John Lutz - Dancing with the Dead

Either way, he’d continue to downplay the dance angle with the media. That was the kind of strategy that boosted career chances. Why shoot himself in the foot by looking like a second-guessing fool for maybe no reason?

But women who danced, maybe they did have something meaningful in common. He’d have to ask Schutz about that. And ask him about how Verlane might feel about dancing, the way his dead wife was so hung up on it. Schutz still had the idea the killer might be doing these women and then not remembering any of it afterward. And Morrisy still didn’t see how that was possible. How could anyone who’d seen the Danielle Verlane crime scene think whoever’d been responsible could ever forget it?

Schutz had come to believe that Rene Verlane didn’t necessarily fit the profile of the guy they were looking for, but Morrisy didn’t buy into that notion, either. He was 90 percent sure about Verlane. Instinct, maybe, but it was instinct that had gotten him to where he was in the department, so it wasn’t something to be ignored. He only wished he hadn’t gone public with his stand against a dance tie-in, because his instincts were sure beginning to whisper something different now, especially since there’d been a dance competition in Seattle around the time of the killing.

He wondered if Waxman would come up with anything on whether Verlane had registered at a hotel in Seattle during the time frame of the Roundner murder. He doubted it. The airlines had no record of him flying out of New Orleans; if he’d used an alias for that, he sure wouldn’t register at a hotel under his own name then go out and do the Rounder woman. But then killers could be unpredictable in small ways. They were a quart of oil short to begin with, so who could tell how they might think, especially if they were the compulsive type, which Schutz said this character was. At least Morrisy and Schutz agreed about that.

Morrisy looked up and saw Captain Bill Quirk easing his bulk between the white-clothed tables, nodding to people he knew. Important people.

Quirk had said he’d meet Morrisy here to discuss the Verlane case. Morrisy wasn’t crazy about that idea. The news media had been laying it on thick, even national news, so the pressure was on and Morrisy knew he figured to get his ass reamed for not coming up with a suspect that could be brought in and booked. When that happened, the media would briefly go spastic, then they’d calm down and concentrate on something else for a while and things would ease up.

Morrisy smiled. The media thought they knew it all, now that it had been made public the two women were humped after they were dead. But they didn’t know it all, only thought they did.

Quirk had assumed Morrisy was smiling at him and smiled back.

The way a shark might smile at a smaller shark.

Rising straight up from the bed, Mary gazed down at her sleeping form, then drifted inches from the ceiling, swooped low, and passed through the window pane as if it were a sheet of cold water.

And she was high up into the night. Everything below was in vivid detail in the artificial illumination of the city. The surgical-like seams of tarred roofs, the silver turnscrews on the domed aluminum tops of streetlights, and, as she rose higher, the geometric maze of blocks and then neighborhoods. Beneath her, unaware of her, nighthawks circled, their wings winking like black sequins.

But up here the air was thin, and she was having difficulty breathing. Her lungs pumped desperately, thirsting for oxygen that existed only at lower levels. She could hear herself begin to rasp, shrill and airless screams that trailed away in the void.

She awoke with Jake on top of her, pinning her to the mattress. Her wrists were in his merciless grip, nailed to her wadded pillow. He’d worked her twisted nightgown up above her breasts, and his nude body pressed down on her with monstrous weight. She could move nothing but her head and her legs. She thrashed her legs helplessly in the air, pounding his buttocks with her heels. He laughed, liking that.

“Jake, damn it!”

His only answer was his bellowslike breathing.

“Goddammit, Jake, get off me!”

For an instant he raised his sweating body and she could breathe. Then he was tight and hot against her again, and inside her even though she was still dry. She heard herself whine, then bit her lip against the pain.

“Mary likes that, huh?” he asked.

She made no sound.

He began the relentless rhythm.

He’d at least used some kind of lubricant, probably the K-Y jelly, so the pain lessened somewhat. He grunted, probing her particularly deep, seeking soft distances.

“Like that?” he asked again.

He released her wrists; what could she do with her hands now anyway?

After shifting his weight slightly, he began moving faster. Thrusting! Thrusting!

A woman in the room was moaning, her breath catching. Who it was Mary had no idea. What was happening had nothing to do with her. Nothing.

She lay as if crucified with her limp arms spread wide, gazing up into darkness and listening to the perfect rhythm of the headboard beating against the wall, and in her mind she danced.

“The more you feel the music,” Mel told her that evening at the studio, “the easier it’ll be to move to it.”

He took her hand gently and led her across the dance floor to where one of the big Bose speakers was standing on its pedestal. A mambo was pounding out of it, almost loud enough to rattle Mary’s fillings.

“Put your haaand on the speaker,” Mel said, imitating a televangelist, and pressed her palm to the warm side of the wooden box.

With each drumbeat or deep bass note she could feel the speaker throb. She let the syncopated rhythm pulsate up her arm and into her body, down to the floor.

Mel raised his forefinger and cocked his head to the side, listening for the one beat. “One!” he said, sharply dipping the finger. “One, two, three, four!” His body undulated from side to side as he counted out the beat in time with the throbbing speaker, waving his finger as if it were a conductor’s baton. “That’s how you need to feel the beat with your entire body so you can dance your best,” he said. “You understand what I mean, Mary?”

She told him yes, she thought so, though she wasn’t exactly sure.

“You need even more lessons,” Mel told her, patting her hand and removing it from the speaker. He grinned. “But not to worry; I’ll have you more than ready by the time Ohio rolls around. You’re making amazing progress, Mary, really you are.”

“By the way,” she said, “there was another dancer murdered, this time in Seattle. Martha Roundner. She’s the one I asked you about. You sure you didn’t know her?”

“Can’t say as I did. Hey, they ever catch the creep that killed Danielle Verlane?”

“Not yet.”

“So let’s mambo!” Mel said, leading her back toward the center of the floor. In the corner of her vision she saw Ray Huggins enter the studio and walk toward his office. He glanced over at her, paused staring for a moment with his fists on his hips, then flashed her a wide smile and clapped his hands. “Way to move, Mary!”

She thought of waving to him, but Mel led her into an arm check and she was whirling so he could pick her up on the one beat.

Finally the music stopped and he stepped away, grinning and wiping the back of his wrist across his forehead. “You got it tonight, hon. Let’s do something slower now so you don’t wear out the instructor.” He trod smoothly toward the stereo to put in another tape. Over his shoulder: “What’ll it be, waltz, fox-trot, or tango?”

“Tango.”

“Big surprise,” Mel said. He studied the cassettes, then drew one from the shelf and slipped it into the stereo. After punching the Play button, he turned back to face her.