Darker Than Night

46

Somewhere in the chaos must be something useful.

Quinn sat back in his kitchen chair and looked at the spread of handwritten notes, computer printouts, and copies of forms and records Nester had given him. What was laid out on the table had all been contained in a large folded brown envelope the retired cop and sheriff’s deputy wrestled out of a back pocket.

An envelope content that hadn’t been wrinkled or folded, though, was a copy of a black-and-white snapshot of Luther Lunt taken by Cara Sand. It had been discovered in the bottom of one of her dresser drawers when the Hiram police searched the house after the murders. Luther was outdoors, barefoot, wearing faded jeans and a white T-shirt, a slender but muscular kid with tousled hair, leaning with one hand against the trunk of a large tree and smiling at the lens. He looked wholesome and innocent. While his body might have passed for twenty-one, his face could have been fourteen. Cara Sand must have known what she was doing when she’d decided to have an affair with him.

Quinn stretched out an arm and reached for the diet Coke on the table. He sipped and thought. This Luther Lunt was some pumpkin despite his appearance of naïveté. He’d led a tough, impoverished life, which must have suddenly become heaven when he moved in with the Sands and had his way with the willing wife. And from reading newspaper clippings and Nester’s notes, Quinn was sure Luther had indeed led a phantom life in the attic, descending into the real world only when the master was away, or occasionally at night for a secret tryst with Cara or for food. Food in the kitchen, where he’d apparently been interrupted around three A.M. while eating a sandwich and drinking milk from the carton.

Domestic murder in the early-morning hours. Every cop knew that was the prime time for it, if not in the bedroom, in the kitchen. Home, sweet…yeah.

Murder could be prosaic, so why not in the middle of a late-night snack?

Quinn let his chair tilt forward so its front legs contacted the floor, then looked again at the photograph of Luther Lunt. The boy standing and smiling, in what was probably his victims’ backyard, would look much different now. He might have gained weight, lost some or all of his hair, grown a mustache or beard. The subtle rearrangements of time.

But whatever his appearance, Luther was out there somewhere in New York.

Staring hard at the photograph, Quinn could feel his presence. There was always a moment when hunter somehow made a mysterious connection with quarry, whether each or only one of them realized it. This was the moment for Quinn, the instant he’d been waiting for, perhaps prompted by Nester’s visit and Luther’s photograph. Quinn was now locked on to Luther in a way he hadn’t been before. Luther grown older…thirty-one now, if his recorded birth date was correct. Luther an adult and a fugitive who’d adapted and led what might seem an outwardly normal life.

Quinn knew he was out there, and knew he was feeling the vise tighten as he killed more often, and increased with each murder the odds of his being caught. Luther Lunt, feeling the pressure, irritable, not sleeping well lately, off his appetite because of the ache in the pit of his stomach.

And there was no reason he shouldn’t feel even more pressure.

Quinn decided to give Dave Everson a call at the Times. The Luther Lunt photo should be in the papers and on TV news. The media would make sure the prime suspect in the Night Prowler murders would have his photograph appear all over the city and beyond. They’d do a better job than a police artist in aging Luther, giving him no hair or shorter or longer hair, facial hair, a double chin, lines in his face, experience in his gaze. Though still a young man, his hard years would show on him, scars inside and out.

Quinn knew this kind of media blitz worked sometimes. Someone out there would see the original photographic image or one of the artists’ renderings and decide maybe they did know Luther Lunt, though that wasn’t what he’d be calling himself these days. They wouldn’t be sure at first; then they’d think about it—whether they wanted to or not—and eventually they’d phone the police.

Usually they’d be wrong about whoever it was they suspected; any photograph, especially an old one in black and white, resembled a lot of people.

Then one day one of the callers would be right. The adult Luther Lunt would be identified. And at Quinn’s convenience, he and Luther would meet.

Quinn stood up and stretched until his aching spine made a soft popping sound and he felt better. Then he went to the phone in the living room, where he could sit down again but in a softer chair.

