of sin is death. Do you understand?”
Oxman understood, all right. A raving lunatic. But the question was, was he a harmless crank, one of the confessors, or was he the psycho? If he was the psycho, it was as bad as they’d feared and maybe worse; a psychotic with a god complex was the worst kind.
“How do you know they were sinners?” he asked. He kept one eye on Slater out at his desk trying to hustle up the trace. “You live on that block, is that it?”
“God resides in the heavens,” the voice said. “The sins of my children are plain to me; I know them all through God’s Eye. No sins can escape the notice of God’s Eye, Detective Oxman. Not even yours.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If you enter my domain, you must act according to my laws and my commandments. You and all your cohorts. Otherwise you will die as the others have died, at my discretion.”
“You can’t kill all of us,” Oxman said. “If you know what’s good for you—”
“If you know what’s good for you, Detective Oxman, you will not challenge me. I am stronger than you. You can’t prevent me from cleansing my universe; you can’t stop me. The fingerprints on the weapon you found are useless to you; my fingerprints are on file nowhere on this earth. Nor will you be able to trace the serial number. So I will continue to strike as I choose. Be prudent, or the next to feel my wrath will be you.”
The line clicked and began to hum emptily.
Oxman jammed the handset into its cradle, pivoted, and hurried out into the squadroom. Manders, his basset-hound face pulled into a tight grimace, was on his way to Slater’s desk, where Slater was talking into the phone. But Oxman knew even before Slater glanced up and shook his head that there hadn’t been enough time to trace the call.
Manders said, “Shit,” and turned to Oxman. “What do you think, Ox? He could have been a crank guessing we couldn’t trace the prints or the serial number on that thirty-two.”
“I don’t think so. Cranks don’t make guesses like that. And, anyway, we said we didn’t find any prints, remember? No, my gut feeling says he’s the one.”
“Yeah,” Manders agreed, “mine too. That kind of motive—the god stuff, punishing sinners—fits pretty good. If it was him, calling you is his first big mistake. It gives us the motive, and it says he thinks he’s untouchable no matter what he does or what we do. I like that; it means he’s liable to get careless.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Oxman said. “But he’s damned cunning, whoever he is; the way he’s handled himself so far proves that. It could be he’s got a reason for feeling secure.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Some sort of edge, some way of monitoring what goes on on that block.”
“Which means he has to be one of the residents.”
“It figures that way.”
“Somebody you talked to personally, maybe,” Manders said. “You have a hard time with anybody over there? Hassle anybody?”
“No. Why?”
“That warning right at the end. The crap about you being prudent or you might be his next victim. It sounded personal, like maybe he’s got something against you.”
“So it did,” Oxman said musingly.
“Why would he single you out?”
“I’m in charge of the investigation; that was in all the media. I could be a symbol, a kind of potential anti-Christ in his eyes.”
In his eyes.
Oxman frowned. He had already begun replaying the conversation in his mind, looking for a lead, anything significant. And now he remembered the voice saying, “The sins of my children are plain to me; I know them all through God’s Eye.” Why phrase it like that? Why eye singular instead of plural? Why not “I know them all because I’ve seen them with my eyes”?
“I guess that’s possible,” Manders admitted. “But I still say it sounded personal. You watch yourself when you’re over on that block, Ox. I’ve already lost one cop; I don’t want to lose you too.”
“You won’t lose me, don’t worry.”
“I get paid to worry,” Manders said. “And I’m worried plenty right now. You just watch yourself, you hear?”
Oxman nodded. But he was thinking: God’s Eye.
What could the caller have meant by God’s Eye?
5:10 P.M. — BENNY HILLER
It took Hiller most of the afternoon to find Willie Lorsec.
After the run-in with that shitbrain Corales, he’d canvassed the blocks between West End and Amsterdam looking at mailbox nameplates; none of them carried Lorsec’s name, so Hilier still didn’t know which building the junkman lived in. It had to be one of them, though, because Lorsec himself had let it slip that he lived there. Maybe he didn’t put his name on his box because he didn’t get much mail. Or maybe he didn’t want anybody to know where he lived; he wasn’t listed in the Manhattan telephone directory, either.
