Stuart Kaminsky - Deluge

The limping man knew him well.

He finished the coffee. James Feldt was alone in the office. Most of the offices in the building were closed because of the weather. In most cases, employees, partners and management had just assumed it would not be business as usual. And they were right. Power kept flicking on and off. Now it was dark inside and outside the door to Strutts, McClean & Berg.

Feldt did not pause. Glasses perched on the end of his nose, he played at the keys of his battery-powered laptop and kept working.

The desktop computer he had turned off sat silently. He would turn it back on when the power was restored or the backup building generator kicked in. He had plenty to do until that happened.

The limping man drained the last few drops of coffee from the cup, crushed the cup and stuffed it into one deep pocket of his raincoat. With his free hand, he reached into the other deep pocket and took out the knife, the knife he would later use to carve, abuse, punish and kill Patricia Mycrant on a roof twenty-one blocks away.

The glass outer door wasn't locked. James Feldt had seen no reason to lock it. It wouldn't have mattered much if he had. The man would simply have knocked and waited till the curious auditor had opened the door. But this was much better.

The man, knife now open in his pocket, went through the outer door and walked to the inside office door that James had left open. He walked silently, though James wouldn't have heard him in any case against the background of rain.

Clap of thunder. Perfect. Perfect. A horror movie. A lone victim in an isolated room, a mad or calculating killer. But the limping man was most assuredly not mad.

He stood in the office doorway, waiting. He was not in a hurry, at least not in a big hurry. He waited for James to look up or sense that he was there. It didn't take long.

When James Feldt looked up, fingers arched lightly over the keyboard like a piano virtuoso, he was startled but not instantly surprised.

When James Feldt recognized the man in the doorway of the office, the man who was closing the door behind him, he was not frightened. He was puzzled.

"You working in the building?" he asked, looking down at his screen, typing in a few words, finishing his thought before looking up again.

The limping man shook his head.

James was completely confused now, wrenched from the numbers he had danced with seconds ago.

"Then what are you doing here?"

The limping man took out the knife and showed the blade to the man seated behind the desk. James adjusted his glasses so he could better see what the man was holding.

The lights came back on and James had a good look at the man's face, but it wasn't the face that suddenly frightened him as much as the clear vision of the knife and the latex glove gripping it.

James sighed deeply, turned off his laptop and closed the lid.

"Which one?" James asked.

The man with the knife understood.

"All of them."

James rose quickly and ran to the window. The limping man was ready. He cut him off. James Feldt would not cheat him by throwing himself out the window.

The limping man pushed Feldt with his free hand and slid the blade under his arm just below the left armpit. Feldt let out a sound like the air leaving a flat tire. He sank to the floor in a sitting position, trying to reach the wound.

He couldn't reach it. Not in time. He looked up. The sensation was strange, as if he had expected this or something very like it for some time.

James Feldt closed his eyes and prayed that the end would come quickly, but somehow he knew that it wouldn't.

"SMELL THAT?" DANNY MESSER SAID as he and Lindsay Monroe walked through the front door of the Wallen School.

In front of them, down the corridor, a uniformed policewoman motioned to them and pointed to a room to her left.

"Smell what?" asked Lindsay.

"Old wood," said Danny, adjusting his glasses. "Schools like this want that old wood atmosphere. Look at the walls. This place is maybe forty years old. Smells like it's a hundred and fifty. I think they spray that smell in here every morning. It's worth a couple of grand more on the tuition bill."

They were almost to the uniformed officer. Their footsteps echoed on the dark stained floor.

Danny reached over and opened the door the policewoman had indicated. Lindsay had her camera out. Both Danny and Lindsay were already gloved, ready and watching where they stepped.

They had driven, hubcap deep, from the lab. They considered taking the subway, but were told the trains weren't moving. Danny had done the driving. Neither Danny nor Lindsay had spoken to each other during the ride. Danny had talked to the other motorists, criticizing their slowdowns, critiquing their driving.

Lindsay was silent because she had gotten a call from her mother in Montana. Her mother was worried about her. Her mother was addicted to The Weather Channel. The call had not gone well.

Danny was not speaking, at least not to Lindsay, because he had been rained out of a date with Augusta Wallace for the last four days. He had been working on Augusta, a beautiful, slim, dark-haired detective, for months before she finally gave in, but the delays were clearly giving her second thoughts. He could tell by her few words, her passing smile in the halls.

Stepping into the murder scene, Danny Messer cursed the rain and turned his full attention to the dead man on the desk with the pencils protruding from his left eye and neck.

"We're still digging out bodies," the fireman said, leaning back against the red truck.

He wiped his face with the heavy gray glove on his hand and took off his helmet. His last name was Devlin. Stella could see that from the name on his raincoat.

Devlin was young, tall, handsome and weary. That was as clear as the name on his coat. Behind him lay what little remained of Doohan's. It wasn't much, a fragment of the bar, an edge now tilted to create a waterfall of seemingly endless rain. The leg of a chair stuck straight up as if someone had planted it in the rubble to mark the location of a buried body. A frying pan lay upside down on top of a torn scrap of checkered cloth. The cloth lay limp, beaten down by the rain and clinging to jagged bits of plaster and debris. At Stella Bonasera's feet was an unbroken and unopened bottle of Dewar's Scotch.

"Not too much of a fire," said Devlin. "Happened quickly. Place collapsed. We're getting a lot of that. Roofs mostly. The rain knocks it down. But in this case it wasn't the rain that knocked it down."

"What makes you think that?" said Sheldon Hawkes, standing at Stella's side.

"The end posts on the bearing walls," Devlin said, nodding toward where the walls had been. "Three of them collapsed at the same time and they didn't just collapse on their own. You can still smell the dynamite, that liquidy sweet smell."

"I know the smell," said Stella.

"Official report'll come from an arson investigator," Devlin said. "We can call in the dogs to track it, but I'm sure."

"The dead?" asked Hawkes.

"Left where we found them," said Devlin. "That's what you want, that's what you get."

"It's what we need," said Stella.

"I'll lead the way," said Devlin, pushing himself away from the truck. "We're shorthanded. Half of the crew is on another call. You'd think rain would keep fires from breaking out, not cause them."

They followed him, walking carefully over a fun-house floor of pieces, bits, chips and jagged metal. Devlin stopped and pointed to a tarp.

"Didn't know whether to leave them in the rain or cover them and maybe preserve evidence," said Devlin.

"It's a toss-up," said Stella.

She had thrown back the hood of her raincoat to give herself a better view of the scene and whatever bodies she might find. Her hair tumbled in front of her eyes. She ran her fingers through it to keep it back. She pulled a thick rubber band from her pocket and awkwardly, the arms of her raincoat swishing heavily together, tied her hair back. Devlin smiled in appreciation of Stella's high forehead and Grecian features. Stella was aware of the fireman's appreciation. This wasn't the time or place. Stella knew it. Devlin knew it. They also knew from their jobs that feeling guilty about small natural reactions wasn't worthwhile.