John Lutz - Urge to Kill

Terri Gaddis thought she’d found heaven. Her own Camelot, at least.

Richard Crane was the most gentle, skillful lover she’d ever experienced. She lay now in her bedroom, hungover and exhausted from the wine and sex, her head resting on Richard’s bare chest. She could hear, could feel, his regular, coursing heartbeat. It must, she thought, be in rhythm with her own.

The pungent scent of their bodies, of their coupling, was still in the room, and she wished it would never leave. The air conditioner was humming, gradually catching up with the heat the two of them had generated. Soon, Terri knew, the room would return to normal, and so would her life.

Or would it?

Surely Richard had felt the same intensity she had, known the same revelation. Yes! Two people can be this gloriously happy!

He was the kind of man who would feel it. She knew that about him now. It was all she had to know.

Which reminded her that she didn’t know very much. He’d mentioned that he worked for a Wall Street firm, but he didn’t say which. Obviously he was successful, had money, or he couldn’t dress the way he did, with the tailored suit and expensive gold watch and cuff links. And he took care of himself, judging by his muscularity and-she smiled-his endurance. She absently ran a hand over her right breast, her erect nipple.

We could do this again. And again and again and again.

She shifted her body and reached over to the nightstand where her half-full glass of wine sat and managed to wrap two fingers around the slender glass stem. After downing the rest of the wine to sate her thirst, she settled down again, snuggling against Richard’s warm body. The last thing she remembered before falling asleep was his arm working its way beneath her neck and pulling her closer.

The room was cool when she awoke in the morning, and she was alone in the bed.

Terri sat up, looking around with something like alarm, and found herself the only one in the room.

“Richard…?”

“In here, darling.” He appeared in the doorway, buttoning his shirt that he hadn’t yet tucked in. “I was getting dressed in the living room so I wouldn’t wake you.” His dark hair was wet, uncombed but smoothed back with his fingers, so he must have already showered. Terri had never been so relieved to see anyone.

“I thought we might go out for breakfast,” he said. “Celebrate us.”

“I can think of other ways to do that,” Terri said.

He grinned. “It isn’t either-or.”

“Almost everything else is,” she said.

The handsome grin stayed. “No, there are some things that are predestined. Nothing we do can change them.”

“Are we predestined?”

“Most definitely.”

“Then I can accept predestination.” She climbed out of bed, unashamed of her nakedness in front of him. After what they’d done with each other…“I need to shower,” she said. She padded barefoot to him, kissed him lightly on the lips, then squeezed past him and made her way into the bathroom.

She’d got under a hot shower, soaped up, and tilted back her head to rinse shampoo from her hair when she noticed the large metal hook screwed into the bathroom ceiling.

Surely it hadn’t been there before.

Or had it? Maybe she simply hadn’t noticed it.

No, impossible. I would have noticed.

Obviously, Richard had put it there while she was asleep.

She felt a deep dread. Why had he done such a thing? What the hell was it about? Some kind of kinky sex? Water sports? S amp;M? If it was that kind of stuff, Terri wasn’t into it.

After last night and what had happened between them, was it going to turn into something dirty and violent? The thought of it made her stomach knot up with disappointment.

She shook her head. Dating in New York…

Then she felt a sudden flare of hope. The super! Jennison the building superintendent must have installed the hook yesterday, or even sometime over the past week, and she simply hadn’t noticed it. That was it. Had to be. She’d been looking at the dark side again, jumping to disastrous conclusions. Her Camelot was safe.

When she got out of the shower, she’d mention the hook to Richard. He might even know what it was for.

Renz loved this kind of thing, a setting where he was in control.

He had them all in his office, Quinn, Pearl, Fedderman, and the team of Sal Vitali and Harold Mishner.

The office was hot because of the way sunlight was pouring in between the blind slats. Quinn knew the blinds would remain open because the deluge of morning brilliance was at Renz’s back, putting his visitors at a disadvantage. Renz tended to play every card in his hand. Quinn also noticed the faint smell in the dust-mote-filled air: Renz had been secretly smoking cigars in his office again. If the mayor knew that, there’d soon be a new police commissioner.

Vitali and Mishner were reasonably friendly toward Quinn and his team, but Quinn could tell they didn’t like the single-killer theory any more than…well, anyone liked it, other than Renz. And Renz liked it because it was politically expedient.

Still, Quinn had to admit it was possible that one serial killer in the city had, for whatever reason, committed two series of murders in different ways in order to forge, or satisfy, two separate identities.

Strategically silhouetted at his desk, Renz held up a folder. “This is more info on the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer’s latest victim, Floyd Becker. He was wealthy from his construction company, Becker Synergies.”

“Never heard of it,” Quinn said.

“They aren’t big in New York,” the silhouette said. “They apparently built a lot of dams and such in South America. Anyway, he was well off, if not a Rockefeller.”

“Liked to hunt, I’ll bet,” Quinn said.

“You got that right.” If the silhouette was irritated by Quinn’s remark, it didn’t show it. “We still need to find out why he checked in at the Antonian under a phony name, and why he went out without carrying any identification.” The silhouette laid the file on the desk and made a show of idly leafing through it. “No surprise to any of us that death was caused by a single twenty-five-caliber slug fired by the same make firearm-one we can’t yet identify-but definitely not by the same gun.”

“Maybe some make of target pistol with a changeable barrel,” Vitali suggested.

“No,” the silhouette said, “we checked that out. The firing pin strikes are slightly different. And you and Mishkin need to be focusing more on the Vera Doaks and Hettie Davis murders.”

“If it’s the same killer-”

“Call it a logical division of labor,” said the silhouette. “Back to the facts: Becker was shot inside the hotel, in a corridor running the length of the building and with a door leading to the passageway outside. A spot of blood on the carpet tested out to be his. For some reason, after shooting Becker, the killer then dragged the body outside into the passageway and dumped it behind a pile of trash bags. The crime scene inside the hotel offered up little evidence other than the blood. The CSU team searched and vacuumed the surrounding carpet, came up with dirt and three human hairs. None of the hairs matches Becker’s. One or more of them might be from the head of the killer. We’ll know that when we nail the bastard.” The silhouette turned its head toward Quinn. Strongly backlighted as it was, its hair looked like a hopeless tangle of wire. “The hotel staff have anything for us?”

“No,” Quinn said. “We’ll talk to them again today.”

“Do that, and interview Becker’s wife. She’s been told about his murder, but was too shaken up to talk last night.”

Quinn nodded and pretended to write something in his notepad.