Hiller couldn’t shake the feeling that Lorsec was up to something, that collecting and selling junk wasn’t his only scam. Blackmail, maybe; that was the possibility that worried Hiller the most. Lorsec had been too damned interested in Hiller’s trash, so interested that he’d come back last night after Hiller threw him out and made off with that fucking ring case and the labels and ID tags Hiller had cut out of the fur stoles he’d heisted over on the East Side last week. What the hell would a junk collector want with labels and ID tags? No, Lorsec must have put two and two together and come up with a fix on Hiller’s real occupation. The bastard was up to something, all right. And Hiller intended to find out what—on his terms, not Lorsec’s.
But it was his own goddamn fault. He should have flushed those labels and tags down the toilet, taken the empty ring box over and dumped it in the river. Only, Christ, who’d figure anybody going through your garbage? Even when he’d chased Lorsec yesterday, he hadn’t figured the bastard would be back; so he’d left the stuff in his trash sack and shoved the sack to the bottom of one of the cans. That had been his big mistake. It was mistakes like that that could land him in jail, if he screwed up in a way that would bring the cops down on him.
Well, he’d fix things with Lorsec, one way or another. And he’d be careful not to make any more mistakes in the future. He’d been burglarizing places for six years now, on an average of one or two a month—over a hundred scores so far—and he’d never taken a fall. Come close a couple of times, like with that guy over on Sixty-ninth the other night, but he’d always managed to come away clean. He was good, one of the best in the business; even his fence, Bud Gould, said that, and Bud had been around a long time. He had luck, he had the power. Nobody was going to take that away from him.
He kept wandering around the neighborhood, looking for Lorsec, avoiding the cops and reporters and curiosity seekers crawling all over Ninety-eighth Street. The cops didn’t bother him much, though. A couple of detectives had been around to talk to him again about the shootings and he’d handled them all right, no problem; as far as they were concerned, he was a short-order cook—and if they’d bothered to check him out on that score, Hymie Dorman would have covered for him. Hymie ran an all-night café down on Sixth Avenue, and he was a friend of Bud Gould’s; they’d had an arrangement for three years now.
No, it wasn�
�t the cops that made Hiller nervous. It was Lorsec, not knowing what the nosy bastard was up to. And it was the shootings, five now, including that undercover cop. Who wouldn’t be twitched over a thing like that? If the law didn’t find the psycho pretty soon, he’d move out of this neighborhood, maybe get a bigger place over on the East Side, move up in the world. He could afford it; he had a nice little bundle tucked away in a safe deposit box at Chase Manhattan. Yeah, maybe he’d do that in any case. He’d been living here three years, and people on the block were getting to know his face. So were the cops, with all these killings. It just wasn’t a good idea to keep hanging around.
Damn cops, anyway, he thought. They were supposed to protect the public from weirdos with guns. They were just no damn good when you needed them.
When he finally found Lorsec it was in an alley between two buildings on Hiller’s own block, near West End. Hiller had been walking along West End, because he didn’t want to make himself conspicuous by confining his search to Ninety-eighth, and he saw Lorsec when he came back around the corner. The junkman, his burlap sack bulging in one hand, had just come out of the basement door of the brownstone on the left, with a guy in a baseball cap who was probably the building’s super.
Hiller backed up to the corner and leaned against a lamppost to light a cigarette. Maybe Lorsec, when he left the alley, would do some more foraging elsewhere on the block. But sooner or later he’d have to go home, and Hiller would be right behind him when he did.
It was another five minutes before Lorsec showed. He headed east, across West End, with the bulky burlap sack slung over his shoulder, like a seedy Santa Claus with his toybag. He wasn’t expecting anybody to be following him, so he didn’t look behind him and he didn’t see Hiller casually cross over into Ninety-eighth Street. Halfway up the block, Lorsec climbed the stoop to one of the brownstones, used a key to open the front door, and vanished inside.
The Eye: A Novel of Suspense Page 15
