by John Lutz
“Alone?”
He looked at her in a way that was unsettling. “Ah! Two nights ago. I know what you’re up to, Detective Meg.”
“Doyle.”
“Two nights ago was when that woman was shot in the park. The editor. .”
“Candy Trupiano,” Meg reminded him.
“Yeah. I had the Candy part. Listen, do I need an alibi? If I’d known you were coming I would have made something up.”
“You don’t seem to be taking this seriously.”
“It’s wearing a little thin, trying to keep track of my life in case I might be questioned about the who, where, what, when, why.”
“You should know how it is. We’re both stuck with the routine. You said you were here two nights ago. Were you alone?”
“Yes. Unfortunately, I didn’t choose that night to have a party.”
His joking manner was beginning to aggravate Meg. “Feel like talking about why you left the NYPD?”
That caused a dark cloud to pass over. She was instantly sorry she’d brought up the subject when she saw the look of pure pain cross his features.
“I think you know that, or you wouldn’t be here.” His voice had changed, too. If she wanted serious, she’d gotten it.
“You’re not the first person to shoot and miss,” she said. God! Now I’m trying to cheer him up.
“I didn’t miss.” He turned away from her. “I hit. Trouble is, what I hit was the hostage instead of the suspect.”
“It wasn’t your fault. It’s the kind of shit the bumper stickers say happens. How were you supposed to know someone was going to move at the same time you squeezed the trigger?”
“It was my job to know, just like it’s your job to be here and work at making yourself a pain in the ass. Which, as far as I’m concerned, you are not.” He wasn’t looking at her. Staring out the window. “I didn’t do my job. A woman died. Case closed.”
Without realizing she’d crossed the room she was at his side, touching his shoulder. “Then let it be closed. Stop torturing yourself about it.”
He turned slightly so he could look at her, his smile faint and sad. “It isn’t that easy. Guns can kill or maim in a lot of ways. Isn’t that the hypothesis-rogue cop tortured by guilt goes crazy and starts shooting people?”
“Not my hypothesis.”
“What’s yours?”
“I don’t have one yet. I’m doing my job, like you were doing yours when you got unlucky.”
“We talk an awful lot about the Job.”
“People are what they do,” Meg said.
“Did. Now I create things out of wood.”
“With sharp tools.”
He glanced at her. “Somebody been murdered with a band saw?”
“I don’t even know what a band saw is,” Meg said. “But I can’t imagine you murdering someone set to music.”
He moved away from her and sat down in a chair, crossing his legs. “Then you’ve never really listened to the blues.”
“Oh, but I have.”
He regarded her without changing expression. “What I sensed about you from the start is you might lie to me, but you’re honest.”
“Of course. I’m a cop.”
The sad smile again. “We keep things light so we don’t sink in quicksand.”
“Lots of us play it that way,” Meg said. “The cop’s world is a kind of swamp.”
He didn’t answer and wasn’t looking at her now. She knew where he was. Back in his personal swamp he could never quite escape, where he would eventually fall prey to the thing he kept alive there.
She walked to the door. The motion stirred enough air to raise again the acrid but pleasant scent of turpentine and freshly hewn or sanded wood. She imagined his muscle-corded arms and powerful hands working the wood, shaping it, creating …
“Interview over?” he asked, sounding disappointed.
“For now.”
“Learn anything?”
“Yeah.”
“Got any wise words for me?”
“Yeah.” She opened the door and looked back at him before stepping into the hall, giving him a mock serious expression. “Don’t leave town.” A touch of humor to show he could get out of the quicksand if only he’d try hard enough.
It hadn’t quite worked. She felt as if she were slowly sinking with him.
He nodded as if giving her instruction careful consideration. “Okay. Don’t be a stranger.”
Back in the unmarked she sat squeezing the steering wheel with both hands, staring straight ahead at nothing beyond the windshield.
I’m falling for him. A suspect in a serial murder investigation.
