John Lutz - Fear the Night

Kelli made sure Jason was clear, then shut the cab door and stepped up on the curb. They began walking the block and a half to the restaurant. After sitting cramped in the cab for so long, it felt good to Kelli to be stretching her muscles. She really should exercise more. She’d been slacking off lately, skipping some of her scheduled workouts. Her chiropractor had given her a large inflatable ball to use for low-impact exercises. It made working out seem like play and might help her resolve.

They were standing on the corner with a man and three women, waiting for the signal to change so they could cross Park, when Kelli released Jason’s hand and touched her chest high between her breasts. She’d felt a sudden, sharp pain and was having difficulty breathing.

Heart attack?

Not in my family.

The light changed to WALK and the people around her began crossing the street. Someone behind bumped her hip as they danced around her, a large woman in a hurry and not slowing down or saying excuse me.

“Mom?”

Jason. Why did he sound so far away?

She started to look down at him and noticed the bright red on her soft brown mink jacket.

What on earth …?

“Mom?”

Kelly touched the red brilliance and stared at her stained fingers when she withdrew her hand from the wet fur.

Blood?

“Mom?”

Blood?

Before she could figure it out, she was dead on the sidewalk.

“A vendetta against the city?” Meg said, when Repetto called and told her about Zoe’s revenge theory. It was almost nine o’clock. The windows were black mirrors. She’d been dozing when the phone rang. Now she was sitting on the edge of the sofa, clutching the receiver and watching on TV a man in a dark suit, a vaguely familiar political pundit, frowning fiercely and waving his arms behind the yellow letters MUTE.

“That’s the angle we’re going to start working tomorrow,” Repetto said. “Disgruntled former city employees.”

Meg tried to shake off her sleepiness. “If Melbourne goes for it.”

“Melbourne will go.” Repetto was at his desk in his study, thinking about smoking a cigar, thinking maybe he shouldn’t. Things were going more smoothly with Lora now that he’d agreed to lay out Zoe’s theory to Melbourne and request additional help.

“There must be a lot of disgruntled former city employees,” Meg said. “Just cops alone. .”

“Not a lot of them with the makeup of a serial killer.”

“How we gonna know we’re looking at that makeup if we come across it?”

“There’s the question.”

“You think there’s actually anything to it?” Meg asked. “The revenge motive?”

“Might be. There’s enough to it that Melbourne will have to cover his ass and send us searching.”

“Seems like a fuckin’ waste of time,” Meg said, thinking about a disgruntled former city employee with the skills and makeup of a long-distance killer. Comes back to Alex.

“It’s what profilers do.”

There was a god-awful taste in Meg’s mouth. She ran her tongue over her lips and teeth and made a face. She’d fallen asleep too early and would have a restless night. Nothing to read. Nothing on TV but the same news over and over, the same conversations about the same subjects, sandwiched between the same commercials. That was the news: everything’s going to hell in the same way.

“Wait a minute,” Repetto said. “My cell phone’s ringing.”

Meg could hear it faintly in the receiver. Repetto’s phone wasn’t ringing, it was chiming, the first seven or eight notes of a tune she couldn’t quite place. Some kind of march. Figures. Repetto must have pressed a button and the musical alert stopped.

Now Meg could hear him talking on the other phone but couldn’t make out what he was saying.

A few minutes later he was back on the line with her. “That was Melbourne. Another Night Sniper victim. A woman. Shot on East Fifty-second near Park.”

“Melbourne say it was our guy?”

“No,” Repetto said, “but it was. Can’t you feel it?”

Strangely enough, she could.

Kelli Wilson’s body was lying beneath a black rubberized tarp large enough to cover most of the bloodstain. Something on the order of a hundred people were crowding the yellow crime scene tape, staring at the lumpy black material. Repetto thought there would have been more if the streets in this area were as traveled as usual.

He elbowed his way through the crowd, past a uniform who recognized him and nodded deadpan, big man in his forties, with a receding chin and droopy eyelids. Meg and Birdy followed in Repetto’s wake. An assistant ME Repetto knew, a tall, husky woman named Charlize, was standing with her fists on her hips, talking with a couple of white-uniformed EMS attendants. About ten feet from them, a female uniform was down on one knee, obviously consoling a dark-eyed boy about ten who was in apparent shock.

Repetto prayed the dead woman wasn’t the boy’s mother.

Charlize left the EMS guys and walked over. She cocked her head briefly toward the boy. “His mother’s the one on the sidewalk.”

“I was afraid of that,” Repetto said.

The uniform who’d recognized Repetto joined them. “I’m Calvin. Me and my partner Len were first on the scene.”

“What do you know?” Repetto asked, making sure Meg and Birdy were within earshot.

Calvin gave them the woman’s name, along with the name of her son. “The kid says he and Mom were on the way to meet hubby at Four Seasons.”

“They almost made it,” Meg said.

“They were gonna have dinner, then spend the night on their boat.”

Repetto glanced at him. “Boat?”

Calvin shrugged. “So the kid said. It’s supposed to be docked at the Seventy-ninth Street Basin.”

“Hubby hasn’t arrived?”

“Not yet. Len’s at the restaurant waiting to intercept him, then bring him here so he can get the bad news.”

Birdy looked at his watch. “Hubby’s late, or the vic and her son were half an hour early.”

“I’d guess he’s late,” Calvin said. “While the ME was examining the body, the dead woman’s cell phone in her purse started to ring. By the time we got to it, the ringing had stopped.”

Meg must have known what Repetto was thinking. “The killer wouldn’t call,” she said.

“Maybe this one would,” Birdy said. He was absently making those odd pecking motions with his head, thinking about it, how the killer they were chasing wasn’t standard issue.

“What did the kid see?” Repetto asked.

Calvin glanced in the boy’s direction. “Saw his mother fall over, is all he says. He’s in shock, wants his dad. Maise over there”-he pointed toward the boy and the kneeling policewoman-“is telling him Dad’s on the way.”

Meg looked over at the woman and boy. There were tears now in the boy’s eyes, and wet tracks on Maise’s broad cheeks. Meg looked away. “God damn this bastard!”

“We’ll get him,” Calvin said. He had a kind of drawl, like a cowboy, that made you tend to believe what he said.

Repetto got down on one knee and lifted a corner of the tarp. A blood-soaked fur jacket or some such thing made everything messier and harder to analyze. Kelli Wilson was on her back, one leg bent awkwardly beneath her, one arm thrown sideways, the other resting across her breasts. Her eyes were open, puzzled for eternity. Repetto wanted to close them but didn’t. Instead he went about lifting the other three corners of the tarp, getting a full view of the body.

“Medium-caliber bullet high on the chest,” Charlize said. “My guess is it clipped the heart and she was dead within seconds. But I’m talking on just the prelim, understand.”