Darker Than Night

73

“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.