Be careful here. Be careful.
23
Kelli Wilson and her ten-year-old son, Jason, left Grand Central Station after riding the train in from Stamford. They took a cab to the Frick Museum, Kelli’s favorite. The museum was open extended hours to accommodate public demand for its Impressionist Masters exhibition.
Kelli and Jason spent almost three hours roaming the spacious rooms. Kelli was an amateur painter and knew she didn’t have as much talent as Jason, whose art teachers at the Bennett School were mightily impressed.
So Kelli was the mother of a superior child. Thinking about it made her smile. She liked to remind herself and smile. Heredity could be a wonderful thing.
Jason liked art, and loved painting almost as much as playing ice hockey. He was receptive when the recorded voice in the earphones of the tape players worn at the Frick explained the histories of the paintings and their creators. Kelli enjoyed watching the expression in his guileless blue eyes as he listened while he stared at the paintings with something like religious awe.
When they left the Frick the evening had turned cooler, and she was glad she’d brought her retro mink jacket into the city. Kelli was an attractive blond woman in her forties and had never owned anything mink before the jacket. Always she’d been antifur, but when she had a chance to buy the jacket at an estate sale, she reasoned that it was secondhand, the minks used to make it were long dead, and there would be no real difference in the world if she wore the jacket or if someone else did. The jacket was made of light-colored female mink fur and was incredibly soft. It looked just right with her pale complexion, and it did the magical thing expensive mink could do for a woman. When she wore it, she looked and felt ten years younger, and far more beautiful than she knew she actually was; the mirror didn’t exactly lie, but it became her friend.
Kelli put her hand on Jason’s shoulder to get his attention, and they stopped at the corner and moved out of the flow of pedestrian traffic. She dug her cell phone from her purse and speed-dialed the work number of her husband, Warren, who was an architect with Lohan and Berner. Warren had been with the firm almost five years, and lately was doing very well. Which was how they’d managed to buy their eighteen-foot cabin cruiser Dream Waver.
They kept the boat docked in a slip at the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. When Warren had to work late, which was often, he would stay in the city and spend the night on the Dream Waver. The boat slept six, so there was plenty of room on the nights when Kelli and Jason took a train into the city and met Warren for a late supper. The family would sleep on the boat. Kelli had resisted the idea at first, but Warren explained that the hotel bills they saved on the times he’d have to spend nights in the city would help to defray the cost of the boat.
The three years they’d owned the boat had proved him right. Not only that, Kelli came to love sleeping on the boat, feeling the gentle bobbing as water lapped at the hull, hearing the soft and subtle sounds of strain on wood, metal, and fiberglass. She also discovered that sex on a small boat was great, though not exactly private. Of course, it only happened on those rare nights when Jason wasn’t aboard. Kelli wondered if they might call Jennifer, the babysitter who sometimes stayed all night with Jason. Jennifer understood-Warren picked up on the third ring.
“I’m in the middle of a meeting right now, hon,” he
said, when he heard Kelli’s voice.
“Sorry. I’ll keep it short. We still on tonight for dinner at Four Seasons?” Kelli had never dined at the famous and expensive restaurant. This was to be a special dinner, celebrating the third anniversary of their purchase of Dream Waver.
“We’re still on. But I’m gonna be tied up here for a while longer discussing soil samples and city ordinances. I called and changed the reservation for eight-thirty. That okay with you?”
It has to be. But Kelli was only mildly annoyed. “Kind of late for Jason.”
“He never minded staying up past his bedtime.”
“That’s for sure. Jason and I can find someplace to kill time.”
“There’s a big new toy store over on Fifth Avenue.”
“I know the one you mean. We can cab over there and explore. But I can’t promise not to buy something.”
“With Jason along, it’s a given. Listen, I really gotta get back.”
“Of course. We’ll meet at Four Seasons a little before eight-thirty. Love you.”
“Love you back.”
