John Lutz - Pulse

In the bottom drawer was a folder with old photos and news articles about Daniel Danielle, how he’d killed a lot of people, been convicted of murder, and then died in a hurricane.

Or maybe it wasn’t so curious. After all, Daniel Danielle was a sort of iconic serial killer. And often in the news. Possibly Professor Pratt was researching sociopath behavior for one of her classes. She and her students had analyzed and discussed plenty of grisly subjects, real and fictional. They’d spent almost a week discussing Silence of the Lambs.

Jody closed the drawer, then took the time to arrange everything in the office as it was when she’d entered.

She drew a deep breath, told herself to pretend she belonged here in the building, and quickly and silently left the office and made her way back to the hall.

She was safe in the hall. She was sure no one had seen her enter or exit the suite of offices, and the odds were against her encountering someone who knew her before she left the building. She was simply another faceless visitor on campus.

She was walking toward the exit at the far end of the hall when she saw a figure stride past where another hall intersected.

It had all happened too fast and too far away to be sure, but Jody thought the figure might have been Sarah Benham.

The privacy tag still hung on the doorknob of Olivia’s room at the Hamaker Hotel. From outside came the sounds of the city, the honking horns, racing bus or truck engines, occasional muffled shouts. Far away a jackhammer began its muffled chattering.

Inside the room, the only sound was the deep and steady rhythm of Olivia’s breathing. Her breasts rose and fell. She was wearing a pink diaphanous nightgown and had one knee raised.

She straightened the knee.

Her breathing became fainter, and was underscored by a soft rattling sound. Flat on her back, her head comfortably resting on a pillow, Olivia raised her right hand and made a flitting motion with it, as if trying to shoo away something bothersome.

Then she lowered her hand and the room was silent.

W hen she entered the offices of Enders and Coil Monday morning, Jody saw through the glass wall of the conference room that something big was going on. Both Enders and Coil were at the long polished table, Enders standing and talking, gesticulating.

Three men and two women, all in business suits, were sitting across from them. Jody recognized the lead attorney for Meeding Properties. She didn’t know the other men or the women. As she watched, one of the women raised the water glass before her and took a sip, seemingly only mildly interested in what Enders was saying.

Dollie Baker, forty-five-year-old paralegal and receptionist, looked up from filing a fingernail and saw Jody gazing into the conference room.

“Important stuff,” she said.

Jody had within a week pegged Dollie as too loose with her tongue and the facts to be working at a law firm. And she liked to trail gossip bait.

Even knowing this, Jody bit. “Important how?”

“They’re deciding whether to go ahead and raze Dash’s apartment building while Dash is still in the hospital.”

“They’ve been arguing that for days.”

“But Dash has been given a release date. She comes home from the hospital tomorrow, if home is still standing.”

That explained the sense of urgency Enders was emitting. He was probably arguing to turn the dinosaur-like wrecking machines loose on the building while it stood empty. That’s how Jody had come to think of the destruction of the apartment building, an attack by iron-jawed prehistoric beasts as might be depicted in a high-tech science fiction movie.

“Leaving Mildred Dash an invalid with no home to return to would create such a firestorm of bad press, it wouldn’t be worthwhile,” Jody said.

“You should be telling that to them in there.”

“Hah! Anyway, I thought that was already decided. So what’s changed?”

“The development company’s position. They’d rather be the bad guys, figuring it would cost less to repair their reputation than it would to delay the project even longer.”

“But it isn’t a dollars and-”

Dollie grinned and held up her hand in a stop signal. “I hear you, Jody. But the fact is, for them and for us, it is a dollars-and-cents issue.”

“There’s always right and wrong,” Jody said.

Dollie smiled. “Notice how odd that sounds in here?”

Jody had noticed. It was as if her words had been absorbed and made meaningless by the deep carpet and thick drapes.

Dollie gave her a reassuring smile. “Remember, kid, this is a law office.”

Jody did remember. For a moment she stood watching the silent storm of discussion in the conference room.

“What are you thinking, Jody?”

“Nothing, really.”

She was wondering what the development company’s position would be if the Dash apartment building was occupied by someone other than Mildred Dash.

Weaver entered Harley Renz’s office and laid a padded yellow envelope on his desk.

Renz reached into it cautiously, as if fearing something might bite him, and pulled out a plastic tube with a metal plug on the end.

“Know what those are?” Weaver asked.

“Thumb drives for a computer,” Renz said.

“Right. You plug them into a USB port and you can transfer information to or from them.”

“I know all that. I’m not a computer Luddite, whatever that is. Where’d they come from?”

Weaver thought the question a little odd, since it was Renz who’d suggested-indirectly, of course-that Weaver enter Dr. Grace Moore’s apartment and search for more information about her patients than her files had provided. Who could tell what kinds of information might be on those drives? Information was Renz’s lifeblood, and nobody knew better than Weaver how to scour an apartment.

Weaver also knew enough not to answer the question directly. “They came into my possession last night.”

Renz looked at her carefully across his desk. She noticed how red his eyes were and how he appeared more jowly than ever. As if gravity were tugging at his features extra hard this morning.

“Anything about Tennyson?” he asked.

He’d tried to make the question sound casual, but there was a charge in the air that made Weaver’s scalp tingle.

She could have said she couldn’t know about Tennyson, because Renz had suggested she seek an opportunity to get into Moore’s apartment, and she couldn’t be two places at once. But she simply said, “Nothing.”

Something was very wrong here. It was time to tiptoe.

“Harl-Commissioner, is everything all right?”

He sat back as if the question needed to be mulled over. “Yes. I’d say so.” He leaned forward and began shuffling papers on his desk. A caricature of a busy executive. “We got a double homicide in the West Village, an ambulance shot at on Broadway, a foreign dignitary arrested in a bar fight, a professional escort dead from a heroin overdose in a Midtown hotel… the usual.”

Professional escort?

Weaver’s voice was steady. “Got a name on the escort?”

Renz pretended to check for information in his mess of papers. “Olivia something…”

Weaver showed no emotion. A game needed to be played here, and she was learning the rules as it went along.

“Any indication of foul play?”

“Not really.” He trained sad, angry eyes on her and shrugged. “But who knows for sure?”

“I’m… sorry,” Weaver said.

Renz suddenly smiled slyly at her. “What for? You want the escort case?”

She couldn’t help but smile back. Pretending could have its moments, and once you sold your soul to the devil there was a lot to smile about.