It was time for Luther Lunt to become a celebrity.

The Night Prowler watched the television screen in horror and rage. First the photograph had been in the newspapers, stopping and momentarily paralyzing him as he walked past a news and magazine kiosk on Broadway. Now the long-ago image was on seemingly every channel broadcasting the evening news. There stood a young Luther Lunt, leaning against the tree in the backyard that had been part of his home. Time made it seem like a photo of someone else, all part of a world the Night Prowler wanted to remain in the past. The photo had been taken by Cara, obviously on the spur of the moment, then put somewhere and forgotten.

And now here it was, an instant, a reality, preserved and displayed years and years later, as if a page in an album had been turned. Photo by Cara, a fraction of time in our bubble of time, in which we lived, loved, feared….

The buzzing began again, a gray cacophony of every color, not loud now, but growing louder.

As the Night Prowler watched the TV, a retired FBI profiler was explaining Luther’s mental illness in pseudomedical terms and talking about what kind of man he’d be now. An artist’s conception of how Luther might appear at different weights and with varying hairstyles and beard and mustache styles showed on split screen while the former profiler yammered away in her strange combination of scientific and media speak.

She knows nothing about her subject! Nothing!

Neither does the pathetically untalented artist!

Some of the media gave credit to the journalist who “broke” the story, a man named Everson. But the Night Prowler knew who really found and loosed the relentless demons from the past. It was the demon of the present—Quinn!

Of course the Night Prowler knew why. He was supposed to think now that Quinn was on his heels, ready to run up his back if he made the slightest mistake.

Or if he had made a mistake!

Quinn was a tracker, a stalker who dealt in the past and eventually closed on a present where he and his prey would meet. And it was the pressure he could exert that made his prey slow down, hesitate, and make a seemingly innocuous wrong move that could lead to disaster. It was like an obscure code, the rules of this game, which Quinn assumed he knew better than his quarry. Advantage, Quinn: The pursuer could make many mistakes and the game would continue, while the pursued could afford only one miscue and it would be game over. The increasing pressure on the hunted would inevitably lead to that fatal oversight or miscalculation.

So Quinn thinks.

The Night Prowler used the remote to switch off the TV. He smiled grimly. Different people felt pressure in different ways, and found different ways to relieve it. White powder, pink sex, green money, red vengeance, the blue eyes of the gods…

The Night Prowler went to the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink and groped in darkness for the handgun that was hidden behind the plumbing and wrapped in an oily rag.

He got the gun out and stared at it. An ugly, functional thing, manufactured to kill. Black forever…. It had belonged to a man the Night Prowler knew sold drugs and would not report its theft. He absently ran a fingertip over the rough texture of its checkered grip, an indecipherable topography of its past.

A gun like this, who knew its history?

Who knew its future?

He rewrapped the gun and carefully wedged it back in its hiding place beneath the sink.

But out of sight wasn’t necessarily out of mind. Just as Quinn was now never completely out of the Night Prowler’s thoughts, which condition was certainly and precisely what Quinn intended. That was his strategy. That was part of how the pressure was applied.

That was how it was supposed to work. Ask any TV pundit or armchair psychologist who’d never shed anyone’s blood and who never dreamed their own might be shed. There were well-documented ways to understand and hunt down the serial killer. Millions of words had explained the who and how of the phenomenon and even the why. Book after book had been written on the subject.

But not all prey were alike. Sometimes the hunter wasn’t fully aware of what he was tracking.

Sometimes the hunter wished that somewhere along the trail, he’d missed a turn.

Black forever…

Lisa Ide’s Visa card showed a charge for lunch the afternoon before her murder. She’d dined at an East Side restaurant Quinn had never heard of, Petit Poisson. Fifty-nine dollars with tip for a salad, pastry, and drinks. Nothing petite about the price.

He doubted that Lisa had dined alone, so he sent Pearl to see what she might learn from the restaurant’s staff.