The connection was broken.
“So what’re we gonna do?” Jason asked, as Kelli flipped the cell phone closed and slipped it back in her purse.
“Oh, I’m not sure. Maybe we could go explore a new toy store.”
“Kids’ toys?”
She had to grin. “I sure hope so.”
“We gonna buy something?”
She tried to ruffle his hair but he pulled away. Grinning, though.
“It’s a given,” she said.
The Night Sniper overheard most of what Kelli had said on the cell phone, her side of the conversation, on the corner near the Frick Museum. And he’d overheard both sides of the brief conversation between mother and child.
Time, place, opportunity. How carelessly people revealed themselves.
Crouching on the rooftop in the cool wind, he fitted the barrel and scope onto the collapsible aluminum stock of his custom-made Italian game rifle and smiled. The rifle was one of the more valuable in his collection, and it had a wonderful provenance. It had been a gift from Mussolini to Hermann Goering, himself an avid hunter, in 1939, only months before the beginning of World War Two. It was perfectly balanced, its hand-tooled components precise, its trigger pressure slight. So smooth was the mechanism that it was a pleasure for the Night Sniper to squeeze the trigger when the rifle was unloaded, simply to hear the buttery working of steel on steel. Steel that was machined to infinitesimal fractions of an inch.
Perfection.
The Night Sniper worshipped perfection.
And he’d found the perfect sniper’s nest, high enough to be unnoticeable from the street during the few seconds he’d be sighting in and vulnerable. Low enough so the angle of his shot was a good one. He had an unobstructed view of the corner of East Fifty-second and Park Avenue, and the entrance to the Four Seasons. The night was clear, and even on the rooftop the breeze was no more than a velvety caress of his bare wrists. Perfect.
His wrists had always been sensitive to even the slightest movement of air, which is why he always shot with his sleeves turned up.
They weren’t turned up now, because he had plenty of time. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch. He was wearing his Tag Heuer chronograph tonight. It kept perfect time, and it indicated precisely fourteen minutes before 8:30.
Approximately fourteen more minutes for his target to live.
And counting.
Jason had fallen in love with a scaled-down radio-controlled model of the red Ferrari Formula One race car driven by his hero, Michael Schumaker. Kelli knew it probably cost more than Warren would have approved of on the spot, but since it was for Jason and it was a fait accompli, he wouldn’t be upset. The agreement between Jason and his mother was that Jason would carry the car, and it would remain in the box until they boarded the Dream Waver.
He didn’t have to carry the car far, because three cabs were lined up outside the toy store. No doubt the drivers knew that almost every adult who entered the store with a child would emerge with at least one bag or package. Pay or schlep.
When she bent over and climbed into the back of the cab after Jason, Kelli noticed the dashboard clock. Ten minutes past eight. They might get to Four Seasons before Warren, but that was okay. They could have something cold to drink while they waited for him, water or Sprite for Jason, a Bloody Mary for Kelli.
As the cab pulled slowly away from the curb, then lurched slightly as the driver nosed into the flow of traffic and accelerated, Kelli smiled.
Usually Warren chided her about arriving late for restaurant dates.
Not this time.
Repetto, Lora, and Zoe were halfway through their drinks, which were in oversize martini glasses. They were in the Campbell Apartment in Grand Central Station, a plush, secluded bar specializing in creative drinks. Repetto had ordered a regular gin martini. Lora and Zoe had drinks with chunks of fruit on toothpicks in them. Repetto had been here before and liked the ambience, lots of rich wood paneling, soft light, and a patina of wealth and excellence from a time when railroads ruled. Chairs comfortable enough to sleep in were arranged around low, generous tables where conversation came easily for lovers or various other kinds of people on the make. However, the conversation around this table had been strained, probably mostly because of Repetto. He’d been quieter than usual, wondering where the evening was going. He knew there was a reason Lora had pushed for this meeting with Zoe.
