Chill of Night

26

“It’s not getting any easier,” Looper said.

“Because you’re getting older,” Nell told him.

“You know what I mean.”

They were standing with Beam at Rockefeller Center, near where the row of colorful flags waved in the breeze above the sunken level where there was a restaurant and, in the winter, an ice skating rink. Business people in suits and ties scurried past, dodging the slower moving and more casually dressed tourists, some of whom were gawking and photographing. A few people glanced at the shapely, elfin woman with the short and practical hairdo, wearing jeans and a black blazer, standing between the angular man in the cheap brown suit, and the tall, athletic older man who wore a well-tailored gray suit and might easily have been a banker or top CEO were it not for a certain set of his shoulders and roughness to his oversized hands. Maybe he was a former big-time football or baseball player the tourists should recognize. Unless they’d happened to catch him in a rare TV interview or seen his photo in the paper, they wouldn’t guess he was a cop on the trail of a serial killer. So they didn’t approach him or aim their cameras his way, even though he was the kind of man who looked like somebody.

“The techs haven’t been able to do much with the security tape,” Beam said. “Looks like the killer’s at least average size, judging by the relative size of Tina Flitt’s car, but they can’t clean up the tape so any of his features are visible.”

“What about race?” Nell asked.

“No way to know. On the tape, he’s really not much more than a shadow.” Beam knew Helen Iman, the case profiler, had the killer down as a white male, but that was because most serial killers were white males.

A man paused walking past and attempted to light a cigarette in the breeze with a book match, but gave up after three matches, flipped away the barely burned cigarette, and walked on. The cigarette bounced, rolled, and dropped through a sewer grate. Looper looked as if he were torn between springing toward the wisp of smoke carried on the wind, or the cigarette itself.

Beam noticed Nell give her partner a disdainful glance. This investigation was wearing on everyone. The killer might be starting to come unraveled. Nell and Looper were getting on each other’s nerves. Da Vinci was starting to react to pressure from inside and outside the department. And of course there was the rest of the city, and all those former and prospective jurors-prospective victims. Beam found himself getting edgy, and thinking more and more about Nola Lima, so maybe he was coming unraveled like the killer he was pursuing.

The increasing pressures of the investigation-not unusual at this stage, when there’s a growing number of pieces and none of them fit.

But that didn’t explain Nola somehow becoming more and more confused with Lani in Beam’s thoughts, in his dreams.

“So far nothing connects the Justice Killer with Tina Flitt’s murder,” he said, “other than the letter J written in blood on her car window. I’m still thinking copycat.”

“Now we’re getting nowhere,” Looper said with mock enthusiasm, taking a last, lingering look in the direction of the fast-dissipating smoke. “And that letter J is some connection,” he added. It didn’t pay to be too much of a smart-ass with Beam.

“There’s no way to get much of a handwriting sample out of one letter,” Nell said, “unless the killer writes in Gothic script or some such thing.”

“Like a German?” Looper asked.

Nell didn’t bother to answer, knowing he was being deliberately obtuse to get under her skin. Seeing the smoker trying to light a cigarette had set off Looper; it was making him irritable and irritating. Nell had been here before. “Different murder weapon,” she said, “different kind of victim. A juror, not a jury foreperson. I’m with Beam. We could have a copycat killer.”

“Using a different murder weapon on a different kind of victim.” Looper said. “Some copycat.”

“The bloody J could have been an afterthought, to throw us off the scent of the real killer.”

“I don’t remember any scent,” Looper said. “And the victim was on a jury whose foreman was her husband. A jury that let a killer walk.”

“That’s why a copycat might think it would work if he killed Tina and wrote the J with her blood.”

“I thought you said that was an afterthought,” Looper said.

Beam decided he’d better stop this before his detective team got in a fistfight.

“We can’t rule out a copycat killer on this one,” he said. “And we’re all feeling the pressure. That would include the killer.”

“What about the human hairs found in Tina Flitt’s car?” Looper asked, not looking at Nell.

Back on point, Beam thought with relief. “Lab said four of the hairs were hers. Two others, from the back of the car, were her husband’s.”

“Think hubby might be sticking it to somebody other than wifey in the car?” Looper asked.

Nell looked at him in disgust.

“Or maybe hubby and Tina got it on in the backseat.” Looper still speculating, maybe to aggravate Nell. “Some couples get a sexual kick outta that. Takes ‘em back to the first time, maybe.”

Nell seemed about to say something, so Beam said. “There were no pubic hairs.”

Looper looked disappointed.

