John Lutz - Darker Than Night

The end of love…

After a while it was time for the second show. He played in his mind once more that night in the Elzners’ kitchen. It amazed him the force of his intellect, the control he had over his recall. He’d reached the point where he could even fast-forward or rewind the reconstruction, as if he were pressing mental buttons, watching the sped-up images moving back and forth across his spectrum of recollection: stop, pause, replay. Slower now-relishing it, seeing it, and reliving it from a more vivid angle…

Unpacking the groceries, the tuna can. There was Martin Elzner, the husband. Surprise, surprise… Pause, play, speedup, aim, fire the silenced handgun. The acrid scent of the shot lingering in the air, in his mind. Fast-forward. He inhaled. Jan Elzner was barefoot, in her knee-length flimsy nightgown… half speed… She sees her husband on the floor, the blood, a rich scarlet almost black, and moves toward him, the blood… Wait until she’s very near him, almost over him… slow motion…

Her eyes… what she knew!

The hand without the folded, saturated cloth moved back down.

He climaxed as he squeezed the trigger again and again.

The colors! The colors are magnificent!

He inhaled.

Finally evening.

It hadn’t even hinted at rain that warm summer day, so Quinn met with his team of detectives again on the park bench just inside the entrance at Eighty-sixth Street. He sat awkwardly but comfortably on the hard bench, sipping from a plastic water bottle he’d bought from a street vender, and watched New Yorkers enjoying their park while there was still daylight and the muggers hadn’t yet come out with the stars. There were more people now that it was cooler, a woman pushing a stroller, a few joggers, and some helmeted and padded rollerbladers zooming about like cyber creatures who’d escaped a video game.

Pearl and Fedderman approached together. They looked hot and tired. Pearl’s pace was dragging and Fedderman had the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up and was carrying his suit coat slung over his shoulder. Quinn thought back to a time when the younger Fedderman had entered rooms with his coat slung like that on a crooked forefinger over one shoulder and would say “ring-a-ding-ding,” like Sinatra when he was a hot item in Vegas and everywhere else. Quinn couldn’t imagine that coming out of the older, heavier Fedderman, who carried the weight of his experience on his shoulders along with the coat.

“Ring-a-ding-ding,” Fedderman said wearily.

Quinn grinned and Pearl stared at both men. She still looked beautiful, her irises so black in contrast with the gleaming whites of her eyes. Her mascara had run a little with the heat, making the right eye appear slightly bruised, as if she’d gotten into a scuffle sometime today. Not impossible.

“Old joke,” Quinn explained.

“Secret male-bonding bullshit,” she said.

“Nothing to do with you, Pearl,” Fedderman assured her, thinking he was too tired to put up with her if she decided to be in one of her moods.

Quinn thought the brief ring-a-ding-ding jingle could apply to Pearl. She was somehow even more attractive when worn down from a difficult and probably futile day’s work. He pulled from beneath his folded sport coat, where they’d stayed cool out of the sun, the other two water bottles he’d bought and handed them up to Pearl and Fedderman. Both detectives expressed gratitude, then uncapped the bottles and took long sips. Quinn watched Pearl’s slender pale throat work as she swallowed.

“So what’ve we got?” he asked when they were finished drinking.

“Nothing new,” Pearl said, using her wrist to wipe away water that had dribbled onto her chin, “but at least we’re more sure of what we do have. I mean, we’ve got everything in the file almost goddamn memorized.”

“Cop work,” Fedderman said with a shrug. He rested a hand on Pearl’s shoulder while looking at Quinn. “One thing she hasn’t mentioned yet. We questioned the witnesses again and one of the tenants in the Elzners’ building, a lonely old guy down the hall, responded to Pearl’s feminine wiles.”

Quinn took a sip of water and stared at Pearl.

“I use them sparingly and selectively,” she said.

“So how did this old guy respond?”

“By remembering something he hadn’t had a chance to tell the police. He’s three apartments away and was only questioned briefly and by phone.”

“So why did you question him?”

“His apartment’s by the elevator.”

Quinn smiled.

Pearl smiled back. “He can hear the elevator through the wall. Like a lot of lonely old people who live alone, he doesn’t sleep well, and he was awake most of the night of the Elzner murder. He heard the elevator, and recalled it because of the late hour. He said he’d never heard it before at that time.”

“Two fifty-five A.M.,” Fedderman said to Quinn.

“Exactly?”

“He said he looked at his watch,” Pearl said. “He sleeps wearing it. Said it sounded like the elevator stopped at his floor. His and the Elzners’. About twenty minutes later, it went back down.”

“He seem credible?”

“Very. And his watch is the kind made especially for old guys with failing eyesight, about the size of an alarm clock and with luminous hands and numerals you could read a book by.” She took another sip of water, then watched a wobbly rollerblader for a moment. “It really isn’t much.”

“It helps fix the time of death,” Quinn said.

“So what have you come up with?” Fedderman asked.

“I visited my sister, Michelle.”

They both looked at him. “The stock analyst?” Fedderman asked.

“The same.”

Pearl shook her head and grinned. “Their credibility’s not the highest.”

“Not about stocks, no. But Michelle isn’t only interested in stocks. She’s a math and computer whiz. She runs comparative analyses on other things, sometimes just for amusement. I asked her a question yesterday, and she spent most of last night and some of this morning finding the answer. Insofar as it can be found.”

“Question about killers?” Pearl asked.

“Right. She used her sources via the Internet and came up with statistics gathered from and about serial killers. It seems a surprising number of them don’t plan concretely but come prepared for murder, compelled to seek situations where they’ll have little choice, and the deaths, in their minds, won’t be their fault.”

“Sounds like public-defender bullshit,” Fedderman said.

“He means they set up the situations,” Pearl said. “Like teenagers baiting their parents. Grown-ups aren’t supposed to lose their tempers, so if they can be made to, whatever comes of it is their responsibility. Or so think the teenyboppers.”

Fedderman uncapped his plastic bottle and took a swig of water. “Some of them think that way up to about age seventy.”

“It’s not the analogy I’d have chosen,” Quinn said, “but it’s pretty accurate. I think of it as Michelle’s scenario-for-murder theory. If the Elzner murders weren’t random, if the killer at least expected he’d have to do them and was prepared for it, or even possibly planned it in detail just in case, that means he killed for his own internal reasons. The kinds of reasons that don’t go away.”

“And?” Fedderman said.

“He’s gone through a door that opens only one way, and leads only to another door.”

Fedderman shook his head. “You’ve gotten cryptic in your old age.”

Pearl understood immediately. “You saying we should wait for him to kill again?” she asked. “That maybe we got a serial killer here?”

“In the bud,” Quinn said, smiling.

The smile sort of gave Pearl the creeps. It wasn’t about amusement. It was more the smile of a hunter who’d picked up the spoor of his prey. Who now wouldn’t be shaken off, no matter what.