It was Zoe who’d chosen the place they were to meet. Through Lora, she was having too much influence on the Night Sniper case. And surely the case was the reason they were here. He thought he might as well be the first to mention the subject.
“Are you still sure our killer won’t shoot a child?” he asked, sipping his martini. He studied Zoe as he sipped. She seemed relieved that she hadn’t had to broach the subject. Lora was looking warningly at Repetto.
“Still am,” Zoe said. “He’s simply not a child killer. Or if he is, he breaks the pattern.”
“New patterns are made all the time,” Repetto said.
“No, not often.” Zoe reached for her stemmed glass and almost drained what was left in one long series of swallows. She’d gotten here before them; Repetto suspected it was her second drink. Did she need nerve for this conversation? “Serial killers are trapped in patterns along with their victims.”
“Profilers can be trapped in patterns along with serial killers.”
Zoe smiled to show him she wasn’t perturbed. “Along with cops.”
Repetto could have cut rope with the look Lora gave him.
Zoe hadn’t taken her eyes off Repetto. “I wanted to talk to you about another aspect of the case.”
“Another insight into the killer?”
“Into his motive.”
“Well,” Repetto said, “that’s the heart of it.” More speculation. “But remember, if we’re a few degrees off when we sail, we could wind up on another continent.”
“What does that mean?” Lora asked.
Zoe looked at her and smiled. “Your husband’s telling me to be careful with my assumptions. And it’s good advice.” She again focused her attention on Repetto. “It occurred to me there was something interesting about the crime scenes and the victims. The murders all occurred in different parts of town, and to a variety of people. The victims seem to have had absolutely nothing in common, and that in itself is unusual.”
She did have Repetto’s interest. “You think the shootings aren’t random?” he asked.
“They might not be at all random. The shooter never happened to kill. . say, two unemployed men, or two recently engaged women, or two garage mechanics or insurance salesmen or whatever. Isn’t that worth noting?”
Repetto thought about it. “I’m not sure.”
“There is some coincidence in the world,” Lora said.
Repetto looked from one woman to the other. “I assume you two have talked this over.”
/>
They both nodded.
“The victims are representative,” Zoe said.
“Of what?”
“Different worlds,” Lora said, “but all clustered together here in New York. So, in a sense, one world.”
Repetto stared at her, trying to figure out exactly what she’d said.
“The victims are various ages, races, and stations in life,” Zoe said, “composing a diverse cross section of people living, working, or visiting New York City. And they were shot in different neighborhoods. It’s as if the sniper wants to stop tourism and local commerce, as if he has a grudge against the city.” She played with the stem of her martini glass. “Viewed in that light, the murders fit the pattern of revenge killings.”
Repetto sat back in soft, padded leather. “It’s a possibility, if the killer hates everyone enough to kill them.”
Lora smiled.
Zoe didn’t change expression. “Just almost everyone-the people who represent the city’s makeup. He’s attacking, in his own way, the city itself.”
“You really believe that?”
“I believe it enough to press.”
At least she was being honest. “What exactly do you want?” Repetto asked, getting to what he knew was the real reason for this friendly meeting over drinks.
“For you to take the theory to Assistant Chief Melbourne. Get him to use his authority to open confidential city records so we can search for anyone who might have a grudge against New York City.”
“That’d be half the goddamn country,” Repetto said.
“You know what she means,” Lora said, throwing in with the enemy. “Personnel files.”
Zoe leaned forward. “We need to find out about seriously disgruntled employees, but just as importantly, former employees. People who left under the worst circumstances, and carrying a load of acrimony.”
“You’re asking for a lot of time,” Repetto said. “A lot of work hours.”
“It might be worth it,” Lora said.
“What about Zoe’s previous theory that the killer’s insisting on game playing, so we should concentrate on that aspect of his personality?” He was asking Lora, not Zoe. Lora the turncoat.
“It could still be true,” Lora said. “So could this theory.”