“Lab said the breeze from an open window, or even the car’s air conditioner, might have carried hairs shed by hubby back there. Hairs from his head. The point is, none of the hairs were the killer’s.”

“So maybe the killer did wear a hat that kept him from shedding any hairs,” Looper said.

“Or he was-”

“I know,” Beam interrupted Nell. “Bald. I’ve been through all this with da Vinci. Lab says it’s possible a hat would have prevented normal hair shedding that you might otherwise expect under the circumstances. Everyone sheds about eighty individual hairs per day.”

“Everyone?” Looper brushed his fingers through his thinning hair mussed by the breeze.

“Everyone,” Beam confirmed. “On average.”

“Unless they’re-”

“Bald.” Looper finished Nell’s sentence this time.

“Or recently combed their hair,” Beam said. The breeze grew stronger, and the flags overhead cracked like sails and bounced steel pulleys noisily against steel poles. “Lab indicated something else: None of the hairs vacuumed or tweezered up at any of the crime scenes matches any of the hairs found at the other scenes.”

No one spoke for a while as that information was processed.

“Different killers?” Looper suggested finally.

“Or one killer with a hat,” Nell said.

“Or bald,” Beam said.

As soon as Melanie pressed the button on her TV’s remote control, Geraldo Rivera appeared on the screen and asked a panel of attorneys, whose staid images were arranged in a pattern of squares, what Merv Clark’s testimony meant to the Cold Cat murder trial.

Melanie’s instructions were to avoid reading, listening to, or watching any news of the Cold Cat murder trial, but she heard one of Geraldo’s guest attorneys say, “Trouble for the prosecution. Col-” just before another channel came on.

“Clark testified-”

She pressed the button again to climb the channels, holding it down as they flickered past. Many of them featured something about the Cold Cat trial. She paused only to look for several seconds at a still shot of Cold Cat entering the courthouse with his entourage. He was stopped by the camera in full stride, glancing over at the lens and smiling sadly.

It was a sound bite, rather than an image, that caused her to pause at the next channel: “…says the judge is considering having the jury sequestered.”

Melanie passed the channel, went back to it, and saw that a commercial featuring a talking duck was coming on.

She switched off the TV so she’d neither hear nor see it. And she’d stopped herself from buying a newspaper from the vending machine at the corner. But it seemed almost impossible to escape news about the trial.

Judge Moody had apparently come to the same conclusion. That must be why she was thinking about sequestering the jury.

Melanie didn’t want that to happen, to be cooped up in a hotel room somewhere in town, probably sharing it with another juror to save money for the city. And how difficult would it be for the jurors not to discuss the case with each other if they were held hostage in a hotel, probably taking their meals together, living under watch, and riding back and forth with each other every day in vans?

Of course, those weren’t the only problems. The court paid a pittance to jurors, not nearly enough to make up for their stopped paychecks. Certainly not enough to slow Melanie’s financial slide! Her bills kept coming, and seemed even to have stepped up their assault on her checking account.

Savings?

Forget savings. Melanie needed to get back on the job.

Regal Trucking had been long enough without her office management skills. Trucks would be loaded with the wrong cargo; bills of lading would be misplaced; cargo would arrive at the wrong destination. The place would be a mess and take her a month to set right.

Worse still, the office might be running smoothly and efficiently without her. Irma Frinkle, in Accounts Due, was interim manager in Melanie’s absence and wouldn’t mind so much stepping up to Melanie’s job.

Plagued by the thought of demotion or even unemployment, Melanie really didn’t want to be sequestered for the remaining days of the trial. Especially now, when she was beginning to believe Cold Cat-Richard-was innocent, and that his arrest was a horrible mistake, or he’d been set up. Celebrities were targets for that sort of thing. Especially celebrities like Richard, whose art was controversial as well as popular. Melanie had even heard a snatch of one of his recordings wafting from a car backed up in traffic as she was approaching her apartment: “Off the bitch what did the snitch!” Then the traffic light changed and the car with the loud radio moved on. Those were the sorts of lyrics that might prompt some nutcase to strike out at Richard by trying to frame him for Edie Piaf’s murder.

Melanie thought the police should be paying more attention to real murderers, like the Justice Killer, who were going around doing actual damage to society. Soon no one would want to serve on a jury, if more forepersons were found slain. And the latest victim had simply been a juror, not a foreperson. No one on any jury was safe now. And why should they serve? Not only might they fall behind with their bills and lose their jobs to people like Irma Frinkle-“Off the bitch!”-but if they were assigned a serious criminal case, they might actually be killed themselves. Melanie, not a timid person, sometimes found herself afraid of the Justice Killer, and a verdict hadn’t even been rendered in Cold Cat’s-Richard’s-trial. If the jury acquitted him, as she thought more and more that they might, how frightened would she be then?

