John Lutz - Darker Than Night

He smiled as if embarrassed. “Yes. Claire.”

“What on earth are you-” And she noticed the knife in his hand, pressed flat against his thigh. From the kitchen. Her own knife.

Her right hand rose to touch her lower lip. “My God! You’re-”

“Don’t scream, Cara.”

Cara again?

She couldn’t move or look away from him. Her breath wouldn’t come. Her heart went wild and seemed about to explode.

He sighed and moved toward her.

Not Cara! I’m not Cara!

When finally the elevator door slid open, the three detectives left a baffled Jubal Day standing alone in handcuffs and ran down the hall toward the apartment door.

“Hey!” Jubal called after them.

They didn’t turn around; their hurried feet made a desperate shuffling sound on the hall carpet.

“Hey! What is this? What’s going on?”

They ignored him.

The door glided shut and the elevator began to descend before Jubal could stop it.

Claire found the strength to move and scooted back across the mattress, staring at the knife, then up into Romulus’ eyes. They were such a beautiful blue, so sad and serious. And intent. Terrifying in their certainty.

He’s ahead of me. He knows what we’re going to share and he’s going to make it happen. There’s no changing his mind.

She decided to pick up a pillow and throw it at him, thinking that in the few seconds he was blinded when it struck his face, she’d make a run to get around him and reach the door. The element of surprise. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it was everything.

It was as if he’d read her thoughts.

He simply sidestepped the pillow and began moving around the bed toward her, his expression unchanged.

Smiling, he gave her the angle to the door now, and she knew he wanted her to run for safety so he could intercept her, so she would come to him. He was waiting for her nerve to break. Giving her a slight chance. Knowing she’d take it as he got closer, because what else could she do?

What else could she do?

“Fast and hard,” Quinn said, thinking the noise might help, might stop or at least delay what was surely about to happen.

If it hadn’t happened already.

Fedderman, huffing like a winded bull, knew what he meant and lowered his shoulder as they neared the apartment door.

Pearl already had her gun drawn.

Claire had taken her first running step, and the Night Prowler his, when the sudden crash of the apartment door flying open made them both freeze.

There was no thought of fighting them this time. Instinct and logic were the same. The Night Prowler bolted toward the window. If he could smash through the glass, reach the fire escape!

Claire knew what he was doing and picked up the other pillow on the bed and hurled it at him as she had the first, with all her might.

This time it struck him in the face and he paused, brushing it aside.

The cost of his hesitation was only a second or two, but it was the ultimate price.

Quinn was through the bedroom door first, Pearl and Fedderman almost running up his back.

The Night Prowler lifted his right arm and at first Claire thought he was raising his hands, giving himself up. But his hand held the knife, his arm drawn back as if he were about to throw it at her.

Giving them no choice!

She knew somehow he wasn’t going to throw the knife. She didn’t even bother trying to get out of the way.

The bedroom roared with the thunder of gunfire and the Night Prowler dropped the knife and staggered backward, hugging himself as if cold. He stared at Claire for a long moment.

As if I betrayed him.

Rolling his eyes in what might have been sudden panic, he dropped to a sitting position, then keeled over and lay curled on his side as if preparing to take a nap.

His cheek was pressed against the carpet and he knew he was dying. His final horizon was only inches away.

The last thing he saw was the vivid scarlet of his blood clashing with the blue carpet fibers.

It was wrong, all wrong!

“His name’s Romulus,” Claire said, standing numbly and staring down at the corpse in her bedroom. “He decorated the baby’s room. Painted it.”

Quinn didn’t have to bend down and examine the dead man on the floor to know he wasn’t Luther Lunt.

“He called me Cara.”

Quinn stared at her. “Cara?”

“Never before. But when he first came into the bedroom. And just before you got here. Is he-”

“Dead?”

“No. I know he’s dead.”

“He’s the Night Prowler,” Quinn said.

“And Jubal? Where’s Jubal?”

Quinn glanced at Fedderman. “Take her to her husband, and get the cuffs off him.”

When Fedderman and Claire were gone, Quinn and Pearl looked at each other.

They’d read a few things wrong. They both realized now that the victims who scratched at the freshly painted door and wall were trying not only to leave dying messages but to direct attention to the paint itself, and to the painter. Mary Navarre’s inverted V, or caret, that Quinn thought might be the first two strokes of an M or A scrawled in blood on the wall, was actually the first, vertical stroke of an R; death had come just as the second, horizontal stroke was about to begin, and her lifeless hand dropped almost straight down.

And they hadn’t delved deeply or soon enough into suspects who might have duplicated keys to the murder apartments. The decorators obviously regarded their specialists, people like Romulus, as unlike the other tradesmen they employed, and above suspicion because they were fellow artists.

“We should have figured it out,” Pearl said.

“Maybe,” Quinn said. “Unless the name Romulus is on this guy’s birth certificate, we’re going to find out who he really is, and what might have made him do what he did.”

“And who Cara is.”

“Was,” Quinn corrected, recalling the information in Nester Brothers’ crinkled brown envelope.

Pearl had gone over to the window near the body and was looking down at the street. “Everybody’s gathering down there. More cruisers, unmarkeds, media wolves. And I think I see Renz. There’s somebody down there that might even be Egan. Can’t be sure, though. One asshole looks pretty much like another from this height.”

Quinn grinned at her, loving her just then the way maybe Jubal Day loved Claire. A couple of actors, not acting.

“Bring ’em on,” he said.

Two days later, Quinn learned what Pearl had whispered in Egan’s ear that day at the hospital, what had infuriated Egan so and made him back away from his threat.

Using the hard drive Pearl had given her, Michelle had matched the incriminating e-mails and Web site visits on Quinn’s NYPD computer with days, and even times, when police records showed Quinn was somewhere else.

Someone had learned Quinn’s password-easy enough to do with a glance over Quinn’s shoulder when he was signing on-and had used Quinn’s computer.

Of course Michelle was implicated in stealing the computer’s hard drive, and the actual crime had been committed by Pearl. But if Egan wanted to charge either of them, they could take him down with them. They could take him down even further than they’d fall.

Egan had no bargaining chips and knew it. The only way he could prevent the hard-drive information from being made public was if he revealed who’d really raped Anna Caruso, which would clear Quinn. Mercer, the actual rapist, had duplicated the scar on Quinn’s forearm and made sure Anna saw it. And he’d stolen a button from Quinn’s shirt in Quinn’s locker and left it at the scene of the rape. Mercer would try to implicate Egan. But without the hard drive, there was no solid evidence that Egan was involved.