John Lutz - Serial

“They do if they’re rams.”

“Then they’re not lambs.”

“Enough,” Quinn said.

“Maybe the killer just happened to find the shoe handy and figured it would make an effective gag,” Fedderman said.

“The shoe’s mate is in the closet,” Quinn said. “He must have taken time out while she was unconscious or too scared to scream, and gone to get it and bring it back over to the bed. He was looking for effect. Whether he was thinking of sacrificial lambs-or goats-is hard to say.”

“Or unicorns,” Pearl said. “They’re mythological, and maybe that’s what our killer wants to become. That’s what most serial killers want to become-myths.” She did a double take and gave Fedderman a keen, appraising look. “What’s with the new suit, Feds? I miss your baggy brown outfit. You keep wearing those Armani threads and people will stop thinking of you as a sartorial disaster. The rumor is that you abuse your suits before you wear them so you’ll look like a suspect after a rough night in the lockup. It makes the riffraff identify with you and open up in interrogations.”

“That’s only a myth,” Fedderman said.

Quinn looked more carefully at Fedderman. He, too, had noticed something different about the potbellied, lanky detective. Fedderman’s obviously expensive blue suit made him look as if his mismatched body was made of matching parts, which was a triumph of tailoring.

The suit was a pip. Quinn could think of only a few reasons why Fedderman might suddenly have become a virtual GQ model. He didn’t like any of them.

After the techs left, Quinn and his detectives went through the apartment methodically. They were sure the lab wouldn’t come up with a useful fingerprint or palm print, and there would be nothing distinctive about the gloves the killer wore. The Skinner was nothing if not careful.

Quinn made it a point to check Candice Culligan’s address book. It contained no Nathan Devliner.

There was no Nathan Devliner in any of the NYC directories.

“Give me a minute,” Pearl said, from where she was seated on the sofa working her laptop. “I’ll check the Socrates’s Cavern membership list Lido came up with.”

The others stood silently while she bent closely over her computer.

“Here it is!” she said after a few minutes. “Devliner was a member.”

She raised a finger, asking for more time.

They gave it to her. More than a few minutes this time.

“Okay,” she said finally, looking up from her computer. “Nathan Ernest Devliner was a Socrates’s Cavern gold-key member from January, 1970, to September, 1975, when he moved out of the area. He died in Kingdom City, Arizona, in April of 1986. A cerebral hemorrhage. He was seventy-four. I guess he retired and moved west.”

“He retired and then some,” Quinn said. “What he didn’t do is torture and kill Candice Culligan. What he isn’t is the Skinner.”

Leaving them with the same puzzle they’d set out to solve.

Jock Sanderson had done time for raping Judith Blaney. It had been hard time. A small man, with fine features and a lean, muscular frame, Jock had fallen victim to sexual abuse in prison. Half a dozen gang members had in fact made him their own, passing him around like depreciating property.

It had been a nightmare, and it had lasted until the team of Legal Aid lawyers, campaigning to overturn wrongful eye-witness rape convictions, used DNA evidence to prove that someone else had raped Judith Blaney.

Late last year, Jock Sanderson was pardoned.

The real evidence had been skimpy to begin with. Jock had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Judith Blaney had been the wrong woman. She’d wrongly identified him in a police lineup, and again in court. She more than anyone had caused him to live his nightmare. To live it over and over for more than five years.

So what was left of Jock had been freed to walk in a world that still thought him unworthy. He’d begun to drink, an old habit that soon became an addiction. Now he was a regular at AA meetings and had been dry for months.

The only job he’d been able to find was with Sweep ’Em Up Janitorial Service, sweeping and cleaning entertainment venues, from sporting events to Broadway and off-Broadway theaters, the days after evening performances. A weekly paycheck had enabled him to leave the halfway house and the constant pressure of church services and one-on-one attempts to convert him to Christianity. Jock dealt with that by doing what he figured most Christians did-pretend. Prison had taught him well how to do that.

He could sometimes even pretend and fool himself.

The way Jock figured it, he’d been done wrong. Somebody owed him. That somebody was Judith Blaney.

He hadn’t raped Judith. He’d been home in bed alone, suffering with a cold, on the evening of her rape. Of course he had no witnesses to corroborate his alibi. Usually you didn’t welcome company when you were flat on your back with a fever and congested chest.

Jock had never seen Judith before his arrest. But he dreamed about her a lot in prison. He’d seen her face almost every night in his dreams. Her nightmare lived within his nightmare.

Often, some of the things that had been done to him in prison, he did to Judith Blaney in his dreams. His muffled screams became hers. Also his humiliation. His pain. She would beg him with her eyes to stop. But he didn’t stop. Not in his dreams.

Sometimes, he thought, dreams meant something.

Jock had been following Judith for almost three months. He didn’t mind if now and then she noticed him. Let her wonder.

After the first month, she’d obtained a restraining order. He was forbidden by law to harass her, or even to approach within a hundred feet of her.

He knew what a hundred feet meant. He could measure the precise distance in his mind. So he continued to follow Judith. He would be far enough away that she couldn’t do anything about it. She would know he was there though. Not always, but she could never be sure when he was observing her. At times she’d forget and feel safe. Then she’d glance behind her and there on the crowded sidewalk, or perhaps across the street watching her pull away in the back of a taxi, there he would be, and any joy would drain from her features and an expression he interpreted as fearful would come over her. That would give him a cold satisfaction.

But most of the time she didn’t know he was tailing her. That also gave him satisfaction. He was becoming expert at watching her without her knowledge. Sometimes even moving close to her, inside the protective hundred-foot legal distance. Like a trespasser on a dare.

Like tonight. He’d been on the same crowded subway car, then only ten feet behind her on the teeming platform. He’d been nearby her on the escalator. He kept a more prudent distance behind her on the sidewalk on the way to her apartment. She would often glance behind her, especially if the night was dark and the sidewalks not crowded.

He was close enough tonight to hear the tapping of her high heels. If he stayed tight to the buildings, keeping an awareness of light and shadow, he could haunt her like a ghost whose presence she would barely sense.

Now and then he’d deliberately let her catch a glimpse of him, let her know she wasn’t alone in this fear-filled world that only the two of them inhabited and that she had helped to create.

Jock knew Judith now better than she could imagine. The way hunters knew the thing they hunted.

It was almost an hour after dusk. They were on a long block that was almost deserted. Only the two of them. Tap, tap, tap went her heels on the hard concrete. Echoing in the street and in his mind.

Can you feel my eyes on you?