It was a question she’d begun to ask herself every night before sleep came.

Da Vinci had taken a hell of a reaming and didn’t like it. Some of the respect he’d long held for the chief was gone for good, dissipated in a storm of accusations and faulty blame. It wasn’t that da Vinci didn’t know how the game of buck passing was played; it was more that the chief had come down way too hard. Feeling the pressure. Da Vinci knew he was expected to come down equally hard on Beam.

Beam was a hard man to chew out. He sat in front of da Vinci’s desk, meeting his superior officer’s gaze calmly with eyes that had seen it all and left no doubt that he, too, knew how the game was played. Da Vinci had the distinct impression that Beam was right now viewing him as something not much more than a gathering storm that would blow over.

So what was the point? Da Vinci decided not to waste his energy. He said simply, “The chief gave me a hell of a going over about the Justice Killer investigation.”

Beam said nothing. Might as well have died right there in the chair a few seconds ago.

“Damn it!” da Vinci spat out.

“Yeah, I go along with that.” Beam might have smiled.

“He told me the commissioner wants this case broken yesterday. People are doing anything to avoid jury duty, and it’s causing a backup in the judicial system you wouldn’t believe.”

“I believe,” Beam said. He decided to give da Vinci something he, da Vinci, might give to the chief, and that the chief might pass on up the line of command, out of the NYPD and into the city’s body politic. “We’re thinking maybe copycat in the Tina Flitt murder.”

“Not seriously?”

That shadowy smile again. “Seriously enough.”

“You of all people know this sicko is willing to vary his method.”

“I know it more than the chief or commissioner.”

Da Vinci, with his usual mental alacrity, understood Beam’s generosity but gave no sign of knowledge or gratitude. “It surely can’t be ruled out,” he admitted.

“You read the lab report?” da Vinci asked.

Beam nodded.

“There’s nothing other than the bloody J to put the Justice Killer in that car when Flitt went out,” da Vinci said. “No prints, hairs, smudges, footprints, DNA-how does this bastard come away so clean?”

“He’s smart. He knows his craft. That’s how he looks at it by now, a craft. An art. Each murder neater than the last.”

Da Vinci swiped a hand down his face hard enough to hurt his nose and make his eyes water. “How are we ever gonna nail him?”

“We know our craft,” Beam said calmly.

“To the chief and, I can tell you, the commissioner, you’re still a cop even if you’re not technically NYPD permanent ranks. The machine won’t hesitate to make you the goat in this, Beam, screw you over.”

“Or you.”

“Goes without saying.” Da Vinci’s right hand went out as if of its own volition and caressed the polished brass motorcycle sculpture on his desk corner, reminiscent of his early days as a cop. “Much as I enjoyed it, Beam, I don’t want to go back to riding a cycle. Just like you don’t wanna go back to doing foot patrol.” He patted the cycle sculpture as if it were a pet, then sat back in his chair “You understand what I’m saying?”

“Understood it when I walked in here,” Beam said. “If it’s gonna be me or you, you’re gonna make it me.”

“That’s true. I wouldn’t bullshit you. I’m sorry, Beam, it just works that way, dog eat dog eat dog. We’ve gotta leave it at that.”

Beam stood up to leave the office. “I won’t miss that part of it.”

“Someday neither will I,” da Vinci said.

“Now you’re talking bullshit.”

Da Vinci tried to keep his features stiff but he had to grin.

“Yeah, I am. Both of us are talking bullshit. In some ways, Beam, we’re the same kind of animal.”

“In some ways.”

“Nell and Looper, I notice they’re getting testy.”

“We’re all getting testy. Especially the killer.”

“You really believe that?”

“Sure. That’s how the game goes. Ask Helen Iman.”

“Maybe I will.”

Beam’s presence was so dominant that when he left the office he seemed to take a lot of the oxygen with him. Da Vinci sat in the vacuum, beginning to perspire, and absently brushed the back of his right hand gently over the motorcycle sculpture again. His mind was turning over and over like a real cycle’s roughly idling engine.

He felt unexpectedly sorry for his friend Beam. Honorable and tough old-school Beam, intrepid and smart in the bargain. Da Vinci thought he’d never known a better man or a finer cop.

The cruel tricks life played on people, the sadistic mazes that circumstances constructed, it was amazing.